Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

September 3, 2021

Eddie’s 45th birthday, a day that should have been filled with joy and laughter and Richie’s endearing yet infuriating nicknames. Richie gave up on trying to convince himself that September 3rd would change with each passing year. Deep down he knew that the day would never be for partying, but for standing at Eddie’s grave. 

Bill, aside from also being one of Eddie’s closest friends, refused to let Richie go to the cemetery alone. He knew the spiral Richie would fall into if he was left alone to stare at the headstone of his long lost love. 

As if the day of the downfall of It and the collapsing of Neibolt couldn’t have gotten any more sorrowful, Richie told the other Losers about his love for Eddie in the quarry. (It’s not like everyone hadn’t already been placing their bets on when he would open up or anything.) The fact that they knew Richie’s confession was coming didn’t make the impact of his words any less painful, though. The Losers’ salty tears endlessly mingled with the freshwater of the quarry that day. The walls of that canyon will never forget Richie’s hushed confessions that spoke volumes. 

I loved him, guys. I love him so fucking much it hurt, but watching the light leave his eyes was so much more painful. 

Richie’s attempt to keep up a strong smile dissipated as soon as he turned off the ignition and stepped into the brisk fall air. He knew that tree, he knew that bench, he knew that - “stay strong, Rich” - tombstone. 

Richie was far from fond of Myra, but he did appreciate her upkeep of his grounds. Eddie was buried by a steadily growing oak tree, and his widow would always make sure to have its branches adorned with windchimes and little cardinal replicas. Memories of a younger Stan would come flooding back in each time he saw the fake birds. “Beep beep, Richie. Cardinals are a symbol of care. They watch over the passed on’s loved ones in place of the person they lost.” 

Once Richie placed the bouquet of sunflowers he had brought for Eddie on the grave marker, he joined Bill where he was standing. They were a few respectful feet away from the dirt mound that signified the hole where Eddie’s coffin was - the hole in Richie’s heart that Eddie had left. Bill let the silence engulf them. He knew Richie better than the other Losers. He knew how much Richie valued being able to soak in the reality of Eddie’s passing. It had been almost five years since the incident, but Richie was still having a hard time believing that everything had actually happened. Surely one day he would wake up from this cruel nightmare. Right?

Richie was the first to break the silence. He started talking about their childhood and his fondest memories of Eddie. “Remember how his voice would go up two octaves when he would tell me not to call him ‘Spaghetti’?” and “That dumbass firecracker. I’ll never forget when I told him I was going to try to reset his broken arm and the first thing he said was, ‘Do not fucking touch me!’ I was only trying to help the poor son of a bitch.”

In their five years of visiting the grave site, this was the first trip where Bill and Richie had actually smiled as they gazed at “Eddie Kaspbrak” etched gracefully into the marble. 

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Neither Richie nor Bill was quite sure how long they stood around pulling up pictures and videos featuring Eddie from their reunion in Derry. It was an emotionally tolling cycle: start a story, pull up picture, end up on a completely new topic, and repeat. Bill’s personal favorite was a picture of Eddie alone. The photo quality was god awful - it must have been taken in their later teens - but Eddie’s mere presence made it all worth the while. He smiled brightly at the camera, both hands raised flashing two thumbs up. Eddie never let his hair down. He was always so uptight and scared. Pictures like these were so hard to come by. 

Some time later, the laughter stopped, smiles dulled, and the silence between Richie and Bill stretched out again. Richie felt his eyes stop focusing as he drifted off into a vivid recounting of Eddie’s burial. It was almost as if he was frozen in time. He heard every sob, felt every rigid embrace, tasted every salty tear. Richie began to fade into another memory, this time from when they were all just about thirteen. Eddie had finally stopped taking his placebos (or, as the Losers liked to tease him, his gazebos ) and was feeling a bit rebellious. Richie chanted and cheered as Eddie shoved cookie after cookie into his mouth, not giving a flying fuck about his blood pressure. 

Bill jolted him back to reality with the slightest brush of their arms. Richie could still hear his own cries of glee, Eddie’s angry munching, and the Losers’ celebrating the sugar intake. The sounds weren’t as clear now. They bounced off the walls of Richie’s head in an echo, slowly fading away. Every grief counselor he had visited said that forgetting your loved one’s voice would be an inevitable and excruciating step in the grieving process. He found it in himself to smirk. They wouldn’t be Richie and Eddie if they weren’t taunting each other into the afterlife, voices clear as day. 

Richie noticed a wind chime had fallen off the branch of Eddie’s tree. On any other day, he, quite frankly, wouldn’t have given a shit. Putting the windchime back up could be an opportunity for Myra to do something other than weep over Eddie’s tombstone when she came to visit. Maybe it was the annoyingly bright glare coming from the fallen chime or the wind almost guiding him forward, but Richie felt as if the only reasonable course of action was the pick up the damn thing. He nudged Bill and vaguely gestured at the object and mumbled an explanation as he walked around the tree and faced bill behind the tombstone. Upon closer inspection, the wind chime was beautiful. Made of ruby red glass and carefully placed wire to illustrate a cardinal in a nest. Richie stood up warily as he prepared to figure out where the hell did this thing fall from when a carving on the backside of Eddie’s tombstone caught his eye. 

“Hey, Bill? Could you uh...could you come back here for a sec?”

Bill looked confused, but sauntered around the gravesite all the same. He couldn’t suppress his surprised gasp when he himself inspected the writing. 

“So it’s not just me, then? You see it too?” Rich pondered. 

A scene flashed through both of their minds, a memory clear as if it had been yesterday. richie marched along in the middle of the group shouting out ridiculous phrases in his horrendous British accent. as they approached the fork in the road where they would all split ways, he declared, “ Pip pip and talley ho, my good fellows! Don’t miss me too much, for I will see you soon! So goodbye for now, gentlemen and good lady! ” Richie yelled his parting line as loud as he could with a tip of an imaginary hat. “Until we m-!”

Richie couldn’t help but fall to his knees, his body buckling under the weight of the words carved so intentionally into the slab. He reached out to touch those four words like they were a lifeline. (Hell, they were the last part of Eddie he had left.) Richie’s voice became one with the whistling wind and the chirp of the chime in his hand as he muttered the phrase staring back at him. 

UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

“Do you th-think It might have p-p-put that there?” Bill stuttered. Richie knew that It was dead. Eddie gave himself up to defeat that fucking clown. However, Richie couldn’t quell the hurt and sadness that bubbled up with the mention of that monster’s name. Bill was starting to feel frightened - Richie could tell by that impediment Bill had worked so hard to get rid of - so Richie chose his next words very carefully and uttered them through gritted teeth. “ It is gone Bill. That thing can’t hurt us anymore. I think…” Richie started to trail off. Did he really believe that this quote could be left for him? Was he deluding himself yet again into thinking that Eddie ever loved him? Yes he was. “...I think Eddie left this for us.”

Bill huffed a laugh through his nose and put his hand on Richie’s shoulder. “No, Rich. He left this for you .”

The tears sprang in Richie’s eyes before he could try to stop them. All he ever wanted to do as a kid was to impress Bill, yet here he was, crying like a little bitch in front of him. It wasn’t as if the two hadn’t been in this situation before. Right after Eddie’s death Bill was the first to comfort Richie as he began to cry. Richie was thankful that this time he could at least reduce his wailing to shaking shoulders as he asked Bill to give him some time alone. Bill, of course, complied and solemnly walked back to the car, hands in his pockets. 

Yes, Richie was an entertainer, but he was by no means a musician. Once Bill was out of earshot Richie just barely whispered the words of a song that had helped him dearly after Eddie’s passing. His voice was thick and cracking, but the lyrics were the only fitting thing to say to the man that he missed this much. 

“I’ll be waiting for you until we meet again.”

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Once Richie sat down on the stone bench by Eddie’s grave everything he had ever wanted to say just poured out. He felt embarrassed and awkward at first, but the wind blew the chimes twinkled again as if giving him permission to continue unabashedly. So, for probably the first time ever, Richie talked to Eddie without insulting him even as a joke. In fact, he rambled like Eddie would, too. It was way messier than Eddie’s carefully thought out medical facts or words of wisdom, but Eddie didn’t normally cry and shiver as he shared his mind.

Richie told the air around him how much he missed Eddie and how he kept thinking that he’s going to just turn around one day to find the shorter man scolding him about not keeping his house clean or put on a disappointed tone because Richie chose whiskey over a shower. He shared some of his fondest memories with the universe as well; like their times in the quarry and their impromptu sleepovers where they would sneak through the other’s window in the dead of night. He said how much he loved the few hugs he got from Eddie and he couldn’t help but light up when Dr. K walked in the room.

He felt as if he owed the grave - no, Eddie - a confession. He missed his chance and he would regret it every day for the rest of his miserable life. Richie choked back the sob and kept it contained to his throat and prepared to let it all out.

“Eddie, hey. I gotta be serious with you for a minute. I know what you’re thinking: ‘ Richie Fucking Tozier? Serious? ’” He made a hollow sound that was reminiscent of a laugh. “Remember back in Derry how we had that stupid kissing bridge where everyone would carve their intials as if that would lead to a happy and promising life with their loved ones?” Richie had literally no reason to be nervous, he was talking to a tree, but there he was, shaking like a leaf. “Well, I was one of the idiots who took a chance on fate. And when we were thirteen I…” he gulped,” Well, I carved our initials there. I loved you, Eddie. Who am I kidding, I have no reason to lie - I still love you, Eddie. And I hate myself everyday for not telling you because now-” Richie had to cut himself off because the sob couldn’t be contained anymore. He tried to talk through the wailing. “Because I missed my goddamn chance. My heart was so shattered when I heard about you and Myra, and I got so close to telling you as you were-were dying, but what kind of good what that have done? Fuck, that probably would have just hurt more.” He started wiping his tears away with his sleeve, setting his glasses down on the bench. “...I love you. I always have and I always will. I wish I would’ve had the balls to tell you when we were kids. Maybe things could’ve been different.”

He ran out of words to say. The wind had stopped blowing completely at some point during the confession, the grass was perfectly still and the leaves had stop rustling. 

This is why Richie still has no idea as to how the chimes twinkled in the silence. 

He likes to think it was Eddie saying that he loved Richie too. 

Richie smiled softly and continued to sniffle and hiccup awkwardly, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs anxiously. He let the wind chimes’ sound slowly fade and huffed out a laugh, realizing that the sun was setting. “Well, Eddie my love, I have to get going.” He slowly stood and trotted in front of the headstone, staring at it for a bit, just smiling and thinking. It felt a little bit like closure. Richie looked up at the sky, silently questioning whatever power above what he was supposed to do now, and when he got no answer, his heart urged him to look back at the bench. So he did. Hands in his pockets, he stood having a staring contest with the tree, but he smiled. With a large sigh he nodded and simply said, “Goodbye, Eddie. I love you.”

And with that, he walked back to the car and told Bill everything that had happened. Bill just held Richie and offered him tissues as he cried, taking care of him the only way he knew how. He decided to drive them back home. 

As they were driving away, Richie casted one last glance at Eddie’s grave, his heart sinking. He hated leaving Eddie the first time, and he didn’t want to leave again. He issued a silent promise that he’d be back, he knew he would. He then looked towards the windshield and asked Bill to play his “Coping” playlist as they drove back.

What Richie couldn’t see was Eddie, sitting on the bench, smiling at his love with his hand stirring the windchimes.