Work Text:
Fall and winter come and go through Chicago, carried by a cold front that makes Eddie shiver down to his bones more than any winter ever has. Richie wordlessly passes Eddie sweaters and coats and blankets and gloves. He turns the heat up without Eddie ever having to ask, and pays the high bill without ever complaining, and he makes Eddie soup nearly every day to get him through the winter, and when he thinks Eddie can’t see, he stares at Eddie like he’s certain they’ll both disappear if either of them look away.
It isn’t as easy, coming back from the dead, as Eddie had expected it to be.
There are things he’s still not used to. Like the fact that he never seems to warm up fast enough, and that this winter felt like it would kill him all over again. Like the nightmares he gets, though he never remembers anything concrete. Flashbulb memories, his therapist tells him. Pictures of the things that frighten him. Sleepless nights that can’t be soothed by the arm that’s slung across his waist and holding him close. The silence of the apartment. The way dirt doesn’t feel the same under his fingers still. The way he sometimes worries if he moves too fast that his body will crumble underneath the pressure.
There are some things he settles into easily. Life with Richie, for one. A morning routine adjusted to accommodate a warm, large body nuzzling into him from behind. Stubble against his cheek and the crisp scent of cologne. Dishes in the sink that aren’t immediately cleaned. Shirts in Eddie’s drawers that are just a little too big in the shoulders. He adjusts to that. He adjusts to waking up in Chicago, in the apartment he shares with Richie with the beautiful west-facing windows and the sunset he gets to watch every night. He adjusts to working from home, he adjusts to the doorbell ringing and bringing warm friends into his home, and he adjusts to being kissed every night before he goes to bed and feeling like it means something. These things he falls into quite easily. Like his new body knows that these are the things he didn’t have but longed for, for many years.
Spring comes. Eddie Kaspbrak continues to live.
“I think Patty’s planning a trip,” Stan announces over the phone, on the day that little sprouts start to appear in Eddie’s herb garden. Stan waits patiently as Eddie struggles to open the cap of his allergy pills, until Eddie’s done murmuring vulgarities under his breath. “She’s being quite evasive.”
Eddie swallows the medicine with a dry wince, sniffling. “What’s so bad about a trip?”
They do this, now. He and Stan. Speak on the phone, every week at least. Sometimes every day. They shared a great deal in common even before their shared experience of dying and undying, but it’s different now. They understand each other in a way no one else does.
“Nothing’s bad,” Stan says mildly. “Just trying to keep the conversation titillating.”
“You can’t ever say that word around Richie,” Eddie warns. He pops his head out of the bathroom and peers around the corner, to where Richie is sat snugly in the armchair in their room, snoring, with an open book splayed on his chest. Eddie sighs.
He can hear the grimace in Stan’s voice when he says, “Trust me, Patty already made that mistake.”
Eddie crosses the room quietly, lifting the book out of Richie’s hands and placing it on their dresser, before carefully removing his glasses and doing the same with them. He presses an absentminded kiss to Richie’s forehead. He murmurs as he leaves the room, shutting the door behind him, “Something tells me she knew what she was doing. There’s no way it was a mistake.”
“No, definitely not,” Stan says, around a small laugh. It’s good to hear Stan laugh. Eddie files that away under things that are easy to adjust to.
“So,” Eddie murmurs. “You’re going on a trip.”
Stan hums. Over the line, it sounds like he’s outside. Likely in the garden, among the tomato plants the Uris’s put in this year. They’ve talked about that. How sometimes the only thing that clears the buzzing in their heads is putting their fingers into the dirt. Digging their toes into the earth. Closing their eyes and sucking in desperate gasp after gasp until their hearts are pounding but it’s fine because they can feel it, they can feel being alive and the scars on their chests and wrists and faces don’t feel like chains and some days that’s all they can ask for.
“I want it to be all of us,” Stan says quietly. A secret whispered over two phone lines and hundreds of miles. “If she says we’re going. I can't go unless it’s all of us.”
Eddie looks wordlessly at the door he just closed, to the bedroom he shares with Richie in this life they’ve built for one another. He thinks about something he learned ages ago, about trees who twine around one another. Trees that grow so close to each other that you can barely distinguish between them. He used to think it was just him and Richie like that. But it’s all seven of them. Eight, with Patty. “I get it,” he whispers, like that’s his secret, too. “All of us. Or none of us.”
“All of us or none of us,” Stan agrees.
They shoot the shit until Eddie faintly hears Patty calling for Stan on the other end, and Stan makes his hesitant goodbyes and ends the call with warm love, and Eddie locks his phone and sets it on the kitchen counter and stares out the window. Listens in the quiet. It strikes him, sometimes, how different the quiet is now. For the first month, the silence had been unbearable. He doesn’t remember much about being dead but he knows there was nothing, and the quiet at the beginning was enough to make his skin crawl.
It’s different now. Better. He likes the quiet. The moments where Richie is dozing in the late afternoon sun, or in the early mornings when the world hasn’t decided to wake up yet but Eddie sits with his eyes open and Richie in his arms. On their walks through the park at dusk, when nearly no one else is out. When they sit and read or type or sleep but hold on to one another’s hand just because.
The quiet used to remind him of being dead. Now it’s the quiet moments that he remembers, most beautiful, how it feels to be alive.
He doesn’t hear it when Richie wakes up and slowly pads out of their room, so he doesn’t expect the warm arms that wrap around his waist or the nose that burrows into his neck, but it doesn’t surprise him all the same. He drops his head against Richie’s and melts back into the embrace with a content sigh.
“You let me fall asleep,” Richie says accusingly.
“You’re a grown man,” Eddie says back. “You make your own choices.”
Richie’s huff of laughter tickles his collarbone. “My back fucking hurts, I’m old, I can’t fall asleep in that fucking chair without waking up and calling my chiropractor before I even stand up.”
“I’m telling you, you make your own choices,” Eddie tries to say again, but Richie pinches his side between his fingers and snickers when Eddie yelps and tries halfheartedly to move away. He doesn’t get too far. Neither of them really want that, anyways. “Alright, fine, Jesus. I’ll wake you up the next time you fucking fall asleep in that chair.”
“No, you won’t,” Richie sighs.
Eddie’s grinning when he turns around in Richie’s arms to face him. He presses his hands to either side of Richie’s cheeks and holds him. Carefully. As though he were the one to come back to life. Very seriously, and completely in love, Eddie says, “You’re right. I won’t.”
He’s still laughing even as Richie tries to tackle him, taking both of them tumbling down.
“What are you thinking about?” Richie murmurs later, when they’re twined together in bed and Richie’s brushing hair away from Eddie’s forehead. He asks this a lot. Richie always wants to know what Eddie’s thinking.
“Our friends,” Eddie answers honestly. That’s almost always his response. He thinks about them so often, he sometimes wonders if his brain feels as though it’s trying to make up for the time they lost. For the time he forgot to remember them.
Richie hums. Eddie presses his lips softly to the tip of Richie’s nose. “What about ‘em?”
“Stan called me today,” Eddie says. Richie’s eyes are closed now. He hums again to show he’s listening. “Said Patty’s planning something.”
That gets a small smile out of Richie. “Sneaky little Patricia,” he mumbles. “What will she do next?”
“Stan thinks it’s a trip somewhere,” Eddie continues. Mindlessly, he traces his fingers against Richie’s back. A pattern he can’t discern. It’s more to comfort both of them than anything else. “Says if it is that we’re all going.”
“Oh, well if Stan says,” Richie teases. As though he weren’t the first person there for Stan when he came back, right behind Patty.
Eddie stifles a yawn. “Are you falling asleep again?”
“So what if I am?” Richie asks. “I’ve had a very busy day being your doting boyfriend.”
“Hm,” Eddie says.
Richie opens one eye, peaking. “Hm?” he repeats. “Hm what?”
“Boyfriend,” Eddie says. The word tastes odd in his mouth. Unfamiliar. Insufficient. Richie sacrificed so much for him. Eddie clawed his way out of the mouth of the devil for a chance at this. These are big feelings, bold feelings, declarations that feel like they can’t be encompassed by a word as small as boyfriend, and too large to even comprehend in such a gentle moment like this. Eddie’s uncertain why it bothers him now. He’s called Richie his boyfriend plenty of times.
“You don’t like it?” Richie asks.
Eddie catches his gaze. Where he once would have expected uncertainty in Richie’s expression, there is none now. That’s the beauty of this, Eddie thinks. He’s convinced Richie enough that this is real and important. Richie isn’t worried about what Eddie might say next. There’s just love there, in place of everything else. “It doesn’t feel big enough,” Eddie admits, and he feels a little silly.
Richie raises an eyebrow. “There are bigger words, you know,” he says. Slowly.
“I know,” Eddie tells him.
“Do you…” Richie begins. He hesitates. Eddie puts his hand on Richie’s cheek and tilts his head down so he can kiss Richie’s forehead. Richie’s voice is softer as he finishes, “Do you wanna talk about whether or not we want to use the bigger words?”
Eddie tips Richie’s face back up. Catches Richie’s gaze. Studies his expression for a moment. Soft and open and loving. His face is warm under Eddie’s fingertips, stubble scratchy under Eddie’s palm. When he smiles, Eddie can feel it under his hand.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Eddie says. He watches as Richie’s expression changes, for a split second. Disheartened. He doesn’t want to show it, though. Eddie presses forward. “I, uh. I want the bigger words. So if you. Also want the bigger words. Then you can do something about it.”
Richie’s expression, for a moment, is so vulnerable that it almost makes Eddie start to cry. God, he loves Richie so much. It seeps from his pores. It covers the walls of their house and it fills their bed and it lights their rooms and everything in between. Eddie wants everything he can possibly have with Richie. Always has.
“Giving me the big job, huh?” Richie teases. His voice is a little too wonderstruck for the joke to properly land.
Eddie shrugs, and in doing so, buries himself closer to Richie’s chest. Richie’s arm tightens around him. “I did it once,” Eddie said. “I didn’t do it right. I want you to do it this time. When you’re ready.”
“Oh, baby, you won’t have to wait long,” Richie promises. His lips faintly press to the top of Eddie’s head. “I can’t guarantee you much, but I know that for sure.”
“Maybe on this trip Patty’s gonna invite us on,” Eddie suggests.
Richie’s still laughing, even as Eddie rolls them over and tries to shut him up with an easy kiss.