Work Text:
They were all fine. And everything was fine. The Great Battle of the Losers' Club vs. It of 2016 had been over for almost six months. Seven childhood friends, united by a force that had seemed unearthly and incredibly powerful to all of them, had defeated that damned clown. A happy closure to their past lives and the beginning of one of those boring chapters in stories, often skipped over because of their monotony: …and they all lived happily ever after.
"I’ve done it full, y’know? The divorce. It’s done."
Eddie's metallic voice echoed in Richie's ear. Phone screen - ear - back to phone - in his ear again. Maybe it was the echo effect that made him feel suddenly isolated in an empty room, like a deer unaware of the red circle of a hunter's scope aimed at its head. Under attack. Why did he feel under attack? Richie wasn't under attack at all.
… divorce - divorce - divorce …
Richie wasn't a deer at all either. And Eddie wasn't a hunter. He wasn’t hunting anybody. That was so stupid. He was always busy thinking stupid stuff.
Richie's lips widened in a forced grin. As he sat down on the couch at his house, he felt his stomach flip. And deep down he knew how his afternoon would soon continue.
“Hurray for the new free man!” Richie trilled. On the other end of the call he heard the sound of creaking wood and fabric being moved. Had Eddie sat on the bed? Had he laid down? Maybe he was doing laundry in his tiny bachelor apartment he didn’t like at all and wanted out of.
He took a breath into the microphone of his device. Richie felt the nausea rise up to his esophagus.
“We could meet, ayuh?” Eddie asked, hopeful and a little bashful; Richie stared at the grounds of his gigantic, empty house, his stomach twisting so tightly that he could feel bile in his mouth. “I mean, it's official now,” he commented again. Richie wasn't sure if it was him or his childhood friend but, to his ears, he sounded like a broken record.
… it's official - it's official - it's official ...
"I was thinkin’..." Eddie continued. Richie heard the note of anxiety in his tone and wondered how he was keeping his hands busy talking. As a child, he often touched his giant watch that beeped every hour, or his inhaler, which he took out, used, and then held in his hands, frantically running his fingers through the plastic components like some kind of magic glass ball with all the world’s answers a rub away. Richie knew it. Richie had spent his childhood watching him out of the corner of his eyes, because Eddie had always been the most special of all to him, and everything he did had importance and substance.
First love, and all that.
Who knew what forty-year-old Eddie was keeping his hands busy with? Now that he no longer had that big watch that beeped at all hours, but a normal one, the kind you couldn't touch too much or it would get damaged, and not even an inhaler, since his lungs were fine. Better than Richie’s, even.
"I was thinking it might as well be time, uh—rright? T’get away from New York, I mean. Maybe…, maybe Los Angeles is as beautiful as everybody goes around sayin’."
Eddie's tone was gentle. Richie’s thought fell on Ben, who was a less stressful topic of thinking than Eddie himself, but who often found himself in that same slightly agitated but happy tone.
Ben had invited Bev to live with him even before they left Derry. Richie had seen and heard them, because Losers don't hide anything from other Losers. In theory.
In practice, while watching them locked in a kiss, all red-faced from alcohol and the rush of love as they talked about how wonderful it would be to live together, share space, wake up every morning in each other's arms, Richie had felt that familiar nausea he was having now. That feeling of his stomach being thrown into a blender and surgically packed back into his belly as best as it was manageable. And he hadn't said anything then, just as he wasn't saying anything now.
He had to fix that, quick. The Trashmouth who didn't speak was the Trashmouth who got cornered to sing.
And Richie’s not much of a singer. Never been.
"Oranges have always trumped apples, after all. La-La-Land doesn't know what's awaitin’. She'll never be ready for the Californication of Eddie Kaspbrak."
Eddie let out a contented chuckle that, a little, eased the stomach aches. Because, after all, he was Eds.
Eds,
Eds, Eds, Eds. You like Eds. You love Eds. You want to be with Eds.
Yes?
…No?
Yes and no. What mental problems are plaguing you, Mister?
“Maybe you could give me a tour of the area.” The man on the other line urged. The stomach pains returned more forcefully than ever. Richie ran his hands down his legs, hip to knee, over the fabric of his trousers. First one palm, passing the phone over, then the other side. Switch. First one, then the other; then one, then the other. Eddie in his ears, his voice soft and hopeful. Switch, switch, switch.
Richie was about to vomit.
Richie wasn't breathing.
Switch, switch, switch.
“Then we could even… have a talk.”
A rasping sound came from Richie's throat, like a vacuum cleaner jamming. Richie hated himself, hated himself! How could he have let out such a Jurassic sound? Eddie had surely heard it, surely now—
"Rich?" he asked, in fact. Richie waited for him to start speaking again before taking the dangerous breath with his mouth open that his lungs were begging for. "Everythin’ okay in there? I heard a weird–."
"—A bug flew down my throat."
"Gross, man!" Eddie panicked. "Spit it out! It could give ya some disease!" Richie knew that voice. It was the tone of Eddie-Soniazoicked, talking a mile a minute, speaking with panicked certainty about completely incorrect medical problems. "And then maybe it'll be spinning in your stomach while it's still alive! Can you imagine? A fly spinning uncontrollably in your stomach? Sick! Sick!"
“It’s too late, Eddie,” Richie continued the charade, clutching his stomach even though the other couldn’t see it. “It’s in there, alright. I think it’s done some construction already. I can hear the drilling going on. Drills in my belly, Eddie, I can hear the drilling! The bitch built a fireplace in the living room, Eds. She’s got a Persian rug under the couch, and it don’t even match the wallpaper!”
Eddie chuckled. The sound reaching beautiful to Richie, which made his real stomachache seem more inexplicable. “Better than The Fly, at least.”
“Absolutely nothing beats the movie The Fly, Eddie.”
“—I just bought the flight for tomorrow.” He changed the subject, sending Richie into panic again. “...Tomorrow’s okay, right? You’re not going on tour these days.”
“No tour,” Richie breathed out. He didn’t quite manage to disguise his actual feeling this time.
“It’s not okay, is it? You would have preferred later? Much later? Should I cancel it?” Eddie asked. He could clearly hear the panic in his voice. That was so Eddie. When he wasn't angry, he was agitated. When he was not one nor the other, he was either asleep or distracted by something else that made him forget how stressed and/or angry he really was.
His voice got smaller. For a second, Richie thought he heard eleven-year-old Eddie on the other end, worried that his friend Richie secretly didn't want to hang out anymore if it was just the two of them, without Big Bill to invent games or Stanley to balance their conversations. "...You don't want to?"
"If…-, if…-, if you don't wanna go to the Barrens, we can just get some milkshake down on Main Street, ayuh? Or–! Or- orrrr... or, goddammit-, or Street Fighter! We can play Street Fighter if ya wanna!"
"Y’don't like the Arcade. It's the den of bubonic plague, snot for noses, and AIDS. Ya told me so yerself."
“Yeah… yeah… and that’s ‘bout it, cause I’m right. But—! Yuh-y’know…, Ma lets me go out and it’s just us two. So…, so– y’know, I don’t wanna bore ya, even if it’s just me. ‘Cause then maybe ya won’t wanna go out next time and, an-an’, an’… an’ I’ll be stuck at ‘ome an’–”
“—The Barrens are wicked cool, man! There’s frogs! Jer Smith swears he seen a purple frog with yellow spots. He swore on his gran! For me, he sniffed too much glue, an’ tomorrow the Good Lord’ll show ‘im a blue an’ pink striped one instead. But ‘till then, we best go look, now. Ya get me? If we get sick together, I want it to be from frog pustules, not stinky teenager pustules.”
“Yuck, Richie.” A little noise on the other end of the line. Sure enough, Eddie had picked up the inhaler to feel it all over and calm down. He took a breath, and his dry voice turned anxious again. The double side of Eddie in all its eccentric beauty. “...Ya sure?”
“Not only sure, I’m plea-sure-d, little man.”
“–Do not call me—!”
“–Still taller than you.”
“-By a lousy inch! By a goddam inch! Oh, for cryin’ out loud–!”
“Why wouldn’t I wanna have ya here?” Richie asked with a manufactured tone of amusement. He noted with pleasure that nothing in his inflection betrayed the heavy bombardment that was happening in his stomach.
The goal of the question was plain as day to Richie. A rhetorical why to make you feel stupid even for doubting it. Why ever wouldn’t I want you here, Eddie? Everyone and their mothers know I’m in love with you. And you’re sweet on me too, for some dang reason. And now you’re divorced. We’re coming up on the end credits of this thirty-year rom-com. Why wouldn’t I want it?
Yeah, why?
“When ya land? And at which airport? Ah’ll come get ya.”
Perhaps Richie’s little trick had worked, because in Eddie’s response there was clearly a smile stuck in it: “LAX,” he just said. “8:35 a.m.”
“Got it written down,” He hadn’t. He hoped to remember it later. He was too far out of it now. He stood up from the couch, heading toward the bathroom. The conversation was at its last gasps, or Richie had to force it to reach that point, because the words available before the inevitable direct jet of vomit into the toilet bowl were in rapid decline.
“Okay…,” Eddie Kaspbrak drawled, and there were two options when he did that: either he was planning how to insult you, or he was assiduously stewing on something he’d said or done, to stoke up his own fuss and self-doubt. Richie had crouched down in between the sink and the toilet. He pressed his burning forehead against his empty palm.
“I can’t wait to see ya, Rich,” he murmured right by his ear. If there was one thing that made it clear the Trashmouth was out of shape, it was that no one had inadvertently pissed Eddie off in the last fifteen minutes, leaving him free to be as soft-spoken as a lamb.
God.
The schoolgirl-like heartbeat didn’t really match well with the sailor’s seasickness Richie was feeling in his gut.
“I think he’ll propose as soon as the divorce is finalized,” Bill had joked with him one time. He still remembered the interaction as clearly as ever. “You know that too, right? The said/unsaid bullshit given that he’s still technically married. Do you know how you’ll plan it out? Not the wedding, Jesus. I mean the rest. The nice stuff. The relationship. He’s moving in with you right away, a–yuh?”
Eddie… with Richie?
Nobody has ever lived in his house except for himself. He’d never have a reason to. The only truly meaningful relationship he had in all his life had been the one with a friend of his. A woman. And that was why it had lasted as long as it did. Because Richie had loved her incorrectly, but safely; without ever showing her all the weirdness that secretly lied within him. A werewolf hidden by a full moon night too cloudy to fuck him over.
And when she came too close to realize who Richie Tozier actually was, when not even the fur but just the fangs were out, he had let Sandy walk away.
It was alright. The nicest thing he had done for her, as a matter of fact. Definitely nicer than not saying he was a homo, for one. But it couldn’t have ended any other way. The closer you end up looking at reality, the faster you run away from it. Leaving only rubbles behind.
Logically, Richie knew Eddie wouldn't run away. They faced the true ugliness of the world together. They were Losers, first of all. Eddie wasn’t for him just some romantic love as he could be for everybody else. Logically, Richie knew to be at the very least less rotten than the wickedness of humanity personified in a child-eating clown. Like, the bar had to be set somewhere above it at least.
But Richie didn’t want the moment to talk to come. And that was clear. That was part of the reality. That was part of the reason why Richie was 40 years old and still clinging to the edge of the toilet like the morning after his first college party.
How fucked up in the head could he possbly be?
“Eddie…,” Richie called him imploringly, hoping that by simply saying his name the other would understand all the things he wanted to tell him.
I love you. I’ve loved you all my life. Im gonna fucking vomit if you speak another damn word. I want you to stick to me forever. I want you glued to New York so that nothing can change between us. I hate change. I love change. I love you. I’m crazy about you. I’m scared shitless. Of you. For you. For us. For me. I love you. I love you. I should have died under that house. I love you.
He wanted to insult himself. He’s been in love with Eddie for… probably forever. He couldn’t remember a moment without Eddie before moving away from Maine, and he couldn’t remember a moment when he hadn’t felt an Eddie-shaped hollowness in his chest making every social interaction ache.
“...I know,” Eddie murmured again. Richie wondered not for the first time for how long he did. How much of it he really understood. Why hadn’t he reconsidered yet if that was actually true.
Eds, I’m waiting for the call to end to throw up my defrosted-in-the-microwave lunch because I’ve got issues with my feelings being requited after more than 30 years. I’m so used to the human facade I forced on my face, I‘m starting to fear the ugly monster inside mistook it for an oxygen mask and forgot how to breath without it.
I’m a liar, Eds. I acted like some kinda freak who wasn’t interested in getting anything back for so long that, by some kinda Pigmalione effect, maybe it all became real. But I love you. I dunno what’s wrong with me or what the hell you see in this whole shitshow that’s worth anything. But the one thing I ain’t got no doubts about? That.
“...Me too.” Eddie finished. Soft and sweet. “I’ll see ya tomorrow. L.A., finally.”
In a movie this would be it. The resolution of the token gay guy. The happy ending of self-acceptance, of being proud. The knowledge that his feelings weren’t something dirty he had to hide all his life.
How nice. How nice! Let’s make a prequel series, even!
“L.A, together.” He agreed. “...Finally.”
How come all those non-freaks that owned their own feelings accepted the risk of the rest so casually? Why only to Richie it seemed like intimacy was something he still had to conquer, instead of receive? Why was only his happy ending set on fire to touch?
Did nobody else feel their skin start to itch and burn at the idea to be seen naked in the core?
Richie wondered how was he supposed to greet Eddie the day after. With what strength he’ll let someone he loves so much walk right into his mess just like that, with no damage-prevention manual. No real instructions.
Step 1: Don’t fall for Richie's trap.
He was such a mess.
Step 2: Run before it’s too late.
He sometimes imagined what would have happened if he’d tragically ended up trapped with It in its lair. Died as a hero under the house of horror, deep in that bottomless cave under Derry where nobody would have ever been able to come and collect him.
It was kind of fucked up, but they were all just moments, he wasn’t actually suicidal, it was just–
It would have just been easier. A tad bit.
-To die saving the people he loved and getting out of the scene before the lines of the script ran out.
Eddie ended the call not even a minute later, and Richie immediately emptied his stomach in the toilet bowl.