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A week after the Losers crawl out of the house on Neibolt Street without Eddie, Richie coughs up a flower.
It's in the privacy of his own crappy apartment, since the Derry Town House and most of the town were destroyed in the flood caused by the storm after they killed It. Richie flew back to LA, and all the others went back to their homes, writing novels or adopting dogs or sailing away on boats.
But Richie doesn't have an abusive husband who died seeing Pennywise, nor a wife who just came out of a catatonic state after seeing Pennywise. At least Bev has Ben, and at least Bill still has Audra. Mike is— a librarian in Derry. Richie's not really sure how that's going to work out.
But Richie is forty years old, leaning over his kitchen sink that is lined with more than one empty bottle of vodka, and wrenching up a flower. His chest burns, and for a second, he thinks he's about to throw up, but instead has to reach back into his throat to dislodge the white flowers. They're white lilies, one of the few flowers Richie can even recognize. Usually, he'll just be somewhat aware that something is a flower, but have no further information. It’s not like he knows what they mean or anything. But he knows they’re lilies, his mom’s favorite flower. That’s sweet, at the very least.
After several very painful minutes, Richie stops coughing. His sink looks like a crime scene, pure petals tainted around the edges with blood.
Memories have been hitting him like bullets lately, lodging themselves in his throat and apparently coming out as flowers. In this one, he's nine years old and coughs up a sunflower in the Church's bathroom. The pastor preaches until the little squiggle Eddie drew on Richie's arm the day before feels like a sentence for condemnation. He flushes the flowers down the toilet, scrubs at his arm until the pen is long faded and his skin is red, stares at the paintings before he goes back to the pew and sits between his mother and father. They’re not religious, not really. But once in a blue moon, they’ll go, see what happens. It’s not the worst thing in the world. He just has to sit still until it’s time to leave again.
The memory makes Richie choke up again. He forgot. He forgot about it, and now it's back, taking up his breath and feeling horribly familiar despite the decades past. And if Richie can remember anything, from hours spent speaking to Stan in hushed tones while hidden in the library, somewhere Richie would rather die than hang out, it's that puking up flowers means you're in love. And Richie's never been more in love than with Eddie, so that checks out.
There’s another memory: Richie in the Macroverse with Bill; Eddie with his arm torn off; Eddie’s inhaler falling to the floor after he uses it with just as much belief as when they faced the giant eyeball as kids. Now, he’s just left with the burning of the Deadlights in front of his eyes and a newly reformed scar on his palm.
He wants to text Stan, but he doesn't have his number, doesn't know his wife's name, doesn't remember that he's dead until he's coughing up into the sink again.
Richie doesn't know how he forgot any of it. His best friends, his entire hometown, Eddie.
His phone broke while in the sewer, so he has to pull up Facebook to message Mike. His laptop is a decade too old, and takes ten minutes for the site to load, another five to sign in. Mike has already created a group chat, with the notable absence of two of Richie’s best friends. It’s fine. It’s totally normal. He has missed messages, but he’s not exactly checking Facebook messages every day.
Richie stares at Mike’s icon, gentle smile in the kids’ section of the Derry Library, and wonders what he’s even going to say.
Hey man, sorry for not messaging earlier. By the way! Know anything about your mysterious love-related disease coming back after decades for someone who’s dead? Don’t worry, it’s not like it’s someone we know or anything!! Haha
Yeah, that’ll blow over well. But Richie’s gone through all this effort signing in, clicking through buttons and searches until he’s looking at Mike’s profile, so he has to do something.
Richie ends up settling for something more subtle. Plausible deniability. As it goes.
Hey Mike. How do we know that It’s gone for good? Because I’m remembering stuff and haha I dunno thx
He knows that Mike never forgot, that Mike has been stuck in their hometown for his entire life, remembering everything Richie so easily left behind when he moved. (So easily as in always looking behind his back, having nightmares of werewolves and giant eyes and statues of Paul Bunyan, waking up crying and shaking.)
Mike doesn’t respond immediately, so Richie takes to half-heartedly cleaning his apartment. There are still month-old takeout containers lining his counters and empty plastic bags for his more unsavory and expensive habits. There’s dust on the floors, places where he hasn’t stepped since he bought the apartment. He doesn’t think the blinds have been drawn for a while, either. (The flowers go down the drain easily. The only lingering proof is the itch that still sits in his throat.)
Richie’s laptop chimes loudly when Mike responds.
Want to call?
Richie laughs to himself, pressing his hand to his forehead to feel the clammy sickness that’s spread over his body. He’s pretty sure that he looks like he vomited out his guts, but he killed a man and a killer clown last month, so he can look however he wants.
Richie presses the call button, frantically rubs at the camera with his sleeves, and looks at Mike as he picks up. He looks tired, but smiles at the camera and waves to Richie.
“Hey, Rich. How’ya doing?”
“Great— awesome. Just spectacular. You?”
Mike laughs at Richie’s sarcasm, but responds just as easily, “Same.”
They talk and laugh until Richie’s throat feels a little less sore and the pain behind his eyes has loosened. Eventually, though, Mike sombers.
“I never did want to see you guys again.”
When Richie laughs and goes to interject, Mike shakes his head. “Then it would mean that we really had killed It, that it was all over. That the reason everyone left and never called or wrote was because it was just traumatic. And it was over. I spent years learning everything I could. My entire life— my parents, my grandparents. I thought it could be over.”
Richie remembers his own mother’s careful look, the pride in her eyes, the easy way she let him leave the house at any time. Have any friends over, but still told him to watch what streets he walked on late at night. Her hazy right eye, stern looks, and reminders.
“You guys forgot. It was still here. But we all still remember, so maybe the cycle’s finally over. Maybe we can finally be done with it all. And we did destroy all those eggs.”
Mike laughs, but it’s obviously pained and reminiscent. He looks somewhere off camera and adjusts his collar.
Richie wants to laugh, wants to joke around and get beeped and have someone remind him that he’s supposed to be a comedian. Nothing really seems funny anymore. Maybe he shouldn’t have fired Steve.
“Yeah,” Richie agrees vaguely, letting the silence sit between them.
Usually, he’d put on a voice, use a sock as a puppet, tell a slightly offensive joke. Now he’s thinking about how he has to die because of the flowers in his throat or get over Eddie. One is more likely than the other.
“Do you—” his voice breaks. It’s like his body has forgotten that he’s not a teenager anymore, now that he remembers those years. “Do you know Stan’s wife? Have her name or number or something? So I can— yeah.”
“Yeah, Richie. It’s Patricia, Patty. I’ll send something over.”
“Thanks. Uh. I’ll message you when I get a new phone. I’m not exactly the best with Facebook.”
“We know. Check the group chat.”
They both hang up, and Richie stares at the blank screen for a moment longer. The group chat is filled with messages of new numbers and addresses and sentimentalities. Richie feels like he’s the only one grieving. But the deep bags under Mike’s eyes and the string of heart emojis that Bev has sent tell him otherwise.
There’s talk of planning a memorial service or get-together; Richie coughs until petals fall out.
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Richie gets a new phone the next day. The employee asks if he wants the same phone number, and he says no. Fresh start, right?
He’s not trending on Twitter; there are no skeptical Reddit posts; no one has messaged him. No one cares that Richie flew to his hometown that suddenly got wrecked by a massive flood and disappeared off the face of the earth for a few weeks. Just another bender, right? Wouldn’t be the first time.
Bev texts him for his address and mails him shirts with a handwritten letter.
Richie! Remember our talent show act with our oh-so-awesome Lindy Hopping routine? Well, I just remembered, so here’s this letter. Call me!
The letter continues for one page, filled with a pile of other memories that Bev has remembered, some that even Richie doesn’t even recall. He’s glad that Bev cares enough to sit down and pen these thoughts, even though she could have just as easily typed them up in a text. And Richie does remember the talent show— their practices were horrible, but the show was good enough that they weren’t booed off. Although they were told it was horribly out of time period and that no one even knew the movie they ripped it off of.
Richie does end up texting Bev, asking if she’s free to call, to which he immediately gets a call in response.
“Richie-Richie!”
“Bevvie-Bevvie, long time without your gorgeous face gracing my screen. How’s it going?”
Bev’s out in the sun, red hair practically glowing from where she sits on the boat. It’s docked at the moment, but Richie can still hear the crashing of the waves against the dock and the sides of the boat.
“Same old,” she says, even though she’s wearing a tank top and has no visible bruises or cuts. She looks happy.
“Molly! Is Ben not living up to your standards? You know what they say,” Richie laughs, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively even though he doesn’t have anything in mind.
Bev laughs easily, twisting her hair and talking about a new movie that she saw with Ben. Richie hasn’t done much of anything recently, so he doesn’t mind quipping with her and pretending that he has his life together. Although none of them really do, so it’s fine. They talk about Bev’s yo-yo tricks and poems that Ben has left her more recently. Bev even pulls off a magic trick.
“Who’s that?” Ben eventually calls, stepping over to Bev before leaning against her when Bev calls out Richie.
Ben smiles at Bev just from sitting near her, and Richie definitely doesn’t have to fight back a stir in his chest. He loves his friends, and he loves how they’re all so happy and in love. He looks at Ben again, remembers him saying Bill’s going to write the books as a kid, and wonders how they even got this far.
“Richie! Did Bev tell you about the polaroids she found in her old place? Never thought you were that into puppets, why’d you never—”
Richie startles, frantically pushing his glasses up his nose and laughing.
“Dang. That train horn’s going off again. I have to go talk to them about that. Highways! Bye!” Richie’s done a lot in his life, but if he has to see polaroids of a younger him with braces and some very unsuccessful ventriloquism, it might take the cake.
Bev laughs at both of them and waves. In the split second between when Richie hangs up and the screen turns off, he sees Bev turn towards Ben with a smile.
He emails Patty, feeling like it’s the least-intrusive form of communication. She doesn’t respond.
He needs another drink.
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“You can’t tell anyone, it’s a secret!” Eddie whispers, smiling nonetheless.
Richie grins from ear to ear, reaching out to pinch Eddie’s cheeks.
“Oh, Eds! I would never tell anyone anything. A true lady never kisses and tells,” he says, all Southern Belle.
Eddie flushes, and Richie can feel himself leaning in closer, pushing his knees against Eddie’s thighs and watching Eddie fluster and playfully swat at Richie’s arm.
“What about Jessica? And Monica? And Ruth?”
None of those girls have even talked to him, but Richie’s the one who told the lies in the first place. So, he wiggles his eyebrows and laughs again as an excuse to move in closer.
Their shoulders are touching, the light feels brighter, the—
Richie coughs until he can’t breathe and his bed is covered in some red flower he can’t identify. He doesn’t even know if it was a memory or a fantasy. Isn’t that how it goes?
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After three weeks, Richie stares at the petals collected in his garbage can and seriously considers whether he even wants to fight it. If he cares if he dies in his musty old apartment with no one around.
He hires a cleaning service and makes appointments with three different therapists for the same day. The first one pities him, the second looks at him with wild eyes, and the third asks him about his father.
On the fourth try, a day later, he’s asked if he really wants to die.
“I just don’t wanna live,” he says, pulling that playful tone that gets people to laugh. The one that gets sold out stadiums of horrible people who just want someone else to suffer. Isn’t that who he is— isn’t that what he’s done? Ruin everyone’s lives and make it just all around worse—
She doesn’t laugh. “Why not?”
Of course, the universe decides he needs to fall into a horrible coughing fit at that moment. When rose petals fall out of his tissue, she sighs, and Richie laughs so hard that his chest heaves up again.
“He’s dead, and I’m in love with him,” he explains uselessly.
She adjusts her brooch. It’s a turtle.
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After five weeks, he deletes all his social media and writes a joke. The thing about remembering your childhood decades later is that you get a lot more material.
He calls Bill, and even though it’s just over the phone, he can see his friend’s smile twisting up his face and his eyes shimmering. Why couldn’t he be in love with Bill? Then Bill laughs, hearty and full.
“That’s— that’s really good, Richie. That was funny.”
Richie hates the way that his back straightens with pride, laughing lightly as he drags a hand down his face. He needs to shave.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Now that I got you here, maybe I can even read you a bit from my new novel. You were right; these memories are a whole new avenue for us creative types! In this one—”
Richie doesn’t particularly want to hear Bill’s strange, twisted version of their childhood melted into his horror novels, especially when all his other ones were so far off the mark, but familiar too. Still— Bill laughed at his joke, so he lets his friend talk.
Partway through a remark about Silver, talking about beating the devil, Richie starts, “Is this supposed to be horror?”
Bill pauses, “No. No— I thought that I’d try something new.”
“Cheeky man! Y’know I’m not that kinda guy, but if you—”
“Richie!” Bill shouts.
“Yeah, yeah. Keep going, I’m listening.”
Richie laughs too. Listens to a tale about biking downhill for a friend, tries to ignore the way his chest tightens when he hears the word asthma, and tries to fight the cough when Bill slips up and says Eddie instead of the made-up character name.
“Richie? Are you alright?” Bill says when he fails.
“Yeah. Just inhaled my water wrong,” he lies, wiping at his mouth and closing his eyes to ignore his own emotions.
Bill fills the silence between them with apologies and falling back into his stuttering, saying, “Man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
Richie laughs, strained. “What? Shouldn’t have what, Bill?”
“Brought it up, I dunno.”
“My joke had him, too. Had them. It’s— it’s fine.”
“Richie. I— yeah. Okay.”
They talk about Audra’s progress in PT instead, how they’re talking about moving. How they’re going to couples’ therapy. Richie doesn’t talk about his own harrowing therapy experiences. It’s fine. Everything is just fine. The petals are a different color every day. Richie’s trying to move on.
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After ten weeks, his apartment is clean. The shakes are gone, but he wants a drink. He wants to drink enough that they’ll be back and that he won’t be able to feel anything again. Rehab went fine, but now he has AA. Maine went fine, but now he has a disease that will kill him unless he falls out of love with his dead best friend. Everything is just fine.
A few days after Richie gets back to his apartment, exhausted and broken, Bill texts him his address and tells him to come over.
He formally meets Audra and notes how neither of them have wine over dinner. Afterwards, Richie and Bill sit outside near his luxurious fire pit, and Richie wonders if he could have had this if he hadn’t blown most of his money on crap he always threw up the morning after. Ben designed his own house. And apparently is designing a Derry Civic Center to help Derry after the flood. All of his friends are so much better than him.
They call the other Losers, something that Richie notes was in Bill’s calendar. They tell him he looks great, which is a lie. His hair has been permanently disheveled since he was five, and his bloodshot eyes are a sure indicator of how withdrawal has gone.
He’s been coughing more lately, which makes no sense. Or, maybe it does. His dreams are mostly Eddie. But then again, so are shadows in the grocery store and voices on the radio. The crackle of the fire behind Bill’s laptop is nights spent with the other Losers by his side, clubhouse under their feet and stones in their hands. The sparse stars are nights grabbing Eddie’s hand, pointing at random dots and saying that’s Jupiter. I’m sure you’ve been until Eddie scrambles away from him and rips grass up from the ground to throw at him.
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Four months after Richie returns to LA, there’s a knock at his door. All the Losers would text or call first, and no one really wants to hang out with Richie in his crappy apartment. Screw all of his hot, rich, and successful friends.
But when he opens it, Bill is standing there, hand still knocking into the air and holding his phone tightly in the other. That’s when Richie realizes that his own phone has been dead for hours, and he’s been writing material for even longer. Not even typing, because his laptop finally decided to power off while plugged in and refuse to respond. Bill looks manic, with no sense of humor as he barges in, literally pushing Richie aside.
Richie fake swoons, but stops when he realizes Bill isn’t even looking at him.
“Sit down,” he commands.
Richie doesn’t even joke about how orders make him all warm and fuzzy, and really, Bill. You should order me around more, just sits down on the new couch that Bill points at and watches his friend.
Bill opens his phone, screen hidden from Richie, but he can tell that Bill is typing quickly. Then, he hears the outgoing call sound, louder as Bill turns up the volume, sits next to him, and places the screen in front of them both. He can see a picture of Mike on the screen, clad in hiking gear and near a pond. It’s the one he sent a month ago, showing Arizona sunsets and snakes.
“What kind of bro-talk—”
Mike picks up the video call, but it’s not just Mike. Stan looks exactly the same, curly hair in the same swoop. Eddie stands next to them both. But both of them have matted hair, blood on their faces, but faded and mostly scrubbed away. They’re wearing what are obviously Mike’s clothes. They have dark circles under their eyes and are on the phone with Richie.
“Haha. Ha.” Richie forces out. “This is really funny. Uh— Why do they look like they’ve been through hell? Your CGI guy really tired this week?”
He directs the question towards Mike, finding it easier to ignore the two ghosts standing beside him. It would be really embarrassing if he was hallucinating them on call.
But then, Eddie flips him off and Stan rolls his eyes.
“They kinda did,” Mike says for them.
“Um.”
“Look who I found in the Utah wilderness!”
Richie blinks. He blinks again and again until the stars disappear and his two dead best friends are in front of him, in some kind of park. A bird chirps loudly, landing on a tree behind the three of them.
“That’s a Snowy Plover,” Stan says absently.
Eddie reaches past Mike to shove at him, “Those aren’t even in the East Coast, how could you possibly—”
Richie lets out a string of curses so vibrant that even Bill startles.
“Trashmouth, this is not the time.”
“Not the time? When is the time for this?” he asks, somewhat hysterically. “The time when two of your dead best friends are… quipping? What am I—”
Maybe Richie’s breathing is getting a little frantic, but that’s to be expected. To recap: his two dead best friends are on call with him.
“How?”
“The Turtle couldn’t help us,” Stan says slowly. It’s clearly something he’s repeated enough that he barely thinks about it. “But, he did. I guess he didn’t really choke on that universe. So, here we are.”
Richie curses again, grabbing the phone from Bill and leaning in closer to absorb every detail. Stan was dead, Richie read his letter and cried his eyes out with the rest of the Losers. (His voice faltered and lowered when Bill asked them to swear they would return if It ever came back. His voice faltered.) But Stan and Eddie are on the screen. Tom isn’t, neither is Georgie, nor anyone else who didn’t survive. Just them. Just the Losers.
“When we were eleven, the Turtle told me that we had to finish it then. That we wouldn’t be able to do it again, that we couldn’t let It get away. Then It told me that he was dead, then I missed my grip in the ritual, but I don’t think he’s dead. Even if we messed up,” Bill offers. By the way that Mike nods sagely, Richie can tell that it’s a new thought Bill’s been thinking up on the way.
Richie had gotten It’s tongue instead of Bill, had gripped his friend’s hand tight and defeated It. Had watched Eddie close his eyes, lingering on You know I… before dying.
“I’m never letting go of my phone again,” he laughs, unsure of how much he’s missed in the past few moments. “Why now? What?”
Eddie responds this time. “I think we’ve been… back for a while. Time was weird. But I think the flood did something. Derry was cursed, has been cursed forever. Mike told us about the Native Americans there. It was trapped by something, but now It’s dead. And we were dead, but now we’re not.”
Bill nods along like he’s heard it before and Richie wonders just how long it took before Bill came over.
Richie just stares at the screen again. He looks at Stan. He looks at Eddie.
“Hey, Rich,” Eddie says.
Richie starts coughing.
Mike visibly turns around, “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything! I said hi!”
Richie can’t breathe, Eddie is alive. Eddie has been alive for an indeterminate amount of time. Richie is in love with Eddie and Eddie is alive. He pushes himself off his nice blue couch, runs to the bathroom and wretches into the toilet. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear Bill talking quietly, before he knocks at the door lightly and sits beside Richie at the tub.
When Richie comes back up for air, he’s left with visible flowers, stems, petals, and all, littering the toilet and the floor around it. They’re sunflowers.
“Richie,” he says.
Richie coughs again, sweeping up the fallen petals as he responds, “I know.”
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A week later, he’s staring Eddie in the face.
Richie wasn’t ready for this; he thought he would be, but he can already feel the flowers twisting up inside of his lungs.
Stan’s chosen to see his wife in person instead of video-calling her from across the country, and that seemed like a better idea, but it’s so much worse watching Eddie step towards him determinedly.
Eddie hugs Richie tight, and Richie knows that his hands are shaking as he wraps them around Eddie and holds on. He closes his eyes and knows it goes on for way too long, but then he feels hands at his shoulders and knows that the others are joining in.
Bev—who flew in from Nebraska with Ben—says, “We missed you, Eddie.”
She’s crying, but Richie thinks he is too.
“I missed you all, too,” Eddie says, slowly breaking away and taking a step back. “You guys look good.”
Richie wants to say, well, it’s not like we just came back from the dead, or, well, we didn’t just remember that a killer clown traumatized our childhoods so hard that we forgot a quarter of our lives, but he just steps back in tandem with the rest of the group. His chest hurts; he ignores it.
Richie doesn’t ask why Stan is in Georgia and Eddie is in LA. He doesn’t ask why Stan went to see his wife and Eddie didn’t go to see his. He doesn’t ask why LA is the first place Eddie went, because he’s standing in the airport without any luggage, just some of Mike’s clothes on his back.
“So, this is the West Coast, huh?” Eddie asks, looking around even though they’re still in the baggage claim waiting for Mike to find all of his stuff.
Richie laughs, and then laughs until he has to excuse himself to the bathroom and lock himself in a stall. Everything is fine. He has this under control.
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He schedules an emergency appointment with his therapist, under the subject line of Need therapy with a post-script of Turns out he’s not dead! It’s going great.
She ends up recommending him to a specialist, since he shared that he doesn’t have days when he’s not coughing up flowers. He goes; they tell him to confess. Yeah, confess. That’s an apt word choice. Tear himself open to Eddie with the hopes that he’ll survive. Confess because it’s something inconvenient, apologize, and beg for mercy. He says he’ll try.
The thing is, Richie’s spent most of his adult life drinking himself into oblivion. He’s taken deals and accepted crappy ghostwriting designed to get the largest fanbase, even if it was just a collection of the most vile men. (That’s what he is, playing to himself, right?) Let his own work be thrown into the trash by request of his manager and sign to deals and contracts until he puked the next morning.
He has a lot more to confess than his stupid feelings. A lot more people he’s hurt. More lives he’s ruined and hate he’s perpetuated. He sits down and writes a relatively funny story about friends coming back from the dead.
(He lied. It’s not funny, there are too many mentions of clowns and turtles for it to come even close to being shareable.)
Richie doesn’t call Eddie. He’s staying with Bill and Audra while he sorts calls to New York, deals with divorce proceedings from across the country, overturns his death certificate, tries to reinstate his accounts and finances.
Richie dying because he can’t say I love you is the least of Eddie’s concerns.
But it’s not even a week later when Eddie calls him instead.
“Richie,” he greets. “Not dead yet, I see.”
Richie nearly died, and Eddie did. Such a great conversation.
“You’re not that lucky,” he jokes.
Eddie laughs lightly and starts answering Richie’s vague question about what he’s been doing. The answer: a lot of lawyers and video calls.
Richie puts him on speaker, so he can take off his glasses and rub at his forehead. His migraines have been worse since he quit drinking. When he rubs at the lens with his sleeve, it pops out, and he curses until Eddie laughs again.
Everything is going fine. Patty even responded to his email. It’s a series of broken sentences, rambling about years with Stanley where he got distant looks in his eyes, where he darkened as if remembering something horrible, too horrible to name. Times when his friend talked about how the Turtle couldn’t help them. She brightens up at the end, tells Richie that they’re doing well. That’s she’s heard a lot about them in the past few weeks, and she’d love to meet them after she has some time to adjust. Richie can relate. He just needs more time.
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Eddie texts him to say I’m going to be at your place in ten. There better not be rats, which is all the warning Richie has before he’s opening his door and Eddie is stepping into his apartment.
“This is a nice place,” he says, even though it’s only a fraction of everyone else’s homes.
Steve tried to convince him to buy a mansion, but Richie never really had any trust in his crappy shows, so he just has a dwindling pile of money feeding flights and organic foods now.
Richie looks around at his own place. He has a couch, a nice lamp, a few paintings. It’s nice, it’s decent.
“Yeah, um. Many people have told me that a good living space is— essential or something.”
Eddie twists around, clearly looking towards his kitchen where he has a visible fruit bowl, “Many people?”
“My… my therapist, mainly,” Richie replies carefully, feeling ashamed and proud all at once. Yeah, he’s forty. Yeah, he has a therapist. Yeah, his life is totally together. It feels like a lie; it probably is.
Eddie nods casually, “You’re doing good.”
Richie guesses that’s a word to describe it. He’s doing good, but his nightmares make it so he can’t go out most days. Good means a clean apartment and enough memories from manifestations of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Crawling Eye, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space that he can’t watch old horror films because the sci-fi ridiculousness that is the movies is exactly what he faced in sewers and in parks and behind his own eyes.
“Better,” he laughs, instead of blurting out every thought he’s ever had. Talk about secrets.
But it has been better. A rough slippery slide of better, but he’s not on the floor face-down every night anymore.
They talk until Richie feels the familiar tingle in his chest. He goes to the bathroom and turns on the shower to cover up his coughing. It’s fine. It’s fine.
When he steps out, Eddie doesn’t say anything about his dry hair or how he’s still rubbing his mouth. However, he does level Richie with an aggressive glare. His stress lines are a little less defined, and his skin is more tan than it was months ago, no doubt a product of actually being outside instead of risk-analyzing or whatever he did in New York.
“That LA sun is doing you good,” Richie starts. It’s honest, at the very least. And compliments always distract Eddie, because he starts trying to fight Richie.
Apparently not this time, since Eddie stares and says, “Richie.”
Richie coughs, stepping back towards the couch and hiding his face in his elbow. He coughs and stops, looks up at Eddie, and starts again. The petals fall out of his hand and onto the floor like feathers, sitting between them.
“Oops,” Richie laughs. “Well, I didn’t want you to find out like this, Eds. But— it’s been real rough since I found out your mom passed. We really did have—”
“Richie,” he repeats.
Why is Eddie smart? Why does Eddie know him? Richie shifts and tries to hide the petals; he can feel his heart rising through his throat with more flowers.
“Haha! You got me— it’s um. It’s not her.”
“Richie,” Eddie says again. He’s not moving, just staring with those wide, unbelieving eyes.
“That is, in fact, my name,” Richie says between coughs; more petals fall.
Eddie doesn’t acknowledge him, “Who?”
Richie sighs. He can tell Eddie, or sit in limbo for the rest of the time he coughs up flowers. Richie doesn’t particularly want to tell Eddie he’s pathetically gone for him, but Richie doesn’t know who else he can lie about. Although Bill might be believable.
Still, he averts his eyes when he replies, “Who else, man?”
Eddie doesn’t respond, just bows his head and stares at the petals. Richie doesn’t recognize them. Eddie must see Richie’s blank look, because he does start to speak after a while.
“These are snapdragons,” Eddie eventually says, reaching towards the pink and purple flowers without touching them. “I used to have them too.”
That makes Richie pause. The only flowers that Richie would expect Eddie to know are the poisonous ones, since he was always screaming about poison ivy and infections as a kid. But he knows some pink flowers, and is speaking as if he, too, coughed up flowers.
“What?” Richie says, at a loss for better words.
Eddie shifts, “They mean protection. Or secrets, I guess.”
“Sorry, you used to have them?”
“Are there flowers in your ears, too? Yeah. It was when we were kids,” Eddie says, as if nothing is wrong with his statement. As if he’s annoyed that Richie has questions.
“Eddie Spaghetti.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and rubs at his forehead. He always did get insanely agitated whenever Richie called him something other than Eddie.
“No— You are not doing this.”
“But— Eduardo,” Richie doubles down.
“No!” Eddie protests.
Richie stares at him, trying to connect the dots. He’s not running away, not yelling at him. Richie feels like he’s still missing important details, because there’s no way he’s hearing Eddie right.
“You liked me,” he says slowly.
Eddie glares at Richie, then pointedly at the flowers as if to say and you’re in some tragic love with me. Which… is fair.
“Um. Me too. Obviously,” Richie feels like he’s a teenager again, stuttering like Bill and falling through each of his words. “And still, I guess.”
“You don’t even know me. It’s been decades, Rich.”
Richie knows Eddie’s favorite color, his favorite ice cream shop, his favorite snack from the drug store, his favorite comics. But they’re all from when he was a kid. Richie really doesn’t know anything about present-Eddie. The Eddie-right-in-front-of-him-Eddie. How is he supposed to argue with that?
“Yeah,” Richie agrees easily. Usually, he goes down with a fight. “But true love knows no bounds, right?”
Eddie doesn’t laugh, which feels pretty mean since Richie wiggled his eyebrows and everything. Richie feels like an exposed nerve at the moment.
After another beat, Richie continues, “I don't know, it was after we left. After I got back here, I mean.”
Eddie doesn’t move. “How’d I forget?” He laughs, clearly remembering his own flowers.
Richie coughs again.
“Well. Cats out of the bag. Eddie, I’m kind of deeply, madly in love with you.”
He mimes shooting a ball at Eddie, who doesn’t even acknowledge it. Richie imagines it bouncing off the couch and rolling onto the floor, left ignored by its recipient.
“You’re supposed to catch the ball, Eddie,” Richie explains slowly, eyes following the ball.
“Give me a minute,” Eddie sighs, pinching his brow and not taking control of the court.
He looks so frustrated, just like Eddie at twelve, but he’s old. He’s had an entire life that Richie wasn’t privy to. He’s worked as a risk analyst, lived in New York, while Richie has lazed around in Chicago before moving to LA and doing the bare minimum to be considered a stand-up comedian.
It has been decades, years and years of other people and different states and memories. But Eddie still sighs the same way and screams at him with the same cadence.
“I’ve seen a few of your specials, in brief. They’re not so good.”
That’s to say the least, he spent most shows out of his mind and with little memory until he saw an editing preview get emailed to him or someone showed him a video. “Yeah.”
“That wasn’t you,” Eddie protests, steadfast and without care for Richie’s shrug.
“Well, I’m the one who said all that crap.”
Eddie looks away again, exhaling loudly. Another minute later, he speaks quietly, as if confessing a horrible sin, “Your voices were okay.”
Richie laughs joyously, wanting to use his Irish cop or put on a silly impersonation just to make Eddie laugh. “Yeah,” he ends up saying, because nothing seems all that funny. “I’m not doing that anymore, though.”
He’s not doing it, but he’s writing. He’s not having shows, but he thinks sometimes that he’s being funny. But it’s not like he has social media anymore to promote anything.
Eddie apparently can read his mind, because he says, “Really? Bill told me that you had some actual original material.”
“Traitor,” Richie mumbles. “I guess. But it’s not like I have a manager anymore or anything.”
“Well, you have a therapist. And a relatively nice apartment.”
He does have a kind of nice apartment, a fact that Richie takes with a couple of grains of salt. And his therapist has been talking about him needing to be more open about his feelings. And this is where it’s gotten him so far, so he can’t blame her. Richie lets it sit between them, looking at the way the light filters through his drawn curtains and onto the coffee table that’s actually clear for once. He needs to get a job; he needs to get out of this apartment. Richie’s pretty messed up in the head. He’s still having nightmares, still throwing up, still getting hazy feelings in his head. Eddie is looking at him like he’s considering something. He’s looking at Richie like he’s worth something.
“I’m kinda messed up,” Richie confesses.
Eddie does’t falter, doesn’t inch away on the couch. He just rolls his eyes and rubs at his chest, where Richie can imagine a large scar from being impaled. He does it with the arm that was ripped off of him in front of Richie’s eyes, too, which is a sight to behold. He’s just a collection of messed-up, ripped-up pieces. Stitched together into something cohesive that’s sitting on Richie’s couch, looking at him with big, brown eyes.
Eddie just says, “Me too.”
Richie looks at him. His glasses are a little smudged in the corner, and the frames constantly popping out means that he can clearly see the brim in his peripheral. Eddie isn’t moving. Richie is on the edge of something great or horrific. Depends which way the coin lands. Depends which side he chooses.
Richie laughs, a little hysterical and disbelieving as he asks, “What are we doing, Eds?”
Eddie shrugs, just gesturing down at the petals to show that Richie’s in a worse-off position than he is. “What were you going to do? Not tell me?”
“Well, you were dead,” Richie says pointedly. He didn’t really have a choice. “So, I guess that was the plan.”
“How are you even in love with me?”
Richie laughs at the blunt language. “You’re well fit, mate,” he says in a British accent.
Eddie levels him with another glare until Richie caves and talks again, words falling out of his mouth without his permission.
“You’re good. You’re a good guy. I don’t know what you want me to say, Eddie. Funny, weird, the whole works.”
“Only you, Rich,” he says with a smile, which is all the warning he has before Eddie leans in and kisses him.
It’s just a light peck on his mouth, before he moves in to hug Richie. Richie’s sure it’s because he was aggressively coughing up the contents of his lungs just a moment ago on the couch and in the bathroom.
“I guess I’m in love with you, too, then. You’re pretty funny. Mostly weird, though,” he says, it’s muffled and into Richie’s shoulder, but Richie doesn’t care.
He slings an arm around Eddie, holding him lightly as the fuzziness behind his eyes starts to clear and he just feels the hammering of his own heart in his ears. He lets himself have the moment, trying to sort out the conflicting shaky hands and relaxed smile as he realizes that Eddie is apparently in love with him. And that Richie isn’t going to die because of it. He lets himself sit there with Eddie in his arms for a few minutes, glad that the flowers won’t grow anymore. But after a while, he remembers that the existing ones are still lodged in his throat, and his chest has started hurting enough that he needs to get them all out so they won’t come back.
“This is nice and all, but I do need to expel the remaining flowers in my lungs, if you don’t mind,” Richie eventually says, dislodging Eddie from his side and stepping away towards the bathroom.
Eddie follows him and kisses him again after he brushes his teeth and flushes the toilet again, finally free of his curse.
Richie’s the one who hugs Eddie this time, holding him close the way he wishes he could in the airport. “I’m glad you’re not a ghost anymore, Eddie.”
Richie’s not looking at Eddie’s face, but he can feel the eye-roll from where he’s propped up around Richie. “I wasn’t a ghost! Me and Stan were just… I don’t know. In Utah, suddenly.”
“Uh-huh,” Richie says, believingly.
Eddie laughs at him. Then he kisses Richie again before he has the chance to respond. Richie doesn’t really mind.