Chapter Text
The three of them made a point of cycling between themselves, so that when Eddie woke up in a dingy hospital bed, there’d be someone to talk him down from the inevitable panic attack. Bill had to work on his movie, so he had already gone back home, and so had Mike - although Mike’s home was close enough that he could be at the hospital in a pinch if they needed him. Bev stayed because she was concerned. Ben stayed because Bev stayed. Richie stayed because he was Richie. By some stroke of luck, though, all three of them are at the hospital when Eddie wakes up.
Richie is in the hospital cafeteria with Ben when it happens, but when Bev texts him, he forgoes the elevator and rushes up three flights of stairs. He’s already in the room by the time Eddie parts his chapped lips, and asks, “Am I dead?”
Bev is at his bedside, a hand sat gently and steadily on his shoulder. “No, Eddie, you’re in the hospital,” she says. Eddie’s eyes scan the room to confirm this, and immediately make their way to Richie.
"You look like shit, Trashmouth," he murmurs.
"Yeah, well, you don't look so great either," Richie counters. Truth be told, they're both in such a state - Richie, unshowered, exhausted, and wearing a wrinkled button-down, and Eddie, having barely clawed his way back from death - that neither really has the right to be pointing it out. Eddie tries to sit up and his face contorts, having overestimated his strength, letting out a small pained noise that sends Richie rushing to his side and shoving Beverly out of the way.
“Should I get a nurse?” she asks. Her voice is tinged by concern that seems more directed at Richie than Eddie, which he ignores. He already has his hand at the back of Eddie’s neck, guiding his head back down to the pillow. Eddie swats at him.
“I’m fine. I just need to lay down.” He takes a deep breath, pausing, closing his eyes for a moment, then opening them again. “Is It really dead?”
Richie is quiet. He’d watched It die while Eddie almost bled out on the floor a few yards away. Maybe it was too soon to say for sure; they’d thought It was dead all those years ago, too. The idea of Eddie almost dying again over nothing is incomprehensible to him.
“We saw It…” Beverly starts, pressing her lips together, almost shivering. “It’s gone. For good this time.”
Eddie nods and closes his eyes again, before Ben bursts into the room, loudly, coffee in hand, having been far less urgent about making his way up there than Richie was. “Hey, he’s awake?” Beverly shushes him softly, pressing her index finger to her lips, and Ben’s mouth curves into a small ‘O’. “My bad,” he whispers.
“No, by all means,” Richie says at full volume, startling Eddie awake again. “Let’s make this a fuckin’ party.”
“Richie,” Bev responds, “he needs to rest.”
“C’mon, he’s been out for, like, five days.” Richie wants Eddie awake, wants him talking, smiling, looking at him. Richie spent a lot of time looking at Eddie since he’d been back in Derry, the same way he had when they were kids, when he’d stare and stare and stare. He wants Eddie to look at him.
“Five days?” Eddie shifts uncomfortably. “Shit, shit. I need to call Myra.”
“You realize the hospital employs nurses, right? You don’t have to bring your own.”
“She’s my wife, you fuck. She has...she has a right to know where I am.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. I don’t think the cafeteria downstairs supersizes, so that might be an issue for her.”
Eddie holds up his middle finger, causing the IV in his pale arm to shift. Richie winces, but he flips him off back just the same.
“I’ll call Myra, Eddie. You need to rest,” Bev says, walking towards the door and pulling Richie with her. “Ben, can you go let one of the nurses know that Eddie is awake?” Ben nods and disappears into the hallway.
“No, no, Bev, you can’t call her. I’ll never hear the end of it. She doesn’t even let me have woman receptionists.”
“Well,” Richie starts, “I’d offer my services, but I don’t speak Jabba the Hutt. So.”
“Oh, good one, Richie. The exact razor-sharp wit that got you booed offstage at your last show.”
Richie’s mouth goes dry. He’d forgotten all about that. He’d expected the rest of the world to forget about it too. “You - you saw that?”
Bev exhales loudly. “Okay, Eddie, we can help you call Myra later. I’m think I’m gonna go for a walk.” Richie doesn’t want to help call Myra. It’s not like spending his nights folded in on himself trying to fall asleep in a bedside chair is ideal, but he doesn’t want to see Eddie go, either. He remembers when they were kids, and Eddie’s mom vowed to never let Eddie see the Losers again. He was so brave then, Richie thinks. He’s always been so, so brave.
Ben walks in with a nurse, who seems nice and unprepared for the onslaught of questions she’s about to be faced with. Bev tugs at Richie’s arm. “Richie, can you come with me?”
Richie watches Eddie, who already has the look on his face that he gets every time he’s about to annoy some poor public service employee. Richie feels planted to the ground. Ben had carried Eddie out, though he was still and barely breathing, as Richie’s pleas - we can help him, we gotta get him out of here - echoed around them. Out the door, into the backseat of a rental car, on the ride to the hospital, Richie watched the monotonous opening and closing of Eddie’s eyes. Talked to him, and touched his face every time they closed for a second too long. Eddie coughed and choked on his own blood the entire way there. And late in the night, after the doctor told them that, miraculously, no vital organs had been damaged, he just suffered blood loss and some minor head trauma, Bill and Mike drove back to the motel to get everyone a change of clothes. When Richie changed into a fresh shirt, he held the dirty one he’d been wearing, and found that Eddie’s blood on it was bright, oxygenated-red and cold. In the hospital room, now, Richie watches Eddie talk to the nurse from his hospital bed, gaze even.
“He’s okay, Richie,” Bev says. “Come with me. Come walk with me for a bit. He’s gonna be okay. Come on, honey.”
They spill out of Derry Emergency Health Center into the warm grasp of the parking lot. It isn’t the first time Richie’s been out of the hospital since Eddie was admitted - he’s had to shower, and sleeping in a bedside chair wasn’t great for his back - but it’s the first time he’s been out since he saw Eddie awake. Derry feels different now. Like a fist that’s become unclenched. Could be because It died - he wants it to be because It died, because that would mean It’s actually dead - or maybe he’s just glad that Eddie’s okay.
Bev reaches into her purse for something, and Richie realizes it’s a box of cigarettes. Richie can see her all those years ago, hair cropped at the ears, sneaking cigarettes out of her locker. He smiles at the thought. “You never quit?”
“No, did you?”
“No, no, I vape now, see, it’s what all the cool kids are doing.”
Bev laughs out loud, the same hearty, unstifled laugh she had when they were kids. She puts a cigarette between her lips and lights it. “Fuck you, Trashmouth.” She takes out a second cigarette and gives it to him.
“Watch us escape the killer clown unscathed and end up succumbing to the dangers of lung cancer.” Bev laughs again, but it’s fainter, and it stops after a half-second. They didn’t all escape unscathed. They didn’t all escape at all. Richie closes his eyes. Bev hands him the lighter and he lights the cigarette, then inhales deeply, desperate to change the subject. “So you and Ben, huh?”
“Beep beep, Richie.”
“No, hey, I’m serious! What’s going on with that?”
Bev smiles at the ground, cigarette dangling between two thin, unmanicured fingers. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t.” Smoke wafts up in the air. Thinking about it now, they might not be allowed to smoke here, but Richie doesn’t really care. Beverly exhales. “I think that when he leaves, I’m … I’m going to leave with him.”
“That’s fantastic. Gorgeous, gorgeous man. Y’know, I always saw the two of you together, when we were kids.”
“Really?”
“Fuck no, are you kidding me? Kid was, like, five times your body mass, he would’ve crushed you.”
“You are such an asshole,” Bev laughs. She pauses to look him up and down. Regard him. “You know, I always saw…” She looks at the ground for a second, then shakes her head, not finishing the thought. Richie thinks it’s the sort of thought he should ask her to follow up on, the sort of thing he might need to hear from her. Instead, he takes another drag from his cigarette. “What are you gonna do, Trashmouth? After all of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when Eddie’s wife comes and brings him back down to New York. Where are you gonna go?”
It’s a dumb question. Richie has a studio apartment, and a job. He has a life to go back to. “Back to L.A., I guess. Keep doing stand-up. Keep being a beloved public figure.”
Beverly turns away from him and pauses. “You really think you can just go back to normal after everything that’s happened?”
“I…” The sun is setting and the sky is turning a soft amber. Richie looks out over Derry’s skyline. How many times he’s done this in his life, staying out until the street lights came on, hands steady on the handles of his bike. His hands are bigger now, rough and scarred. The scar from the blood oath they’d made as kids disappeared after they killed It. Richie’s mind drifts to the place on the bridge where he’d carved he and Eddie’s initials, and he wonders if that disappeared too. “I’m going to try my best.”
“Why?” Bev leans to the ground and puts out her cigarette on the pavement.
Richie feels sick. The mental image of Eddie, eyes wide and blood in his mouth, has become an inescapable mainstay in his mind. It flashes behind his eyes now, making him shake his head and take a step backwards. If Bev notices something is wrong - which, Richie thinks, she probably does - she doesn’t say anything about it. He’s grateful for that. He exhales, then puts his cigarette out.
“I think I’m gonna go back upstairs.”
“Okay, I...well, do you need me to come with you?”
Richie scoffs. “What, so you can see your boyfriend? No thank you, I’m fine.”
Bev rolls her eyes and nods. “Okay. Well, I’m gonna stay down here a bit longer. Need to stretch my legs.” Richie walks towards the entrance of the hospital. “Richie?” He stops and faces her. “I know that … I know that you’re hurting. Maybe more than the rest of us.”
“Oh, great, I’ll tell Eds you said that.”
“I’m being serious, Richie,” she starts. Beverly looks at the ground. She’s about to say something else, but Richie decides that he doesn’t want to hear it, and he goes back inside.
-
When he’s back in the hospital room, Eddie is, unsurprisingly, not sleeping, but Ben looks like he wishes he was. Eddie looks up at Richie. “Hey, dickwad, where have you been?”
“I -”
“This hospital is disgusting. Fucking disgusting. Completely unsanitary. And I talked to one of the nurses - no idea what she’s doing!”
“What, she’s working at a hospital in Derry and she didn’t go to Harvard? Shocking.”
“There is a base level of healthcare quality that I’m owed. There are, like, laws and regulations for this kind of stuff.”
“Well, next time I have to heroically save you from bleeding out in the sewers, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Um,” Ben interrupts. “I’m actually the one that heroically saved him from bleeding out in the sewers.”
Eddie smirks at Richie. He probably doesn’t even remember getting dragged out of Neibolt House, drenched in his own blood, and that’s probably a good thing. Richie remembers. Richie remembers in full, HD clarity, and the memory plays on loop in his mind every time he closes his eyes.
A part of him wishes Eddie would remember, but only a few bits and pieces - how viciously Richie had attacked Pennywise after the fact, how Richie had been the one that ran to him and clung to him and made Ben carry his body out. Maybe then he’d understand. It’s unlikely, though, even if he does remember; he’s had a whole lifetime to understand, and still he doesn’t. Richie isn’t sure he understands, either. He hadn’t even really remembered these people until coming back to Derry a few days ago. The feeling was always there, lying in wait at the back of his mind - a sense of emptiness that he’d always chalked up to being lonely. The first time he saw Eddie again, when they all reunited at the restaurant, he realized that it wasn’t loneliness. It was longing.
Richie’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He takes it out; 48 missed calls from his manager, and he doesn’t even look at how many texts he’s missed. He frowns.
“Is that your manager again?” Ben asks from his chair. They were never that close as kids, but the past few days, during the times when they were both at the hospital, they talked a lot. Well, Ben talked a lot. Richie mostly looked at him. Gorgeous, gorgeous man. He’s happy that Bev ended up with someone like him; she deserved it, after everything. His friends all deserve good things.
“Yeah. I’m surprised he hasn’t, like, hired out the FBI to come and find me yet,” Richie says. Eddie shifts in bed, and Richie’s gaze turns to him. After watching his body lie still and silent in the sewers, every little movement is a blessing.
“What’s going on with your manager?” Eddie’s voice is scratchy and weak, which Richie hates.
“Well, I bombed at my last show, then told him I was going to visit a childhood friend, and I haven’t contacted anyone since then. It definitely sounds like a euphemism. He probably thinks I’m coked out in NorCal right now. Or that I have my wrists slit in some motel bathtub.” Memories of Stan rush back, and, in unison, all three of them wince.
“Jesus, Richie,” Eddie murmurs.
“The point is that I’m a national treasure. The public needs me.”
“Well, then, let them have you back. I called Myra, she’s going to be here by tomorrow morning. I’m finishing my treatment in a real hospital.”
Richie inhales sharply. He doesn’t know what he can say that will convey how much he hates that. “So soon?” seems a bit inappropriate, so he just rolls his eyes. “Whatever. The sooner I can get out of this shithole the better. Y’know, I could be back in L.A. downing margaritas right now if it wasn’t for your whole near death experience.”
“You’re free to go whenever you like,” Eddie exclaims weakly, and Richie laughs, because he isn’t.
Luckily, Richie doesn’t have to say this aloud, as Bev appears in the doorway, smelling of smoke and looking slightly ruffled. Richie is amazed at how well everyone pulled themselves together after what happened. He hasn’t quite gotten around to pulling himself together yet, and maybe that’s why Bev hugs him after she announces that she’s going back to the motel.
“I’ll go with you,” Ben chirps, following her towards the door.
“Yeah, I bet you will,” Richie says, then whistles. Beverly laughs and rolls her eyes, pulling away from their hug.
“Goodnight, Richie. Goodnight Eddie.” She looks at him, then at Eddie in the bed, then back at Richie. She squeezes his arm. Then she leaves.
Richie turns back to the bed, and Eddie is looking at him with that confused, lost puppy look he wears so well. Richie points towards where Bev and Ben were just standing, then pantomimes a blowjob.
“Oh, that is so juvenile,” Eddie says. Richie laughs, walking towards the chair by the hospital bed. He sits. Eddie’s hand looks pale and sallow, resting above the blanket, and Richie feels the sudden urge to seize it in his own hands. He rests one arm on the edge of the bed, close enough to feel the heat radiating from Eddie’s body, but not so close as to imply what he’d rather be doing. It’s a nothing gesture. Just an arm on the bed.
“I’m not wrong, though, am I?”
“I really don’t want to think about it.” Richie moves his arm slowly, hesitantly, closer to Eddie’s. “Y’know, it’s weird, I think I always knew they were going to end up together.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, like - you remember when we were kids, and Bev got caught in the deadlights?”
Richie thinks back to that summer. It’s weird, the breadth of childhood memories he has access to now. He thinks about that last encounter with It. “Oh shit, yeah, and he kissed her to get her out of them! I forgot all about that.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Richie’s arm inches a bit further towards Eddie’s, so close that he can feel the hairs on his arm brushing against his. They aren’t touching, not really, not making skin-to-skin contact, as much as Richie wants to. Eddie glances at his arm, and for a second, Richie worries that he’s pushed his luck. Then Eddie looks away again.
Richie wonders if it’s always been this hard for him to touch Eddie. It hasn’t; they were incredibly touchy as kids, falling all over each other, gangly limbs intertwined. Even as adults, a few days before, Richie had barely been able to keep his hands off of him. Eddie almost dying did something, though. Chipped away at something deep within Richie. From the bed, Eddie laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Richie focuses on his breathing. In, out, in.
“I was just thinking that, uh, maybe if I did that to get you out of the deadlights instead of, y’know, attacking It. Maybe I wouldn’t be in a hospital bed right now.”
Richie laughs, and he feels nauseous. He shouldn’t, but he hates Eddie for joking about that. Eddie’s arm is brushing against his while he talks about kissing him. Richie swallows. He remembers kissing Eddie’s face on the way to the hospital, when he thought he might die before they got there. It’s too much. It’s all too much. He chokes out, “At least buy me dinner first.”
Eddie laughs, again. Richie’s glad that he can still make him laugh. At least that hasn’t changed. “I always knew you didn’t write your own jokes.”
“How? You barely even remembered I existed until a few days ago.”
“No, but … I knew you. You make me laugh. That guy didn’t make me laugh.”
Richie puts his hands up, feigning affronted. “Well, thanks for the scathing criticism, Eds.”
“You sure you have a job waiting for you in L.A.? I saw a video of what happened at your last set. It looked pretty rough.” Eddie pauses. “Was that after …?”
“Yeah.”
Eddie nods understandingly. “I crashed my car when he told me.” Eddie inhales, then covers his face with his hands, like he’s just remembering this happened now. “Jesus, I crashed my car.”
“You sure you have a wife waiting for you in New York?”
Eddie laughs, but Richie wasn’t really joking. “Myra isn’t going to leave me over this. I mean, she’ll probably have me on forced bedrest for the next year.” Richie winces at the memory of Eddie’s mother. “But she’s not going to leave me. She needs me.”
“What do you need?”
Eddie pauses, looking at Richie. Then he shifts in bed, moving his arm away, and Richie knows he’s pushed his luck.
“I need to go to sleep.”
Richie nods. He gets up and turns off the light, then places another chair parallel to the one he’d been sitting in. A makeshift bed; this was how he’d spent his nights there sleeping, though he’s too tall for it to be even remotely comfortable. He lays down.
“That cannot be remotely comfortable,” Eddie says.
“More comfortable than going back to the motel and listening to Bev and Ben -”
“Don’t finish that sentence.”
Richie nods, then stares up at the ceiling. It’s quiet, for a few seconds, and Richie thinks it’s going to stay that way, when he feels a stir in his chest. He turns his head to the bed, and Eddie is staring at him. “What,” says Richie.
“Nothing,” Eddie says. His gaze turns away, but Richie keeps looking at him. “It’s weird sleeping in the same room as you again. It makes me feel like a kid.”
“Promise I won’t put your hand in warm water.”
Eddie chuckles, then looks at Richie again. They stay like that for a few quiet moments. Richie doesn’t know how he could ever have forgotten about Eddie. There really isn’t anything he’d rather look at than him. Eddie sighs and turns on his side to sleep, and the moment is over.
Richie lies awake for a while, breathing in rhythm with the rise and fall of Eddie’s narrow frame. He watches his back, thinking how much he’d like to touch it, and he keeps thinking about this until he falls asleep.