Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Eddie went back to Derry, the first real, concrete memory returned to him was the blood pact. The bitter brightness of the sun on their skin and the scratchy plaster cast brushing against his arm, an unreachable, persisting itch. Their words were still beyond him, concealed in the fog, but the heavy weight of guilt he'd let pool in his chest was recognizable, as he made the promise he had no intention of upholding. He thought, deep in his mind where nobody could see, that he might not have a choice. He assumed they would stay close after high school, never stray too far from one another, and so one of them (at the very least, if not all of them) would drag him back to Derry when it was time. And even then, they would take him kicking and screaming and ripping at the floor to get away, to stay as far away from that thing as possible. 

He never imagined he would forget his friends, that he would return to Derry of his own free will, driving himself into the heart of this beast like a man who had nothing else to lose.  

Seeing them again felt like dying, like mercy, at the end of all things. As if every year of his life had been agony, and falling into their arms once again was the final gift he'd ever receive. He listed off his allergies in alphabetical order to the waitress, who one hundred percent did not care, and found, between one word and the next, that he was a liar. A liar doing a really bad job at acting like the person he tried to be before, before he came back to this place, and also doing a really bad job at trying to be cool about it. Mike, Stan, and Bill's faces drove a wrecking ball through everything he thought he knew, as his act finally slipped away and he stepped off set for the first time in his entire adult life, without knowing anything about backstage.

When he saw them, the first thing he could think of was they reminded him of holographic pictures. The ones that look one way at one angle— like spindly, asshole teenagers with wide-mouthed smiles and terrible manners, and entirely different on the other— fully grown adults with lives and histories Eddie knew nothing about. When he saw them, he struggled to imagine the picture between the two, to comprehend that there had ever been a time where they didn't know each other, to understand he doesn't truly even know them now. 

The holes in his memory filled so quickly it was a physical pain, a dull edge tearing at the patches he used to cover up the gaps. Bill's drawings, Stan's smile, the orchestra of bike chains and pedals on hot summer asphalt, the hiss of a skinned knee. He could taste the blueberry muffins he used to bring to school for him and Stan for breakfast, and the lemonade Mike would make whenever they came to visit. A phantom pain shot down his arm, as he trailed off with 'tree nuts' and the waitress made a break for it in the other direction. 

Eddie's eyes burned with tears and his body moved towards them before he let it, crashing together into a familiar embrace he couldn't believe he ever survived without.

Mike was always tall, but he shot up a few more inches since the last time Eddie saw him, with the same strong hands and a comforting shoulders, but more worry lines across his forehead, a humbled grin that didn't match the dangerous brightness the old one did. Eddie basked in their return to his heart, as he sunk into the times he and Stan would walk around town, late at night right before the sun rose, and neither of them could sleep, letting the anchoring presence of one another lull them into a comfortable fatigue. Bill's hair stood in every direction, like it always did, along with the crease in his brow and the brightness of his smile. The gentle atmosphere of his company meant safety, like being thirteen and following wherever he led, because they trusted him enough, even after everything.

Not everything came back, even as Ben and Beverly fell back into his memory and filled in his pictures, but he finally had something to color in the empty void where his childhood once left him. Beverly's hair shoved into a winter cap as she miserably smoked outside of school while they waited for Ben to finish with his poetry club, his stomach dropping out of his body as they all, willingly, threw themselves off of a cliff for no good reason. Ben's overpriced and overused sandalwood hair product, from when they were sixteen and he was trying too hard. Their karaoke nights, the nights when they said nothing at all to each other, afraid to break the silence or have someone else break it for them. He had a past now, a luxury he couldn't afford just an hour before, and it made the present look... less shitty, and the future look like a real possibility. 

And then, as he always did, Richie came in and fucked the entire thing up. 

At first, there wasn't any noticeable difference. Eddie saw him and, in a rush of feelings he'd almost grown comfortable with experiencing, flashes of adolescence came, pictures he had of blank, empty figures repainted themselves in Richie's likeness. Napping together in a hammock, bickering with each other at lunch until someone had to come over and scold them, him trying to talk with a cigarette in his mouth before he almost fucking swallowed it. The sense of fond annoyance and grateful amusement colored every corner of his brain, and Eddie once again was glad to know he had such amazing friends, and proud he decided to return to them. 

All seven of them crashed into one another as they clambered into a group hug, and the brush of Richie's hand on the back of Eddie's neck set his whole world alight. 

It wasn't a memory; it didn't move in his mind like the others did, sending Eddie back to whatever time, but a picture. Like a snapshot. Except there were hundreds of them. Eddie carding his hands through Richie's hair, finding another reason to love him in between each strawberry-shampoo-scented curl wrapped around his finger, the two of them huddled inside a blanket fort on Richie's living room floor. The too-smooth, slide of Richie's always-chapped lips against his, covered in the lip balm made to taste like Dr. Pepper. His face burned as the image of Richie tore through his memory again, completely naked, hovering over him with a ravenous look in his eyes, like he could eat the world whole. 

Oh.

Eddie staggered back from them, away from his friends and from Richie's clueless face. He wondered, for a moment, if he was hallucinating. He wondered if he clicked his heels, would he wake up in his crunched Cadillac in New York? Would this all have been a dream? 

He was clawing his way out of a sinkhole of thoughts trying to swallow him, grasping uselessly as everything crumbled around him. How was he supposed to sit down and have dinner with them knowing what he knew? How would he ever be able to look Richie in the eye if one of them didn't fess up right fucking now confess that they know what they may or may not have been before they all forgot one another? How would he ever be able to look Richie in the eye if one of them did fess up? He couldn't think of anything worse. 

---

It didn't take more than fifteen minutes before Eddie realized he had never loved anyone else like this. A light guiding him home, warm and centered, his love for Richie had always been sitting somewhere inside him, whether he knew its name or not. Between each moment of nothingness, of a lull in the conversation, or when they all stopped to take a drink, gather their breath after laughing, Eddie allowed himself to bask in the simple grace of truly loving someone, to admire Richie for bringing that out in him. 

Accepting what he remembered took a moment, but only a moment, before Eddie tumbled back into the one-size-fits-forever affection embedded into his bones. To have a part of him so cleanly excised from his body felt like losing an organ, a natural part of himself. All he could imagine was searching for that missing piece in the friendships he made when he was gone, and never succeeding, but finding it again Richie's smile, the back of his hand, the hinge of his jaw. He wanted to crawl into Richie's rib cage and make his home there, to print their names all over his skin until nobody could forget what they were to each other, not even them.

When Eddie first mentioned his marriage, the need to throw himself through a wall quickly followed the fumbling of words he tried to pass off as an explanation. He tried to slip back into an old suit, the one that didn't know anything about this place, blurting out harsh declarations of absolute bullshit, with words he often used before then, but now sounded out of place. He noticed that the way he talked since moving to New York made him sound like a weird...frat jock who Eddie could never imagine even knowing, let alone sounding like.

Richie blinked at him, unreadable look on his face. "What, like, to a woman?"

For a very long moment, while everyone sort of chuckled and tried to gauge whether it was okay to laugh or not, if that was even a joke or not, Eddie was speechless. And then, very loudly, he wasn't anymore. Words spilled out of his mouth in a flood, filling up the room and the building and the entire east coast, so controlled and yet thoughtless Eddie lacked the ability to contain them even for a moment. He wanted to curl up under the rock he crawled from before all this and lay there until the sun exploded. 

When he managed to breathe in between rampages, Richie just nodded, eyebrows furrowed in a conniving little bastard way. "Got it."

"I'm glad one of us does," Stan muttered, making confused eye contact with Richie before they both decided not to push the matter further. Eddie thanked them for it, because he really didn't understand it either. 

Even in his newfound hatred of his entire vocabulary, his mind didn't stray from Richie. He wondered if Richie still did Voices, if he still laughed at his own jokes so hard at his own voice that tears would form in the corners of his eyes. He wondered if Richie ever learned to use an inside voice, or to fake one, since they'd all come to the conclusion long ago that he didn't have an inside voice, and if he ever said the things he said to Eddie, to someone else. That was the constant stream of consciousness, rattling incessantly around Eddie's thoughts. Did he love someone else? Did he still love that person? Had he forgotten everything too? Was everyone he loved a desperate attempt to be normal, like Eddie had done with Myra, or was it real? Had he managed to find something real? Had Eddie not been the stumbling block to Richie that Richie had been for Eddie? Over and over again, the record skipped and repeated. 

"There's no way Richie got married!" Bev's eyes gleamed in amusement, her smile wide and still the same as it was the very last time he saw her. 

His face seethed with a rage so gentle it barely passed for anger, as Richie's dumb fucking impression of Sonia the Hutt, his eyes rolling so far back in his skull it hurt. 

Richie's arm lowered and he cleared his throat, while Eddie dropped his glass back down on the table, ignoring the sweat forming in the creases of his palm and the way his whole body lit up at the opportunity to return where he always loved to be: the center of Richie's attention. 

"But yeah, no," he muttered, scratching at the back of his head. "I never got married. Never could until a few years ago, y'know, with the...being gay and everything, but I also never...felt the need. Or, or the want, I could say." 

Every muscle in Richie's body tensed, as every atom in Eddie's caught flame. A chance, as small as it was, that something in their past remained somewhere in Richie's future, and Eddie held onto it for dear life. 

Bill blinked. "I...I feel like I knew that, something about it, but I don't...I don't remember you ever telling me." 

Eddie fixed his eyes on the muscles of Richie's arm to avoid Bill's gaze...and also to stare at Richie's arms. Time had been uber fucking generous to Richie, and turned his lanky teenaged popsicle stick looking body into broad sweeps of his shoulders and a frame he actually knew how to use, instead of the wild, and frankly dangerous, flailing he used to do when he talked with his hands. His hands, now, though, were sturdy and strong, which didn't seem necessary with his job description, and when he talked they just sort of...accompanied. They weren't doing an entire background routine anymore. Which was not to say Eddie complained about them much before. He could still picture those hands, less confident in their actions, palming over his hips while he sucked a mark into Eddie's collarbone, and Eddie wondered if someone could die from being so turned on.

The sudden bloom of heat in his chest sent him grappling for his drink, chest burning as the air in the room struggled to enter his lungs. He would not use his inhaler right after Richie came out to them. He would not fucking imply he was anything but neutral about the fact that Richie was gay, though he very much was not . 

Richie shrugged. "I don't remember a lot of shit, but I think...did one of you tell me about you being gay? Maybe not gay...bisexual maybe? Something queer."

"I know it wasn't me, but I think everyone is a little gay sometimes," Bill said, turning his hand in an 'ehh' gesture, non-committal, but also very, very telling. Eddie considered sliding out of his chair and becoming one with the carpet. 

Ben blinked in surprise. "No? No, I don't think...Really?" 

Eddie remained frozen in his seat and silent in every way, not even blinking in fear that it might be some sort of gay morse code or something. The rest of them, however, shrugged, like it was no big deal, like it was nothing . Assholes. 

"I think it was me," Bev spoke up, her body leaned forward but her eyes were miles away. "I know I told someone…"

Richie snapped his fingers and tapped them against the side of his head, trying to convince it to cooperate. "Wait, no, yeah, it was...uhh...at the fair, the fair that was in town that year, and you—"

"Told you on the ferris wheel!" Bev recalled, her smile wide and bright. "I knew that. That I told someone, but after I moved away, it all kind of...fogged up. I forgot a lot of it, but also...some of it was kind of just...there? Sort of sitting under the surface." Beverly shifted in her seat while Stan took a drink next to her, hanging onto the conversation in a way Eddie could not even attempt with Richie being so fucking close to him. He smelled like evergreen and raspberries, and Eddie could feel the rumbling of his voice when he spoke. God . 

Richie nodded slowly before asking, "And...were you...did you have a thing with Stephanie Beatriz once? Or am I remembering somebody else? It might be somebody else..." 

"No, that happened. Before I got married, obviously," Beverly replied, nodding. Mike's head whipped up to face her. "It wasn't serious or anything, though."

"I think I saw you in a picture with her once...Yeah! You met Andy, right? Samberg?"

Bev thought for a moment. "Once. Or twice, maybe? I definitely didn't know him, but...."

"I cannot believe this is a real conversation I'm witnessing," Bill breathed, loud enough for everyone to hear.  

"I can," Stan muttered, tipping his head back to empty his glass before setting it back down. "This is the most Bev-and-Richie thing I have ever heard in my life." He sniffed and looked down at his lap. "I'm almost glad I missed it. Not enough to forget all the other shit, though. I...I really did miss you guys."

Ben smiled and nudged him. "Cute."

Stan shook his head and smiled. "I do that sometimes."

Richie's hands shot out towards her, making half of them jump and sending Beverly rearing back, but she didn't curl away, laughing at the outburst after a quick second.

"Exactly! Yeah, see, I had a thing with him , so it's so fucking crazy that you were— 

"No. No, wait," Mike interjected, holding one finger up in front of his face. He looked like the fucking shell of a man. "You're telling me...that you, and, and—"

Richie's face was bright in his amusement, but carried the strong undertone of someone who was bragging, and he knew it. He looked...cocky. Looking at him, Eddie realized he'd been familiar with this expression before, intimately. He still couldn't wrought out the fine details, the bold articulation of them together, but he knew that face. He'd known that face. He wanted nothing more than to see it again. 

His warm brown eyes gleamed in the glow of the lamp. "Andy Samberg, yes."

They could hear Mike's brain dialing up. He pointed to Bev with his free hand, the other still up to pause the conversation. "And—"

"Stephanie Beatriz, from—"

"Brooklyn Nine-Nine, yes, I know," Mike whispered to himself. Beverly and Richie locked eyes, their smug charm worming its way back into their company. "That's so...odd."

"We were never more than a few connections away," Beverly noted, a gentle smile etched in her features but not in her eyes, like the sentiment of this reality was too bittersweet to acknowledge, and left the consequence of mentioning it burning in her throat. 

"How did you fucking...they're famous." Mike combed his hands through his hair. "They're...I hate knowing this now."

Richie snorted. "Love you too, Mikey."

It lingered in their silence. The thing which drove him from this place hung around them as a latent growth, seeping into the air and reminding each of them the true reason they were here. The exact shape of it was hazy, a phantom tearing through the walls Eddie built to keep it out, crawling through his own form of deception and forcing him to make sense of his life, of his past, of what little became of him and the ocean of wasted potential he found content to sink in. What, if not that, would kill him? How could he survive like this? 

Richie still picked at his nails, torn up cuticles and ragged edges to his nails. He still had that birthmark on his arm, and the scar on his forehead from the rock fight. He was still the kid who used to throw rocks at his window and try to climb through, even when his shoulders got too wide to fit. He'd drive aimlessly around town to wait for the song on the radio to finish, and doodled stupid shit in the margins of Eddie's notebooks instead of focusing in class. It was all him, and he was right there. 

It was love, Eddie realized. That was how he could survive. He loved his friends enough to risk his life for them before, and even though he was an hour into the end of a twenty year intermission, his heart still beat with them in mind, even when it did not know the faces attached to the names ingrained in it. He'd known, somewhere, that his survival was one long journey he had to trudge along to be able to see them again. He clawed through his miserable life, a life meaning nothing, nothing but this, with the sole intent to love again, and to be loved again. He would fight for this, for this love, and swim in its embrace until it either baptized him or let him drown. 

The weight of his emotion was a physical force, threatening to crack open his body and pour out onto the table, as he ached desperately for their company. This one hour wasn't enough, he wanted a lifetime. He wanted it with his friends, with Richie. He wanted to put his heart in the palm of Richie's hand and not be surprised if he crushed it or kept it, if he returned this or didn't. Whatever companionship Richie wanted from him, Eddie would willingly give, endlessly, and he was not ashamed of it. He was afraid, with every fiber of his being, but being ashamed of his life so far had awarded him nothing but an empty life and a reflection he hated recognizing as himself. To be at the mercy of a love as powerful as the one burrowing into his skin, Eddie considered it a blessing. 

His hands twitched with the need to take Richie's, to curl their heartbeats together and remind him this was all they needed. 

---

"And remind me again why we can't just sleep over at Mike's house?" Richie yelled as they all unloaded their bags from their cars. 

Eddie looked over at him from his rental, his hands buried deep in the torn apart contents of his second suitcase, trying to stuff his essentials into one bag so he didn't look like a neurotic, chronic overpacker, which was exactly correct. His phone buzzed with a million calls and texts from Myra he steadfastly ignored, not willing or able to juggle both crises at once. Remembering everything, the domino effect of events which led to him ending up with her, the less he wanted to answer. Maybe, if he came out of any of this alive, he could change his name and fuck off to Nebraska or wherever Myra would never be able to find him. It would be preferable, at this point. 

"I live in the library, Rich, not really suitable for guests," Mike called. Him and Bill walked into the Townhouse together, with Beverly, Ben, and Stan trailing further behind. Absentmindedly, Eddie heard someone ask about him selling the farm.

Panicking, Eddie stuffed the rest of his emergency clothes back into the second bag and decided to just take them both, and let the others make fun of him. It was literally the only way they knew how to be: do ridiculous shit without apology, and laugh with everyone when they (kindly, but not without truth) made an ass out of you for it. It was an odd aspect of their friendship he was sure he hated, but secretly hoped for its return. 

Eddie jumped when he noticed Richie next to him, his brows furrowed as he looked at Eddie's current situation. He seemed particularly interested in the three pairs of pants stacked on top of his second bag, which somehow no longer fit into either one. Eddie had no idea what he was deducing from this scene, but he assumed it couldn't be good. Partly because he looked like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but also because Richie couldn't deduce his own belt buckle on a good day.

"You know we're only here for, like, a few days, right? We're not moving back or something, no matter how much you missed being able to wear tube socks without being bullied." 

Eddie rolled his eyes. "Fucking crucify me for being prepared, dipshit. Did you even pack a bag?"

"Yeah, I packed a bag. As in one. You are one duffel away from needing a fucking U-Haul."

"Asshole," he muttered, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards. "If you ask me for toothpaste or some shit later because you couldn't fit it in your duffle , I'm calling animal control to come and take you."

Richie faltered for a moment, like this wasn't the same energy Eddie had been exuding all fucking night, and then he smiled. He fucking beamed at Eddie, sighing from deep in his chest. Eddie swallowed hard and wondered if looking at him would ever be different, if he would ever be able to push down the butterflies in his stomach and remain calm . When Richie pulled him into a hug soon after, he understood that no, no he wouldn't. 

"I fucking missed you, Eds," Richie whispered, close in his ear like it was a secret. He laughed as he pulled away, leaving the cool summer air to sweep over him again. "Even if I didn't know it."

"I missed you too," Eddie responded, bare heart on display for anyone who wanted to see. He shoved the three pairs of pants away and left them in the trunk, pulling his bags out before slamming the door shut. His phone, gripped tight in his hand, near-overheated with the sheer traffic Myra created all on her own. Sighing, he shut his phone off, something he'd been expressly forbidden from ever doing, allowing himself one ounce of serenity as the buffering wheel spun, and then the screen went black. He could worry about it later, he could worry about anything else later, Now all he had to focus on was Richie, and their maybe-impending doom the next day. 

Richie grabbed one of Eddie's bags without Eddie needing to ask, rolling it behind him as they walked inside. He had his own bag slung over his shoulder, a bigger bag than Eddie thought he would've had, knowing who Richie was in the past. Never prepared, but always making do with what he had on him at the moment. One time he brought a blanket, a bag of chips, socks, and a twenty dollar bill on an overnight field trip to the aquarium, and he somehow managed to convince Stan to share his sleeping bag with him, Eddie to trade half of his packed lunch in exchange for a pile of chips Eddie's mom would never let him eat, and bought them a bunch of small, matching dolphin keychains the next day. He was a fucking conman. 

Mike and Bill came running out of the inn, a sense of urgency too energetic for this late at night. 

"We'll be back!" Mike threw out behind him, climbing into his car with Bill before gearing out of the parking lot. 

"Those two are weird as fuck," Richie commented, fond smile on his face. "I hope Bill's wife doesn't mind sharing."

"Hey," Eddie blurted out, without entirely meaning to. Richie stopped and looked at him, eyebrows raised. "Earlier, when you...talked about being gay and shit...did you...how did you...not how did you know , but did you...remember?"

Richie's eyebrows shot further up his forehead, a medical feat, and his eyes went wide. Chuckling to himself, like a dick, he kept walking, pushing through the doors and heading for the staircase. "I'm gonna need another drink before we get into that conversation. Hopefully you'll walk your drinks off and actually be able to ask me what you want to ask." 

Eddie watched Richie's three mile wide shoulders turn from him again to climb up the stairs, where Beverly stood, hugging Stan so tightly he might suffocate. They were both crying. Richie, noticing this, pulled Stan from Bev's arms and spun him around. 

"Stan the Man returns to the arena!" He chanted, in a very bad impression of a sports announcer, while Stan laughed and said nothing, not even telling Richie to put him down. Beverly wiped her tears and laughed, dragging the two of them and Ben into a hug while Stan struggled to catch his breath. 

Eddie threw his suitcase bodily up once he reached the top step, leaving it on the ground so he could join the bundle of them in the hallway. "You guys are fucking dumb." 

---

Consuming more alcohol than he already had definitely wasn't the best idea, considering the next day's itinerary, but Eddie still let Richie pour him a drink when he offered it. His hands moved confidently about the bar, grabbing the glasses with a practiced movement. Eddie figured he worked as a bartender at some point, but didn't find it important enough to ask about. He wanted to know all the minute details of everybody's life, of how they filled their time from then to now, and if it changed anything in their lives the way it had changed Eddie's, but that could wait. Bev had trailed out a while ago, leaving the two of them alone in the room, and Eddie had questions. 

Richie had a touch of gray hair at the temples, something Eddie didn't consider being into until he noticed it then, and his glasses suit his squared jaw. He looked like a proper adult, without the baby fat and the naivety, but still curled in on himself, still insecure. His shoulders slumped down as he slid one of the glasses over to Eddie, and downed the other himself in one long sip, his throat working around the movement in a way that made Eddie's heart pound. 

He set the glass on the table and left the bar, collapsing on an antique couch in the room like he lived there. Eddie followed, sweaty palms pressed against the ornate glass containing his untouched drink, sitting gingerly down on the loveseat sofa opposite him. Looking at Richie stretched out like that, he didn't think they needed to have a conversation or anything. They could stay there, and Eddie could stare, until the sun came up the next morning and they had other, more important things to do. Really, he wouldn't mind. 

Richie sighed and looked over at him, lips curled into an amused smirk and his eyes lidded, chuckling as he recalled their earlier conversation. "So...What were you saying earlier? In a way that makes sense, please." 

"Fuck you." Eddie's face flushed but he didn't slink away from his question, turning his glass in his hands, staring at the bourbon swirling at the bottom. "What I was trying to say, asshole, is...How did you...know...that you were gay after Derry? Like, did you remember?" 

Richie looked at him for a second, and then pondered the question, his eyes fixated on the ceiling. Eddie wanted to melt through the floor. 

He didn't understand what jump his mind made to convince him he was straight, or what part of the Pennywise magic seeped into his brain so much that he somehow forgot such a large part of his own identity. To forget him and Richie were sleeping together when they were teenagers was one thing, but to forget he was attracted to men at all , was a separate wheelhouse entirely. It complicated itself further when Eddie realized Richie hadn't forgotten, leaving Eddie alone in a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. 

"No? I don't think I remembered," Richie answered finally. "I mean, I know I didn't remember. I'm still missing a lot of stuff, even now that I'm back here, but I didn't know anything about this place, or about you guys, until I came back and saw you. Guys. Until I saw all of you guys." He cleared his throat and pushed to sit up, his long legs still sprawled across the sofa. "But I guess some... part of me remembered, or else I wouldn't have slept with so many guys in college." 

"Oh. That makes sense." 

Going from not knowing someone three hours ago to having a burning jealousy charring his bones when he thought of that person with somebody else was an uncomfortable experience Eddie was not entirely proud to have, but it was there, turning his sternum to ash and his ribs into smoke and dust. He hated the new onslaught of emotions this man could ignite in him, in a way nobody else had ever managed. He never thought of himself as this person, as someone who loved so deeply it carved itself into his entire being, a person so hungry for the love of another person that they starved themselves for years in the absence of it. He had never known this in his adult life, but he recognized the shameful pooling of it from adolescence, the slippery weight weighing him down like stones in a river. He despised this hurricane of affection ripping through his body; he was ravenous down to the marrow. 

Richie didn't seem to hear him, continuing, "I mean, if I really think about it—"

"You don't have to if it's weird," Eddie blurted, but Richie was still talking. Always interrupting, never willing to be interrupted.

"I guess for the first few months I did remember this place, but only bits and pieces, and I was just kind of going with what I knew already. After I forgot, I had already slept with guys, I figured I was sleeping with them because I liked sleeping with them, and not really with girls, and went from there. Followed where my dick led, I guess." 

Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're disgusting." 

"Hey! From what I remember, you used to like that about me." 

It was too close to the truth, to the frightening admission of the reality between them. If Richie knew , in every detail that Eddie did, how close they were as teenagers, he would have said it by then. He never knew how not to say something, and Eddie guessed he never learned. But still, even the slightest hint that he did, that Eddie's recollection hadn't been some weird fever dream he was digging up from childhood, was enough to put him on edge. 

When Eddie didn't respond, Richie tilted his head. "Why did you wanna know?" 

Before Eddie could answer, he finished his drink and set the glass down on the table. Richie's eyes burned holes in his head as he stared, and Eddie burned up at the thought. He couldn't handle this, his throat tightening up and all knowledge of the English language throwing itself from his mind. Somewhere on the second floor, he heard Stan laughing at something, and he all of a sudden thought this conversation was far too loud. 

Richie waved his hand in front of Eddie's face. "Dude, are you okay?" 

Eddie inhaled as much as he could with his impending panic attack, throwing himself from his own seat to sit next to Richie on the couch. Richie moved his legs to accommodate the change, swinging one leg off of the sofa so he could still face Eddie, the other one bent, his knee pressing lightly against Eddie's hip and his shin flush with Eddie's thigh. The contact made Eddie feel like a fucking nun, tripping over himself at the slightest touch. 

"If I tell you something, you promise you won't tell anyone else? Like, not even Beverly, not Bill, nobody." Eddie clasped his hands together so Richie wouldn't see they were shaking, his skin blotchy and vision swimming in his anxiety. He didn't know why he felt like this. Richie wouldn't make fun of him for being gay, Richie is gay, but he didn't know how to do this again. He didn't know how to acknowledge this part of himself, and then trust his own mouth to express that sentiment correctly. 

"Sure," Richie answered lightly, shrugging his shoulders. God, Eddie loved him. 

"I think…I don't think I'm attracted to...w—Fucking Christ." He cleared his throat to try and break up the wall inside of it, preventing him from speaking. "You know I'm married, right?" 

Richie laughed but didn't move away. "You told me, yes." 

"Right." 

How could Eddie forget? His desperate need to be nothing but a chalk outline once again rose in his stomach. Richie reached out towards him, but stopped short, his hand falling uselessly on his knee, his knuckles brushing against Eddie's elbow. 

"Dude, what is it? Are you, like, do you not want to be with her anymore? Is that what you're trying to say?" 

He was trying to say a million different things, all of which more or less meant: I love you, I barely know you now but I've known you my entire life, and every moment I spent without you is a prayer I sent up to someone that you would return to me. He meant to say that loving Richie is what Eddie knew how to do best, he'd put in years of practice and he got pretty fucking good at it. It could come out wrong, he could say 'I really liked having sex with you when we were teenagers, and I really need to keep you by my side forever so I can continue doing that', as long as the point was there, it wouldn't matter. But it did matter. As much as it felt like he did, Eddie didn't know anything about this Richie, the one sitting next to him. The basics were all the same, but the little intricacies can lead to a large difference, and there were a lot of those that Eddie didn't know. He wanted to know, with everything in him his heart ached to know, but he didn't. And they didn't have time for it right now. 

The very acute sense of time running out, a large, metaphorical countdown clock eating away at his patience, to the moment that would decide if the future was an achievable goal, ticked along in Eddie's mind, helpfully telling him he may never have the chance for this again. He was betting so much on the aftermath without knowing if he was going to be there to see it. It was so fucked . 

"We might all die tomorrow," Eddie whispered, to himself more than to Richie, using the momentum of that reality to drive him forward. 

He faced Richie fully, then, before grabbing his shirt and pulling him into the most emotionally charged kiss of his entire adult life. He felt certain he was doing it wrong, Myra always thought kissing was for punctuation in a relationship, only necessary when used to highlight an affection, as a farewell, as a hello, etc., and anything other than chaste, closed mouths pressed together for a short moment was salacious. This...this was the entire opposite of that. Eddie thought he would be worse at this, out of both practice and his element, but he didn't let himself think too much about the mechanics. Muscle memory seemed to be making headway, and Richie's hand coming up to cradle his head now owned over fifty percent of the real estate in Eddie's mind. 

He pulled away panting, despite Richie's entire body begging him to stay close to him, despite Eddie's compulsion to listen. His fist curled tight in Richie's shirt, the back of his hand resting gently on the soft cotton of his undershirt. God, he dressed like a muppet, and Eddie couldn't care less. 

"Do you," he breathed, swallowing. Richie stared at him, processing his words on half speed. "Do you remember when we used to do this? When we were kids?" Richie's eyebrows scrunched up and he leaned a fraction away from him, while Eddie sat there. "We used to do this when we were kids," he repeated.

"We used to make out with each other when we were kids?" Richie asked, touching his own lips like the memory would come back if he reminded himself to see it. 

Eddie blinked and pursed his lips because, yes, they used to make out when they were in high school, but also, he could distinctly recall multiple occasions where Richie fucked him within an inch of his life, and that kind of falls into the same category as the one they're talking about now. If he said it out loud, though, Richie's head might actually explode. It was one thing to point out how Richie fell into kissing him like it was riding a bike, and another to admit Eddie had been replaying losing his virginity in Richie's childhood bedroom twenty-four years ago for the past three hours. Eddie used to hate when people touched him; the queasy, writhing ghost of something he did not welcome on his arm or shoulder always managed to crawl under his skin, sometimes even as an adult, but Richie used to touch him. He used to give him hickeys and pull Eddie's hair and fuck him until he cried in the best way possible, and Eddie let him . He used to seek it out, actually ask for it, for the one thing he wasn't allowed to have, the right connection to the 'wrong' person. And Richie was an asshole then as per usual, but that particular parcel of information might be too much to introduce at a conversation between two bros having a casual late night drink. 

By now, Eddie realized him and Richie weren't dating then. He knew, if they were, there was nothing that could have stopped him— not his mom, not Pennywise, not God, from following Richie to the ends of the fucking earth if it meant being able to love him the way he wanted to. He also would have remembered by now, anything about getting to be with the person he wanted to be with for so long. He remembered pretty much everything else they ever did. 

"Basically," he said, for lack of any better explanation. 

"Basically?" Richie laughed. "That's a pretty big fucking gray area. I mean...did we just...kiss? Or...did we...was there—?" Eddie could see him trying to figure it out, catch the smoky memory with his bare hands and come up empty, like a rope he'd just grazed the edge of before it slipped from his reach. "Wait."

"We don't have all night here, asshole," Eddie whispered, voice gentle in a way he'd forgotten how to sound without forcing it. 

Richie's hand pinched the back of Eddie's shirt as he tried to scramble for his own dirty memories, but Eddie didn't want to wait for them. He won't try to make him remember something he can't, and, if this night were to end in them sleeping together, Eddie wanted it to happen with Richie knowing this was not the first time. He wanted Richie to remember how to fuck him, and then use every bit of knowledge he gained over the past decades to fuck him twenty times better. 

"Rich, it's fine if you don't remember. We can just go to sleep now and forget this whole thing happened." Eddie shot up and turned to rush out of the room, but Richie stopped him, grabbing his wrist so he wouldn't go. 

"I don't want to forget it happened," Richie muttered, his jaw tight, as he squeezed Eddie's arm. "I didn't want to forget any of it happened. I just, I wish I knew." He sniffed recoiled whispering, "I wish I knew." 

Eddie refused to look at Richie, knowing he would probably collapse into a sobbing mess on the floor if he did. He'd been cheated out of something, out of a life he could have had. All this time, he wondered what he was even supposed to be doing with his life, but the answer was always the fucking same. Loving Richie. He meant to love Richie for his entire life, without any time taken out, and It stole that from him. From them. 

He stared at the top of Richie's head and the clock behind it, solemnly informing him it was past two in the morning. "It's not your fault," he said, managing a smile when Richie looked up in search of one. "There's, literally, one reason why you don't remember, and we're killing that fucker the next chance we get."

"True." Richie couldn't tear his eyes away from Eddie's hand, still hanging at his side where he left it. He could see Richie's tired slumping, the way his eyes stayed closed for a second too long each time he blinked. 

There was a question on the tip of Eddie's tongue he couldn't force out of his mouth. Its honesty cut the sides of his throat until he bit down on the words, afraid to let them leave his head in fear they'd cut the very fragile thing they weaved together here. 

"Do you want to come upstairs with me?" Eddie asked, all in one breath before he could convince himself not to. "Just...to sleep. I don't think I would be able to sleep by myself tonight anyway , but—"

"Yeah," Richie interrupted, his voice bursting so brilliantly into the silent room Eddie flinched with it. "Yeah, okay." 

Eddie tangled himself in Richie's arms as they let themselves drift into a cautious sleep, knowing they didn't have much time before Mike came in and woke them up to go clown hunting the next day. He hesitated, for a moment, internal checklist screeching at him to take his medications, but he couldn't force himself to leave, and part of him knew he'd be okay without them. 

Even if he wouldn't be, even if they had more time, and he woke up with a solid eight-to-ten hours of sleep, Eddie would still be reluctant to ever leave that bed. Richie held onto him around his waist, his head bent low so his face could bury itself in Eddie's chest, a position that would hurt his neck when they woke up, and his hair soft and curling against Eddie's nose. He never felt safer, bathed in the warmth of comfort, than he did here.

---

In his dream, they were younger. A mess of scrawny limbs, they laid together on Richie's bed while the sun set behind them, both on their sides with Richie wearing Eddie like a backpack. They'd been asleep moments before, only to wake up to the loud clanging of the radiator. Eddie buried his face in Richie's pillow, sighing at the smell of botanical shampoo and laundry detergent. By then, Eddie liked to think he understood what it meant to love someone, but the way every innocuous aspect of Richie added to Eddie's feelings for him, gave him one more thing to think about between each beat of his heart, still stood beyond his understanding. 

Smiling, the giddiness of being so enamored with his best friend making him feel ridiculous, he buried his cold nose into the back of Richie's shoulder, high up where his shirt collar didn't reach. Richie immediately whined and curled away from the shock, sliding his hand up Eddie's calf and pulling it further over his hip, despite how his upper body sought to escape him. His voice reverberated through his body and against Eddie, who followed his movements to keep his nose against his skin. 

"Eddie!" Richie cried, burying his face into the pillow, his voice rough with the small amount of sleep they'd gotten. "I'm gonna kill you." 

A twinge of shame stabbed through Eddie, the realization that Richie didn't feel that way towards him, and Richie might hate him for the feelings he had, refreshed themselves in his mind. Logically, he knew they all did this, how they all liked to press against one another and forgo any idea of personal space, but none of that mattered with the others because Eddie wasn't in love with them . He was in love with Richie , who would hate him if he ever found out Eddie had been using their innocent proximity to fulfill his disgusting fantasies. 

"Dude, you're stiff as a fucking rock. I was kidding, obviously." Eddie could hear him roll his eyes, but still couldn't bring himself to move. He might be kidding, but nothing about this situation was funny to him. Richie swallowed and turned to him, his face open in an unfamiliar way without his glasses.

He blinked in the sudden light of the setting sun. "Are you okay? Did...Did I do something?"

In that moment, two distinct thoughts entered Eddie's brain. 1. Richie was so beautiful it made him want to throw up, but also kiss him and name the beauty marks dotted across his face after stars, to never spend another moment not looking at Richie's face, and 2. He needed to figure out a way to change the fucking subject. 

How, in his right mind, his brain decided the first idea was the one to go with, he would never know. But there he was, at six in the evening on a Thursday, with his mouth pressed, crooked, against Richie's, and every muscle in his upper back screaming for him to lay back down and stop straining. Sirens went off in his mind, blaring so hard there's structural damage to his skull, as Richie moved from between his legs. Richie's lips parted from his for a split second as he turned over to face him and resumed kissing him. He kissed him. 

Again, Richie pulled back, blinking slow and heavy. His eyes focused on Eddie's face, darting back from either of Eddie's eyes. "Why did you do that?" Something dawned on him and he backed away, slamming into his wall and rattling the shelves mounted above them. "Why did you do that?" He repeated, hands covering his mouth. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to kiss back if you didn't mean to...Why did you kiss me?" 

Eddie felt wild, like a pack of wild dogs were rushing through the dense forest of his bones, and he couldn't tell if he was part of the pack or of the trees. Like a blackbird as they dove towards the earth. 

"It just...I just did? You were right there and I...my mind got all scrambled." 

Richie picked at the skin around his nail. "So, you didn't kiss me on purpose. You just kissed me because...I was there?" 

"Yeah, yeah." Eddie took the out when he saw one, not willing to face the bottom of this particular cliff of truth, not yet. Maybe not ever. 

"Do you wanna do it again?" Richie asked, eyes trained on his lap and refusing to look anywhere else. God, Eddie wanted to look at him. "For...like, fun. Not...in a gay way or anything." 

Eddie nodded, barely processing the information beyond the fact that it was a chance to keep kissing Richie. 

"Sure."

---

Richie's hand gently shook him awake, tearing Eddie from the soft comfort of his dream. Before he could reminisce, though, he used his newly opened eyes to stare at Richie, as the door closed softly behind them and his naked face peered down at him. His hair got squished down in the few hours of sleep they managed to get, and his stubble stood a little more prominently than it had the night before. Eddie first felt pleased that Richie looked disheveled, not thinking him capable of being anything other than the man of Eddie's literal dreams, until he realized, unfortunately, he still found Richie hot with half a wizard's beard on his face and bedhead. He was so fucked. 

"That was Mike," Richie said. "He said we gotta haul ass if we want this bitch dead by today, so we better get going." 

Eddie wanted every morning to start with Richie, he thought, but didn't voice it. Instead, he pinched the fabric of Richie's fleece pajama pants, the ones he left the room to put on before sliding into bed with him. The lights were off when he came back, and so Eddie only now noticed they had cow spots all over them. 

"You buy these with your tour money?" he asked, letting the pants slip from between his fingers in order to roll off of the bed and onto the floor. 

Richie snorted. "These were a gift from my mom, actually, so I better put them away nicely." He slid into a pair of sandals Eddie assumed he put on after the cow pajamas, and went to leave. 

"See you downstairs," Eddie muttered, ruffling through his bag to find a decent shirt, like he was going on his first fucking date in middle school. 

"Hey," Richie muttered, hand loose on the doorknob. "Did you...did you have a weird dream last night? Of...well…"

Eddie raised an eyebrow at him, a wave of fear crashing into him like a Buick Enclave, as he struggled to even make sense of the world anymore. "Uh, yeah...we...I…"

Richie nodded. "You kissed me, in the dream. We were in my bed, and you just—"

"Mine too." 

"Okay," Richie breathed, processing the moment in his head. "That was a memory, wasn't it? We'd never kissed before that." 

Eddie shook his head instead of answering, putting no faith in his words anymore. 

"Cool, cool." Richie stared at him for another long moment before pulling him into a hug, so wary it felt forced, yet the compulsion in his action, the insistence of his actions, were like a man possessed. 

The memory lit up in his mind before he fully agreed to see it, flashing in bright definition as him and Richie returned to their teenaged bullshit. This was...a different day, a different year, when the box fan in Richie's room sputtered, not made for such long term use, and the California sun had made some of his hair lighten, streaks of it nearing blonde. 

He also noticed it was a different day because oh, of course, Richie was naked again.

They'd only had full blown sex once before that summer, the night before Richie left for college, and Eddie was certain he would never see him again. It was clumsy, and awkward, and sort of perfect and everything Eddie ever wished for in trusting someone to do that with him, but it was only once. He had almost forgotten it, despite its significance, until he saw Richie carrying in boxes of his stuff in late May. Then, those tons of emotion he carried returned to him full force, and presented themselves with a desperate need to continue what they had started the summer before. Eddie went to community college forty minutes away and went to high school with half of the people he shared classes with, meaning he got laid approximately zero times since, and now he was aching for it. 

"I'm going to die of heat stroke if we do this another time today," Richie panted, his back slippery with sweat that Eddie surprisingly didn't mind. "That, or you're gonna have to start doing the fucking work." 

"As if," Eddie groaned, trying to keep his sentences short and not show how much Richie's voice got to him. He was like those people getting electrocuted in cartoons, when the lights flash in your eyes and your whole body is so full of energy that you can see his bare bones. He wiggled his hips and tugged the hair on the nape of Richie's neck. "Now fuck me, before this gets gross." 

"It's already gross, asshole," Richie murmured into Eddie's neck, pressing his lips gently against his skin as he sunk in deeper. "You just don't care because you got my dick in you."

Eddie threw his head back and bit his lips, eyeing Richie's open window. So oversensitive, he could hardly stand it, but the raw electricity of it was addictive on its own. He pulled Richie closer to him so he could kiss him, the faint tang of orange soda still trailing on his mouth. Richie was barely fucking him, content to stay buried inside Eddie as long as the world kept spinning, but they could practically wear the humidity in the room, and Eddie was so hard it hurt , so he needed to pick up speed. If anything, they could fuck in the shower. They had a No-Slip Mat. Eddie couldn't believe he was even entertaining that thought.

He moaned into Richie's mouth when he started moving, beaming when Richie sunk his teeth lightly into Eddie's shoulder and cursed, moving like he could barely stand to pull out for a second. 

Richie pushed his hair off of his forehead and groaned. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Eddie kissed the side of his head. "I thought that's what we were already doing."

By the time Richie pulled away to look at him, his eyes shining. Like Eddie just told him the secrets of the universe or something. The look faltered, a quick flash of thought before Richie bent down to kiss him again. Eddie melted into him, his hands shaking as he held Richie's face. 

He knew that this didn't mean love. He knew people had sex and did this without it ever being love, but this was them . Richie had to know Eddie would rather die than let anyone see him like this, or be with him like this, and what about that wasn't love? Was he speaking a language Richie didn't understand? Is that all this was? A miscommunication?

An answer never got the chance to form before real-Richie pulled away from him, eyes bleary. For a moment, Eddie thought he was angry, that some part of Eddie's disgusting feelings for him had sickened him, but he just looked sad. He didn't seem to share the same memory Eddie had, and the failed potential in that being a shared moment tore at his chest. Richie didn't seem to catch on, sniffling as he stared at the floor. 

"I'm sorry I forgot you." He wiped his eyes and smiled at him, a depressed and jilted thing. "And I'm sorry I can't remember...more...of what we were." He paused. "Of what we could have been? If I'd...I don't know."  

Eddie rolled his eyes. "We have things to kill, dumbass, I'm not letting you go on another shame spiral." 

Richie laughed despite himself, a tear falling onto his glasses as his eyes became crescent moons and Eddie wondered what it would be like to know that laugh, to fit the shape of it to his skin, to live every day walking beside its form. He wanted to waste his remaining years on this fucked up floating rock rooted in the melody of Richie's laugh, to devote his time researching all the ways he could get Richie to keep doing it. He wanted this to kill him, to wrap him in itself so long that it became preferable to breathing. 

"Fuck you, I just...I thought I would have...it makes a lot of sense." Richie cleared his throat and finally looked at him, his eyes red and bleary, dark circles marking his face. "But I...if we're all going to die today, I don't want to fucking pussyfoot around this, but even the possibility of saying it, and then not dying and having to face the consequences is...a part of me would rather actually die."

"Get over it," Eddie choked, trying to fight every thought in his brain sending his body into overdrive. He wouldn't be surprised if smoke was shooting out of his ears. "Please."

"I would have waited for you," Richie said, without pause. "I know I didn't mean to forget, but if...if I remembered, I would have waited for you." 

Before Eddie could even process what he said, and the weight of that statement, Richie turned on his heel and left the room without so much as another breath. Eddie felt the ghost of the space he occupied, but turned from it. This all seemed like filler now, the boring shit he had to get through before he could actually start living, all this time after he was already supposed to have done so. He picked a shirt at random, not willing to concern himself with the menial details at the end of this chapter of his life. He would rather start new in an ugly shirt that didn't match, than worry about it and let this one story drone on until it grew tired and inescapable. He was ready for this chapter to end.

Eddie's pill box sat on top of his clothes, somehow unearthed from the very bottom of his bag, where it always was. It was the first thing he put in his bag when he left, the little rainbow collection of pills shining through the white plastic. With shaking hands, he took it from his bag and popped open the compartments, eyeing the capsules and tablets and the bullshit he knew he didn't need, but still took, to cleanse himself of whatever malignant thing lived inside of him. His mouth had gone dry, teeth clenched together, before he slammed each one shut and threw the entire thing in the trash. A new story. A new life. 

---

Just being in the clubhouse again, with all the unidentified dirt and thick layer of dust covering every inch of the place was enough to make Eddie's skin crawl. He breathed as lowly as he can, trying to trust the voice in his head telling him he'll be okay. He recognized that voice, but knew he hadn't heard from it in a very long time. He missed it. His heart beat against his skin, as Bill picked up a box and started leafing through a collection of photos in it. He almost gagged when Ben brushed a scrape on his elbow with a dust covered sweep of his hand, as Eddie balled his own up into fists at his side to prevent himself from actually throwing up on him.

Artifacts. Mike said they were here for artifacts, but as Eddie looked around, he couldn't see anything that was once so special to him it would have the power to kill much of anything. Clutter filled every available surface, even spilling onto the floor, cracked cassettes and rusted empty cans that held rotted pencils. He didn't know how to piece together a token out of this, how to pick a single moment out of the melting pot of his adolescence, and then find a tangible object to represent it. He hoped they would go somewhere else after this, where he could maybe scrape together an object from his past, find a piece of his old cast, find the shoelaces he threw out in the third grade...anything at this point would be helpful. 

"Are you okay?" Stan asked, placing a warm hand on his shoulder. "I mean...all things considered; you look like you're about to throw up." 

Eddie stared at him, at the scars on his face from his incessant scab picking habit he had after they killed It the first time. His hair curled onto his forehead, kind eyes he always had gently peering into Eddie's fucking soul. It was like magic, the reassuring glance of his friend, smoothing out the spikes in his heart rate. 

He took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah, yeah. I'm good." He cleared his throat to look more convincing, but he knew it didn't work. 

Bill laughed and pulled out an old polaroid, still in good condition, and handed it to Stan. Eddie caught a glimpse of the photo, Stan mid-yell, white-knuckling a pair of binoculars as his head whipped around to scold the person behind the camera, their shaking hands making the entire photo blurry.

Stan smiled as he grazed his finger over the photo. Flipping it over, chicken scratch handwriting in blue pen. ' yelling about birds. taken by B.D.'

Beverly collected the drawings from the corkboard hanging on the wall, signed drawings by Bill of them, of the birds he and Stan would watch together, of the clubhouse itself. She delicately eased the thumbtacks out of the board and pinched the aged and fragile paper, piling them up on the table below it. She knocked into a can of Pick-Up Sticks and a broken paddleball, sending them tumbling to the floor. 

"Oh, shit," Richie muttered to himself, fingers shoved into a Chinese finger trap he now couldn't get out of. Eddie looked away for reasons of protecting his own dignity. Ben reached over to help him tear it off. 

Bill took a stone from the box, tossing it in his hand before throwing it back in the box. Stan's face brightened, reaching over Eddie to grab the rock back out and see it. Eddie barely had time to process what was going on before Stan was holding the rock, bounding over to Beverly from across the room and showing her what he was holding. 

"Do you remember this?" He asked, before flushing. Even in his forties, he still blushed like a teenager. Richie screamed as Ben pulled his fingers from their paper prison. 

Beverly furrowed her eyebrows and looked at it, eyes searching for something that would give her a clue. Taking it from her, her eyes glinted in the dim light, her beaming grin taking up half her face. 

"The duck pond," she breathed, laughter in her tone. 

"You used to throw rocks at ducks?" Bill asked, him and Mike looking back up from the photo box. 

"We used to hang out in the park in the summer, at night when nobody was there," Beverly explained, running her thumb along the stone's contours. "And we used to skip rocks in the duck pond until we got tired."

"Or until we fell asleep," Stan added. "We probably slept out there more than we ever slept at home... if we ever slept at home."

Eddie shuddered as he recalled the first year after they killed Pennywise. He'd forgiven his friends for the fight earlier that summer, but he could hardly stand to look at them without wanting to run away. When he saw them, he saw that cave, he saw the bodies of those kids. The sharp stab of fear would cut through him when he tried to be around them, as he struggled to remind himself that these were his friends; they were the reason he got out of there in the first place. He used to scrub his skin raw in the shower, to wash away the entire experience, standing under the water until his entire world turned into a storm, clouding the memory. 

They used to sit in Bill's basement, staying up all night, talking in hushed voices, about nothing in particular, just to stay awake. Richie used to put on skits, dragging anyone he could into it as an unwilling participant, until they fell asleep in a pile on the floor. Eddie and Stan would hang out every afternoon they could, squeezing into Stan's twin bed and sleeping when the sun was still up, when nothing could lurk in the dark, knowing it was the only time they were going to get sleep if they could. Stan would walk him home at sunset, an excuse to stay up longer, and Eddie always assumed he went home after. 

Eddie remembered fondly when Richie would go over to one of their houses, right when the sun rose and the sky was pink lemonade summer-streaked, only to fall asleep once he'd survived the darkness. They were probably enabling each other's insomnia, Eddie thought, but he took comfort in the company, as Richie would plop his head down on Eddie's shoulder and slump his body against Eddie's side. His hair smelled like fresh air as it tickled the side of his neck, and he'd sleepily tangle their fingers together as he fell asleep. 

Mike was the only one of them who got over their sleeping problems when they were all still together. After working on the farm all day, exhaustion wore him thin, making sleep an easy escape. He had the most nightmares out of the group, though, and Eddie would often find him in the early hours of the morning, clutching a shotgun in his hands from his front porch step. 

"That's fucking true," Richie agreed. "All seven of us probably got, what? Ten? Hours sleep? The entire year of 1990?" Without being asked, he started picking up the sticks on the floor and shoving them back into the can. "We were fucking nocturnal at one point."

"Oh my god, and you kept comparing us to owls?" Beverly said, making Richie smile. "Every sleepover we had you would start hooting." 

"Who?" Richie joked, his voice warbling impressively like an actual owl. "Me?" He chuckled when everyone groaned. 

"That gave me war flashbacks," Bill told him. 

"Yeah, well, at least you had a basement to stay up all night in. I only had my bedroom, and my mom kept interrogating me over whether or not I was dating Stan." 

Stan wretched. "You wish, Trashmouth." The rock stuck out of his cardigan pocket while he carded through the drawings Bev had collected. "She did ask me about it, too, though." 

Richie's eyes became the size of dinner plates. "She never told me that."

"She said she saw us kissing one day, and didn't think you would ever tell her yourself." 

Eddie's heart dropped fifty stories and plunged into an icy darkness. It was stupid, to be jealous of something that happened thirty years ago, but he couldn't help it. Everything Richie said before was Eddie-specific, he knew that. He...thought he knew that. He definitely didn't leave the room after saying all that and whisper the same thing to the rest of them, but it felt like someone had shined a light on him and exposed the core of his heart. It was humiliating, to hold that moment so close to his chest, when Richie might not have meant it in the way Eddie thought he did. What if that was the product of bad whiskey and nostalgia, and that was all it would ever be? 

Ben looked at Stan, as if making sure he heard correctly. "She saw you and Richie doing what?"

Richie shook with laughter. "We kissed, like, two times when we were twelve. I was testing a theory."

"I was bored," Stan clarified. 

"What does 'testing a theory' even mean? " Bill questioned, face colored in amusement. He was loving this. Eddie was considering just...becoming one with the earth. 

Richie rolled his eyes. "To see if I liked guys , dumbass. Duh."

"I already knew I did, so kissing Richie was more of a...gaining experience thing." Stan ducked as Richie threw a yo-yo at his head. 

"Hey! I was a fucking Adonis!" He called, laughing so deeply he could barely get the words out. "You're a dick."

"Wait." Mike squinted at them. "Stan, didn't we…"

"Yeah," Stan confirmed, rubbing at his temple. "But we, like, made out...I kissed Richie once or twice."

"Mike, you whore ," Richie scolded, pursing his lips and tutting disapprovingly. "Also, neither of you bitches said anything when I asked if anyone else was gay."

"Yeah, because I was supposed to follow you and Bev talking about sleeping with half of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine cast with my oh, hey guys I'm bi. I would have rather eaten the eyeball cookie," Mike replied. 

"Nice to know we can joke about that already," Bill muttered, leaning into Mike as they laughed. Eddie and Richie shared a look as they both noticed them. Interesting. They whispered something to each other, but it was drowned out by Stan yanking off the lid of an old coffee canister and seeing what was inside. 

Richie popped into his space suddenly and without hesitation, knocking their shoulders together but not saying a word. He kicked at the floor, shoe catching on a piece of fabric on the floor, so dirty from age that Eddie hadn't even noticed it until then. Frayed pieces of string limply circled the wooden pillars on either side, where the same string had once been nailed into the wood to hold it steady. The hammock. Their hammock, that had never been theirs, but never really had a free moment to be anyone else's. Eddie could recall the papery roughness of Richie's old button up shirts, a familiar frustration as he glared at whoever was in there with them, looking at them curled up so close together that it meant something, his eyes trying to communicate that, whether it did or not, don't say anything. Don't cost him this, please. 

The back of Richie's hand brushed his with an electric touch. No meaning, no intention, the contact of him could make him breathless. He used to shove his inhaler between his mattress and his box spring when Richie would come over, in case the feeling of Richie's body on his, hands on Eddie's sides while he tried to map out the topography of his fucking tonsils with his tongue would suddenly steal all the oxygen from Eddie's body and send him into full asthmatic shutdown mode. 

Eddie blinked and thought again of his inhaler. ...That was as good a token as any.

---

"Richie…"

The taste of blood became sickeningly familiar to him, as he attempted to wrap his hands around the protrusion shoving through his torso. What holding it would do, Eddie didn't know. He knew he didn't have the strength to push himself off of it, and he knew he would only die faster if he tried, but he took his confusion as a natural consequence of the situation and rolled with it, loosely placing his shaking hands on the claw. As though being able to touch something meant being inherently able to understand it. But he didn't understand this. Red speckled Richie's lenses, blood working its way into the spidered cracked glass and obstructing his eyes from Eddie's blurring vision. He felt nauseous, but other than that, he felt nothing at all. The screaming agony that came with the initial surprising attack had faded, and his body slipped into numbness. 

"Eddie," Richie breathed, hand shaking as he cupped his cheek. Well, the one currently not fucking perforated by fucking Bowers. Eddie could barely make out his face, eyes widening behind his stained glasses and eyebrows shooting up towards his forehead. A new emotion washed over him, but as soon as he opened his mouth to tell him, there was a gaping wound where his stomach had been, as It threw him into a crevice of earth that had parted enough for Eddie to projectile into. 

He was going to die in this place, in the dark. His friends would fight Pennywise, and he would die here without them, alone, and afraid, while they tried to kill the thing that would prevent them from getting help. Blood pooled in his mouth and tears ran hot down his face, as he avoided even touching the place where he'd been hollowed out. If there was a bright light, he didn't fucking see one, and if there was, Eddie would rather go to Hell for all eternity than fall for the glow of another fucking Deadlight. There was only darkness, at the edge of his vision, begging him to surrender himself to it. 

The distant laughter shook him from it, but only barely, as it reminded him of summer here. Of the quarry and sound of an overused and under maintained bike chain rattling. Fresh air and his friends laughing and everything that had made life so worth living. Had giving it up really been worth it, for the extra time? Was staying now worth it, for the potential of one more moment?

Before he shut his eyes, ready to return to the darkness that had clouded the past twenty years of his life, Richie slid into view, covering in Pennywise-ooze and eyebrows furrowed so deep Eddie feared they would stay that way. 

"Hey. Hey, hey, hey," Richie said, tripping over his own words as he grabbed Eddie's face. His hands were so warm. He was so cold. "I—"

"I'm so fucking cold," Eddie muttered, head lolling in Richie's hands. "Rich, I-I can't—"

"I remembered," Richie interrupted. He was always interr upting. "I remembered everything, okay? I remembered." 

Eddie shook his head as the others came in with them. He laid his hand over Richie's the only thing he could manage, sighing as Richie flipped his own over and clasped Eddie's hand in both of his. "You don't...you don't have to say that. It's...It's okay." 

"What, are you kidding?" Richie laughed, but he was crying. They all were, but Eddie couldn't bear to look at them. "I wouldn't fucking lie about that. I remember it. I...I remember when you took French in high school, and you would talk to me in really bad fucking French after we hooked up, and then you wouldn't tell me what you said." His shoulders shook as he held back his own sobs, but Eddie didn't know what bottling them up would do. It was a little late for boosting morale here. "I fucking love you. I always have. A—And I've always been trying to find you, even when I didn't know it. You can't fucking die," he pleaded. "I was never able to find you, I was nev— Please ." 

The others crowded around him without speaking, trying to figure out a way to lift Eddie up without causing more damage, but Eddie knew it was no use. He was going fast now, and he didn't know how many more moments he would have, but he knew it wasn't enough to get him back to the surface. 

He wanted to say goodbye to them, to thank them for being his friends, for loving him even when they didn't know who he was. He wanted to thank them for being his reason to keep living, even if it meant a fake marriage he didn't know was fake, and for giving him the fierce need to claw his way through time until the world could let them meet again. He wanted to thank Richie for being his first love, his only love, and for letting him go with all the grace Eddie could have asked to die with, even if he had to die right then. He wanted to tell them he appreciated them, how he loved them with every ounce of his soul and every breath he had left in his battered lungs. But he knew he wouldn't have the time to say it all. He fell silent as Bill instructed Ben to lift Eddie under his arms, quiet as he tried to sum up all of that into one sentence or two, just to let them know, before he would never get to again. 

His jaw fell open as he struggled to remember how to speak. Everything faded so quickly. 

"You know, I...I…" Eddie closed his eyes, thinking of how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over, he died. 

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Going home was always the same for Eddie: dreadful. Turning from the smiling faces of his friends as they waved and shrugged at the tragedy of having to deposit Eddie in the depths of hell, all sunburnt cheeks and frowns before they silently biked away. Then it was just him, too small for his body that was only brushing average, dwarfed by the same house he always lived in, its same familiar effect, like his skin was shifting against his muscle, loose where it didn't fit. He couldn't always pretend to be someone he wasn't, and the constant demand to do so where he was supposed to feel the most like himself sometimes made his costume irritating and hard to maneuver. 

Tip toeing into his house, trying to shift his weight off of the creaking floorboards, Eddie jumped when he found his mother, awake, and staring at him as he came inside. She wasn't in her chair that time, instead sitting up straight, trying to provide an air of authority Eddie no longer recognized in her, her hands clasped tight together and her chin turned up. Eddie's heart sank as he looked down from her, to the college brochures his school counselor gave him earlier. Specifically, the collection Eddie had hoarded in the steadfast hope that Derry was not forever, that these pamphlets from all over the country were not only real, but that Eddie would get to one of them one day. Every night, like porn, he would pull them out of his top drawer where he hid them in the very back corner, and live in the facade they provided for him if only for a moment. And here his moments were, thrown and scattered on his coffee table underneath his mother's burning glare. 

Eddie blinked, his eyes already beginning to sting. "Why were you going through my—"

"It's my house! I can do what I want, and I thought we talked about this!" She interrupted, her voice booming in the otherwise silent room. 

Eddie flinched, knowing already that this was over: that dreaming of ever leaving was over. A future was only plausible if his mom had no knowledge of it. Anything more and she would take it over completely, ripping it from Eddie's hands and leaving him with nothing. 

"You're going to go to Bangor, like we planned, and then you'll come home and work here." 

"But—"

" No but's. " She scolded. "I'm not turning back on the plans we already made just because you want to follow those friends of yours. Ridiculous. All the way across the country? You know I can't go that far out, Eddie. You know that." 

That was the entire point, Eddie thought as she continued ranting, but he really wanted to go to his room and shut his door, or run in the other direction and back to his friends, where they'd talk about everything except this, and make him forget that this was his life. A cavern opened in his chest, and his costume became suddenly tight and overbearing, threatening to rip from his body and leave him bare. He crumbled under the scrutiny of his mother, the woman he shared half of his DNA with, and nothing else. He didn't understand how she'd grown up to love him so much that it wasn't love anymore, to convince herself that imprisonment could pass for anything akin to it. When had she stopped noticing the difference between torment and love? Between parenting and suffocation? Between medicine and poison?

"Okay, mama, I get it," he blurted, careful to raise his voice enough so she would hear him, but not so much that she would get angry with him for shouting. He always walked the edge of a fine blade, and every day his mother ensured he walked away with bloody feet. Harder to run away, and a good excuse for making him stay longer. If he had the chance, he would rather leave bright red footprints behind on the sidewalk as he ran barefoot out of county lines, than stay, a sitting duck, wrapped in bandages and his mothers approval. "I know." 

Without letting her enter her next tirade, as she immediately moved to do, Eddie stormed up to his room and buried himself underneath his comforter. More than anything, he wished it didn't matter. He wished his mom was full of shit and that nothing she said would've kept him in this bullshit town, but she had all of his money from his father under lock and key, with only her name on the account. Without her, he'd sink into debt faster than he could swim out of it. 

He wondered if that was an excuse he used, a flimsy facade he spewed in order to avoid admitting that staying with his mom felt secure. Terrible, and his worst nightmare, but at least her erratic behavior was familiar. College was entirely new...an off-world experience he knew nothing about, and people who didn't know at all. What if he got laughed off campus on the first day, and had to return home to his mother, who would use his ultimate failure as a reason to keep him forever. Wouldn't it be better to avoid the failure, and let the suffocation of this home bury him? At least then he couldn't die a failure. Not if he'd never tried anything to begin with.

Eddie had been laying in the dark for an hour, but he hadn't slept, by the time Richie made a mariachi band out of Eddie's fucking roof shingles. Eddie curled into a ball, not even wanting Richie to see him like this, or ask about what was wrong, in case Eddie caved and told him. Fear struck his heart, knowing the stubborn loyalty of his friends. If they knew Eddie had to stay here, with his mother, they'd all end up making some half hearted attempt at staying here with him. Even if they did it with their chest, dropped their plans and agreed to stay in Maine for another four years, Eddie would never in a million fucking years let them. This was his cross to bear, and he wouldn't let his friends take it for him. 

Richie didn't even knock, pulling up the window and climbing inside on his hands, until only his legs hung out the window, and he dropped his entire body, silently, onto the floor. Eddie watched curled up in his blankets, knowing Richie could see him, the setting sun offering them enough residual light that it wasn't pitch black yet in the room, but Richie didn't greet him. Instead, he kicked off his shoes and shoved Eddie over, ignoring his groaning protests until he was lying next to him in his bed, his long ass body squished against Eddie's. 

Eddie looked at him through the opening in the covers that he made for his face. "What do you want, Trashmouth?" 

Richie snorted and pulled Eddie from the blanket so he could wrap them both in it. "Got bored at home, knew your mom wouldn't let you come over right after you got home," he explained simply. "What's wrong?" 

"She's being crazy again." Eddie left it at that, and Richie didn't push, knocking their foreheads together and wrapping his arms around Eddie's waist. Tears Eddie'd been holding back since earlier fell now, letting his stony silence finally crack into quiet sobs. Richie exhaled, surprised at the sudden outburst of emotion, but soon he ran his fingers through his hair, kissing the top of Eddie's head. It was times like this, that Eddie wondered about love. He understood that, romantic or not, this was what love was. Whatever his mom was doing had no similarities to this. 

"I'm sorry," Richie whispered, swirling tickling patterns on Eddie's scalp. His chin pressed against Eddie's hairline as he hummed the Zelda theme song, gentle notes filling the room while the summer breeze swept in through the window Richie forgot to close. 

Eddie sniffed and pulled away from him. "If you fucking let bees into my room, I'm going to fucking kill you." 

Richie rolled his eyes, but got up and shut the window anyway. As soon as he left, he was back, rolling back under the covers, shoving his legs between Eddie's and tangling them together. Eddie buried his face back in Richie's chest as Richie wrapped his arms around him, letting out a sigh from the bottom of his chest. 

This was love. He wished it could be this way forever.