Chapter Text
“Rich. Richie. Wake up.”
“Eds?” Richie rolls over and knocks a pillow over the edge of the pullout couch. “What’re you doing?” He blinks and then it registers that Eddie is not only awake, but standing up, one hand on his abdomen and the other braced on an armchair. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy, hold on.”
“Fuck off,” Eddie says with no bite to his words. “I feel perfectly fine.”
“Fine my ass, you’re shaking.”
“Well someone likes to keep the AC all the way up, and there’s definitely been some muscle atrophy in my legs from bed rest.”
“Eds, if the thermostat was too low, you should’ve told me.”
“Oh my god, stop being a mother hen. I think if I have to watch Stranger Things one more time, IT is gonna morph into a demogorgon in my next nightmare. The kid who plays Mike looks just like you did when we were little, you know.”
“Then I pity the poor kid,” Richie huffs a laugh, even as he stands to offer Eddie his arm.
“Nah, he’s adorable,” Eddie replies, and goes strangely silent for a moment as he takes Richie’s arm. “What is this, are we about to go waltz?”
“Shut up, let me at least help you out a little if you’re not gonna take care of yourself.”
“Fine.”
The two of them stumble around, arms intertwined, until Richie finds the light switch by the door and they both blink rapidly as their eyes adjust.
“That’s better. Breakfast?” Richie says brightly, leading them both towards the kitchen.
“Yeah, sure.” Eddie settles into a dining chair and looks up at him. “What were you thinking, and don’t say toast because the last time you tried that you nearly burnt this place down. What would the landlord say?”
“He wouldn’t say a word. What’s he gonna do, tell the grievously injured man and his adoring caretaker to leave?”
Adoring caretaker. Fucking hell, could he be any more obvious?
“Yes, Rich. He would.”
“Well then I’ll fight him. A crusty old man’s not half bad compared to a fucking space clown.”
“Uh huh, but the bar’s on the fucking floor.”
Richie opens the fridge and a precariously perched jug of orange juice drops straight down onto the tile floor with a thud. Both of them flinch at the noise, but neither one acknowledges it.
“So is that, apparently. Fantastic comedic timing, I should be taking notes,” he jokes, placing it on the countertop and scanning the floor for any spillage.
“Yeah, can’t have an inanimate object be a better comedian than you.” Eddie is pale, smile forced, and sitting bolt upright in his seat. I love you, Eddie . The words almost slip out, as if they’d do any good.
“Fuck you,” Richie says instead.
Eddie smiles, and Richie could swear that the thermostat moved up a few notches.
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“Richie. Richie.”
Fucking hell, what time is it?
Richie shakes his head awake and finds Eddie standing over him in the dark, leaning heavily against the back of the couch with wide eyes.
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.
“What’s the matter? What happened?” He practically shoves his glasses onto his face and immediately scans Eddie’s clothes for blood. “Your stitches, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“No, no, Rich. I’m fine.”
All the color is drained from Eddie’s face, and the hand gripping the arm of the couch is white knuckled and shaky. Definitely not fine.
“Bullshit,” Richie murmurs, and his hand moves of its own accord, pressing lightly against the bandage on Eddie’s abdomen, warm through his thin sleep shirt. Eddie’s jaw tenses, but he threads his fingers through Richie’s like he’s his fucking lifeline. They stand there in silence, hands intertwined on Eddie’s stomach, Richie desperately trying to read his face.
“I need to get out of this fucking house,” Eddie whispers after a time. “Just for a little while. I feel like I’m suffocating.” He pauses. “But I don’t want to be alone.”
Richie gets exactly what he means. Nightmares.
“Yeah, yeah ok.” Richie stands, snatching his car keys from the coffee table before throwing an arm around Eddie’s waist for support. “Where do you wanna go?”
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They spend twenty minutes driving around Derry in Richie’s rental minivan, alternating between silence and quiet commentary on each landmark they pass.
“Best ice cream in town,” Richie points at a closed shop. “We tried every flavor one summer and ranked them from best to worst.”
“Yeah and your ranking sucked,” Eddie’s smile tips up on one side. “Fucking strawberry ice cream at the top.”
“I stand by it.”
“Unfuckingbelievable.”
“You say that, but my choice in flavors never stopped you from stealing my cone.”
“What can I say, it tasted better when I’d stolen it from you.”
“I wouldn’t call it stealing, I let it happen,” Richie protests. “Don’t give yourself too much credit.” And yeah, maybe he always got the flavors that Eddie liked best just to split it with him. Years of eating fucking Rocky Road, his least fucking favorite, all to touch his lips to the same ice cream as Eddie Kaspbrak’s. Fucking pathetic.
“Mhm, sure” Eddie hums before gesturing towards a deserted parking lot on the other side of the road. “How bout we stop there?”
“Yeah okay,” Richie takes the turn way too fast and Eddie’s hand goes to grab the door before he cringes and places a hand back over his abdomen.
“Give me a fucking heart attack why don’t you,” Eddie jokes through gritted teeth, slowly settling back into the passenger seat.
“Sorry Eds,” Richie apologizes, slowly pulling up the curb ramp into the parking lot, stopping smack in the middle of at least four spaces.
“I see your parking hasn’t gotten any better over the years, huh.”
The memory hits Richie like a truck. They’re seventeen, lying in the back of Richie’s dad’s truck, hearts pounding from the adrenaline of careening out of Eddie’s street right past his mother in the front yard. The first time Richie realized that he loved him. And those fucking blurry as shit stars.
“Hey, at least I’m not still a fucking astronomy nerd.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie grins. “On the bright side, there’s no nasty truck bed for us to get multiple infections from this time.”
“You remember that?”
“Yeah of course, Rich, that was-” Eddie pauses. “That was the day I almost told you to keep driving straight out of this hellhole town.”
“Seriously? I thought you were going to kill me and then drag me back to your house and revive me again just so we would get our asses kicked together.”
“That too,” Eddie turns and smiles right at him, eyes overflowing with some emotion that Richie can’t pin down. “I kinda realized then if I was to escape from Derry, I’d want you to come with me.”
Richie doesn’t know what to say to that, but he doesn’t need to. Eddie keeps going, his ears faintly pink from the glow of multiple brand new street lamps surrounding the lot.
“You’re my best- my best everything, Rich, full stop. You were then, and you are now. I just wonder sometimes what it would’ve been like to finish growing up with you. Like what you would’ve been like the first time you got absolutely wasted or the look on your face when you finally realized that you wanted to be a comedian. I don’t know, eighteen just didn’t feel like enough for me. I guess we’ll never find out though, stupid curse and all.”
“Yeah,” Richie replies, voice suddenly hoarse. “I grew up with you, but I guess I wanted to grow old with you too.”
He resolutely keeps his eyes forward, feeling a little like his soul’s been stripped bare right in front of him. He’s said too much, that’s for damn sure.
“Rich-”
“Wanna look at the stars again?” Richie interrupts. “You know, like old times?”
“Yeah sure,” Eddie nods, tone uncertain, and slowly begins reclining his seat back, lip caught between his teeth as his wound surely aches. At the same time, Richie fumbles for the handle of the sunroof of the car and tips his own chair way too quickly, hearing a resounding thunk as it falls all the way back. Both of them wince.
Ten minutes later, both of them have settled silently into their seats, craning their necks uncomfortably to get a clear view of the night sky through the unnecessarily small sunroof. Fuck rental cars.
“Kinda weird,” Richie speaks after a while. “Laying under the same stars we did when we were teens.”
“Not quite,” Eddie corrects him absently. “That was summertime, we’re on a different rotation of stars in winter.”
“Fuck you Eds,” Richie says fondly. “Tryin’ to be romantic and you gotta go ruin it.”
“Richie, what?”
Fuck.
“Nope, nothing, nothing Eddie.”
“No, you’re not going to just brush past this again. What did you mean?”
Richie forces himself to look over at Eddie for the first time since they’d opened the roof, and just seeing his face, the tension leeches out of Richie’s shoulders.
“What’d you think I meant?” he murmurs, tracing every line of Eddie’s face with his eyes.
“Richie,” Eddie sounds like he’s pleading, and Richie immediately flexes his hand as if to reach out, but stops himself. “I’m on like fifty pain medications and it’s like three in the morning, just spell it out for me, I don’t wanna feel like I’m just hearing what I want to hear.”
What he… wants to hear?
“Fine,” Richie takes a deep breath in and lets everything out slowly as he exhales. “I wasn’t making a joke or exaggerating or any of the dumb shit I normally do, because I love you and I want to spend the rest of my stupid goddamn life with you and yeah okay I’m a fucking nuisance a lot of the time and I can’t express my feelings well, especially not now, because that’s what pining for someone for your entire life does to you and god , Eddie-” he stops, half out of breath. “- god, I sure as hell never imagined telling you and I’m sorry, but this is it. You’re it for me.”
The car is entirely silent with the exception of Richie’s heaving breaths. He started crying at some point in this whole confession, like the fucking mess that he is, and he lets the tears fall unchecked as he looks at Eddie, who’s staring at him like he’s not even sure any of this is real.
It’s a hand in his hair, and then another at his shoulder tugging as leverage, and then suddenly it’s Eddie fucking Kaspbrak leaning over the center console and kissing him intently like there’s nothing else in the world that could ever distract him. Richie can’t breathe, he can’t fucking think, but he returns it with everything he has, and suddenly they fling apart onto their seats, Eddie groaning and applying pressure to his stomach.
“Shit, Eddie,” Richie breathes, scrambling up over the gear shift to nearly straddle him, putting pressure on the wound. “What the fuck were you thinking, you could’ve ripped out your stitches.”
“Worth it,” Eddie beams up at him, flushed pink all the way down to his collarbones.
“Nuh uh, I’m gonna need you in one piece if we’re doing this again,” Richie frowns down at him, rucking up his shirt and prodding the bandages for any signs of blood. After a few minutes, he’s fully satisfied with the lack of bleeding, his clinical touches morphing into soft circles traced into Eddie’s hips. Eddie shudders under him, and hisses through his teeth.
“Fuck you, that’s not helping.”
“Sorry,” Richie says, but follows the trail of Eddie’s blush with his lips.
Eddie squirms and laughs, but Richie resolutely keeps it up, concentrating on one spot under Eddie’s jaw that makes him gasp, tilting his head back.
“Aldebaran,” Eddie chokes out, making Richie pause and look down at him like he’s having a fucking stroke. “Capella.” At the confused look on Richie’s face, Eddie smirks. “The stars, Rich. That’s what you wanted to hear about right?”
“Oh my god, fuck all the way off.” He returns to the task at hand, breath catching when Eddie’s hands wind into his hair and tug at the hem of his shirt.
“Rigel.” Richie moves down his throat. “Pollux.” Now to his jaw again. “Procyon.” The corner of his mouth. “Sirius.”
Eddie’s words are cut off by Richie’s mouth on his, and he smiles into it, even as Richie’s hands shift in an attempt to keep him there. Eddie breaks the kiss and opens his mouth as if to name another star and Richie moves right to shut him up, but Eddie stops him with a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth.
“I love you,” he says instead.
“And I love you,” Richie says seriously, and then Eddie’s stars disappear in the wake of his hands.