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When Eddie gets back to Derry Town House with the others, he’s ready to sleep for ten years. He takes a key for another room because there’s no fucking way he’s going back to the bloodstained bathroom he’d been stabbed in, and it’s not like anyone seems to work here anyway to tell him he can’t do that.
He trudges up the stairs, keeping a steady grip on the banister to help haul his lethargic limbs up the steps. But he stops when he realises Richie isn’t following.
“You coming, Rich?” he asks.
Richie lifts his head and blinks at Eddie from behind his broken glasses. He really needs to get those fixed.
“In a minute,” he says after a short pause.
If Eddie weren’t so exhausted, he’d take the time to be worried about Richie. But he’s swaying a little on the spot and they’ve all just battled a killer clown that’s been haunting them since they were thirteen-years-old. A little dazed staring from Richie is sort of apropos of the situation, so Eddie just gives him a weak smile.
“Alright. I’m gonna go shower and then sleep for forever.” He turns and continues his walk upstairs, stifling a yawn. “I’m dead on my feet.”
“Don’t say that.” Richie’s sharp tone makes him halt and he looks back over his shoulder at Richie, still rooted to his spot at the bottom of the staircase.
“What?” Eddie asks.
“Don’t say that. You’re not dead. You’re fine.”
Eddie honestly can’t tell if this is a bit or not. There’s no trace of humour in his voice and his eyes are blazing with something that definitely isn’t the usual light-hearted glint of a man constantly waiting for a reaction to his punchlines, but maybe there’s a playfulness in there that can’t break through the foggy barrier of Eddie’s sleep-addled brain right now. God, he just wants a comfy pillow.
“Yeah, Richie, I’m fine,” he agrees absently before following the others up.
***
It’s dark when he wakes up and panic immediately clutches at him. It digs its nails into his skin and leaves him grasping at his bedsheets until his eyes adjust to the darkness and he remembers where he is.
He’s still in Derry. Fucking Derry.
But Pennywise is gone.
His fingers cramp as he stretches them out against the duvet and slowly pushes himself into a sitting position. A dry ache scratches at the back of his throat and he’s grateful to cling onto the banal, mundane and totally human thought of ‘I need a drink of fucking water’.
When his bare feet find the carpet, he automatically jerks his knees up. He stares at the faded pattern on the rug below him. It’s sure as hell ugly but it’s not threatening yet he can’t shake the thought that if he lowers his feet again then a hand with sharp-taloned fingers poking out its gloves will try to grab his ankle from underneath the bed.
“It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead,” he mutters to himself. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until colours pops in his vision.
His nostrils draw desperately at the stagnant, summer air of the room and he slowly exhales, repeating the process until he can build up the courage to set his feet back down again.
He chases the feeling of a garden spike gripped in his hands, of him throwing it at Pennywise. He wants to remember how the adrenaline flooded through him when he dropped down next to Richie, the impact making his knees sting before that was swiftly forgotten in favour of staring at Richie and feeling like he was still brave enough to just lean down and-
Well, he never got to do that because suddenly Richie was rolling them both out the way and stopping the fucking clown from shish-kebabing the pair of them. But Eddie knew he’d been brave then.
“Be brave,” he told himself.
If he could kill a demonic entity in the shape of a dancing clown, then surely he can walk across a hotel room in the middle of the night.
He’s grateful that he brought a second pair of shoes with him, because his sneakers still smell of sewer water. He’d left them out in the hallway and, when he opens his door, the putrid stink floats up and makes him gag a little. Fuckin’ greywater.
Everyone else’s doors remain closed – bar Bev’s but Eddie has a sneaking suspicion that Ben’s room is making use of the ‘Maximum of Two Occupants’ rule. Good for them.
He creeps silently along the hallway and tries his best not to be too loud descending the creaky stairs. There’s still no one at the front desk to hush him and tell him he’s not allowed to be up and about at this hour (seriously, who the fuck runs this place?) but Eddie can’t help but feel like he has to be quiet anyway.
The soles of his shoes scuff against the wooden floors but that’s not the only noise that reaches his ears. A grainy crackle of something fights through the particles of the night air to make it to Eddie and he freezes on the spot.
He hates to think that for the next however many months, he’s going to have a hair-trigger reaction to anything unexpected and immediately think that the fucking clown is back. At least this time, common sense quickly prevails before real panic can set in and he follows the sound towards the kitchen anyway. It’s just music and he takes comfort in the fact that it’s the sort of electronic, rhythmless nightmare that he usually hates, instead of the haunting tinkle of circus music.
He figures someone left the radio on, or maybe it was a fucking useless contraption like everything else in Derry and only abided by its own laws. He doesn’t expect to walk into the kitchen and find Richie sitting there, large hands dwarfing a cup of coffee that looks like it hasn’t been touched.
“Rich?”
Richie startles. He jumps and Eddie immediately lets his hands fly up defensively.
“Whoa there!” he says.
Richie stares at him for a moment then wrinkles his nose. “Don’t ‘whoa, horse-y me!”
There’s a teasing lilt in there somewhere and Eddie finds himself sub-consciously latching onto it. He hasn’t had time to let himself sink back into the memories of baring his chest for a ribbing off Richie. Maybe it was a joke about his mom or his fanny packs or how ‘cute’ Richie pretended to find him, but Eddie would constantly claim to be annoyed whenever Richie cracked a joke around him, the affectation a thin veneer to hide the way any attention from the other boy rubbed him raw until his heart was left shining like a new penny.
How no one had ever noticed could have just been a testament to Eddie’s good acting. But he’d always worried that he’d been so obvious, that every ‘shut up, Richie!’ would betray him and shed its disguise and reveal itself to be the ‘I love you’ he slipped into every insult thrown at his best friend.
The everyday Clark Kent of ‘you’re so fucking annoying’ was exercised too often that its glasses nearly fell off to show everyone the ‘I’d do anything for you’ face of Superman underneath.
“Why are you still awake?” he asks, dragging a chair out and sitting down.
“I could ask you the same thing, Spaghetti,” Richie shoots back.
“I’ve been sleeping.” But Richie hasn’t. Eddie can see that right away, his lack of sleep made clear by the dark circles carving out bags underneath his eyes. He looks fucking exhausted and Eddie’s chest hurts. He should have checked on him before falling asleep.
“Yeah, I can fucking tell. Do you always sleep in a fucking tux?” Richie says, a grin sliding easily onto his face as he appraises Eddie’s matching sleepwear.
“It’s fucking pyjamas. It’s a sleep set, jackass. They come like this, it’s called being fucking civilised,” he snaps, feeling heat shoot up the back of his neck.
“Okay, grandpa,” Richie replies, lifting his coffee mug to take a long, slurping sip.
Eddie knows he’s just doing it to be annoying and he lets him.
The thudding bassline of a song Eddie doesn’t recognise is still pounding from the radio, garbled slightly by the age of it. “What is this shit? Are you even listening to it?”
“It’s helping me shut my brain off,” Richie answers and it’s the first sincere thing Richie has said since Eddie sat down.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Richie quirks an eyebrow. “What’s wrong? Alphabetically or in order of most psychologically fucking damaging? Maybe I’m the only one that remembers the fact that we just killed a fucking clown, Eddie. And on top of that fun little Kodak moment, I also murdered a guy.”
A sick feeling lurches in Eddie’s stomach when he remembers Bowers’ body, still left in the library. Although it’s been a full day since they left him there. Somebody is bound to have discovered him by now but the cops have yet to knock down the door of the town house and come looking for them, so Eddie figures they can worry about it later.
When the fuck did he become so blasé about dead bodies?
“Hey,” he says, reaching across the table to peel one of Richie’s hands away the mug. He slips his fingers into the gaps between Richie’s, holding onto it a little awkwardly but giving it a comforting squeeze anyway.
“You were just protecting Mike. And we’ll back you up on whatever happens,” Eddie promises. “We’re here.”
“But you nearly weren’t.” There’s an edge to Richie’s voice that cuts through the calm. Eddie frowns, slightly taken aback but he doesn’t let go of Richie’s hand.
“What are you talking about?”
“He nearly fucking got you. After you saved me from the Deadlights you were just kneeling there and he nearly…”
Richie makes a choked sort of noise and Eddie is horrified when he realises he’s trying to hold back tears. His other hand flies over to take Richie’s same hand and he ducks his head to try and catch the other man’s eye.
He’s not great at comforting people so he feels completely out of his depth, but he’s also acting on instinct, hesitantly lifting his hand to slide a finger under Richie’s chin, the prickle of unshaven stubble comfortingly scratching his skin as he tilts Richie’s head up.
“Richie, I’m right here. We got out of the way in time.”
“I can still fucking feel it.” The blue of Richie’s eyes disappears behind tightly scrunched eyelids and Eddie’s forehead creases.
“Feel what?”
“Your fucking blood.”
Eddie stills. He drops his hand against the table with a dull thud. “The fuck are you talking about?”
His cheek is still aching with the stab wound Bowers gave him but that had been patched up before they got to the library. None of Eddie’s blood had gotten on Richie.
“It was right through your chest and it was coming out of your mouth and there was nothing I could fucking do.”
Stupidly, Eddie wonders if Richie is sleep-walking. But he’s shaking too much and his grip on Eddie’s hand is too tight for him to be anything other than lucid which leaves Eddie wondering if he’s slipped into total insanity.
But then it hits him.
“The Deadlights?”
The whites of Richie’s eyes, lifeless and ghoulish, flash into Eddie’s mind and he has to fight against the nausea rising in his throat. He doesn’t want to see that again, but he presses on with his question. “Did you see me die in the Deadlights?”
Richie presses his lips into a thin line and gives a small, minute nod.
Eddie can comfort himself by claiming that his lack of reaction is based solely in the fact that there’s no real way to approach the knowledge that, in some other reality, his best friend had to watch him die. He squints at Richie a little, the full of impact of his words taking their sweet time in reaching him.
“But I’m okay?” He can’t help but make it sound like a question.
“Tell that to my fucking brain,” Richie croaks. But his eyes are open now and he’s staring at Eddie like he’s trying to commit him to memory. Eddie lets himself smile, his cheeks dimpling, because if this is the image of him that Richie is going to think of to ascertain that Eddie is real and alive, blood still pumping through his veins, then he’ll give him this: proof that Eddie is happy.
It sounds stupid. They’ve just gone to war with an evil entity and they’ve yet to leave the backwards ass town they grew up in. Eddie probably still has to go back to New York and deal with Myra and Richie is going to be on the other side of the fucking country when plane tickets are booked. But right now, Eddie feels oddly content as he sits at a rickety kitchen table, hand in hand with Richie, like this is where he should be. He’s happy.
“I’m not going anywhere, Rich.”
He speaks with such certainty that he surprises even himself, but his words have the desired effect when Richie’s breathing turns less shaky and he lifts his head for long enough to let a watery smile slip onto his face.
They continued to sit there, just looking at each other, and Eddie feels it all slipping into place. There’s no room for any maybes or a stray ‘possibly’. He’s been second guessing himself his whole life, analysing the risks of every situation he finds himself in but Richie’s steady gaze grabs onto his conviction and maintains a tight hold. Like every move Eddie’s been making his whole life has just been the result of a jumbled ring of keys clanking off each other. Now he’s found the one that fits in the lock.
It would be really poetic if he knew what to fucking say. And Richie’s not saying anything either. And they both know what they want to say, he’s sure of that, but they’re still sitting staring at each other like a couple of idiots and Eddie hates them both and he wants to laugh out loud at how familiar that it.
They’re not poems or songs or lyrical sentences. They’re bugs in the grass and bare feet in a hammock and skin against skin in dirty quarry water. They’re years upon years of knowing there’s something out there waiting for them with no name and that makes Eddie angry enough to want to scream. He could have had Richie this whole time.
You have him now, he reminds himself.
The radio crackles again but before Eddie can voice his frustrations about whatever dubstep remix is about to assault his eardrums next, he cottons onto the familiar melody.
Wise men say only fools rush in…
“Oof, Mrs K is gonna be rolling in her grave,” Richie pipes up. Eddie glares at him and all Richie does is tip his head back and laugh.
“What? You know I’m right. She hated Elvis. Remember when she caught you humming Blue Suede Shoes and monitored your record collection for like, a month?”
Eddie remembered his mother’s horror when she realised what kind of music he’d been listening to. She’d spoken about all sorts of perversions that it would bring about and the word ‘gyrating’ had been used way too many times for Eddie’s liking.
“We could only listen to it at yours,” Eddie snickers. Fuck, he remembers vividly Richie offering to quiff his hair just like Elvis and Eddie had readily agreed so he could feel Richie’s fingers slip neatly against his scalp, slick with an overabundance of hair gel. He’d looked like an idiot after it and Richie had cracked up laughing, still not stopping even when Eddie had kneed him in the groin trying to wrestle him so he’d shut up.
“Sneaking around behind Mrs K’s back. You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, Eddie baby.” Richie grins at him and Eddie’s cheeks ache from grinning back. That won’t help the stab wound but he doesn’t fucking care.
The music swells, pushing through the grain of the radio until it sounds smooth and melodic like it should. Eddie doesn’t know if that’s his own imagination or remnants of Derry magic but he’s bolstered by the song dipping into the second verse in a clean, effortless flow.
Shall I stay, would it be a sin?
His hand slides away from Richie’s so he can push his chair back and stand up. A frown flits across Richie’s face and Eddie wants to smooth it away with the pad of his thumb.
The confused expression Richie wears clears away when Eddie takes a deep breath and offers him his hand.
“Uh,” is all the asshole has to say for himself.
“Come on,” Eddie urges him gently, the corners of his lip twitching.
“Wait…” Richie’s eyes wrinkle at the sides. There’s a sly smile creeping onto his face. “Are you serious?”
Suddenly, Eddie feels flushed.
“Am I serious? Am I standing here at half past fucking asscrack, in my pyjamas asking you to dance with me? You know what, jackass, maybe I am but if you don’t fucking want to then-”
He doesn’t get to finish his sentence because suddenly Richie is up and out of his chair, his hand enveloping Eddie’s wildly gesticulating one as he tugs him forward. One arm wraps around Eddie’s waist and, in one fluid movement, they’re pressed against each other with Richie smiling down at him.
“You were saying?” he asks and Eddie hates how fucking smooth that was.
“Just dance with me, you idiot,” he says, still breathless.
Richie complies, although they aren’t dancing as such, just swaying gently in the middle of the room, fingers intertwined and their feet nudging playfully against each other.
Eddie feels like his heart might burst. He hasn’t had butterflies since he was a teenager but they’re making a comeback in full force. They’re the same ones from when he was a kid. Eddie knows this because they’re brought on by the exact same person.
Take my hand, take me whole life too…
Without a word, Richie messily spins Eddie under his arm, bringing them together again with a loud laugh. Eddie chuckles, feeling light-headed in the best way. He can feel Richie’s thumb stroking his back through the material of his cotton shirt and it gives him the encouragement he needs to gently rest his head against Richie’s chest.
They stay like that for a while, the song still going, until Eddie feels Richie press his nose into his hair. He trails it down until he’s nuzzling it against Eddie’s temple and Eddie takes the hint and finally looks up.
Blue eyes. Cracked glass. Same smile.
Just as Richie leans down, Eddie cranes his neck up and they meet in the middle.
It’s the dry press of lips that Eddie’s been dreaming off since he was little. That same chaste touch softly turning into a wet slide as Richie opens his mouth and Eddie lets go of his hand so he can reach up and slide his own around the back of Richie’s neck.
It’s a moment that feels like it should last forever but when they pull away, the song is still playing and Richie is looking at him dazedly through his eyelashes. His mouth is still open, moisture gathered on his bottom lip, and Eddie could melt.
“How long?” Richie asks softly.
There’s no point in being obtuse. He knows what Richie is asking. “I think since I was twelve. You ruffled my hair coming home from school one day and it was all I thought about for like, three weeks.”
Richie lets out a wet laugh, squeezing his eyes shut and surging forward to press a fierce kiss to Eddie’s forehead.
“You?” Eddie’s fingers idly play with the hair at the nape of Richie’s neck and his eyes flick up cautiously. “I mean… do you….”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Eddie?” Richie laughs and the rumble of it vibrates through his chest, so strongly Eddie can feel it against his pyjama buttons and he automatically leans into it.
“You’re the first thing I remembered,” Richie whispers. His hand moves to the small of Eddie’s back. “Not… loving you, because I don’t think I ever stopped.”
“What?”
“I dunno. This sounds stupid but since I left Derry I’ve always felt like I’ve been holding onto something and I can’t remember what. Like I’ve left the fucking stove on for twenty three years. And then Mike called me and the first thing I remembered was this skinny little asshole telling me to shut the fuck up and my brain was just like ‘oh yeah, it was him’ and it sort of made sense.”
“You better not be fucking with me right now, Richie,” Eddie warns him, because he’s five seconds away from bawling his eyes out and if Richie is joking with him then it would sure be a waste of their combined efforts to keep each other alive while they fought Pennywise only for Eddie to murder Richie in the kitchen of Derry Town House while Elvis croons soulfully in the background. “Because I swear, if you’re joking, or… or…”
“I love you,” Richie says quickly.
Eddie’s vision blurs with tears. He reaches up and catches Richie’s lips in another kiss. Richie lets out a contented hum before jerking his head back.
“Eds?”
Eddie stares at him, a little dopily. “Huh?”
The light in Richie’s eyes dulls into a half-lidded look of ‘are you kidding me?’
Eddie grins. “Oh.” He tugs Richie down by his shirt. “I love you too.”
Richie kisses him again, deeply and deliberately and Eddie never wants him to stop.
Eventually, the song comes to an end and even though they’re still kissing, it’s a lot less romantic when the tune changes to the repeated mantra of how tonight is the night and it’s the only night and we only have tonight and man, Eddie fucking hates pop music.
“Hey,” he mumbles against Richie’s lips. Richie chases his mouth with his own, stealing another kiss before he answers with a questioning grunt.
“We should go to bed.”
When Richie freezes, it’s a full body thing. There’s not one of his limbs that isn’t locked into place and Eddie frowns, wondering if he’s overstepped.
“Eds, I don’t know if I can… if I can sleep right now. I don’t wanna see that shit again, I can’t…” He’s shaking his head and Eddie reaches up, running his thumb along Richie’s cheekbone.
“I’m still gonna be here when you wake up.” Richie still looks unsure so Eddie smiles and tags on a fond, “Idiot.”
It does the trick for a few seconds but Richie’s smile eventually slides away. “I can’t lose you now that I’ve got you.”
“You won’t.” Eddie steps back and, for the second time that night, he offers Richie his hand. And, if Elvis has anything to say about it, his whole life too, he guesses.
“Come to my bed.”
Because Richie is Richie, Eddie has to roll his eyes at the eyebrow wiggle he receives and pushes at Richie’s chest even when the other man takes a tight hold of his hand. “Not like that, asshole, just… Sleep next to me.”
Richie holds his gaze for moment before he eventually nods. “We’ll be alright, Eds.”
As Eddie leads him back upstairs, he thinks he believes him.