hypochondrias | open post;; yeah why's it so fuckin' funny dickwad?

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open post;; yeah why's it so fuckin' funny dickwad?

text/call/action ; open to losers and cross-canon! ; drop a starter or send me a prompt! ; specify era/age if you please

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One second

[ myra is a light sleeper in the best of circumstances, but eddie swears she’s gotten even worse in the time he’d spent recuperating from surgery. which means he has to leave the house entirely if he’s going to have a conversation, slipping into a coat before he steps out onto the front landing. he sits down beside the front door, bringing his knees up to his chest, heart hammering when he calls richie first. ]

Hey. [ his voice is small, but the emotion is evident. he sighs, relieved to be talking. ]

Hey, spaghetti.

[ he collapses back in bed and scrubs his face with his hand. ]

You okay?

[ the first and most important question. ]

Yeah. Yeah, god, I feel... really great, actually. [ eddie sighs again, huffs a laugh. ] Yeah. Are you?

Yeah. [ a pause. ] My dick's so hard I could probably fuck a diamond right now, but I mean, yeah.

[ there's a laugh in his voice at his own joke. ]

Eds—

[ his eyes close, feet sliding across the floor. eddie can imagine any number of ways richie can relieve this tension. almost too many scenarios to narrow down. ]

Yeah?

I had ... like, five shots earlier. So if you needed a freebie ... [ he trails off, another huff of a laugh in his voice. giving them both the coward's way out. he shouldn't, shouldn't have to. he killed that fucking clown, they both did, and even if eddie let him go he's still the bravest motherfucker richie has ever known. he shakes his head. ] Fuck. No, that's not what I wanna say.

[ he rubs at his face with his hand some more. for some reason he thinks he could cry any second now, even though he just said he was fine. ]

I'm not fucking around. When I say that shit. [ his voice low, whiskey-syrupy. ] Just want that on the record.

[ no surprise that Richie’s been drinking; that’s usually the case whenever they stray too close to affection, when the talk between them gets heavy with implication. loose tongues and all that. he stays quiet, giving richie space to work through his emotions in words. and when he does, eddie finds himself nodding, cradling the phone against his face like it’s precious. ]

I know. [ no judgment, no pressure. ] I mean it too. Everything I say, it’s not just... because it sounds nice, or something. I think about you all the time. Every day.

I never stop thinking about you.

[ the raw honesty of the confession floats on top of the haze of his arousal. he doesn't pay his dick any attention just yet, his eyes on the indeterminate darkness of his ceiling. ]

I wish I'd ... I should've done something different. In Derry.

[ eddie involuntarily sighs, his head hitting the wood of the doorframe with a soft thunk. he wants to bury his face in his hands, or bury his face in richie's neck, settling instead for crossing an arm over his chest to grip his opposite shoulder. a precautionary measure, turns out, for the sudden rush of panic that wells up in him at the first sign of expressed regret.

his heart races regardless of the logic, already skipping steps, bounding down the stairs to the inevitable Worst Case Scenario. the alarmist in him shakes his head — i knew it, you were too much of a burden, eds — and the defeatist accepts this conclusion. all that waiting around, all that caring for you, who would do it gladly?

except it isn’t regret. not like that. a smaller voice than the previous two won’t quiet. it’s the one that tells eddie that whatever this is he’s circling around with richie, it’s worth pursuing.

all this happens in a few seconds, a pause that goes on too long after richie's spoken. wrestling the insecurity, eddie hopes his voice doesn’t sound as small and pathetic as he feels. ]

You did everything you could for me. What do you wish had gone differently?

[ the brief moment of suspended silence is almost enough to make richie's own pulse tick up a little, like even though he already said he wanted to kiss and hold and fuck him it's only now that he crossed a line. ]

I didn't want to ruin it. We were having so much fun even with you all fucked up and ... I thought, he's really going through it right now, Tozier, you can't just ...

[ he lets his eyes sink shut and thinks about derry, their hospital stay: the weeks that should have been miserable but were sweet instead; the nights that he spent wrapped around eddie like a vine, like he could transfer every drop of unearned wellness from his own body to eddie's. the things that poured out between them when richie could get him alone, greedily drinking in the thirty-odd years of eddie kaspbrak he'd missed, minutiae and secrets alike.

once they'd cleaved away the horror on which the town was built, richie might be the only loser who would even venture to say out loud, at last, that yeah, derry was good. after it, after everything, derry was good to him at last, gave him something he could take with both hands in broad daylight instead of a token to burn in the dark. ]

But I wanted to. [ a pause of his own, his hand fully over his eyes now. ] I wanted you so fucking bad.

[ Well, when Richie says it, it does almost sound insane. To call the whole event ‘fun,’ like it was just a tiny hiccup in an otherwise magazine-beautiful vacation and not Eddie’s too-close brush with death. Like it wasn’t the worst thing that’d ever happened to him, like it isn’t an enduring nightmare even now, every time Eddie buttons up a shirt or a letter arrives from a hospital or his insurance. All the ways this is another trauma in a life dotted with them, there’s Richie, like an alchemist turning even the most difficult moments into ones Eddie’s capable of looking back on with fondness and longing.

He feels insane. Suspended in this life moving neither forward nor backward, on a coast so far away from the only person who actually makes his life better. Something seizes in his throat when Richie speaks, and Eddie holds his breath. ]

God. [ He breathes out the word, squeezing his shoulder. ] I think about it all the time, you know that? How many times you touched me, when you held me and I didn’t...

[ Hold you too, is what Eddie wants to say but how could he have? It was a physical impossibility with his injury, but Eddie knows now, after many nights of lonely reflection, that that was a convenient excuse. ]

I should have told you. I should’ve told you how I felt. I felt better all fucked up and half awake in a hospital, thousands of dollars in the hole than I’ve ever felt in my life. Cause of you. [ Eddie pulls his coat tighter around him, just a loose t-shirt underneath. ] I could have said something, and I - and I didn’t and I’m sorry.

Edited 2019-11-19 04:18 (UTC)

[ the revelation that eddie thinks about him at all like that hardly feels real. he knows eddie thinks about him, at least in perfunctory ways: in the past few months they've racked up entire novels of text messages; they talk on the phone at least three or four nights a week. richie is aware, peripherally, that he should just be glad to have his best friend back.

it's not enough, of course it's not enough. richie's always been greedy for his attention. he got a taste for more in derry, the touch of those hands, the warmth of that body, and now he wants the rest. ]

You can say something now.

[ his tone dropped low again, inviting, his hand over his eyes. he becomes aware, viscerally, of his heart pounding in his chest. ]

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. [ there's that familiar terror, the one he had to live with passively even with eddie sprawled in a hospital bed beside him. but they killed a fucking clown, for god's sake, and richie's so burnt out on fear. ] How did you feel. With me.

[ there it is, the obvious answer that doesn't feel so obvious. or didn't, at least, until richie brought it up five seconds ago. now that they're facing each other in the open after so many times circling one other in the dark, it's clear: this is eddie's path forward. this is the way he faces his demons, the way he brings himself back to earth after waking up from nightmares of drowning, of sinking. maybe instead of scrambling out of bed to hug his own knees on the couch downstairs, eddie actually calls, and listens to the voice he wishes was the one comforting him, keeping him sane.

it's so obvious.

eddie's heart hammers shallow in his chest, like it'll jump out of his skin if he's not careful. what he's about to say isn't conditional on richie's reciprocation - it just needs to be said. ]

It felt right. It felt more right than anything I've ever felt. [ he goes quiet a second, contemplative. ] My whole life, I thought, maybe this is how it's supposed to be, Eds. You just find the things that're comfortable, that you're okay at, that'll be good enough. You'll grow into it, or some shit. And then when I woke up one morning - that time I had the really bad fever - the nurses came in, they told me you were with me all night. And I hated every minute you were gone. Until you came back, cause you'd just gotten to get yourself breakfast.

[ he shakes his head, eyes drifting to some point across the street, at the darkened porches of a neighbor's house. suddenly richie feels very close by. ]

I don't want to be without you, man. And right now, I don't have you.

[ suddenly richie is glad he left his hand where it is because some part of him loosens all at once, sagging his shoulders into the worn mattress, turning his knees to jelly, the withering iceberg of his pretenses starting to melt at full tilt. he chokes back a sob and pushes his glasses off his face all the way so he can scrub at his eyes with the back of his wrist, knotting his fingers in his hairline after and pulling in deep breaths to try and steady out. he can still taste liquor on his breath but there's a kind of sick clarity sobering him fast: he needs to hear this, he needs to be heard. ]

Fuck.

[ part of him is always combative. he wants to say why didn't you say something but he knows he could ask himself that question just as easily. why didn't he say something at fifteen, when it might have made an even bigger difference? why didn't he say something the first night they were back in derry? he has fewer reasons not to do it. less to lose. practically nothing at all.

he sits up and uses the hem of his shirt to scrub at his face a little, sniffs, lets out a vaguely hysterical huff of a laugh. ]

I, uh. Used to wonder ... I dated, a little, you know, I'm fucking forty, you play a numbers game and you're gonna say yes sometimes and someone's gonna say yes sometimes. But it never really worked out. I got good at this thing where eventually, it doesn't matter how good it was, eventually someone was gonna ask for something and I wouldn't wanna give it. It wasn't always anything big, either. I dug my heels in about a lot of stupid shit. Eventually they'd get the picture. It didn't matter how fucking nice somebody was, I wasn't going to bat for them, I didn't want them enough to do it, I wasn't even playing ball. And I was like, yeah, it's me. The answer to the question what the fuck is your problem, Richie, it's always been me.

[ he keeps his hand over his eyes for the most part, feels more dampness against his fingers, but it doesn't stop him from gesturing out as he speaks. man used to monologuing. ]

But actually it's been you. —no, well. It's still me. Obviously it's me. It's me and the fucking thirty-year Wile E. Coyote hole in my brain you left when I forgot you. I won't pick somebody up from the fucking airport but I stayed in our shithole nightmare hometown for fucking ... weeks, I've never ...

[ never wanted so badly to pick another person up when they fell. ]

And that's not me being like, oh, [ mild voice ] I kept vigil by your bedside how darest thou not fall into my arms immediately [ end mild voice ] nah, man, I didn't do shit. You did all that shit, you got better on your own, you were so fucking strong, and brave, I just wanted to be there when it happened because I love it so much, I love seeing you like that. Not—hurting. Just—strong. It's who you are. I know you are. I've always known.

[ he wraps his arm around his knees, lets out a long breath for this last and awful truth. ]

It's all I know how to want.

[ in the months after derry, eddie had come to learn a lot about richie. not just about his life now, but the important things: what he thought, what he believed, what he wanted. all of it was information eddie craved, like nourishment for a starving man. and each idea, no matter how minuscule or irrelevant, was precious. another step to close the enormity of the gap between them, the twenty-some years of emptiness.

but even after months of this, of hours of conversation during eddie's every waking hour, it's never been so raw. it's not a revelation so much as a dawning, sunlight breaking over the horizon. this is where the threads meet, his and richie's both, and eddie is so close to the truth he feels like he can reach out and touch it.

because whatever richie says, that's shit eddie's thought about himself too.

as eddie listens, he gets the immediate sense of not just vulnerability, but relief. an inherent trust richie places in him to reveal so much, to unburden himself three times his weight without expectation. eddie can hear it, the emotion in richie's voice and finds it moves him too, the beginning of tears welling up in his eyes. it's not just the honesty, or the fact that richie's expressing some kind of experience that's a mirror image of eddie's own, or that richie thinks he's not just brave, but strong when his whole life eddie's been anything but - it's everything. the way it's all come together and though three thousand miles separates them now, they've been in the exact same place since they were thirteen years old.

he's quiet save for a sniffle or two, until richie finishes and eddie finally releases a breath, fingers loosening from where they'd been curled tightly into the shoulder of his shirt. ]

Richie.

[ just his name, to reaffirm that he's here, he's heard him. he doesn't pause long for what he says next, in a tone that doesn't waver despite how overwhelmed he is. ]

I'm in love with you.

[ richie drops his head on the tops of his knees, eyes squeezed shut. he can feel his face twisting in another effort not to cry out loud or lose his shit on the phone, the hard ache in his chest all cracked open and filling him with this liquid longing. ]

Eds—

[ the nickname, even now. one of the first claims richie ever staked on him before he knew what it meant to want someone bad enough to mark them like that, to hold onto them fast with limbs and teeth.

his whole life he's only wanted one thing. even when he didn't remember eddie, he wanted him. wanted him when he was small and slim and loud, wants the way he is now, rangy, scarred, even louder, just as perfect as he's always been, the vanishing point of all richie knows of desire. before derry richie figured the long years had frozen him over for good, but he knows better now, burns so fucking hard and hot he could give a fuck if anybody else gets hurt.

he's gripping his phone so tight the case is creaking in his hand. the room isn't spinning anymore. it's just dark, and richie is by himself, in his bedroom in los angeles, hugging his knees as if physically bracing his body can keep him from flying apart. ]

I'm so fucking in love with you. I lived my whole life in love with you. I'm gonna die in love with you.

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