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Richie and Eddie are both quiet, as they pull into the parking lot outside Jade of the Orient and Eddie parks their rental car. They sit in the silence, there, for a moment. They had argued about coming back to Derry, where Richie had reminded him they had sworn a blood oath and Eddie had insisted they didn’t even remember what the oath was about, and they didn’t have any obligations to return.

Neither of them wanted to go. Both of them knew they had to.

“I don’t want to go in,” Richie says. When Eddie turns to look at him, Richie’s already looking back. “We should just go home.”

“It can’t be that bad, right?” Eddie asks. “What could Mike really ask us to do? It can’t be that bad.”

“You trying to convince me or you?” Richie asks. Eddie takes his hand and squeezes it.

“Both,” Eddie tells him. Richie kisses the back of his hand. “Should we call the kids again? Just to make sure—”

“We called them twenty minutes ago, they’re fine,” Richie says. Silence hits the car again, and then Richie says, “I love you.”

“Me, too,” Eddie replies. He shifts to lean over the center console, and Richie meets him halfway, kissing him softly with a hand against his jaw, holding him in place. When they separate, Richie sighs.

“Boot and rally,” Richie says, clapping his hands down on his thighs and moving to get out of the car. Eddie follows, feeling like there are weights tied to his ankles as he does it. There’s another couple in the lot, talking to each other pretty close; Richie’s already walking over to them before Eddie can stop him.

“Richie,” Eddie hisses, but Richie’s hugging the guy. The woman’s got red hair, and Eddie can’t help but say, “Bev— Beverly? Beverly Marsh?”

She looks at him, and of course she’s Beverly Marsh. She smiles at him, and he waits behind Richie, holding for a social cue. He usually waits on Richie in these situations as a guide.

“You remember Eddie,” Richie says, motioning back to him. “Eds, look, it’s Ben! You remember Ben?”

“Yeah, I remember Ben,” Eddie says, letting Ben pull him into a hug, too.

“Oh, of course you’re Eddie,” Bev says. “You look just the same, Eddie. Look at your eyes.”

Eddie lets Beverly look at his face so he can look at hers a little longer, too. She’s just as pretty as he remembers her being, when they were kids together.

“Did you guys drive in together?” Ben asks, as they’re heading into the restaurant. “Run in to each other at the airport?”

“Oh, no, we got married,” Richie says. He takes Eddie’s left hand in his right and lifts it up to show off Eddie’s ring, which just makes his face go red. Being with his friends again, it makes him feel strangely childish, like he’s thirteen again and has to hide his crush on Richie. They’ve been married for eleven years now. It’s okay for him to hold Richie’s hand, even if doing it in Derry gives him hives.

“Did you remember each other?” Ben asks, bewildered. Richie shakes his head, shoving his glasses back up his nose.

“I heard him talking on the radio,” Eddie says. They make it to the room Mike’s booked for them, one huge table for the seven of them, presumably. There’s already three men there, and Eddie recognizes them, after a beat. Stan’s there, Stanley Uris, beside Mike Hanlon and Bill Denbrough, and Richie’s running past him at Bill to hug him before anyone can say anything.

“You heard him on the radio?” Ben asks later, when they’re all sitting around the table eating dinner. “What, and you remembered him then?”

“No,” Eddie says. He feels his face go hot again, keeping his secret crush.

“No, Eds just called in every single night to flirt with me,” Richie says, kissing Eddie loudly on the cheek. Eddie brushes him off with a huff.

“It’s just because I was trying to improve his taste in music,” Eddie jokes. Richie tips his face in his direction, kissing him on the mouth instead, tasting like soy sauce and avocado.

“I always thought you’d be good together,” Ben comments. He motions between them, says, “You guys were best friends when we were kids.”

“We were all best friends,” Richie argues. “But you’re totally right, I was in love with him then, too.” Eddie thumps him on the arm, which just makes Richie grin as he exclaims, “Wanna see our kids?”

“You guys have kids?” Stan asks. Eddie tugs out his wallet and flips it open without any further provocation, which just makes Richie laugh as much as it always does. He’s got them all in age order in the pocket sleeves.

“I have pictures on my Instagram, in case anyone wants to join the twenty-first century,” Richie offers. Stan lifts a hand, and Richie passes his phone over, scrolling through his photos. Eddie passes his wallet over to Mike anyways.

“That’s Lola,” he says, pointing at their oldest daughter, Dolores. “She’s nine years old, and that’s our second oldest, Lynn— He’s six. And…” Eddie flips the photos and says, “That’s Ingrid, she’s two and a half.”

“Just a baby,” Richie says. He passes around a picture of her on his phone, too. “Do any of you guys have kids?”

Everybody says no. Richie frowns, as his phone comes back into his hands.

“I can’t have kids,” Stan offers. Richie claps him on the shoulder.

“Neither can I,” Bill adds.

“I’ve never tried, but I’ve never had a—” Bev starts, then stops. They’re quiet for a second. “Is— Are your kids, Richie, are they—”

“We adopted them,” Richie answers.

“I was married before Richie,” Eddie offers up. He knows these people. He can say shit like this to them, if he can say it to anyone. “To a woman. And she— There was a consideration. To have a kid. But we never did.”

They’re all silent for a second. Bill sets his fork down on his plate, and it makes a soft clattering sound. Eddie folds his wallet back up, then clears his throat.

“Why are we here, Mike?” Eddie asks. It takes him a second before he can lift his head but, when he does, Mike’s looking back at him.

Mike hesitates for a moment before he says, “It’s back.”

It. The memories all flood back, and Eddie feels a coppery taste in his mouth; his hands go numb, cold and tingling as he looks to Richie. Richie looks horrified, wide eyes staring ahead with terror. Eddie knows that face; Richie’s getting lost in his own head, whatever he’s— thinking, or remembering, he’s stuck in it. He reaches out and takes Richie’s hand.

“You should’ve told us about It over the phone,” Stan says, sounding almost stern as he talks to Mike. This is a forty-year-old Stan; for all Eddie knows, he is some sort of authority figure now.

Richie turns away from the table and sprints out of the room. Eddie looks after him, briefly alarmed, before he hears him vomiting right outside their door. He takes the opportunity to leave, too, finding Richie over the trash can near the hostess’ stand while the hostess looks down at him with disgust. Eddie crouches down beside him and says softly, “Hey, Rich, it’s okay.”

“It fucking is not,” Richie says. He spits, then stands up straight, rubbing at his face with his hands. Eddie just turns him away and drags him to the bathroom so he can wash his face and rinse out his mouth.

“Should we leave?” Eddie asks. Richie rubs his face so vigorously with cold water that Eddie wants to reach out and take his wrists to stop him, but he gets it. He lets Richie work out the energy. “We should just… go home. Right?”

Richie looks down the drain. He just stares, for a long moment, before he shakes his head and sighs. “I don’t know, Eds. I don’t know.”

They’re both quiet for a long moment. Eddie slips over to Richie’s side, shifting under his arm and wrapping himself around Richie. Richie kisses the top of his head.

“We can go out there and listen to what Mike has to say,” Richie says. “Maybe it’ll be an open-and-shut case, you know? One and done. We’ll just pop down into the sewer, blow the fucking clown away, and go home.”

Eddie’s skin is flooded with goosebumps, an uncomfortably cold sweat working up all over. Richie hums a little, burying his face in Eddie’s hair. “I don’t want to stay.”

Richie nods against his head. “I know. I know, Eddie.”

They’re both quiet for a longer moment, then. Richie shifts, swaying a little bit, back and forth, with Eddie held tightly under his arm.

“We should go back out there,” Eddie says, finally. Richie sighs heavily.

“Fine,” Richie says. “But you’re coming up with our excuse.”

“Everybody heard you puke, man, there’s no excuse-making here,” Eddie tells him. Richie groans again, but he lets Eddie drag him back out to their side-room, where Bev and Ben are talking in low tones, Stan is shaking his head at something Bill is saying, and Mike is trying to get them to listen to him. They all stop and look up when Richie and Eddie come back in.

“Alright, Mikey,” Richie says, when it becomes clear nobody else is going to speak. He squeezes Eddie’s hand, so Eddie squeezes back, looking up at him and getting distracted by the shadow under the line of his jaw, this close. “Lay it on us. What the fuck is It up to now?”

“It’s back and It’s killing again,” Mike tells them. Bill buries his face in his hands. Richie looks a little pale again, sweaty at his temples, so Eddie pulls him back to their seats and pushes him to sit down again. “It killed a man last week, a man named Adrian Mellon. He wasn’t even from here, he was here visiting his boyfriend.”

“Who was his boyfriend?” Bev asks quietly.

“Don Hagarty,” Mike says. Bev shuts her eyes, dropping her face down into her hands. Ben hesitates a moment before he rubs her back. Eddie looks incredulously from Stan to Mike.

“We’re not seriously going to try and fight this thing, right?” Eddie demands. “Because it’s killing people again. Another person’s actually dead, this isn’t a fucking— This wasn’t a hallucination? This was real?”

“It’s real, Eddie,” Mike says. Eddie pushes his chair back from the table.

“We have kids, Mike,” Eddie tells him. He wants to beg them to understand, not to think less of him for wanting so desperately to leave. He’s got to force himself not to look at Bill, terrified of seeing that look of disappointment on his face that he always feared when they were younger. The shame that look gave him isn’t worth reliving.

“What would we have to do?” Richie asks. His voice is all quiet now, quieter than Bev’s was. It’s unsettling; Eddie’s only heard this tone of voice once or twice since they met. Or, met again, he supposes.

“There’s a ritual,” Mike says.

“What kind of ritual?” Stan asks.

“I can show you,” Mike tells them. “Back at the library, I have everything. I can show you how we’ll do it.”

“Great, then we can do it tonight and go home,” Richie says, clapping his hands together. “Perfect, sounds great, how about we just—” The table thumps, rattling their silverware and dishes, and Richie stops short. All of them stare at the table, but it doesn’t move; just as Richie is about to speak again, the thing jumps, and everyone skitters backwards from the table, hopping out of their seats. Richie grabs Eddie by the shoulder and shoves him behind himself.

“What the f-f-fuck is that?” Bill demands. Mike leans forward hesitantly just as a fortune cookie pops out of a bowl that must’ve been brought in while they were in the bathroom, because Eddie doesn’t remember seeing it before. The fortune cookie shakes, then cracks open, sending a bat shooting into the air and making Mike shout as he stumbles backwards.

Another fortune cookie erupts with flame, and another with the dying fetus of a chicken, crawling its way towards Stan. Eddie can only stare with wide eyes, frozen in place behind Richie, looking over his shoulder at the chaos. He can see the disembodied heads of children floating in the fish tank behind Ben; one of the heads looks like Lynn, and Eddie slams his eyes shut, burying his face in Richie’s back.

Richie jerks under his hands, stepping forward and batting at something with one hand. Eddie looks up again to see Richie smacking some flying thing out of the air. The misshapen creature, whatever it is, screams on the floor before it heals itself and sits back up again.

“They’re not real,” Eddie says quietly. He looks up to Richie and says, “Rich, it’s not real.”

“It feels pretty fucking real, Eds,” Richie tells him, stepping back into Eddie’s space and turning so he can catch Eddie’s face in one hand. “Are you okay? Did it get you?”

There’s a shattering smash of glass on wood, and Eddie whips his head around to see Bev throwing a glass at something spitting at her from the table. He starts to go to her, but Richie moves before he can, dragging Eddie with him and ducking under another flying creature to yank Bev away from the table. Mike steps in between all of them and the table and said, “We have to go.”

They pay their bill with the cash they pull out of their wallets, without checking to see even how much they were tossing over until they were allowed to leave. Eddie slips his hand into Richie’s again on their walk out to the parking lot.

“What the fuck was that?” Eddie demands. “That was fucking insane. You couldn’t have warned us about that shit?”

“I didn’t know that was going to happen,” Mike answers. Eddie’s about to argue back when he realizes Richie’s stopped short.

“Hey, Rich, what’s—” Eddie starts to say, but then he realizes a child has caught Richie by the hem of his shirt.

“Are you Richie Tozier?” the kid asks. Richie smiles, forever unable to be too serious for very long, and crouches down.

“Yeah, man, what’s your name?” Richie replies. Eddie jumps almost a foot in the air when a hand lands on his shoulder, and he turns to see Stan beside him.

“I’m glad you two found each other again,” Stan tells him. “He used to talk about you all the time.”

Eddie feels his face flush. Richie had mentioned multiple times on their flight out that he had been in love with Eddie when they were kids. Eddie had told him he’d had a crush, too, but hearing the evidence that Richie liked him back still makes him feel like that same lovestruck kid again. Even though he’s forty years old and married to the man he had a crush on when they were boys. Derry brings that out in him, apparently.

“Eddie used to talk about Richie, too,” Bev chimes in. Richie straightens up, smiling still as the kid runs back to his parents.

“Who’s talking about Richie?” Richie asks, as they resume their journey to the parking lot.

“Eddie used to,” Bev explains.

“All the time,” Ben adds. “It was really sweet.”

“Shut the fuck up, Ben,” Eddie snaps at him. Ben just laughs, and Eddie wonders how the hell he could have ever forgotten the Losers. They hesitate near their cars, hovering, waiting for an indication of what to do next.

“You can all follow me back to the library,” Mike suggests. “I can show you the ritual and then we can all get some sleep.”

“F-Fine by me,” Bill says. They part ways, Eddie sliding into the driver’s seat, just to tailgate each other all the way back to the library. Richie encourages Eddie to rev his engine when they’re beside Stan at a red light, but Stan glares at them through the windows like he knows what they’re talking about, so Eddie won’t do it.

Mike’s place is kind of sad. It’s musty and cluttered; Eddie wants to clean it so badly his fingers itch as he looks around. Richie sifts through a desk filled with empty bottles with a frown on his face.

“Can I get anyone anything? You guys want water?” Mike asks. Eddie hesitates to drink anything that comes out of any faucet in Derry, but Richie and Bill agree, so he nods. They settle around a long table in the center of Mike’s weird attic apartment; Eddie holds his glass between his hands, watching the cloudy water fog up the glass, sending condensation rolling around his fingertips. He feels like he’s sweating just as bad, waiting for whatever Mike’s going to say next.

“So,” Ben says. “The ritual?”

“Right,” Mike says. He’s looking at a vase in the center of the table. He leans up, stretching to get the leather piece; when he goes to sit back down, though, it’s like there are six Mikes, all moving in slow motion.

“What the fuck,” Eddie whispers. He looks nervously up to Richie, but Richie is staring at the backs of his own hands.

“Did you fucking dose us?” Richie demands. He flexes his fingers. “Eds, look.”

“I just gave you a root,” Mike says. Eddie turns, furrowing his brow to glare at Mike, but he can’t find him. It’s like they’re in the woods as Mike walks them through an explanation of the ritual they need to perform. As he explains, it’s as if the seven of them are in the woods together, deep inside Derry, watching these ancient Native Americans try and fail to trap the creature they know as Pennywise.

When they snap back out of the vision, Bill gags, then runs to Mike’s sink, vomiting down the drain. Bev presses the heels of her hands hard into her eyes while Richie buries his face in his folded arms beside Eddie, making soft sounds that may or may not be words, but Eddie can’t hear them all that well.

“We have to perform the ritual,” Mike tells them. Ben pushes his hair back from his face, and it stays slicked back with sweat. Eddie wants to power-wash the room and everyone inside of it, but the walls are still spinning and he feels like he’s looking down at himself, so he shuts his eyes again. He feels more than hears or sees Richie get up, but he knows Richie gets up and goes somewhere else, even though he can’t drag his eyes open to see it.

“What happens if we don’t?” Stan asks calmly. Eddie wants to scream; he doesn’t understand how Stan isn’t losing his fucking mind right now just like the rest of them.

“We die,” Bev and Mike say simultaneously. Eddie forces one eye open to see them looking at each other with confusion.

“I’ve seen it,” Bev says. “In my dreams, every night. I’ve seen how each of us dies.”

“That’s just fucking great,” Richie calls to them. He’s over at the sink with Bill, Eddie realizes; he must’ve gotten sick again, which makes Eddie’s pulse skyrocket, a looming anxiety attack clouding his mind, even though he’s gotten things like that down to all but once every few months. He’s suddenly petrified, though, with the memory of the leper fresh in his mind, begging him to give him a blowjob. Seeing Richie sick makes his blood run cold.

“How do we stop that from happening, Bev?” Ben asks. His voice is soft, and warm, and understanding, like Bev isn’t telling them she’s seen how they’re all going to die.

“We have to stop It,” Bev says. “If we don’t, we’ll all die.”

“Why us?” Richie demands. “Why the fuck is it us? What, because we said we’d come back when we were kids? What the fuck kind of bullshit is that?”

“I know,” Mike tells them. “I know. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, though, and we have to. If we don’t… Bev’s right. We’ll die.”

The reminder that Mike has been in Derry all this time — alone, forgotten, waiting and hoping for them to remember again — is like a blow to the chest. Eddie runs a hand back roughly through his hair.

“Mike, I’m so fucking sorry you’ve been stuck here so long,” Eddie tells him.

“I wish you’d called us,” Bill says softly. The way they look at each other makes Eddie’s head throb, but he’s still fucked up on the root shit and he needs Richie but he can’t feel like he can ask for him, not in front of the Losers. He’s just a thirteen-year-old kid again, after all.

Looking at Stan, though, and the softened line of his shoulders, and Bill with the grey through his hair, and Mike with his six-foot-four-inches of height, and Bev with her sharp cheekbones, and Ben with his beard — it’s all so jarring, how adult they all are, how well they wear their own skin. Even Richie is sort of disorienting to look at, as Eddie struggles to reconcile the kid he knew with the man he married.

Maybe he’s changed, too. Maybe he wears Eddie Kaspbrak better than he even had the last time he had seen them. He hates to think of a lifetime where he came back worse, where he had to face the Losers while he was still married to Myra — or, worse, if he had never even left his mother at all — and had never gotten Richie back at all. This is, probably, the best possible outcome, if they would always end up back in Derry anyways.

“I wanted you to live your lives,” Mike said. “We didn’t all need to stay behind.”

“Then I w-w-wish you’d called me,” Bill tells him, desperate. “Mike, you should’ve brought me back. I would’ve stayed with you.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then the faucet turns on, the water running again.

“Don’t mind me,” Richie says. “You two have your sexual tension—”

“Richie,” Eddie hisses.

“—I’m just gonna rinse out my mouth from the fucking mushrooms and vomit, courtesy of Mikey Hanlon himself—”

“It’s a root,” Mike corrects him. He looks to Bill instead again, standing just a step away from Richie at the sink, and says, “You deserved better than Derry.”

“So do you,” Bill tells him. They’re quiet again.

“Do you— If any of you want to stay here,” Mike says, “I’ve got plenty of space.”

They can see the entire attic apartment from where they’re sitting, and it doesn’t even look like Mike has enough empty floor space for them all to fit, let alone beds and couches. In the end, only Bill stays, surprising no one; the rest of them drive back to the Townhouse, where they’ve all booked rooms, with plans to regroup in the lobby of the Townhouse the next morning.

They’ve already got all their stuff in their rooms, from when they’d checked in separately earlier that afternoon. Ben suggests a drink, and they all accept, even Richie, though he hasn’t drank in almost twelve years now. He doesn’t take a drink, though, just watching as Eddie sips at his bourbon while Stan swirls his in his glass, staring at it with unfocused eyes behind the glasses he’s got at the end of his nose.

“What’re we gonna do?” Ben asks quietly. Bev stirs up a drink for him before handing his glass over, which Ben takes with a grateful, stupid-sappy smile. Eddie wonders if he has any idea what he looks like when he looks at Bev, but then he catches Richie staring down at him with a dopey grin, and when he smiles back, he thinks, Who cares?

“We’ll just talk with Mike and Bill in the morning,” Richie says. “They’ll know what to do.”

“How do you know that?” Stan asks.

“Because…” Richie says, then trails off. “Because it’s Bill. He always knows what to do.”

“How the fuck is Bill going to know what to do?” Eddie asks, even though he remembers thinking the same thing. When they were kids, Bill had seemed invincible; now that they’re adults, Bill seems strangely fallible. Eddie has a life. He can’t stake everything on Bill Denbrough and his hunches.

“He always knows,” Richie repeats firmly. He looks down into his glass. “He’s not going to let us die. I know he wouldn’t. He promised.”

Stan frowns, when Eddie looks at him. He looks pale and sick, and he sets his glass aside in the center of a coaster before standing and dusting himself off.

“I’m going to bed,” he says. He looks at Richie more meaningfully than he looks at any of the rest of them, and then turns to go, waving off their goodnights. Richie stands once he’s gone.

“I’m gonna make sure he’s okay,” Richie says, and he goes, too. Eddie’s left with Ben and Bev, who are just making eyes at each other, so he sighs and stands, too.

“I’m gonna go call my kids,” Eddie tells them. “See you guys down here in the morning?”

“Bright and early, Eds,” Bev replies. Ben smiles up at him. Nobody but Richie has called Eddie Eds since the last time he’d been in Derry. It’s strange, but it’s warm, a cloud filling his chest when he hears it.

“I’ve missed you guys,” Eddie tells them. Bev gets up and hugs him goodnight.

“I missed you, too,” Ben tells them. Bev squeezes Eddie before letting him go, and Eddie goes, making his way upstairs to his and Richie’s room. He calls their neighbors’ house, the Ameses, a couple and their two kids that Lola and Lynn like to hang around with, and so the place they’re staying for a couple of nights while Richie and Eddie are gone on their urgent family emergency; the kids’ mother answers, and she puts Lola on the phone.

“Hi, Dad,” Lola exclaims over the line. “How’s Maine? Is it cold? Is it fun?”

“It’s not that cold,” Eddie tells her. “It’s not that fun, either. How’re you doing?”

Lola makes a non-committal noise. “I miss you guys.”

Eddie’s heart squeezes. He puts his head in his hands as he says, “We miss you, too. We’ll be back in a couple days, though, alright? I promise.”

“If you say so,” Lola says, sounding so much like Richie that Eddie has to smile. “D’you wanna talk to Lynn?”

“Sure,” Eddie says, and Lola puts her brother on the phone. He’s too young to really give too much of a shit about the phone, but he does let Eddie ask him about his day and how he’s doing. When Eddie says “I love you,” though, Lynn sighs quietly.

“I love you, too,” Lynn replies. “When are you coming home?”

“Two days,” Eddie tells him, hoping that he’s not lying. “Then we’ll be back.”

“Can I talk to Dad?” Lynn asks.

“He’s not here right now,” Eddie says. “He’s just helping someone with something. But I’ll make sure he calls you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay,” Lynn replies. There’s some quiet before he adds, “Ingrid says hi.”

“Is she behaving?” Eddie asks. He wants to be with them more desperately than he’s ever wanted anything else; he wishes he could leap through the phone line to them. He’s not used to feeling so far away from the people he loves. The last time he felt this way was when he was still talking to Richie over the radio, before they met in person.

“Eh,” Lynn answers, which just makes Eddie smile again.

“Tell her I said to behave, then,” Eddie says. “Get some sleep. Don’t stay up late.”

“Okay,” Lynn agrees. “Night, Dad.”

“Goodnight,” Eddie says. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Lynn echoes, and hangs up. Eddie huffs a laugh when he sets his phone aside, just for Richie to come in, exhaling hard as he shuts the door behind himself and slumps against it.

“Is Stan okay?” Eddie asks. Richie rubs his face vigorously. Eddie takes advantage of his distraction to go to him, wrapping his hands around his wrists and pulling his arms down so he can look up into his face.

“He’s alright,” Richie says. “He told me he thought about killing himself instead of coming back. He wants me to make sure he’s not a liability.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Eddie demands. Richie shrugs, then cups Eddie’s face in his hands and kisses him, which is really all Eddie has wanted for hours, so he sinks into it. When Richie pulls back, Eddie says, “I called the kids. They say hi.”

Richie groans. “I miss them, I wanted to talk to them. Fuck.”

“You can call them in the morning.” Eddie rubs his thumb under Richie’s eye, then says, “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?”

Richie shrugs, draping his arms over Eddie’s shoulders and leaning in to kiss him along the column of his throat. Eddie sighs, tipping his head to the side.

“I don’t know,” Richie says. “But it seemed like Bev and Mike knew what they were talking about when they said we’d die if we didn’t defeat it, so. It seems like either we leave and die anyways, or we fight and maybe survive. At least if we fight, our kids have a chance of not being orphaned.”

Eddie’s blood runs cold, and Richie doesn’t smile, even though he’s the one who made the joke. Richie kisses the juncture of Eddie’s shoulder and his neck, where his shirt collar rests, pulling the fabric aside before he stands up straight again.

“I guess so,” Eddie says. Richie looks him over before pulling him in to hug tightly again.

“I keep thinking about when we were kids,” Richie confesses. Eddie tips his head up, trying to look at him, but Richie doesn’t pull back far enough for him to see properly. “I was so fucking in love with you and I thought I was going to die for it.”

Eddie makes them separate now, so he can hold Richie’s face in his hands and kiss him, too. Richie makes a soft moaning sound, deep in his throat, the sort of sound he makes when he’s particularly touch-starved and wants Eddie to touch him. Eddie obliges, stretching up onto the balls of his feet so he can bury his face in Richie’s throat as he reaches into his pants to wrap a hand around his cock. Richie whines softly, going from half-hard to hard in moments, filling up right in Eddie’s hand.

“I’m so fucking glad I found you,” Eddie tells him, and Richie huffs a breathless laugh. He slowly drags his fist up around Richie’s cock, the way he knows he likes, tight and dragging his thumb over the head as he goes. Richie whines again, his head tipping back to thump against the door. “Shh.”

“You shh,” Richie shoots back. Eddie pulls him into another kiss with his free hand, the other hand using Richie’s precum and sweat to slide over the heated length of his dick. Richie’s gasping, now, open-mouthed pants against Eddie’s mouth and jaw as Eddie speeds up, then slows down, enduring Richie’s cursing because he loves to feel the control.

“Do you want to cum?” Eddie asks. Richie nods vigorously. Eddie pulls his hand out of his pants, ignoring Richie’s desperate groan, and says, “Go to the bed, get the lube.”

Richie scrambles to do as he’s told, grabbing the lube out of his bag and tossing himself backwards onto his bed, wriggling his pants down his hips so he can slip slick fingers into himself and start spreading himself open. Eddie can only watch as Richie moans his name, eyes shut behind his glasses as he writhes on his own fingers in the hotel bed.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” Eddie tells him, even though it’s not sexy, because he needs Richie to know it’s true. “We’re not going to die in Derry. Alright?”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Richie says. He slips a third finger into himself, and Eddie throbs with the need to be inside of him, to show Richie that he’s going to take care of him. Even though he’d love to ride Richie’s huge cock on the bed until he could feel him in his throat, he’s overwhelmed with a protectiveness he can’t shove back down.

“I mean it,” Eddie says. He strips out of his clothes, leaving them in a neat pile on the floor before climbing over Richie on the bed. Richie slips his hand free and rolls onto his back, letting Eddie straddle him and pull his shirt up and over his head, leaving him naked, too, sprawled out on the covers. “I’m not letting you die here. Not after all the work I put into getting you back in the first place.”

“I believe you,” Richie tells him. It sounds like he really does, or that he at least believes Eddie believes it, which is good enough for now. Eddie takes the bottle of lube and slicks himself up before he lines up with Richie’s entrance and pushes in. He’s five or six inches shorter than Richie, on a normal day when Richie’s not wearing his giant fucking boots, so it’s hard to envelope him like he likes, but Eddie tries anyways. He pulls Richie’s face into his shoulder and tugs Richie’s legs up around his waist so he can wrap around him, using the width of his shoulders and the strength of his arms to cover him tight.

“I love you so much,” Eddie says, his head dropped down beside Richie’s, his lips brushing the shell of Richie’s ear when he speaks. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay? You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me—”

“Eddie,” Richie groans, too loud. Eddie puts his hand over Richie’s mouth, and Richie shuts his eyes, inhaling deeply at the sensation. Eddie waits until Richie’s eyes slide back open; it takes a minute, but they do, looking up at him with a hazy stare, magnified by his thick glasses.

“I’ve got you,” Eddie says. “Always.”

“I know,” Richie says, and Eddie’s cock throbs inside of him, impossibly more turned on by the absolute trust Richie has in him. He braces his free hand on the headboard, still holding Richie’s mouth shut with the other hand as he bends Richie in half as far as he can go without throwing either of their backs out and fucks into him. Richie keens weakly when Eddie finds his prostate, a muffled sound behind Eddie’s palm; Eddie just lifts his hand to kiss him as he fucks into the same spot over and over until Richie’s coming untouched between them, Eddie’s name whimpered from Richie’s mouth and down Eddie’s throat.

“I love you,” Eddie tells him, slowing his pace as Richie shivers through the aftershocks of his orgasm. Richie reaches for him, after a moment, pulling at his shoulder, so Eddie picks back up, losing his rhythm entirely as he pushes himself up and over the edge before spilling inside of Richie, filling him like they both fucking love it.

When they’ve both caught their breath, Richie says, “I love you too, you fucking sap.”

“You’re such a shit,” Eddie replies.

“Dick drunk,” Richie shoots.

“Slutty bottom,” Eddie replies.

“That’s just true,” Richie says, then whimpers, “Motherfucker—” when Eddie slips out of him. He slips into their bathroom, grabbing the baby wipes out of the toiletry bag he had left in there earlier before returning to clean Richie off as he lays there, boneless and grinning at him.

“What’s that stupid look for?” Eddie asks, impossibly endeared. Richie hands over his used baby wipes and Eddie takes them with a slight frown, tossing them all in the wastebasket.

“Fuck Derry,” Richie says simply. “I ended up with you anyways.”

Eddie’s warmed, then, his whole body filling up with heat from top to bottom; he can’t help but climb right back onto the bed and burrow in Richie’s side, yanking the covers up and over them. Years and years of therapy and medication and hard fucking work have made him okay with things like hotel beds and sex with men, but he’s so glad they made it this far in moments like this.

Richie kisses the top of his head, once and then a bunch of times in rapid succession. Eddie’s infatuated with him.

“Thank God,” Eddie says, a beat too late. Richie kisses him again anyways and rubs his back softly until Eddie falls asleep.

Their first stop the next morning, after Richie calls their kids and the seven of them eat breakfast, is the Clubhouse. Richie remembers this place vividly; he could walk the path from his parents’ old place to the Clubhouse with his eyes shut, he thinks. He could certainly find it on a bicycle, with muscle memory, but he’s not about to try getting on a bicycle again anytime soon.

Stan remembers exactly where the door into the Clubhouse was, lifting the latch neatly and slipping inside, finding the rungs on the ladder like he’d just been here yesterday. Ben follows him, all but leaping down the hole, and then they follow suit. All of the old shit they left behind in the Clubhouse is still there, comic books and games and an old paddle ball that Eddie broke when they were still little boys.

“Remember this?” Stan asks, lifting an old coffee tin and pulling the lid off.

“Oh, shower caps,” Bev says. “In case of spiders, right?”

“Right,” Stan says with a smile. He hands her a cap; Richie turns his down, but Eddie takes one, pulling it down around his curly hair. Richie pats the top of his head and kisses his cheek, just to watch him blush like he used to when they’d first gotten together.

“Oh, I remember this,” Richie exclaims, swinging their old hammock. It’s too small for him by far, but he tries climbing into it anyways. It creaks, and his limbs are almost trailing on the floor, but it doesn’t collapse.

“No fucking way!” Eddie shouts. That’s all the warning Richie gets before Eddie’s climbing in beside him, ignoring Richie’s warnings as the entire thing comes crashing down, sending them both down into the dirt. Richie can’t stop laughing, gasping for air in the dusty dirt of the Clubhouse floor while Eddie checks him over for injuries, but it’s the happiest he’s been since Mike called them two days ago.

“You’re going to rip the place apart, you fucking animals,” Stan comments, smiling at them. Richie gets up and dusts himself off, yanking Stan into a headlock like they’re fifteen years old all over again. Stan brushes him off, but he’s still grinning.

“Why’re we here?” Ben asks. “Not that I don’t appreciate the trip down memory lane.”

“Because we need to do something before we can perform the ritual,” Mike tells them. When they’re all looking at him, he says, “We need to get an item of personal importance. Something that’s symbolic to us, of— of our fight against Pennywise. Of our strength, so we can defeat him. We’ll need to split up—”

“Hell no,” Richie interrupts, at the same time Eddie and Ben also vocally disagree. Bill’s brow is furrowed as he looks at Mike, but he doesn’t comment yet. Just like Bill, to take in all the information and then tear down everyone’s arguments afterwards so they’ll do exactly what he wants instead. He’s always been too observant for his own good.

“I’m not going anywhere alone here, and I’m not letting Richie go anywhere alone here,” Eddie says loudly, over everyone else’s voices.

“Why do we need to split up?” Bill asks. “I th-thought we’d be better together. Isn’t that wh-what Bev s-s-s-said, the first time?”

They’re quiet again. Richie reaches out and finds Eddie’s hand without looking, squeezing it, a silent promise. Eddie squeezes back.

“I think we should split up,” Mike says, with an air of finality. Bill looks him over for another moment, brow still furrowed, before he stands.

“Mike’s right,” Bill says. Eddie throws his hands up in the air, turning away from them all to angrily pace down the length of the Clubhouse and back as Bill continues, “We weren’t together that whole summer. We need to find our tokens separately like we found our way separately back then.”

Richie thinks that’s a load of bullshit, but Bev falls in line when Bill does, and Ben follows her. Eddie and Stan still look unconvinced, but Stan nods when he’s asked if it’s okay, just leaving Richie and Eddie as the lone dissenters.

“Richie’s not gonna just walk around Derry by himself, are you insane?” Eddie demands. “He’s a magnet for trouble. Besides, if we’re separate and Pennywise finds one of us, what’re we gonna do, exactly? We should all go together.”

“Overruled,” Bill says, with a slight smile. “Sorry, Eds.”

Eddie makes a frustrated noise, throwing his hands up and turning to Richie with a look on his face so infuriated that Richie’s surprised smoke isn’t coming out of his ears.

“Fine,” Richie says. Eddie frowns at him, looking even angrier than he had the moment before. “We’ll go our separate ways and meet up at the Townhouse after.”

“You’re sure?” Mike asks, which is fair; it’s an abrupt change of heart. Richie’s got his own plans, though, so he just grins and nods and lies until they’ve all separated again. It’s only then that he loops around and finds the path Eddie had taken into town and cuts through a shortcut to catch up with him.

“You’re such a dumbass,” Eddie comments, as Richie weaves their fingers together. “I thought you were fucking insane.”

“Like I’d ever pass on the chance to take a walk with my husband,” Richie replies. Eddie flushes again, all red-faced and pleased-looking; it’s one of Richie’s favorite looks on him. “First stop, yours or mine?”

“Do you know where you want to go?” Eddie asks. Richie hums, lifting one shoulder noncommittally. “We can do mine. I just wanted to go to the pharmacy. I remember seeing It there when I was a kid.”

“Oh,” Richie says, feeling his blood run cold. He remembers when he saw Pennywise that summer, too, when he’d been by himself, and he’s not looking forward to revisiting it. At least Eddie going first gives him a little bit more time. He almost regrets catching up with Eddie again, just because he doesn’t want Eddie to have to see it, but they’ve seen each other at their best and at their worst; this’ll be nothing, comparatively. Hopefully.

Richie still kind of feels like the repressed thirteen-year-old who carved his initial with Eddie’s into the Kissing Bridge in an explosive fit of child-passion, overwhelmed by the all-consuming love that only a kid can have for a crush. It’s unsettling, walking through Derry with his hand in Eddie’s. He keeps wanting to separate, to keep distance between them just in case. It’s not even crazy; it’s just precautionary, because it’s only been a few days since the hate-crime turned clown-crime that killed Adrian Mellon. Derry hasn’t gotten any better just because Richie’s come to better terms with who he is.

Eddie leads them into the pharmacy, the two of them hiding in the cold medicine aisle until Mr. Keene turns his back and they’re able to sneak downstairs to the basement. Eddie’s shaking, his hands trembling as he puts them on the railings to guide his way down. Richie keeps a hand on his shoulder down the stairs, just a reminder that he’s there.

“I remember coming down here that summer,” Eddie says. “After I’d broken my arm. And when I was down here, I…” Eddie stops, trailing off as he looks at the curtain at the far end of the basement. Richie’s hand slips down Eddie’s arm to tangle their hands together again. “My mom was down here. With the leper.”

Eddie had told Richie about the leper early that morning, while he’d showered and Richie had brushed his teeth over the sink. It had sent shivers down Richie’s spine, the idea of the disease-infested monster that had plagued Eddie for so long, but he has his own secrets about Pennywise, so he can’t really do too much about it. It’s fucked up, but it’s their life.

“Nobody’s down here now,” Richie says. Eddie squeezes his hand, then releases him, stepping forward hesitantly. Richie follows him, but Eddie picks up his speed without warning, striding forward and yanking the curtain back so he could see to the other side. He doesn’t say anything, for a moment, and then he jerks around to look at Richie with huge eyes.

“Richie?” Eddie demands. Richie frowns.

“Yeah?” he asks. Eddie’s head whips around again, to look back at whatever he sees on the other side, and he’s trembling again. He turns back to Richie, apparently not believing what he’s seeing.

“It looks like you’re in here,” Eddie tells him, voice in a choked whisper. Richie forces down the fear and anxiety bubbling in his gut to follow Eddie across the cold basement floor, until he’s right behind him.

“I don’t see anything,” Richie whispers back. There’s nothing there; it’s just shelves and a chair shoved into the corner, all covered in dust. That’s it.

Eddie, apparently, sees more than that. He reaches out, fingers brushing against empty air. It looks like he’s stroking someone’s face, through thin air, before he turns back to Richie again.

“It’s you,” Eddie says. They both look at the empty spot Eddie’s hand is in, even though Richie can’t even see anything. Eddie shudders, a wavering breath slipping out of his throat. Richie kisses the crown of his head, wrapping one arm around Eddie’s chest, stretched across his shoulders to envelope him.

“I’m right here,” Richie assures him. “That’s not me. I’m me.”

“You look sick,” Eddie comments quietly, like Richie hadn’t even spoken. “Are you sick?”

“No,” Richie replies, but Eddie’s not listening to him. Instead, he’s pulling Richie’s arm down and pushing past him, heading to the empty space he’d been reaching for. He stops there, looking at, presumably, a vision of Richie. “Eds, it’s a trick. We gotta get out of here.”

Eddie keeps staring at the empty space. It’s incredibly chilling to watch, so Richie reaches out and takes Eddie’s wrist, making him snap around, his dark eyes huge when they see each other again. Abruptly, the room is filled with fluttering records, clean white sheets of medical records falling to the ground around them, and that, that Richie can see. He grabs out at one, but it slices along his hand in a paper cut, and he hisses, yanking his hand back. Eddie snatches one more easily, holding it up to read.

“It’s my medical files,” Eddie says. His breath’s picking up, and he says, “It’s my old medical files from when I lived in Derry, it says—”

“It’s a trick,” Richie repeats firmly. “Eds, we gotta go, find your token and let’s get out of here.”

Eddie’s eyes are locked downwards. He grabs another sheet out of the air, then reads it over, then another, furiously, snatching sheets as fast as he can and skimming the contents with his eyes. Richie has to grab him by the wrists and pull him in close just to get him to stop.

“Some of these are yours,” Eddie tells him, trying to free himself. “Look, Richie, look—”

“These aren’t real, Eds,” Richie says desperately. “Come on, just— Just take one and we’ll leave—” Eddie grabs another page out of the air, and Richie looks down at it over his shoulder, reading his own name and date of birth at the top of the sheet. Under pre-existing conditions, it lists HIV/AIDS, and Richie’s own heart starts pounding even harder. He takes it out of Eddie’s hand, reading it with terrified speed before he says, “What the fuck is this?”

Eddie looks down at it, reading it just as fast as Richie had. This, for some reason, seems to be the thing that snaps him out of his weird fugue state. He gathers up all the paperwork and flings it into the corner of the basement, where it bursts into flames, blasting them both with heat. Out of the ashes rises what Richie can only assume is the leper, dragging itself closer towards Eddie. Eddie screams, so Richie does, too, but then Eddie launches himself forwards, wrapping his hands around the leper’s throat and shoving him to the ground.

“Kill him, Eddie,” Richie encourages him, because it really looks like Eddie might be able to do it. All these years, all those deaths, and yet, somehow, Eddie’s got his hands around It’s throat right now, and It’s shrinking. Eddie laughs, deliriously, but then It makes eye contact with Richie over Eddie’s shoulder and jerks Its hand in his direction, and Richie chokes, his chest suddenly feeling like a tin can getting crushed. He falls to his knees, hands scrabbling at his chest and his throat as his lungs struggle to expand. Wheezing, gasping, he catches himself on one hand over the ground.

“Richie, Richie, it’s okay, look at me,” Eddie shouts from across the room. “Richie!”

Richie wants to look up, but he can’t, still wheezing and failing to pull any air into his lungs. He tips, then falls, slamming into his side on the basement floor and clutching at his chest as he slowly suffocates. He’s got tears in his eyes, partly for the pain and partly for the loss, the fear of his kids growing up without him, and he kicks out against a creature that isn’t there to hit, but he tries anyways.

Eddie falls to his knees at Richie’s side, tipping his head up and pressing their mouths together, forcing air into his lungs. Richie gasps, air finally slipping in through his throat, but then he coughs, feeling like something’s lodged in his chest. He shifts, getting onto his hands and knees and coughing; whatever it is slips up from his lungs into his throat, and he gags before it falls out of his mouth.

“What the fuck is that,” Richie rasps weakly. Eddie pulls his sleeve over his hand and lifts the object up without touching it with his bare skin.

“It’s my inhaler,” Eddie tells him. Richie coughs again, trying to breathe properly and still struggling. The leper-creature in the corner snarls at them.

“Too bad you spent all your time choking here in Derry,” It spits at them. Richie doesn’t know which of them It means, but he supposes it could apply to either of them. “You’re just going to choke again. Scaredy-cat Kaspbrak and Trashmouth Tozier—”

“Shut up,” Eddie interrupts, standing up and advancing on It.

“The comic relief for the Losers’ Club,” It says, morphing into a smaller, twisted version of Pennywise, his proportions all off, his skin drooping off his frame. “The funny guys, easy for a laugh and easier to lose—”

“Shut up!” Eddie shouts, running at him and trying to grab him, but Pennywise is gone, in the next beat. Richie flips onto his back, still panting as he stares up at a bare bulb swinging from the basement ceiling.

“Guess it’s my turn now,” Richie manages. Eddie jogs back over to him and offers him a hand up, hauling him to his feet. “I think I know where It wants me to go.”

“I’m not sure we should go,” Eddie says. He looks around the room, then grabs a jar off the shelf and hands it to Richie. “There, that’s your token, just use that.”

Richie raises an eyebrow as he holds the dusty jar up. “Eds, this means nothing to me.”

“I don’t know if we should go chasing the thing that just choked you with my inhaler, Richie!” Eddie exclaims. “I mean, call me fucking crazy, but that seems like a pretty stupid idea, don’t you think?”

Richie waits, then says, “I need my token, Eds. This won’t work otherwise.”

Eddie looks like he’s going to get worked up again, but then he looks at the inhaler in his hand and visibly deflates. He sighs, then says, “Alright, yeah. Fine, fine! Where do we have to go?”

The walk to the arcade is just as familiar as the walk to the Clubhouse, if not moreso, because Richie had been going to the arcade since he was old enough to escape his house once his parents really got into it with him or with each other. The arcade is closed for good, which is probably for the best, since the owner was a shithead and the place smells like piss just as much as it had back then.

Still, though. Some of Richie’s best memories were in this arcade. It’s hard to see it die.

Richie breaks into the place just like he used to at night, when they were closed and he didn’t want to bother any of the Losers sneaking in their windows at two in the morning, but he still needed something to focus on or he’d go insane. There’s still a few games and an old coin machine, and Richie goes to the thing, slipping in a quarter to get a token in return.

“A literal token,” Eddie comments, as Richie lifts the token up out of the tray. “Figures.”

“Yeah, figures,” Richie replies. He flips the token between his fingers and remembers what it had been like that summer, looking a boy in the eye and thinking maybe this is okay for ten seconds before Bowers was screaming fairy and faggot at him. Richie hadn’t had a comeback for things like that, in those days. He’d just been so paralyzed by the fear that somebody really knew, that it was the truth and not just insults to sling like any other barb, like pussy or fuckface, any of the other cruel, but less personal, things Bowers had shouted at him. He didn’t even get screamed at all that much for the Jewish thing, not like Stan did, since he barely ever even went to temple.

The gay thing, though. He had always been terrified of getting called out on the gay thing.

“Richie?” Eddie asks. Richie shakes his head, shoving the token in his pocket.

“Just thinking about it,” Richie says. “And It. That summer.”

“Did you see It in here?” Eddie asks, leaning back to look around the corner into the theater. Richie reaches a hand out, because he needs him. Eddie takes it without a second thought, like it was on instinct. The thirteen-year-old Richie who got called a faggot in here with increasing regularity throughout his teen years never would’ve believed he’d end up here, with Eddie Kaspbrak, of all people.

“I love you,” Richie says.

“That’s not an answer,” Eddie replies, “but I love you, too.”

“I didn’t see It in here,” Richie tells him. “I just thought I’d be able to find a token here.”

“You’re hilarious.” Eddie kisses the back of his hand, then drops it to go over and examine a line of dust along the old Street Fighter game. “Did you actually ever end up seeing It? I remember you saying you hadn’t.”

Richie looks out the broken glass of the arcade window, jagged and foggy with age. He can see Paul Bunyan on the town common outside, looming tall in the blue afternoon sky; despite the sunshine, he feels freezing cold.

“I saw It,” Richie says. He leads Eddie back outside and across the street to the small park, looking up at Paul Bunyan with his hands in his pockets. Eddie stands beside him, clearly waiting for him to speak. He keeps looking between Richie and the statue like he’ll be able to glean the meaning by sight alone.

“Did you see It here?” Eddie finally prompts, impatient as ever.

“That summer,” Richie says, even though he’s never told anyone this, “the statue— It attacked me.”

“Paul Bunyan attacked you?” Eddie asks. He’s not disbelieving, just horrified, thankfully taking this as seriously as Richie had hoped he would. They’re both nervously eyeballing Paul Bunyan now.

“When I was little, before that summer, I sort of had a crush on Paul Bunyan,” Richie confesses, all in one breath. Eddie turns to him with one eyebrow lifted. “Alright, look, he’s huge and hot and super-masculine, that’s not the point—”

“Paul Bunyan turned you on?” Eddie asks incredulously. He looks back up at the statue again, appraising. “You got a lumberjack thing, Rich?”

“Shut up,” Richie replies. Eddie reaches down and takes his hand tightly. “It screamed at me and chased me. Tried to kill me. I…” Richie trails off, unsure how to phrase exactly how he’d felt that day. “After he went away, I almost went to your house.”

“Yeah?” Eddie asks. “Why didn’t you?”

“I figured you were still mad at me,” Richie says. “I was still mad at me for letting you get hurt. I always said I wouldn’t let you get hurt, and then you broke your fucking arm, and Pennywise almost got you, I— I didn’t know what I’d do without you, Eds. Not even then.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Eddie says. Richie glances behind them, making sure nobody is looking before he kisses the top of Eddie’s head and lets him go.

“Instead of going to your house, I went down to the Kissing Bridge,” Richie tells him. “And I—”

A guy shoulder-checks Eddie, shoving him hard enough that he stumbles back into Richie. He’s only got a second to catch Eddie before the stranger’s shoving a piece of paper in his hand and saying, “Watch your back, hot stuff.”

“Watch where you’re fucking going, you dickbag,” Eddie shouts after the guy. He looks back over his shoulder, and his entire face is dripping wet and rotting, torn apart. Eddie gags, then spits, “Oh, holy fuck, what was that?”

“Eddie,” Richie says, his hands shaking as he looks down at the memorial card in his hands. It’s got his own face and name on it, says that he’s going to die this year. He flips it over and starts skimming what’s written about him, his eyes catching on where it says “his repulsive inclinations toward homosexuality and deviance emerged,” and then he hears It’s voice.

“Hiya there, Trashmouth,” Pennywise says, all fucked up and warped, and Richie shrieks, looking up to where Pennywise is sitting on Paul Bunyan’s shoulder. Eddie looks up and apparently sees It, too, because he shrinks backwards. “Finally told Eds your dirty little secret?”

“Shut up, fuck off,” Richie snaps up at him. Pennywise has a massive handful of balloons, all floating high above him; Richie’s transfixed by them.

“Did you tell him how dirty you are inside, Richie?” Pennywise asks. He stands, then pushes off of the statue, hopping down and floating to the ground with the balloons. “Did you tell Eddie how dirty you made him? How you made him this way—”

“Stop,” Eddie shouts over Pennywise, “I knew I was gay, like, way before that—”

“And you, Eddie,” Pennywise says. He lands on his feet in front of them, releasing the balloons. Instead of floating away, though, they just hovered, surrounding them and the fucking clown. Richie pushes Eddie behind him, trying to put himself in between Eddie and Pennywise as best as he could. “You let dirty Richie Tozier touch you with his dirty, sick hands? Let him—”

Richie shoves at Pennywise, but Pennywise grabs him by the throat, sharp nails digging into his flesh. Richie gasps, shoving at him, trying to choke him like Eddie had, but he can’t find his neck. He smacks at Pennywise’s wrists.

“Eddie,” Richie gasps, pulling uselessly at Pennywise’s wrists. There’s a hard thwack, and then Pennywise is gone, stumbling backwards from an unknown assailant. When Richie manages to breathe again, he sees Eddie standing over them both with a branch torn from a tree near them.

“Fuck off,” Eddie snarls, and Pennywise vanishes, shrinking away and blowing into the wind like dust. Eddie tosses the branch aside and helps Richie stand up straight again, cupping his face in his hands and looking him over.

“I’m okay,” Richie tells him. Eddie clearly doesn’t believe him, dragging him by the hand out of the park and back towards their rental car.

“Fuck this shit,” Eddie says. “Fuck this. Fuck it. We’re going back to the Townhouse, we’re going to pack up our shit, we’re going to get the others and kill It once and for all, and then we’re going to go the fuck home. I am done.”

“Sounds good to me,” Richie agrees, exhausted and strained. Eddie kisses the back of his hand again over the center console over the rental car before he drives.

Richie uses the car ride back to the Townhouse to get a grip. He’s seen Pennywise twice in an hour, and it’s not doing his forty-year-old heart any favors, but at least now he knows he’s not insane. If they get back to the Townhouse, regroup, perform the ritual, and kill It, they’ll be free. That’s it. That’s all they need to do. They’re seven forty-year-old semi-healthy adults; they can kill one fucked-up clown thing.

He stares at Eddie in the early afternoon sun, watching it flicker across his face as he drives. Eddie glances at him partway through the drive, a small smile ticking up at the corners of his lips.

“What’re you looking at?” Eddie asks.

“My husband,” Richie tells him. “Got a problem with that?”

“I will if you distract me and I crash the car,” Eddie replies. Richie smiles a little, but he doesn’t laugh; he’s still thinking about the smashed front end of their car back at home, from where Eddie had crashed when Mike called him.

“Maybe we’ll be home by tonight,” Richie says hopefully. He doesn’t fully believe it, but he’s hopeful. There really can’t be all that much they can do. The sooner they’re done here, the fucking better. Richie’s looking forward to getting back to his kids and his normal life; he’s looking forward, too, to introducing the Losers to his adult life, and being introduced to theirs, learning who they are as adults and loving them properly for the first time in decades.

Richie laments the fact that he doesn’t have any of his CDs, settling instead for flipping through the radio stations until he finds Cher singing “If I Could Turn Back Time” and he has no choice but to stop and grin at Eddie.

“One of your favorites,” Richie comments. Eddie rolls his eyes, but he’s already humming along. He had had the entire Heart of Stone album on cassette when they were kids, when it came out in ‘89. Richie had given it to him as an Easter present, in spite of the fact that he, himself, did not celebrate Easter.

In the Townhouse, Ben and Bev are sitting on the stairs, speaking softly to each other. Richie kicks the front door shut behind himself and Eddie, startling the two of them apart, but Ben leans back in, in the next moment.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Richie tells them. “We’re just gonna get our shit together so we can bounce A.S.A.P. after we kill this stupid fucking clown.”

“Don’t mind us,” Eddie says, stepping around them up the stairs. Richie follows suit, winking back at Bev over his shoulder as he goes. Eddie just rolls his eyes at him as he unlocks the door to their room. “Get the toiletries, I’ll start folding our clothes.”

“You don’t need to fold them, Eds, they’re just gonna get all rattled around anyways,” Richie calls to him. He snatches the toiletry bag from the floor by the bathroom door and starts gathering their things. Eddie’s already managed to unpack all of it, somehow, so Richie has to find toothbrushes and shampoo bottles and medications from all over the bathroom.

He hears the shower curtain move behind him, and he frowns, setting their medication bottles upright carefully in the bottom of the bag, how Eddie prefers them.

“Can you grab your body wash while you’re over there?” Richie asks. Eddie doesn’t respond, so Richie turns. “Eddie?”

It’s not Eddie. It’s a man Richie doesn’t recognize— Or, maybe he does, but then the guy’s stabbing a knife into the juncture of his shoulder and his neck. It’s a hot thrust of pain, and Richie screams, stumbling backwards into the wall. Eddie skids into the bathroom.

“What the fuck is— Who the fuck is this—” Eddie’s shouting, but Richie can’t see him. He’s too focused on yanking the knife out of his own shoulder, but it gets stuck on something inside his shoulder when it’s halfway out. After that, he can’t pull it out the rest of the way; it hurts too badly.

“Eddie, Eddie,” Richie says urgently. The guy turns around again, and Richie recognizes him. “Holy fuck. Bowers.”

It is Bowers, Richie realizes with a jolt, except he looks like shit after being in jail since the ‘80s, if memory serves (and it hasn’t in years, so, who’s to say). Bowers advances on Richie, but he just ducks under his arms and shoves Eddie back through the doorway, slamming the bathroom door behind himself.

“Holy shit, Richie, holy fuck, you’re hurt,” Eddie says, the words spilling out of his mouth. Richie holds the door closed with one hand, his other arm hurting too much from the knife in his shoulder, but it’s too much when Bowers starts yanking on the knob on the other side.

“Take the knife out, Eddie,” Richie tells him. Eddie looks up at him with wide eyes, blanching so aggressively that his face looks as white as bone. “Eddie, take it out.”

“You’re going to bleed out,” Eddie snaps. “I’m not taking it out—”

“If you take it out,” Richie whispers, and Eddie finally focuses on him, listening, “I’ll open the door and you can stab him when he comes through. Okay?”

Eddie stares up at him for a long moment before he nods vigorously. He steps up, wrapping his hand tentatively around the hilt of the knife in Richie’s flesh. His first pull is too gentle, and all it does is make Richie nearly vomit at their feet.

“Fuck, sorry, I’m sorry,” Eddie hisses. He exhales, centering himself, then yanks the knife out in one swift, hard movement, like he’s ripping off a bandaid. Richie bites back the pained sound that wants to come out of his throat as he wrenches the bathroom door open. Bowers staggers out, and Eddie leaps on him.

Richie just slides to the ground, trying to cover the bleeding wound near his neck with one hand as Bowers’ body falls beside him. He looks over at him and his slit throat, then tips his head back to look up at Eddie where he’s standing over the corpse of their childhood tormentor, his chest heaving, the knife in his hand dripping blood down his wrist.

“Eddie,” Richie says. Eddie doesn’t move, so Richie says again, louder, “Eddie,” and Eddie’s eyes finally shift to lock onto Richie’s.

“Oh, shit,” Eddie says, tossing the knife aside. There’s a pounding on their bedroom door, but Richie can’t make himself focus past Eddie’s hands on his shoulder, pulling Richie’s shirt aside so he can see the wound better.

“Richie!” Bev shouts on the other side of the door. “Eddie! Eddie, answer the door, we heard the screaming! Eddie, come on!”

Richie waves Eddie off, pushing at him so he’ll stand and let Bev in. He keeps his hand clamped over the knife wound, though, blood pulsing out around his fingers and drenching his shirt. When Eddie opens the door, Bev and Ben all but spill inside, nearly falling to the bloodied hotel carpet underneath them.

“Oh, my God,” Bev says through her fingers, dropping to her knees beside Richie to examine his knife wound. Ben steps around them to examine Bowers’ corpse, kneeling down closely beside him. Richie makes the mistake of looking over at Bowers, at his open, dead eyes staring back at him, and it makes his stomach churn.

“Can someone— Can you close his eyes?” Richie asks. Ben frowns down at him, and Richie shakes his head, unable to look away from Bowers’ eyes. “Please, Ben.”

“Rich, you’re bleeding, you have to stop talking,” Bev tells him. “You’re just making it worse.”

Richie’s still staring into Bowers’ eyes. He’s seeing him on a loop, advancing on him with the knife in his hands, over and over. It’s overlaid with moments from their childhood: Bowers screaming faggot at him, Bowers trying to drown him in the river that one time, Bowers pushing him in that ditch and breaking his collarbone when he was ten. Henry fucking Bowers has tormented them all their lives, and Eddie killed him.

Eddie killed him.

Eddie killed him.

Richie gags again, then turns away, vomiting in the bathroom doorway. Bev’s hand rubs over his back too hard for comfort, but he appreciates her closeness nonetheless. She disappears, in the next moment, in favor of Eddie.

“Is it bad?” Richie asks quietly. He still feels sick, so he shuts his eyes as Eddie cleans his wound and bandages it shut.

“It’ll be okay,” Eddie tells him. The butterfly closures are tight on Richie’s sensitive skin, sticking to his body hair in a way that’ll hurt like a motherfucker to rip off later. Richie realizes, with a lurch, that there may not be a later, and he’s sick again.

“Where did Bill go?” Ben asks, while Richie’s emptying his stomach contents on the bathroom’s tile floor and Bev is turning Bowers’ face into the carpet with her small hands so Richie doesn’t have to look at him.

“He said he had to go to the carnival,” Bev tells him. There’s a beat of silence, and then Bev says, “Neibolt—”

“We have to find him,” Ben says. Eddie pulls Richie’s face into his hands and looks him in the eye, but it’s not a hard look; it’s one of the softest looks Eddie has ever given him, and Richie wants to hide inside of it.

“Are you okay?” Eddie asks. Richie nods, even though it’s not true.

“Are you?” he asks. Eddie shakes his head. Richie pulls him in, kissing Eddie’s cheek, his temple, and his hair as he goes, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he embraces Eddie as tightly as he can manage from the floor. “It’s okay. You were just— It was self-defense.”

“I killed him,” Eddie says. He looks at the corpse and says, “I killed Bowers, Richie. And I don’t…” Eddie starts, then stops. He exhales shakily and adds, “I don’t feel… that bad. About it.”

“Nor should you,” Richie says, trying to settle into his normal self. He feels adrift, in the too-solemn room; trying to joke might at least make it all feel more real and less terrifying. “This is the same guy who made me literally eat his shit when I was nine years old. Don’t feel bad for him.”

Eddie laughs, funny enough, and hugs Richie again, rocking him a little bit when he digs his fingers into Richie’s back. Richie clings to him in return until Ben sheepishly asks them if they can go find Bill.

Richie mostly stifles noises of pain the entire way to the house on Neibolt Street. He turns up the radio, finding them an oldies station that plays Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do For You,” “The Promise” by When in Rome, and then Bryan Adams again with “Summer of ‘69.” Richie’s quiet through them until, halfway through “Summer of ‘69,” he says, “We need to make sure one of us makes it out alive.”

Eddie clutches the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles go white. “We’re not discussing this.”

“We have to—”

“We don’t,” Eddie cuts him off. “Nobody’s going to die.”

“You almost died last time, and I’m not letting you die this time,” Richie says. The car is silent again for a moment, Bryan Adams singing faintly at them. Eddie’s nearly shaking with emotion, too charged to keep it together.

“So, you mean we need to make sure I make it out alive,” Eddie grinds out.

“In a perfect world, I mean, we’d both be fine,” Richie says. Eddie stares ahead hard at the road. “But if something happens, I— I think it should be you. That we should prioritize you.”

“This is literally insane, I’m not agreeing to this,” Eddie snaps at him. “I’m not agreeing to just let you die, Richie. I’m going to do literally anything to stop you from dying, I don’t know why you seem to think I’m just going to give up on you.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you die,” Richie says, raising his own voice and sitting up, ignoring the pain in his neck as he does. “You can’t ask me to do that, Eddie.”

“Oh, but you can ask—”

“Yes,” Richie interrupts, “I can, yeah, because the kids need you—”

“They need you—”

“Stop, stop,” Richie exclaims. The two of them go quiet again, Eddie’s chest heaving as he catches his breath, his face all red with anger. “I’m sorry. It’s not what I meant.”

“I’m not going to let you die,” Eddie says again, firmly. After a beat, he says, “But I get it. We’ll— I make sure. If anything happens to you, I’ll get back to them. Okay?”

“Same here,” Richie says. He reaches out, taking one of Eddie’s hands and pulling it off the steering wheel to kiss the back of it. Eddie scratches underneath Richie’s chin before putting his hands back on the wheel, forever just as anal as he was when he was learning to drive in the first place. If nothing else, Richie’s just so happy he gets his childhood memories of Eddie back.

Sure as shit, Bill’s standing outside the house on Neibolt Street, having a shouting argument with Mike. Eddie parks haphazardly in the street behind Ben and Bev and Richie follows them up to the house at a weak jog, his shoulder throbbing. Stan’s sitting on the stairs of the house, watching Bill and Mike argue with tired eyes that flit over to Richie when he gets there.

“Whoa, whoa, what the fuck’s going on here?” Richie loudly interrupts. Bill and Mike are glaring at each other, both looking infuriated. “What the fuck happened?”

“Mike w-w-w-won’t let me go in,” Bill snaps.

“He wants to go in by himself,” Mike explains. Richie raises an eyebrow at Bill.

“Yeah, fucking obviously not, Big Bill,” Richie says. “Don’t be stupid. We’re doing this together.”

“I’m n-n-not letting you all die like I l-let George die,” Bill says. He goes to push past Richie, shoving the heel of his hand into his bandaged knife wound, and Richie hisses, doubling over. Bill grabs him, saying, “Fuck, I’m s-s-sorry, what—”

“I killed Bowers,” Eddie says. They all look at him, standing by the gate out into the street. His eyes flick over the house, and then he swallows, looking back down at Richie and Bill. “I want to kill the clown, too.”

“Then let’s do it,” Richie agrees. He lets Bill help him straighten up before he says, “Let’s kill this fucking clown.”

They’re not as ready for the ritual as Richie had hoped they would be. It’s easy for them to get back down into the sewers, working on muscle memory from when they had been here as children. They track through the greywater in the tunnels until they get to the caverns, swimming into Pennywise’s cave; it’s only there that Mike finally pulls the artifact out of his knapsack and sets it on the ground in between them all, settled on a low rock. Pennywise’s fucked-up stone nest is some stupid bullshit, but the sooner they get this done, the sooner Richie’s back home with Eddie and their kids.

“We have to sacrifice our tokens,” Mike says. He lights a match and drops it in the artifact, pulling out his own token first. It’s a bloody rock, and he holds it up to Bev, who smiles. Stan tosses in a feather; Bev has an old postcard; Ben has some weird yearbook page he kept in his wallet like a freak; Bill has a paper boat with S.S. Georgie on the side. Eddie takes the penultimate sacrifice, and Richie goes last, flipping his token in like it’s a magic trick.

It doesn’t go right. Something’s wrong with the ritual, and they try to capture It, but they’re thrown back against the walls of the cavern as Pennywise swells and grows into an enormous, grotesque creature, covered in scorpion-tails and spider-legs. Eddie stumbles when he’s running, and Richie puts himself in between him and Pennywise. The Deadlights come spinning down, whirling around Pennywise’s head, and then they shoot through his mouth and catch Richie’s eyes.

Richie blinks. The cavern’s gone, but he’s in his childhood bedroom. When he looks down at his hands, he feels small and weak, smaller than he has in years; his heart jumps into his throat when he hears a footstep outside his bedroom door. One of the floorboards creaks in the hall. Richie recognizes his father’s tread.

“Richie,” his father calls through the door. The knob rattles, the entire door shaking. “Richard, open the damn door—”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit,” Richie curses under his breath. He scrambles out of his bed, looking for a place to hide. His mother’s footsteps come down the hallway, too, and then the door is crashing in. Richie spins on his heel just as his father launches himself at him.

“Dirty Richie came home,” his mother taunts him from the doorway. His dad hits him hard enough to knock his head back into the floor. Richie kicks at him, but Wentworth Tozier is back in a heartbeat, punching Richie’s jaw and cracking the knob of the bone. Richie manages to swing back, this time, kicking his parents back through the door and locking it behind them.

He can’t figure out where he can hide, because he feels like he’s too big for his childhood bedroom. The bed is too small to hide under, and he can’t fit himself behind the dresser, so instead he wrenches his closet door open—

—to find Eddie inside.

“Eddie,” Richie whispers. Eddie turns and looks at him, but his eyes are a fucked-up piss-yellow.

“Welcome back to the closet, Richie,” It-Eddie says. Richie screams and slams the door, leaning up against it to keep it shut. Pennywise pounds against it, trying to shove through, but Richie refuses to move. There’s a tiny plink, then. Richie frowns, looking around to find it in the nightmare. His bedroom door is rattling, and Pennywise is pounding on his closet door, but there’s another plink: a pebble against his bedroom window.

Richie runs to the window, throwing it open and leaning out. Eddie is standing below, with the dark eyes Richie has known and loved since they were babies, and he calls up, “Eddie, we have to go, you’re stuck but we can go, come on—”

Eddie reaches up, and the house folds in half, rushing towards the ground with a dizzying speed. It’s surreal, as the house collapses and they clasp hands, Eddie’s mouth finding Richie’s to kiss him deeply. Richie blinks again, and he’s back in the cavern with the Losers.

Eddie’s kissing him here, too, pulling him back out of the Deadlights just like Ben had done for Bev all those years ago. Richie grips Eddie’s wrists and kisses him back just as hard. When he opens his eyes again, he sees the giant monster that Pennywise has become whirling on them, lifting up one claw and aiming for Eddie. Richie screams.

In one moment, Eddie is kissing Richie, ignoring the blood pouring from his nose and his ears so he can try and yank him back out of the Deadlights. In the next moment, Richie is gasping awake and kissing him back. In the last moment, though, Richie’s screaming and running to the side, dragging Eddie with him.

As they’re running, one of Pennywise’s claws comes hurtling through the air to pierce the stone ground beside where they had just been standing. Eddie stares at the crack in the rock, his chest heaving, as Pennywise retracts his claw and aims again.

“Eddie, move!” Richie shouts. Eddie takes off at a sprint. He was always the fastest of the seven of them, and it’s no exception now. He can hear Richie following close behind him, his boots pounding on the stone, but then his footsteps abruptly stop. Eddie whirls around to see Pennywise hoisting Richie up into the air, his claws wrapped around his body and piercing through his clothes into his skin as Richie wriggles to get free.

“Richie!” Eddie calls up to him.

“Eddie, go,” Richie tells him, but Pennywise grabs him anyways, his claws sinking into Eddie’s sides. Richie sobs once, then starts speaking so fast even Eddie is having a hard time understanding him, begging, “Don’t take Eddie, take me, please take me, don’t kill him, kill me, please, please—”

Pennywise surveys him for a moment before turning to Eddie and opening his mouth. Eddie can see rows and rows of sharp, jagged teeth, and he inhales sharply, his heart pounding. He becomes acutely aware of the fact that he’s about to die.

“No!” Richie screams, his voice hoarse like he’s torn his throat. Pennywise’s teeth come down, but Richie worms his way half-out of Pennywise’s claws, knocking his head aside. Instead of Pennywise tearing into Eddie’s face and throat, he catches him by the arm instead, ripping it off. Eddie stares down at the empty space his elbow was supposed to be for a moment before the pain hits, and he starts screaming, too, the worst searing agony he’s ever felt shooting through the jagged end of his arm.

Richie’s still shouting something, tearing into Pennywise’s face with his nails until Pennywise drops both of them. Richie reaches out, yanking Eddie in and curling up around him so his side hits the ground first. He can hear something crack, but it’s something of Richie’s, so he can’t tell what it is. It’s only seconds before Richie is rolling Eddie onto his back to examine his arm.

“Hey, hey, it’s gonna be okay, you’re going to be okay,” Richie tells him. When Eddie looks down, he can see through the blood that his arm ends only halfway down his upper arm, now, and it makes him groan, his head falling back as tears stream openly down his face. Richie cups his face in his hands and forces him to make eye contact.

“Rich,” Eddie says tiredly. Richie yanks his jacket off and balls it up, wrapping it around the end of Eddie’s arm to staunch the bleeding. “Rich—”

“I gotcha,” Richie tells him. “I gotcha, Eds, no worries, I’m not gonna—”

A spray of blood hits Eddie in the face, and he slams his eyes shut, gasping. When he blinks them back open, Richie’s got one of Pennywise’s claws torn right through his chest and stomach, holding him still above Eddie. Richie’s hands touch the claw tentatively as he frowns down at it.

“Eddie,” Richie murmurs. He looks up, and Eddie’s entire world turns inside out as he coughs and blood bubbles up out of his mouth. Eddie reaches up with his left hand, his only hand, and grabs onto Richie’s shirt.

“Richie, no—” Eddie says, but then Richie’s gone, hurtling through the air on the end of Pennywise’s claw before he’s being flung at the wall, cracking his head back against the stone and crumpling into a heap on the ground. Eddie screams, trying to roll up onto his left side to get over to him. He can hear Bev screaming, too, and Stan keeps saying Richie’s name; a strong arm comes around Eddie’s shoulders, hauling him up, and Eddie looks up through the tears and blood to see Ben.

“Let’s go, Eddie, come on, let’s go,” Ben says. Eddie tries to fight his way free, but he’s losing too much blood; he can feel himself weakening, but Richie still isn’t moving, and he needs to get to Richie. Fuck Derry and fuck Pennywise and fuck the Losers, actually; fuck everyone and everything that isn’t Richie, because Richie needs him and if he— if he dies, Eddie will just— It’s not an option. It’s not an option.

“Richie, we need to get to  Richie,” Eddie says. Ben shakes his head. “We have to—”

“We need to get to Mike and figure out what we’re going to—”

“We can choke it!” Eddie exclaims. He remembers It, in the basement of the pharmacy; he remembers hitting it with the branch on the town common. “We can kill it. We just have to make it small, we have to make it small, tell Mike—”

Ben deposits Eddie leaning against the wall behind a rock outcropping. The second he’s gone, Eddie’s dragging himself across the ground, half-limping, half-crawling to where Richie’s still slumped over in a heap. When he gets to him, he cups Richie’s face in his hand, lifting his head; Richie’s eyes are shut. Eddie sobs again.

“Richie, wake up,” Eddie demands. It’s wrong, to have Richie all silent and boneless like this. Eddie finds Richie’s glasses on the ground and slips them back on his face, just so he looks more like himself. He’s got a gash and an explosion of bruises across his face from hitting the wall, but Eddie can’t look away from the mess of his chest. Pennywise’s claw tore him open front-to-back, shredding muscle and bone like tissue paper. Eddie can’t stop staring inside Richie’s abdomen, for a second, before he forces himself to move.

Eddie doesn’t give a shit about his own arm, yanking Richie’s jacket off the end of it to push it into Richie’s chest to stop the bleeding. He can hear the other Losers shouting at Pennywise behind him, and then there’s a hand on his shoulder.

“Eddie, we need you,” Mike tells him. Eddie shakes his head, looking back down at Richie. Without even asking or needing to be asked, Mike ducks down, helping Eddie lift Richie with one arm around each of their shoulders. Richie half-wakes up, looking blearily at Eddie with a faraway stare as he’s dragged closer to Pennywise.

They ridicule Pennywise to death, which feels like an unfitting end to the creature that’s responsible for Eddie missing an entire fucking arm right now and Richie bleeding to death propped up against a stalagmite. Stan’s bleeding from a gash in his face, too, and Ben is limping; Bev is holding her side when she watches Mike lift Pennywise’s heart out of his chest, her eyes sparkling as he crushes it between his fingers. Richie even laughs weakly, watching from his place leaning against the rock until Pennywise is finally dead.

When Bill and Mike kiss, Eddie skirts around them to catch Richie before he can fall entirely to the ground. He guides him down, then kneels beside him, Richie’s head in his lap, his hair falling in bloody tangles across his face.

“Rich, hey, Richie, we got him,” Eddie tells him. “We can go home now, let’s go home.”

“Eddie,” Richie says, his voice so rasping and quiet that Eddie has to fall silent just to hear him. The others are silent, too, none of them so much as breathing as Richie tangles his hands up in Eddie’s ripped shirt. “Eds, I think I’m done for.”

“Don’t fucking say that,” Eddie snaps at him. He starts to stand up, but Richie pulls at him, tugging him back down.

“I love you,” Richie tells him urgently. “I want you to go home and take care of our kids for me, okay? And I want you to be happy—”

“Richie—”

“And you have to go now,” Richie says. His eyes are shining when he looks up at Eddie. He cups Eddie’s face in his hands and says, “Eddie, I need you to go right now. If you don’t leave now you’re going to die, but I’m going to die anyways, so you need to go now.”

Eddie understands, suddenly, that Richie means go without him, and he shakes his head, a sob catching in his throat as he says, “No, no, I’m not leaving here without you.”

“I’m not asking,” Richie says, shoving at him. Eddie feels Mike’s hand on his arm, but he tears away from him, falling back into Richie. “Don’t make me White Fang you, Eds.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Eddie tells him. “I’m never fucking leaving you behind here again.”

Richie shakes his head, but Eddie drags him up anyways.

“Eddie, honey, he’s dying,” Bev says. “We need to go—”

“Listen to her,” Richie begs. Ben runs to Eddie, helping him get Richie on his feet all over again. Mike hesitates, then joins them, kneeling down so they can drape Richie over his back, since he’s the only one tall enough to carry him. He hooks his hands under Richie’s legs and sets off. Richie’s blood drips down their legs on the way, a Hansel-and-Gretel path through the caverns and caves back to the bottom of the well.

“Leave me here,” Richie says, as they’re about to climb up the well. Eddie kisses Richie hard, tasting pennies and sewer water and stomach acid. He’s terrified he’ll never be able to kiss Richie again, though, so he does it a second time anyways. “Eds, just let—”

“We have never given up on each other before,” Eddie interrupts him. Richie looks at him tiredly over Mike’s shoulder. “I’m certainly not about to fucking start now, Richie.”

Richie starts crying all over again. Mike has to readjust his grip when they start climbing up the well, and Richie passes out, all dead weight hanging off Mike’s back. Mike doesn’t even break pace. Eddie can feel himself getting dizzy the further they go, but he can’t take his eyes off Richie; he keeps his one hand on Richie’s back until he needs it to climb. Bill helps him, pushing him up one rung at a time.

They get out of the house on Neibolt Street with only seconds to spare; the entire thing collapses in on itself just as they make it out into the street. Mike falls to his knees, Richie sliding off him to his side and falling to the road. Eddie falls down beside him, turning Richie’s face towards him, ducking his head down to begin CPR. His arm throbs with pain, but he keeps working anyways, until Richie’s heart is beating, even if he’s not awake still.

Eddie looks down at his own arm, the pulses of blood washing across his leg where he’s sitting up in the road. He tips over, too, laying down next to Richie so their foreheads press together on the gravel. There, he shuts his eyes and exhales, too tired for anything else.

Time moves in fits and starts. He hears Bev crying, and then he’s being moved, and, next thing he knows, he’s in a building, then a new room, then another new room. After a while, there’s no pain; he can feel sensation, like a hand in his and dull tugging on the wound that was once his arm, but that’s all. It doesn’t bother him. He feels separate from it all. It’s probably the first time in his entire life that he’s just been completely unbothered.

It’s not until whatever pain medication they gave him starts to wear off that Eddie begins to understand where he is. He’s in a hospital, but he’s not sure which one; he assumes he’s still in Derry, but he could be in Bangor or, fuck, maybe they’ve airlifted him as far as Portland or Augusta, it’s possible he was bad enough or Richie was bad eno—

Richie, Eddie thinks, desperate, and forces his eyes open. The hospital room he’s in is dimmed to dark and nearly empty, save for Bill and Mike, curled up in chairs beside each other next to his bed. He reaches out for them, smacking at them with his left hand— his only hand— until they wake up.

“Guys, guys,” Eddie says. Mike wakes up first, eyes opening slowly as he yawns. He has a bandage on one arm, and Bill has stitches on his forehead, but they look okay otherwise.

“Eds, hey,” Mike says, standing up and grabbing Eddie’s hand. He turns back, says, “Hey, Bill, look who’s up.”

Bill squints at Eddie, then his face breaks open into a wide grin, and Eddie catches himself smiling back, because it’s Bill. He’s never been able to resist smiling with Bill.

Mike leans in and hugs Eddie tightly, then Bill does the same, swaying him back and forth a little bit before pulling back.

“Where’s Richie?” Eddie asks, because he’s waited an entire minute and nobody has offered any information. Bill and Mike exchange a look, and Eddie instantly starts to panic. “Where— Is he alive? Please, guys, I— I need—”

“He’s alive, it’s okay,” Mike cuts him off. Eddie’s hyperventilating anyways, feeling his lungs squeeze together and his heart race. He can’t get enough air in, and Bill catches his face between his hands, looking down at him with such tenderness that Eddie starts to cry.

“He’s not awake yet,” Bill tells him. “They d-d-don’t know when he’ll wake up. He’s really b-bad, Eddie.”

Eddie wants to ask how bad, wants a detailed list of every single thing wrong with Richie so he can memorize it and fix it all himself, but the panic attack crests again and overwhelms him until he’s gasping for air, clutching tightly to Bill as Mike runs into the hall and calls for a nurse. Eddie’s sedated before he can successfully calm himself down, and then he’s asleep again.

The next time he wakes up, the room is brighter. He thinks it might be late morning. He tips his head to look around the room again, but it’s just Stan this time, sitting in a chair and scrolling through his phone, his glasses perched on the very end of his nose. He has a long bandage along the side of his face, his curly hair erupting out around it like it had after he’d been attacked in the house on Neibolt Street the first time, all those years ago.

“Stan,” Eddie says roughly. He clears his throat as Stan lifts his head and sets his phone aside, leaning in to take Eddie’s hand and squeeze it.

“You’re not allowed to freak out,” Stan tells him, half-stern and half-soft. Eddie nods once, exhausted even though he’s been sleeping for who knows how long. Stan takes the cue to sit on the edge of the bed beside him, stroking Eddie’s hair back from his face. “You’re okay, Eddie. It’ll be alright.”

Eddie nods again, still tired, turning his face into Stan’s side. Stan brushes his hand down Eddie’s right arm, over the bandaged-up end of it. Eddie shudders and says, again, “Stan.”

“Shh,” Stan murmurs, and Eddie does. “I know, Eddie.”

Eddie quiets, letting Stan just hold him for a moment as he tries to keep his breathing even. He only makes it a few seconds before he says, “Where’s Richie?”

“He’s got his own room in intensive care,” Stan tells him. “He’s had two surgeries, they’re prepping him for a third soon. None of us have been in to see him.”

Eddie can’t decide what he wants to ask first. A thousand thoughts run through his head as his face burns, the backs of his nose and eyes prickling as he finally manages to say, “Please say he’s not going to die, Stan.”

Stan rubs Eddie’s back and says, “He’s not going to die. He wouldn’t dare.”

Eddie wants to laugh, but he can’t. Instead, he turns his face into Stan’s chest and lets himself be held there until he remembers he should probably make some calls, first and foremost to their kids, even if he can’t tell them much of anything at all, even if it’s just to hear their voices.

“Dad?” Lola asks, as soon as Mrs. Ames passes the phone over to her. “Why didn’t you call us last night or this morning? I was worried sick.”

She sounds like a tiny version of Eddie at her age, which just makes him smile a little, now that he actually remembers again what he sounded like at her age.

“Sorry about that,” Eddie says. “Your dad and I were— Uhh, there was an accident, but everything’s going to be okay.”

Lola bursts into tears instantly, because she’s a soft and sensitive soul, but she quickly becomes inconsolable and the phone gets passed onto Lynn while Lola needs to be calmed down by Mrs. Ames.

“Are you okay, Dad?” Lynn asks over the phone. Hearing their voices makes Eddie relax back into Stan, shutting his eyes.

“I’m okay,” Eddie says. “I’m going to talk with Mrs. Ames about you guys coming out here, okay? You and your sisters are going to get to go on an airplane by yourselves.”

“Cool,” Lynn replies, non-committal. “Can I talk to Dad, too?”

“He’s not with me right now,” Eddie tells him, tears burning his face as he struggles to keep his voice even. “You’ll see him when you’re here, okay?”

“Okay,” Lynn says. “How long before we come home again?”

“I don’t know yet,” Eddie tells him. “But I love you. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay, Dad,” Lynn repeats. “Love you, too.”

“Tell your sisters, too,” Eddie says, and Lynn agrees and hangs up. Eddie has to call back and ask Lynn to give the phone over to Mrs. Ames so he can talk with her about getting the kids on a flight the next morning to come out to Maine. A nurse knocks on the door, and Stan takes over on the phone, pacing to the opposite end of the room and making arrangements for Eddie while the nurse explains to him how his arm is going to heal.

When the nurse is gone, and the flights are arranged, and Stan’s hung up the phone, Eddie feels completely useless. All he can think of to do is pick at the bandage around the end of his arm, and Stan keeps swatting his fingers away from it. Eventually, Stan climbs back into bed with Eddie and flips on the television, and they kill the time while Richie’s in surgery watching television. They watch The Devil Wears Prada, The Mummy, and three episodes of Hoarders before a different nurse comes to tell them Richie’s not dead.

It’s then that Eddie finds out Richie has head trauma, has had massive damage done to his abdomen and the organs inside it, and shattered bones in his legs, back, and one arm. He, like Eddie, had pierce marks along his side from Pennywise’s claws, all stitched up, now; Richie’s got lacerations on his face and his side, too, according to the nurse. He’s not allowed out of bed yet, so he can’t go to Richie, but it’s time for his pain medication anyways, and he falls asleep with his head on Stan’s chest.

He doesn’t wake up again until the next morning, but he actually feels semi-rested when he does, for the first time. Stan and Mike leave to pick up Eddie’s kids from the airport while Bill helps yet another nurse load Eddie into a wheelchair and take him to the ICU.

Ben and Bev are waiting there, and Bev bursts into tears again when she sees Eddie, falling to her knees and wrapping her arms around him, awkwardly bent over the arm of the wheelchair. Ben claps him on the shoulder and presses their foreheads together, tears in his eyes when he says, “I’ve missed you, man.”

“Good to see you, too,” Eddie tells him. “Is he— Have you seen him? How is he?”

“He’s alive,” Bev says. People keep saying that; Eddie hates it, every time. It means nothing anymore. “He’s still asleep. They’re waiting for him to wake up on his own.”

“Can I see him?” Eddie asks, and Ben and Bill flag down a nurse so they can get Eddie into Richie’s room. He’s the only one allowed in, though, so the nurse pushes him in in the wheelchair and sets him up next to Richie’s bed.

“Call for us if you need anything,” she says, and leaves him there. Eddie barely hears her; he doesn’t even register the click of the door shutting behind her as he left. He’s too focused on Richie.

Richie’s got a patch cut out of his hair where he has a stitched-up wound, black thread over his skin, and another line of stitches holding his face together. He’s asleep, his head tipped down to one side, a breathing tube threaded down his throat and through his nose, looped back around his ears. The worst part is the heavy bandaging around his abdomen and one shoulder, where Bowers’s stab wound was, his organs pieced back together before he’d been stapled and stitched back into one piece.

“Richie,” Eddie says softly. He can still hear Richie’s voice ringing in his ears, can hear him saying, “I want you to be happy.” There hadn’t been time, then, to reply how he’d wanted to, but now Eddie has the chance to say, “I’m only ever happy with you, Rich. That’s it. So you’ll have to come back.”

Eddie gets himself up and out of the wheelchair and into Richie’s bed, resting his head on Richie’s uninjured shoulder, his bare skin warm under Eddie’s cheek. He takes Richie’s glasses off the table attached to the bed, slipping them onto Richie’s face so he looks more like himself. After a beat, he grabs his phone from the wheelchair seat and opens up his music app. The first song he plays is “Linger” by the Cranberries, but the playlist he has on is the one he puts all the songs that make him think of Richie, so he just leaves it on shuffle and tangles his fingers in Richie’s hair while he listens to the music.

It’s almost like it had been over a decade ago, when Eddie would sit on the bathroom floor in his old apartment with Myra and listen to Richie’s songs over the radio, longing to have him there, to hear his voice and touch him. This is, strangely, almost no different.

“Cloudbusting” comes on next. Richie had always liked Kate Bush, when they were kids, Eddie remembers. It explains the Kate Bush records and CDs he still keeps now. Eddie closes his eyes, feeling Richie’s pulse pounding through his body, and rests with him, waiting for him to wake up.

Eddie wakes up first, to Stan knocking gently on the door and saying, “I’ve got some visitors for you.”

The door opens further, and Lola slips in past Stan, glancing shyly at him as she shuffles over to Eddie and throws herself into his hold. She pulls back after a brief moment, shocked, and touches the end of his arm. Her whole face creases up.

“It’s okay, honey,” Eddie tells her, but she’s already crying anyways. He rubs her back when Lynn stands beside her, shoving his head into Eddie’s hold on her. Mike has Ingrid, and Eddie has to get up off Richie’s bed so he can hold her properly with one arm, burying his face in her hair as she clings to him.

“Daddy,” Lola says mournfully, looking past Eddie to Richie in the bed. Mike helps him back into his wheelchair without having to put Ingrid down, since she refuses to let go of him now that she has him back.

The kids being there ends up being a good distraction, as the days go by and Richie still doesn’t wake up. Stan’s wife, Patty, comes up, and the two of them help take care of the kids at night at the Townhouse while Eddie and Richie are still confined to the hospital. Once Eddie is discharged, he goes back to the Townhouse with them at night himself. They still stay with Richie all day.

Eddie gets a prosthetic for his arm and starts adjusting to using it. The kids are adjusting, too, and they very rarely let him out of their sight, which is fine, because he doesn’t want to let them out of his. They read and play quietly and watch television in Richie’s hospital room while Eddie talks to Richie, and reads out loud to him off his phone, and plays music for him.

He plays music the most. It reminds him of the year he’d spent talking to Richie on the radio, when the only thing he had had, most days, was Richie’s voice and whichever song he chose. He hopes it’s the same for Richie now, if he can hear them.

It’s days, of Richie not waking up, but then, fucking finally, he does. Whitney Houston is singing “I Have Nothing” while Eddie quietly reads The Princess Bride to Lola and Lynn, Ingrid asleep beside Richie on the bed. Lola turns the page for Eddie, since he’s holding it in his left hand and hasn’t worked out turning pages yet with the prosthetic.

“Hey, peaches,” Richie’s low voice says quietly. Eddie’s head snaps up to find Richie looking down blearily at Ingrid where she’s sleeping against his side. When Richie looks up at Eddie, brow furrowed in confusion, he says, “Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit is right, you dumb fucking asshole,” Eddie tells him, choked up. Lola and Lynn hop off of him to run over and hug Richie tightly — too tightly, and Eddie has to pry them off before they hurt him. When it’s his turn, though, he hesitates.

“I’m so sorry, Eds,” Richie rasps. Eddie drops onto his bed and wraps Richie up in a tight embrace, burying his face in his neck and holding him close. Richie holds him in return, letting Eddie tip him to the side a little. There’s a soft whimpering sound, and Eddie’s not sure which of them it comes from. Either of them is just as valid as the other.

“Do not do that to me ever the fuck again,” Eddie spits tearfully into Richie’s neck. Richie laughs, still scratchy, so Eddie gets him water before asking Lola to run into the hallway and get a nurse. Richie won’t let go of any of them until the nurse demands that he does, and only then when Eddie makes him.

He’ll need physical therapy. They’ll both need physical therapy, for sure; luckily, though, they’ve both already got therapists for the mental side of things as soon as they get home. It’s a few days before Richie can officially be discharged, too, and Richie’s a monster the entire time, arguing with Eddie to let him out of bed, let him move around, let him do this and that when he’s not allowed to do anything at all. He’s Richie about it all, and Eddie’s just so fucking happy that they’re both still here that he doesn’t even mind.

Once Richie’s finally considered well enough to be discharged, he’s still pissed, because he’s got a cast on one leg and a brace on the other knee, so nobody will let him walk. It’s frustrating, but Eddie holds his hand tightly the entire time, so it’s fine. Ingrid sits in his lap in the wheelchair, clinging to his shirt on the entire way out of the hospital and out to their rental car. It takes Ben and Mike to get Richie into the passenger seat, but they pull it off between the two of them.

“Where’s our first stop?” Richie asks, once the kids are buckled into car seats in the back and Richie’s fastened into the front.

“You’ll see,” Stan says, hopping up in the driver’s seat. Eddie rides with Patty, because he can’t drive, but they all meet up out at the Kissing Bridge, weirdly enough.

“What the hell are we doing here?” Richie asks, when Stan neatly parks behind Ben’s car and Mike jogs over to help Richie out.

“It was Eddie’s idea,” Stan tells him, snapping the wheelchair out so they can hoist Richie into it. Eddie jogs over to them, taking the handles of Richie’s wheelchair in his hands, one synthetic and one flesh, pushing him over towards the side of the bridge. They stop beside a section filled with carved names.

“I wanted to show you something before we left Derry,” Eddie tells him. He steps aside, motioning to an R carved into a heart on the bridge. “I carved this for you that summer, when It was here the first time.”

Richie looks down at the R, at the jerky heart carved by Eddie’s thirteen-year-old hand wrapped around a knife. He thinks about the boy who put that there, who loved Richie so much that, when he heard his voice on the radio years later, even without remembering who he was, he’d called in to talk to him. Richie leans over the edge of his wheelchair, brushing his fingertips over the heart.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” Richie says, before pointing with his good arm down the bridge a little ways. “See that R + E over there?”

“No fucking way,” Eddie exclaims, running over to see where Richie’s pointing. Lola follows him, peering over Eddie’s shoulder to read her fathers’ initials carved into the bridge.

“Same summer,” Richie tells him.

“Not to steal your th-thunder,” Bill says, “but I m-might’ve also done this.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Stan comments dryly, his hands in his pockets. “It’s the Kissing Bridge, Bill. It’s only good for kissing and carving.”

“That’s the whole point, really,” Bev says, smiling.

“Whose initials did you carve?” Mike asks, sounding more than professionally curious. Richie grins at Eddie when it seems like Mike and Bill aren’t looking, and Eddie smiles right back,  trailing his hand over the back of Richie’s.

“I carved B-Bev’s name,” Bill confesses sheepishly. Bev’s face flushes as she laughs.

“I’m sure this isn’t a surprise,” Ben says, “but so did I.”

“I carved Ben’s,” Bev says to Mike, before she looks over her shoulder to Ben, whose face has gone so red it’s nearly purple. “I had a little crush on the new kid.”

“I carved yours, Bill,” Stan says quietly. “And, uhh. Yours, Rich.”

“You didn’t,” Richie says, delighted. “Stan, you should’ve told me!”

“Oh, fuck you, Richie,” Eddie laughs. Richie reaches out and takes his hand, squeezing it tightly.

“I carved yours, Stan,” Mike admits, before looking at Bill and saying, like it’s somehow infinitely harder to confess to, “I, uhh— And you, too, Bill. Also.”

Bill looks over at him, color splashing high across his cheeks as he processes it. Richie raises an eyebrow, but neither of them sees him. There’s a beat, and then Mike reaches into his jacket pocket and digs out his Swiss army knife. He flips the blade out and starts looking over the bridge.

“What’re you doing?” Bill asks. Mike drops to one knee in front of one of the bridge posts and digs his knife in.

“Refreshing my carving,” Mike tells him. Bill looks like he might just swoon so hard he’ll pass out.

“My turn next,” Richie says, and they take turns recarving their old initials and names, all scattered across the bridge. Stan takes his turn to carve his and Patty’s names in, too, and she kisses him on the cheek while he does it, her chin hooked over his shoulder where they’re crouched together on the ground. Eddie goes last, kneeling next to the bridge and carving each of their kids’ initials in, too, while they watch him with delight.

They sit along the bridge, after, a couple of them sitting on the railing, most of them sitting along the ground. Ingrid and Lynn both sit in Richie’s lap in the wheelchair and listen to the stories the Losers share, the memories they bring back up, the little things about their adult lives that they haven’t had a chance to tell each other yet. When there’s a lull in the conversation, Richie gets an idea.

“Can I see your knife again, Mike?” Richie asks. Mike flips it between his fingers and hands it over; Richie slides the knife out and cuts his palm without much hesitation. Lola shrieks while Eddie starts shouting at him, but Richie just holds the knife out to Bill. “Swear we’ll never be apart again?”

Bill studies Richie’s face for a long moment before he looks down at the knife and smiles. He takes it, doing just as Richie had done and cutting his palm open. Richie looks over to Eddie, who just sighs and holds out his hand.

The seven of them cut their palms and tangle their fingers together, there on the Kissing Bridge, twenty-seven years later and still mostly in one piece, comprised of seven smaller ones: the Losers Club.

“I swear,” Eddie says near Richie’s ear, kissing him on the temple. Richie turns his head to kiss him back properly.

On the car ride to the airport, Richie plays at disc jockey, flipping through radio stations until he finds Huey Lewis and the News. The last time Richie sees the town he grew up in, he’s drumming on the dashboard to “The Power of Love” and watching Derry flick by outside the car windows, frozen forever in his memory now in this moment once he leaves the place behind.