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From the first moment Mike explained this ritual of burning the past with the present or whatever, Richie thought it was a crock of shit.
It’s not even on theme, he thinks. Wasn’t It some kind of alien thing from outer space? Richie wasn’t listening very closely at the time, too consumed with thinking holy fuck holy shit I’m gonna get fucking murdered by a clown to worry about the villain origin story of said clown, but Mike definitely said something about a meteor. Bill would probably be better qualified to evaluate the level of cohesion in a given plotline (although maybe just barely; Richie has read his books), but Richie thought it was kind of fucking ridiculous to come at an eons-old, intergalactic, shapeshifting monster with a tribal ritual that they ripped off from some local natives.
Bottom line is, Richie feels silly standing around a burning lampshade or whatever the fuck that thing is and waiting to toss in his token, and he kind of thought everyone else would feel silly about it, too.
He definitely wasn’t expecting all of these emotional and occasionally cryptic announcements before each artifact was sacrificed. Something that I wish I had held onto? What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Bev? Richie figured they’d just toss everything in the fire and move on, he didn’t know he had to prepare a statement to convey the emotional significance of his token. What the fuck is he supposed to say? This is a token from the arcade where I thought a boy was cute for five seconds and then he called me a fairy and Henry Bowers chased me out, then the weirdly homoerotic lumberjack statue in the park tried to kill me. Yeah, he thinks he’ll pass.
Anyway, Richie feels like he’s back in middle school and realizing he misunderstood the assignment right as he’s handing it in. Here everyone is, having some big full-circle moment burning tokens that represent love and bravery and all that bullshit, and Richie’s gonna have to follow it up with all of his fear and secrets.
Ben’s token is, obviously, a symbol of his everlasting love for Bev. Shocker.
“I probably should’ve forgotten it, but,” he shrugs, voice choked. Barf, Richie actively thinks to avoid acknowledging how soft and warm Ben’s love makes him feel, because he never did emotionally evolve past 13 years old. “I couldn’t ‘cause I kept it in my wallet. For twenty-seven years.”
He laughs a little as he says it, embarrassed and blushing. But still, he says it.
Fuck, he’s brave. Richie doesn’t know if he’s more impressed or envious. In just a few seconds, Ben has been more honest about himself than Richie has been in forty years.
He’s still thinking about what Ben said as he turns the token in his fingers, I kept it in my wallet echoing in his head and making him feel oddly unsettled.
“This is a token from the Capitol Theatre,” he says quickly. He goes to throw it in the fire, but something stays his hand. A feeling of wrongness he can’t place.
I kept it in my wallet.
“You brought an actual token?”
For twenty-seven years.
The sudden headrush he gets looking over at Eddie is overwhelming as the memory snaps into place. It’s like the wind has been knocked clean out of his chest, a feeling like deja vu but with a stronger emphasis on nausea that has Richie fearing a repeat performance of the fire escape at his last show.
“Fuck,” he whispers breathlessly, closing his eyes against it.
“Rich, you okay?” Bev asks as she places a hand on his shoulder.
Richie watches Ben’s yearbook page burn, Beverly’s signature disappearing as it’s eaten by the flame, and feels a lifetime of shame and secrecy burning in his back pocket with it.
He forgot he even had it on him until this very moment, but now he’s remembering all the years he’s spent traveling with it from Maine to LA to Chicago and back. Usually, it lives on his bookshelf in LA, between the pages of his well-preserved vintage copy of X-Men #136, but something made him take it out and tuck it into his wallet before he left for his tour all those months ago.
“Fuck,” he says, louder this time, knocking his glasses up to squeeze the bridge of his nose. He laughs a little hysterically out of sheer discomfort as he reaches into his back pocket. “God, fuck you, Ben.”
Ben makes a little wounded, confused noise, all wide-eyed innocence. “What? What did I do?”
Richie doesn’t respond, busy pulling the picture out of his wallet. It’s a polaroid, taken in December of 1993. It was just Richie, Eddie, and Mike left at that point, and they’d long since figured out what happened to the people who left Derry and decided to pretend, while they could, that it wouldn’t happen to them. Richie and Eddie had pooled their money (Richie’s from working part-time at his dad’s office, Eddie’s stolen from his mother’s purse since he wasn’t allowed to get a job) to buy Mike a camera and film for his eighteenth birthday since he’d liked using Stan’s so much before he left that summer. Richie feels that tightness in his chest he’s been getting the last few days at the memory of Mike’s open-mouthed smile when he opened the gift.
“You-!” he’d gasped, looking rapidly between the camera and the couch where Richie and Eddie were sitting. “You guys didn’t have to-”
“Happy birthday, Mikey,” Eddie said with a smug smile. It was his idea to get Mike the camera after he’d vetoed Richie’s idea of beer and dirty magazines, which was a joke, Eddie, jeez lighten up.
Mike scrambled up from where he sat on the floor by the coffee table to wrap them both in a tight hug, kissing their cheeks one after the other. He was always very open and unselfconscious with his affection in a way that made Richie almost sick with love for him.
(Richie wants to scream thinking about Mikey all alone in Derry for over twenty fucking years, wonders if he had anywhere to put all of his love, anyone to give it back to him the way he deserves. It’s all so fucking unfair.)
“Thank you, guys,” he said, muffled into their shoulders. “This is the coolest- wait!”
And then he was stumbling back, uncoordinated in a way he only got when he was really excited. Richie thought it was maybe one of the cutest things he’d ever seen, and then felt a familiar guilt for the thought.
Mike was pulling the camera carefully out of its box with what looked like great restraint, which he lost almost immediately as he fumbled to load the film. When he got it set up, he turned around on his knees and pointed the camera at them.
“C’mon, get together, I want you guys to be the first picture,” he said, looking at them through the viewfinder and flapping his hand in a vague gesture for them to pose.
Richie, always one to take an opportunity to be close to Eddie when he had it, grinned cartoonishly and threw a heavy arm around Eddie to drag him close to his side, rough and too-tight on purpose to hide the desire to touch him gently. Instead of shoving him off as he was supposed to, as he did in the carefully choreographed exchange in Richie’s head so that Richie could then double his efforts and maybe end up ruffling his hair or, if he was lucky and feeling particularly reckless, wrestling him to the ground, Eddie leaned into it. He pushed them tighter together, put his head on Richie’s shoulder so that his hair tickled Richie’s jaw and, oh god, wrapped his hand gently around Richie’s where it hung over his shoulder.
He could feel his face burning, knew it was bright red as he looked down at Eddie tucked into him and smiling brilliantly at Mike’s camera. The flash went off before he could wipe the stupid look off his face, which only made him flush deeper. His heart was racing and he spared a brief, panicked thought for whether Eddie could feel it through four layers of thick winter clothes before Eddie reached his hand (the one not holding Richie’s, holy shit) out to Mike.
“Come over here, get in the next one,” he said, still sounding so fucking smug it made Richie’s blood hot with feelings he didn’t want to name.
Mike crawled over to kneel on the floor between them and held up the camera. They had to try that one a few times, Richie remembers, to get one where no one’s head was cut off or blurry.
Mike spent the rest of the night, the rest of their time together in Derry, really, taking pictures. He put most of them up on the wall in his room mixed with the few he had of the others that already left, and Richie was relieved and a little disappointed to never see that first one of him and Eddie on the wall. Part of him wanted to ask Mike where it was, if he could have it, but the risk of Mike asking him why and Richie fucking exploding with humiliation was too great, and Richie was way too much of a fucking coward, anyway.
He managed not to think about it for a long time, until the night before he left Derry for college that summer. The three of them were back at Mike’s for a little going away party. They were drinking stolen, room temperature beer around a bonfire out behind the barn, and Richie was trying to get just the right level of drunk that’d he’d be brave enough to ask Mike for that picture, but not sad and reckless enough to do something stupid like ask Eddie to recreate it with him. Or any number of other stupid things Richie wanted to ask Eddie for before he flew across the country tomorrow morning and forgot the way it hurt to look at him.
So far, he was unsuccessful. Honestly, he thought, the way the night was going, it was safer just to stay sober and not risk lowering his inhibitions any more than they already were. Eddie, who barely needed a full drink before he started losing his grip on volume control and his concept of personal space, was cracking open his fourth beer, and Richie didn’t trust himself not to encourage how touchy Eddie was being if he got any drunker. He knew he didn’t really have anything to lose, he was going to forget all of this by noon tomorrow, but he didn’t want to spend his last night with Eddie being a total fucking creep.
Mike, at least, was keeping Eddie company in getting absolutely blasted. He’d been taking increasingly out of focus photos with his camera all night, said he wanted to have something to sell the tabloids when Richie became a famous Hollywood star, and Richie pretended it didn’t make him so fucking sad to know that he was really just desperate to capture some good memories before he was all alone in Derry, last Loser standing.
(Richie remembers leaving Mike a note on his pillow to find after he left. A last-ditch attempt to beg him to leave Derry behind like the rest of them did, with his dorm’s address and his phone number and instructions to just show up and live with him whenever he wanted. Even if I forget you, he wrote, I’ll love you the minute I see your face again.
He worried about writing that, worried that even though he didn’t mean it to be so fucking gay that that’s how it would sound and Mike would think he was some gross pervert, but in the end he decided that either way, Mike deserved some goddamn sincerity for once.)
“Oh shit,” Mike slurred, trying to take ‘artistic’ photos of Richie through the flames of the bonfire. “I’m out of, uh...the fuckin’, shit-” he paused, face scrunched. “Uh- film! I’m outta’ film, I’ll be right back.”
“Get some snacks!” Eddie called after him, loud enough that if he weren’t already half-deaf, Mike’s grandfather would be able to hear him all the way in the house. “Fuck- get tortilla chips!”
Mike laughed as he stumbled around the corner of the barn, at that perfect level of drunk where everything is hilarious, leaving Richie alone and unsupervised with a three-sheets-to-the-wind Eddie.
There was a brief moment of tense silence in which Richie determinedly watched the burning logs of the fire and felt Eddie staring at him from where he sat in a lawn chair a couple yards away. He knew if he looked, he wouldn’t be able to help himself staring back and fucking, longing for him. Ugh.
“Hey,” Eddie said, quick and loud enough to make Richie jump. “Hey- sorry. Hey, Rich. Richie.”
Richie braced himself before meeting his eyes. “Yeah?”
Eddie just stared at him with his big fucking lemur eyes glowing in the light of the fire. Jesus Christ. Richie curled his hands into fists on the blanket under him and tried not to grin like an idiot.
“Richie.”
Trying not to smile at Eddie was a losing battle, anyway. “Eddie.”
Eddie was smiling just a big back at him, fucking, beaming. The beautiful little Mogwai. Richie was gonna yak up his heart all over the place, looking at this kid.
“I-” he said. Stopped. Swallowed hard. He was breathing fast, but he had that look he got in his eyes sometimes when he was about to do something stupid or dangerous just because Richie goaded him into it. Determined and brave as hell. Still grinning right at Richie.
Richie’s favorite.
“I have something for- for you,” he said at last. “To take. To California.”
“Yeah, Eds?” Richie said, smiling harder if that was even possible. “You got me a present?”
“No, I-” he said, shaking his head. “Hold on.”
Eddie rolled his entire body to the side, taking the chair down with him. He got like this sometimes when he was drunk, just throwing himself bodily in whatever direction he wanted to go and turning his surroundings into collateral damage. If they were inside or around anything breakable, Stan would stick to his side and limit his path of destruction. Richie has never had it in him to do anything but watch and be utterly endeared by it.
He half-walked, half-bear crawled to where he’d left his backpack against the edge of the barn on their way out here. Falling to his knees, Eddie rummaged through his bag and pulled something out, keeping it hidden behind his back as he stumbled over to Richie. He dropped heavily next to Richie on the blanket, his back to the fire and his legs folded so that his knee was practically in Richie’s lap.
For a moment, he just looked at Richie. He sat close enough that if he weren’t backlit by the fire, Richie would probably be able to see the freckles on his lips. Oh my god, stop looking at his fucking lips-
“Here,” Eddie said, shoving something into Richie’s chest.
Richie looked at it for a moment, mouth hanging open. “Seriously?” he asked quietly in disbelief, eyes wide as he looked up at Eddie, feeling gut-punched. “Your X-men #136?”
Richie spent most of his childhood from ages eight to fourteen sitting with Eddie in the little space above Eddie’s garage, reading comics and eating junk food that Richie smuggled from his house. The Dark Phoenix Saga was their favorite. They must have read the whole series dozens of times, lying down shoulder-to-shoulder on some old throw pillows and blankets, Eddie controlling the page-turning because you’ll get Cheeto dust all over them, Richie, and these are special, I don’t want to get them dirty.
They were special. They belonged to Eddie’s dad before he died and all that Eddie had left of him was a few boxes of ‘junk’ that Sonia couldn’t bear to look at. She threw a lot of it away, but Eddie managed to hide a few precious things, including his comic book collection, in that little crawlspace above the garage that Sonia was too big to even fit her shoulders through.
The comics were Eddie’s most prized possession. Richie was strictly forbidden from touching them, and when they were done reading, Eddie would carefully replace each comic in the correct order in a tupperware he swiped from his kitchen, snap the lid on tight, and put the whole thing in a pillowcase, hiding it behind a beam in the corner.
His dad had a lot of comics, and they read all of them at least twice, but they always came back to The Dark Phoenix. The last one, #136, was Richie’s favorite. He must’ve made Eddie read it with him two or three times a week when they were kids, and Eddie always complained and said haven’t you memorized it by now? And he always pulled it out anyway.
“Eddie…” Richie said softly. Horrifyingly, his eyes started to burn and his throat felt tight as he hovered his fingers over the cover without touching it.
“You could probably just close your eyes and read it from memory, but,” Eddie said, the cadence of teasing but just as soft as Richie, and when Richie looked up he could see Eddie’s eyes were shining a little. He sighed with a small smile, sounding more sober than he did a minute ago.”It was always your favorite.”
Richie just looked at him.
“Eddie,” he said again after a moment, voice breaking when he tried to speak above a whisper.
“Open it.”
It took Richie a second to follow his direction, eyebrows furrowed. There couldn’t possibly be more. Richie couldn’t handle it if there was more. Still, he delicately picked the comic up, thinking it’s special, Richie. Special special special. He didn’t even have to open it when something fell from between the pages into his lap.
Richie had never seen the picture before, so even though he’d lived in this captured moment, its reality surprised him. There they were, pressed together on Mike’s couch. Wrapped together, more like. Richie’s face looks just as stupid as he felt in that moment, looking down at Eddie sort of surprised, more-than-sort-of in love. And Eddie’s smiling at him through the picture, so bright and happy and so, so beautiful.
Richie didn’t even have the capacity to be embarrassed when he felt the first tear well over hot and wet onto his cheek. He wiped it away quickly, not to hide it, but so that it wouldn’t fall onto either of his gifts and ruin them.
“Oh no,” Eddie said, a little panicky. He drunkenly wiped at Richie’s dry cheek fast and rough with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t- Richie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- I just-”
Richie grabbed him by the shoulders and hugged him tight to his chest, probably choking him a little with his arms around his neck but he had to, he had to.
Eddie made a surprised little sound in his throat, but he was quick to wrap his arms tight around Richie’s ribs. “I just wanted you to remember me, just a little bit, if you can.”
“I will,” Richie said into his shoulder. Well, tried to say. His throat was clogged with tears and hiccupping little sobs that he tried to quiet by holding his breath, but his chest was still jumping against Eddie’s.
“Hey,” Eddie said, stern, but Richie could hear his smile. His hand was rubbing up and down Richie’s back in what he probably thought was a soothing rhythm but was a little too fast, like he was trying to warm Richie with friction. “Breathe, asshole. You’re gonna give yourself an aneurysm.”
Richie laughed, choking on it a little as he pulled back to look at him. He was right about the smile, soft and bittersweet on his face, but growing to expose teeth as he looked back at Richie. Eddie reached up and, again, not-so-softly brushed the tears off Richie’s face, more effective than before now that there were actual tears there to catch.
“Away, now,” he sang, the way Maggie had done to all of them whenever they’d cried as kids. It’s so sweet, and so fucking cute that Richie thinks I have to kiss him and doesn’t immediately shut down the thought. He has to. He’s going to.
“Eddie, I got your fucking-” Mike stopped short as he came around the corner of the barn and took in the scene the two of them were making. He paused for a moment. “Did you guys start crying without me?”
But Mike had burst into tears halfway through his sentence and didn’t hold a grudge longer than it took for him to join them on the blanket and squeeze the breath out of them.
They did all end up crying like that, wrapped together in the glow of the fire, before Richie said, “Christ, I haven’t cried this much since Mrs. K brought in the whips and chains to try her hand as a dominatrix.”
Eddie jerked back with a gag and yelled, at the top of his little lungs, “Fuck the shut up!”
Which made Mike and Richie fall back laughing, and Mike spent the rest of the night saying “Fuck the shut up!” every time it was relevant and many times when it wasn’t.
Richie had tucked the picture back into the comic and put them both safely into his bag, then spent the next twenty-two years making sure they followed him just as safely through every step of his life. He forgot the details, forgot the name of the beautiful boy in the picture and how he knew him and why the comic was so fucking precious, but every now and then he’d look at the picture and remember what it felt like to love him.
The picture is faded a little now in Richie’s hand, the details hard to make out in the shadows of the cavern, but Richie has spent enough time over the years looking at it that it doesn’t matter. This is it, he’s certain. This is his token. Something he can hardly bear to part with, but that’s why it’s a sacrifice.
“R-Rich?” Bill says quietly, and Richie’s eyes snap up to the group, startled, as he tucks the old polaroid to his chest.
“Uh,” he says, looking around at them. He can’t bring himself to really look at Eddie, simultaneously overwhelmed by his affection for him and fucking humiliated by the evidence held in his hand and written on his face. “Yeah, uh. It’s a picture.”
He says it quickly, and while he still has the nerve to do it, he tosses the picture face-down into the fire. He focuses his eyes carefully on the floor of the cavern to the right of the artifact destroying a tangible piece of his heart, unable to watch it burn when he’s as close to crying as he already is. He barely survived the memory of crying into Eddie’s shoulder for the few hours that he had it, embarrassed enough to contemplate lying down in traffic. He would simply rather be clown murdered where he stands than fucking cry about his childhood crush in front of him as a grown fucking adult.
The group is silent. Richie looks around at their raised eyebrows and baffled faces.
“What?”
“Seriously?” Eddie says, arms crossed. “After being so fucking dramatic about it, all you’re gonna say is ‘it’s a picture’? You just stared at it in silence for like, five full minutes-”
“Oh my god, and I’m dramatic? It was not five minutes-”
“-like some World War II vet thinking about the beaches-”
“That’s-!” Richie can’t help but laugh, quick and loud and overjoyed. “That’s so fucking offensive!”
“Says the prince of, fucking, ‘bitches be crazy’ jokes.”
Richie grins. “Prince of fucking bitches-”
“Holy shit, both of you! Shut the fuck up!” Stan yells, clearly at his absolute wit's end. “This is the fucking-” he waves around the cloth in his hand. “-tallit from my bar mitzvah!”
He throws it into the flames, straightening up and brushing a stray curl off his forehead with visible aggression before turning to Mike.
“Mike! Burn your thing so we can go the fuck home please!”
They’re all quiet and wide-eyed for a moment. Mike makes a strangled noise like a dying animal, which takes Richie a second to realize is his attempt to hide a laugh as a cough, and by then everyone else is laughing, too.
Except Stan, who just screams a frustrated little “Uahh!” like every teenage girl in every shitty high school rom-com Richie has ever seen.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mike says, still laughing a little. He clears his throat and holds up, of all things, a bloody fucking rock. “Okay, uh, okay. Bev, look closely.”
And everything gets a lot less funny after that.
---
The five hours that Eddie is in surgery are, without a doubt, the most miserable of Richie’s life.
They’re all sitting in the hospital waiting room, covered in raw sewage and blood and clown dust, connected by hands held tightly and heads on shoulders and feet in laps. Richie can’t tell if the low-level glare ringing his vision is the consequence of seventy-two hours of clown hunting and no sleep or a lingering effect of the deadlights, but the headache it’s giving him is preferable to the mental image of Eddie bleeding out in his arms he gets whenever he closes his eyes, so.
The clown’s talon ripped right through his side where he knelt over Richie, diverted from piercing the center of his chest by Stan’s attempt to tackle him out of the way. Stan got a nice long gash across his arm for his trouble, and Richie sat with him while the doctors stitched him up because it was the only thing he could do. Stan was nice enough to let him and pretend the hand-holding was for his own benefit instead of Richie’s.
When Eddie’s surgeon came out to tell them he was out of surgery and stable and looking at a full recovery, Richie almost threw up out of sheer overwhelming relief. He thinks he cried, although he suspects he might’ve been crying to some degree this entire time. He knows he asked immediately if they could go see him, to which the doctor replied, with an impressive amount of patience and kindness, that he wouldn’t be awake for hours and that they should use that time to go home and get cleaned up. He thinks the word “biohazard” was thrown around, and as much as Richie didn’t want to leave the hospital, he would do whatever the doctor fucking said if it meant he could see Eddie.
Bill stayed while the rest of them left to shower and change because there was no way they could leave Eddie alone in his least favorite place on earth (maybe second least, Richie thinks, after the clown den, but still), and he tags out when they get back to go get cleaned up himself. Eddie still hasn’t woken up by the time he gets back, but they’re allowed to go sit with him until he does.
They’re mostly quiet, sitting around his bed in uncomfortable vinyl chairs. Or at least Richie thinks they’re quiet. He’s not really attuned to his surroundings outside of Eddie’s hand that he’s clutching in both of his and the steady rise and fall of Eddie’s chest.
Eventually, god knows how my minutes or hours or years later, Eddie makes some weird little snuffle-snort noises and his eyes blink open and take in the six adults crowded around his bedside.
“Eddie?” Ben says quietly. Richie’s voice is miles away, not that it could make it around the lump in his throat anyway. “Eddie, buddy, you there? You with us?”
Eddie groans, squinting at his surroundings. Very slowly and with great effort, he manages to say, “Is this... fuckin’... Normal Rockwell painting?”
Mike whispers, very softly but with obvious amusement, “Normal Rockwell?”
To this, Eddie simply raises his hand, the one not held by Richie’s, an inch off the bed and gestures weakly at Stan sitting at the very end of his bed. He lets them sit in that silence a moment longer, Stan looking around at the rest of them and back to Eddie with a raised eyebrow.
Finally, Eddie says, with great solemnity, “Turkey.”
It’s then that they all realize Eddie is high as shit, and the room dissolves into the quiet, hospital-brand of chaos (re: muffled, snorting laughter and whispering that gets progressively more intense to spiritually resemble screaming, and jerky hand gestures that stay close to their chests like T-rex arms) that Richie would expect from them.
Eddie’s fading back into sleep fast, but before he’s down again, he squeezes Richie's hand to get his attention (like he hasn’t always had it) and says, “Rich. Your glasses...are spiders.”
“Ex-fucking-cuse me?” Richie says around a bemused laugh, but Eddie’s asleep again. “No, yeah, say the most unsettling shit and pass the fuck out on me, sounds good, Eds.”
“They’re cracked,” Bev says, smiling, before tenderly brushing Eddie’s hair back from his forehead and kissing his temple. “Your glasses are cracked, is what he meant.”
“Barely lucid and still putting in the effort to nag me,” Richie says, missing the tone of a joke by several miles and landing firmly in fond and choked up. “Very on brand.”
Over the next few days, Richie gets his spare, unbroken glasses from the townhouse (well, Stan gets them, since Richie doesn’t plan to leave the hospital again without Eddie, but whatever), the Losers catch up on the twenty-seven years they spent apart without the threat of an alien clown to dampen the mood, and Eddie is weaned off the hard stuff until he until he’s back to his normal, bitchy, wonderful self.
“I’m just saying, I haven’t seen a single person come in here to dust this entire fucking time,” he’s saying to Richie as a nurse walks in to drop off his hospital lunch. “Do you know how much dead skin can accumulate in dust in a single week, just from one person? And then you get dust mites which fucking eat your skin and shit on you and trigger allergic reactions just because no one took a fucking swiffer to the place- excuse me, can I get a vanilla one instead?”
Eddie cuts himself off mid-tirade to hold up his pudding cup to the nurse, who smiles tightly with murder in her eyes and says “Of course.” in a way that sounds like “Eat shit.” Eddie has been real hit or miss, popularity-wise, with the hospital staff. Richie tries not to swoon visibly.
Once she’s gone, Richie says, “Dude, that nurse is gonna spit in your pudding.”
“She’s not a nurse, she’s a PCA, I’ve told you this a thousand times,” he says, rolling his eyes. He takes the lid off his tray and wrinkles his nose at the admittedly gross-looking hospital food on it. “And the pudding is sealed, moron, you think I would accept an open fucking pudding cup?”
Richie sends a quick text to the group chat and gets a response before Eddie’s stopped talking, which is a feat considering how fast the man can speak. “Bev said they’ll pick you up some stuff to eat on their way back. They should be here soon.”
Bev and Stan had gone to pick up Stan’s wife from the airport, and Ben and Bill were helping Mike pack up twenty years of conspiracy theorist memorabilia at the library, so it was just Richie on Eddie duty. Richie was giving himself too much credit, making it sound like a job to keep Eddie company, considering he wouldn’t leave the hospital during visiting hours unless forced out by security or if Eddie asked him to. Neither had happened yet, so Richie’s been ‘on Eddie duty’ from 9am to 9pm everyday for the last week.
Visiting hours are 11am-6pm, but Richie has been much more popular with the hospital staff than Eddie, who is apparently very crabby when his friends leave.
“Oh thank god,” Eddie sighs, relaxing back into his little pillow throne that Ben made for him. Ben has also been a big hit with the nurses. He moves his tray to the rolling table beside his bed. “I don’t think I can stomach any more hospital food.”
“Hey, only two more meals before they release you back into the wild,” Richie says, continuing his running joke that Eddie’s an endangered animal at some rescue facility for rehabilitation. Eddie hates it, especially when Richie picks up random objects in his room and asks if they’re enrichment toys for his habitat. “You can rejoin all the other baby seals in the Penobscot.”
“Shut the fuck up, you goddamn manatee-looking motherfucker,” Eddie scowls, but he has this constipated look which means he’s trying not to smile. Got him. “And it’s only one meal, I’m not staying here a second past eight tomorrow morning. They can keep their mushy oatmeal and fucking apple slices.”
The apple slices are a touchy subject for Eddie. What am I, a fucking preschooler at snack time? I can’t eat a whole apple like a fucking adult? This is- Richie, stop fucking laughing, it’s not funny! This is humiliating!
“You know, apple slices are illegal in the state of California,” Richie says. “Our incarcerated population is like, mostly five-year-olds, but at least the rest of us are safe.”
Eddie breaks at last, smiling even as he shakes his head. “Fuck you. Don’t make fun of my pain.”
This is another running joke of Richie’s, only it’s not so much a joke as a legitimate campaign to get Eddie to move to the west coast. Sometimes it sounds like a joke, like when he puts on his creepy Hollywood director Voice and says I can make a stah outta ya, toots. Other times it’s just honest attempts at persuasion that Richie fears are getting more and more pathetic. It’s sunny and warm, Bill’s there, I’m there, Ben has a Malibu beach house and a private jet to take you there, you can’t spit without hitting an earthy-crunchy health food store, the weed is unreal, I’ll love you forever, etc.
He hasn’t played that last card yet, considering it’s just as if not more likely to ensure Eddie keeps a country’s distance between them, but his deck is running low and he might have to throw a hail mary before Eddie finds a permanent place in New York. He’s mixing his metaphors, but what can he say, he’s fucking flustered about it.
“I’m just saying, I have a heated pool,” Richie says, leaning back in his chair and kicking up his feet to cross on Eddie’s bed. “Does your divorced dad AirBnB in the subway rat capital of the world have a heated pool?”
Eddie shoves his feet away, and Richie falls forward a little as the chair slams back down on four legs. “Like LA isn’t fucking infested with rats and white people with dreadlocks. Do you even clean your pool? Do you know how?”
“Please, Spaghetti,” Richie scoffs, playing up the old-money tycoon Voice. “We have people for that.”
“‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?” he asks, crossing his arms before wincing and putting them back at his sides. “You and your giant fucking ego?”
“Nah, just me and your mom.”
“Shut-!” Eddie reaches a palm out to shove his face away. “The fuck up!”
They slap at each other for a second before the nurse - PCA - whatever, comes in with the pudding replacement to break it up.
“Thank you,” Eddie says, not-so-subtly checking the cup for tampering.
“Let me know if you need anything else,” the girl (Summer, according to the badge on her lanyard) says, just barely maintaining the passive in passive-aggressive. She turns to Richie. “You can’t be rough with him like that, he’ll pop a stitch.”
“Sorry, I know, we’ll be more careful,” Richie says, putting on a sheepish expression. “Thank you for taking such good care of him. You must’ve been doing this a long time, you’re an awesome nurse.”
“Oh, I’m just a PCA, I’m still in nursing school,” she says with a pleased little smile.
“No way,” Richie smiles back at her. “Well then, you’re a natural.”
“Thank you,” she ducks her head, blushing a little as she backs out of the room. “I’ll be back to take your vitals at 4, Mr. Kaspbrak.”
“Mmhm,” Eddie hums, eyes a little squinty and annoyed watching her leave. The door’s not even closed before he turns to Richie. “Would you stop fucking flirting with my healthcare professionals? You’re gonna distract them and get me killed from neglect.”
“I think she can manage a pudding handoff without Kevorkian-ing you, Eds,” Richie says, raising an eyebrow. “And that was not flirting, that was just a normal conversation.”
Eddie gives him a flat look, then widens his eyes and pulls his brows together. “You’re the best nurse I’ve ever seen, you’re a natural-”
“Okay, next time I will not try to make positive connections with the people who hold your life and care in their hands like a small bird,” Richie huffs, but he can’t keep himself from grinning. “And I don’t fucking sound like that.”
“You absolutely do,” Eddie says, still using a cartoonish, nasally voice. “You sound just like this.”
“You’re such an asshole!” His absolutely giddy laughter is probably taking away from the sentiment, but Richie’s alright with that. “Just eat your fucking pudding, you gremlin.”
“Ugh, no, vanilla’s fucking disgusting,” he says, wrinkling his nose.
Richie sputters. “Wha- what the fuck, you asked for it!”
Eddie looks at Richie like he’s the one saying ridiculous things.
“Yeah, it’s your favorite,” he says, holding it out to Richie with a spoon like it’s really that simple.
Richie looks back and forth between Eddie and the pudding. He’s not sure what his face is doing, but he thinks based on the way Eddie’s face is falling that it’s conveying a little bit of how blown apart he feels.
“I mean,” he says slowly, lowering his hand. “It always used to be. When we were kids.”
It was always your favorite.
Eddie always paid attention to stuff like that, always remembered the things he liked and the things he didn’t, always knew what Richie would order at the diner or what RIchie would pick out at the video store before he knew himself. It makes him feel too tight in his skin, to be this known and loved by Eddie.
“The picture,” he blurts, too loud into the quiet of the room.
“Huh?” Eddie asks.
“The- my token, the picture, the one I burned for the ritual,” Richie says, voice fast and breathless. “It was the one you gave me before I left for college, of us at Mike’s.”
Eddie blinks. He opens his mouth to say something, but Riche interrupts him.
“No, just-” he says, holding up his hands, palms out. “Just let me say this, okay? I need to say it all at once or I’ll pussy out, I just know it.”
Eddie just looks at him, eyes wide with concern and confusion. After a beat, he nods, a slow bob of his head.
Richie takes a deep breath.
“Okay, uh, okay. Fuck,” he says. His hands are clenched tight around the arms of his chair, forcing himself to keep looking at Eddie. “So. You might not even remember yet, but the night before I left Derry, you gave me your X-Men #136 and the picture Mike took of us on his birthday and you asked me not to forget you and- Eddie. It’s still the nicest thing anyone’s ever given me. You always did the nicest shit for me. No, you did,” he says when Eddie makes a skeptical face. “We were little assholes to each other all the time, but you were still so fucking nice to me.”
Richie swallows against the way his throat is choking up, breathing shaky as he tries to keep going.
“No one else has ever cared about me like that. You gave me the comic because it was my favorite but really, Eds, you were my favorite. My favorite thing that ever existed. And maybe I forgot all the details when I left, but every time I looked at that picture in the last twenty-two years, I remembered that. I knew that whoever you were, you cared about me, and I-”
Oh fuck, he’s gonna be sick. Just say it. Say it say it fucking say it-
“I could feel it, how much I’ve always been just. Stupidly fucking in love with you.”
Eddie’s breath catches, and Richie loses his nerve almost instantly. He laughs shakily and brings his hands down into his lap to stare at them.
“And I’m sorry, I don’t mean to drop all my fucking feelings on you like this, but I’ve been so afraid of them for my entire life and I can’t- I can’t do it anymore. I had to tell you, even though I know you probably don’t want to hear it and it might fuck up our whole friendship-”
“Richie-”
“Just one more thing, one more thing and I’ll shut up,” he cuts him off, frantic. “And we can forget I ever said any of this if you want, I promise I’ll never be weird about it or like, fucking, hit on you or whatever because I’m-”
He takes a sharp breath, makes himself look up so he can say it to Eddie’s face.
“I’m so fucking happy just to have you back in my life, man. You’re my best friend in the whole fucking world and that matters more to me than any of the rest of it, okay? It’s always gonna be more than enough just to get to know you again, I swear.”
The silence that follows is, in a word, excruciating. Richie’s eyes go to his lap as he endures it.
“Rich,” Eddie says, quiet and rough. “Richie, look at me.”
Eddie’s smiling at him softly, the way he did all those years ago when he dried Richie’s tears by the fire.
“Are you done?” he says. “Can I talk now?”
Richie nods.
“You are so fucking dramatic.”
He chokes, surprised, on a laugh, watching incredulously as Eddie grins at him. It’s not cruel or mocking, the way it’s always been in Richie’s nightmares of this moment. Just warm, shining with fond amusement.
“I’m confessing my undying love to you here, Eds,” Richie says, grinning back at him. “I think the situation warrants a little drama.”
“Well, you don’t have to be so miserable about it,” he says.
Richie tilts his head and gives him a look, a little half-smile that he hopes evokes Bogart at the end of Casablanca. Hopes Eddie gets the message so he doesn’t have to say it out loud.
“Oh, stop that,” Eddie tuts. “Enough of that.”
He reaches down to grab one of Richie's hands out of his lap, shaking it until he loosens his fist enough for Eddie to slide his palm against Richie’s and hold it.
“Richie,” he says softly, rubbing his thumb across Richie’s knuckles. “You’re really gonna sit there all tragic and noble, talking about undying love like you’re the only one that feels it?”
Eddie’s voice cracks a little on ‘love’ but he just keeps going like it didn’t. He did this a lot, when they were kids, postured up when he was feeling emotional like he didn’t have a million tells to give him away. Richie doesn’t even really need to see the shining eyes and twitching lips, not when he has Eddie’s literal heartbeat rabbiting away on the monitor behind the bed. Not that Richie has any room to talk with how fucking sweaty and shaky he feels right now.
“What?” he croaks.
Eddie rolls his eyes, but his smile doesn’t waver. “Come on, I was clearly the romantic hero of that story.”
Richie laughs shortly, bewildered. “What?! I held onto that picture and loved you as a stranger for all these years and I’m not the hero?”
“I gave it to you in the first place!” Eddie exclaims, talking with his hands even as he’s clutching Richie’s tightly. “I gave you a piece of me to hold on to so I could always be with you even when you forgot me because I was stupidly fucking in love with you. That’s a hero move.”
“Eddie,” Richie rasps, voice wrecked as the tears start to burn his eyes. The world around him is actively shifting, breaking and reforming to make sense of itself in Richie’s reality, past and present. It’s somehow a complete blindside and a familiar, inevitable, unshakable fact to be loved by Eddie. “Fuck. You’re right, that’s romantic as shit.”
“See?” Eddie grins, so fucking smug. The only man on Earth, Richie’s sure, that tries to win a love confession. God, Richie loves him so much he could just combust with it. “Not to mention the inscription. Now that was fucking romantic.”
Richie raises an eyebrow. “Inscription?”
“Yeah, on the back, remember?” he says. At Richie’s blank look, Eddie’s face flattens. “Are you- are you fucking kidding me? You never saw it? You had this picture of yourself and a stranger for twenty-two years and you never fucking flipped it over?”
Richie just does a weird, full-body shrug, shaking his head and opening and closing his mouth like a fish as he sputters in his defense.
“Richie!”
“I, I-” he says. “It didn’t occur to me!”
“It didn’t-” Eddie stops, pinching the bridge of his nose between his closed eyes and sighing deeply. “It didn’t occur to me, he says. I like to make things difficult, he says.”
“Well, I’m sorry!” Richie says. He’s getting roasted a lot more in this exchange than he would’ve imagined, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Next time you leave me a cryptic little love note, let me know so I don’t ritually sacrifice it to a clown!”
Eddie looks at him and makes the face that he thinks is stern but Richie knows is him trying not to laugh. “It wasn’t a note, it was an inscription,” he says, pedantic as ever.
Richie waits for a moment, but he doesn’t say anything more. “Well?”
“Well what?”
He rolls his eyes to hide the way his heart is pounding nervously in anticipation. “Oh my god. What did it say, asshole?”
To his surprise, Eddie looks away and blushes. He grumbles something under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Shut up, dickface,” Eddie glares at him, cheeks bright red.
“Is that what it said?” Richie grins. “‘Shut up, dickface’?” Wow, eat your heart out, Thoreau.”
“Thoreau was a naturalist, not a romantic poet, jackass” Eddie argues, still all pissy and embarrassed and adorable. “And it wasn’t a fucking poem! Christ.”
“You know, you’re calling me a lot of mean names for a supposed romantic hero,” Richie pouts, though it’s a little warped by his uncontrollable smile. He can’t help it, antagonizing Eddie until the little vein pops up on his forehead is one of his favorite pastimes.
But Eddie’s not really paying attention, too busy angrily digging through the drawer beside his bed and muttering curses. He pulls out his wallet and a pen. “God, this is humiliating. You’re lucky I didn’t burn this one, and that I fucking love you so much.”
No fucking kidding, he thinks, taking the words like bullets to the chest. Richie’s gotta remember to buy a lottery ticket after this, see if the luck keeps rolling.
Eddie pulls something out of the billfold and writes on it with quick pen strokes before flipping it and shoving it in Richie’s face. “There. Try not to burn it in effigy this time, sweetheart.”
It’s clearly sarcastic, but Richie still lets out the most embarrassing little whimper and full-body flushes. Eddie grins evilly, a shark smelling blood in the water.
“Aw, honey,” he coos. “Baby. My dear, my love, my sweetheart-”
“Mercy,” Richie groans, hiding his face in his arms by Eddie’s hip. “Jesus, Eds, I’m gonna fucking die, is that what you want? To murder me?”
Eddie pets a hand through his hair, touch gentle to contrast his borderline aggressive voice as he says, “You’re so fucking cute, it’s infuriating. Look at the fucking picture already.”
He lifts his head, Eddie’s hand still in his hair, and looks.
It’s the picture. Well, it’s a picture of the picture, a little less focused than the original but still unmistakable. Richie feels struck through, speechless. “You…”
“Flip it over.”
He does, in a bit of a daze. On the back are their initials written in pen, e r. There’s a heart drawn around the letters and something scribbled out next to it. Underneath all of that, Eddie’s written ‘in ‘93, and always’.
Eddie points to the little black splotch next to their initials. “Back then,” he says, “I… fuck, this is so embarrassing. I drew a heart there, but I panicked and crossed it out. When I stopped being such a fucking pussy about it, I drew it around our initials so I couldn’t cross it out again. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it out loud, but I wanted to tell you I loved you so bad and this was the best I could do.”
“Eddie, I-” he chokes.
Richie only realizes he’s crying when Eddie raises his hand to thumb away the tears and cup his face in his palm. Away, now, he thinks, feeling eight and eighteen and forty all at once. He looks at Eddie and sees every version of him, too, the boy he loved all those years ago and the man he loves now, one and the same.
Richie kisses him the way he should have twenty-two years ago.
He brings a hand gently to Eddie’s neck, mindful of his injured cheek even as Eddie gasps into his mouth and presses back hard, apparently on a mission to manually melt each circuit of Richie’s brain. The hand not holding Richie’s face grabs at his shoulder and pulls, forcing Richie closer until he’s hovering over Eddie with one arm braced against the opposite side of the bed to keep his balance. Richie could live here, awkwardly twisted around the hospital bed, if it meant always having Eddie Kaspbrak underneath him and licking into his mouth with that whip-sharp tongue of his.
It could be minutes or hours before they part. Eddie doesn’t let him go too far, keeping him in range for a few soft, chaste kisses, lingering against his lips.
“Rich,” he whispers, breathless. Holy shit, Richie did that.
“Yeah, Eds?” He rests his forehead against Eddie’s and brushes a thumb over his jaw. Eddie shudders.
“Does this…” he breathes. “Does this mean you want the pudding?”
Richie laughs, too loud and sharp and close to Eddie’s face. Eddie sneaks another quick kiss while he’s distracted, getting mostly teeth.
“Does this mean you’ll come with me to California?” he responds, the tone of a joke to hide how sincere and deeply invested he is in the answer. A Richie Tozier Special.
“I already bought our plane tickets and looked up your house on Zillow and Google Earth,” Eddie says, no hesitation, not even trying to be funny. He’s gonna put Richie out of a job. “Please tell me you’ve hired a landscaper since 2011.”
“You’re insane,” Richie beams, overwhelmed with joy and affection. “You’re an insane person. I love you so fucking much.”
Eddie smiles, pulls Richie in by the neck to kiss him again, hard and closed mouth and gone again before he really starts. “I love you,” he says. Finds his mouth again to kiss the words into it. “I love you.”
Richie’s whole chest feels like a fucking fondue pot, warm and bubbly and cheesy. Part of him, the small, scared part that he might never shake, is still waiting for the other shoe to drop because there’s no way he gets to have this, right? There’s no way Eddie’s here and real and perfect and in love with him, too. Happiness like this just doesn’t exist in real life.
Fuck it, he thinks. Might as well live the dream while he’s in it. He drags a hand from Eddie’s face to his chest, resting just above his heart so he can feel it beat against his skin. And if he cops a feel of his little gym rat body while he’s there, well. He’s only human.
Richie’s about two seconds from dropping all pretense and propriety (like they ever had any in the first place) and climbing into the bed with him when a voice behind him says, “Eddie, look out, you’ve got a limpet attached to your face.”
They jolt and break apart. Eddie’s hand is still clutching at Richie’s shirt when he tries to straighten up and turn around, so it gets all twisted around his neck and chokes him as he looks at Bev standing in the doorway.
It’s quiet for a moment before Richie panics and defaults to his instincts. “Believe me, Marsh,” he says. “The last thing I am right now is limp.”
Bev snickers while Eddie makes a noise like a stalling engine and shoves a hand against Richie’s face. “Shut up!” he squeaks. Bev comes to stand beside Richie, ruffling his hair and leaning around him to kiss Eddie on his blushing, uninjured cheek.
“Hi boys,” she says. “Sorry to interrupt, but we come bearing snacks.” She lifts up the Target bag, overflowing with what looks like exclusively junk food.
“Are they done?” Stan calls from the hallway. “Is it safe to come in now?”
“Hold on, Eddie’s still got his dick out,” Richie responds.
“Oh my fucking-!” Eddie slaps at Richie’s arm, eyebrows thunderous. “Dude, you are such a fucking dick!”
Stan’s already walked in, apparently still able to recognize Richie’s brand of bullshit after all these years apart, with a tall dark-haired woman wearing green plastic glasses by his side. They stand on the other side of the bed.
“Hey, Eddie,” he says. He gestures at Richie. “My condolences.”
“Thanks,” Eddie grumbles, still a little stormy in the face. The clouds part a bit reluctantly to reveal the sunshine of his smile when he sees Richie pouting. He reaches his hand out to him, which Richie only freaks out about a little before he takes it and sits back down beside him. These people are his friends, he doesn’t have to be afraid.
He’s not sure what to make of them having almost zero reaction to their best friends, one of whom tells pussy jokes to crowds of thousands for a living and the other of whom is still legally married to a woman, making out like teenagers in a hospital bed. He supposes it’s not the craziest thing any of them have seen this week.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Patty,” Eddie says, seemingly powering through the last vestiges of his embarrassment for the sake of politeness. “I’m sorry you had to fly all the way up here, I tried to send Stan home but-”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Patty waves him off in good humor, grinning a little mischievously. “You think I didn’t want to come up and meet the long-lost best friends my husband went monster hunting with?”
“Okay, so you’re really just chill with all of that?” Richie interjects, raising an eyebrow. Ever since Stan said he told Patty the truth about everything, murder clown included, Richie’s been half-expecting someone to come and haul them all off in straight jackets. “Like, Stan told you we fought an interdimensional, shape-shifting demon clown and you’re just gonna roll with it? You don’t think we’re all having a joint psychotic break or something?”
Patty shrugs, unbothered and absolutely baffling to Richie. “I’ve been married to Stanley for twenty years. I mean, is the foundation of my reality and my perception of the world completely obliterated by this? Sure. But I believe Stanley’s telling me the truth, and I don’t think any of you are crazy. I’d never think that.”
Somewhere in the middle of that, she’d grabbed Stan’s hand to hold in her own, and now they’re looking at each other with so much obvious love and devotion that Richie is absolutely going to start crying if he’s exposed to it for any longer, so he changes topics.
“That reminds me, Patty, what’s your email?” he asks. “I have so many questions for you about young Stan. Has he always worn matching pajama sets to bed like Ebenezer Scrooge?”
“Since college,” Patty says with no small amount of amusement, smirking devilishly. “I have so many pictures.”
“Oh my god,” Richie whispers reverently, his whole face lighting up to beam at his newest best friend.
“This isn’t going to happen,” Stan insists, gesturing between the two of them. “You can’t be friends. Leave my wife alone, Trashmouth.”
“Aw, Stanley, don’t be jealous,” Richie pouts. He reaches over to boop his nose and Stan smacks his hand away “You’ll always be my sweet little latke pie.”
“Offensive,” Stan says. “And also nonsense. You can’t see the pictures.”
Richie and Patty exchange a look that clearly means we’ll connect about it later, and Stan sighs.
Eddie and Bev aren’t paying attention to their conversation, too busy digging through the spoils of Bev’s Target trip. Bev’s got a twizzler dangling from her mouth as she pulls open a bag of chips, and Eddie seems to be contemplating the nutrition facts on a box of poptarts.
“Eds, they’re poptarts,” Richie teases, smiling at the adorable furrow in his eyebrows. “I can tell you right now you’re not gonna like what they put in ‘em.”
Eddie shoots him a squinty little scowl. “I know that,” he says. He turns his glare onto the snack, and after a second, his face adopts that determined look that Richie loves so much. “Fuck it.”
He tears into the box viciously, ripping it down the side instead of along the seam so that all of the aluminum packets go spilling onto the bed. Eddie picks up the nearest one and similarly shreds the wrapping before biting into both pastries stacked together like a psychopath. Richie, alarmed by how blisteringly hot he finds the whole feral display, has to check to make sure he isn’t actually popping a boner in front of his friends.
Caught up in the nostalgia of willing away an Eddie-induced erection, he doesn’t get a chance to comment on his insane behavior before the moment passes and everyone is settling into the seats around the bed to rifle through the snacks. Richie observes them, still trying to reconcile this moment with everything that’s happened since that first summer facing It. Can they really just...have this now? Have each other, have their lives and their happiness back? Richie can’t remember what it felt like to live without always dreading some inevitable darkness on the horizon. Even when he didn’t know what it was, he knew it was there waiting for him, and he thought once he met it, that would be the end of everything.
Now they’re all on the other side of it, and Richie’s realizing he didn’t plan this far ahead. He’s technically in the middle of a tour right now, but the thought of leaving here and picking back up where he left off makes him panic-sweat. He has no idea what to do from here.
He looks at his friends and thinks, what’s next for us? He looks at Eddie, who’s complaining to Bev that poptarts are not as good as he remembered them to be like he’s a suburban mom’s Yelp review come to life, and he thinks, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re there.
Richie picks up the pudding and spoon where Eddie left it on the tray beside his bed, and Stan looks over after a moment to say, “Gross, Richie, vanilla? They taste like you’re eating an off-brand Yankee Candle.”
Richie shrugs, smiling at Eddie like a sap. “What can I say? They’re my favorite.”
Eddie smiles, blushing and more beautiful than anything Richie’s ever seen in his whole life, and reaches out to put a hand on Richie’s knee. Just to touch him. Just to be close to him. Because he loves him.
He can figure out his plans for the rest of it all later, he decides. He has everything that matters, everything he’s ever going to need, right here.