Chapter Text
“ – fastened and all carry-on luggage is stowed underneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead bins. Thank you.”
“Oh shit,” Richie mutters, looking up from his phone, as the announcement fades with a click, and belatedly remembering a pretty important detail about three days late. He reaches out, shoving at Eddie’s shoulder in the seat next to him. “Eds – Eddie, we might… Fuck, we’re fucked.” He ignores the peering look of the kid sitting in the row just across from them. “Damn it. I might’ve fucked us.”
“What?” Eddie mutters blearily, a marked golden glow flickering through his eyes in irritation.
“We might run into trouble when the other uh, fangs here find out I – I turned you,” Richie says, keeping his voice low and indulging himself a short lean in closer to Eddie, pressing their arms together while he mutters into his ear. “I’m not supposed to. Do that.”
Eddie slowly turns and stares for a long beat, then tilts his head with a somehow angry blink. “We’ve been on planes for almost fourteen hours, we’ve had three layovers, and you fucking tell me this now?”
Richie shrugs weakly, reaching up and running a hand through his hair with a groan. “I just… forgot? It’s a colony thing and kind of why I live there – they do the opposite of want me to bring in new blood.”
“A colony,” Eddie repeats, quietly, then leans back in his seat with a short pinch at his mouth. “Like pilgrims?”
“Like bats,” Richie says, wagging his eyebrows for a beat before the nerves catch back up and he feels his face fall. “Shit. I might’ve fucked this up worse, Eds. We should’ve just tried our luck in Seattle.”
Eddie snorts quietly, then drops his eyes for a quick moment. “Are you not allowed at all?”
“I mean, yeah, but if I remember correct it’s a whole process,” Richie says, scrubbing at his face while leaning into the tray table, briefly digging his hands up under his glasses and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I would’ve had to clear it with like everyone, I think, and get approval that you consented, let them verify you’re not going to go aggro on tourists, et cetera. But shit, I don’t really know – I’ve never looked into it, man!”
Eddie doesn’t respond for a beat. “Why not?”
Richie stares into the dark shadow between his arms and the back of the seat, then swallows back a bitter laugh, forcing himself to sit back up with a glance sideways at Eddie. “It’s mostly partners and stuff. And as you already know, Eds, the last, most intimate relationship I had with a human was with – ”
“Do not!” Eddie snaps, catching on quick with a shove at Richie into the window. “She is fucking dead!”
“So’re we, Spaghetti Man,” Richie says, idly shifting the cover back closed when a slip of light peeks through and threatens to catch his bare hand; announcement or not, the plane is still well above the cloud cover.
“Fuck off, barely,” Eddie says, glaring for a beat longer before his shoulders relax. He keeps staring at Richie though, as his eyes become less mockingly angry and more thoughtful - unreadable. “You uh… We could just tell them that, if you wanted. If it would make it easier?”
Richie blinks back a few times, then raises an eyebrow.
“That we’re like together,” Eddie says, markedly clipped, looking down at his tray table and carefully clipping it into place.
Richie opens his mouth, startled and letting it hang open for seconds, then forces a huff that he hopes doesn’t sound choked. “You would – What?”
“Okay, uh, so… So.” Eddie pauses for a few seconds, then lifts his eyes to Richie’s with an evident determination, his next words in a low voice, if quick and conspiratorial. “What if we already were together, a long time ago, but we lost touch, alright? Because you got – became… You know. But then we just started talking again, maybe we talked about – about uh, us being a thing, and making me one of you maybe after my divorce, but boom, I was dying and you made a snap decision.”
“That is a very thought-out plan,” Richie begins slowly, feeling a disbelieving grin twitch at the corner of his mouth, “To steal Stan and his wife’s werewolf story.”
“Not exactly!” Eddie snaps, leaning back into his seat with an irked eye roll down the aisle toward the front of the plane. “I think I did a better rewrite than Bill could’ve.”
Richie offers a wavering hum, tipping his head back and forth. “Putting all the Loser shit together sounds way worse than one of Bill’s stories.”
“Fuck... Yeah, maybe,” Eddie says, heavy brow furrowing for a pair of beats, then looking sideways at Richie with a small, if affable grin. “I’d rather be where I am than Stan is, though – do you think they shed?”
“I think as a vampire I’m legally required to say: yes, obviously,” Richie says, lifting both hands to gesture forward in front of himself, as if upchucking down into his lap. “I bet he gets hairballs the size of basketballs.”
Eddie snorts just as the seatbelt sign flickers on, hands soon moving along to follow direction. “Can you actually turn into a bat?”
“I can’t,” Richie admits, shaking his head slightly while glancing back and forth from clumsily doing his own seatbelt to Eddie over his glasses. “Other people can.”
Richie stands immediately when the plane lands, mostly to hear Eddie’s little hiss, and incidentally spots a fang he recognizes that is surely on their way to Petersburg. He nods awkwardly at her while deplaning, catching sight of a gaudy, cartoonish Dracula phone case clutched in her hands. He lets his shoulders fall and ignores Eddie’s raised brow, just nodding him forward and trying not to think about how she’s probably been texting half the Clover Pass colony about Eddie.
Eddie proves himself an effective distraction by dragging Richie to the restroom immediately after making a fuss of getting his oversize luggage, shoving him through the swinging door like they’re back in Maine again rather than a ferry ride and a middling drive to Clover Pass. He doesn’t know that, to his credit, and Richie could tell him, but he also just wants to indulge in how eager Eddie is to get him alone, even if it is only motivated by fledge hunger.
“It’s only been like three hours,” Richie says, pretending to be put-upon while Eddie starts tugging at his sweater sleeve.
Richie twitches only a little when Eddie sinks fangs into his arm, intently listening for people who might wander into the restroom. The first time they had done this in the Townhouse, after the terrifying actual first time in the cistern that he’s not going to think about ever, he flinched so badly it made Eddie recoil hard enough to slice Richie’s arm up to the elbow, which was when Bev peeked in, proceeding into a panic attack produced by her particular share of clown PTSD at the sight of all the blood.
It had all around been the worst time, demonstrating all the reasons Richie hated traditional feeding, hated being a vampire, hated what he had done… Yet now he’s comfortably doing it without thinking three days later in a public bathroom.
Growth.
Or he’s still just fucking whipped for ol’ Eddie Kaspbrak.
“Fuck,” Eddie mumbles into Richie’s arm, crimson seeping around his lips while he sucks from Richie’s artery. He pulls off a moment later, a purr in his voice that he maybe, probably, doesn’t actually realize he’s making, “Are you seriously not hungry?”
“Nah,” Richie says, swallowing a little while watching Eddie lap down the wounds as they heal, then forcing himself to look away with a short clear of his throat. “It’s ‘cause you’re a baby.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, shoving Richie away while turning to the mirror, lifting his chin with a wipe of his thumb across a stained lip.
Richie has never really been into the whole vampire thing; he tried at the beginning, for obvious reasons, but biting was never more than sticky, the attempted blood bonds never managed to satisfy, and the few guys never seemed to be right, even if they were mostly enthusiastic. He ultimately just decided that it wasn't for him, another bullet point to put on the list of why he was a shitty vampire, but now… He’s starting to think maybe it isn’t that he’s not into the vampire shit, so much as a damned alien murder clown made him forget the one person that might make it super hot. He’s never gotten hard in an airport bathroom in his life, or from getting fed from, but this is now the third time experiencing both in a scant seventeen hours.
“Do I look younger?” Eddie asks abruptly, peering in closer to the mirror with a marked twist of befuddlement at his mouth. “Or are my eyes just bigger?”
“Both?” Richie guesses, watching Eddie raise and lower his eyebrows with an evident study of the wrinkles on his forehead. “I told you, you might change a little.”
Eddie glances backward with an unfairly devastating smirk. “Is this why you look like an unkempt stoner from 1999?”
“Uh, no,” Richie says, lifting both hands to silently tell Eddie to go fuck himself with a pair of fingers. “You asshole, I just was. But I got a little bigger, I guess – I used to be pretty weedy, remember?”
Eddie’s eyes shift in the mirror, fixing Richie with a startlingly intense stare just below his neck, holding there for a beat before they flick to his face; shit, maybe his eyes are bigger. “Right.”
Richie tries not to read too much into the look, shouldering his duffle with a gesture of his chin toward the door. “We’ll let’s get a move on, littlest vampire.”
Eddie reaches out with a swipe, shoving Richie at the sternum and hard into the sink with a thunk, though he doesn’t seem to have meant to by the immediate panicky reach to pull him back with a reach for his shirt. “Shit – Richie!”
“It’s cool,” Richie says, rubbing a little at his hip, then looking up with an exaggerated pout at Eddie’s unsettled face. “Someone might finally have to learn to control his temper.”
“Fuck off,” Eddie says, hands falling from Richie’s shirt with a sneering eye roll, though the way he then presses his lips together and reaches for his bags seems sheepish. He makes a face when Richie takes one of his oversize Samsonites, but doesn’t say anything, only clearing his throat as they approach the sliding door out to the lot. “Do you live close by?”
“Kind of,” Richie says, tipping his head back and forth while reaching up and pulling his jacket hood up after he catches the glare of sunlight on the pavement. “I live on the north end of the island. It’s like half hour away – like Bangor to Derry, I guess?”
Eddie copies the movement with a blink, warily pulling the strings on his hoodie to better cover his face. “I thought you said it was always cloudy?”
“Like 90% of the time,” Richie says, peering sideways up at the sky from the safety of his shadowed hood, then glancing down to Eddie with a wag of his brows. “Do you want my umbrella?”
Eddie immediately shakes his head, straightening his sleeves over his fingertips. “Uh, no. It looks fucking stupid.”
“Be still my dead heart,” Richie says, putting on a southern belle Voice while clutching over said heart with an exaggerated, shuddering gasp and knocking sideways into Eddie on his next step. “Derry’s Own Doogie Howser calling a health precaution stupid?”
“You said that the guy who bit you – ”
“He uses a spell,” Richie interrupts, maybe a little sharp, humor dampening and thoroughly regretting that he’d ever mentioned Steve at all. He should’ve known better than to expect Eddie not to remember any of that first night, even exhausted and half-dead while the curse took him; his own turning was practically burned into his mind, and it had involved a lot less trauma. “You’ll have to have someone teach you that if you want. Maybe you can do it for both of us.”
“What?” Eddie says, voice pitching with plain annoyance. “Why can’t you – why aren’t you doing it?”
“I told you, I’m garbage at being a vampire,” Richie says, rolling his eyes while pulling his truck keys from his bag. He throws his duffle and Eddie’s luggage in the bed, gesturing for Eddie to do the same, then unlocks the driver side door with a grumbling jerk of the key. He has to lean over to the passenger side to pull the lock, and determinedly ignores Eddie’s judgmental look across the truck cab as a whole.
“You can drop your hood,” Richie says, wincing slightly when the hinge creaks like the door of Barnabas Collins’ crypt. “The tint is 5%.”
“Great,” Eddie murmurs, curling his nose while wiping his fingers across the thick layer of dust on the dash.
Richie turns the key and proceeds to thank all that is unholy that the engine revs to life without the usual choke. “Just say it, Eds.”
Eddie sputters into a laugh, bracing himself against the dash when Richie shoves at the stiff clutch and clumsily forces it into reverse. “This is a fucking beater, Rich.”
“You want to walk?” Richie asks, pretty sure he would be flushing if he had the blood left to do it; it wasn’t just the big stuff he forgot to think about when deciding to bring Eddie back, but the totally mundane aspects, too, like this shitty truck or how he hasn’t really cleaned his place in… maybe years. Shit. “I got it cheap from someone who was moving – I didn’t feel like paying for the ferry from Bellingham.”
“Christ,” Eddie says, his eyes going wide and briefly breaking into a pitchy chuckle when Richie goes over a speed bump – it’s a sound Richie will still gladly humiliate himself to, apparently. “The springs are so bad, too. Is it going to like fucking stop and fall to pieces like a cartoon?”
“Fuck off,” Richie says, laughing himself after Eddie exaggeratedly jerks in his seat when Richie pauses midway down the ramp toward the ferry. He wonders how long it’ll take Eddie to notice how they’re leaving the airport, fairly sure that the realization is going to be a loud one. “I guess I can tell you now: this is the real reason I turned you – I needed a mechanic.”
Eddie shakes his head, lips rolling together in a plain attempt to hide a smile. “I haven’t done that shit since high school.”
“Perfect,” Richie says, easing further down to the ramp and slapping the top of the wheel. “1993, babe.”
“Richie, still that — Oh, you asshole, fuck no. We’re not getting on that, are we?” Eddie says, voice pitching high and promptly changing the subject when he finally notices the small ferry docked at the ramp with space for maybe ten cars, its paint chipped and faded, engine loud with its own knocks. He turns to Richie with a snarl, emphasizing it with a swipe of his hand. “It’s older than this piece of shit Toyota.”
“You want to live at the airport, Eds?” Richie asks, gesturing backward and using it as an excuse to throw an arm over the back of the seat, feeling about sixteen and not even minding the mild sting of the sun against the back of his fingers through the break in the tint. “I thought you hated airports.”
Eddie promptly hunches in his seat, sulking as Richie slowly pulls onto the ferry, teeth scraping and biting down his lip when the boat settles with a small rock. “I’m going to be so pissed if this fucking thing sinks, asshole.”
The ferry manages, as it does every time, to totter over to the other side of the strait with little misfortune, though Richie can't say the same for his seat, as the place where Eddie’s clutches to the old foam bears a print that lasts for miles driving up north. He keeps opening his mouth, trying to think of something meaningful to say about how Ketchikan's not so bad or that he hopes Eddie won’t regret coming back with him, but all that comes out is jokes about the normal size Walmart and whales taking bites off swimming moose.
His driveway is empty when he gets to it, so they’ll probably be able to get settled unharassed for a few hours. He catches Eddie looking around his porch, poking at the small collection of rocks on the sill by the door. The look he receives sideways assures him that Eddie fully realizes he picked them up because they look a bit like dicks.
“Velcome to my house; come freely, go safely – ouch, Eds,” Richie says, backing up with a laugh when Eddie jabs him in the ribs to shove his way past and in the door. “Still no love for the classics?”
“Or your stupid – Jesus,” Eddie yelps, halfway into the entryway and gaping at the mirror Richie keeps near the door. He gestures back and forth with his carry on, which floats disembodied a few inches from his sleeve. “What the hell? I thought the mirror thing was bullshit – I could see my face everywhere!”
“It’s an antique!” Richie says, slipping past Eddie and dropping his duffle further into the entry. He waggles his fingers in front of the mirror, just near Eddie’s face and grinning when Eddie slaps him away. “It’s got silver.”
“Why keep it in the house, then?” Eddie asks, expression twisting while he looks over at Richie, gesturing with his other hand at the mirror. “It’s like fucking useless.”
“Come on, look,” Richie says, throwing an arm around Eddie so they can stand together, in headless sweater and hoodie respectively, pressed back to front like an eerie portrait. “Gotta admit it’s pretty funny.”
“Dumbass,” Eddie says, clearly trying to come off irked and totally failing, as his frowning expression quickly scrunches up with swallowed laughter. He pushes Richie back with a span of his fingers against his chest, every point of pressure startling enough it actually causes a stumble. “I hope the whole place isn’t just a shitty joke.”
Richie hums up and down, regaining his footing and turning to gesture at the door that leads to the main house. “Well. I didn’t know I was bringing you back, Mr Clean, so it might not be up to your standards, but the water and heat work.”
“What an endorsement,” Eddie mutters, picking up the duffle that Richie had dropped and tying it to his own, dragging it all clunking on the hardwood behind him.
Richie leads Eddie through into the kitchen side of a house that a realtor once generously called open plan, slipping along the counter to hurriedly grab and drop a crimson stained mug into the sink. “So here’s the kitchen, there’s the office slash extra room,” he points over Eddie’s shoulder, flicking his fingers in a wave toward the half-open door. “We, uh, walked through the sorta TV room. There’s laundry and bathroom right there, and –” He points up at the ladder, “A loft, which is sort of the only real bedroom.”
Eddie is quiet for a few beats, his expression a little assessing, though not quite judgmental, not until it drops back down to the Richie. “Okay, but,” he says, turning back and putting his carry-on onto the table, then reaching out past Richie’s arm to tap at the counter. “What the fuck is this?”
Richie turns to look over his shoulder, blinking for a beat before he slowly shrugs with one shoulder. “That is… a bottle warmer, duh.”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Duh?”
Richie shoves his glasses up with a short clear of his throat. “It’s for blood.”
Eddie hums shortly, staring at it for a beat longer, then abruptly he looks up with a little too intense of a look for a household appliance. “Where do you keep it?”
Richie rolls his eyes and points with a turn of his hand toward the fridge. “You cannot seriously be hungry,” he says, watching Eddie pull open the door and start yanking on drawers. “Eds.”
“Not me,” Eddie snaps, pulling out a bag with a frown at the labeled date, then turning his assault on the cabinets to apparently find and grab a mug. “The only thing I’ve seen you drink since I met you again is like three gallons of booze. How long does this last?”
“Like a month,” Richie says, trying to feel embarrassed, but instead a giant stupid part of his brain is fucking thrilled; it feels like he’s twelve and getting a squished sandwich shoved in his hand all over again.
“How do you use this?” Eddie asks, hands on his hips and bag clutched in one, bent down peering at the dial on the warmer.
“I just put the bag straight in there,” Richie mutters, scratching down the stubble on his neck while cataloging every little brush Eddie makes at various points against his side; he is, maybe, a little pathetic. “It needs water.”
“Got it,” Eddie says, pressing even closer to Richie while shifting to fill the mug with water. “You have to think about how the fuck am I supposed to eat if you don’t – like, I’m not touching these,” he says, wagging the bag before dropping it into the warmer with a critical look. “Do you even know the background of these people?”
“Uh,” Richie intones, understanding belatedly crashing over him regarding something he should’ve realized between the Townhouse and the airports: Eddie doesn’t eat something unless he knows what is in it. Or, now, who. “Not even a little.”
“So fucking eat, dude,” Eddie says, shoving the mug at Richie, then turning to the stairs to the loft while grabbing the carry-on back off the table. “I’m going to put this shit away.”
“Yeah,” Richie says, a little dazed, dropping his head to stare at the warmer as it starts to blink it’s ready to start. He feels his shoulders drop while he reaches out to turn the dial. “Shit."
Richie had been upset to lose his phone the second he realized it, sacrificed as it was to the fucking Derry sewer, a final little twist of the screw by Pennywise. He did have a few minutes of being a little thankful when he realized it meant none of the fangs in town could call him, but now he’s back to being annoyed, familiar weight missing, not to mention knowing he’s got a newish group of people to annoy with memes and cannot do it. The amount of dog jokes he’s got building up at the back of his head has him worried he’s going to forget some of them.
“ – maybe Richie was right.”
Richie raises his eyebrows, pausing while crossing the sitting room and glancing up at the loft with a slightly tilted ear.
“Eddie,” Bev says, immediately disapproving, which is a little rude.
“I know,” Eddie mutters, folding a little too quickly, followed by a conspicuous thump that sounds distinctly like a body onto bedding.
Richie looks back down and blindly reaches for a book, continuing to the sofa and trying to concentrate on the words on the page and definitely not thinking about the implications of Eddie rolling around in his bed, or the fact he took his luggage up there, too. He knows that Eddie said he wanted to pretend if they needed to on the plane, but… Richie hadn’t really expected him to go through with it to a degree. He doesn’t think Eddie realizes the lie would have to go on for potentially centuries, and is positive he doesn’t know that it’ll end up driving Richie a melancholic sort of crazy.
Eddie makes a bitter sort of laugh, unwittingly echoing the mood. “I don’t really want her dead, I guess. Just gone.”
Oh…
Shit.
It hadn’t been Richie’s best joke, since the understanding of it depended heavily on knowing he’s prone to upchucking if he tries to actually feed from people already, which he's realized pretty fucking recently was probably because of repressed memories, but he had remembered too late that no one actually knew that, leading to a series of dismayed looks and six people who now think he was serious about eating Eddie’s wife. He can’t imagine she would have been very nourishing, anyway, probably more like whatever Bowers would’ve tasted like if he’d given into that briefly potent instinct in the library.
“We’ll figure it out,” Bev says, pausing for a marked few seconds, then humming lowly, “Both of us. Block her number, though – it’ll be better for your health.”
Eddie is quiet for a conspicuous beat, then snorts, “Fucking ironic.”
“Oh, Eddie,” Bev says, humor re-entering her voice with a gradual huffing laugh. “You’ve got a whole new set of shit to be worried about.”
“You know…” Eddie stops, his pause stretching on enough that Richie begins to dread how he’s going to continue: if he’s been feeling weird from the curse, if he already doesn’t like the small colony life, or if Richie himself has done something wrong without thought. “It’s not that bad. So far, anyway – Richie keeps telling me there’s all this magic stuff, but I haven’t seen him do shit. Not even like Stan with that weird crap with his wife.”
“He didn’t do anything in Derry...” Bev muses, pausing for a few seconds, then ultimately humming loud in some apparent realization. “Oh, except in the cavern.”
Eddie scoffs quietly, grumbling under his breath. “I don’t remember him doing shit.”
Richie grimaces hard, slumping further in the sofa and pulling the book over his face, as if Sabriel is going to keep him from hearing any more.
“You were kind of out of it,” Bev says, briefly a little less composed as her voice drops, falling silent again for a more painful, conspicuous beat. “But when everything was falling apart, I thought I saw him in two places at once while we were moving through the tunnels. He got out first, you know, even with… with you.”
“Fuck,” Eddie says, followed by a noise that sounds worryingly like him getting up from the bed, both feet landing hard on the floor above Richie. “I hate that I can't remember all that.”
Richie throws the book to the window, clearing his throat and looking up to the ceiling to expose himself. “Are you guys having Shitty Parent club without me?”
Eddie noticeably pauses, the creaks of floorboards going silent under his feet.
“We moved on to a shitty spouse club,” Bev answers, belatedly and her laugh a little tense, but her tone evens out quick with wry humor. “Your membership has tragically lapsed.”
Richie swings a leg up to climb the ladder, skipping rungs, to find Eddie looking down at him with a pursed frown. “Unfair,” he says, pausing to pout with only his head just over the floor of the next level, framing his chin with both hands. “Can’t my one time shitty almost spouse story count – I did sort of die, you know?”
“What?” Eddie says, brow furrowing deep while his mouth settles into an unreadable twist that shows just a trace of his fang. “You wanted to marry that guy?”
“What? No,” Richie says, a tense laugh escaping from his lungs without his strict permission, only barely able to swallow back the old reflexive: who said anything about a guy? He climbs further up the ladder, exaggeratedly flopping onto the floor. “But there was sort of an implication, you know.”
Eddie stares for a beat longer, then sweeps his eyes toward the dark tinted window with a hard shift of his jaw. “No, it doesn’t count.”
“Rude,” Richie says, pulling himself up completely and leaning against the post of the bed with a turn of his nose up, then looking down from the corner of his eye at the phone held loosely in Eddie’s hand. “How you doing, Bevvie?”
“Oh, you know,” Bev says, tilting her head and sweeping at her short hair dramatically, as if it could go over her shoulder. “Lawyers, mostly. You want to eat my ex?”
Richie pretends to think while Eddie rolls his eyes across the roof of the loft. “Get me a time and place – maybe I can even turn it into a teaching moment for our Spaghetti Head. I cannot, however, promise to get rid of the body, unless you know any cannibals.”
“Gross, Richie,” Eddie snaps, as if he hasn’t been himself snacking from Richie’s arteries for the last four days.
“Uh, no,” Bev says, stepping through a glass door out onto a patio with a brief flash of skyscrapered horizon. She pulls out a blue pack of cigarettes, tapping it against the railing before going for the ribbon pull. “That I know of, anyway.”
“Oh, hey,” Richie says, reaching out to pick up his own pack from the side table, then crowding in close to Eddie and waving at it the camera with a crooked grin. “You want to recreate the bleachers from two thousand miles apart?”
“And I’m going downstairs,” Eddie says, throwing the phone at Richie with a sneer at the pack while taking a step toward the ladder. “If you’re going to fucking smoke do it out the window.”
Richie slumps exaggeratedly, watching Eddie descend the ladder, then looks down at the phone while directing the camera to watch him throw the cigarettes to the bedside table. “It’s totally empty – I smoked like the entire thing after Mike called.”
“I tried,” Bev says, a noticeable twitch in her expression, eyes briefly dropping before looking right back up. “How’re you doing? Eddie sounded like he’s getting used to it.”
Richie takes a step back and slumps against the bed with a shrug, ignoring an impulse to sink into the duvet to search for a sparse hint of Eddie’s scent. “It’s only been a few hours.”
“Is it just me, or does he look…” Bev lowers her voice, a single brow going up while her eyes dart to the edge of the screen. “Younger?”
“…I think his eyes are just bigger,” Richie says, knowing full well that Eddie is very likely listening from the kitchen, just like he’d been five minutes ago. He hopes somehow Eddie isn’t, though – the way he acted in the airport, this seems like might be something that could give him yet another complex.
Bev's brow goes even higher. “And you know what’s up with that?”
Richie rolls his lips together over his teeth, briefly letting them prick into the flesh. He glances down at the top of the ladder, then looks back out the window with a grimace. “The curse – bite, whatever, is supposed to make you a more effective, like, predator.”
Bev blinks exceptionally slow while tilting her head.
“Like, you know…” Richie takes a breath, trying to think of a good way to describe the whole stupid process when he barely understands it himself. “When it happened to me, I didn’t need my glasses anymore, got bigger, all that shit, but it was also a lot easier for me to do Voices, too, like to adapt myself to roles to lure…” Prey. “Food.”
“So, it fulfilled your childhood dream,” Bev says, offering a smirk at the same time that she lifts a hand palm up. “But it’s making him baby-faced?”
Richie gestures widely with both hands, wishing the little edge of her expression didn’t feel so cheerily judgmental. It’s not like he planned it; he thinks Eddie is – was overwhelmingly cute with his wrinkles. “I think… it’s just emphasizing it. Making him seem less threatening? So prey underestimates him.”
Bev is quiet a beat, then pointedly presses her mouth into a flat line. “People, Trashmouth.”
“Right,” Richie says, nodding slightly while grinning back with a little show of fang; it’s a little fun to joke now after desperately pretending nothing was weird with him in Derry. “…Friends. Not food.”
Bev snorts quietly, leaning back from the camera and crossing one arm over other. “Rewinding here – you don’t need glasses?” She clarifies, waving with a pointed finger and a marked glance up and down Richie’s face. “But you still wear them?”
Richie rolls his eyes, carefully looking away from the screen. “My face looks fucking weird without them.”
“What the shit!?” Eddie abruptly shrieks, his voice ringing loud and irate from downstairs, followed by an unmistakable crash of a mug against a wall. “Get the fuck out, asshole! Have you never heard of knocking?”
Bev blinks up widely through the phone, then hums while a grin cuts across her face. “Sounds like you got to go?”
“Uh, yeah,” Richie says, scrambling to the top of the ladder and leaning down to see to see a familiar blond, bearded face peering up at him. “Oh, Alek. Yay.”
“Oh, Alek,” Bev repeats, her voice markedly lower and far more insinuating, which almost makes him want to leave Eddie to it and enlighten Bev on the hundred or so reasons why that’s not even possible.
“Yeah, no – bye, Bev!” Richie says, sparing her a dark look downward before ending the call. He tosses Eddie his phone while scrambling down the ladder and opening his mouth, only for Eddie to swiftly interrupt.
“He just fucking slipped in here like a goddamn ghost!” Eddie snarls, gesturing aggressively now with his phone and eyes lit up solid gold with fury on a rarely startled Alek. “What the fuck, Richie?!”
“Sorry, he, uh,” Richie drags his teeth sharply down his lower lip; he is not prepared for any of this shit. “Does that. I should’ve warned – ”
“Warned me? No!” Eddie interrupts, stepping past Richie and looking ridiculous marching up to Alek, who is somewhere around 6’6” in his deck boots. “Richie might not have given a shit, but he’s an idiot – I live here now and you’re goddamn going to knock, you impolite fuck!”
Alek remains quiet for a few seconds, then blinks slowly from Eddie to Richie with a short tilt of his head. “Eivor told me you brought back a friend.”
“Do not ignore me!” Eddie demands, literally snapping his fingers in front of Alek’s nose at a frankly hilarious angle. “I’ve already dealt with a fucking prowler once this week and I stabbed him.”
“I will knock in the future,” Alek says evenly, taking a step back and focusing down at Eddie with a typically neutral face. “I apologize.”
“Thank you,” Eddie says, sounding not particularly thankful, his eyes still glowing when he glances back to Richie over a shoulder.
“Yeah, thanks,” Richie echoes, reaching up and scratching at the back of his neck while forcing himself to look over Eddie’s head at Alek’s face. He had somehow forgotten about Bowers’ near miss, how Eddie could’ve died at the hand of that clown-possessed psycho fuck while Richie was halfway across town pouting in a synagogue.
He had been mourning, too, at least until Stan had sat down next to him smelling like rank dog breath.
“Marion asked me to come by,” Alek says, jaw ticking slightly now, though it’s difficult to tell if his irritation is at being used as an errand boy or at getting shouted at for it. “She wants to speak to you.”
Richie hums flatly, hoping Alek reads his total lack of surprise. “Great.”
Alek glances between blinks at Eddie. “And him.”
“Great,” Richie repeats, rolling his head back and forth for a beat, closing his eyes while pushing back his temper; the flat white glow of his eyes isn’t nearly so pretty as Eddie’s gold. “Couldn’t even let me avoid her for a day?”
“Eivor also texted Marion,” Alek says, offering a pointed, almost sullen tilt of his chin. “I don’t care about the fledge.”
“Who has a name,” Eddie snaps, narrowing his eyes at Alek before tipping his head to glare at Richie in a silent scold.
“Oh, I do apologize for the rudeness, sir, this is Alek,” Richie says, purposefully a little obnoxious, putting on a butler Voice while grinning back with teeth at Eddie’s immediate irked frown. “He’s a Viking berserker. Alek, this is Eds – ”
“Eddie,” Eddie corrects, his tone a little slurring with the tight scowl around his new teeth.
“ – He’s an insurance adjuster.”
Eddie rolls his eyes hard, leaning into the kitchen table with his hip while directing his glare toward the window. “Risk analyst. Except not anymore, probably, and the firm better still fucking pay out my investments.”
Alek blinks in a way that articulates everything about how he understands nothing of what Eddie is muttering about, but he nods anyway, neutrally polite. “I am also no longer a berserker.”
“Debatable,” Richie mutters, pushing up his glasses with a sharp, worthless breath.
“She wants you to come by during after hours,” Alek says, glancing to Eddie again, then nodding slowly while taking a step back and turning toward the entry. “I am going to leave now. Nice to meet you.”
“Thanks,” Richie calls after flatly, slumping against the counter and ignoring the tickle of Eddie’s stare. He lowers his voice, but doesn’t try too hard to really be quiet. “You awkward fuck.”
Alek’s thumping footsteps pause just out of sight, followed by a vacillating creak of the door. “You didn’t text back. Dick.”
“Once a Loser, huh?” Eddie jeers a few seconds later, though his voice is quiet like he’s not sure Alek is really gone.
“And you’ve had your wagon hooked to this train since 1982,” Richie reminds, wagging his brows while looking over to make eye contact, relieved to see the gold has ceded quickly back to brown.
Eddie is quiet for a few beats, then bites out in a low tone. “Do I really look baby-faced?”
“As hell, Eds,” Richie says, offering a sharp grin against Eddie’s irrefutably adorable, if now scowling face. “Literally your whole life.”
Eddie reaches out with a quick, open palm, shoving Richie at the shoulder, and evidently too fast anymore for Richie to easily duck from unless he actually puts in effort. “Fuck off, four-eyes.”