Chapter Text
Eddie stands in the middle of the bathroom and prods experimentally at the stab wound on his face. Neat black stitches run through it, professionally done and about as even as you can get them. They remind Eddie a little bit of rows and rows of millipede legs, running down the side of his face forever. He shudders at the thought, his skin crawling.
Like the hole through his chest, the one on his face is never going to heal. The stitches are there only to hold the two flaps of skin together, and they are never coming out. He covers the row of sutures up with a flesh-colored band-aid, as he does every morning. There: now it looks like it could have just been the result of a simple morning shaving incident.
Quite a large shaving incident, though.
Eddie very carefully does not look at himself in the mirror as he finishes applying the cover-up to the contours of his face, the way Bev had taught him the last time she had visited. Not caked on too thick the way he had become accustomed to doing it before, which apparently made him look uncanny. But not too thin, the way it had become in vogue recently, pale grey skin peeking out visibly underneath the flesh-colored mousse. To remind the world that you were a dead thing.
“Eds!” Richie’s voice calls out from behind the closed bathroom door. “Eds, quit hogging the fucking bathroom! I’m gonna be late to my meeting!”
“Almost done!” he yells back. He screws the lid back on the container of cover-up and wipes the residue off of his fingers in a piece of toilet paper. Prying his left eye open, he carefully pops a contact lens in, then repeats the action with the other eye. Finally, he allows himself to focus on the figure in the mirror.
There. Eyes- normal, human, brown. Skin- passable as alive, as long as you didn’t look too hard. After months of this and also Bev’s makeup crash-course, he’s gotten quite good at it.
“All yours,” he nods to Richie as he exits the bathroom.
“About time, Deaddie Spaghetti,” Richie declares, shouldering past him. He does not make eye contact.
“Don’t fucking call me that-” Eddie starts, but Richie is already gone, the door shut behind him. Eddie touches his hands to the side of his face, automatic, wondering if he’d missed a spot, or forgotten a contact lens, or something to give away his deadness. But he knows the answer.
Richie has been avoiding eye contact with him ever since he’d moved in.
Five years ago, Eddie had watched Richie’s retreating back as darkness closed in around the edges of his vision and thought to himself, “this is a good death.” He’d closed his eyes with that sight in mind, and hadn’t expected he’d ever be able to open them again. He hadn’t expected that he'd ever get to see Richie again.
Almost precisely one year after he died Eddie lurches upwards from the position he’d died in and opens his eyes again, although the semantics of whether or not he’s able to see with them is one up to the philosophers to debate. Sure, light reflected through his ruined pupils were being translated into electrical impulses along his optic nerve. But could it truly be called “seeing” if there was nothing at the helm to process these impulses?
Four and a half years after he dies he finally sees Richie again, for every definition of that word.
It’s in a government-sanctioned facility in San Bernardino (meant to serve the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and surrounding unincorporated counties). Eddie had been on a plane and then a series of covered trucks for the better part of two days, and although he doesn’t sweat anymore, he desperately wants a shower. “You’re one of the furthest we’ve had to transport,” a very young-looking man in camouflage armor, the only guard willing to talk to them, had informed him. “Most people get picked up and processed pretty close to where they were buried, which means they’re pretty close to any family or acquaintances willing to be assigned as a designated caregiver. But you, we’ve had to move you clear across the country for your pickup point!”
Eddie squirms in the tacky plastic chair he’s sitting in and tries not to panic. Overhead, the whine of the too-bright fluorescent lights is audible, buzzing like a nestful of angry bees. He waits, and then the door opens, and anticlimactically, Richie is there.
Six months earlier, Eddie Kaspbrak had come back into awareness surrounded by doctors, blinking awake under bright medical lights. Later, he’ll recall how they stood clustered a safe distance away from his jerking body, one of them with a large syringe of Neurotriptyline clutched in a thick glove, another holding a professional-grade taser. Later, he’ll notice how he’d been strapped down and restrained to the hospital bed as a “precautionary safety measure” just in case the medication didn’t take. In that instance, though, he could only think about one thing, because it was the thing on his mind when he’d died, and it’s the first words out of his mouth in a long, long time.
“Richie?”
By the time uncharacteristically heavy winter rains had finally flushed him out of the cistern after he’d been trapped in it for years, the inhabitants of Derry (as well as most of the planet) had a well-established protocol for dealing with beings like what Eddie had become. He’s actually a bit of a late arrival, the doctors explained to him. They’d already gone through all the fun and excitement of dealing with a zombie apocalypse back when everyone had risen and society had become a bit chaotic as a result, but then someone had invented a drug that could wake the dead up and life was more or less back to ordinary by the time Eddie had shown up.
It’s lucky, Eddie supposes. He had shambled around Derry a bit after picking himself up out of the sewers and, in a fitting display of irony, managed to frighten a group of children playing in the woods (where, naturally, they were absolutely forbidden from going). However, in the intervening years Derry had apparently finally wised up to the possibility of monsters in the woods, because the children had immediately retreated and told their parents, who told the police department, who contacted the government, who picked him up and pumped his brain full of medication until enough neural pathways had been repaired such that he could remember his own name and no longer felt like eating people’s brains.
The doctors and a series of cheerful but sterile posters and pamphlets informed Eddie that what he has is “Partially Deceased Syndrome” (PDS for short), although the symptoms sounded suspiciously similar to the zombies in the B-list horror movies Richie had made him watch so much of as a child. There’s a short brochure listing some common stereotypes and misconceptions about being undead (not transmittable in any form, which at least explains how easily society had managed to bounce back. Eddie has enough stuffed into his head about the bubonic plague and the Spanish Influenza and the AIDS epidemic to know how easily things can go south very quickly). They teach him how to administer the Neurotriptyline and explain he’ll have to take a dose once a day for the rest of his not-life, lest he revert to his previous, rabid state.
Eddie’s not sure about this strange new future he’s been thrust into, and he’s finding that he really hates being dead. But if there’s anything he understands its disease and medication, so he clings onto that familiarity as best he can. For possibly the first time ever there’s actually something wrong with him, but as long as he remembers to take his daily dose of medicine he’ll be okay. The sickness bubbling inside him will be held at bay, and everything will be okay.
“We would like to reintegrate you back into society now that you’ve been treated,” they’d explained, “Only legally you’ll need a non-partially deceased human caregiver, just to sponsor you and make sure you’re accounted for, and can you think of anybody from your old life who would be willing to do this?”
Nonsensically, the first person to pop into Eddie’s mind is Richie , which was utterly insane given that Richie is a man who probably should never be given any responsibilities Eddie was friends with as a child, then didn’t talk to or remember for three decades, then became reacquainted with over the course of about two days, most of which was spent fighting a murder space clown. And then Eddie died.
The other problem was that Eddie is married and has a wife, who is just so much more the logical choice in literally every aspect. So he called Myra instead.
Except, several phone calls, a screaming match and a bunch of paperwork later, it turned out he isn’t married and she wasn’t his wife anymore. The legality of dying and then coming back to life was apparently pretty tricky, but generally it’s agreed upon that the death of one party is a good reason for a marriage to end. Five years was also a pretty long time to not be alive, and in the interim a widowed Myra had remarried. Eddie can’t blame her for that.
The screaming, though, had been because Myra vitriolically didn’t want to see or have anything to do with him, or PDS sufferers in general, or “any of you rotting abominations.” She’d hung up after yelling at him to never call again, or she’d contact the authorities.
Eddie found he doesn’t mind the rejection too much. The sudden disintegration of his decades-long marriage should probably have worried him more than it did, but if he were being honest, privately he’d always known Myra was kind of a bad person. If anything, he felt relief, and with no other options he could think of, he called Richie.
Richie had picked up after the second ring. “Richie Tozier speaking, who’s this?” He had mumbled into the phone, sounding groggy as he answers. The call must have just woken him up. Belatedly, Eddie realized that it must still be very early in the morning over on the West coast, and Richie did not feel like the sort of adult who gets up before noon on a good day.
There’s really no good way to ease into this, so Eddie had plunged right in. “Hey Rich, it’s Eddie- hey Richie? Richie? It’s going to be ok-” because one sentence into the conversation, Richie had drawn in a sharp breath and then promptly burst into tears.
“Shit sorry, sorry!” Richie was babbling over the phone now, voice still thick with emotion. “It’s not like I didn’t think this was a possibility, but then the months kept passing and they never found you and it felt like everybody and their mom was getting brought back to life, and I wondered if maybe you were some sort of fluke thanks to Pennywise and just missed the boat, or maybe you’d been killed again during the initial chaos, and I didn’t want to hope and- I just missed you so much.”
It had been so good to hear Richie’s voice that Eddie had had to sit down. He let it stream over him, grasps at it like the lone anchor in the sea of uncertainty his life had become. “I was trapped in the cistern until about a few months ago- flooding finally washed me out, and then they had to explain what the fuck has been going on since I died, and make sure I wouldn’t go rabid again, and it’s just been so much and- I missed you, too.” And even though for him it’s only been a few months since they’ve last spoken, he had known it to be true. He took a deep breath. “Richie, I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything!” Richie’s response had been immediate and earnest.
“They say I need a human caregiver to take responsibility for me in order to get out of here and I seriously couldn’t think of anybody else and I’d hate to impose, but do you think I could move in, just until I get my shit together-”
“Eddie,” Richie had cut him off, voice serious, “Of course you can come stay with me. The guest bedroom already has your name on it. I’ll have it deep cleaned tomorrow.”
So they sewed close his injuries the best they could, and gave him some medication and contact lenses and makeup to make him look more alive and two and a half hours of government-mandated therapy (and not a second more), and shipped him all the way out to California in the most roundabout way imaginable. And well. Now, here they were, finally facing each other in a small, sterile waiting room in San fucking Bernadino.
It had been five years since Eddie had died looking at Richie’s figure shrinking in the distance, although 45 year old Richie looked very much the same as 40 year old Richie. His hair was a little shorter and a little grayer and there were maybe a few more laughter lines around his eyes, but five years was not yet enough time to render him unrecognizable in any way. Although, Eddie suspects that even if it had been another 27 years and Richie were now an old man with no hair and a limp from arthritis and liver spots, Eddie would still be able to recognize him regardless.
Richie breaks the silence first.
“Eddie, I-” his voice cracks on the syllable, and he clears his throat, and then tries again. “Eds, why are your eyes the wrong color?”
“What?” Eddie pauses: for the first face-to-face conversation they’re having in years, it’s a bit of a non-sequitur. He’s wearing his contact lenses, remembers putting them in just before Richie arrived, so his eyes shouldn’t be the terrifying milky white that gave him away as one of the undead.
“They’re the wrong shade of brown, I mean. Your eyes were always very dark, almost black, but now they’re so much lighter?”
“They’re contact lenses,” Eddie tries to explain. This is not how he expected their reunion to go. He was picturing something so much more emotional, something that would start filling in the emptiness in his chest that had been forming ever since he woke up. Instead, this is the opposite- stilted and awkward. Richie hovers a few feet away but makes no motion to move closer. “Government only provided the three most basic colors, so they aren’t going to match up entirely in most cases.”
Makes sense,” Richie hums, shuffling his feet. “I suppose that explains the whole- skin- bit as well.” He gestures vaguely at his face, looking down at where Eddie is still huddled awkwardly in his uncomfortable plastic chair. Eddie clears his throat.
“I really do hate to intrude, you know. Sorry for making you drop everything just to deal with me. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I’m allowed to.”
Richie makes like he wants to grab Eddie’s hand but pauses at the last second, his fingers stopped as if by a brick wall. “Come on Eds, this place is giving me the creeps. Let’s get out of here, my car’s parked out back.”
Eddie stands up and follows, trailing after him to his car, and into his home, forcibly crawls his way into the gaps in Richie’s life. The awkwardness between them had never dissipated but neither had Eddie. And here he still is, all these months later.
Richie leaves soon after with a cursory goodbye and Eddie is tasked with another day of trying to fill in the hours by himself before he has to go to group therapy. He doesn’t much care for leaving the house in the daytime, worried that people would easily see through him even though logically he knows that this is Los Angeles and nobody cares. Theoretically he could go about finding a new job (his previous one- reasonably- no longer available after he’d been dead for half a decade), but he’s heard that the job market is not great for PDS sufferers and does not relish the thought of having to interact with a series of strangers, some of them possibly holding opinions similar to Myra’s. Also, Richie had jokingly promised that he would look after Eddie with his “huge piles of comedy cash money” if Eddie never wanted to work again, and at any rate being dead at least means Eddie’s living expenses are almost nonexistent.
Eddie still hates being dead. Left to his own devices like this, puttering around the house as if he were some sort of ghost, brings out the worst of his neuroses. He makes an attempt to straighten and dust and clean up Richie’s surprisingly neat home as a distraction, but it doesn’t really help.
Eddie’s very existence makes no physical sense. Breathing is ingrained in his body as an automatic function but even if he were to stop, the only negative side effect would be that he would no longer be able to talk: he won’t asphyxiate, won’t suffer brain death due to lack of oxygen, and at any rate his heart no longer beats so there is no circulation to carry that oxygen, no hemoglobin on which for it to bind. He doesn’t need to eat or drink (and in fact, has been warned trying to do so will make him very sick), but without incoming carbohydrates or lipids or hydration there’s no reason his body should be able to continue functioning. And yet, like an impossible machine, it does. If he thinks too hard, Eddie imagines worms burrowing into his flesh and chewing through his cartilage, his form falling apart at the seams like flesh off a bone, his cold grey skin peeling off in fatty flakes to reveal the rotting mess of meat and greywater that must surely be hidden underneath.
So he calls Stan.
“Eddie? How are you doing? Is everything alright?” Stan picks up almost immediately, his voice polite and comforting as always. It’s November but it’s also Los Angeles, so the sun still shines bright in the cloudless blue sky. Eddie curls up under the patch of sunlight on the couch and wills it to keep him warm.
Stan’s back the way Eddie’s back, all the way over in Georgia, but he’s had a few months longer to adjust to the whole situation, for whatever amount of adjusting is even possible. And so, against all odds, the Loser’s Club remains whole, just with two very large asterisks amongst its members.
“I just needed someone to talk to for a bit.” Stan makes a noise of understanding. Despite being on completely opposite sides of the country, there are some universal constants to the undead experience, and it’s good to have a friend. Occasionally he’ll catch Richie whispering away on the phone with Patricia Uris of all people, no doubt talking through the difficulties of their shared experience as caregivers as well.
Richie had always looked slightly guilty when Eddie found them talking, like he’s just been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
Like Eddie, Stan’s unemployed, floating through life untethered with no idea what he’s going to do next. As a result, he too spends most of his time whittling away the hours. Eddie’s not sure, but he thinks Stan may have taken up stamp collecting: the last time they’d talked, Stan had mentioned off-hand that his current self had a tendency to scare away the birds.
Eddie wonders if the real reason is, like himself, Stan finds the idea of leaving the house overwhelming.
“Is anything specifically the matter?” Stan asks, when Eddies doesn’t volunteer anything up.
“I’m freaking out again thinking about being dead, and I need you to talk me down. So you know, the usual.”
“Is it the… body stuff?” Stan asks. “The disease eating you up from the inside out thing?”
“Yeah,” Eddie nods even though Stan can’t see it. He knows that Stan doesn’t share in his squeamishness towards his own physical form, that Stan sees his miraculous return to life as a gift to be cherished. But then again, Stan has never dealt with the particular cocktail of neuroses constantly churning through Eddie’s head. Stan doesn’t have a horrible, unforgettable gaping wound going straight through him, or a second wound on his face he must look at each day to remind him of what he is, both of which will never heal, stark reminders that no matter what he is now a dead thing.
Stan does have two stitched up cuts, one neat line on each wrist. These too will never heal.
“Ok, what brought this on? Let’s dig to the bottom of this,” Stan says.
“I just started thinking about what a body is and isn’t supposed to be able to do, and aging, and decomposition? And it just kind of spiraled.” Eddie pauses for a second, tries to think back onto what train of thought led him down this path.
“I think something that’s irrationally stressing me out is that everyone else is aging, but we’re still 40 and we’ll always be 40. It seemed like it would be an immutable fact that no matter what else, the Losers Club would always be tied together by our age. That we’d all step through time together at the same pace, but now-” Eddie chops his hand through the air in frustration, unable to vocalize why he feels so unmoored, why the steadily increasing age gap between him and his friends brings with it a feeling of loss, of mourning. “-now it feels like-”
“Like we’re being left behind,” Stan finishes. “Hey, I just remembered. It’s your birthday today, isn’t it?”
“Yep, or it was,” Eddie replies, drawing his knees up to his chin from where he is perched on the couch. “And the thing is, Richie didn’t mention it at all before he left this morning. I know it’s dumb, ‘cause we really haven’t known each other that long as adults and maybe he just forgot, but when we were kids he’d always go all out for my birthday. Like he’d sneak cake to school because he knew my mom wouldn’t let me have any, and bring little party hats for everyone and throw confetti and sing badly and blow that stupid party horn in my face the whole day and I just-” Eddie finally lets it out. “I think Richie is disgusted by me being dead, and he’s too polite to kick me out.”
Stan laughs in disbelief. “Are you sure? Eddie, we once saw Richie eat a slice of pizza without hesitating after it had fallen on the ground. Cheese-side down. The man has no standards.”
“You don’t understand,” Eddie whispers softly. “He barely talks to me anymore, and he’s always careful not to come too close. Like the idea of taking care of your dead best friend is fine on paper, but then you’re confronted by the reality of living with a walking corpse. It just feels like he’s avoiding me, and I don’t know why or how to stop it. Not that I blame him, or anything. Being dead is really gross.”
“I think it’s just in your head,” Stan insists. “I don’t think Richie could ever be disgusted by you. You should just talk to him about it.”
Eddie hums. He’ll believe Stan when it happens. “How’s Patty?” He changes the subject. “How’s Georgia?”
“Savannah is still alright.” Something in Stan’s voice seems hesitant. “Not so hot, now that it’s almost winter. Raining all the time now, though.”
“And are you still having trouble finding a job? It must be worse out there, Georgia being how it is.” Eddie knows it’s a little unfair, but he imagines the inhabitants of Georgia as not dissimilar to the inhabitants of rural Maine in some regards. The underlying question lurking behind his words is: “does it still feel safe, living there the way we are now?”
“Well, Savannah’s not as bad as if you were out in the less developed areas of Georgia, so to speak. But yes, job hunting has been a bit of a slog.” Stan sounds a little self deprecatory, his voice flattened by the phone’s speakers into tinny sarcasm. “Turns out there’s not much demand for accountants who have been dead five years, who knew?”
Eddie makes a sympathetic noise. “And Patty?”
“Patty is lovely, as always. I’m incredibly lucky she decided to have me back, it’s just taking some adjustments.”
Something in his tone sounds off. Eddie hesitates- he doesn’t want to press on a sore point, but:
“Is something the matter?”
“Yeah,” Stan finally answers, “Let’s just say Richie and you aren’t the only two going through it right now. But it’s not Patty or anything, it’s just a really bad situation.”
Eddie waits for him to elaborate.
“So when I passed, there was already a bit of a delay in getting the life insurance payout, because I’d committed suicide, right? But she got it eventually, so she was able to keep the house.” Stan pauses for a moment so Eddie can absorb that.
“That’s good, right?” Eddie asks. “So you guys still have the house. Life insurance companies are always dragging their feet about these things to avoid paying out so you really have to push them- and I should know, I worked for one.”
“But then I came back, and now the life insurance companies are claiming the payout is invalid and they want it back. And since I haven’t been able to find a job, she’s had to pull double shifts to keep the mortgage paid so we don’t get foreclosed on while this whole mess gets figured out. And I know she loves me because otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to be my caregiver, but sometimes I just worry about the way she looks at me. There’s something about it I don’t recognize, but I’m worried she might be starting to resent me? Because after all, I’m the one who put her in this bad situation by killing myself, and then coming back, and it’s just fucking, a lot.” The curse word hangs heavy in the air, made all the more powerful by the fact that Stan never, ever swore.
Eddie frowns. “But that doesn’t seem right,” he says. “When I came back they told me my marriage to Myra was no longer valid, because I had died. You can’t have it one way and not the other. And anyways, aren’t debts canceled after death anyways?”
“Yeah,” Stan groans, “But the insurance companies don’t want to play nice, so they’re claiming I never died at all, basically. Obviously there’s no clause for being undead, so they’re looking at it like I had faked my own death, or something. There’s a pending class-action lawsuit, but the court case is making its way up the system and it could take years for them to make a final ruling on it.” Eddie feels his heart clench in sympathy at that. Even if the insurance company was ruled in the wrong, it would take years for them to get their money back, and of course by then it would be far too late. He is all too familiar how things in the corporate world worked.
“The legal status of people like us- it’s all very ambiguous,” Stan is on a roll now. “I heard a rumor- only a rumor, mind, that someone killed a PDS sufferer and the small-town cops let them off scott-free. Because you can’t murder what’s already dead.”
The thought sends chills up Eddie’s spine. He knows the people who live in rural Maine, and he thinks he knows the people who live in rural Georgia, and he can imagine this scenario playing out all too easily.
Eddie is suddenly struck by how lucky he’s had it- Myra hadn’t wanted him so they’d had a clean break, very simple, and then Richie had come in and scooped him up with the explanation that “he’d already taken care of everything.” Eddie, too preoccupied with his new state of existence, had accepted that it really was that easy and hadn’t thought any more on it.
He wonders for the first time if Richie, of all people, had had to deal with any of these legal complexities. Richie doesn’t seem like the type of person who’s filed his taxes on time once in his entire life, let alone be equipped to deal with the legal mess that Eddie’s very existence might entail.
“Thanks for listening to me,” Stan interjects, interrupting Eddie’s train of thought. “Sorry, I’ve just been dealing with a lot and it kind of poured out of me.”
It feels strange to be the one to comfort Stan, who had always been the responsible, steadfast one. “Hey man, always here to repay the favor, god knows you’ve done it enough times for me over the years. And by the way, I’m really excited to finally see you next month!”
Stan chuckles at that. “Yeah, me too. I miss everyone so much- but out here, it’s hard to see anyone except Mike.”
Since his return, Eddie has seen most of the other Losers at least once. Bill’s in the city pretty frequently for his various projects and Eddie meets up with him on a semi-regular basis. Bev and Ben, too, both have satellite offices in the Los Angeles area, and at any rate the two can afford to come visit on a whim. Mike’s a little trickier now that he’s settled in Florida on the steady but not glamorous salary of a research librarian, but even he’d been able to drop by for a weekend.
Stan and Eddie living on completely opposite coasts bring with it their own set of challenges, namely that PDS sufferers were currently banned from flying, so the logistics of meeting up inevitable involved some combined 40 hours of driving. They hadn’t been able to coordinate it until now, but for the December holidays Stan and Patty and Mike were driving across the country for the first complete Loser’s meetup in so many decades. Eddie couldn’t wait.
“And listen,” Eddie finds himself saying, hoping it’s true. “If nothing’s going on between Richie and me, then Patty and you will work things out, okay? You guys love each other, right?”
A pause. “Yes,” Stan replies, sounding more sure of this than anything else in their conversation so far. “Yeah, we do.”
The two of them exchange goodbyes, and Eddie ends the call. Talking to Stan definitely helped- he can feel the anxiety receding, although it continues to lurk at the edge of his periphery, ready to swoop in and ruin his day at a moment’s notice.
But he’s glad he doesn’t have to face it alone.
The first time Eddie had stepped foot in Richie’s home, he hadn’t been sure what to expect. Eddie had assumed Richie would either have some sort of fancy penthouse apartment in the bustling city or else an eccentric, sprawling mansion in the middle of nowhere. Instead, Richie lived in a friendly two-story house in a quiet suburb. Eddie had been able to tell by the size of the house and the distance of the nearest neighbor and the enchanting greenness of the lawns that surrounded them that this was a very pricey suburb, but he’d never expected Richie of all people to settle down here. The house was charmingly ordinary, creamy whitewashed walls and California terra cotta roofing. The bright blue window frames, which clashed terribly with the orange roof tiles, were incredibly Richie and helped tip Eddie over into realizing that this home was lived in and loved instead of something pulled out of a catalog.
Eddie had loved it immediately.
“I moved here a couple of years ago,” Richie had explained as he shouldered the door open. “I just needed a change, you know? My party days were long behind me, and then my career skyrocketed and I figured, why not? A little peace and quiet would do me some good.”
On the drive from the drop-off facility Richie had done his best to get Eddie caught up on what he’d missed. Bill had written several novels with endings people actually liked, and was now in the process of getting what felt like every book he’d ever written adapted into either a TV show or a movie. Mike had done a road trip across the country before settling down in sunny, beautiful Florida. Beverly and Ben had finally gotten married just last year- Eddie had felt a pang at that, regret at having missed the wedding. His friends deserved happiness, and he just wishes he could have been there celebrating it with them.
“And Stan’s back!” Richie had exclaimed suddenly, “Can’t forget that! So you’ll have someone to talk to about the whole- ” and he had gestured vaguely at his whole body, taking both hands off the steering wheel as he did so.
“And what about you?” Eddie had asked, after he had finished screaming at Richie to keep his eyes on the road. “What’s new for Richie, other than dropping everything to take care of his dead best friend?”
“I’m doing really good, actually?” Richie had replied. “Surprising, I know. It wasn’t great for a little bit after, you know, the whole thing. But I got my shit together. Got a therapist and some meds and things are just so much better now! Somehow completely rebranded my image and started writing my own shit and now a lot of people actually like my comedy. You can Netflix my specials if you want, but do me a favor and watch them when I’m out of the house? I kind of hate seeing and hearing myself on screen.”
The inside of Richie’s home had also turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Eddie, who had been picturing piles of dirty laundry on every inch of available surface like some sort of eternal frat house, was surprised by how neat everything looked. But the cleanliness didn’t feel sterile or impersonal; the house was clearly lived in. Eddie spotted a shoe rack crowded with battered sneakers and a single pair of nice leather oxfords in the entrance hallway. Next to it was a coffee table holding up a crystal bowl filled with keys and various pieces of stationary. Further down the hall was the kitchen, also painted the bright electric blue of the window frames outside. A row of ugly novelty mugs lined the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, and underneath was a surprisingly large assortment of cookware, slightly dented but polished and clearly well loved.
Richie had looked sheepish at that. “I cook a lot,” he explained. “I started after I decided to get my life together, my therapist thought it would be calming, and then I never stopped because guess what? As with all things, she was right. I bake too, and like to think I’m pretty good at it! Do you want some? I think I have some leftover lemon bars in the fridge.” And then Eddie had had to decline regretfully, explaining that if he ate anything it would make him very, very ill.
Eddie fucking loved lemon bars. Or he used to love them, at any rate.
The rest of the house had been much the same way. Very little in the way of actual clutter, but any knick knacks or coffee table accents had felt carefully chosen and uniquely, chaotically Richie. Vintage movie posters had been framed neatly and hung on some of the walls. There were even a few houseplants in eye-searingly painted clay pots. The sole exception was the dining room table, which was covered in papers and looked like a hurricane had recently passed over it. Eddie had craned his neck to look: the top page was a pamphlet featuring a familiar-looking stock PDS woman smiling at the camera and, in bold white text, “SO YOUR LOVED ONE HAS PDS: NEXT STEPS”.
Richie had hastily gathered the stack of papers together and then offered to show Eddie to the guest bedroom and Eddie hadn’t thought any more on them.
Much later, after Richie had gone and Eddie was mostly settled in, he pulled up one of Richie’s Netflix specials on his new phone, settled himself into his new bed, and hit play.
The comedy was remarkably different than any of Richie’s old work. It’s punchier, darker, more personal and also much less sexist. Richie talked at length about clown-related trauma but also his insecurities towards having to grow up and Eddie found himself laughing along despite himself. And then Richie made a joke about hot guys and-
-Eddie’s world tilted entirely on his axis.
Five minutes of furious googling later, Eddie had gathered all the details on the one, very important thing Richie had neglected to mention in his abbreviated summary of the past five years. Post-meltdown and pre-comeback, Richie had broken his months-long radio silence by coming out as gay on twitter, then immediately disappearing again for another six months. The Internet, already swirling with rumors about Richie crashing on stage, had gone absolutely feral. And from there Richie had managed to pivot away from his previous work and into the upper echelons of a successful comedy career, into the sort of genuine but thoughtful humor that people nowadays favored.
Richie was gay.
See, here’s the thing. Eddie had already justified to himself why he needed to stay with Richie as opposed to the other Losers (Mike had done enough and deserves a break, and Bill wasn’t even in the country half the time, and Ben and Beverly traveled too much for their jobs, and clearly Stan was out of the picture) but the truth of the matter was simply that Richie is, and has always been his favorite, and also that, since childhood, Eddie had been hopelessly in love with him.
Before he’d died, he’d wanted so desperately to tell Richie, but had chickened out at the last minute. It had been the one regret he’d died with, staring at Richie’s familiar shoulders and his retreating back- that in his last moments, he’d still been a coward.
Eddie had vaguely wondered if he should bring it up, now that he’d apparently been given a second chance, but now he knows he can’t. Richie being gay would make the confession just a little too uncomfortable. Richie being gay meant that Eddie was just one bitter step closer to what he can’t have, what he could never have. He wanted to scream.
He never directly mentioned his newfound knowledge to Richie, but did make an offhand remark about watching the special. A few days later Richie made a comment about dating men and Eddie did his best to not look surprised, so he figured Richie knows that he knows, and that’s the end of that.
Eddie’s back in the cistern.
It’s dark and it’s wet and it’s utterly disgusting and he hates, hates, hates it down here. The bottom of the cistern is flooded with about a foot of foul greywater, mud mixed with raw sewage and other unspeakable fluids. And it’s so cold: the sun doesn’t reach down here, not anymore. There’s no way out within reach, all entrances closed off when the cistern collapsed in on itself. And so Eddie wanders, around and around and around in circles through the sludge, like a wind-up toy, for what feels like years and years years.
“Eds!”
Eddie has always been in the cistern. He is never going to be able to leave.
“Eds, hey Eds! Eddie! Wake up, you’re having a nightmare!”
Groaning, Eddie startles awake to Richie hovering above him and shaking him by the shoulders, glasses glowing slightly in the dark. Even in the dim lighting of the bedroom, the concern twisting his face is palpable.
“I heard moaning and I was afraid something was wrong so I came by to check and you were all twisted up and I’m not sure if PSD sufferers can actually dream? But it looked like you were having a nightmare so I decided to wake you up. Sorry if I overstepped my bou-”
Eddie holds up a hand and the panicked stream of dialogue falling out of Richie’s mouth immediately tapers off. He tries to pull himself together and not think about how stupid Richie is, to hear guttural noises from the ex-zombie’s room and immediately come running.
“-Thanks, Rich. For waking me up. I’m okay now,” Eddie manages to force out. He does not feel alright. A large part of himself does not feel like it is currently present- it feels like he’s still trapped in the cistern, never escaping the cold and the damp. Distantly, he’s aware that he’s gasping for breath (which is utterly ludicrous, seeing as he doesn’t actually need air). Eddie’s heart doesn’t beat anymore, but if it did it would probably be jackhammering right now.
“Are you sure? Dude, you don’t look so good.” Instead of taking the confirmation and leaving him to his own devices, Richie drops his weight down on the bed, settles his legs underneath him and looks at Eddie with a frown.
It’s difficult looking directly at Richie like this, when Eddie still feels like the greywater he’d been stuck ankle-deep in has become a part of him, filled his lungs with an infection he’ll never be able to rid himself of. He looks down instead, fiddles with a loose seam on his blanket. “At group,” he begins, “sometimes we’ll talk about the nightmares. It’s perfectly natural, a byproduct of the Neurotriptyline reforming neural connections in our brains. Usually, they’re memories from when we were in our untreated state that we weren’t able to unlock until now. That’s what brought this on, I think.”
“Okay,” Richie nods, “So you had a nightmare about… your time as a zombie? I don’t understand why that would be scary. It sounded like you had a really boring time, all things considered. If anything, you were the one doing the scaring-”
Eddie laughs. “Everybody else is always telling me how lucky I am, that I was basically trapped the whole time I was untreated. And they aren’t wrong. At least I don’t have memories of myself hurting or killing or eating anybody, like most of the others have to deal with. I don’t know how they live with that guilt. So it feels like I don’t really have a right to complain, comparatively, it’s just-”
Richie’s moving closer to him, the warmth of his body almost in reach, and it is very distracting. “It’s just, I was trapped in that cistern for four years. And now I’m remembering every moment. Can you imagine it? Just wandering endlessly in this tiny, awful space you’ve been trapped in, but with no way to escape and no way to stop.”
Distantly, Eddie acknowledges this is the most they’ve talked to each other in weeks- maybe even months. There’s something about the quiet darkness surrounding them that facilitates honesty in a way they haven’t been able to achieve on their own.
“That’s fucking hilarious!” Richie cackles. “So you were basically, like, this glitching video game NPC? Just blindly walking into walls until you finally clipped through one of them. You were functionally a Roomba for four years.”
“Please stop making fun of my trauma,” Eddie snaps back at him, deadpan but not actually annoyed. “It’s very hurtful. I feel like you aren’t taking me seriously,” and for a moment it’s just like old times. Like whatever strange rift has been opening up between them since Eddie’s return is finally closing.
Richie pokes him affectionately in the cheek. “Don’t think I don’t notice you stress cleaning our house when I’m out. What, the dishes magically do themselves after I leave? And the shelves magically dust themselves? Face it, you always were and will always be a Roomba. You’re certainly about as tall as one.”
“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie groans. It feels so good to beep Richie, like scratching an itch he didn’t even know he had.
The cistern feels further away, when they are like this.
“You shouldn’t compare your pain with others, you know. Trauma is equally valid, and it’s not healthy to trivialize yours.” Richie’s tone is sober now, earlier humor gone. He is very serious about this, Eddie realizes.
“God, I liked it better when you weren’t in therapy and didn’t have words to describe unhealthy patterns of behavior.” Eddie lets himself smile. “But thanks. Sometimes I get a little trapped in my own head, and it’s nice to have someone tell me otherwise. It just sometimes feel like I never left, you know?”
Richie smiles back, and it breaks Eddie’s heart. There’s sorrow there, and something that looks like it could be regret.
“I’m really sorry we left you in the cistern,” he says. “I know you would have hated it down there.”
“Yeah,” Eddie shrugged ruefully, “It smelled terrible and it was cold and dark and damp but hey, it’s not like I can actually get sick anymore, so you know. Small mercies.”
Richie leans over, resting his head on his hand so Eddie and him are lying side by side. With his other hand, he reaches out and touches the stitched-together cut on Eddie’s cheek. “Does it hurt?” Richie murmurs to him, and Eddie wants to cry.
“Not really. I don’t really feel things, the way a living person would. The cold is worse, in a way.”
“Are you cold?” Richie sounds worried at that. “I know you can’t actually generate body heat anymore, but if you need to be warm-”
“It’s not that,” Eddie tries to find the words to explain. “The cold doesn’t really bother me- and Richie, preemptively going to say if you make a Frozen reference I will kick you off the edge of this bed- but I remember how it’s supposed to feel, to be warm. And no amount of blankets or comforters can help if you don’t make any body heat, so sleeping is usually not a great experience. Particularly since being in the dark and being cold just reminds me of being trapped-”
He is cut off, unexpectedly, by Richie wrapping his arms around him in a hug. “Is this okay?” Richie asks. Eddie doesn’t know how to answer when it feels like all the breath has just been knocked out of him, but after a moment he throws his arms around Richie’s broad shoulders, touches his back as if to say, this is okay .
Richie awkwardly shuffles his body underneath the covers, presses the warm line of his body to Eddie’s cold one, tangles their legs together like when they were kids. After a few moments, the space underneath the mess of blankets begins to warm up. Eddie sighs in relief. He cannot help himself.
“That’s much better, thanks.”
“We can turn on the lights as well, if that helps? You said that the cistern was really dark-” Richie makes to roll back off the bed but Eddie stops him, panicked. This is the closest Richie has allowed Eddie to be in so many months, and cruel as it is he would give anything not to lose this.
“Don’t,” Eddie croaks, then, “I don’t- I’m not wearing any coverup or my contact lenses right now, I don’t want you looking at me when I’m like this.” Richie peers closer at his face in response and Eddie has to will himself not to cringe away. Even in the darkness he knows he must make a terrifying sight.
“You know, I actually like it better when your eyes are like this than when you put in those dumb contact lenses,” Richie confesses. “Those are just close enough to your old eye color to be uncanny- but since they aren’t, I just know they’re fake and I don’t like it.”
“They’re monster eyes,” Eddie tells him. He knows what his eyes look like: the irises so pale they were almost whiter than the scleras, the pupils jagged and bleeding irregular edges.
“They look like nebulae to me,” Richie murmurs back. Eddie can’t think of how to respond to this, so he buries his face into Richie’s chest. Richie lets him, so he allows himself this small luxury.
It’s warm and it’s comfortable and it’s all he’s ever wanted. Eddie can feel himself drifting off, thinks he can feel Richie’s hands carding softly through his hair but that might just be wishful thinking.
“Happy birthday, Eds,” Eddie maybe hears Richie mumble, but by this point slumber is dragging him back down into its depths.
He sleeps peacefully, and this time he doesn’t have a single dream.
Richie’s gone by the time Eddie wakes up, his half of the bed rumpled and growing as cold as Eddie’s body now is.