Work Text:
1)
“Richie!” The voice calling was barely audible through the bathroom door, the running shower almost drowning it out entirely.
Richie was half asleep in bed, well aware of Eddie’s morning routine enough to know that he had roughly ten more minutes before the automatically programmed coffee maker Eddie had insisted on buying would begin its brew. Coffee would drag him from his blankets, Eddie would finish his shower, they would have breakfast together, and Eddie would run off to his boring office job for the day.
Having a predictable morning schedule felt so adult and unusual still, but was a welcome change. (Eddie had very nearly had a conniption when he’d learned that Richie usually just ate a shitty granola bar for breakfast, if that.)
“Richie!” The bathroom door wrenched open and the full volume of Eddie’s shout pulled Richie out of his half doze with a start. “Are you a fuckin’ idiot?”
“Mm?” Richie squinted across the room at where Eddie’s blurry form stood, holding a towel to his hips. “Probably. Why?”
“What the fuck is this?” One arm stretched out toward him, but Richie still couldn’t make out enough detail to know why.
He leaned toward his side table with some effort, only idly considering how old he felt, to slide his glasses on finally.
Eddie stood, one hand wrapped tight around one of the expensive plush towels he’d bought when they moved and the other aiming at Richie. His entire posture was self righteous accusation.
“It’s a bar of soap…” Richie sat up properly. “Eddie, I know we’re old but it’s a little early for Alzheimer’s.”
“Shut the fuck up, Richie.” He finally dropped his arm, the one with the soap, not the other one, unfortunately. “It’s not right.”
“What do you mean ‘it’s not right’?”
“It’s the wrong brand, dumbass!” Even at his side, his hand was clenched in a tight fist around the soap.
“Oh.” Richie allowed himself to drop back onto the mattress, folding a pillow under his head lazily. He spoke through a wide yawn. “They were out of the regular stuff, I just got store brand.”
This was, apparently, not the correct thing to do.
“Richie, why.” Eddie was not whining, but it was a close thing.
“What? It’s normal soap, unscented.” He wasn’t going to brag or anything, but he had actually listened when Eddie told him about perfumes and dyes used in other soaps.
Eddie’s responding scoff came from so deep it sounded painful. “It’s store brand, Richie, it’s going to leave residue.” He said residue like it was the foulest word in the English language.
“I’m going to be sticky all day!” He waved the soap around, looking remarkably like an old man telling a bunch of kids to get off his lawn. Richie wondered for a moment if he could manage to get a video of it on his phone; Beverly would love this.
“It’s going to leave gross shit all over the shower-”
Eddie’s rant continued uninterrupted, a laundry list of reasons why his preferred brand of unscented plain soap was better than any other brand available.
Richie, to be entirely honest, stopped listening. To his words, at least. The angry, rapid cadence remained in his awareness, right there with the furrow of his brows and the lean body. Everything on display in a thoughtless way only because he was so caught up in being indignant.
About soap.
That was precisely when the realization struck Richie: Eddie was boring.
That’s not to say Eddie was uninteresting, that was far from what anyone would call Eddie. He was loud and crass and funny and sweet, nothing about him was uninteresting.
But he was boring. He had boring adult interests and cared about what brand of unscented soaps they bought and Richie loved him so much.
“Are you listening?” Eddie demanded.
“No.” Richie was too caught up in his dreamy thoughts to be anything but honest.
With a final exasperated sound, Eddie turned to stomp back into the bathroom. There was only a brief flash of towel being whipped away before the door slammed shut again.
xx
2)
Richie had a show in Chicago. Yes, against all expectations, people still wanted to pay money to see him on a stage.
He’d done a bit of work in LA once life with Eddie settled down, a few tv appearances, a few live shows, but this was his first time going out of state again. Mostly facilitated by the fact that Eddie was able to get the same days off and go with him.
Before his near-career ending onstage meltdown, Richie was a pretty frequent traveller for work. He would even venture to say he was pretty good at it. He never missed his flights, he had the expensive TSA pre-check so he could skip security, and he was a speed demon when it came to packing the night before leaving.
That’s precisely where he was. His large duffel bag was wide open on the bed and he was tearing apart his closet to grab what he wanted.
Eddie was already packed, unpacked, and packed again. (Richie’d had to convince him that two large suitcases were more than he would need for what was essentially a long weekend away.) His small bag was neatly organized and parked conveniently next to the front door waiting for them to leave early in the morning.
So far, Richie’s bag had two pairs of pants and a random handful of underwear thrown haphazardly into it. One pant leg hadn’t quite made it all the way and draped down over the side of the bed.
He turned from his closet and threw the random selection of shirts he’d grabbed vaguely in the direction of his bag just as Eddie huffed his way through his second trip through the bathroom to pack toiletries. He couldn’t find his travel toothbrush and was in a bit of a tizzy about it.
“What are you doing?” Eddie asked. His tone was innocuous, but that didn’t always mean Richie wasn’t in trouble.
Richie turned to face Eddie, standing alone in the middle of their room holding no fewer than three ziploc bags filled with soaps and lotions and products. His eyes flicked between his suitcase and his boyfriend- partner- whatever, they’d never really settled on a word they liked best.
“Uh,” Richie started intelligently. “Packing?”
Eddie’s eyes bulged just a bit before his shoulders dropped, utterly defeated.
“Please tell me this is a joke.” His tone was even and disappointed.
At Richie’s long and apparently, telling, silence, Eddie heaved another long suffering sigh.
“I’ll be right back.”
Eddie disappeared back toward the living room and returned without his elaborately packed plastic bags. Stood next to the bed, he heaved all of Richie’s clothes out of his bag in a pile, laid his first shirt flat, and began to slowly and deliberately fold it smaller and smaller.
“What are you doing?” Richie asked.
“I’m Marie Kondoing your shit,” Eddie explained. “You really just throw your clothes in your bag in a big pile?”
“Whatever!” Richie yelled. “I just hang it in the hotel bathroom while I shower, it gets the wrinkles out!”
Eddie made a face like Richie just told him he’d be really into trying out cannibalism.
“Fuck off.” Eddie shooed him, actually fucking flapped his hand out at him like an old woman to shoo him away and everything. “Go empty the fridge so shit doesn’t go bad while we’re gone.”
With only the hint of a sulk, Richie did exactly that. He emptied trash and recycling, threw in a load of laundry, he even folded and stored the plush couch blanket before he dared to return to their bedroom.
Eddie hadn’t moved from his spot, Richie silently observed from their doorway, still folding Richie’s obnoxiously colored shirts into tiny squares on their bed. He looked peaceful as he worked, none of the performative annoyance playing at the lines in his face or tugging at his eyebrows. He was in a soft shirt, something to sleep in, and a pair of joggers Richie only recognized as his own by the cuffs Eddie had to make at the bottom to avoid an excessive pooling of fabric at his ankles.
Soft face, soft clothes, soft, soft, soft.
Eddie turned and Richie knew it was all written on his face, his every sappy thought as he watched this man he loved.
“You’re a disaster.” Eddie’s voice was gentle, half of a laugh coloring his words.
xx
3)
“Oh shit.”
Eddie’s voice disrupted the peaceful quiet of the living room very suddenly. They’d both found comfortable spots on the couch together about an hour ago, independently doing their own things, but sitting with their legs tangled between them. Eddie had been scrolling quietly on his tablet nearly the entire time, eyebrows pinched in the way they always did when he was focused on something.
His unexpected outburst immediately pulled Richie out of a sleep that had really been setting up to leave a painful crick in his neck.
“Whuzzat?” He tried schooling his face into one of a person that hadn’t been falling asleep with the conviction that only a person who had very recently been falling asleep can pull off.
His eyes were barely open and his glasses were crooked.
He was pretty sure he was very convincing.
“Look at this.” Eddie clicked once and turned the tablet to hand it over.
Richie wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, maybe another strange gossip headline about him (Eddie loved those) or a paparazzi photo of he and Eddie boringly grocery shopping together.
He was not expecting a shopping page with a complete set of pots and pans.
He stared for probably too long, trying to figure out what had made Eddie exclaim. “Okay?”
Eddie wrenched the tablet back out of his hands with an annoyed huff. “It’s a good deal,” he explained.
“I can’t believe you’re getting a fuckin boner over frying pans.” Richie actually wheezed, his laugh caught him so off guard.
“It comes with a matching slow cooker, dude!” Eddie jabbed a finger at the tablet violently, trying desperately to convey what a deal they were being confronted with.
“Jesus Christ.” Richie’s shoulders shook as he tried to calm himself. He stretched, acting like he was trying to get a look at Eddie’s body. “How hard are you right now?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Eddie squirmed, ripping one leg out of their comfortable tangle and kicking at Richie’s thigh with the top of a socked foot, a loud but painless thwap. “You’re so fucking annoying!”
Richie caught his ankle, laughing. He tugged it close to his hip, allowing his thumb to brush up and over the bumpy bones and under the leg of his sweatpants. Absentminded reverence leading him to Eddie’s skin.
He smiled wickedly, unable to allow the peace to stick.
“If I knew kitchenware was what got you going-“ He was cut off by a pillow directly to the face, and it ripped a loud laugh out of him.
“You know what?” Eddie settled heavily back against the armrest of the couch. “Fuck you, I’m buying it and I’m using your card. Fucker.”
He announced it like some kind of grand revenge, like Richie would even care, like either of them were even remotely concerned about his money versus my money.
Weeks later, Richie bought a slow cooker recipe book and scribbled ‘I used your card for this, love you’ on the inside cover. He left it innocently on the kitchen counter, keeping a mental timer on how long after getting home from work it would take Eddie to spot it.
(He found it almost immediately and Richie got 1. kisses and 2. dragged to go food shopping near immediately.)
xx
4)
Every Saturday, provided they were actually home, Eddie cleaned.
It took Richie some time to adapt to. He wasn’t a complete slob before Eddie moved in. Well, no, he wasn’t tidy before Eddie, but he wasn’t living in filth either.
He just wasn’t used to cleaning on such a schedule, especially not when there was hardly a mess to clean. Like, he was pretty sure the entire linen closet didn’t need to be emptied and scrubbed and restocked every single week, but Eddie did it.
Honestly, for a brief time, it made Richie worry Eddie did think he was filthy. They joked and jabbed each other about it enough.
Bev, when he called her from a dank hotel room in Albuquerque, had told him not to worry about it. She told him Eddie’s love language was in acts of service and it was something he actually wanted to do. Richie didn’t even know what the fuck a love language was.
It weirdly helped, though.
He wasn’t sure it made sense, but it helped.
Eddie had never once kept his thoughts from Richie. If he thought Richie was a disgusting slob, he would call Richie a fucking disgusting slob to his face. He wasn’t waking up early on Saturdays to scrub and tidy because it needed to be done, it was because he genuinely liked it.
He wasn’t passive aggressively cleaning to make Richie feel bad about his messes.
He didn’t mind Richie staying in bed while he removed the shelves from their pantry to scrub and throw anything out of date into the trash.
Eventually Richie would rise and join Eddie in the kitchen. The two of them worked around each other without getting in the way. Richie dropped breakfast and hot coffee on the table and admired the small self-satisfied smile Eddie had while looking at their pristine refrigerator.
A few weeks later he called Bev again while he was home alone.
“What’s worse?” He started as soon as she answered. “Eddie’s boring habits or me being kind of turned on by Eddie’s boring habits?”
She laughed in his ear for so long that she drew Ben to the phone and then Ben knew what they were talking about which meant surely in no time Mike would know and what Mike knew, Bill knew.
He could hear the smile on Ben’s face when he spoke. “You could use a little boring in your life, Richie.”
It wasn’t fair, like on a divine scale, that Ben was allowed to be both hot and smart.
xx
5)
Richie wasn’t bad with money, not really. He had a decent savings built up and he had a guy who took care of his taxes every year, but he didn’t worry too much about the stuff in between all that. His bills were on autopay, most shopping he needed to do could be done online, and he hadn’t seen an actual physical dollar bill in years.
Eddie was significantly more money conscious.
He had spreadsheets of information balancing income and expenses. He tracked his recurring charges and monitored any bills that were subject to change over time. He had a specific mathematically created budget that was a precise percentage of his income allowed to be “disposable” and subdivided that even further into different categories.
He had a vacation savings account.
Eddie, before Richie, was not struggling for money. He had enough to live in a decent place in New York City even after leaving his wife, and had taken care of moving to LA entirely on his own.
Point being, he wasn’t exactly at risk of a bounced check any time soon, so Richie didn’t see why he felt compelled to track every single dollar in and out.
That was, until Eddie offered to do it for Richie as well.
He’d been, well, “disappointed but not surprised” would probably be the most accurate description when he realized Richie really didn’t think about his expenses too deeply. He wasn’t spending more than he could afford, wasting it all on lavish vacations and fancy cars (one fancy car was perfectly acceptable, okay?) - he was just fine.
It took Eddie a good few weekends to build a budget spreadsheet from the ground up for Richie.
He tried, at first, to sit by his side and listen to his explanations, but Eddie would start talking about equations and Richie’s brain would announce that it was bored and turn into useless static. Instead he grabbed snacks and wrapped his ankle around Eddie’s and watched him work.
It was… boring. That wasn’t unexpected, but it really was.
He liked watching Eddie do the work, though. His eyebrows pinched and his posture shifted like he was responding to a challenge when an equation he put in didn’t come out quite right. His smile was real and smug in a surprisingly attractive way when it did.
He found eight subscription services Richie had forgotten to cancel and had been paying monthly for a length of time they couldn’t even measure realistically.
That night, crawling under blankets and draping comfortably over one another (a habit borne from the fear of waking up and thinking the other was gone, taken away by monsters they were still adapting to being gone) Richie became possessed by the need to speak.
He didn’t want to
It was embarrassing, even for him.
“I have to tell you something.” He spoke into the darkness.
Eddie rolled onto his side to face him. Richie still couldn’t understand how he liked sleeping on his stomach. One arm reached out, landing casually on Richie’s bare shoulder, fingers absentmindedly tickling across his back. “What’s up?”
“You’re really hot when you’re working on spreadsheets.”
It was out there, and there was silence.
Then there was more silence.
Then Eddie laughed. One of his real, shocked laughs that started with a ‘pppfffffff’ and ended with him gasping for breath and wiping his eyes.
Richie groaned, half rolling to hide his face against Eddie’s arm, but that didn’t help at all because he liked Eddie’s arms.
“I thought you said it was boring!” Eddie’s voice was high and wavered with even more barely contained laughter.
“It was!” Richie wailed. “It was so boring!”
Eddie cackled in the darkness of their bedroom and Richie would throw himself under a million buses if it meant getting to hear that from him.
xx
+1)
Not to be a complete sap or, like, basically a very loyal dog, but Eddie getting home from work was pretty much Richie’s favorite part of the day. It was just really really nice to hear the door open and know Eddie would come looking for him wherever he was. He would lean against the edge of his desk if Richie was writing and roll his sleeves and loosen his tie and act like he had no idea that he was driving him to distraction. Or he would find him in the kitchen and pour each of them a drink and they would cook together while Richie asked for updates on the crush he believed Susan in Accounts had on Eddie. Or he’d find Richie on the couch and join him without a second thought, climbing on top of him and burying his face into Richie’s neck and, more often than not, falling asleep.
It was, if you’ll pardon the dramatics, everything both of them never thought they would get to have.
On a hot day in early September, Eddie got home from work and didn’t drape himself like a blanket over Richie and fall asleep. Instead, he dropped a plastic bag on Richie’s chest and said, “this is your fault.”
“What is?” Richie sat up properly, thrown off by the change in routine.
“My coworkers got me a birthday gift.”
Eddie was the only person Richie had ever known who could verbally roll his eyes.
“That’s my fault?” He turned the bag over in his lap and watched three crossword puzzle books fall out.
“Yes!” Eddie grabbed the top book and shook it at Richie menacingly. “You told people I’m boring. On TV. Now my coworkers think I love crosswords.”
Richie laughed and moved the two books on his lap to the nearby coffee table with one hand and reached out to Eddie with the other. Eddie went willingly, allowing Richie to drag him down onto the couch.
“I’m sorry I tarnished your badass reputation,” Richie said. Eddie smacked his head with the floppy crossword book before tossing it away toward the others. “I’ll make it up to you for your birthday.”
Eddie snorted and buried his head in the crook of Richie’s neck and shoulder, his favorite pillow. “You better.”
Weeks passed. They took a long weekend trip to Santa Barbara for Eddie’s birthday where they slept late and lounged on the balcony of their rented villa and watched for whales on the horizon. It was one of the most rejuvenating weekends either of them could remember in a long time.
Eddie considered all previous offenses regarding his boringness to be thoroughly made up for.
It was surprisingly easy, though, to return home and jump back into their schedule.
One afternoon Eddie returned to quiet music and the smell of something delicious. He found Richie in front of the wide, bright window in the living room, curled up on the sofa chair and chewing on a pencil. Crossword puzzle book open on his lap.
“Are you doing my crosswords?” He asked, eyebrows pulled high enough to bring out the lines in his forehead he hated so much.
Richie jumped like he hadn’t even heard Eddie come into the room. Like he was absorbed enough in the puzzle that his surroundings were lost on him.
“Yeah.” He looked embarrassed, almost. “They’re weirdly relaxing, you know?”
“No.” Eddie wandered over, dropping to sit on the arm of the chair. “I hate them.”
He looked down at the book.
“Inordinate,” he read 3 Across. The ends of his lips twitched downward and he nodded, impressed. “That’s a lot of syllables for you.”
Richie barked a loud pleased laugh, far more pleased than anyone should be when their partner suggests they’re stupid to their face.
“I know,” he agreed with a suggestive eyebrow pump. “Didn’t know you were hooking up with a world class genius, huh?”
He snorted, but the fingers of one hand found their way into the back of Richie’s hair. They curled and grabbed and smoothed over.
“World class chef, too.” Eddie grinned. “What’s cooking?”
“I used your slow cooker,” Richie announced with a smug pride. “I made meatballs, cause I know how much you love my-“
Eddie literally pinched Richie’s lips together to cut him off. “Please don’t.” He looked like it caused him real physical pain to consider the end of Richie’s thought.
Richie pulled Eddie’s arm away, coy smile pulling at his lips. “My cooking,” he finished. “What did you think I was going to say?”
“I hate you.” Eddie laughed, soft and warm. He leaned, trying to not overbalance his awkward perch on the chair arm, to kiss Richie.