Work Text:
“If my stats are right on this one, I figure there’s only two possible outcomes for this.”
June 2nd, 2015. That was the day Eddie found out Dr. Richie Tozier was most likely dead. It’s not easy to survive an explosion, and Richie was in a small capsule when it blew. Not even crash-landing in a lake was enough to stop the explosion from happening.
“Either, I make it down there in one or more pieces, and I’ve got one hell of a story to tell…”
Eddie’s voice fought against the rest of the traffic from Mission Control, desperate to reach Richie. He doesn’t know if Richie heard. It doesn’t matter, anyway. His reassurances that they were tracking the location of the tracker became redundant as soon as the capsule blew. They had his last known location. It didn’t mean that they had him.
“Or I’ll… Fuck, it’s so hot. Fuck. Or I’ll burn up in the next ten minutes on re-entry.”
Eddie begged to be a part of the search party they sent to Richie’s last known location, but he was shot down. He’s just Mission Control. He’s not high enough up on the NASA operative ladder to be privy to classified information like this. Hell, he’s not high enough up any ladder for anyone to even consider it. So now he’s stuck at home. He’s off work. Fourteen days, mandatory. Ordered after the capsule blew and Eddie didn’t have a reason to stay anymore. He’d worked for practically thirty straight hours, desperate to help Richie stay alive.
“Whichever way it goes, well. No harm, no foul, right? Either way, it’s…”
Eddie squeezes his eyes shut. Richie’s voice sounds smaller at this point in the recording, no matter how many times he listens to it. Eddie knows his voice better than anyone. He’s memorized the ins and outs of it. Richie’s voice was the only connection Eddie had. Which is how he knows that Richie’s feigning bravery he doesn’t feel, in his very last moments.
“It’ll be one hell of a ride, right? I’m ready.”
The recording ends there. Eddie had to be quick, grabbing it on his phone, listening over the official NASA recordings but taking this bit for himself. What comes next doesn’t matter, anyway. What comes next is frantic shouts from Richie and one moment where he breaks down in tears. What comes next is a heartbreaking, shattering moment where Richie cries out in joy when the parachutes deploy, followed by each inhale and exhale of breath he takes before the capsule hits the body of water. What comes next is the sounds of Richie trying to undo his restraints and struggling to open the latch of the capsule, then one final cry as water starts to fill the inside before the systems are too damaged to pick up any more information.
Eddie doesn’t need to hear that part. He’ll hear it in his dreams.
He just wants to hear Richie’s voice again.
He presses play.
It gets bad. He listens to the recording more times than he can count. Plugs headphones into his phone and walks through his apartment listening to it. He’s got it memorized. It’s not enough to bring Richie back, and that’s the part that hurts the most.
He hears nothing from NASA. Eddie’s television is constantly on, playing the news while he sits in front of it and stares and hopes that someone says something about Dr. Tozier from STS-157. They talk about him, sometimes. They mention the astronaut who survived unthinkable circumstances, who tragically outlived the rest of his crew, and how his current status is still unknown. Eddie doesn’t like unknowns. He never has.
On his third day home from work, Stan lets himself into the apartment. Eddie’s sitting on the couch, cross-legged. No headphones. The recording plays through his phone’s speakers. He goes to pause it, but the damage is already done.
Stan stares at him. “What are you doing, Eddie?” he says softly.
“Don’t,” Eddie whispers. “Please, just. Don’t, Stan.”
“Is that the recording?” Stan presses. He toes his shoes off by the door and hangs his coat on Eddie’s rack before joining Eddie on the couch. Eddie doesn’t protest when Stan picks up Eddie’s phone from where it rests on his knee and presses play.
“… or I’ll burn up in the next ten minutes on re-entry.”
“Eddie,” Stan says again.
Eddie closes his eyes. “Whichever way it goes, well, no harm, no foul, right? Either way—”
“It’s one hell of a ride,” Stan finishes. He puts Eddie’s phone back on his knee. “Dr. Tozier always did have a dramatic way of speaking.”
“When he was younger, he wanted to be on the radio,” Eddie tells him. He opens one eye to peek at Stan. “Used to practice a whole bunch of different voices so he would be ready when he got his big break. Thought he was gonna be the youngest radio host ever. He told me he’s still not sure how he became a bioengineer.”
The corner of Stan’s mouth turns up into a smile. “That sounds like him.”
Eddie tries to smile too. He even forces out a tiny laugh. He is exhausted, drained at knowing so much about Richie and so many things that made him uniquely him, tired of holding this knowledge inside of him and not being able to do anything with it. He wanted to know more. He’d hoped he’d find out everything.
“Why are you doing this to yourself, Eddie?” Stan asks.
It’s a loaded question. Eddie’s not sure he knows the answer. How can he explain that he feels guilty without it turning into a big thing? How can he even be expected to carry on with this weight on his shoulders?
“Why do you think, Stanley?” Eddie says instead. Making a confession he never expected to make. “Why do you think I know about his dream career when he was a kid? Why did I work for thirty hours straight that night because I couldn’t stand to leave? Why did I beg to go to Argentina even though it’s nowhere near my paygrade? Why do you think every shift I tried to work was during hours I knew Richie would be on the comms?”
Stan’s face goes through a series of complicated emotions. He’s always been the best at reading people. It’s how he got his job as Director of the STS-157 mission.
“You fell in love with him,” Stan concludes.
Eddie nods in response.
Stan sighs. “You fell in love with one of my astronauts.”
“Could have been worse,” Eddie tells him. “It could have been—”
The rest of his sentence dies in his throat.
Stan was the Mission Director. And almost his entire crew died up there. There’s no word on whether or not the last surviving crew member even survived. Eddie feels as though he has been incredibly selfish. “Stan. Shit. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Stan tells him. “I don’t blame you.”
“I was Ground Control, I could have—” Eddie tries to say.
“You couldn’t have stopped the debris from striking the Explorer. If Tozier and Kowalski hadn’t been on that spacewalk, we would have lost them all then,” Stan tells him firmly. “And Eddie, Tozier was communicating with Mission Control in the blind. He couldn’t hear you talking back. You did what you could.”
Eddie chokes back a sob. Stan’s arms are around him in an instant, pulling him close until Eddie’s head is pressed against his chest. Eddie cries into his shirt, and Stan holds him tight.
“You did what you could,” Stan repeats. “You did what you could.”
“You lost all of them,” Eddie cries. “I’m so sorry.”
Stan runs a soothing hand down Eddie’s back. “It wasn’t your fault. It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”
Eddie’s not sure he believes that.
He’d told Richie it was going to be okay, too.
September 6th, 2014. This was the day Eddie first heard Dr. Richie Tozier’s voice.
“Houston, permission to call Commander Kowalski a killjoy?”
Kowalski had laughed and retorted back before Eddie even had a chance to intervene. They volleyed back and forth, for a while, until Kowalski finally gave the voice a voice. Tozier. Belonging, of course, then, to Dr. Richard W. Tozier, bioengineer. Eddie had assumed this would be one of the only times that Dr. Tozier would make him laugh, since Eddie’s previous experience with astronauts and especially with bioengineers had been anything but humorous.
He was wrong.
Dr. Tozier became Tozier, and Tozier became Richie, and before Eddie knew it he would log on each day of the mission that he worked and he’d be greeted with a warm and hearty, “Well, hello, Houston, and welcome to the work day.”
Eddie worked night shifts because it meant he got to be alone, solely in charge of manning Mission Control, and because Richie slept weird hours and was almost always up to talk to him. They talked to each other a lot. There wasn’t much else to do on a night shift, whether it was on the Explorer a couple hundred kilometers above the planet or in an empty, cold control center. So they talked. Richie made him laugh. Richie drove him up the wall sometimes, with his subordinate comments and terrible innuendos, but he also made Eddie smile. More times than Eddie could even try to count. Eddie had assumed he wouldn’t fall in love with an astronaut he’d never so much as laid eyes on in person.
He was wrong. Again.
October 7th, 2014. This was the day the thought first crossed Eddie’s mind that he might be in love with Richie. He knows, because his conversation with Richie was recorded and dated and stored in NASA’s archives. Almost one month exactly since the first time Eddie heard Richie talk.
“You know, Houston,” Richie had said, even though he told Eddie once that part of him was always dying to use some kind of nickname, “I do think our little conversations are the best part of my day. And I’m in literal space.”
“Wave to us mere earthlings while you’re up there, will you?” Eddie had asked with a smile. A few hours later, when the crew uploaded their data dump for the day, there was a picture of Richie waving to a window with the Earth gleaming bright and brilliant on the other side.
Eddie had smiled so hard his cheeks her and then, intruding, the thought had crossed his mind. He wishes he could say that was the only time. But the next time came just a few days later. And the time after that was after less than twenty-four hours had passed.
Eight months. God, it was eight months that Eddie spent loving Richie in secret. Eight months that he woke up excited to go to work solely because it meant hearing Richie’s voice. Eight months of greedily looking at every picture of Richie that the crew updated, falling all over again for his errant curls and his bright eyes and his contagious smile. Richie had always been smiling. And Eddie had always been falling for it.
Part of him believed that Richie felt the same. God, there’s a part of him that still believes it. Some desperate, broken part of him that’s rattling the inside of its cage, unable to let go of the possibility that it might have been loved by Richie Tozier.
June 5th, 2015. By this day, Richie Tozier has been declared missing, presumed dead for three days. Well, only two and a half, for specificity. It’s only three in the morning. It will be three days officially just a little bit after 9am. Eddie pulls himself out of bed and goes into the living room where his laptop is charging.
He sits down heavy on the couch and wraps a blanket around his shoulders numbly. His laptop boots up at a glacial pace. Eddie thrums his fingers against his knee while he waits. His phone is on the coffee table, too. He picks it up and unlocks it.
It’s still opened to the app that holds all of the recordings he took of Richie’s voice. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut. They’re stinging, but he won’t cry. Not yet. There’s still things that he can do before he allows himself to cry again.
While Google pulls up on his laptop, Eddie sifts through recordings. None of them have names, but he knows what every date on here means.
February 14th, 2015. By this day, Eddie had known Richie’s voice for just over five months.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Houston” croons Richie’s voice over the recording. Eddie puts his phone back on the table and pulls his laptop onto his lap. The blinking cursor taunts him in the search bar. “I didn’t get the dates mixed up, did I? Time is so strange up here.”
Eddie takes a deep breath. He poises his fingers over the keys.
“Got a hot date tonight? Bet all the Earth people are crawling all over themselves to spend some time with you.”
Eddie can’t do much, but he can do this. He takes another deep breath. He types JOHN DOE ARGENTINA JUNE 2015.
“What?! What do you mean you don’t go on dates. Houston, you’ve got to get out of the building more. Let people hear your pretty voice. Bet you’ve got a pretty face to match. No, no, I’m right, I know I’m right! It’s not harassment, you’re laughing! It’s Valentine’s Day, I can flirt with Mission Control.”
Argentinian newspapers pull up. Eddie clicks on the first link and starts scouring the words.
“Of course you don’t believe me, you capricious asshole. Hang on. Hey, Commander Kowalski. Permission to flirt with Houston on this most lovely of Valentine’s Days?”
“Granted. Just get your work done, Tozier,” chimes Kowalski’s voice. It had made Eddie smile then. It makes him smile now.
“See? I told you.”
The first link is a bust. Nothing substantial. Eddie goes back and clicks on the next one. He refuses to do the obvious and Google search Richie Tozier. He’s not sure he’ll like what he sees. Besides, he’s done it before. Looked up Dr. Richard Tozier, bioengineer for the University of Texas before applying and being accepted onto Space Flight STS-157. But the pictures and the factual articles about him didn’t do justice to the real thing.
They won’t do justice now, either.
“Yeah, yeah, I bet you say that to all the slouchy astronauts who try to vie for your attention. Really, though, you don’t have any plans tonight?”
Second link is a bust. He clicks on the third one and says a silent thank you to whoever is listening that his high school Spanish isn’t as rusty as he thought it was.
“Huh. Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll tell you what, Houston. I’ll be back in your neck of the woods in a few months. Maybe we can preemptively make plans for Valentine’s Day next year, whaddya say?”
There isn’t much on the third link, either. If Eddie had more clearance, he might be able to use his NASA job status to view hospital records for practices near Richie’s crash site, but he doesn’t have the clearance. He doesn’t have the clearance for anything except for communications, and he can’t even do that now.
“You’re just saying that,” Eddie says to the recording. The exact same words he’d said to Richie the first time around.
“You think I flirt with every Mission Control guy I talk to? No. Don’t let this go to your head, but that’s reserved especially for you.”
“Okay,” Eddie says to the recording. This, however, is not what he said to Richie the first time around. “Let’s do Valentine’s Day next year. It’s a date.”
Richie’s laugh comes over the recording, boisterous and happy. “I’ll take what I can get, Houston.”
There’s a sound of a bedroom door opening in the apartment then the telltale padding of Mike’s socked feet across the hardwood. Mike comes to a stop at the side of the couch. Eddie doesn’t look up at him. “Hey, it’s late. Why are you still up?”
Eddie’s shoulders droop guiltily. “Can’t sleep,” he murmurs. He clicks on link number five. He’s grateful the next recording doesn’t start autoplaying.
“Eddie,” Mike sighs. He sits down on the couch next to Eddie and pulls the laptop out of his hands. “What are you doing? You have to know this isn’t healthy. There are… there are better ways to process grief, healthy outlets, people who can help—”
“I’m not grieving, he’s not dead!” Eddie snaps.
Mike shifts backwards. “Eddie,” he says again.
“I’m the—” Eddie tries to say. Panic or hysteria or desperation or something is rising with a self-righteous fury in his throat. “I’m the only fucking person that’s doing anything to try and find him, I’m the only one who knows he’s still alive, I. Christ, fuck , Mike, I’m the only fucking person who wants to find him!”
“NASA is trying,” Mike reminds him. His voice is gentle. “They’re trying to find him, too.”
“Then why haven’t they?!” Eddie shouts. He stands up and runs his hands through his hair, angry in a way he can’t ever remember feeling. “Why haven’t they found him yet, Mike? They should have let me come with him, then he’d—then we’d have him, then he’d… then he’d be here, Mike!”
Mike stands too, and he puts his hands on Eddie’s shoulders to try and calm him down. “Eddie, breathe, man, you gotta take a breath.”
Eddie chokes back a sob. “I can’t fucking breathe. I can’t breathe until I know he’s okay, Mike, I can’t—”
Still resting on it’s spot on the coffee table, Eddie’s phone starts to ring.
On an otherwise unnoteworthy day near the beginning of June, a fisherman visiting Lake Nahuel Huapi watched as a piece of the sky fell from the heavens and tumbled down right into the water beside him. Granted, he was a couple hundred kilometers away, and therefore completely unharmed by the falling sky, but he had been the only one around to see it. He watched as the sky piece smoked and sizzled until catching flame entirely and sinking, then, rapidly, to the bottom of the lake. He wondered idly if he should call someone to have them collect the fallen piece of the sky, since it would likely tarnish the lake and the creatures who called the lake home.
The fisherman didn’t have much time to think about it, though. Not long after the sky piece sunk itself, a man walked himself out of the water. The fisherman watched as the man tilted his face up to the sky, otherwise unmarred despite it’s missing piece, and began to laugh. The kind of full-bodied, relieved, gut laugh that nearly makes a man sound insane. He laughed straight up until the moment he collapsed on the sand.
The fisherman didn’t call for someone to collect the sky piece, but he did call for help regardless.
Alternatively, on the most remarkable day of Eddie Kaspbrak’s life, the man who fell along with the piece of the sky was transferred from Hospital Bariloche in Argentina to NASA’s private hospital in Houston.
June 5th, 2015. This is the day Stan Uris calls Eddie and tells him the news.
Eddie’s not sure exactly how many miles he lives from JSC, but as his phone slips out of his hand and tumbles to the ground, he’s certain he could run the entire way there. Mike ducks to catch it, though he’s not quite fast enough to grab it before it hits the ground. Eddie doesn’t care, anyway. He doesn’t care. His ears are ringing. He thinks he might start to cry.
He doesn’t need a recording to replay Stan’s words over in his head.
“Eddie, what the hell?” Mike’s asking. Eddie’s vaguely aware of Mike lifting Eddie’s phone to his ear and taking over the conversation. It doesn’t matter. Eddie heard what he needed to.
While Mike’s on the phone, Eddie goes to his room.
Same routine he does every morning. Put on a shirt, put on pants. Find a jacket. Find shoes. Place wallet in pocket. Find car keys. Check the room to see if anything is missing. Walk out the front door. Go to JSC.
Veer from routine.
Richie Tozier is alive, and Eddie’s going to the hospital to see him.
Mike stops him before he can make it out. “I’m going with you,” Mike says, because he’s a good roommate and an even better friend. Because he’s known Eddie his entire life. Because no matter what they find at the hospital, Mike knows Eddie is gonna need someone there when the adrenaline wears off and the truth weighs in.
Eddie lets Mike drive them, though he’s not quite sure why. This is a drive he takes every day. Left turn, straight for four miles, right turn, left turn, et cetera. He could make this drive in his sleep. He probably has, before. But Mike takes the keys from him gently and persuades Eddie towards the passenger seat of the car and Eddie goes.
It’s not until Mike takes too long to turn left that Eddie finally speaks.
“Can you step on it, please?” he croaks. He’s surprised by the sound of his own voice. He’d expected anxiety, anger, the same fast-paced voice he takes on when he’s at work and lives are on the line. Not a voice that sounds like it’s screamed itself raw for the past three days. Not a voice that sounds like it’s never properly been used.
Mike steps on it.
Eddie doesn’t have the clearance needed to make it through the hospital, and everyone knows that. He spends the entire drive wondering what he can say or do to be let in. Mike’s fingers tap anxiously against the steering wheel and Eddie knows Mike is wondering the same question. How is Eddie going to get back? How is he going to get the chance to see Richie with his own eyes and know, irrefutably, that Richie is here and alive and breathing, and a real living person that Eddie didn’t make up?
God, how will Richie even know it’s him? Will he recognize Eddie’s voice?
He runs out of questions by the time they make it to JSC. Eddie uses his badge to get them in. And in the end it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have clearance or any half-assed plan he had to sneak himself in, because Stan’s waiting in the lobby of the hospital and he takes both Eddie and Mike up with him.
“So Tozier’s alive,” Mike says, as they wait in the elevator.
Stan is the picture of professionalism, except for the relieved and tired smile that barely breaks through his even expression. He’s happy, too. One of his astronauts made it home.
“Tozier’s alive,” Stan confirms.
Finally, Eddie starts to cry.
“You’ve got to pull yourself together if I’m gonna let you meet the famous astronaut Richie Tozier,” Stan says. He raises an eyebrow at Eddie.
Eddie chokes on a laugh. “Cut me some fucking slack, here. You know I’ve been a mess the last three days.”
“Everyone knows,” Stan tells him solemnly. He bumps his shoulder against Eddie’s, though, as the elevator stops and the doors begin to open. “I hope this means we get the regular, anal-retentive Eddie Kaspbrak back.”
“Don’t press your luck, I still might quit,” Eddie says. He wipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.
“No, you won’t,” Mike says with a laugh.
“No, he won’t,” Stan agrees.
Eddie, against all odds, manages another laugh. “Fuck the both of you.”
“Oh, so you don’t want to see Tozier?” Stan asks, but the threat is empty even if he weren’t currently leading Eddie to Richie’s room. Mike hangs behind, which Eddie is grateful for. Stan tells Mike he’ll join him in just a minute. Then Stan turns to Eddie and says, in a quiet voice, “So he doesn’t look bad, and he’s gonna be fine, but he’s not at one hundred percent. Be careful. Please. That’s my astronaut in there.”
And Stan’s right; Eddie opens the door gently and takes his first real look at Richie Tozier, here and alive and breathing. He looks well, considering. A few lacerations on his face, covered by bandages. Bruising around his eyes and down his arms. Nothing externally that Eddie can see. More than that, Richie is beautiful in a way that wasn’t done justice in photographs. Even like this, in a hospital bed wearing a hospital gown. Richie’s looking out the window, when Eddie comes in. Eddie’s not sure what he’s looking at, since it’s still night time and the world outside is bathed in black. It gives him a moment to collect himself, though, before Richie turns and looks at him.
Nothing could prepare Eddie for this.
This is the man that Eddie fell in love with, knowing nothing about him except for the sound of his voice and the stories he chose to share with Eddie. This is the man that Eddie rewrote his body chemistry for, overcoming internal anxieties and letting walls down and opening up because something in his atoms knew that Richie was worth it. And Eddie feels all of that magnified, when Richie looks at him. He feels the very molecules that make up his existence lighting up, everywhere on his body.
Richie smiles. His shoulders sag in relief. “Eddie,” he breathes, though he’s never seen Eddie’s face before.
Eddie startles. “How’d you know?”
Richie’s eyes are wide and beautiful behind his glasses. Like he’s not quite sure he can believe what’s going on. “I just…” he tries to explain. He shrugs one shoulder and hides the grimace. “I dunno. Guess I just knew. I mean, it had to be, right?”
“What, you think no one else would come visit you?” Eddie asks.
“I didn’t care if anyone else came,” Richie says honestly. The kind of honestly that knocks the wind out of a person. “I only cared if you came. Ain’t that something?”
Something in Eddie’s chest cracks. He takes a step forward, and his hand is reaching towards Richie on its own accord, but none of it matters anyway as he crumples in on himself and gasps out, “Richie, they thought you were dead. They tried to tell me you were dead, you weren’t here, you were—”
“Oh, c’mon, Eds,” Richie scoffs. “You really think I’d leave this earth without meeting you first?”
Unwillingly, a laugh bursts out of Eddie’s throat. “My name is Eddie,” he says. He won’t admit for a second that he’s been waiting to hear any nickname Richie was willing to give him. “And you did leave this earth without meeting me first.”
Richie covers his heart with his hand. “Oof,” he breathes. “Too soon for space jokes.”
“I’m sorry—” Eddie starts.
“I’m teasing you, Spaghetti Man,” Richie says. He points to the chair that’s right beside his bed. “You wanna sit down? You look like you’re gonna pass out.”
Eddie sits carefully. Richie is ethereal this close. Eddie could spend hours memorizing the curvatures of his face. Instead, he reaches up and uselessly wipes his own tears from his face. “Kind of shitty for me to be the one having a meltdown when you survived literal hell,” Eddie comments.
Richie laughs. “You know what? I’ll allow it.”
“Are you feeling okay, though? Honestly?”
“Hurts to breathe,” Richie admits.
Eddie nods. “That’s probably the smoke inhalation.”
“I think it’s the fact that you’re sitting there across from me looking all pretty, but yes, the medical professional’s real diagnosis said smoke inhalation in the lungs,” Richie says seriously. His eyes are searching Eddie’s face for something Eddie himself can’t identify.
“You’re really gonna flirt with me from a hospital bed?” Eddie asks incredulously.
Richie’s grin is shit-eating. There’s no other way to describe it. Eddie’s so in love with him that it fucking hurts to try and keep it in. Richie says, “Depends, I guess. Is it working?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “No.”
“Liar.”
God. Eddie can hear the smile in Richie’s voice. Richie’s voice. He could start to cry all over again. He squeezes his eyes shut and blindly reaches for Richie’s hand. It’s easier, he thinks, to imagine saying this to Richie without having to see his face. This is how they always talked before. “Wanna know the truth? Your flirting always worked on me. You’ve had me charmed since day fucking one, Richie.”
Richie’s voice is soft when he says, “Eds, why are you closing your eyes? Don’t you wanna look at me?”
Eddie lets out a breathless, disbelieving laugh. “If I had it my way, I’d never stop looking at you,” he admits.
“Jesus,” Richie breathes out, with a disbelieving laugh of his own. Like he can’t believe Eddie could be saying something like this to him. “I mean. Shit, Eddie. Is it stupid that one of the reasons I tried so hard to stay alive was because I was hoping I’d have a chance to do this?”
Eddie peeks at him through one eye. “Do what? Fall out of the sky in a literal meteorite? Get treated in an Argentinian hospital? Give Stan a stress ulcer with paper work?”
“You idiot,” Richie says fondly. “I meant this. Holding your fucking hand in a goddamn hospital. Holding your hand anywhere. Getting the chance to meet you. Is that fucking insane? Is it crazy that I got these huge, over the top feelings for you while I was a hundred miles above the earth and without ever seeing your face?”
“I think it’s pretty insane you’re just saying all of this to me right now,” Eddie tells him, like his own heart isn’t going to beat right out of his chest.
Richie shrugs. “I almost died,” he says. “Puts some things in perspective.”
Eddie smiles at him. There’s still a good chance he’s crying, but he can’t find it within himself to care. It’s not as important as this. Holding Richie’s fucking hand in a goddamn hospital. “For what it’s worth, I have the same huge, over the top feelings,” Eddie says honestly. “I’ve been a fucking mess for the past three days.”
“Something tells me you’re always a mess, but luckily that’s just my type,” Richie tells him. That same shit-eating grin is back. Eddie stands up out of his chair and shifts forward until he’s hovering over Richie.
“I’m gonna kiss you now, if that’s alright,” he says.
“I’ll literally die if you don’t,” Richie tells him, and Eddie surges forward to press a kiss to that smug, perfect mouth.
It’s a perfect kiss, with no other way to describe it. Their hands are still twined together. Richie reaches up with his free hand to cradle the back of Eddie’s head and keep him close. It’s a kiss they’ve both waited for since the first time they spoke. It’s a kiss they’ve waited for for maybe even longer. There’s heat without intention, just enough to make Eddie’s toes curl. A movie-magic first kiss.
“Fuck, I wanna say it,” Richie breathes, when Eddie pulls away, before Eddie ducks back in to press his lips softly against Richie’s once again. “Is that crazy? Is it too soon? We just met.”
“I think I’m in love with you,” Eddie says, for him, even though think is actually know and there isn’t a doubt in Eddie’s mind that this is how he wants the rest of his life to go. Not this, exactly, with the hospital bed and the healing lungs and the dangerous space travel, but. Richie kissing him. Their hands interlocked. Richie’s fingers in his hair. Happiness threatening to bubble out of his chest and fill the whole room. He’d take that, for the rest of his life.
“Thank fuck,” Richie laughs. “I’m in love with you. Fuck it if this is the first time we’re meeting face to face, right? I love you. Goddamn.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and laughs and ducks down to press his forehead against Richie’s. He squeezes his eyes shut again. June 5th, 2015. This is the day the life Eddie had always wanted to live finally begins. “Thank you for finding your way back to me,” Eddie breathes out.
Richie closes the distance between them so he can kiss Eddie again.