Work Text:
Eddie can’t see his mom’s eyes behind the reflection of the TV on her glasses, but he can still feel the beam of her gaze as he stands just beyond the threshold, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“Come closer, Eddie Bear.”
He shuffles into the living room, feeling his sock snag a little on a nail in the hardwood floor. Trying not to breathe in the stale air too deeply, he approaches his mom’s reclined armchair. Once he’s within reach she takes his hand in hers.
“Now, what is it you were saying?”
“I just asked if I could—if I could spend the night at Bill’s tonight?” Eddie’s voice comes out strained in his effort to raise it over the raucous cheers on The Price Is Right. “My friends are all over there now.”
“Not tonight, Eddie,” his mom says, without deliberation. “I told you earlier—you’re not well today.”
“No, but—I feel fine, Mommy,” he says, hoping in vain that she can’t see the lie on his face, because he’s actually been feeling a familiar ache in his bones ever since waking up. “Really, I think maybe the worst of it will be tomorrow? And I can stay home then, but tonight—”
“Eddie.” Her voice is low and sharp, cutting through the head-rattling din of the TV. He can see her eyes now, lurking hard and dangerous behind the reflection on her glasses. “You’ll stay home tonight. In the sterile room. You’re sick.”
Eddie opens his mouth again to argue, but then she clenches her hand tightly around his, and the words dissolve on his tongue like a bad-tasting cough drop.
“You don’t want to get your friends sick, too, do you?”
Eddie blinks hard and looks away. On the TV, some old lady is hemming and hawing over the price of a toaster oven.
“Do you?”
“No,” he snaps, turning back to glare at her. Horribly, traitorously, he feels his eyes prickle, but he refuses to wipe at them.
His mom’s mouth is a thin hard line as she looks up at him with narrowed eyes. Then she relinquishes her hold on his hand and her gaze slides back to the TV screen. “I’ll let you know when it’s time to go down,” she says.
“Lynnette Baker!” roars the host on the TV. “Come onnnnn down!”
Eddie turns on his heel and strides quickly out of the room. Once he’s safely around the corner, the breath he’s been holding comes out in a whisper-scream of rage. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, his shoulders shaking; then he forces his arms down to his sides and takes a deep, excruciatingly long breath. He imagines taking the feeling in his hands, folding it up, putting it inside a tiny box, and swallowing it in one painful gulp. When he opens his eyes again he’s calm.
He goes into the kitchen and takes the phone off its hook on the wall, craning his neck to see into the living room and make sure his mom is still glued to the TV. Then he dials Bill’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mrs. Denbrough,” Eddie says in a voice he hopes is sufficiently chipper. “It’s Eddie.”
“Oh, hi, Eddie! The boys were wondering when you’d get here.”
Eddie’s mouth twists. “Um,” he says, “can I talk to Bill, please?”
“Sure, one moment—” There’s a rustling sound, and when she speaks again her voice is muffled. “Bill? Eddie’s on the phone, he wants to talk—just a moment, Richie, he wants to talk to Bill—here—”
“Hey, Eh-Eddie,” comes Bill’s voice through the receiver. “We were j-just about to go to Video City and p-p-pick out a movie, when are you c-coming?”
“I can’t come after all, Big Bill,” Eddie mutters, wrapping the phone cord tightly around his finger. “I’m—”
“Sick?”
Eddie grimaces. “Yeah.”
“B-bummer,” Bill says, though he doesn’t sound surprised. “Well I guess—okay, oh-kay, Richie, Jesus—s-sorry, Eddie, Richie wants to—”
There’s a scuffle of some sort, and then Richie’s loud voice crackles through the receiver. “Eds, what the fuck, when are you gonna get here?”
“I’m sick, dickwad.”
“You’re—fuck off, Stan, I’m talking to Eddie—”
Eddie bites his lip. When Richie speaks again his voice is quieter, less brash.
“Shit. Are you, I mean, are you really sick? Like, the usual thing?” he asks carefully. “Or is your mom being—”
“I dunno,” Eddie says. He hates to admit it, but the ache in his bones is becoming sharper. He shifts his weight and hears his knee crack. “I thought I was feeling okay, but… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I mean, I think she might be right. I should stay home.”
He doesn’t know why he’s getting upset—it’s not like this doesn’t happen regularly. Richie is quiet for a moment; Eddie can faintly hear Bill and Stan laughing in the background.
“I don’t think—Eds, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
“But I’m—I don’t know, I think I might really feel like shit—”
“No, I know, I don’t mean…” Richie trails off, and then he sighs. “I just meant, like, in general, you know? Like, fuck what your mom says. She doesn’t know you like I—like we do.”
Eddie feels his stomach squirm, and can’t quite tell if the feeling is a good one or a bad one. “I, um. I should go,” he mutters after a moment.
“Oh—yeah, sure. Feel better, Spaghetti-O.”
Eddie carefully places the receiver back on its hook. He stands there a moment, fists clenched at his sides; then he runs down the hall to his room, takes two ibuprofen, and screams into his pillow until his throat hurts.
+
He wakes up the next morning in the basement, his head throbbing so badly that he eventually has to roll over on his narrow cot and puke into the mixing bowl on the floor. It’s just a little—he wasn’t hungry for dinner the night before—but the acid still burns his throat and he lets out a little groan on accident. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and reaches blindly for the dusty, half-empty bottle of Listerine he keeps under the cot. He fucking hates mouthwash, he thinks as he swishes it from one cheek to the other, eyes screwed shut. It burns worse and for longer than the barf did, but if the people in the commercials are to be believed, you’re supposed to be fucking thrilled while doing it.
After spitting it out he rolls onto his back and stares up at the strings of cobwebs hanging from the low ceiling. His mom’s called it the “sterile room” ever since they moved into the house six years ago, but Eddie can’t think of a worse possible misnomer. “Sterile” implies a serious, medical-grade disinfecting regimen the likes of which Eddie can only dream about, standing in the cleaning aisle at Keene’s Pharmacy eyeing bottles of chemicals his mom says they don’t need and couldn’t afford anyway. “Sterile” implies a lack of germs. In reality, the room is the exact opposite—it’s where Eddie goes when he’s sick, trudging down the creaky wooden steps on evenings he feels bad and hauling himself back up in the morning when he feels marginally better.
His friends think it’s weird. “Well, where do you go when you’re sick?” Eddie asked defensively on the playground a couple of years ago, when Richie’s eyes had bugged out even bigger than usual at Eddie’s mention of his basement retreats.
“Uh, my room?” Richie said, staring at Eddie from behind his stupid glasses like Eddie had sprouted extra ears. “And my mom brings me soup? In bed?”
“See, that’s gross.” Eddie crossed his arms tightly over his chest, jutted out his chin. “Then your room’s all germy. And maybe you get your mom sick. That doesn’t happen with me.”
And it was true. According to his mom, one night when he first started getting sick he sleepwalked, delirious with fever, up to her bedroom and almost infected her. Ever since then she’s locked him in at night. Now the germs stay in the basement behind the padlocked door, and in all these years they’ve never gotten out. As their science teacher Mr. Knowles would say, The proof is in the pudding!
By now, thin rays of sunlight are jutting knifelike through the wooden boards that cover the small windows up by the ceiling, illuminating the dustmotes falling gently through the air. He’s always struck by the stillness, on mornings he wakes up down here. Like he’s a survivor in a disaster movie, blinking blearily through the smoke and debris and watching his barren new landscape settle around him. It would be nice, he thinks, just to lie here and linger in it. But the quality of light tells him it’s mid-morning now, and it won’t be long before his mom starts knocking anxiously on the basement door. Eddie Bear? Eddie Bear? Eddie Bear?
He pushes himself up into a sitting position, moving his jaw gingerly from side to side, hearing it click as the bones shift against each other like tectonic plates. Then, wrapping the quilt tightly around his body like a toga (no clothes allowed down here with all the germs, something he’d carefully avoided mentioning to Richie that day on the playground), he picks up his barf bowl and shuffles across the dusty green wall-to-wall carpet towards the stairs.
It’s not until he starts climbing that he realizes how sore his legs are. Every step elicits a wince as pain jolts up his calves and into his hamstrings, and he has to lean heavily on the wooden railing as he hobbles up. By the time he reaches the top he’s splashed a portion of the barf bowl contents on his feet and he’s plummeted into a decidedly evil mood. He raises a fist and knocks loudly on the door until he hears the padlocks on the other side start to rattle and click.
“Eddie Bear,” his mom says breathlessly when she opens the door.
“What if you died while I was down here?” he blurts croakily. “I’d be locked in the basement forever until I starved. I’d have to drink Listerine and eat puke to stay alive. Oh, I puked,” he adds unnecessarily, gesturing with the barf bowl as he edges around her and heads for the kitchen.
He dumps the vomit down the sink, soaps up a sponge, and starts scrubbing the bowl vigorously. On the counter to his left is a new stack of his mom’s dirty dishes that he’ll have to clean later, too. He scrubs harder.
“You shouldn’t say such horrible things, Eddie,” his mom says from the kitchen doorway.
Eddie pinches his eyes shut and pretends he can’t hear her over the running water.
He rinses the bowl out and sets it upside-down on the drying rack, then turns around. His mom stares at him, her eyes large and wary behind her glasses, her lips pursed tightly.
“I’m going to go take a bath now,” Eddie says evenly. He pulls the quilt tighter around his shoulders and turns down the hallway towards the bathroom, and she lets him go.
He paces the tiny room agitatedly while the tub fills up. When he finally sinks down into the warm water, he’s disappointed if unsurprised to find it doesn’t immediately calm him. Still, he slides down in the tub until only his face is above the surface, closes his eyes, and tries his best to focus on the slow, steady roar of his own breathing in his waterlogged ears.
These mornings sometimes go like this. He doesn’t know where the flashes of anger come from, only that sometimes, when he sees his mother’s wary, almost fearful expression after waking from a sick night, the urge to start shouting at her is almost uncontrollable. What! Why are you looking at me like that! What the fuck do you know that I don’t!
And yet it’s strange how easily he can lay that feeling to rest when he wants to. How content he is to fall into the old routines, to let her keep the secret if it means they don’t have to fight. He’s not exactly conflict-averse—usually the opposite, with his friends—but it’s different with his mom, as most things are. It’s like navigating a minefield; he knows so intimately the things that will set her off that sometimes when he feels a conversation veering in that direction, the hair on the back of his neck will stand on end.
The worst instance happened a couple of years ago, the last time he ever made mention of his dad. He’d found a stack of John Prine and Johnny Cash LPs in the back of the storage closet with Antonin Kaspbrak scrawled in Sharpie in the top right-hand corner of each, and nervously asked his mom if she’d kept any more. She stared at him from her recliner, her face turning a blotchy red and her breath becoming labored, and even once Eddie had run to his room and shut the door he could still hear her wailing.
The truth is that he thinks about his dad all the time when he gets sick. Sometimes he’s not sure whether or not it’s a coincidence. Occasionally it will strike him, like suddenly remembering a piece of useless trivia, that he only started getting sick after his dad died. Weird, he’ll think, and then make a sharp mental U-turn and go back to the X-Men issue he’d been reading. But like the urge to fight with his mom, this train of thought is less easily avoided after a sick night, when his defenses are down.
Eddie was with him when it happened. He was six, and they were walking in the woods at dusk. He remembers his dad’s big callused hand holding his, and the sound of leaves crunching under his secondhand hiking boots, which had been a size too big and rubbed his heels a little despite his thick woollen socks. He remembers wondering if his mom would have dinner waiting for them when they got home. Then, crisp and cacophonous, the sound of a twig snapping directly behind them. And then nothing.
He didn’t know it was possible to forget something like a bear attack, but he supposes it’s the sort of thing that’s better left buried. Eddie escaped, somehow—with a large scar on his upper back he can now only barely glimpse in the mirror, and his life. His dad did not.
Eddie stares up at the mildew speckling the ceiling above the tub, only vaguely aware that the water around him has turned tepid.
At times—briefly, fleetingly—it all feels very obvious. Like he’s staggering around in a pitch-dark room, and brushing against the thing he’s looking for; but before he can grasp it in both hands and feel the shape of it, it slips away.
He’s not always sorry to feel it go, never quite sure whether his desire to find it outweighs his fear of it.
“I brought you some medicine,” his mom says, as the bathroom door swings open with no forewarning knock.
“Jesus fuck!” Eddie sits bolt upright and draws his knees tightly to his chest.
“Language, Eddie,” his mom scolds mildly, tutting at him as she sits down on the toilet lid.
Eddie wipes his sopping hair out of his face furiously. “Mom, seriously, you can’t just come barging in here when I’m in the freaking bath, I’m not a little kid anymore—”
“You’re only twelve—”
“Almost a teenager! You ever heard of puberty? You can’t—”
“Eddie.” It comes out in a low hiss, her eyes flashing behind her glasses. Eddie blinks at her, feeling his face redden.
“You need to calm down. You’re not well.”
She stares at him unblinkingly, waiting for him to talk back. When he doesn’t, she holds out her hand. Pressed into her palm are two white pills, small and round.
Eddie glares at them. “What are those for.”
“It’s medicine. To make you feel better.”
“I feel fine.”
“Don’t lie.”
Eddie wraps his arms tighter around his knees, digs his fingernails into his calves. “How do you know how I feel? You always—every time I’m sick. You always know when it’s gonna happen, don’t you?”
“Eddie…” his mom says dangerously, but it’s too late; he can feel the anger bubbling up his throat like a geyser.
“I guess that’s why you never take me to the doctor’s, because you already know more than them, huh? If you know so much, why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with me? Why won’t you tell me why my body feels like it got fucking steamrolled? Why won’t you tell me how dad really died?”
She jumps to her feet so quickly that Eddie recoils. She looms over him, fists and teeth clenched, and in spite of himself Eddie imagines cartoon puffs of steam coming out of her ears. He suddenly regrets starting them down such a path while he’s literally naked in the bath and can’t escape.
Then, just when it seems like she’s about to boil over—her chest rising and falling rapidly, her shoulders shaking with rage—she stops. She lets out a long breath, and all at once she appears to deflate. She sits down hard on the toilet lid and drops her face into her hands.
“Why do you do this to me, Eddie?” she whispers. “After everything I’ve done for you, after all it took for me to raise you by myself all these years....” She lets out a wavering sob. “Why can’t you just trust that I know what’s best for you?”
She looks up at him, her eyes watery and shockingly blue in her pink face. Eddie drops his gaze down to the grimy rim of the bathtub.
She holds out her hand again. “Take your medicine, Eddie Bear.”
Eddie stares at the little white pills, and for a moment everything is silent save for the steady drip of the faucet. Finally, he reaches out and takes them between his pruney fingers. Glaring at her, he puts them on his tongue and swallows them dry.
His mom sighs out through her nose. “There’s my sweet boy,” she says quietly.
She gets to her feet laboriously and takes a step towards the tub. Eddie squeezes his knees tighter to his chest, and pinches his eyes shut when he feels her hand come to rest on the top of his head.
“You’re delicate, Eddie,” she murmurs. Her sickly-sweet voice has an air of finality to it. “And I’m the one who takes care of you. Try to remember that.”
Then she’s gone, the door closing behind her with a soft click.
Eddie lets out a long breath. He lowers a hand to the now icy bathwater and skims his fingertips along the surface, watching the small, undulating ripples spread from the points of contact before disappearing.
He has a hard time remembering the nights he spends in the basement, hazy with fever and exhaustion. But sometimes, days or even weeks later—or right now, sitting in the cold bath—it can hit him like a suddenly remembered dream. An indistinct recollection of lying naked on the narrow cot, his nerve endings going haywire, his thoughts becoming less and less accessible until the only thing he’s aware of is a powerful, steady pulse inside his body growing larger, coming closer and closer to the surface.
You’re delicate, Eddie, his mom said. Has always said—so many times over the years it’s like she’s been willing it into reality. Now, as he finally clambers to his feet and listens to the bathwater pouring in rivulets off his body, he feels for the first time with certainty the thing he’s long suspected: that he may not be delicate at all. He can feel the proof of it thrumming just beneath his skin.
+ + +
four years later
His house sits at the top of a hill, but rather than coasting Eddie pedals his bike down it to get away faster. It’s a warm, damp night in June, the air rich with the chirping of crickets and spring peepers, but he can’t hear any of it over the sound of his own labored breathing and the blood rushing in his ears.
The wind whips at his face as he gains speed, making his left eye water; he can feel the tear trickle back towards his temple and into his hair. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists around the handlebars so tightly he’ll probably have little grooves indented into his palms for days. At the bottom of the hill he takes a sharp left and pedals furiously down the middle of a side street, the parked cars on either side of him nothing more than glinting metallic blurs in his periphery.
He can’t think about the past ten minutes of his life, can’t think about what he saw, he can’t—but the only alternative is to steer his bike in front of a moving car, and the streets are all but empty tonight.
He spent all day in the basement, drifting in and out of consciousness as he recovered from one of the worst sick nights he can remember ever having. When he finally woke up for good it was dark outside again. He rose achingly to his feet and yanked on the string dangling from the lone bare lightbulb in the ceiling. Dim fluorescent light flooded the room, and then his stomach plummeted.
The green carpeting was ripped up off the floorboards in places, the quilt on the cot was torn to ribbons, and on the far side of the room, four huge, ferocious claw marks—at least three feet long—were gouged deep into the crumbling drywall.
He stumbled backwards until he hit the opposite wall, his chest heaving. Then he bolted up the stairs and down the hall to his room, threw on the first clothes he could find, and sprinted out the front door.
“Eddie Bear?” he could hear his mom calling faintly from the TV room, but he had already snatched his bike from where it was propped against the side of the porch.
Now his front tire hits a speed bump, sending a clamorous jolt through the rickety bike frame, and Eddie’s front teeth come down hard on his lower lip. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Zeroing in on the pain and the coppery taste on the tip of his tongue, he tries to turn the rest into white noise.
He zig-zags at random down the next residential block, takes a right at the intersection and a left at the next, his insides twisting and roiling as though trying to keep up. He doesn’t think he knows where he’s going until he’s already there, his bike slowing and rolling to a stop as though of its own accord. First he recognizes the old oak tree out front, and then the shiny blue Honda CR-V in the driveway, and then the house itself.
He can’t quite tell if he’s surprised to have ended up here, or if it’s the least surprising thing in the world.
The Toziers’ old Victorian house is the biggest and nicest on a block of big, nice houses. To compare it to Eddie’s own house is and has always been a pointless exercise, but Eddie always does it anyway just for kicks. He can’t look at the stately brick exterior without picturing the peeling yellow clapboard back home and making some distant mental note to ask his mom if he can paint it sometime soon, a resolution he’s been tabling regularly for years.
The windows are dark—Richie’s parents have always been early to bed—but as Eddie walks his bike up the driveway he can see the windows of Richie’s room around the corner, soft light glowing through the thin blue curtains. Eddie leans his bike against the side of the house, close enough now that he can clearly make out the familiar lyrics of the music blasting through the wide-open windows.
“This near wild heaven—not near enough—living inside, living inside, living inside—”
Eddie picks up a pebble off the driveway and hurls it up towards Richie’s window, grimacing at the cliché even as he brings it to life. It bounces off the pane with a plink and falls back down to the driveway with a clack. Nothing.
“Whatever it takes, I’m givin’—it’s just a gift I’m given—”
This time Eddie sends the pebble sailing straight through the open window. He hears it clatter and thunk against something inside, and then hears Richie’s voice.
“The fuck?”
His shaggy dark head appears out the window. He adjusts his glasses and squints. “Eddie?”
“Hey.” Eddie’s voice is hoarse; it must be over 24 hours now since he used it last. He opens his mouth again, hoping some explanation for why he’s chucking rocks at Richie’s window in the middle of the night will come forth, but nothing does.
Thankfully Richie doesn’t wait for an explanation. “Hang on, I’ll meet you at the door,” he says quickly, and then his head disappears.
Eddie swallows, his stomach twisting now into an entirely new variety of knot. He trudges around to the front of the house and up the porch steps. Moths are careening wildly around the porch light overhead; something about the sight sends bile rising jerkily up the back of his throat, but he can’t bring himself to look away until the front door opens with a squeal.
“Hey,” Richie says, a bit breathless. In one ungraceful movement he pushes his glasses up on his nose and pushes his mop of black curls back off his forehead. Eddie blinks at him, feeling dazed, trying to push away the splotchy green hole the porch light burned in his vision.
“You okay, Eddie? You wanna come inside?”
Eddie feels himself make a bizarre movement somewhere between a jerky nod and a half shrug. He follows Richie inside, and Richie shuts the door behind him.
Eddie toes off his tennis shoes automatically, placing them on the shoe rack by the door next to Richie’s beat-up Chuck Taylors. He takes a steadying breath as he glances around the entryway, dark but for the streetlight filtering in through the windows. The living and dining rooms shoot off through rounded archways to the left and right, each room full of tasteful antique furniture that you need to sit on correctly if you don’t want Mrs. Tozier to twist her mouth at you.
Something lands on his shoulder just then, and Eddie flinches violently.
“Shit, sorry,” Richie says, coming around to face him, “just me.” His eyes drop to Eddie’s throat. “Just, um—your shirt’s on backwards, dude.”
Eddie glances down to see the tags sticking out of the collar of his t-shirt, then looks back up at Richie. “Yes,” he says, stupidly.
Richie reaches out carefully and tucks the tags back in, smoothing the fabric over Eddie’s collarbone. Richie’s own t-shirt, Eddie notices placidly, depicts a cartoon donkey apparently having heat stroke in the middle of the desert. Camp Carrizozo: 30 Miles From Water… 2 Feet From Hell!!!
Richie looks at Eddie levelly. “Are you okay, Eds?”
Eddie’s throat works; he casts his eyes around the room as though hoping to find an answer carved into the door frames.
“Maybe a dumb question,” Richie allows. “All right, can you at least tell me you’re not, like, in crisis? No cancer diagnosis? Imminent heart attack? Is it—Eds, did your mom just tell you where babies come from?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie mutters, feeling his mouth twitch into a reluctant smile for the first time all night.
“Okay,” Richie says, satisfied. He pauses. “I’ve got some Pop-Tarts in my room, you want one? I know you like ’em cold.”
It’s then that Eddie realizes he hasn’t eaten anything since his mom microwaved him a TV dinner before he went down to the basement last night. He puts a hand on his stomach as though to apologize for the neglect.
“Why do you keep Pop-Tarts in your room.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Richie’s voice goes up innocently as he leads Eddie up the stairs. “Lubriderm, tissues, Pop-Tarts? The bedside staples?”
“Oh my god.”
“What did you think the frosting was made of?”
“I’m gonna kick your ass, Richie.”
The upstairs hallway is dark, but he can see Richie’s teeth glinting when he turns to him and grins. “Shh, my mom will hear you,” he stage-whispers. “I don’t want her to know I’m being bullied.”
He pushes open the door to his room and a slice of light escapes into the hallway, wide enough for them to slip into before closing the door again like they’re trying to keep it contained.
Richie’s bedroom is, as always, the definition of organized chaos. Now that school’s out for the summer, the desk along the far wall bears the detritus of sophomore year: stacks of textbooks, piles of crumpled notes, graphite-smudged locker miscellany. The chair is invisible beneath the heaps of clothes that adorn it, though Richie has still taken the time to drape the whites and darks over separate armrests, and colors over the back. By the unmade twin bed, long stacks of milk crates both serve as Richie’s nightstand and house his record collection, the latter of which is meticulously organized via some arcane method that’s completely incomprehensible to anyone but Richie himself.
The R.E.M. record Richie was playing has come to the end of its side, the speakers now filling the room with an ambient static rhythm. Richie strides to the record player, perched precariously atop two stacked milk crates, and lifts the needle with a fuzzy thwick.
In the almost-silence that follows, Richie rifles through his open backpack on the floor and extracts the box of Pop-Tarts. “Here,” he says, holding it out to Eddie like a gift.
They’re strawberry—not Eddie’s favorite—but he doesn’t think he could possibly care less. He sits down on the edge of Richie’s bed, rips open the silvery packaging, and commits himself to the single-minded task of eating on an empty stomach.
The Pop-Tart’s gone in no time, and only then does he glance up at Richie, sheepish and a little alarmed, like he’s been caught talking to himself.
Richie’s standing awkwardly in the middle of the room with his hands in the back pockets of his shorts, and he’s looking at Eddie with an expression that’s half amused and half concerned.
“Jeez,” he says. “You wolfed that down, huh?”
Almost immediately Eddie feels sick. He crumples the wrapper up in his fist and wedges his fists under his thighs. “Sorry,” he mutters.
“What? Don’t be sorry.” Richie comes to join him on the bed, folding up his too-long legs pretzel style and facing Eddie full-on. He clasps his hands in his lap, then changes his mind and rests them on his knees, then changes his mind again and wraps them around his socked feet. “What are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know. For coming here in the middle of the night and having this weird-ass freak-out on you, I guess.”
“Are you kidding? I’m glad you came,” Richie says, dark eyes bright and earnest behind his glasses. “Seriously, what was I gonna do otherwise? Take my nightly shit and go to sleep? This is way better.”
“Oh, I’m better than a piece of shit? Thanks, fuck you.”
“Also, this is, like, far from the worst of your freak-outs I’ve lived through. This one’s just kinda weird because—” Eddie turns to glare at him and Richie balks. “There’s just usually more, uh, yelling and stuff,” he finishes lamely.
Eddie breathes out roughly through his nose. What the fuck can he say that doesn’t make him sound like an even bigger lunatic than usual?
“I just… I had to get away,” he settles on. He blinks hard, staring at his own knobby knees. “Away from my mom, you know, and the house. I don’t know, man. I just couldn’t—I couldn’t do it.”
Richie nods slowly, as though Eddie’s words made any sort of sense. A breeze drifts through the open window, cooler than Eddie would’ve expected. He watches as the hair on Richie’s arms stands up, goosebumps spreading over his skin like water spilled over a tabletop.
“Have you—” Eddie begins. Stops, swallows, starts again. “Have you ever been… afraid of me?”
Richie blinks, but his stunned silence doesn’t last long. “Only when I tell you about my latest sexcapades with your mom and you look at me like you’re gonna tear me a new—”
“Forget it.”
“No—come on, Eds, I’m sorry.” Richie reaches out, his fingertips brushing the skin above Eddie’s knee. Eddie stiffens, and Richie’s hand slides away. “Why would I be afraid of you?”
Didn’t answer the question, Eddie thinks bitterly, before tamping it down. “I dunno,” he says harshly, casting his gaze around the room. “I could—I mean, I could, like, kill you. Right now.”
Richie cocks his head, sucking his top lip between his teeth like he always does when he’s thinking. “No you couldn’t,” he says, finally.
“I could!” Eddie’s voice rises higher than he meant it to as he flings his arm out in an unidentified gesture. “I could—I could wring your neck, or put a fuckin’ pillow over your face, or, or I could pick up that lamp and crack your head open—”
“Yeah,” Richie says slowly, conceding to Eddie’s points with a nod. He leans back on his hands and licks his lips. “You could… but you wouldn’t. Isn’t that kinda the same thing?”
Richie pushes his glasses up his nose with his middle finger, rubs a hand over his jaw. He’s got a smattering of pink acne there, right along with his collection of sporadic nicks from shaving.
He’s right, of course. Eddie wouldn’t. Couldn’t. But sometimes when he looks at Richie, there’s something else, prodding him in the gut or otherwise the innermost layers of the cerebral cortex, something whispering to him, saying, what if. Something hungry.
Sometimes when he looks at Richie, Eddie wants to unhinge his fucking jaw and swallow him whole.
There’s no way to reckon with a feeling like that. There’s no way to win. He can feel it now, bubbling to a simmer as it spreads through his veins. He thinks of the claw marks in the basement wall, three inches deep. Is there anything scarier than realizing exactly what you’re capable of?
He puts his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. “Fuck.”
“Eddie—”
“Don’t touch me, Rich. I think—fuck. There’s something wrong with me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Eddie hears himself laugh, a rough, horrible sound. “You don’t know.”
“Then tell me, Eds, you can tell me anything. You know that.”
Eddie wipes furiously at his eyes and lifts his head to look at him. “I can’t. You’d think I was a, a fucking.... You’d never speak to me again.”
“Bullshit.” If Richie meant it to come out forcefully, he didn’t succeed. His voice is as tender as his features are as he looks at Eddie softly, leaning in. “That’s bullshit, Eddie. You’re… you’re my best friend, man.”
Eddie can’t look at him. He drops his head into his hands again, breathing out heavily through his mouth.
“I, um.” Pixelated splotches of color swirl across his vision as he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’ve kind of… figured something out. About myself, I mean. And I think I’ve kind of always known, somehow. Like, deep down. But I didn’t—I couldn’t, like, accept it, I guess. Because I didn’t think it could be true, and I—I didn’t want it to be true. But something, uh. Something happened, and I don’t think I can… you know. Ignore it. Anymore.”
He glances sidelong at Richie and finds him sitting rigid, his eyes wide and his lips slightly parted. He’s onto you, a distant part of Eddie’s brain whispers, and his heart jumps into his throat.
“I know none of that makes any sense,” he says quickly, “but—”
“No,” Richie interrupts, his voice slightly hoarse. “No, it, uh. It does.”
“You don’t have to say that,” Eddie mutters, turning his face away and wiping furtively at his nose. “This is fucking… crazy talk, man, I know that. But I just....” He huffs out a laugh, blinking rapidly at the ceiling to stop the prickling in his eyes. “It’s just that I’m realizing my life is fucked.”
Richie’s throat works audibly, his hair sticking up from having run his hands through it so many times. “Eddie,” he says finally, “you don’t have to, to explain yourself to me. I mean, what I mean is that I—I get it.”
“No,” Eddie says automatically, shaking his head. “No, you really, really don’t—”
“Eds, listen to me.” Richie’s voice is wavering slightly, but when he reaches out and puts a hand on Eddie’s knee, his grip is warm and firm. “I’m telling you, okay? I’m telling you I understand.”
What he’s saying is impossible. Eddie knows this. But he also would’ve said it was impossible for Richie to reach out and touch the side of Eddie’s face, gently, the way he’s doing now. For him to lean in and kiss Eddie on the mouth.
Richie’s lips are chapped but soft, and Eddie inhales sharply against them. After what feels like an eternity but is likely only a few seconds Richie pulls away, their lips separating with a soft sound that makes Eddie’s stomach flop over. His fingers, he notices, are encircling Richie’s wrist, but he can’t remember having put them there.
Richie’s eyes flicker back and forth anxiously between Eddie’s own. “Um,” he says haltingly, “was that—did I, like… misread?”
Eddie blinks, processing the question to the best of his ability.
“Eddie?” Richie says.
Eddie’s throat unsticks. “Do you wanna… um. Do that again.” It’s the only answer he feels confident enough to give.
Richie swallows. “Yeah.”
He leans in again, and Eddie lets out the breath he’s been holding. He brings his hand to the back of Richie’s head, fingers twisting carefully into his hair. A soft sound escapes Richie’s mouth, and he shifts closer, one arm wrapping around Eddie’s waist, the other hand cupping his jaw. Eddie can feel his tongue with the tip of his own, and he can’t help the shiver that wracks through his body, knows that Richie can feel it too, absorbing it into his own chest.
At some point Eddie pulls away to catch his breath; Richie’s eyes are still closed, his mouth just slightly turned up at the corners. Eddie blows a stream of air in his face, ruffling the curls on his forehead.
Richie laughs. “Dick,” he mutters, and reaches out to take Eddie’s clammy hand. They’re quiet for a moment, taking turns breathing in steadily.
“I, um, I just want you to know,” Richie says then, addressing their intertwined fingers, “that, uh, if your life’s fucked, then, you know. Mine is, too. But I don’t think… I don’t know, man. I don’t really think either of them have to be. You know?”
He glances up at Eddie and gives him a nervous half-grin. Eddie squeezes his hand tight enough to feel his pulse, then leans forward until he’s resting his forehead on Richie’s shoulder.
“Can I stay here tonight,” he asks.
Richie’s hand is warm as it sifts through Eddie’s hair. “Yeah, Eds,” he says, without hesitation. Eddie can feel him smiling into his temple. “Of course you can stay.”
+
So Eddie does.
They sleep in their clothes, under the top sheet, the duvet bunched around their ankles. There’s a moment, after Richie settles onto his side and lifts his arm invitingly, when Eddie finds himself thinking, despite everything, He’ll be gone the second you let him out of your sight. He pushes it away as best he can, turning and lying down next to him, letting Richie drape his arm around his waist.
But Richie pulls him closer, apparently reading his mind as he murmurs, “I’m not going anywhere.” His breath is hot on the back of Eddie’s neck. “You can’t scare me away that easy.”
Eddie falls asleep with the breeze from the open window playing across his face, and when he wakes up Richie’s still beside him.