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In Richard Richard’s 35-odd years of life, he’d kind of always taken for granted the fact that he was, well, alive. He seemed to have the miraculous ability to avoid death at every turn, even when things looked grim; he’d fallen out the kitchen window more times than he could count, had had his entire urinary tract backfire, and even gotten a tent spike impaled through his eye, and yet none of it had ever done more than superficially harm him.
Falling off the tallest Ferris wheel in Western Europe seemed a tad bit more fatal, if you asked Richie. But nobody had asked him, so he just closed his eyes as the ground sped up towards him, and tried to accept the reality that this sure as hell looked like the end.
Honestly, he fully expected to go splat on the pavement like some sort of horrific water balloon, or perhaps a tomato that had been left out to ripen and then dropped. It would have been remarkably foolish to expect anything else - who could say they’d fallen 350 feet onto solid concrete and lived to tell the tale? Nobody, that’s who.
And yet, when Richie finally unclenched his eyelids enough to blink them open, he was sitting on the ground at the base of the Ferris wheel, with absolutely no injuries that would suggest how far he’d just tumbled. Eddie was sitting nearby, somehow pulling an intact miniature bottle of liquor out of a tiny rip in the lining of his jacket. This rip seemed to be the only damage to him, too (although Richie had to look away, because Eddie’s floral skirt had flipped up at some point during the fall).
“Richie! Look at this fantastically lucky stroke of luck! Maybe you should buy a lottery ticket, mate.” He took a casual swig from the bottle and got to his feet, thankfully righting the skirt situation. “You coming?” For his part, Eddie didn’t seem to care how they’d survived. Richie, on the other hand, was still just a little bit in shock; he glanced up at the towering ride, then down at the crumbling wreckage of the seat they’d been in, fiddling rather anxiously with a button that had come loose on the front of his coat.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
He looked down at his hands, which seemed normal enough. Solid enough. Of course, he’d have to test that supposition out later with a good wank, but - that wasn’t the point, was it? Everything felt as real as always, from the roughness of the pavement to the sweatiness of his hair (and general body).
So why, then, was he still alive? By all accounts he shouldn’t be.
It didn’t seem to bear thinking about at the moment, or in this particular setting - sitting on the ground, amongst all the common fairground detritus: crumbs of sticky food and johnny wrappers and puddles of something disgusting. So finally Richie got up, checked that his legs were still attached (they were, the amount of wobbling they were doing notwithstanding) and headed towards Eddie, who by now had meandered down the midway in the vague direction of home.
The trip home was unusually quiet; it usually would have been peppered with bickering arguments and perhaps even a fistfight or two, but the fall had sombered them both. Even on the Tube, they just sat quietly in their seats, and Richie didn’t dare look at Eddie for fear of seeing his own shaken expression reflected back at him in Eddie’s eyes. Neither of them spoke until they were back at good old 11 Mafeking Parade, which felt safe - even though the flat had been the site of some rather painful mishaps for them both.
“Well, nighty-night then, Richie.”
The evening’s excitement, coupled with all the drinks he’d downed earlier in the evening, had seen Eddie collapse face-first into the sofa, his feet sticking rather awkwardly over the arm and off the end. Loud, unbothered snores broke the terse silence in the room.
Naturally, Richie rolled his eyes at this. Apparently Eddie had been unaffected by the fall, since he would probably be unconscious and snoring into the sofa cushions at this time even on a normal night. So, nothing had changed in that regard.
Richie shook his head and drifted aimlessly into the kitchen, where he peered out at the moon through the smudged glass of the window and reached out, intending to lean on the countertop - but instead placing his hand squarely on the kettle. On any other occasion, he might have realized this immediately (and he would be clutching his scorched hand and screaming), but in the absence of any pain he noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Richie sighed and pressed his face up to the glass, halfheartedly hoping the neighbors might be having a bit of a shag with the curtains open, but wasn’t really surprised to see all the drapes in all the windows in the street firmly closed. Anyway, for what was perhaps the first time in his life Richard Richard did not feel in the mood for a little voyeurism. He still felt strangely unsettled, even jittery; unlike Eddie, the lucky bastard, sleep seemed like it would not be on the itinerary for Richie that night. Maybe he would make a nice cup of tea to calm his nerves. No, scratch that - a nice cup of tea was impossible in this flat, they’d established that before! He’d have to make a shitty cup of tea, but maybe it would settle his nerves too. Only with that decision did he finally glance down in the direction of the kettle (predictably jumping at the sight of his hand on it and yanking away automatically, even though it didn’t hurt).
There it was, still plugged into the wall and switched on, just as they’d left it. Richie couldn’t claim to be particularly well-endowed in the intelligence department (or any other, for that matter), but even he knew logic then dictated that the kettle really should be piping hot. And if it had been piping hot, shouldn’t his hand have been burned like every other time?
Richie really didn’t like the idea of testing this theory again, but tentatively he reached out - flinching reflexively and looking the other way - and touched trembling fingers to the smooth metal surface of the kettle. Which, again, did not burn him.
Okay, this really was very strange. Strange things were not a particularly uncommon occurrence in this little flat, but even amongst those strange things, this was stranger. On any usual occasion, Richie might have been glad that he no longer seemed able to feel much in the way of pain. But the possible implications of this fact were too much for him, so he bustled over to where Eddie was still blissfully asleep and unaware, because if his senses were dulled, then the next step would naturally be to find out if Eddie was the same.
The small stone figurine he grabbed off the bookshelf ought to do the trick, although in his frenzy Richie managed to fumble it, dropping it on his foot (and instinctively howling in pain that never came). Miraculously the thing hadn’t broken; he shrugged and proceeded to swing it into Eddie’s head with a satisfying thud. Absolutely nothing happened, so he did it again, and again, and a further two times - but Eddie just shifted, muttered a quiet “door’s open Sue Carpenter, you sexy thing” and snored loudly in Richie’s face.
It wasn’t working, but hitting Eddie always did make Richie feel marginally better. It did this time too, although only for a moment or two; the situation quickly caught up with him, sending him straight into his signature staccato panic screams, and if he hadn’t been absolutely losing his shit he might have hoped the noise would wake Eddie up. (It didn’t, because once Eddie was in one of his drunken stupors he was capable of snoring his way right through a nuclear apocalypse. Probably.)
Okay, maybe violence wasn’t the answer for once. Maybe, just maybe, smells would do the trick this time! Richie was just on his way to the fridge to grab one of those whiffy and slightly furry pieces of fish, which had been sustaining an entire ecosystem in the back since approximately last Christmas, when he spun on his heel, promptly slipped on a banana peel (really, of all the ludicrous things someone could have carelessly left on the floor) and flailed, doing an awkward pirouetting motion that spun him right out of the kitchen window. With an accompanying yell, naturally.
Richie would, on the way down, curse whichever stupid bastard had left the window open. What he would not do was realize that he was the stupid bastard in question.
Other falls through the very same window had seen him land on top of some unfortunate passerby, or with a squelch in some kind of mucky garbage of indeterminate origin. This time there was no such comfortable rubbish to pad his fall, however; Richie dropped straight down to the pavement with a speed which really should have caused the crunching of bones, at the very least.
Not only was he perfectly intact, though, but nothing hurt either. No aches, no pains, and certainly no broken bones. Richie wasn’t quite as shocked this time (surviving a 350-foot fall did sort of surpass surviving a 20-foot one) but as he got to his feet and made his way back inside on autopilot, he didn’t really know what to think. When he sat down at the kitchen table, casting a disdainful look towards Eddie’s snoring and indifferent form, he still didn’t really know what to think.
He’d survived a fall off the top of a Ferris wheel, and (an admittedly much less impressive) one out of the kitchen window. The hot kettle hadn’t burned him. Eddie’s skull was un-bashed. This all called for a serious amount of thinking, which would mostly consist of Richie squinting at the wall with his mouth slightly open until something came to him.
Of course, after some time he could come to only one reasonable conclusion: he and Eddie were dead. Properly dead, not that kind where you lie in the hospital and pop out of your body and then come back. No, they were legitimately ghostly now, and it was kind of shit-your-pants scary. (Not that Richie could shit his pants anymore. The reason he knew this was certainly not because he’d just tried.)
Naturally, the only thing Richie could think of to do was wake Eddie from his drunken slumber. Or at least try. (Again.)
This time, he tried grabbing him by the shoulders and jolting him about a bit. “Eddie! Oh, Eddie, wake up! Wake up you bastard!” Even Eddie could not sleep through such frantic shaking; he came to life with a sudden flailing motion that effectively backhanded Richie across the face. (Why shaking him had worked and hitting him repeatedly with a small statue had not was anyone’s guess, and it certainly wasn’t an unfortunate oversight by the author.)
“Huh? Wazzat! Where’s the fire? Save the Malibu!” He attempted to stand, presumably to save the Malibu from the imaginary fire, but just fell back into the sofa cushions with his wild-eyed and drunken gaze bouncing about the place. His gaze finally stilled when it found Richie, on the floor clutching his nose by force of habit (surprised to find it wasn’t actually bleeding). Richie, who only now seemed to remember he was supposed to be panicking, shuffled closer on his knees and grabbed onto Eddie’s forearm.
“Eddie, help! Help! Oh, it’s horrible! Cruel world! I’ve buggered off and died and - oh God, am I never to feel the touch of a woman? Oh bloody hell, no, I’ve only gone and died a virgin! Richard Mary! Kept pure until the very end! … I wonder if there are any juggy ghost girls around I can have it off with?” Even though he’d perked up a little at that last thought, Richie quickly remembered the seriousness of the situation, and frowned. “I mean, this is some heavy shit, Eddie! And I’m not talking about the contents of the lav after you’ve had a curry!”
Faced with this tirade of verbal bollocks, Eddie gave him a disgruntled look and wrenched his arm free of Richie’s clammy grip. The histrionics were beginning to give him a headache which rivaled the aftermaths of even his worst drinking binges.
“Slow down, Richie, I can’t understand a word you’re talking about! You’ve always had a leaky mouth, but I never thought things were this bad!”
“Well at least I don’t have a leaky anus, Edward!”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who told that serving girl not to worry about that smell coming out of your trousers because it was only a fart!”
Richie bristled, sticking a finger out at Eddie in that vibrating sort of way that meant he was truly angry, and don’t fuck about. “Yeah, well I was bloody near on there, wasn’t I? If only I hadn’t been so suddenly and mysteriously taken ill…” If he’d cared to look, he would have seen that Eddie’s expression turned a bit shifty at this, but in true Richie fashion he took no notice. “And on my birthday, as well!”
“Yeah, well - guess you just have lousy birthdays mate. Not my fault you’re a great ugly git with no friends.”
“Eddie!” Richie gasped at the indignity. “You take that back right now, young man! I do so have friends! I’m a right hot stag! I’m such a popular guy, I’ve got friends oozing out of… well, everywhere!”
This imagery was rather disgusting, Eddie thought. “Yeah, who? Friends you paid? I’m the only one you’ve got, buster, and don’t you forget it!”
Richie’s mouth opened and closed several times as he searched for a suitably clever retort, but it just made him look a bit like some odd sort of fish. Finally he gave up, with a dismissive wave of both hands. “Anyway, that’s not the bloody point, is it! Edward Elizabeth Hitler, we are dead! Bereft of life! Finito!” He paused for emphasis, expecting Eddie to darken in surprise, or perhaps bewilderment. The response he did get was completely underwhelming.
“... Ah.”
“What do you mean, ‘ah’? You find out we’re dead, and all you have to say is ‘ah’? Oh, how philosophical, Eddie.”
Eddie clawed his way up and off the couch, with some difficulty. “I mean, ah, I thought we might be.”
“You… thought we might be.” Richie sighed a long-suffering sigh. “Well why in the name of Satan’s putrid anus didn’t you tell me, if you thought we might be dead? I mean, Christ, it’s just fucking common courtesy, isn’t it! When I found out, did I keep it to myself? No, I did not! I told you, like any good friend would do!” He conveniently left out what he’d done with the stone statue that now lay innocently beside the leg of the sofa.
“Well… I didn’t want to worry you. I mean, you are a little on the highly-strung side of things, Richie.”
“You didn’t want to worry me?! How long did you think it would be until I noticed I’m fucking dead! We’re really fucking dead, Eddie! Oh God!” He began to panic again, darting around the drawing room like the seat of his trousers had just been set aflame - although this was cut short when Eddie promptly grabbed a fistful of his greasy blond hair and slammed his head into the nearest wall.
“CALM!” Slam. “DOWN!” Slam. “RICHIE!” Slam.
It didn’t really hurt, but there was still something rather unpleasant about having your face smashed into several layers of plaster and wallpaper. “Alright, alright! I’m fucking calm, shit! ” He wasn’t really calm, but at least he wasn’t screaming anymore, so Eddie released him. Richie straightened his nose with an audible crunch before making one of his trademark angry faces, you know the ones.
“Right!” And he threw one of his windmilling wind-up punches, which connected with Eddie’s shoulder - but Eddie didn’t even fall back. They stared at each other in a moment of rare silence, which Richie was (predictably) the first to break.
“Well, shiiiiit! Looks like we can’t beat each other up anymore.”
Eddie shrugged, and sat back down on the sofa with a magazine that seemingly materialized out of nowhere. “Looks like it, mate.”
“Well I don’t mind being dead anyway! Yeah! See if I care! You twat!”
“Yeah? Well it’ll be a blessing when I don’t wake up and see a stupid fat bastard first thing in the morning!”
“At least then I won’t have to listen to your utter utter bollocks for an eternity!” Seemingly satisfied with the cleverness of this quip, Richie sat down at the other end of the sofa and pointedly glared a venomous glare in the direction of the kitchen. If the plants in the window box hadn’t already been completely dead, they would have withered under it.
How exactly had they died, anyway? (Richie and Eddie, not the plants in the window box.) If he really thought about it (scrunching up his face in concentration, or perhaps it was fecal impaction) Richie knew the most likely culprit had been another attempt at avoiding paying the gas bill gone wrong - the gas explosion a few weeks back. That… kind of sucked actually, knowing that they’d been killed by something so easy to avoid.
He didn’t share this with Eddie - he didn’t think Eddie would care, anyway, since he was currently perusing his magazine (probably stolen from under Richie’s bed) and making lewd noises at the lingerie section. Business as normal, then. Meanwhile, Richie had begun to wonder if a “deathday” present was something he could conceivably ask for. It probably wasn’t, but that wasn’t going to stop him.
Life (or was it death?) went on as usual after that, for the most part. Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog didn’t come over anymore, on account of the fact that they couldn’t exactly see Richie and Eddie anymore - but honestly, that was just fine with Richie. (He’d never liked those two much, anyway.) Aside from that, though, they ate, they drank, and in Richie’s case, they wanked. To his delight, when he realized he still could. But really, honestly, in many ways neither of them felt dead.
That is, until one morning Eddie didn’t come down from his bedroom.
Richie did not notice this, at first; he was too busy bustling around the kitchen with his frilly pink and blue apron, “dusting” the shelves with a feather duster that looked as if it disseminated dust instead of removing it. Anyway, it was not unusual for Eddie to sleep in a bit, considering he didn’t exactly have a job to go to anymore. But it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon now, and this was getting ridiculous.
“Well, I guess if Eddie isn’t going to get up, we can THROW AWAY THIS BOTTLE OF MALIBU then, can’t we?” Richie paused, because if a threat against his beloved alcohol wasn’t going to get Eddie up, nothing would. Any moment now he was going to come charging down the stairs to protect the bottle, just you watch!
But he didn’t, and there was nothing. Nothing but an uneasy silence.
There was simply no sign of Eddie. Not even when Richie rushed up the stairs and rapped loudly on the bedroom door, counting to three with a reprimanding “young man!” before opening the door, hoping he wouldn’t find Eddie in the middle of a steamy session with a copy of Parade. But he was gone; the bed was even neatly made, and it was highly unlikely that Eddie had ever even learned how to make a bed.
Eddie never reappeared, on that day or any other.
At first, there was always the possibility that it was a prank. Maybe Eddie had just popped out to scare the shit out of Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog, he would be back any moment and it would be all laughs! Days later this seemed like a far less likely possibility, but Richie didn’t have much else choice but to wait. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and there was still no Eddie to be found. (And the months turned back into days, because what was time when you were a ghost?)
There was really only one rational conclusion: Eddie had moved on. Passed on. Whatever you wanted to call it.
The flat was remarkably boring without him; there were only so many times Richie could muddle his way through War and Peace or iron the same pair of crusty y-fronts or try to learn the finer points of chess all by himself. He was even so bored that he actually cleaned the flat at one point, properly made it shine in a way it probably hadn’t shone since it had first been built - he’d hoped it would help him pass on (it hadn’t), and besides, there hadn’t been much else to do. Eventually, he read every book in the house, actually cracked open a cookbook (even though he couldn’t really eat), and also dipped into some of Eddie’s alcohol stash. It wasn’t like there was anyone else around to drink it. And he wanked. Oh, he wanked.
Most of all, though, Richie was frustrated. And lonely.
“Oh, why can’t I do it? I mean, not that kind of doing it, the moving on twaddle… what’s wrong with me, anyway?!” He sighed and slumped down in his seat at the table, glancing towards the kitchen counters which now looked abnormal with all their clutter and filth removed. “Eddie you bastard! …why’d you have to go and leave me all alone? Selfish twat!”
But then Richie sniffed, and added more quietly: “Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye… you cunt!”
That was the last time he let himself talk to the memory of Eddie.
He’d tried a couple of hauntings to ease the boredom, here and there; he’d even popped over to visit his nephew, the college brat with the unfortunate ponytails and the yellow overalls - who, come to think of it, looked an awful lot like Richie. That is, if by “visit” you meant “stay uninvited and unseen in the sharehouse and float around the ceilings, generating damp spots and sticking all the lentils together.” But the orange one had inadvertently rearranged his ghostly organs with a cricket bat, the stupid hippie had started screaming about the house being haunted and thus totally uncool, and besides which there were never any girls around the flat - a Richard family constant, apparently - so Richie had gone back to his own uninhabitable home. Hauntings were overrated, anyway. If only he could find a way to move on!
Maybe praying to God would do it. He was a Christian, after all, good old C of E; never mind that he hadn’t been to church in years. (And even then it had only been for the free wine and biscuits, and a quick goggle at some of the ladies with ample bosoms spilling out of the tops of their smashing blouses.)
He got to his knees and slapped his palms together, staring up at the dingy lightbulb socketed into the ceiling light in the drawing room. There was a moth lazily circling the light, and Richie couldn’t help thinking that there could be a metaphor there about angels, but if so it was a pretty piss-poor one.
“Hello, Lord.” He made a strange sneering grovel-y noise that was supposed to be subservient, and dipped into a bow that was low enough that his nose almost scraped the crusty carpet. “It’s me, Richie! Richard Richard! You know, the one you’ve been keeping pure for… holy things?” Richie waited for an answer, but there was none. This did not dissuade him.
“Anyway, I just wanted to give you a quick prayer today to ask if you’d, you know, let me get a move on and pass on into your swanky Heaven joint. It sounds smashing! I’d normally ask for a bit of hot hanky-panky action while I’ve got you, oh Lord, from the birds of course not you, big jugs and all that, but I guess there’s not much point in that now, is there?” He doubted he would even be able to use his knob on a real girl if the chance arose. Not that arose was the best choice of wording, all things considered.
“I’m sure there’s loads of birds with cracking knockers waiting for me up in Heaven!” A disturbing thought came to him. “That is where I’m going, isn’t it?” He’d had this particular worry before, although he always managed to convince himself that it didn’t exactly matter which way he went, so long as there were sexy girls with their jugs flapping all about the place. “I assume if I was going to go, you know, to Hell and all that, you would have given me some sort of sign. Oh, of course I’m not going to Hell! I’ve been so good, and innocent… why, I wouldn’t hurt a fly!” (It could be argued that Eddie didn’t count, since in the grand scheme of things he probably ranked lower on the evolutionary chain than a fly.)
Richie waved the thoughts off with an offhand shake of his head. “Oh, well never mind about all that. Please, God? I’ve been your loyal servant for years, and I’m ever so sorry about all those times I crossed my fingers making promises to you. See, you let my mate Eddie go, and I know I’m just so special you’ve got to keep me down here on Earth, you know, to watch over all the commoners, but I’m ready to come up now! Really, I am!” Miraculously, he paused here for breath and closed his eyes.
“Come on, if Eddie can do it, so can I! Fucking BASTARD doesn’t get to be special, well what about me?! Pass on, pass on, diddly doo, diddly doo…” Richie made a vague noise of concentration, which came off sounding a bit constipated. Finally he squinted an eye open, just to see if he’d somehow miraculously done it without noticing, but the flat was still there, as dirty as ever. The moth flew clumsily into the lightbulb with an audible ping.
“Oh, Jesus Christ! ” Perhaps not the best way to end a prayer to God, but the profanities he’d already used weren’t exactly holy either, and Richie was getting sick of the grey-bearded bastard anyway. Perhaps he’d go back to Eddie’s philosophy of being a Buddhist, at least there was a chance for a snog with that one! But that just reminded him of Eddie, making him feel even more lonely; Richie huffed over to the sofa and huddled himself in his pink blanket, where the bright lights and colours of the telly could distract him just a little bit. At least, even when he couldn’t pass on and was utterly alone, he could still watch Emmerdale Farm.
More time passed, although Richie could not say whether it was weeks, days, months or simply hours. (It probably hadn’t been hours.)
He’d been thinking more about family lately, or more specifically, his family. There wasn’t much to think about there, not really - he’d never met his father, the supposedly great Oswald Richard, and his mother had somehow managed to miss most of his childhood until she eventually vanished completely. Occasionally, Richie wondered what happened to her. Then again, his parents were the type of people who were too lazy to give their baby boy a first name that was actually different from his last name; he supposed he should never have expected too much from them.
So, parental regrets probably weren’t the reason he hadn’t yet moved on, then. There was his sister, though. Rachel. The only one who’d ever paid much attention to him growing up (excepting his sweet old aunties, whom he'd only seen on special occasions anyway, so they didn’t really count). When Richie had been five years old and too scared of the dark to sleep, for example, she’d distracted him with a little song, a song which made him giggle and pull the covers all the way up to his chin. Even now he remembered their little night-night song; he’d even sung it to Eddie the night they went camping.
He missed her. He hadn’t seen her in years; on the Ferris wheel, when he’d thought of her and worried that she’d overhear his conversation, he’d never even considered the possibility that he would never get the chance to see her again. It was a sobering thought (if Richie hadn’t already been sober, because he’d never had quite the same affinity for alcohol as Eddie).
Okay, that was it, he was going to visit her. Even though she wouldn’t be able to see him. (It had to count for something.)
His first impulse was to float over there the moment he thought of it, but it was the middle of the night; while ghosts didn’t have to sleep, he figured it’d be pretty boring, not to mention a tad bit creepy, to float outside Rachel’s window while she slept. No, he’d better wait until morning.
It was, in fact, early evening when Richie finally made his way over to his sister’s flat. This was namely because while waiting for morning he’d fallen asleep (neglecting the fact that he didn’t have to anymore) and, upon waking up, promptly fallen into a mindless trance in front of the telly. Just like any other day, really.
He didn’t really know what he expected to do when he finally got there, aside from loiter around the house like some vast shadow, so he took even himself by surprise when he reached out and rang the doorbell without a second thought. What was that supposed to achieve?
Richie didn’t know, but the door swung open anyway. He hadn’t seen his sister in years, and there she was, looking just the same as he remembered. A little older, perhaps, a little more weary around the edges, but mostly the same. She was looking right through him, but people had been looking at Richie that way for his whole life, so momentarily he forgot he was invisible.
“Rachel! Come on, look, it’s me, Richie! Your little brother?”
But she couldn’t hear him, and with a shrug closed the door on what appeared to be nothing but was actually Richie’s face.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Maybe this had been a mistake, but he was here now.
Although ostensibly he should have been able to float right through the door if he tried, Richie did not think of it, and so did not think of trying. Instead, he went around to the side of the house, where he could see into the dining room through the window he pressed himself up against.
Rachel looked like she was probably happy. And Richie did not begrudge her it at all, although if it had been anyone else he most likely would have seethed with jealousy. She had a family, a loving husband (even if the bastard did have the stupidest last name, Pratt), and a child, even if it was just the college brat he’d haunted for a day or two - why wouldn’t she be happy?
But she didn’t look very happy. She looked rather sad, really, and when Richie tracked her gaze over to the mantelpiece he was surprised to find her staring at an old photo of the two of them together. As he watched, she stood and took the photo from the shelf. He remembered it well. It was a relatively old one, from when he’d first moved out of his mother’s place and into the flat with Eddie; he’d been young, at least somewhat clean, and excited to start his new life. Rachel had helped him move, and in the picture she had her arm slung around his shoulders.
She was wiping at her eyes now.
Richie hadn’t actually considered the fact that other people might know he was dead, or might - shockingly - even miss him. He didn’t know where he’d left his body (how did supernatural things like that even work?) but it stood to reason that someone must have found it. Or at least wondered why he and Eddie never came around to the Lamb and Flag anymore. But Rachel had progressed from simply wiping at her eyes to crying into her hands, and it sure as fuck seemed like she missed him even if nobody else did.
Richie was crying too now, and snotting what was probably ectoplasm down her window, but he didn’t care. Finally he phased through the glass, and he might have wondered why he’d been able to do it now of all moments if he hadn’t been distracted by the rather disconcerting feeling of having his incorporeal form pass through something solid. (But, being Richie, he made a face which suggested that he’d actually rather enjoyed the sensation on second thought.)
Now that he was inside the house he could see Rachel more clearly, and he could see that she was clutching the photo to her chest and whispering his name. Between sobs, obviously. He shuffled nearer, wiping his own tears and snot off on the sleeve of his coat and then putting a hand on her shoulder, as if trying to tell her that he was there in some way, even if it only manifested in a sweaty handprint on her shirt.
Perhaps it was the sudden influx of warm and fuzzy feelings that did it, or perhaps it was the fact that for once Richie actually gave a flying fuck about someone other than himself. Either way, he didn’t realize it until he first noticed the soft yellow light.
His hands were glowing, and he didn’t think this was a side effect of masturbating too much.
The glow spread as he watched, working its way up Richie’s body like some strange fungus until it was wrapped all the way around him, and despite the initial urge to panic he felt strangely like this was something he’d been waiting for. Maybe this was the ever-so-elusive passing on business. At last, some good news!
“Hold on! I’m coming, Eddie!”
And that was the last thing he said, because what was there left to say? This was it: the big one. The final push. Giving up the ghost, quite literally.
Just for a moment, he thought maybe Rachel could finally see him, because she was looking straight at him with a kind of wide-eyed, holy-shit-is-that-the-ghost-of-my-dead-brother expression on her face - but then the golden illumination reached his head, and he didn’t think anything more after that, because at long last he’d moved on.
Finally, Richie was at peace.