Reddie Oneshots

What REALLY happened after It Chapter 2 (Pt. 1)

this shit really just occurred and you cant tell me otherwise. 🤫

edit: forgot to credit the author whoops

its on ao3 titled "not exactly where i need to be (and yet it seems so close)" by varnes
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Eddie dies at the end.

Richie doesn't — the weird thing is that this outcome had never been one that Richie had even considered. It seemed so impossible. Bill, sure. Bev. Fuck, even Stan taking himself off the board, all these things were incandescently sad to think about and remember, but Eddie dying had just never been a possibility, when Richie had thought about it, when he had stood in that park and stared up at the fucking clown and thought, for the first time, holy shit, I am going to fucking die.

He runs his hands down the long spine of the E that he's just finished recarving. He'd done a pretty good job as a kid, actually. The letters are neat. Eddie would have liked it. He was always getting on Richie's case for having shit handwriting.

"I don't know how to write a joke about this," he says out loud, to the initials.

You don't know how to write any jokes at all, jackass, says Eddie's voice in his head, but that Eddie is a ghost. The letters are here, they're real, they're carved, and when Richie asks them how to make a bridge across the gaping loss of the real, dead Eddie Kaspbrack, they say nothing. Of course they don't.

-

Richie goes back to the hotel. He packs his bags. He sits in silence at the Chinese restaurant and lets Ben hover over him, pushing dumplings onto his plate. He lets Bill give his neck a squeeze and promises yes, he'll keep in touch. Yes, he'll come to whatever fucking reunion they want him to, just send him the dates.

Yes, I love you. Yes, I'll call. Yes, I promise, yes I mean it, yes, for God's sake, what are you guys, my fucking mother? I have a plane to catch.

He's going to be fine, Richie thinks. He's going to be sad and he's going to write a joke about how sad he is, and then he's ... then he's going to be fine, eventually. You can't help but overcome; that's what humanity is, that stubbornness, that getting up every day and letting something fade no matter how badly you wish it wouldn't. How badly you want to hold the wound open because the wound is what you loved.

But that's just how grief works. That's how grief works for everybody, no matter what you lost. No matter who took it.

He takes a sleeping pill on the plane and looks out the window and as the sun sets he thinks it looks a little like a perfectly round red balloon.

-

And then Richie Tozier wakes up.

-

"You were screaming," his mother says, voice oddly gentle. "Honey, it was very loud."

"Sorry," he answers automatically. He watches his hand reach out, entirely of its own volition, to touch the edge of her cheek. "Sorry. Shit. Mom?"

She blinks down at him. "Who else would I be?" she asks, before ruffling his hair, rising, and leaving the room without looking back. In the doorway her hair catches the light from the kitchen and her hair glints silver. Richie remembers this. He remembers exactly this year, her hair starting to go grey, her eyes going thoughtless sometimes, glazed. He remembers the way she began to look at him every now and then, as if she had no idea who he was.

He remembers because it gave him nightmares: that one day he would find MISSING posters with his own face, and when he cried mom! mom! it's me! i'm right here! she would look into his eyes and still not recognize him.