Chapter Text
He can't stop his rabbit heart from panicking while she noses at his bicep. Her incisors have already descended, and the sharp tips delicately scrape along his goosepimpled skin. It's not a threat--she's only trying to find the vein--but his body can only understand animal fear, getting tenser by the second. It instinctually understands that it's been caught by a predator. It anticipates the kill.
Once his mommy gets her fangs in him, it doesn't hurt. It never does.
She grunts when she finds the right vein, fangs digging in for stability before she clamps down hard. Eddie gives up a gasp as painful pressure gives way to sharp, cold numbness. His mom whines sweetly as she starts to suck, and suck, and suck. She's curled her comforting weight around him, one hand draped over his body to cradle him close as she goes at his left arm. She's everywhere, enveloping him in her scent of rose petals, sweat, and blood. The smell of home, as nostalgic as Vick's or baby powder.
She gnaws at him.
The numbness finally hits his head like a punch and he starts to float. He feels himself go limp in her embrace, sinking into his bed's mattress, no longer feeling the scratchiness of the towel they laid down. The strange rushing of his blood leaving his body fades to the background of his senses.
This is where it starts to get good, in his opinion. All of his normal fears and anxieties are smothered under the hazy cloud of calm. He's not scared of the blood. He's not nervous about how he'll hide the bite from the Losers. Right now, he can't remember how many bacteria are in a human mouth (he's not sure if anyone's ever figured out how many bacteria are in a vampire's mouth). The best part is, he never even really remembers the initial fear and discomfort, which is already growing less important in his memory. Now, he can just lay there and slowly count the popcorn patterns on his bedroom ceiling as Sonia cuddles him close. Her teeth in the meaty part of his arm are an anchor, keeping him from floating away entirely and keeping them stapled together like two flighty pieces of paper.
Unbidden, Eddie thought, I missed this. She hasn't asked him to help her in ages. When even was the last time she fed from him? There was that brief snack right before the start of last summer, that nightmarish summer that sucked for completely non-vampire related reasons. But nothing since then. Which was weird, now that he was vaguely thinking about it.
Casting his mind dizzily back to that summer, at first he had been too focused on the leper and the clown (and the horrible knowledge that there was much more out there than his own pedestrian experience of the supernatural) to worry about which state of hunger Mommy was in. Then eventually he assumed that she was too proud (or maybe too embarrassed) to ask him to help her after the Big Confrontation they had about his inhaler. He'd just kind of assumed that eventually they'd get back to normal with the pills and the inhaler and the feedings, all of which he'd been prepared to resent like a normal teenager for once. But she'd kept not asking him to help her. Even after not having a normal meal out of Eddie for months and months, Sonia looked just as strong as ever until the end of the summer.
It's now been two months since they all risked sepsis via dirty glass bottle out there in the Barrens. Two months, and Mommy was looking worse and worse lately. Tired bruises under her eyes. Losing weight. Getting up out of her chair less and less everyday. Sleeping more, and sleeping during the day.
Another naughty thought floats through Eddie's fuzzy head. Mommy didn't need to eat when It was alive. She only got hungry again after we killed It. He lets that one drift out of sight out of mind.
Everything had come to a head today when he'd come home from school. He had come in carefully, not wanting to disturb the frigid silence he and Sonia had been operating under ever since the Big Confrontation. At two months, this was the longest silent treatment she'd ever accomplished. After shutting the door and taking off his backpack, jacket, and shoes as quietly as a fourteen-year-old could, he had braved entering the living room, ostensibly in order to pass through to the kitchen. If he also had wanted to sneak a look at Mommy, then it was only because silently watching her deteriorate was literally keeping him up at night with anxiety.
He'd been cataloguing her hunger symptoms almost against his will; he'd love to be a normal teenager, the kind of teenager who didn't obsess over his mommy's physical and emotional health, like the teenager he'd briefly been during the Big Confrontation, but apparently that's just not who he actually is. He's noticed her, and it's been killing him to watch her ignore him while she suffers. It almost feels like he's withholding from her. Like he's hurting her. All of this has been forming a cold and heavy ball in his gut that keeps him up at night with its discomfort.
When he'd stepped into the living room, Mommy had been collapsed deep into her chair. Her face was gaunt with loosened skin, too much weight lost too quickly. She hadn't turned to greet him, but her beady eyes had been glued to him, just as they had been for the last couple of days. Usually, Eddie skitters away under her hawk-like gaze--a mouse escaping. But today he had been squarely in freeze mode, not flight. He'd taken in the sight of the pitiful picture his mother made. Her powerful eyes peered out from a body that looked like it was falling apart, rotting off the bone. He had never seen her, his all-encompassing Mommy, look like this.
She had been wanting without asking. She had stared but not beckoned.
Today, after school, had marked the very first time ever that Eddie had offered.
"Oh, my sweet boy," she'd purred while hauling him in for a tight hug. "You do take such good care of your mommy."
He really had missed this, he now realizes. The quiet sound of his mother gulping down his blood, occasionally lapping up what she's spilled across his skin, is the same kind of familiar as hugging a childhood stuffed animal. It feels like forgiveness--like he's forgiven her and she's forgiven him. He's just glad he can do this for her, provide this for her again. He's glad that they can be a family again. A team, maybe, this time. Maybe the Big Confrontation was really the beginning of a whole new phase of their relationship. She'll respect him and stop treating him like a baby. She won't lie to him anymore. He knows now that he can be strong, and she does too. He's certainly strong enough to do this for her.
A team. Eddie smiles up at the ceiling and dares to flop his head over to nestle into her hair as she feeds. Together, they bob up and down. Yeah, he'd missed his mom.
/|\ ^._.^ /|\
Eddie was five when Sonia changed. He knows this only because his very first scary memories of Mommy, the few that he has, are tangled up with his last scary memories of Dad dying, which he intellectually knows happened when he was five. He remembers very little of that year, all things considered. Most of what he has are flashes of moments with no order or context. Any narrative those moments tell is one that he's guessed at and sleuthed out over the years.
One memory is eating green jello in the hospital while trying not to look at his dad, who looks like the Nosferatu vampire.
One memory is hiding in Mommy's dress rather than see the casket at the funeral.
One memory is the musky smell as he and Mommy enter his aunt's house, which was hours north of Derry and they probably only went because of Dad dying and how sad Mommy was after. Eddie doesn't remember visiting Salem's Lot ever before then, and certainly not since.
Once memory is his Auntie's eyes gleaming at him from the entry hall.
One memory is of Mommy and Auntie screaming and screaming and screaming like they were dying downstairs, while Eddie was locked up in the guest room he was supposed to be sharing with Mommy. They didn't come let him out for days, because Eddie remembers he had to eat all the snacks he sneaked into his backpack, and then the ones Mommy sneaked too.
He doesn't remember what happened when they came and got him. He does remember later on asking when they'd go back to visit Auntie again, and Mommy telling him brusquely that she had died.
He doesn't remember when he found out what she now was, what Mommy had become. For all he knew, it could have been right away. The more she takes, the hazier his memory becomes of the during and immediately before. Most of that year is hazy, whether because of naturally fading memories or because of bites. All he knows is that by the time he started remembering her feedings, he'd known that it was a normal part of his life. Come home from first grade, get an after-school snack, then help Mommy out with her snack. She had changed sometime during that year; she changed and Eddie got used to it.
He supposes that there was a silver lining to that order of events. By the time he could mentally grasp what was happening, his body was used to it. Her bites always calmed him down, no matter how scared he might be beforehand, which would've been perfect for getting a small, already-anxious kid used to the job. It would've also been the perfect way to get him, a perpetually nervous child, to finally take a relaxed breath. His mother, the source of that relief, was a looming figure of comfort in his early, hazy memories, both a homey den and the dangerous wolf inside it.
As far as it mattered, she had always been a predator and his Mommy at the same time. And he loved her all the same, even when he was incapable of being a good son otherwise.
/|\ ^._.^ /|\
Eddie rubs his eye boogers away roughly while standing in front of his closet, evaluating his options for clothing today. Luckily, the bicep is, like, the easiest place to hide a bite. Baggy t-shirt, sweatshirt over that, and voila. A Perfectly Normal school outfit for the middle of October. Honestly, he’s just glad he finally got the cast off. It’d been much harder to plan clothes around that cumbersome thing. He's still bone-tired and bleary from last night, so that's about all the planning he's capable of this morning.
The bite doesn't hurt at all, like normal, so it's easy to ignore as he pulls everything over his head after stumbling into his jeans.
Mommy's probably still dead asleep in her room down the hall, so Eddie doesn't bother stopping the door from slamming on his way out of the house.
Leaving the house is like leaving his blanket after a nap--bracing and brutal. One of the first crisp October morning breezes slaps him in the face, stinging sharply and waking him the fuck up. The comfortable cobwebs are ripped from where they'd been protecting his brain, and suddenly his cozy outlook on last night sits a bit more uneasily with him. Offering for the first time. What that meant. Wanting them to be a team. God, what to make of all that in the gray morning?
It's a quiet unease, though, so he lets it settle into his stomach as anxiety and starts running to school to bleed off this new jittery energy.
He's starting off to school earlier that he would've last year, not because he's any more dedicated to eighth grade than he was to seventh, but because the Losers started this habit of goofing off in the morning before school while Ben does his little not-volunteer-not-a-job thing in the office. Apparently he mostly makes copies and lets the office ladies pinch his cheeks. The rest of them mostly just shoot whatever shit there is to be found and punch each other.
Eddie kind of feels like they're pretending to be cooler and older than they are, since there are packs of high schoolers that do the same thing the next building over. But Bev and Richie seem to have decided to turn their trauma from the summer into weird gothy stuff, and Bill's transitioned his normal flannel into tattered, baggy flannel like a regular burnout, so Eddie privately thinks they look cool enough to compete with the dumb high schoolers anyway.
Bill and Bev are already there and leaning casually against the outside of the school when he comes jogging up, panting hard. They match in their oversized flannels as well as in their bright smiles to him.
"Hey, guys," Eddie gasps between deep breathes.
"Hey, dude," Bev smirks from behind her spiky, hairsprayed fringe, "You wanna take a breather?"
"Yeah, I ran here," Eddie continues to gasp. Speaking of, he is kind of sweaty under his aptly-named sweatshirt. He starts ripping it off, and only pauses briefly to run the numbers on the elevated risk of exposing the bite. Then he gets a whiff of himself and decides getting his top layer off is more of an emergency.
Bill grimaces at the thought of running. "God, why?" he asks. He always was more of a bike guy than a running guy.
Eddie finishes tying his sweatshirt around his waist. He actually sort of likes to run, but he doesn't have time to find a non-dorky way to communicate that before Richie arrives noisily on the scene from behind. Very noisily.
"Sup, virgins!" he yells, way too loud for seven thirty in the morning. "Eddie, you didn't start stripping for me, didya?"
Eddie's mind is suddenly a blank slate, made only of rage. "Shut the fuck up about virgins!" he screeches, unfortunately rather squeakily. In his defense, he's still pretty out of breath. "You're a virgin too! It's normal to be a virgin in the eighth grade!" He pauses to suck in a breath. "And I wasn't stripping! I didn't even see you come up behind me!"
"You can't lie to me, Edster. You're a natural stripper, huh, it's like it's genetic from your--"
"Beep beep, Richie!" Bill moans. "Dude, it's too early for Eddie's mom jokes."
"Yeah, boooo!" Bev joins in. Eddie laughs, vindicated.
Richie huffs, blowing some of his likewise heavily hairsprayed hair out from where it'd stuck behind his glasses. "Fine, fine, you pure virgins can't handle The Talk, I get it."
Eddie can't quite contain his snickers successfully, but he thinks he keeps them to himself alright. He sneaks a real look at Richie this morning as Stan comes ambling up and takes the focus of the conversation and Richie's attention. He looks like he walked out of one of the album covers in his room, with his hair a riotous, vertical mess of hairspray and gel inexpertly applied, and a black leather jacket that is much too big for him.
Richie's fashion change has mostly been a matter of swapping out his hawaiian shirts for secondhand leather and his dad's old suit jackets (obtained from Went by a process of stealing them, getting grounded, then stealing more of them). He's also been doing increasingly frequent experiments with Bev's eyeliner, which mostly end with him looking like a dirty raccoon. Eddie is not afraid to tell him this. What Eddie has not told Richie, and will never tell anyone ever, is that he thinks dirty raccoons are very cute. And he looks very cute today, Eddie thinks miserably to himself. A bad omen for the rest of the day, for sure.
In an attempt to set the universe to rights, Eddie starts stepping on Richie's toes through his beat-up converse while he talks to Stan.
Richie ignores him haughtily and keeps talking to Stan.
Eddie decides to escalate the situation, and fully stands on Richie's toes.
Richie's eyes only narrow.
Fine. Eddie slams his full weight down on one foot then the other, stomping to his heart's content.
"You fucking spaz!" Richie finally, FINALLY, yells. "It's over for you, dicknut!" He rips his feet out from under Eddie, sending him stumbling back. Then, like the tactical genius he is, Richie uses this opportunity to very effectively tackle them both to the cold ground.
Eddie can't stop grinning, and screams, "Richie, stop!" Even though this is exactly what he wanted to happen. "Stop it!"
"Not likely, little Spaghetti. I won't stop until you stop being an annoying shit. So...never!" he yells back, and does an imitation wrestling move where he flips them once, so a dizzy Eddie is on top, and twice, so a grinning Richie is back on top. Their fight is an elegant and mature flurry of elbows and slaps, and it’s all Eddie can do to turn his irrepressible smile into an evil grin. He gets a solid elbow into Richie’s side, because what that boy has in lanky, new puberty height, he loses to Eddie in sheer pointiness of elbows.
A real sting seems to galvanize Richie even further. He gives a war cry and goes in for the tickle. Eddie screams, once again too loud for 7:40 am when he’s sure other kids have started to show up. Richie gets him in the stomach, on his neck, and Eddie’s anticipating the next target so much that it takes him a long two seconds to realize Richie’s stopped attacking him and is just sort of hovering over him.
“What?” he wheezes.
“Dude,” Richie sounds kind of far way, “what the fuck is this?”
It takes Eddie catching his breath again to give himself time to figure out what the issue is. He might actually be a little dizzy. Then he notices where Richie is holding him—one hand around his bicep, with the baggy t-shirt sleeve rucked up. Shit.
“Shit,” he says.
“Hey guys, come look; Eddie’s been mauled!”
Maybe it’s a little too soon after the summer of mauled children to take Richie’s shout sarcastically, because no one makes any jokes about it. They just rush over. Bill gets there first, and has a regrettably worried face on.
“Uh,” is all Eddie gets out while they all stare at his bite in shock.
“Eddie,” Bev looks right into his eyes, after tearing her gaze away from the bite (which honestly doesn’t even look that bad, in Eddie’s opinion), “are you okay?”
“Uh,” he says.
“Oh god, he can’t even form a sentence,” Richie actually sounds worried too.
“That looks really serious, Eddie,” Stan says from where he’s standing further away than the others.
Bill crouches down to where Eddie and Richie are still on the hard ground like idiots. “Tell us what happened,” he frowns.
He can’t do this while pinned under Richie. Eddie huffs a sigh and shoves at the other boy, wiggling his way out and conveniently allowing himself time to think of a response. Richie is no help, still kneeling on the ground, looking at him intensely, so it takes a thankfully long time. “It’s, uh, really not a big deal, guys,” he finally says once he’s sitting up fully. “Really! I just got bit, uh, by a dog.”
“A dog?” Stan raises an eyebrow.
“Oh, so like a werewolf?” Richie exclaims shrilly.
“Yes, a dog, no, not a werewolf,” Eddie rolls his eyes. A werewolf, honestly.
“Which of your neighbors has a dog?” Bill looks confused still, and maybe a little unsatisfied.
Uh. “Oh no, um, I went down to the trainyard; it was some random dog there.”
“A stray?!” Stan now looks truly horrified, and everyone else bugs out too.
“What about rabies, dude? The disease you’re literally always yammering about?” Richie yells, outraged.
“Mom took me to the hospital to check it out already,” Eddie is now doing improv with the worst of them. “All clear!”
“And she let you out of the house again after that?” Bev asks.
“Well,” Eddie’s warming to the topic now. “She didn’t want to, but I put my foot down and basically made her let me go to school.”
Everyone looks suitably impressed.
“Good for you,” Bev smiles down at him.
Eddie smiles a little back, biting down a bit of guilt. It feels nice to make Bev proud of him, even if he lied to get it. “Yeah, and it’s honestly not bad, like, it doesn’t even hurt anymore. So it’s not a big deal!”
“Good,” Bill looks a bit bemused, so Eddie counts it as a win.
“You know,” Richie starts, with a growing smile. “That’s pretty badass of you, Spagheds. Hey, maybe if it scars, you’ll finally lose your super embarrassing virginity.”
Ben picks this moment to run up to them. “Hey guys! Eddie lost his virginity?”
/|\ ^._.^ /|\
During the month of October, as the leaves deaden, Eddie recovers. He rests up, drinks his twice daily apple juice Mommy sets out for him, and feels less tired. The recovery process is never hard, not when her bite injects him with the very medicine he needs to heal. It’s funny, he thinks to himself one Monday before dinner, for all those years Mommy had me take the gazebos (wait, plah-see-bows, Stan made fun of me last time I said gazebos), while she held the real medicine within her the whole time.
The bites were painkillers, they were antibiotics, they were anti-scar creams. He looks at his scar, long since scabbed, peeled, and now a bright shiny pink. From experience, he knows that by the end of October it’ll fade to white, then soon after gone for good. Faster and more painless than any other papercut or scraped knee he’s ever had. Why had she ever given him the fake stuff?
With a huff, he figures he won’t ever get it. And really, at this point it’s dredging up ancient history. They’re past all that now, so why keep getting worked up about it? He knows he tends to keep grudges, specifically toward Richie. He’s petty and jealous and mean. But this is his mom. And those are all things he kind of doesn’t like about himself anyway. He wants to be nicer. Right now, he’s going to meet her halfway.
Her voice pierces his train of thought from down the hall, presumably the kitchen. “Eddieeeeee!” she yells, with a strange tone in her voice.
Eddie jumps up and comes down the hall with a sliver of trepidation in his heart. He’s stopped short in the entrance to the kitchen by a supremely odd sight. His mom is almost bouncing around the space, humming to herself and smiling. That’s why she sounded strange, he realizes. She was smiling when she called for him.
“Oh, Eddie-bear, there you are. Set the table, dear.” She briefly directs her blinding smile right at him before stooping over to stir the boiling pot. Eddie boggles and does not set the table right away.
It’s just that…she looks well.
For months she had been a sack of bones covered by loose and flabby skin. She sat in her chair and got worse. After feeding, she hid away in her room for a few days like normal, and for the next week she was still sat in her chair, getting “situated” as she said. She had looked better, spots of bright red color high in her cheeks, but she didn’t move much. Eddie had always thought this period after feeding was like a cat luxuriating in her fullness.
Now, though, she’s energetic. She’s moving. The fullness of her body and the healthy shine of her skin and hair scream her vitality. Eddie knows that the dead thing is still in there, inside her, but this is the most mom his mom has been in a long while.
The feeding must have been really good, he thinks blankly.
“Eddie-kins, the table,” she chides, still smiling smiling smiling.
“Right, sorry,” he splutters, edging around her in the small space between the table and the counter to get the plates. In a fit of good feeling, he picks the nice plates.
That’s when he notices the pill bottles on the counter.
His breath shudders in his throat despite himself. He’s very familiar with the tightening that will eventually have him whistling.
“Ma…”
She’s heard him already. Or perhaps she had seen him freeze. Or she was waiting for this moment. She’s right behind him, crowding him, before he can turn around. So he doesn’t turn; he just keeps looking at the pill bottles.
“Oh, Eddie-bear. I wanted to talk about that after dinner.”
I thought we talked about this. I thought we talked about this. I thought we talked about this.
“Ma, I thought we talked about this.” That’s as far as he gets.
“Honey, you don’t need to be snippy.”
That got him in his dark, twisted little core. A flare of anger spikes through him.
She continues, “This is completely different, honey bear. These are supplements.”
“Supplements for what?” he huffs.
“Eddie,” her tone is firmer, meaner. She grabs his arm and turns him around to face her. “They’re for your health.”
“I’m healthy,” he says to her stomach.
“Even healthy people need supplements. All the doctors are saying it now.” Doctors in Derry or doctors on TV, he wonders. “And Eddie-bear, you in particular need them.”
“I told you, I’m healthy!”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Eddie,” her voice is tight but lilting. Her grip on his arm tightens, and he realizes she grabbed him right over the bite. He looks up at her, and her face is shadowed with how much she’s looming over him. The crystal overhead light is warm, and her eyes are cool.
He mostly looks at those crystal swirly patterns when he speaks again, even though it makes him squint. Looking past her works a little to preserve his confidence. “You’ve never given them to me before.”
“Before, I could trust that you would actually rest and protect yourself when you were more delicate, Eddie. Since this summer…” she cuts herself off with a huff. “Anyway, I just want to make sure that you’re strong, Eddie-bear.”
Eddie twists his head to look back at the bottles. They don’t have prescription labels, and they’re all different sizes. He picks up the one closest to him: iron supplements. Another one is capsules of fish oil.
He peaks back at her. Her eyes are locked onto him already. “Healthy people take these?”
The storm clouds clear, and she smiles at him again. “Yes, honey bear.”
“Well, maybe I’ll take a couple, then.”
She hugs him and she’s his entire world for three seconds. She defines his borders and boundaries and then he’s free again.
“Oh, Eddie-bear I knew that I raised a responsible boy. Now, weren’t you going to be setting the table?”
They have whole wheat pasta with no sauce, frozen peas and carrots, and sweet corn once his mom fishes it out of the boiling water. Well, Eddie has the pasta, peas, and corn. Sonia has one of her microwave meals, cheerfully chatting and smiling after each spear of indecipherable, gravy-smothered meat.
“I was just thinking, Eddie, as I was heating this up, that I’ve finally figured out why I like these Swanson meals even when I can’t stand the thought of eating animal after you’ve filled me up, dear. They don’t taste like animal at all!” She laughs at herself, something that rarely happens. Eddie doesn’t really know where the joke is, but smiles anyway. She sometimes doesn’t eat for weeks after she feeds from him, that much is true.
She skewers another chunk of what could be country-fried steak. “Eating a bloody animal, why, that was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tried to do. Did I ever tell you, Eddie, about the time I tried to drink cows instead of people?”
Somehow, it seems, he’s made some incredible transformation into a trustworthy peer, someone she can confide in. She’s never told him any of this; they leave the details of her condition entirely unspoken. It’s always the shadow in the corner of their relationship, never out in the open.
He answers, nonplussed, “No, Ma, you haven’t. You drank a cow?”
She laughs again. “Yes, I know. I found out very quickly, dear, that I very much can’t drink a cow. Just doesn’t work; it’s like drinking sludge. And I tried to do so much research about cows and their health benefits. I even read about husbandry, for God’s sake. All a waste!”
A gleam enters her eyes, and she picks up his half-eaten cob. “Eddie-bear, did you know that corn-feed makes the best tasting cows?”
/|\ ^._.^ /|\
After about thirty minutes of shivering in their Halloween costumes out in the Barrens, tacky orange and black decorations jerking sadly in the biting wind, Stan calls it by simply walking away from the group into the darkening forest. Just stands, huffs, puts his stocking hat on over his Spiderman mask, and leaves.
The others follow him one by one, since it really is too buttfuck cold for their original plan of partying in the woods like the high schoolers are rumored to do. Bill picks up their barely-drank bottle of illicit whiskey (turns out whiskey is super gross and not even Richie could stomach it) and pulls up the rear. All in all, the Losers’ Halloween Extravaganza is a huge failure.
They are Losers, after all. They go to Bill’s garage instead.
Eddie ends up next to Mike on the ratty couch, watching Bev and Richie yank a blushing Ben, who is unfortunately dressed as a pumpkin, around to the tune of Monster Mash. Stan and Bill are getting pop and snacks from the house. Mike is looking handsome in a homemade Indiana Jones costume, fedora included, which is presumably his grandpa’s given how it’s a little big on him.
Eddie’s suddenly full of missing him. Mike is still trying to convince his grandpa to let him attend regular school with the rest of them, racist-ass town and farmwork be damned, but right now he’s still homeschooled. So the vast majority of their time hanging out is Mike-less. He works long hours on the farm, especially during harvest season, but in this moment of emotion, Eddie can only think about all the times that they could have made a group hang work but didn’t try hard enough. Or didn’t try at all. Guilt burns at him. Can Mike feel it, sitting next to him on the couch?
“You look really cool,” Eddie leans into Mike’s shoulder to say.
“Not as cool as Bill's, though. His looks more like the real outfit from the movies.” Bill’s parents had obviously gotten him a costume from the store, having stopped making him costumes forever ago.
“No! Yours is like, way cooler! You’re authentic! Your hat is old and everything!”
Mike grins, and looks even more charming. “Thanks, Eddie. You look really cool too.” He reaches over and ruffles Eddie’s hairsprayed-to-hell-and-back locks.
“Hey!” Eddie smacks his hand away before he can do too much damage, but smiles brightly anyway. Bev worked hard on that hair! He and Bev had met up beforehand to help each other out. This mostly meant he let her make his hair big and messy, with wild, animalistic makeup to match. One of her flannels with the sleeve ripped up to reveal his (now less than impressive) bite mark completes his look as a teenage werewolf.
In turn, he helped her paint her whole face white for her ghost costume. It’s very elaborate, with teased hair standing almost straight up and an old wedding dress from Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. Eddie thinks she looks like a movie star as she twirls between Ben and Richie.
Mike bounces his shoulder gently against Eddie’s in apology. “I was just helping you look more authentic!” he teases. Eddie sees his eyes flicker down to his bicep. “Are you feeling any better?”
Nice Mike strikes again.
He covers the bite self-consciously with his hand. “Well, it didn’t really ever hurt, so…yeah I’m okay. Thanks, though.”
Mike just smiles and gives him another friendly shoulder nudge, which literally knocks Eddie over. “Well, good. You’re pretty tough.”
Before Eddie can huff, deflect, and continue the conversation, he’s suddenly and violently yanked off the couch and thrown into the dance circle.
“Jesus, Richie!” He kicks his friend’s shins in retaliation. “I was having a nice conversation with Mike!”
“Enough chitchat, you fuddy-duddy!” Richie crows in British Guy. “Let’s dance!”
Eddie doesn’t even like The Monster Mash, so he kicks Richie a few more times and lets him swing their arms around. Richie is mostly lurching around him, since he keeps tripping on his Bela Lugosi cloak with his sneakers. “Dracula isn’t British, you know.”
Richie fake-thoughtfully (because he’s never been real-thoughtful in his life) taps his chin. “You know what, my good Eds, you’re right. Let me do better!” He grins maniacally, produces fake fangs from his pocket, and…puts them directly into his mouth!
“GROSS, RICHIE! THE LINT!”
“Vat, Eds,” the idiot lisps. “I am Dracula! I vant to suck your blood!”
“You didn’t even rinse those! You have lint in your mouth now and also all your pocket germs!”
“Vell then you’ll haff to SUCK them out!” With that, Richie firmly grips Eddie’s arms and bends him over backwards in a poor imitation of a dip. Eddie’s heart starts beating wildly, and god he knows his face is aflame.
For a frozen, sparkling, uncomfortable moment, he can’t look away from Richie’s plastic fanged mouth, leering at and learning towards him as they dip even lower. His stomach squirms, eyes locked onto Richie’s mouth and the fangs therein. Then the moment unfreezes and he re-realizes that Richie is shoving his pocket-lint dentures in Eddie’s fucking face.
“Richieeeee!” he shrieks, giving one more brutal kick to Richie’s shin. This turns out to be a mistake, because his balance is apparently the only thing keeping the two of them up, and with Eddie sacrificing one leg for violence, they both go tumbling down onto the hard concrete of Bill’s garage floor. Technically they land on the rug, but Eddie’s elbows (and recently broken arm, shit) can now attest that the rug sucks. At least Richie also yelled as they went down.
“Shit, ow,” Eddie groans.
Mike, along with Stan and Bill who got back with the snacks at the worst time, at least laugh quickly then get back to their own conversation. Bev, the devil, lingers.
“Graceful,” she smirks, and starts dancing the Time Warp around them. Whenever she does her dramatic pelvic thrusting, her ratty gown smacks them both in the face.
“Get the fuck outta here, Ringwald,” Richie gripes.
Unfortunately, Eddie can’t stop staring at Richie, who is once again on top of him. The fucker. It looks like he’s smeared a whole thing of pomade into his hair to attempt that shiny Bela Lugosi look, and the smell is kind of overwhelming at this close range. Peeking out of Richie’s slightly open mouth are the fake teeth, and Eddie’s stomach twists again.
Their eyes meet. For two people who are so often wrapped up in each other, Eddie thinks, they don’t actually make a whole lot of eye contact. Richie’s eyes are enormous and shining behind his glasses; instead of hiding behind the glass, it’s as though his friend’s inner soul is beaming out to him.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Richie announces and starts to stumble off of Eddie, somehow kneeing him in the side in the process. Quick as a bat, he’s flitting around the workbench and through the door into the house.
Weird. Weird and worrisome.
Eddie glances around at his friends, trying to get a read of their read of the situation. They are all basically totally ignoring the aborted Eddie-and-Richie show. Mike and Stan are loudly talking about comics, something about Wolverine getting beat up so bad in the latest issue, and for a second Eddie’s love of loudly sharing his opinions on the latest happenings for the X-Men almost weighs out his Richie-duty. But Richie could be going through something, or worse, sick. Honestly, he's probably puking in the bathroom right now.
So with a burdened sigh, Eddie scrambles to his feet and goes to the couch to pick up his fanny pack full of supplies. He focuses on not hearing anything so Mike and Stan being (probably) wrong won’t distract him. Once he has the strap in hand, he darts after Richie out of the garage and into the main house.
After all, Richie can’t be left alone to be weird all by himself.
Bill’s house is also weird in and of itself. The Losers have managed to wrestle the garage back from bad memories, but the rest of it still feels a little bit like a funeral home, or a museum. It’s not that there are any memorabilia or even pictures of Georgie around; Bill’s mom and dad still yell at Bill whenever he tries to take anything out of his brother’s room. It’s that everything feels untouchable.
It’s like there’s this defensive wall between him and Bill’s parents whenever they’re in the same room, like the enormity of their loss creates and maintains a barrier too intimidating to cross. There’s too much awful tension to speak through, sometimes even when Bill’s parents aren’t even in the room. Eddie wonders if any of the other Losers feel that too.
Eddie wades through that tension in his search for Richie. He thinks he can hear Mr. Denbrough in his office down the hall. He can almost feel Mrs. Denbrough’s weight upstairs like sensing a ghost.
He finds Richie, as expected, in the downstairs bathroom, a little offshoot from the kitchen, by the warm strip of light seeping from under the door.
“Richie, do you need any Pepto Bismol or Tylenol? I have some for you if you want,” Eddie tries helpfully to the closed door. He thinks that this is probably the most reasonable situation for Richie to be puking in, completely unlike other times his friend’s weak stomach made appearances. They had that awful whiskey earlier, and even though he played tough, Richie had hated it just as much as the rest of them. “Are you drinking water? You should have been sipping—not gulping, sipping!—water this whole time, dipshit. You know what, I’m just going to get you some; bathroom water is infected with like, shit bacteria. I’ll be right back—”
The door flies open to reveal Richie’s exasperated face. “Would you just get in here?”
Eddie sniffs suspiciously as he snakes his way past Richie, who isn’t moving his body an inch. He brushes tinglingly close to Richie’s hot side before emerging safely into the bathroom. He narrows his eyes at the other boy. “Are you okay?”
Richie rolls his eyes. “Could you maybe sound a little less mad at me and a little more worried?” Unfortunately, he pulls out British Guy again. “Yer hurting me feelings, wot wot.”
“I already told you that Dracula isn’t British!” He chops for emphasis. “He’s German or Russian or something!” He takes a moment to breathe, an admittedly rare move. He’s just a little bit really worried about his friend. “Richie, you ran away from the party. I just wanted to check to see if you were actually sick.”
Richie blanches, now looking like he might puke right on the tiled Denbrough bathroom floor. Eddie’s stomach sinks. He’s making it worse.
“I’m, uh,” Richie starts softly but firmly, looking down. “I’m not sick.”
Eddie waits a beat. “Okay?” he adds in the resulting silence.
“It’s just, um.” Jesus, but Richie’s eyes are darting everywhere but Eddie. “It’s, um. I—your bite looks better.”
He can’t help but blink at the nonsequitor, and his stomach tightens just a bit in annoyance. It’s like none of his friends think he can take a little pain, a little scarring. “You know, Rich, you don’t have to keep bringing it up? I was fucking fine when you guys first saw it and I’m even finer now, okay? I’m not a baby!”
Richie chews his lip for a second. More like gnaws on it. Eddie can see the spots where Richie previously drew blood. “Hey, you know how we killed a demon clown pedo?” he says out of fucking nowhere.
“JEE-SUS, Rich!”
“No, no, I mean—” Richie groans like he’s dying. “To set the scene. That summer. I never told you guys what I saw when Bill and I checked out Neibolt to see if we could find your Syph Hobo.”
“That is NOT what he was.”
“Let me finish! I told you all we saw It. But I saw…something else. Or I guess It as something else.” Richie stops again. He pushes his glasses up and rubs down his face in a strangely adult manner. “It was a werewolf. It was also me but It was a werewolf.”
Eddie frowns. “I didn’t know you were scared of werewolves.”
“I’m not scared!” Richie breaks off to scream into his hands briefly.
It’s like a horrible lightbulb goes on over Eddie’s head. “Oh shit, Richie! I’m a werewolf tonight! I’m sorry!” He feels like he’s going to cry, he has so much frantic energy inside him all of a sudden. “I’ll take it off, I swear! I’ll do it right now!”
Richie catches his hands before they can dart up to scrub away Bev’s handiwork. “Chill out, dude!” He holds on when Eddie tries to rip his wrists out of Richie’s grip. “Seriously, don’t take off your costume. You look great. Ignore me.”
Eddie scoffs uncertainly. “As if anyone could ever ignore you, Rich.”
His friend just grimaces. He’s acting so weird, Eddie worries to himself.
Richie starts one more time, determined. This time he looks right at Eddie. “I was the werewolf. That what It showed me. And your bite…it looks like I got you. When I landed on you out there, it looked like I bit you.”
Eddie can’t help but turn to the mirror behind them. He looks at his reflection, and this time internalizes it as himself, rather than a costume. Does he look like a victim? Like Richie the werewolf “got him?”
He looks feral. His hair is fluffy and tangled, his shirt ripped to reveal where he’s staring to actually get lean muscle instead of baby fat. His mom’s bite stands out starkly through the biggest hole in the flannel, healed over and pink. It’ll be gone soon; it was lucky that Halloween fell in the short window of time before Mommy’s saliva could finish getting rid of the evidence.
The thing is, he doesn’t look like a victim, like Richie thinks. He looks like the monster. He’s got fake blood on his hands.
He grins at his reflection, then turns to face Richie and reestablishes their eye contact. The other boy looks like a startled deer.
“Fuck that shit. Fuck that stupid clown.” Eddie is too wound up to moderate his tone, or his volume. “That shitbrain clown didn’t get me. No werewolf is gonna get me.” His mom, a literal vampire, couldn’t hurt him, not now. “Nothing is going to get you either. Dude, we’re actual monster hunters! We’re basically superheroes! We’d fuck anything up before they could do a thing!”
Eddie grins at his best friend, and believes.