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Eddie waits until 2:06 (6 minutes after Richie was supposed to get here) to go on the hunt. Richie is in general very punctual when it comes to their hangouts - he has to be, seeing as they’re working around a tight Absence-Of-Sonia-Kaspbrak schedule - and Eddie is in general very impatient, so this delay more than calls for investigation. He hops on his banana bike and heads into town quicker than you can say Inconsiderate Dipshit.
His first stop is the arcade; since they graduated last year, Richie spends every day in there playing Aero Fighters like a deadbeat dad at a bar. Not today though. He hasn’t stopped by at all, according to Aero Fighters’ current high scorer, Boogers Taliendo. “Usually he comes in around twelve to push me off. Like, actually push me,” Boogers tells Eddie.
“I know,” Eddie snips, cuz he does.
“But not today. Today I’m the king of the castle, haven’t seen the asshole since Tuesday.” Before Boogers goes back to button-smashing, he smiles a little shyly at Eddie. “Say, you got any of those Ritalin pills left? I’ll trade you a Bubble-Eez.”
Richie isn’t at the drugstore either. Eddie only checks the comic book rack with any real thoroughness, but the results are pretty conclusive. It’s at this point he gets concerned. If whatever’s distracted Richie has prevented him from even leaving the house, their plans are royally sunk.
By the time Eddie’s biked over to the Toziers’, he’s sweat through his Button Your Fly shirt and fully scripted + rehearsed a lecture on Richie’s tardiness. “My time is pretty fuckin’ precious these days, you know. Just cuz you think community college is cowshit doesn’t mean I can just…on hold…” Eddie mumbles to himself as he mounts the porch. He pauses to re-knot his laces, rings the doorbell, and keeps going, “and when I think about it you’ve been like…ever since school ended you…”
Richie himself opens the door, or at least some vaguely Richie-Shaped Bodysnatcher does. He’s wearing a button-up and a tie under his sweater (not polka dots or Pepé Le Pew novelty print, just a positively conservative orange) and his hair’s been detangled. Like, with-a-real-comb detangled. Eddie can see actual parting up there. He can also see an embarrassed little look cross over Richie’s face, before it’s quickly replaced with a stupid squinting one.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. You must be the rent-girl I ordered!” Richie says in his Old Fogey voice, arms stretched out blindly for good measure. His fingers grab at Eddie’s chest as he goes. “Swear on my Crunchola I specifically requested Double D’s, but. Blind old sports like me can only be so choosy, honey. You mind turning around so I can measure up your bahookie?!”
Eddie only graces him with one, withering look, then makes to barge straight into the house. To his total surprise, Richie blocks him.
“I’ll kill you. Actually,” Eddie says.
“I believe it, dude, you look all scary.” Richie makes a big show of wiping his groping hands on his pants. “Why are you so sweaty?”
“Because I’ve been on a whole fucking Final Frontier quest looking for you since two. And it’s hot. And as I’ve told you a million times I’ve got a glandular issue.” Eddie swipes for a fistful of Richie’s sweater. “You’re sweaty, you freak. Why are you, like, swaddling yourself with -“
Richie blocks him again - this time with a corky little karate chop. “Blind old sports like me feel the cold. That’s why I like the rent-girls, they keep my tallywhacker warm.”
“You do know Babylon 5 starts in ten minutes, right? Like, tell me you factored that into whatever lame ass joke this is meant to be.”
Richie’s face falters again. Jesus H, their plans really are sunk. He’s forgotten all about them. “You know!” He squeaks. “Now you say that, I think my dad’s actually recording it for me.”
“Richie.”
“We should probably rain check. It’s a sin to spend such a beautiful day inside watching TV, Eds, look at you. Your peepers are going all square.”
“Richie!” Eddie throws his hands up. His rattling snake act has melted away into genuine disappointment. After a long, lonely week of studying/yearning endlessly to get the hell out of Derry, he’d really been jonesing to just bum around with Richie for a day, like old times. Now all he’s got to look forward to is watergate salad with his mom tonight. “What the fuck else was so important?!”
Richie squirms. “It’s. Well. I’m actually heading out soon.”
“Yeah, dressed like Mr. Rogers.”
“I have a questioning thing. Not a police-organized one, though, more of…kind of a tete-a-tete. A scheduled meeting of the minds. Very intellectual stuff.”
“Oh my God, are you going on a date? Is it horse girl again?!”
“No and never. It’s, like, a job interview,” Richie says, voice begrudgingly going shy.
Eddie blinks. Richie’s complete lack of interest in getting a job or generally doing anything by way of moving past high school is very well-documented. They’ve even fought over it before. Several times. “A job interview,” Eddie repeats.
“A job interview, a job interview…j-ooo-b…view,” is Richie’s impression of an echo. He even mimes tumbling backwards for added at-the-bottom-of-a-well flair.
Eddie spends a couple more seconds gawping at him, before he attempts one last barge into the house. He projects such supreme determination as he does so that, this time, it works - Richie lets him pass. “Alright. Yeah, Jesus Christ, in that case we’re most definitely hanging out,” he puffs, hopping out of his sneakers, lining them up briskly by the doormat. “How long do you have?”
“Ninety minutes, but you -“
“Ninety minutes is enough, I work best on a time crunch. You got tweezers?” Eddie mounts the Toziers’ staircase, pausing on the second step to give Richie a baleful little look of ‘who am I kidding, course you don’t’. Then he waves a hand at him in beckoning. “Giddy up, Dicky. I’m gonna get you ready for real.”
-
Richie does have tweezers - a guy who’s been obsessively picking at his face since he gained complex thought has his tools, Eddie learns - but what’s really important to start with is his outfit. When Eddie dumps himself on the one non-laundry-covered patch of Richie’s bed and says, “the sweater has to go. Damp and smelly are not employable,” he gets the shock of a lifetime.
Obligingly, Richie pulls his sweater off to reveal not only his button-up and tie, but the periwinkle blue jacket of his bar mitzvah suit. He’s wearing the matching pants, too, which seem to have become ten times periwinkle blue-er now that the jacket’s entered the picture. “Didn’t wanna walk over there looking all suited and booted,” he says, grinning. “Thought someone’d pull over with questions about my magic underwear and have me running late.”
“Oh, no. No, this isn’t saying Mormon, Richie,” Eddie marvels. “This is saying circus. Clown. Juggle.”
Richie does a little Cabbage Patch dance on the spot that makes his suit seams audibly groan. His arms are exposed from his wrists to halfway up his forearms. “It’s fancy!”
“It’s what every small town rube thinks is fancy corporate attire, sure. And, like, only the small town rube-iest of ‘em actually wear.”
“I think it’s kind of a big swing to call Sears corporate. A big, like, wrong swing.”
“Huh?”
“That’s where I’m interviewing. All goes well and you’re looking at the Derry Sears off the highway’s next picture guy. The future of modern under-five-bucks portrait art.” Richie now switches to madly bowing and paparazzing with an invisible camera, but Eddie can see in his face that he’s going shy again. He can always see it in his face - Christ, they’ve spent way too much time together over the years.
Eddie mimes taking the invisible camera out of Richie’s hands, then mimes lobbing it out of the window. He points to Richie’s wardrobe, with its Tales From The Crypt stickers and Babes With Power Tools calendar pinned to the front.
Richie stalks over to it and throws it open. “You got a better suggestion?” He says, gesturing to the rack of gaudily colored bell bottom pants, cutoff shorts and 1987-1995 Comic-Con shirts signed by various minor Star Trek cast members. “Not all of us have stock in Buttons & Beige, wouldja believe.”
Eddie flips him a middle finger while continuing to speak completely regularly: “pretty sure Wentworth does.”
“He’s got a lock on his closet. Has since the whole stitch picking revenge situation.”
“Does your mom?” Eddie doesn’t need to pre-clarify whether Richie’s parents each have their own wardrobe, cuz of course they do. The Toziers are a very modest, suburban flavor of loaded, but loaded all the same.
Richie’s eyebrows shoot up like he just got shocked. The expression is exquisitely annoying. “No doy, why didn’t I think of that?! I’ll wear a pencil skirt and hike it right up. That way if I bomb all the questions I’ve still got a trump card, just bend over and flash a little bit of ball,” he gabs.
Eddie’s already walking to the bedroom door, beelining for Maggie and Went’s room across the landing. “You gonna put me in a push-up bra first?!” Richie goes on, following him. “A good blouse won’t fit right without a push-up bra, Cosmo’s always saying. It’s bazonkers or bust.”
“The fact you’ve read Cosmo is so much worse than just wearing your mom’s regular ass shirt,” Eddie snips back.
“That’s where I get all my insider info, it’s like the Vatican Library of Girls.”
Maggie Tozier’s wardrobe is much easier to navigate, Eddie discovers upon bursting in. She keeps it neatly divided into workwear and leisurewear, and it all smells like nice fresh lavender. Eddie snaps up a white button-up shirt from the workwear side - so clean it’s actually impressive, considering the woman’s a kindergarten teacher. He shows it to Richie, who, as expected, makes another exquisitely annoying face of displeasure. Equally as expected, Richie pulls it on anyway.
This outfit change straightaway makes him look more like a Qualified Candidate. Or at least like Richie Tozier dressed up as a Qualified Candidate, instead of just, you know. The Richie Tozier part. Eddie hands him some black slacks to replace the periwinkles, struck with genuine unreality seeing him dressed so schmick.
“Jackpot. Already miles better,” Eddie says, a little wide-eyed. He juts forward to fix Richie’s buttons. “Now you look hot.”
Richie makes a noise that probably started out as a laugh but veered off halfway into a perplexed kind of oink. “Beg pardon?!”
Eddie does a big, useless hand gesture at him, starting to giggle at his own joke. When Richie doesn’t get it after 0.5 seconds, he says, “you know, cuz your mom. Cuz you’re dressed like your mom.”
“My mom is literally post-menopausal.”
“And maybe that’s how I like ‘em, asshole! Let’s face it. I am so not ready to be a father.”
The next step in qualified candidacy is being generally clean. Eddie isn’t really in the mood to give any sponge baths, so he just makes Richie stand in the bathroom with his arms out while he douses him in Verve spray. Richie doesn’t have to say ‘why the fuck do you have that in your bag’ - his incredulous little flick of the eyes from the spray to Eddie’s backpack makes it clear enough.
“I have a glandular issue,” Eddie hisses, and sprays a good quarter of the stuff.
Once Richie is smelling like at least four boys’ locker rooms, Eddie decides something ought to be done about his hair. Despite Richie’s attempt at combing it’s still looking Marge-Simpson-after-a-windy-car-ride-y as ever.
(On some deep dark level, Eddie’s always liked it. Even in the various awkward, swoopy bowlcuts Richie’s worn it in over the years. Something about its scruffiness seems to soften the rest of him right out, in a way Eddie finds dimly comforting.
Nevertheless. Qualified candidacy calls.)
Eddie doesn’t have a pair of scissors stashed in his bag, but he does have a penknife - the one Bill Denbrough gave to him before he moved to Orono for college. He fishes it out, takes a tuft of the bangs hanging in Richie’s eyes, and slices it off. The thick, curly brick that is Richie’s bangs springs right up after being cut. The finished result is ridiculously short.
“Fuck,” Eddie says.
Despite the literal knife being waved in his face, Richie had apparently been happy to go along with all this up until now. Hearing the snick of hair-choppage, he flinches hard. “What?”
“Nothing.” Eddie figures/prays it’ll look better evened out. He slices the other half of the bangs - this time he manages to cut it even shorter. “Fuck.”
Richie, now looking like a forsaken Barbie doll (from some unholy Barbie Meets Revenge Of The Nerds collaboration), tries to grab at the knife. “What the shit have you done to -“
“Stopyou’regonnacutme! It’s my freaking process,” Eddie says. He looks wildly around the room for a quick fix - comb, there’s Richie’s comb on the side. Maybe he could back-comb it into a kind of satellite style so it looks intentional? Like a Saved By The Bell girl? No. God, no. There’s a jar of Dippity Do gel, presumably Went’s, by the sink. That could work. He grabs it and starts slathering the contents on Richie’s hacked up hairline. “Just trust me for - one second.”
“Trust is earned, keed, not knifed into me.” Richie tries to poke at his Dippity Do’d head. “I thought damp and smelly were banned?!”
“It’s eucalyptus scented. Your nostrils probably don’t process anything non-armpit or -fart anymore.” Eddie steps aside so Richie can look into the bathroom mirror, trying to turn his stressed grimace into a smile and more or less failing. He’s gelled the front chunk of Richie’s hair back flat on his head; a look that was meant to be suave Wall Street guy but is much more skeezy used car salesman.
“Oh. Yow, I feel like I didn’t have…this much face before,” Richie marvels. “Or this much eyeball? Like, my specs look kind of terrifying.”
Eddie raises his brows, pretending he wasn’t already in complete agreement. “You could always lose them,” he says, plucking Richie’s glasses off his nose. “As long as you hold onto walls and stuff you’ll be fine, won’t you? Sears has walls.”
Richie does look marginally better. Marginally. “Loads of walls. Yeah. Okay, awesome, I’m into it,” he says, sounding excited now. He mimes a little Rocky right hook in readiness. “Let’s engage Captain. Feeling corporate as fuck.”
Eddie claps him on the shoulder. “Sweet! Okay, go lay on your bed.”
“We’re not done yet?”
“Almost. Anyone can put a clean shirt on and slick their hair back, Rich, it’s the finishing touches that’ll bag you this thing.”
Richie waves a yadda-yadda hand at him and turns to leave. He does a few uncertain shuffles, blind eyes squinting, arms out, then commits to walking forward. He manages three full steps before smacking face first into the shower door.
-
Now, finally, Eddie gets his hands on the tweezers. He’s also got his hands on a frozen bag of peas from the Toziers’ freezer, which is less exciting, but pretty inoffensive. He gives those to Richie. “Do not just dump the whole ass bag on your head. Just use, like, a corner,” Eddie coaxes. Richie is laying on his bed with a giant, blue bruise forming in between his eyes; he’s just plunked the peas on top of it like a hat. “If I’m gonna fix your eyebrows I need full frontal access.”
Richie groans from behind the peas. “I’d give you anything, Eddie my love, anything money or a bat of the lashes can buy. Anything apart from my eyebrows. Or any other stuff that’s attached to me, as a general rule.”
“Didn’t you shave your left one off on purpose, like, two years ago?”
“Right one. And growing it back was a ballache. I had to wear a Beach Bunny visor to school.”
Eddie snorts. He hikes up onto the bed, swinging a leg over Richie’s middle so he can get a good straddle on him. This is the Assumed Position, after all. Many evenings have been spent with Eddie perched on Richie’s belly like that old painting of the Incubus, after he’s successfully convinced Richie to let him pop his zits or dig his dandruff. This is how they debrief - often with a Beastie Boys record or Babylon 5 playing in the background.
(Went Tozier had even stumbled in on them once, presumably to ask for any dinner requests. The grotesque hostility-intimacy of it all - Eddie hissing at Richie to hold the fuck still, Richie duly kneeing him in the balls, all while glued to each other like pistol shrimps - seemed to have stunned him for real, and he’d left without saying anything.)
“Nurse, scalpel,” Eddie says, gesturing to the tweezers on Richie’s nightstand.
Richie passes them over. As his part of the Assumed Position, he lets his body go limp. “Gotta motor in twenty. You better mean fix and not, you know, full scale renovate.”
“I’m speedy,” Eddie says. He scooches the pea bag out of the way, lining his tweezers up with a particularly juicy clump of Richie-brow. “Lucky for you. If you brought up the fact you were even looking for a job before now I could’ve done this last night, but.”
“Wasn’t looking for shit. I just happened to see it in the paper.”
“Aw, my bad. You saw it in the paper you read every morning.”
“Eddie. Listen. You’re a very good guy to play Chrono Trigger and talk about things and, like, receive facial surgery from, but when it comes to stuff like this you are super fucking weird.”
Eddie plucks the clump out. He gives Richie a couple seconds to flinch and wince before going back in. “Weird?”
“You get all pissy about it. Like my college and career choices are directly responsible for your bills being paid.” Richie lifts the pea-bag up for a sec, swatting it around like a rolled up paper - he’s doing his particularly awful, particularly sexist Nagging Yankee Mother impression. One day this will become a staple on Rich Records’ KLAD show. “You get off ya fat bee-hind and put my chow on the table, mistah. In my day we went to work fresh outta middle school. We went fresh outta the nutsack!”
“It’s not that I’m pissy, per se,” Eddie says, although he punctuates this with a particularly evil pluck. He also wants to add that Richie doesn’t pay any bills but manages to control himself. “I guess it’s just that college has kinda sucked for me so far, especially with working at the Living Centre on top of it and all…I think I get jealous of you.”
Richie shrugs, or shrugs as much as one can while laying down. “Life’s long. You don’t have to do all that stuff right now.”
“Factually I do. I need to start getting cash and qualifications and shit behind me ASAP if I wanna get out of here before I’m on a zimmer frame. And I need to do it at Derry Community because my mom is, you know, my mom.”
Richie hums as if he understands, although it’s somehow extremely clear from the tone that he doesn’t. “What’s that gotta do with me, though?”
“Nothing,” Eddie says. “At least not really. Maybe it’s just kind of hard for me to…I never really get how you’re fine just chilling here in Derry, I guess.”
“Derry’s peachy. I don’t care what anyone says, I like how it smells.” When he doesn’t get a snort or anything out of Eddie he squirms a little. “Plus Stan and Mike are here. Stan’s literally at college with you every day, you guys are Derrying way better than me.”
“That’s cuz Stan and Mike have to be. I have to be, but you don’t.”
“Well I -“
“And actually you’re right, it does piss me off. Screw it. It’s batshit insane to me that you have that choice but you just don’t seem to wanna make -“
“Agh!”
Eddie, too impassioned, has accidentally tweezed right over a pesky eyebrow zit. He backs up a little as Richie claps a hand to it. “Oh - jeez, are you good?” He kind of pants.
“Fucking ow! No! That’s - there are way too many risk factors involved in this process, dude!”
Eddie surveys the eyebrows. They’re still eighty percent thick and scrubby, only with some random smooth edges near the front; plus the redness of his tweezer-attacked skin paired with the forehead bruise makes Richie look like something out of Deep Space Nine. Alas, Eddie’s now feeling guilty enough to say, “alright. No more plucking. Just one last thing,” before Richie can start wriggling to get up.
He reaches for the nightstand - a pretty impressive stretch for a guy with daschund arms - where Richie’s got a tub of Vaseline, a Kleenex pack and various other presumed handy shandy supplies. “Will your dick and balls mind if I use some of this?” He says, flicking his head towards the Vaseline.
Richie’s pupils blow out. ““Yes. Affirmative. They will. They’re extraordinarily stingy. Do not -“ Eddie picks the tub up, “- touch that.”
Eddie dips a pinky finger in, then leans in close to Richie’s face. He begins painting it onto Richie’s lips with most un-Kaspbrak-ian precision. Richie sits through this in most un-Tozier-esque silence. Mostly because he has to keep his mouth still, duh, but Eddie gets the sense it’s cause he’s pondering something too. Sure enough, when Eddie pauses to take another dip of Vaseline, Richie finally speaks: “it’s kind of scary.”
“What, actual lubrication? You missing your fuckin’ scabby sandpaper?”
“Like a limb,” Richie says. He swallows. “But I mean about what you said, before. The idea of actually raking all my shit together and doing something ‘bout leaving Derry. It’s scary.”
Eddie stares at him owlishly, goo-covered pinky hanging in midair. “Oh. Yeah,” is his lame as hell response.
“Wouldn’t you be way more pissed if I just booked it off to UCLA and left you?”
He wants to protest the use of left you, perhaps not-so-kindly remind Richie he’s not his little brother or three-legged puppy or something. But that’s what it’d feel like, at the end of the day. That’s what it felt like when, Christ, Richie’s mom just kept him off school sick for a day. “I mean, we’d still talk,” Eddie says. “Even if everything changes. We’ll still be friends anyways.”
Richie gives him a look, and for the first time in their codependent two-headed-snake friendship, Eddie can’t really translate it. Doubt, maybe. One that’s saying, oh, right, like you talk to Bill and I talk to Bev and Ben comes over every weekend. Or it could be disappointment, that’d check out for Richie’s melodramatic ass. He’d probably been hoping for Eddie to say yes, Rich, pissed and heartbroken too, I’d rather hack my own leg off and wear it as a necktie than spend a minute of my life without you. Excuse me while I go cry myself unconscious just thinking about it.
Alas. It’s none of those. It turns out Eddie can’t read this particular expression because Richie’s never actually worn it before - or at least never this visibly. Far more grave than doubt or disappointment, this expression is one of - lets face it - lust; all of a sudden, Richie jerks upwards so violently you can hear one of his bones clunk, and he kisses Eddie on the mouth.
It’s very urgent and clumsy. The abandoned bag of peas slips off the bed and thumps to the floor, just as Richie’s front teeth thump into Eddie’s bottom gum.
Eddie lets it happen for around four seconds, his mouth feeling like it’s in another continent to the rest of him, before he pulls away. He’s so scandalised he can’t formulate a reaction, but he scrambles to think of at least an exit plan: get off the bed, tell Richie he’s got to pee really bad, discretely slip out of the house. From there he can either go home to his bedroom or wander about the woods, get to work on humanly processing this situation in his own time. Eddie straightens up, prepares to leave, and…and goes in for another kiss.
He kisses him hard, too. Less bumpy and more serious road accident. He whacks the shit out of his nose on Richie’s deceptively plush-looking cheek and has to clasp onto the pillow to steady himself.
Richie pulls away now, but only for a second. He’s so pink-faced and breathless he looks like he did running the mile at school. He’d been the slowest runner in their whole grade, and Eddie used to finish his own lap ASAP so he could loop back around and hang out with him. This memory + the eye contact has Eddie flighty and convinced they’re doing something obscenely wrong again.
Then the reason for Richie’s pause becomes clear: he pops his retainer out. He throws it on the floor and goes all limp again, this time in more of a ‘kiss me please’ way than a ‘give me face surgery I guess’ one. (Although it will occur to Eddie before the day’s over that maybe those were never so different.)
“Are you - concussion?” Eddie says.
“Nope,” Richie squeaks.
And so they recommence frantically sucking face. That’s what it is, now that Richie’s retainer’s gone and they’re both all open-mouthed guns a blazing. Eddie swaps his death grip on the pillow for tangling his fingers up in Richie’s hair (the non Dippity’d parts at least), or occasionally for cradling his jaw and chest. Richie seems to enjoy all of these variations equally. He’s all but purring, holding patiently onto the belt loops of Eddie’s jeans.
One pleasant surprise is that it’s very similar to their usual play wrestling. From the way-too-rough-but-deeply -uncoordinated enthusiasm, to Richie covertly letting Eddie win every time. It’s basically all a long game of Sumo with, like, tongue.
They might’ve kept kissing until both their jaws caved in, Eddie thinks, if it weren’t for Richie’s alarm clock suddenly blaring. Eddie jumps up, startled. Richie clumsily tries to tug him back down the by shirt as if he hasn’t heard it. “Rich. Richie, your interview,” Eddie says, voice all croaky like he’s been yelling. He shimmies sideways so he isn’t straddling Richie anymore, instead kneeling on the duvet just beside him, and gives him a chivvying pat on the shoulder.
Richie sits up with some difficulty. His Dippity Do is coming a little un-Do’d around the ears and his top couple of shirt buttons have popped open. “Not really in the mood anymore,” he says groggily.
“You should go. If Sears never gets a chance to interview you they’re gonna make some total fucking dingleberry their picture guy.”
“S’true…yeah. Heavy are the hands that hold the sticky Kodak disc cam and…stuff, yeah.” Richie flicks him one last, longing little glance - he’s clearly angling for Eddie to say ‘fuck it’ and yank him back in for a spot of more tonsil tennis.
Eddie doesn’t, but he does throw Richie a bone: “you want me to drop you off? I biked over, we could ride double.”
Richie grins in accord. He lets Eddie guide him up and out by the hand.