Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The soil above his head was packed tightly against his body. He tried to say something, feeling his mouth open and close like a fish out of water, but no noise was coming from it. Eddie Kaspbrak could sense how his bones rattled in effort against thin skin. It took what felt like hours to crawl from underneath where he was buried, the cold darkness seeping gradually into the welcoming warmth of the sun at dawn. For a second, he couldn’t decipher where he was exactly, only that he couldn’t help but relish in the way oxygen came freely into his lungs.

He looks down at himself, still covered in dirtied blood, and attempts not to cringe at the thought of what could possibly be underneath, but as he looks closer, his skin doesn’t seem quite like it had when he first entered the house of Neibolt. When he looks behind himself, he sees the crumbled remains of what used to be the greatest monster of his entire life even when he didn’t know it existed. There was no reasonable explanation for why he was still alive, still walking around and behaving as if he hadn’t been impaled through the chest completely. After a relieving and much needed shower, he feels how cold his skin is to the touch. Everyone is gone, and it feels impossible not to think all his friends had ultimately left him behind to rot. 

He was alive, didn’t they know that? 

Eddie distinctly remembers Richie’s weeping; loud sobs wrecking through the other’s body as he tried to convince the ones behind him to bring Eddie alone, something about the way he held onto the back of Eddie’s head as if it were the last time he would ever touch him again.

But if Richie knew that Eddie was still alive, then why did they leave him? Why does he walk the streets of his childhood alone? 

People he passed by stared him down, and it got to a certain point where Eddie began to believe that maybe something was deeply wrong with him. He could feel the specific way his stomach twisted in on itself, making the tightness in his throat thicker than before. The more he walks, the more he begins to realize how pale his body is; and not the kind of pale that one gets when they ultimately just need to step outside for a while and soak in some Vitamin D, no. It was the kind of pale where the body is void of all blood flow, if he looked close enough, he could see the way the skin shines blue. He remembers, vaguely, Richie hovering in the air; suspended in time and space as his jaw hangs unhinged, eyes white from the blaring lights in front of him. The Deadlights. He remembers his own thoughtless bravery, the spear flying through the darkness, cutting it like a limb. 

He thought he got It, the monster that hungered off of him for decades unknowingly, but he was so awfully wrong. Eddie remembers, now, the way Its claw ripped through his torso, splitting him in half, and how It threw him across the cavern unable to gather enough energy to lift himself from the cold, cold floor. For a second, he forgets what else happens, but then he regains his memory as he walks past the theatre: Richie’s sobbing form, hovering over him.

Eddie vaguely remembers saying to him, or maybe just thinking: don’t cry, God not you out of everyone, please.  They defeat It, that’s what Eddie is sure of, but just after that his memory goes blank. Dark. Like his brain was a wiped chalkboard. He limps his way through the empty town, aimlessly, feeling his throat groaning on its own, and clamping a hand over his mouth as to not let anything else leave it. Eddie realizes, oddly, that he feels like he’s decaying. But it can’t be. He was walking. Terribly, but he was walking. His legs led him to the hotel, where his stuff still lay lifelessly there, clothes thrown around the room as if in a hurry to abandon it all. 

He holds onto where the wound is still gaping open, ready at any time to swallow him whole. And then he remembers his father. The way the cancer slowly ate away at him, too, and the way Eddie had watched him fight back against an invisible army. Eddie, although devastatingly young, understood then, that death was a tangible thing. And he watched as Death consumed his father as he took each step. The older man was a walking corpse by the time that his mother finally decided to keep him in a hospital bed. There, Eddie remembers clearly, the stories he would make up in his head, the dirty tiled floor, the stage, the bright lights above, the imaginary sun of each scene. It shook their family apart silently, and as Eddie continues to tremble and walk through the streets, he suddenly feels just like his father.

It was a horrible thing, remembering everything all alone. He thinks he remembers Richie kissing his head just before the others drag him away, and Eddie not being able to scream out to take him with them. He trips over a small rock, falling to his knees on what he thinks is some kind of bridge. This small thing, bringing him hard to the ground, nearly makes him want to cry. If he did, Eddie thinks that he really wouldn’t mind, it’s not like anyone else is around to see it anyways. But as he looks up, he sees the side profile of someone so achingly familiar that he feels his heart stutter violently in his ribs, like a bird attempting to take flight inside of a cage. The man was both young and older, the age they had first met and the age where one of them was left behind. 

The man stood, legs and arms trembling as they lifted himself to the other side of the bridge’s railing. Somehow he was both terrified and confident in his decision. Eddie, realizing nearly too late, rushed over to his best friend Richie Tozier and held on tightly to his shoulders. Eddie’s own weak arm shaking underneath the pressure of a full grown man ready to lean forward and let gravity take him. At first Richie doesn’t look at him, but after a while of them staying like that, the other man looks behind himself to make eye contact with Eddie. 

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Eddie whispers, hiding his face from Richie’s gaze. They both breathed heavily. One from pure panic, the other from disbelief.

“Am I hallucinating?” Richie asks, his voice half laugh half sob. He clings onto Eddie’s arm regardless, and brings himself back to safety where Eddie then gives him a correct hug, both arms holding onto his friend with all the strength he could realistically muster in this moment. They didn’t say anything else, just exchanged breaths.

They got into Richie’s car, which was parked haphazardly by the side of the road; as if he wasn’t planning on coming back for it, and wasn’t expecting anyone else to see it for some time. So, they sit there in his air conditioned car, Eddie regaining some mental strength after saving Richie from what he thought was most likely a suicide attempt. He wasn’t trying to make a joke of it, but he never really knew how to deal with these things correctly (probably something stemming from his childhood), and he felt that he was still in shock of having miraculously come across Richie at just the right time. 

It must’ve been fate. 

“You’re in my car right now.” Richie points out stupidly. 

“Yeah, I am,” Eddie says, looking at Richie’s side profile. The other wasn’t looking at him, instead looking ahead of himself at the open road and clenching onto the steering wheel with all his strength. “You guys left me back there.”

“You were dead.” Richie sighs out, his voice wavering.

“Apparently not dead enough.”

“How did you even get out?” This time Richie does meet his eyes, but it’s with fearful confusion rather than the preferred reverence that Eddie was internally expecting.

He shrugs, “I crawled my way through I guess,” he mumbles to himself more than the man sitting next to him. “I could barely breathe.”

“How did you find me?” Richie asks, voice steady, but almost unintelligible. It was as if he didn’t really want to ask, but his mouth behaved as it usually does and said it without his permission. Richie swallows thickly, the clicking sound an almost unbearable thing to hear in the dreadful silence between them.

“I didn’t really mean to,” Eddie says. “I thought all of you left without me, I’ve just been walking.” He pauses, trying to gather up both the courage and the right words to say what he feels needs to be said at this moment. “I’m not going to ask,”

Richie cuts him off abruptly and harshly, voice becoming a knife. “Then don’t ask.”

“But I just want to know.” Eddie finds himself pleading. “I just held my best friend back from jumping off a fucking bridge, Rich.” He feels tears welling up in his eyes, but if Richie was right, and he was actually living dead, then that couldn’t be possible. It didn’t make it hurt any less, though.

“Yeah, well, that was your choice.” Richie spits out, turning the ignition on and turning them on to the main road, speeding down countless streets.

“What,” Eddie replies indignantly. “You’re saying I should have fucking let you do it? And watch?” He finds himself yelling over the loud roar of the engine. They’re hurtling towards nowhere, the same way they both know this conversation is going to end up hurting one or the other.

“You could’ve.” Is all Richie says, like it was proving a point that Eddie didn’t know he was making.

“No,” Eddie says instead of entertaining Richie’s cowardice. “You don’t get to do that to me. You can do that to Bev or Bill or fucking Mike for all I care, but you have no right to do that to me.  I saved your ass because you fucking mean something to me, Rich. It’s on you whether or not you can fucking accept that.” He’s breathing hard by the time he’s done, and it seems that Richie was done, too.

They never argued much, and even if they did, it always worked out in the end. This was something heavier than the two of them had ever approached in conversations. An argument worse than calling each other ‘asshole’ or ‘pussy’ or ’dickface.’ They were adults now, and for some reason, the two of them forgot that. They forgot, for an inch of a second, that they weren’t just two middle schoolers dunking each other’s heads underwater. This was not some play fight ranked up to be bigger than what the actual issue was. It was something real . 

“I don’t have anywhere to go.” Eddie admits suddenly. Realizing that Richie was bringing them back to the hotel to get his stuff. There was a beat of silence that almost felt like an hour before Richie even inhaled a single breath. He pulled into a parking spot, put the car in park, and shut the engine off before even moving otherwise.

When he finally looks at Eddie again, it’s like Riche is a whole other person. He says, deeply sighing out as if he’d been holding his breath since the fight with It, and says, “You’re coming home with me. No one wants to be married to a walking corpse.”

And something about that both reassures and pains Eddie. Knowing that yes, Eddie shouldn’t be alive right now, and yes, he probably shouldn’t even be seen right now. It was a comforting thing, knowing that ultimately Richie was there to acknowledge his newfound existence, but he couldn’t escape the image of his father. ‘Walking corpse’ is what they always said behind his mother’s back. And now Eddie was the exact same way even though his whole life was dictated by his mother, his future partners, and even himself so that he wouldn’t end up anywhere close to that. It was impossible to tell when exactly Richie had decided that he would bring Eddie back home with him, but he found it to be more of a hassle to ask than to just agree. 

When they go inside, Eddie can finally feel just how exhausted his body is. It brings him to the floor, and for some reason, Eddie can’t fight back against the feeling. He lets himself sprawl along the ragged carpet, where the corners look as if something chewed away at them, and the void underneath the bed reminds him of childhood monsters. He understands, then, just how dead he is. Not entirely physically, or mentally, but he feels it in the way that he experiences time. He lives in memories; where he is at once young, old, and not born yet. He can feel the youthfulness of his laugh, but can also experience the way his deteriorating bones creak whenever he attempts to move himself from his position on the floor. 

Richie is somewhere in the bathroom, the sink turning off and on at intervals, and at one point Eddie comes to believe that he dropped and broke something. If it was something of Eddie’s, he couldn’t come to care, as he didn’t believe that brushing his teeth would help them reattach themselves to his gums. He took a better look at himself when Richie was still in the car, after telling Eddie to go inside first. It was almost comical, the deadness of him. Eddie almost thought that a special effects makeup artist came by while he was lying there in the rubble and muck and painted him up to look dead. 

“Eds,” Richie calls out, and God if Eddie couldn’t help but smile in relief. “Eds, I have all your stuff in the car.” In response, Eddie groans and huffs, hoping it would convey his answer. He could hear Richie’s footsteps approaching closer, and the telltale sign that he saw him lying on the floor: a bark of familiar laughter that rings like church bells in Eddie’s soul.

Instead of helping him up, Richie drags Eddie by the ankles until he gets them to the staircase. Eddie half expects Richie to let him bang his face against the steps and just drag him further down, but then he feels Richie lift him up as if he weighed nothing and down they continued. Of course, it wasn’t without a grunt here and there from Richie which was entirely expected. When Richie buckles Eddie into the car, and then himself, they drive off. The other had a smile plastered on his face as if they didn’t have a whole ass conversation just an hour or two prior. But that’s how they always were; too deeply entangled into one another where they would never fail to find their ways back to each other in one way or another. 

Eddie begins to thoroughly believe that it was actually fate that saved them both and led Eddie to the bridge earlier. There was a small airport that hung graciously on the horizon, and Eddie almost found himself in love with Maine once again. Richie’s smile was as bright as the sun, and something inside the both of them sang relief and acceptance, a duet of both their souls surviving something no one else possibly could.

They got past the gates, and they laughed about the TSA security’s faces. Their joy was unkept and unapologetically loud even at the late hour, for it was a song only they knew the lyrics to and couldn’t help but sing for everyone else to hear. Richie got better, his attitude leaning gently into being his usual self once more instead of the tangled ball of regret and contempt that Eddie had to face in the car earlier in the day. Eddie thought about how the whole thing will finally be completely behind them once they board the plane.

They take refuge on one of the circular couches by the gate and twist themselves to fit the shape of it. They were head-to-head, as they were laying in opposite directions. When Eddie heard gentle snoring from Richie’s side, he took the moment to revel in the impossibility of his existence. Without Eddie being there, he would’ve died. And something about that made him cry. It wasn’t normal tears, as when he wiped them away, they came away black. Rotting blood. The disgust he felt didn’t stop him, as it only made him more emotional about their connection in the middle of the damn airport. He felt, inexplicably, like he held this love for him in the palms of his hands. 

It was such a fragile thing, and yet he kept it outside of himself. Eddie no longer felt as if he needed to hide it. He knew, deep down, that their childhood had shaped them to be fearful of the way they felt for each other, but they were older now, they could love each other the way they wanted to. It was only a matter of time for Richie to realize the same thing. And when he does, Eddie will be waiting. 

He wished, stupidly, that he didn’t have this revelation now, but when he was still breathing back before the fight took place. Even better, before Eddie moved from Derry. They could’ve had so much time together, to explore hidden depths even if it had to be in secret. But it was stupid to think of what ifs. They had each other now, wasn’t that enough? It should be.

But for some reason it wasn’t. It felt like Eddie had missed out on so much. They both had. Eddie began to believe that coming alive after death was a second chance; to love how he should have from the beginning, and to guide Richie to loving, too. 

It wasn’t just loving each other, but loving themselves. And loving life as they knew it.

Chapter Text

Eddie began to dream. It was the kind of dream where you usually wake up sweating regardless of whether it was a nightmare or not. It was impossible to tell how long they’d both been asleep for, but they awoke to the sound of rustling clothes as people readied themselves to board the plane. By this point in time, Eddie was able to truly see the blue-ish tone to his skin, now transitioning harshly into a shade near purple. Eddie watched as Richie dug around in his carry-on for a sweater that Eddie was able to pull onto himself, covering any exposed skin. It was difficult to say whether the strangers’ eyes were looking out of sympathy or the mob mentality to attack anything that looked particularly different than the average human. 

He knew, innately, that he wasn’t himself anymore. Not in the way that he sometimes felt during his childhood where all he made himself was what his mother could stand; someone healthy, smiling, and clean. No, this time, as he grew into himself more, he began to find himself outside of the diseases lingering in his peripheral vision. As he walks- more like wobbles- onto the plane, he can distinctly feel the way that his bones threatened to shatter beneath the weight of his body. He didn’t feel like himself, because the true him was still buried underneath that damned house. It didn’t come back with him the way his body did. Eddie ultimately knew that even this rotting body wasn’t going to last very long, but he hoped it would give him a little more time with Richie like he knew they both deserved. 

The flight to Richie’s home was exhausting, and every now and then, Eddie felt the way his head attempted to detach from his neck whenever he tried to sleep. He could feel the tendons as they stretched further the more his head leaned away from his shoulders. It didn’t hurt like he thought it would; it was more like the stinging of knowing you’re stretching your leg too far.  His ‘condition’ wasn’t getting any better and he couldn’t help but imagine his mother scolding: I told you you were delicate, you never believed me. Now look at you. As helpless as your father. I told you that you needed me. I told you to take your pills. I told you to eat well. I told you I told you I told you. 

It was a near unbearable thing for your parents to be right.

Eddie knew this thing would come for him sooner or later; whether it was his father’s heritance or something else just as terrifying and deadly. He felt like he should have come with a warning swinging from his neck: do not engage, nothing good comes from it. Because he looks at himself in the mirror of the small, enclosed bathroom, and can’t help but feel that this is what he deserves. Truthfully, it wasn’t as if he chose to be undead, but he can feel it rattling through his thinning skin: something akin to God’s plan. 

He remembers the way his mother used to murmur prayers in the waiting room, calling upon some faceless and good-willing God to save them from the shackles of an ill-rattled father. It was unfair, Eddie thought at the time, to put the blame on anything other than themselves. But as he goes to find his seat beside Richie once more, he makes eye contact with a mother and her child and couldn’t help but stare at the horror-struck faces that he met. It was one thing to get it from people he didn’t know, nor cared to, but all he had stuck in his head was the way Richie’s own face twisted into something that Eddie didn’t want to know. 

It felt like a black hole; always there, eating and eating, but could do nothing to stop its insatiable appetite. He remembers seeing a god there, in the space between what was most likely dying and when he woke up. It wasn’t the face of a man, like Jesus, but something more benevolent that lingered out there silently and in the consuming darkness. Eddie began to pray, eyes fluttering closed in despair, knowing that he won’t see anything other than the backs of his eyes and something about that scares him. That there’s nothing out there to cure him from this deadness. That it’s only himself that has to fight against the same invisible army that shot down his father.

Eddie can feel the weight of Richie’s sweaty palm on top of his hand, and this too, is agony. The knowledge that Eddie will never be warm again. He fights with himself, over and over again, the whole six hours it takes for them to reach sunny California. Richie’s car was parked in the parking lot, and when Richie swerves into the garage of his big house, Eddie realizes that he’s really here. He wants to say something to the other man, now three times the age that Eddie thought they’d be forever, and finds that his throat closes in on any words attempting to escape. It’s impossible to tell if the tingling in his throat is from sadness or a maggot eating away at him. 

He finds that he doesn’t really want to fucking think about the very likely possibility of that.

So instead, he bucks up and says, “Thank you.” And it rings inside the hollowness of the car they’re in and Richie looks like he’s just about ready to cry. And so Eddie lets him. The other man, tossing his glasses to the side, leans further into Eddie’s cold, dying embrace, and weeps until Eddie can’t remember hearing anything else. 

This is who they used to be. This is who they are now, just children needing each other for warmth. And so one has what they’re both looking for, and the other has only his body to imply that he is who he is. They don’t tell the others, they keep it a mourning secret between themselves. 

Richie gives Eddie a spare key and his own bed room right across the hall from Richie’s: In case something happens. You never know, Eds. 

Eddie tries to eat the stir-fried rice Richie made, and it seems like the food disintegrates before it goes down his throat. And he does his nightly routine, both of them too jet-lagged to think of anything else. He dresses himself in nice pajamas and brushes his rotting teeth, which he suddenly realizes is just exposed bone growing from his mouth, and tries not to think about the growing hole in the side of his thigh. He couldn’t have been underground for very long, but the state he found Richie in tells otherwise. 

His unkempt stubble began to grow into visible facial hair, the hair on his head greasy with oils. Eddie finds it almost humiliating to think it took him so long to crawl from where he was left alone, but then rethinks the whole statement into a confusing wonderment about why he even is here to begin with.

He never really was one to question his existence, and the meaning of it that usually follows suit, but now he has more time on his hands (or at least he thinks he does because you can’t die twice , right?). Eddie tries to ignore the sobs coming from Richie’s room, and how it tears him apart from the open wound in his chest. The feeling spreads, as if he was being split apart once more, and he suddenly realizes that this is what sympathy is like. Of course, he’s always been more sympathetic and emotional than others, he was called sensitive for a reason, but this felt differently. It was the kind of sympathy you experience when someone you love oh so very much is in constant pain and you can do nothing to alleviate it because you, at the root of it, are the problem. 

You, Eddie Kaspbrak, are the cause for Richie Tozier’s undeniable suffering. 

And instead of crying, Eddie turns on his bedside lamp and watches as Richie finds his way, almost blindly, to his door like a moth to a zapper lamp. He tries to feel bad when Richie opens the door and says nothing as he crawls into bed with Eddie, but in reality, Eddie needs Richie. Like, a lot. And when Richie’s crying subsides just a little to where it was only small, aching whimpers here and there, Richie whispers out an agonized, trembling statement.

“You’re dead.” 

There’s a beat of silence before Eddie says in return, “But you don’t have to be, too. Live for me.”

“But you’re dead.”

“Just about as much as you are.” He says, combing Richie’s hair back idly. “Not wanting to live is about the same as actual death.”

“So what do we do?” Richie’s head turns to look up to meet Eddie’s eyes. 

“We fucking live as much as we can, Rich.” 

And they fall into a sleep-like death, where they both are holding onto each other as tightly as possible, hoping that by the morning, something changes in one of them or both of them to where there aren’t two living corpses in the same house.

-

The morning comes just as graciously as you’d expect it to. And unexpectedly, the first thing Eddie notices when he wakes up is that his arm is gone. He turns over on his other side, facing Richie once more and unsurprisingly it was currently lying lifelessly underneath Richie’s head. Eddie just stared at it for a moment, trying to gain an understanding of why his arm is detached from his shoulder before he finds that one of his feet is currently tangled up in the sheets, completely separated from his ankle. 

He finds this whole situation varyingly inconvenient. 

So instead of waking up Richie next to him, he gathers his spare limbs and finds himself sowing himself back together on the closed toilet seat in the bathroom. Luckily he had brought his first aid kit with him. He just finished his foot when Richie bursts through the door like he was the motherfucking CoolAid Man and the scream that tore through Eddie’s throat could discredit all accusations that he was dead. 

“Richie, Jesus Christ man!” He screams, snatching his arm from where it was dropped on the floor.

“What’re you doing?” Richie asks slowly, the decision to bust in on a man in the bathroom most likely catching up with him. Eddie stared dumbfounded at the question, as it was quite obvious what he was going, even in the dim light provided by the light above the sink.

“My arm and foot fell off.” Eddie says, deadpanned. He didn’t know how to deal with Richie like this. It wasn’t an insult, but ever since they reunited under extraneous circumstances, Richie was acting… off. It was impossible to tell, at least to Eddie, why.

“You didn’t want any help?” Richie whispers, attempting to hide the hurt in his voice, but failing miserably. He opens the door wider, leaning heavily on the wood, hand propping him up on the doorknob. Eddie couldn’t tell what Richie’s eyes were telling him.

“I mean,” Eddie started, but realized that sowing his arm with only one hand would prove to be difficult. “Maybe now, yeah.” He murmured, feeling awfully ashamed they were in this situation to begin with, but found that he should stop blaming himself for the things he didn’t choose for himself. Yeah. He didn’t choose to come back alive. That damn god did; and without his permission at that, but Eddie would have chosen this over Richie’s own suicide any day.

Eddie couldn’t forget the image of that: Richie’s acceptance of death. It was as if, foolishly, Richie believed he had nothing else left for him. As Richie took the needle and thread in between his calloused, thick fingers, Eddie almost began to cry about the very thought. He couldn’t imagine a life without Richie; how they had twined themselves around each other like vines, unable to tell where one began and the other ended. To think that Richie believed he wasn’t deserving of life, how awful a thought. 

Eddie didn’t notice he was actually crying until Richie’s eyes widened with such genuine shock and concern in his face that Eddie wiped at his face and saw how his blue fingers stained dark. Eddie opened his mouth to try and explain, but he knew only as much as Richie did. The sewing only lasted so long and the needle in Richie’s hands were pulled away from his shoulder. 

“Your neck,” Richie says out of nowhere, giving no other context. 

“My head almost came off on the plane.” Eddie shrugs, which makes his head loll, a sliver of his neck splitting. Richie laughed, but it was the kind of giggle where you weren’t sure how to react otherwise. The bluntness of Eddie’s information probably didn’t help. 

“Do you want help with that, too, or?” He trails off, a nervous smile etched scarily on his face. It almost looked funny despite the implication for why he was nervous.

“We used up the last of the thread.” 

“There’s something called a store.” Richie points out, placing the needle gently back into the first aid kit and closing it with a sharp click .

So they went to the store. It was only a small walk down the hill and Richie figured they both needed the exercise. Eddie was wearing a zip up, the hoodie thankfully hiding the line where his head was in the constant process of separating itself from the rest of his body. People stared because of course they did, but that wasn’t anything different than what they encountered in their childhood where slurs were thrown their way by adults and older teenagers alike. It felt awful, Eddie nearly says, how the stares were now for a different reason. But it didn’t feel any different than back then. Eddie had never felt so out of his own body before; the tips of his fingers buzzing with an unconscious anxiety to enter the packed corner store and see more people judging them because two men couldn’t possibly go to the store together without it insinuating something between them. Someone whispers something to Richie as he’s idly looking at the fruit (that they didn’t need) and when Richie makes eye contact with Eddie, Eddie suddenly realizes what the feeling is. Deep in his bones, he feels it humming louder and louder.

Alienation. Fear. But the kind of fear that follows you like a shadow because it doesn’t want to go with anyone else. It’s the kind of alienation that rings like a telephone in an empty house because your mother didn’t want you to go grocery shopping with her. It was the kind of otherness that you can only feel when you grew up too afraid to be anything else other than separate. Eddie thought he’d grown out of it once he moved away, but in reality it was just dormant. Sleeping, and waiting for the moment Eddie realizes it’s been there in the corners of his mind where only cobwebs dare to gather. 

He hears Richie say, “Oh, he doesn’t get out very much.” To one person and “It’s a kind of condition.” To another and even “He was born with it.” To a concerned mother with her children riding in the cart’s basket. Eddie felt like he ought to be ashamed, but the way Richie says these things; a lilt in his voice, almost mocking, it was as if he didn’t really believe it himself. Something inside Eddie’s stomach blossoms where he knows it’s just an empty cavity now, his organs most likely deteriorated black like tar. 

So the shopping trip should’ve gone better, who cares. 

They got what they needed plus some, and when they get home, Eddie eats an apple while Richie focuses on stitching Eddie’s neck back together again. He isn’t quite sure how he’s going to cover it up, but he’s just glad that fall is coming.

“Can I ask, now?” Eddie asks around a bite of the apple, juice falling from his lower lip. Eddie tries to ignore the way Richie stares. 

“I guess it’s only fair now that we’ve slept in the same bed.” Richie shrugs, getting himself a cold drink. Eddie watches as the cubes of ice float to the top of the glass and the bourbon glistens in the afternoon sun. 

“Don’t be gross.” Eddie says instead of anything else.

“I’ll only let you talk about it for 10 minutes tops, I don’t really like it in the first place.” 

“Why were you going to do it?” Eddie asks, setting the apple down on the polished wood of the dining room table. The hollow thud of it made his skin crawl for some reason. 

“Because you were gone,” Richie starts. He swallows, the clicking of his throat being reminiscent of the way Eddie’s own skin disobeyed his every move. “Because you were gone and no one else would love me.” He finishes, swallowing the rest of his drink in one go. Eddie stares at him, waiting for something else, but no other words come.

“That’s it?” Eddie says, almost indignantly. “Because of me? What about the others? We already fucking lost Stan to this, we didn’t need you, too.”

“You were dead, so I don’t know why you’re saying ‘we.’” Richie snarls. “I didn’t want to be here if you weren’t.”

“But why the bridge?” Eddie says, feeling the tightness in his throat getting harder to ignore. He was about to cry for the fifth damn time in the last 24 hours. “Why not wait until you’re at home?”

“I wrote our initials there.” Richie says blatantly, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. It wasn’t. “That was where I realized I first loved you.”

“When?” Eddie whispers. He didn’t have enough energy to make his voice louder. 

“After the first fight with It.” 

Eddie almost wanted to laugh. Or cry. Or fucking both because nothing made sense, but this. This did. And for the first time in his life he never wanted to let something go. He wanted to be by Richie’s side, reminding him that he was alive and he was here and that Richie didn’t need to worry about killing himself anymore. Eddie knew distinctively that no one can fix someone who hates themselves, but he wanted to try. He wanted to try more than his mother had for him. 

“Is there anything else?” Eddie asks, kindly. He reaches across the no man’s land of space between them and holds on tightly to Richie’s trembling, sweaty, ever-warm hands. 

Richie looks up at Eddie and meets his eyes where once they were confused, were now swimming with adoration. Eddie wondered if he would drown if he let himself get sucked into those eyes. He wondered if Richie would let him. Eddie wondered, not for the first time, how long they had both loved each other at the same time in the same moments and if it was the same intensity. And something inside of Eddie answered him: of course. Of course they have. All their lives they have.  

There was a moment of silence where they just stared at each other. Then, subtly, Richie shakes his head in response to Eddie’s question. A little bit late, but he found he didn’t really care. Instead of saying anything else, Eddie kisses him.

It was the kind of kiss that Eddie imagined them doing when they were younger; hungry, but soft, as they both wanted the moment to last. They were both starving for this even when they forgot each other, but they had each other now and something about that made both of them cry. Their lips met again and again, tongues exploring their mouths. Eddie had half the mind to pull away in fear of Richie realizing how rotten he truly is, but when he showed any sign of separating them, Richie put a large hand at the back of his head and pulled him even closer. Here, Eddie really couldn’t tell where he began and Richie ended, and Eddie let himself revel in the certainty of it. 

Love was always an exchange, a possession, but here, Richie made love magic. It was a spell casted upon the two of them where time didn’t exist and it was just them existing within the same heartbeat. Eddie’s ribs were Richie’s, and they shared only one heart. It no longer mattered which one wanted to die and which one was actually dead. 

They found each other again and Eddie never wanted to find another, because no other could ever make him feel the way Richie does. 

Chapter Text

“I’m telling you, Eddie,” Richie begins to scold, gently, but his voice is still stiff with fury. “We can’t keep stitching you up. It’s just prolonging the inevitable.”

“What do you want me to do about that, Richie?” Eddie begs, his hands thrown in the air with sacrifice. They’ve had this same conversation about eight times in the span of two weeks, all saying the same thing, but wrapped in a different bow. They both know how this will end, it was just a matter of who broke first. 

Neither of them have seen their friends since the defeat of It, and something about that made them more stir-crazy than if they were to just be truthful and out themselves of the fact that Richie almost killed himself and Eddie is standing in front of him currently deteriorating as they continue to yell at each other. This wasn’t like the other times they had fought when they were children, this was something real. Childish bickering became echoing shouts throughout Richie’s huge apartment. It was impossible to tell, at least for Eddie, where the anger resides within Richie, and why exactly the anger had gotten to the boiling point. 

Eddie felt like he was drowning. Swallowing gaspfuls of salt water that continuously enters his lungs, in hopes that one of the inhales will be real air entering his body. Eddie had heard the muffled sobs from Richie’s bedroom, when they spent nights away from each other after a fight like this. One time, Eddie overheard the shuddering breath of Richie whispering to the four walls, or to himself: It’s not the real Eddie. It’s not my Eddie.

Since then, Eddie was overly careful about what he said, and overly conscious of what he did. How he stood, how he laughed, the way that he put his clothes and shoes on. He felt like a stranger in his own body; and it wasn’t like the way he had felt when he was younger and realized he didn’t actually like girls. No, it was more like when someone jokes that someone is really just a bunch of rodents hidden under a trenchcoat. It was worse than that. Some nights, he couldn’t sleep properly knowing that he was actively dying even as he was living. There was a living monster inside of him and he didn’t know how to take it out, or even if he should. 

“You just don’t have to come with me,” Richie says plainly. It was hard for Eddie to convince himself that Richie didn’t mean it. That this was just an argument and they’ll get over it like they always do. But then Richie murmurs, “I don’t want you around me.”

And Eddie nearly loses it. 

He feels the way his heart, that no longer beats, drops to the empty pit of his stomach. He feels the waves of static wrack through his whole body over and over. And over. Eddie’s convinced his vision blacks out, and suddenly he’s crying. The kind of crying he only used to show in front of his mother. What would she think of her baby boy now? Richie’s face is hard, until the first stuttering inhale comes from Eddie’s chapped, dying lips, and suddenly he’s rushing over to where Eddie was standing on the other side of the room. At first Eddie almost wants it. Almost lets himself want it, for Richie to touch him, but then he starts trying to back away as his brain screams at him: Don’t touch me, I’m infected. I’m dirty and gross and sick and dead, and oh God I don’t want to spread this to you, too, I don’t want you dead. I don’t want you sick, but I want you. I need you. I need-

But Richie hugs him despite Eddie’s thoughts.

“Eddie,” Richie says, voice broken. “Eddie, oh God, I’m sorry.” He says. He repeats this in Eddie’s dying ears and he can feel the way the words attempt to patch up whatever’s broken inside of him. He doesn’t have the strength to tell Richie that everything in him is broken and unfixable. 

“Why would you say that?” Eddie weeps out, a desperate kind of plea that he would never ask if he were in his right mind. Even now he’s embarrassed that he allowed himself to say it, but the way Richie responds by holding him as tightly as he can to the warmth of his body, Eddie thinks for a second that it was worth it.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says for the final time. “I didn’t mean it, truly, I was just upset and got caught all up in the moment.”

“You meant it, though,” Eddie relents, wiping his tear-stained cheeks. They still come away black. “I’ve heard you, in your room. You think I’m not him.”

“Listen, Eds,” Richie sighs, sitting back on his legs. He stares at his hands that are folded in front of him in between the two of them. “I was in mourning. Still am, if I’m completely honest. I mean, you’re not exactly who you were when you were alive.” He pauses. Another sigh. Eddie finds himself breathing along with him. “Even if you’re here now, I am constantly reminded that you’re not exactly alive. I mean, you’re falling apart.” 

He makes eye contact with Eddie, a slow and sad smile coming to tear his face in half. And Eddie hates it. Hates that Richie is looking at him like that. But it can’t be helped and internally, Eddie knows this. He looks down at his own hands and glances at Richie’s. His were not the hands of a living person, and he keeps on forgetting that. 

“I don’t care if you think that I’m not going to last,” Eddie says, scooting himself closer to where their bent knees touch, then Eddie puts his forehead to Richie’s. “I want to live with you like I would’ve if I had survived. If I were alive. Just give me that, Rich, you’re all I need.”

It was a selfish declaration, request, but Eddie feels the way Richie nods anyways, finding that he’d rather have a reborn Eddie than no Eddie at all. Their knees part, letting the other get closer, and the hug they shared seemed almost ever-lasting. It was so deep, that Eddie almost couldn’t tell where he ended and Richie began, as is often the case with them. 

Later that night, Richie calls the others in an attempt to explain everything that had happened to them for the past month.

- 

“I can’t believe you’re just now telling us,” Beverly nearly yells through the speaker. She’s in disbelief, but both of them can hear the relief she’s attempting to hide behind her sense of being betrayed. “I mean, you go radio silent, and next thing I hear is that you’re sewing Eddie up in a goddamn bathroom.”

“Bev, light of my life,” Richie tries to placate, picking up the phone where it previously laid on the coffee table. “I’m telling you now, aren’t I? We just weren’t sure if Eddie was going to survive this long.” From another room, Eddie yells Hey! in which Richie promptly ignores. 

“That’s no excuse, Rich,” Ben chimes in, suddenly, because of course they’re in the same room together. “We thought we were going to have to mourn another one of us.” His voice was steady, reassuring, but there was still that hint of sadness that tremors through his staticky voice. Richie almost smiles at the thought of Ben being sad over him, but then remembers how very serious this situation is. 

“Maybe we should get everyone together,” Eddie chimes in, in which Richie yelps from the fact that the other was not there just a second ago. Both Beverly and Ben agree, alongside their overlapped amazement to hear his voice again. For a moment, Eddie couldn’t believe that people would be happy to hear from him, but he realized once more that these were his friends. Of course they were going to be happy, and he was going to have to get used to that. 

The calls with the others went about the same way, with some angry at how long it took, but relieved nonetheless (Mike) and others began to sob (Bill). It took another week for everyone’s schedules to align to where they could come by to California just to see the state of Eddie. In a way, their disturbance of his zombification was in a way of supernatural curiosity. In a way, Eddie was happy to see them, and even more so to feel their warmth once more.

His mother, still an ever-present voice in his ear, gave him many reasons to stay locked away in the spare room across from Richie’s, but he didn’t want to be that person again anymore. He already had been when he first left Derry, and he felt that he needed to be someone else now that he was dead. Or undead. Whatever term they use nowadays to relate to people dead but walking and breathing still. Some days it was a relentless discomfort, like sleeping on a mattress where you could feel the springs, but other days he found that he was used to the routine. 

Richie and Eddie made a game out of his common loss of limbs. Who can guess what Eddie will wake up without this morning? The others, when called to chat, did not find it as funny.

When the day finally came of the post-It-defeat Losers reunion, Eddie felt so nervous he was afraid all of his limbs were going to fall off all at once like Frankenstein’s Monster. The door opened and four full grown adults came washing in, pushing through and squeezing both Eddie and Richie into an involuntary group hug that no one agreed to, but all accepted. After the first few moments of discomfort, Eddie found the collection of six bodies all smushed together to be something that warmed the extinguished fire of his soul.

It was interesting to revel in the way that this love surrounded him. It was one thing to be around Richie for the past couple of months, where although they were conscientious of their affection for each other, it was still more awkward than giving a speech to a crowd of uninterested students. But here, with the rest of them all together, he didn’t feel the need to say anything. It wasn’t like Richie’s presence demanded anything from Eddie, either, but it was more of Eddie’s self-consciousness that made him think that he needed to fill the silence with something of importance. 

Suitcases were left by the staircase, as the rest of the Losers fretted over their glasses of alcohol at Eddie’s blue skin and stitch marks. They marvelled at his current dead existence the way that Eddie himself had when he first took the time to look at himself in the mirror, stretching the skin on his face so he could see the veins that no longer took in oxygen, nor spread blood, but instead were sleeping achingly below the thin layer of skin he had just managed to hold on to.

Beverly attempted to scour every inch of his body that wasn’t covered by clothes, and Ben barely held her back from her nosiness. It wasn’t as bothersome as Eddie first thought it would be, but at the same time he felt like he was hiding something awful beneath the surface. Which, in a way, was true. The clothes barely were able to envelop the holes that began to cave in his abdomen. He could feel them now, now that they are old friends, but they had never been possible to ignore in the beginning. 

“So what is it like, exactly?” Mike speaks up, softly, encouraging but in the way that unspokenly allows there to be room for Eddie to say ‘no thanks.’

“It’s like,” Eddie pauses, putting a palm to where he knows one of the holes are. “It’s like I know I’m dying, or dead, but there’s physically nothing I can do to prevent the process of decomposition from happening.” He thinks that he wasn’t able to properly explain himself despite the silent nods from where the others sat around him in a circle. 

“How did you find Richie?” Bill then asks, steady. 

“I,” Eddie hesitates again. “I was just wandering and I wasn’t really familiar with the kissing bridge, but that’s where Richie was. He was,” and here he stops himself entirely not knowing exactly how much he was allowed to say about the situation.

“I was going to jump.” Richie then cuts in, sitting himself in a chair beside Eddie, his hands fidgeting with the perspiring glass in his hands. There was a heavy silence after that statement, most of them probably remembering Stan, as they so often do. 

“Rich,” Beverly starts, reaching her hands out to the middle of the table. Richie grabs them, his and her hands wet.

“I couldn’t find,” Richie clears his throat. “I couldn’t find anything worth carrying on for. I’m sorry.” His face scrunches up as if that would make him disappear from the room. It didn’t.

“When I found him, I couldn’t help but be relieved.” Eddie says, putting one of his own hands on one of Richie’s shoulders. “I thought I was left behind, there was no one around.”

“It had been a little over a week,” Ben chimes in calmly, staring at his hands folded in his lap. “Everyone but Richie had gone back home.”

“E-even Mike had ta-taken a chance for the n-new world.” Bill says, looking out of the corner of his eyes at the mentioned man sitting next to him. 

"And that's even worse," Eddie says out loud, meaning to keep it in his thoughts. "I mean, leaving Richie? None of you wanted to bring him with you?" Eddie almost starts crying at how awful Richie must've felt to think that his only love was buried under a mountain of rubble, not to mention having to live with the image of Eddie getting impaled right above him. They never really talked about it, but not much needed to be said in order to be understood.

-

The night waned quietly after that, where no conversation entered the realm of the miraculous existence that was Richie-and-Eddie. As the rest of the Losers settled in the two other spare rooms left, Eddie went out the front for a walk.

The streetlights hung above, the closest to Heaven he fears he’ll ever encounter. He remembers his mother’s prayers, the way God never answered. He wondered, selfishly, if God had answered him instead, when he had feared death so severely in that dark cavern. Eddie remembers himself, praying, and tears like the beads of his mother’s rosary hanging from his eyes.

He can’t help but think he isn’t supposed to exist, like he did when he first awoke under the rubble. Did God spare him, or was this Judgement? Eddie almost found himself thinking that maybe he should bury himself and feel as time passes around him. It’s better off being where corpses lay, than in an environment where he knows something is wrong with him.

He hears, far behind him, the soft tapping of shoes hitting the road. Eddie almost hides himself, staying still in the dark space between one street lamp and the next. But the person stops in front of him, a glowing angel, and beckons Eddie towards him. Richie takes Eddie’s cold hands in his warm palms, like they so often do, and Eddie can’t help but look up into Richie’s eyes. Eddie felt like a sinner baring himself in front of a priest, begging the Father for saving. 

Eddie thinks that only Richie could do that for him.

“You’re funny to think I wouldn’t notice that you left.” Richie tries to joke, but his voice trembles with something that Eddie can’t name.

“I wasn’t trying to run away.” Eddie responds earnestly.

“I know.” Richie smiles.

He leans down and kisses Eddie, and it felt like it was the first time all over again. Eddie thinks that he’ll never fully get used to it, this particular love. But Richie enacts it like it’s as easy as breathing. And Eddie can’t help but cry at how awful a sentiment that is. Loving someone dead. But Richie does it anyway, and Eddie will gratefully accept it while he can. They are two burning stars, reaching their arms towards each other no matter how many light years apart they become, they will always travel the distance to find each other again. That’s what Eddie didn’t tell the others; how he found Richie, but how he found Richie. 

It was almost like there was an invisible string pulling on his soul to where he stumbled across the bridge; a song, bursting and wonderful, something Eddie had never heard in his life before. 

The song, inevitably, was Richie. 

The streetlights flicker above their heads as they kiss lazily in the middle of the road, and Eddie finds that he couldn’t care less who sees. He was happy, even if he was rotting, and he felt almost like looking to the future.