Chapter Text
The first time Eddie ever met Richie, it was in the quarry, and Richie had just saved him from drowning.
It wasn’t really Eddie’s fault, was the thing. Stan and Bill weren’t available for the day, Bill had to babysit Georgie and Stan was studying the Torah, but Eddie hadn’t known that until he’d come around to call on them and they’d both sadly turned him down. And he didn’t really feel like heading back home at the moment, so he’d simply taken off to the quarry on his own. That was the very first time, and the very last time, Eddie would ever head to the quarry on his own.
He knew how to swim, of course. He swam a lot at the pool, where his mother claimed he was safest. The problem was that as he was swimming, with no one to distract him, some strange, terrifying thought kept creeping into his mind: I wonder how long I can swim. I wonder if I could swim out to the sea, out to home, out to where I belong, away from here.
The sea had always fascinated Eddie, was the thing. From a young age he’d always wanted to go to the beach, and feel the sand between his toes, the tide slapping against his feet. He took swimming lessons because it felt right to, because it was the closest thing to freedom he could find, but his mother had put an end to the lessons when he was young. She had been terrified he would get sick because of whatever was in the pool, or he would drown because his asthma would act up at the worst times, and so over Eddie’s protests, she’d forbidden him from taking any more swimming lessons. Or from swimming at all. You could drown, she had said, tears shining in her eyes, you could get an asthma attack and drown, with your inhaler far from shore.
He’d given up swimming until Bill and Stan pulled him into their orbit, and pulled him into the quarry. With them around, he felt as safe as houses, swimming.
Without them, though…
Well, he still felt safe as houses, but now some part of him was thinking, somewhere in this quarry there’s a way out to the ocean, I know it, I just know it, I have to find it.
He sucked in a deep breath, then dove down deep.
He was fine, at first. Then his arms began to ache as he pushed through the water, then his lungs, and when he turned back he found he could not see a way up and out. Tried to push up, up, up, but his arms had grown weak from hours of swimming, and he couldn’t—he couldn’t—
A pair of arms took hold of his and pulled him up.
When Eddie broke the surface, he sputtered and gasped for air, then blinked and looked down at his arms. They were still held in someone’s grasp, and when he looked up to see who was holding him, his breath caught right in his throat again.
“Are you okay?” the boy who’d saved him asked, eyes as shimmery as freshwater. No one, Eddie would think later, had shimmery eyes, not like this boy did. “You were freaking out, and I don’t know a whole lot about humans but I know you guys need air, and you were swimming for so fucking long—are you okay?”
Eddie said, “Yeah! Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. I’m Eddie.”
The kid grinned, and Eddie saw the flash of sharp canines. “I’m Richie,” he said. “You have a really shitty pair of tails, you know that, right?”
Eddie blinked at him. “You mean my legs?” he said.
“Oh, is that what you call them?” said Richie. “I just need the one tail.” And he leaned back, a little, and Eddie saw an unmistakable fishtail with iridescent scales and translucent fins break the surface of the water.
“Holy fucking shit,” he whispered.
--
Richie wakes up on the sidewalk outside of Neibolt, with six Losers clustered around him and staring in shock, and says, “Fuck. What the hell happened to my legs?”
“You don’t have legs anymore,” Stan says, “your tail’s back. Only bigger, and heavier.”
“You calling me fat, Stanley?” Richie weakly jokes, sitting up now and staring in horror at his tail. His very large, very ungainly tail. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Twenty-seven years he’s gone without it, without even remembering being anything other than human, and now it’s back, like a final spiteful gift from the goddamn clown. “Oh, fuck,” he says. “I guess my deal’s off.”
“Yeah, f-fffff-fuck is right,” says Bill. “Can you s-scuh-huh-hoot anywhere?”
“Fuck no,” says Eddie, “Richie’s not scooting anywhere, do you know what you could pick up if you touched your bare skin to the sidewalk? Birdshit and mud and—”
“I have scales, Eds, I’m fine!” says Richie. “Well. Okay, not fine, because I am definitely not getting up any stairs like this.” Oh fuck. “Oh, shit, I’ve got dates in Reno,” he says. “I can’t go anywhere with a giant fucking tail!”
“Okay,” says Mike, “I’ve got room in the back of my pickup, we can take Richie to the townhouse and put him in a bathtub.”
“A bathtub,” says Richie, incredulously.
“It’s a short-term solution,” says Mike. “We’ll figure out something better, but for now, bathtub it is.”
“Our rooms are on the second fucking floor,” says Richie. “And my bathtub is too damn small!” He lifts up the end of his tail, the fins trailing on the ground, the light glinting off the iridescent scales. On any other day, he’d find the tail oddly majestic, far from the juvenile shine of his now-recovered memory. Today, though, it’s just about the worst possible thing to happen to him today, on top of all the shit with the clown.
“I’d say you can have mine,” says Eddie, “but, uh, there’s still blood in it.”
“There’s what,” says Richie, alarmed, then, “oh, fuck, Bowers stabbed you in the bathroom? I thought he fucking jumped you in the street or something!”
“You can move into mine,” Ben, the absolute fucking sweetheart, volunteers. “The bathtubs are all the same sizes, but my room’s closer to the stairs and the bathtub doesn’t have any blood.”
“You’re a goddamn angel, Haystack,” Richie tells him.
Bev prods at Richie’s tail, and says, “Can you move around with this? At all? This is a lot bigger than the one you were sporting when we were kids.”
“I don’t actually know,” says Richie. “Eddie? You’re the only other person here who knows shit-all about moving around with a tail. What’s the prognosis?”
Eddie leans back, pursing his lips. “My prognosis is,” he says, “my wife has my sealskin and has had it for the whole time we were married. I haven’t used it in fucking years, so no, I don’t know fuck-all about moving around with a goddamn tail.”
“Oh,” says Richie. “Shit.”
“Also, I’m a selkie, not a fucking merperson,” Eddie adds, “so it’s a completely different thing, anyway.”
“We can’t walk into the townhouse like this,” says Stan, waving a hand over the dirt, blood and unidentifiable sewer grime caked into his clothes. “I refuse to walk into the townhouse like this. There’s got to be communal showers nearby, something, anything.”
“The quarry’s the closest thing there is,” says Bev, helping Ben haul Richie up. Richie goes with very little complaint, mostly because wow, Ben is fucking built now. He maybe exaggeratedly flaps the end of his tail, a little.
“The fucking quarry?” Eddie yelps. “We can’t go to the goddamn quarry! Fuck, I can’t go to the quarry, I have a hole in my face, do any of you assholes know what the word sepsis means—”
--
They go to the quarry.
Most of them jump from the cliff, but given that Richie’s currently unable to do much in his be-tailed state, Eddie helps Ben haul him into the water, strips off his own hoodie, and wades into the water. Richie experimentally swims around, as if trying to get used to his tail all over again, but he’s doing a lot better in the water than he is on land with only minor collisions. So, y’know, thank fucking god for small miracles, Eddie supposes.
He wades a little deeper in. The old itch is back, the desire to dive down deep and look for a way out of here, a way back to the ocean where he belongs. Selkies and merpeople are two different beasts, sure, but they are both children of the ocean, born to swim in the deep blue sea. It always calls to them, but to selkies in particular. They always leave, unlike the mermaids.
The thing is, Eddie doesn’t think he can, anymore. He’s been too long away, his sealskin hidden even from his memory, thanks to that fucking clown. He doesn’t think it’ll even fit him anymore. He doesn’t know if the sea will accept him again.
God, he’s almost jealous of Richie. At least Richie doesn’t have to worry about his tail fitting him in his old age.
But neither of them are quite as home in the water as they used to be, not anymore. Especially not Eddie, with all his years spent with his sealskin out of his grasp. He’s going to have to come back for it, he knows, because whoever heard of a selkie without a sealskin, right?
God, Myra’s going to fight him for it the whole way. He knows that in his bones, because that’s how this story goes. When the selkie’s spouse hides their sealskin, they’re willing to fight tooth and nail just to keep their selkie captive with them. Eddie half-remembers the stories Richie used to tell him, about human fishermen who saw a prize, not a person, stripping their sealskin off on the beach, and stole the selkie’s skin like a thief in the night. They don’t like it when their selkie brides leave.
He does not imagine coming back for his sealskin and getting a divorce will go over very well with his wife.
But he can’t imagine simply—going back, now, either. All this time he’s felt ill at ease in his own skin, tried to dull it with pills and work, and all this time Myra had the solution just right there. She could’ve given it back at any time. She could’ve. That, perhaps, is the thing that hurts the most, the thing that decides him.
“I’m going to divorce my wife,” he announces, as they’re all splashing around like kids again, with Richie doing the most splashing.
“You can’t borrow my lawyer,” says Beverly.
“I think I know another lawyer for you,” says Ben.
“I’d call mine, but then I’d have to call my manager,” says Richie, “and I’m not sure how well he’s gonna take me having to cancel the rest of my shows because I have a goddamn tail now.”
“Not great, I’m g-guessing,” says Bill.
“Probably not!” says Richie. But his shoulders are—lighter, somehow. Eddie wades over towards him, but Richie looks over, ducks underwater, and the next thing Eddie knows he feels the brush of a fishtail against his legs. He can’t help the sudden yelp that escapes from his mouth, the way he flails in the water briefly before Richie comes up, laughing already. “Gotcha!” he says.
“Fucking c’mere you shit,” Eddie says, grabbing for his ridiculously broad shoulders to dunk him underwater. He feels arms wrap around his middle, and that’s all he knows before Richie pulls him under.
He should panic about the water, he thinks. He should be freaking out about sepsis, about MRSA, about all the possible shit you could get from swimming around in shitty water with an open hole in your face.
But it feels like coming home.
--
Richie, it turned out, wasn’t the kid’s actual name. “But I heard this guy singing over the watchacallits,” he said, “and the announcer said his name was Richie Nelson. And I liked the name.”
“You mean Ricky Nelson?” Eddie asked, kicking lightly at the water from the ledge he was sitting on now. It had been a couple of days since he’d first met Richie, and he’d honestly thought he was hallucinating the whole thing for a while. His mother had thrown a fit when he’d come back all wet, and it had been a trial and a half going out today. If she knew he was back here, in the quarry, she would ground him for fucking ever. “And it’s a radio.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Richie. “Well, whatever. I like Richie better, sounds nice.” He was looking up at Eddie now from the water, this impossible boy—gills flaring along the sides of his neck, eyes shifting colors from green to shimmering blue, and there was the tail. And it was unmistakably a tail, with iridescent scales and actual fins. Tiny juvenile fins, nothing like the fish Eddie saw in aquariums.
“What’s your real name?” Eddie asked.
“You couldn’t pronounce it,” said Richie.
“Well, I won’t know until you tell it to me.”
Richie shrugged, and said—something, Eddie wasn’t sure what. But it sounded strange to his ears, like an eerie combination of the crashing of waves against the shore, the click of crabs’ claws, and the whir of a ship’s engines heard underwater. No human being could ever hope to make those sounds.
Eddie made the effort anyway. Richie laughed, splashed his foot, and said, “Fuck, man, just stick with Richie instead. You tried.”
“Can’t you show me how to make them?” Eddie asked. Something about the way they sounded in his mouth, the shape of them—it had felt strange. Wrong, but wrong in the way that familiar things were when they changed suddenly on you. Like he knew how to shape his mouth and his tongue around the syllables, but couldn’t quite remember.
Richie shrugged, and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s not something I can teach to humans, y’know? You guys have all the wrong inside bits for it.” He smiled up at Eddie then. “Anyway, I like Richie better. It’s the name I picked.”
Eddie kicked lightly at the water, sending droplets splashing away from him. He didn’t know how to explain to his new friend that strange feeling of—of familiarity, but to the left. Didn’t quite know what it even was, himself. Instead he said, “Are merpeople’s inside bits any different from ours?”
“Oh, definitely,” said Richie. “I guess there’s some things that’re the same? We got hearts same as you guys. We have brains. We bleed red. But like, shit’s different. Like with teeth.” He opened his mouth and pointed at his teeth, and Eddie startled at how sharp they were, specialized for tearing into fish. “Yours are basically useless for live, wriggling things,” said Richie, closing his mouth.
“Fuck you, if we ate anything live we’d get so many diseases,” Eddie said. “Like salmonella! And tapeworms!”
“That’s another thing!” said Richie. “I still don’t get why you always have to cook shit. We don’t have to, we can just eat it raw.”
“That is disgusting,” said Eddie, recoiling.
“That’s just nature,” said Richie, with a shrug. “You guys are the crazy ones. You stick your fish over a fire and you burn away all the good taste on it. It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s necessary so we don’t fucking die,” said Eddie, and proceeded to spend the next thirty minutes passionately telling a very wide-eyed mer-boy about the grave dangers of eating raw, unpasteurized food. This was the state of affairs that Bill, who’d been let out early from looking after Georgie by his mother, found Eddie in.
“Oh, what the f-ffff-fuh-huck,” said Bill in shock.
Eddie fell off the ledge in shock, sputtering as he came up for air, supported by Richie. “Bill!” he said.
“Eddie, does that k-k-k-kid have a t-t-t-tail?” Bill asked. “Is this like, a—a Halloween th-thing? Are you p-puh-practicing?”
“What’s a Halloween?” Richie asked with genuine curiosity, as he and Eddie swam together towards shore once more. “And of course I have a tail! See?” And as soon as he hauled himself onto dry land, he lifted the tail up for Bill to see.
“Holy f-f-fuck,” said Bill, his eyes as wide as saucers.