Reddie oneshots

Like everything going to the beat

Ao3:saintsrow2

Sleeping had always been fraught for Eddie. As a child it was a time when his anxieties saw fit to run free, his fears taking seed in the shadows and growing into vast creeping vines until it was 3 AM and he was still wide awake, staring at the dark wall as his mind raced. What if the plant he had touched when he was playing in the Barrens was poison ivy? What if the ache in his legs that Stan said were growing pains was a sign there was something terribly wrong? What if that dark shape in the corner was the leper from outside that old house, waiting for the moment when Eddie was most alone and defenceless? What if... As an adult, the fears only transformed, never leaving, the childhood worries about bullies and monsters becoming adult agonies over work, money, dissecting the possible implications of microexpressions on Myra's face in the period before an argument, when the tension in the house was so thick it was like the moments before a storm, when the air was so stifling and hot you couldn't breathe.

When he was a kid he had no real way to handle this other than to obsess over the damage to your health that would be caused by a lack of sleep, and to spend his nights counting how many hours of sleep he'd get if he fell asleep right that second. Five hours of sleep before I have to get up for school. Four hours of sleep before I have to get up for school . The rare occasions he was allowed, he found he slept better on sleepovers. This felt absurd; sleepovers were not for sleeping , they were for watching the terrible horror movies Bev smuggled out of the Blockbuster, listening to the stupid ghost stories and urban legends that Richie and Bill loved so much, eating so much junk food that you felt sick. Eddie put down the good night's rest to exhaustion, but you couldn't rely on your friends to run you ragged every night, especially not on the bad weeks when his mom wouldn't let him see people for days, trapped in his room under the veil of getting better from whatever illness he supposedly had, when he had no friends to measure the normality of his reality by and his fears were allowed to run rampant. It was ironic that he probably slept the least at times when he was supposed to be getting the most rest.

His adult response to his problems sleeping was to adopt obsessive control over every aspect of his sleeping situation. If anyone were to ask he would have called it good sleep hygiene, and Myra condoned this kind of careful eye on your health without question, and there wasn't really anyone else close enough to ask. He thoroughly researched the sleeping pills he bullied his doctor into prescribing him, he turned his phone off an hour before he went to bed, he never worked where he slept, he monitored his diet and his exercise like a hawk. Eddie tried to cut himself off from the world as much as possible, create a deprivation tank in his own home to try and hammer his brain into enough silence that he could sleep. It made... Some amount of difference. He told himself the memory foam mattress, the sheets he bought, and the white noise he had to listen to, and being in bed at the same minute of every day made a difference. He slept in a cocoon; stiffly lying on his back, earbuds in, deafened the world around him, couldn't see or hear or feel where he was, couldn't even see his wife by his side.

Maybe it helped, or maybe it was just nice to have control over something. Either way, he still had a lot of restless nights.

The first night after killing Pennywise he had slept like a rock, but that was probably because he was heavily sedated, sleeping off the emergency surgery and the 72-hours of wakefulness that had preceded it. He slept for two nights almost continuously; he woke up intermittently, tiny bursts of consciousness he didn't remember, only getting flashes of the faces of people around him, of staticy fluorescent lighting, the horrific storm whipping itself into a frenzy outside the window. It was enough to give him a lasting impression of the hospital room, of the tiled ceiling with its flecked pattern and the way the cheap pink curtains trembled constantly.

When he actually woke up the first thing he saw was Richie's face and the first thing he thought was oh. This is nice .

Richie would attest that he did not look nice. He was haggard and tired, face grey from lack of sleep, wearing several days worth of stubble, hair even more of an untamed mess than usual. His glasses were still cracked and he'd been wearing the same clothes for days, sleeping in uncomfortable hospital chairs, drinking cheap coffee from vending machines. Richie would have said he probably looked half-dead.