somewhere between the soul and soft machine

Richie’s startled out of a half-sleep and, at first, he’s not entirely sure why.

Then, he hears an ear-splitting scream from the other room, a sound so genuinely terrified that his heart leaps into his mouth. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa watching television earlier that night; now, he scrambles to his feet so quickly he nearly tumbles sideways over the coffee table. Grabbing the arm of the couch, he shoves himself upright and takes off like a shot down the hallway, towards Dani’s room.

Eddie comes sliding out of the bathroom, hair damp as he yanks his bathrobe on and ties it one-handed. He looks just as horrified as Richie feels.

“Hey, Danno!” Richie calls up the stairs, shoving his feet into his boots. He stomps his heels to get them down into the bottom of the shoes. “You wanna come for a walk with me?”

Richie hears his daughter’s feet hit the floor upstairs before she comes flying halfway down the steps. Dani grips the railing, half-hanging over the bannister.

“Where’re you going?” Dani asks.

“Gonna go pick up your dad and your sisters from the grocery store,” Richie tells her. “They need our help with the bags.”

Eddie balances Dani in the crook of his arm, reaching out with just his fingertips to tug open one of the drawers in the nursery’s dresser.

“What do you think?” Eddie asks quietly. He pulls loose a pink hat and offers it to her, but she doesn’t reach for it. With a contemplative hum, Eddie sets the pink hat back in the drawer, then withdraws a yellow hat instead. This one, she reaches for, hooking her fingers in the fold. “Oh, you like this one, hm?”

Dani just keeps pulling on the hat, wrapping her fingers up in it and pulling until Eddie releases it. He keeps humming to her, keeping her carefully tucked in the inside of his elbow as he keeps digging through her dresser drawers, pulling out a onesie for her, a pair of pants, a tiny pair of socks. Everything he pulls out, he passes to her, draping over her legs, where he can reach. She pulls her socks up to her face, and he tsks at her, clicking his tongue.

oh king thank you 🥺🥺🥺 i love writing it so i'm always so happy when people tell me they enjoy reading it too 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Two hours ago, most of the Losers had just left Eddie’s apartment. It was while waving goodbye to Stan and Patty, the last to drive away, that Richie had noticed the dark clouds outside and turned on his television set to learn that a nasty storm was coming their way.

Richie whistles, leaning his head out Eddie’s kitchen window, while Eddie nervously sits himself on the edge of the coffee table in front of his television.

“Look at how fast it’s moving,” Eddie says. He has to resist the urge to lean in and grip the set with white knuckles. Behind him, he hears the window slide shut, then lock; after a moment, Richie’s hand comes to settle on his shoulder, then the back of his neck. He digs his fingertips in, and Eddie sighs, hanging his head.

“It’s going to be alright,” Richie tells him. “It’s just a storm. We can get up to all sorts of stuff in a storm.”

this message made me feel incredibly emotional and good, thank you so much. i pretty much wrote it to be my "it chapter 3" and it got incredibly self-indulgent, so i never really knew how people took that, but reading this makes me feel both extraordinary and so warm 🥺 ❤ thank you so so much for not only reading this long but reaching out to me and making me feel so good about this!!!!

Richie knows he can be a little bit of an anxious guy.

He takes medication, and he goes to therapy, and he smokes weed, and he’s good. Done and dusted, he’s all set and just fine to go about his day. Every now and then, he’s hit with a particularly rough day, but who isn’t?

That being said, he’s had more tiny panic attacks in the last few months than he knows what to do with, and no amount of marijuana or appointments with his therapists are capable of stopping that. Every time Eddie feels sick, Richie’s terrified; Eddie feels faint, Richie nearly has a stroke. It’s overwhelming, and it’s probably the most frightening experience of his life. He’s excited, too, he is, he’s just— He’ll be more excited when the baby’s here, and Eddie’s not so sick all the time, as happy as he is that Eddie’s having a baby at all.

Richie holds his breath so he can hear better, still lying in bed. Eddie had darted out of bed minutes ago without a word, but Richie hadn’t heard anything since.

Eddie is incredibly suspicious of silence in his house.

Once upon a time, it would’ve been more suspicious for his house to have noise in it. The only sounds his mother would regularly make that he could hear were the television and her voice, shouting for him. Otherwise, the place would be silent like a crypt, his footsteps the only thing he ever heard echoing in the halls. At the time, he’d grown used to it; now, he knows better.

Now, living with Richie, it’d be strange if the house was quiet for longer than five minutes at a time. At any given point in the day, multiple televisions are on, radios are blaring, stereos leaking music; wherever Richie is, his loud voice is usually saying something, whether he’s on the phone or practicing bits or teasing Eddie.

Richie can hardly focus on dinner when Eddie’s just sitting there, looking how he does.

He’s just glad they didn’t go out for dinner tonight, because he doesn’t know how he’d have managed to get all the way back home without taking at least eighty percent of Eddie’s clothes off on the way. It’s about all he can take to just make it through to dessert.

“Do you know how handsome you look like this?” Richie asks. Eddie’s face goes pink, and he looks down at his dessert fork, tracing the tines along the edges of his plate.

“Richie,” Eddie admonishes him.

Richie wakes up to the smell of coffee.

He hasn’t woken up to the smell of coffee in— in years, if he ever has. Maybe his dad did it a couple of times when he was a kid, but he would’ve been too young to remember. With a frown, he rolls over in bed, but he finds it empty.

“Eds?” he asks, half-muffled by the pillow. He drags his head up, but further examination of the room reveals no Eddie. With a huff, he heaves himself up into a seated position, then hauls himself over the edge of the bed into standing. His back is a mess, his mouth is dry, his hair’s falling into his face. He doesn’t really care; he’s curious about Eddie.