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“Here’s a truth: you’re a sloppy bitch! Yeah, that’s right! Let’s dance! Yipee-ki-yay, motherf—“
The world goes blinding white.
The music, he thinks, could have been fucking creepy in another life. A jazzy orchestra bit with a smooth, deep voice crooning over it about midnight, the stars, and someone – the ornate hotel ballroom that lies on the other side of the doors should have been ridiculous with all the gold, and the music should have been terrifying. It’s not, though, and the white light spilling from behind the bar is enough to encourage him at least that far in. He can get a look at the dancers spinning around the floor from there.
Richie crosses the middle of the room, swanning past dancing pairs and gents draped across red velvet couches with confidence - more than he should by all rights, more than he has ever, felt in his life.
He slides into a high bar stool. “Hi, Martin,” he says cheerfully to the familiar bartender he has never seen before. “Been away, but now I’m back.”
“Good evening, Mr. Tozier,” says Martin, equally friendly. “It’s good to see you.”
Richie drums on the bar. “It’s good to be back, Martin!”
“What’ll it be, sir?”
“Hair of the dog that bit me.”
“Bourbon on the rocks?”
“That’ll do!”
Martin pours him the drink and sidles off back down the bar to serve a few other hangers-on seeking his talents. Richie lets him go, satisfied to sit and sip and not bother good ol’ Martin with shitty jokes that he didn’t write. He turns back to the dancers again, barstool spun at an angle to watch men in suits spin ladies in party dresses around the glittering floor. It looks like a slip hazard to him, but what does he know? He doesn’t dance.
A body obstructs his view for a second as someone else comes up to catch Martin’s attention, carrying two drinks back over to one of those red chaises to deliver to a date who looks very relieved indeed to see the pale gold bubbling in the crystal flute.
“Alone tonight, Mr. Tozier?” Martin collects the empty glasses from the bar where the other fellow had deposited them and dunks them into a sink of soapy water, which steams gently in the barback.
Richie nods, lifts his bourbon in a one-man toast before answering. “Only always, Martin. Perpetual bachelor, me.”
Martin slides him a look and a quick smile. “If you say so, Mr. Tozier.”
He doesn’t rise to that one.
A second interloper comes up to the bar to claim Martin’s attention, hanging at the corner of the bar, in the blind spot behind Richie’s right shoulder. He gives Martin his order in a voice Richie can only hear the timbre of, and it sounds familiar, pleasing, the kind of voice you like to hear singing in your kitchen, or under your ear first thing on a lazy morning in the bed you share, drenched in morning sun.
“Certainly,” Martin says in response, and he drifts away again, pulling down a bottle of gin from a shelf.
Richie drains his bourbon, and when Martin delivers what looks like a gin rickey, Richie requests a second drink and, really, it seems as good a time as any to take a peek at the fellow down the bar. He’s not facing Richie, head propped on a bent elbow and a nervous hand, and angled away from the dance floor; the white and gold light catches in his dark hair, and Richie swallows hard.
The newcomer is sharply-dressed, with actual cufflinks to his shirt and a jacket - deep red and black plaid, of all things, and the red almost a perfect match to the lounge chairs and the carpeting in the hall outside the gold, gold ballroom - that does him all kinds of favors. It’s this observation that leads Richie to realize he’s also in a suit, blue with slick black lapels and a damn bow tie. Of all things. Huh.
A glance around the room and he puts together that pretty much everyone has some sort of outstanding suit or dress on. There’s not a dull dresser in the room.
Richie does not remember being invited to this party, nor indeed what it’s actually for.
“Quite a night, huh?”
The man in the red suit startles and looks up at him from where he’s been studying the bartop, arm blocking his face and absently working his fingers into the back of his neck while he awaits his drink. “Sorry?” He seems only politely interested in what it actually was that Richie said, not that Richie blames him. He’s not entirely sure where the statement even came from, but it doesn’t matter now that this man, this man, is looking at him.
This is a man he’d die for. Maybe a man he has died for already, fuck, Richie doesn’t know, too caught up in the electric relief in the ends of his fingers at the sight of this face. His brain goes a little blank, a little fuzzy and white around the edges, and for a second he would swear he could hear that voice shouting his name, if you believe it does, beep beep motherfucker.
“Eddie.”
Eddie seems only mildly surprised to see him. “Oh, hey, Rich. Sorry, I was kind of preoccupied.” The other hand goes back to the curve of his neck, still tense, but Eddie smiles at him, and Richie feels his heart stop. “Been kind of a rough day, huh? Almost thought I wouldn’t make it tonight.”
Richie remembers how to breathe. “Yeah, a real kick in the head. Glad you came, though. Was shaping up to be a real quiet night, otherwise.”
“With you here?” Eddie raises an eyebrow at him, picks up his glass. “Not on your life, Trashmouth.” Smiles. Takes a drink, looks past Richie to the dance floor.
There was something Richie needed to tell him. Had been meaning to. Not the moment, though, not now. Right now, Martin is dropping off a fresh drink, and Richie wants to sit here and talk with Eddie, not to him.
“Tell me about you, Eds,” Richie says over a new song. (Is that Bobby Darin?) “How you been? It’s been, what, a couple years since I’ve seen you?”
“Almost two and a half,” Eddie confirms. “I think it was spring, wasn’t it? When Ben had that party on completion of that huge project he’d been working on. Yeah, two years, three months. Twenty-seven fuckin’ years months, Rich.” He looks back to Richie, levels a look at him that seems more significant than even Eddie realizes. “It’s too long.”
Richie agrees, but the burn of the bourbon and Eddie’s steady brown eyes is almost too much for him. He chooses more bourbon, diffuses the sincerity of Eds’ gaze with an amber warmth inside to match the golden glow outside. The lights from the bar shelving catch the glass in his hands. “I know. I don’t like it, either.” A joke, please, Jesus fuck, any time now. “All that time since I’ve seen your mom, Eds, she’s gotta be wasting away from the heartbreak.” (Not that joke!)
“Fuck you, jackass! You know, I was being fucking sincere and you just had to come in and fucking trample it, didn’t you. And don’t call me that.” Eddie’s getting worked up, agitated in the way that makes him talk a mile a minute, nigh-unintelligible and completely endearing.
Richie feels a dopey grin spread across his face like warm honey. “You know I only have eyes for you, Eddie, my love. Hey, you think the band would play that next if I asked?” He cranes his neck, sits high on his high seat to look for the source of the music, but he sees neither a band nor a system to pipe in recorded music. Wherever it’s coming from, Etta James’ knockout voice is soaring crystal clear over the heads of all those dancers. He likes this development immensely.
Except for the part where it makes his voice match Eddie’s eyes - soft, deep, and far more sincere than Richie really feels comfortable navigating. “Hey,” he says in that Voice, the soft one he finds immediately even though as a kid he spent more time ignoring it in favor of others he practiced time and time again. “Did I ever apologize for that shit with your arm when we were kids?”
Eddie blinks. “Apologize? For me falling through a rotten fucking floor in a murder house off my bike and breaking my arm? How could that have possibly been your fault, Rich?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure I could find out,” he says thickly. “And anyway, I meant for alternating between not trying to see you and getting you in trouble for trying to see you after your mom locked you in the house. That was a shit summer, Eduardo.”
He lets that one go. “You were the only one who did try to come see me, Richie. The others were too afraid of my mom.” The hand not still cradling his drink finds Richie’s wrist where the sleeves of his jacket and shirt (buttoned, not cufflinked) have pulled up. Eddie’s thumb works over the knob of bone there. “You know you were always my best friend, right?”
Richie can’t breathe again. Eddie’s hand isn’t actually wrapped around his wrist at all, he thinks, but has dipped right into the heaving cage of his ribs to cradle the tender, fluttering heart there. Fucking hell. “I-I know.”
Eddie smiles again. “Starting to sound like Big Bill, there, dickwad,” he says, and lets go of Richie’s wrist. “Remember that fucking rhyme his parents always had him spit out that never did him much good?”
“Yeah.” Richie tries not to gasp, that desperate to get air back into his lungs before he gets so dizzy that jovial Martin has to peel him off the bar. “He did better with swearing than all that shit about posts and ghosts.”
The Ink Spots ask them if it would be the same. The last few lingerers at the bar go to dance with partners who stretch cajoling hands towards them, and Eddie watches them go. They’ve both finished their drinks, but Martin seems to have stopped being able to see them, because Richie can’t catch his eye for shit. Fucking tragic; maybe a third bourbon would have made him less of a coward.
You’re braver than you think.
The thought’s an odd one, unattributed, but it’s the only thing in his head when Eddie hops down off his bar stool and says, “Come dance, Rich. Getting close to the end of the night. It’d be a shame to not have gotten one dance in.”
“I got here late,” Richie says dumbly.
Eddie rolls his eyes, and then his hand is the one cajoling, outstretched, painted in all that gold. Richie feels his feet meet the floor without actually directing them to do that.
He’d developed a fondness for Billie Holiday pretty much by accident, after someone said something about his Buddy Holly glasses when he was too young to remember names or make connections very well. A trip to the library with crossed wires and too little information had misguided him rather fortuitously - or not, maybe, not if the next heart-pounding several minutes of Richie’s life are anything to go by - to Lady Day instead. He hadn’t told his friends about how much he loved her; they probably wouldn’t have given him any shit for it, not after he explained, but it was kind of nice to have something that was his the way his mother’s records had been. Maggie hadn’t really told him not to touch them, but the long, warm afternoons when his parents were away and his friends were occupied (or, a few times, put off to another day) and Billie was crooning at him were just. They were special.
…A lot like Eddie is special, actually. Richie takes his hand.
Fuck it. He’s gonna tell him. He’s gonna dance.
Richie’s taller, but Eddie leads, which, not that Richie has a lot of experience leading, but he’d taken a couple of girls to dances in high school. He keeps stepping the wrong direction on shoddy instinct. “Left, Richie, your left,” Eddie has to keep reminding him when Richie nearly catches his foot and sends them both tumbling. “Relax, I got you.”
Relax, Richie tells himself, Eds Spagheds has this, has you, and you can focus on the other thing.
“Eddie, listen - ”
And then those dark, dark eyes are back on his and Richie just knows he’s gonna fuck this up.
Eddie blinks.
“I don’t remember this song being this long.” He lets his head fall to Eddie’s shoulder, but it’s more of an attempt to beat it against a brick wall than anything else.
“Rich,” Eddie says into his hair. “Left.”
Richie steps left, straightens up to look at Eddie again, once more with feeling. “I love you,” he feels more than hears himself say. “Since we were kids.”
Eddie blinks at him again, slower this time. They stop dancing; everyone else moves around them, starting to blur just a little at the edge of Richie’s vision as they keep moving against that gold, gold room. Richie thinks he’s going to miss this room, this gold, gold ballroom in this not-creepy hotel. He’s going to miss looking out over all those sharp-dressed dancers and he’s going to miss Martin who knows him immediately and his going to miss the slow, syrupy sound of Billie Holiday’s voice floating over the crowd as Eddie stares gently at him, tugs at his lapels, kisses him with one hand at the back of Richie’s neck and the other pressed to his chest, warm and alive and unhurried.
It’s over too soon, but only, Richie thinks, because he could happily spend the rest of eternity kissing Eddie like that.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he says just in time for Lady Day, looking at the moon, to echo it as the song fades. “Tell me again, when I do.” Richie can’t tear his eyes from Eddie’s, but is is probably about to cry. “And Richie?” He drags a thumb over Richie’s cheekbone. “Step left.”
Things go dark again.
STEP LEFT, MR. TOZIER, Martin the turtle says.
“Holy shit! Rich, Rich! Hey Rich, wake up!” There are hands on him. He blinks.
“Hey yeah, yeah! There he is, buddy! Hey, Richie, listen, I think I got It, man, I think I killed It. I did, I think I killed It for real!”
STEP LEFT.
Richie rolls them both to the left, and there is no sickening crunch, no Bev screaming, no Bill screaming, just him and Eddie rolling back down into the cave, out of It’s reach.
“Eddie,” Richie starts.
Eddie heaves a breath, and then another. “Yeah,” he says, stunned, but alive and pinned between Richie’s arms. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Richie lets his head drop to Eddie’s shoulder again, lets out a huge, relieved breath himself. “Listen, I know this isn’t really the time, but just in case some other dumbfuck bullshit bad-luck thing happens, you.” He almost chokes on it, but some gold-lit thing in his chest screams at him to just fucking do it, bitch. “You gotta know I love you, dude.”
Eddie blinks. “What.” It’s not a question.
Suddenly petrified, Richie launches himself away from him. “I’m sorry, I know, that’s some fuckin’ bullshit, but. I don’t know, I guess I didn’t want to let it sit there for another 27 years.”
“Not that, you fucking idiot. I love you too.” It’s Richie’s turn to blink, mouth hanging open with a partially formed question, something in the what the fuck vein, but Eddie’s barreling on. “I meant, what the fuck, did you just call me ‘dude’ and tell me you’re in love with me in the same fucking breath? What the fuck.”
Richie blinks again, still a little stunned, and then the sounds of It beating Itself against the rock bleeds through, followed by skittering rocks at the other Losers struggle to keep their balance down the tunnel. They’re shouting their names, concerned, hoping everyone is still alive after losing sight of them.
It’s really, really not the moment. “I feel like we should come back to this later,” Richie says weakly. “Bigger, uh. Bigger fucking clownfish to fry.”
Eddie rolls his eyes, loops a hand behind Richie’s neck, drags him in for a fleeting kiss that has Richie floating, counterpoint to all those kids It killed, and that’s a terrible comparison but Richie feels like he could strangle the clown with his bare hands. “Bigger fucking clownfish,” Eddie agrees on the tail end of it.
They turn to catch their friends in their arms, regroup. They gotta kill this fucking clown.