𝔸 ℝ𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝔹𝕪 𝔸𝕟𝕪 𝕆𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 ℕ𝕒𝕞𝕖 - reddie

#𝟚𝟛: 𝕀 𝕂𝕟𝕖𝕨 𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕝 𝔼𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙

​​Suddenly I wished I was back in the deadlights, feeling nothing at all. Feeling no pain. No external injury from Henry Bowers or Pennywise could never compare to the immense amount of suffering I was feeling right this second.

I felt helpless. I felt weak. I felt like I was going to be sick.

He wasn't dead, he couldn't be dead. 

Everything in my body had been ripped apart and stitched back together. All at once, over and over, on and on, in an endless loop that will never end. It really did feel like I had been trapped in the monster's bright trance. And that didn't seem so bad now. I would've taken the deadlights one hundred times more instead of this. Anything but this.

People dropped down and met their maker every single second; but for some reason, in this moment, Eddie should have been the exception. He must have been. He had to have been. The world didn't have the right to remove someone as pure and special as him. Life isn't fair, everyone always shoves that shit in my face. But I didn't expect it to be this brutal. 

I was convinced that I was still dreaming. Right, the deadlights had taken me and I was unconscious and they defeated the clown and carried me out of the barrens over their shoulder. And Eddie was trying to shake me awake with his stupid, panicky, doctor-like voice that I always thought was annoying as hell.

That was the only thing I wanted to hear now. His voice. Even annoyed, even done with me, I wanted to hear every last bit of it. 

 No more sunsets over Derry. No more shared ice cream, even if he was afraid of germs. No more bike rides early in the morning, before Maine had even woken up. No more arcade games. No more slingshot shooting in the barrens. No more lake hangouts. No more comics. No more jokes. No more laughing. No more Eddie.

Wake up, Richie. It's another bad dream. You've had plenty of bad dreams like this.

But none of them felt so painful.

None of them made me hurt, inside and out, and all over. Everything was black and red and dark and cold, and I felt ill.

This was suffocating.

Dying didn't feel like getting my head shoved into a toilet by Henry Bowers.

It felt like this.

Stan was wrong about one thing in his note. We were losers. But the worst part about being a loser was that you value every other loser. I valued my friends, and I valued Eddie. But he was worth losing. And I lost him.

"They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing, and twice when somebody says your name for the last time."

Everyone knew that when you die in Derry, you never really leave. And I didn't want that for Eddie. I didn't want him to be forgotten. I had lost memory of how I felt for him once, and I wasn't going to do it again. I was going to think of him day and night, as long as I live. And that seemed to hurt me inside even more somehow.

My bottom lip quivered in the immediate need to scream. No more voice. I was almost choked up, in the way somebody would be if their parents were yelling at them and they couldn't start sobbing. Even if I did have the ability to speak, I had no idea what I would possibly say.

I didn't even need words anyway, I turned my painful expression away from Beverly and pulled Eddie's limp body to my chest, cradling his head in my hand and squeezing my eyes shut. If I closed them hard enough, maybe everything would go away.

Using my left hand, I stroked through Eddie's hair, which rested weightlessly on my shoulder, and I buried my head deep into the front of his bloody neck. He was so cold. He was so stiff and departed, it was almost uncomfortable to have my hands on his body in such a way. I didn't care, though. He was still Eddie. He was always going to be Eddie, no matter how many dust particles he would decompose into.