Reddie Oneshots

What REALLY happened after It Chapter 2 (Pt. 3)

aww shit.. this mf really fucked up hot ben for the rest of us.. smh 😔
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The thing about stories is that you have to tell them. If you don't, they fade. Stories become memories and memories are vague, always; the ones you think are vivid aren't — it's only the stories you've made of them that have clear edges.

The other thing about stories is that the more you tell them, the truer they become. Richie built a career on saying things that weren't true until they were. He talked about girlfriends until he got one, about not giving a shit about what people thought until he didn't, about being famous until he was. Tell someone you're famous and they will ask for your autograph. Tell people you don't care what they think and they'll stop telling you. Tell people you're straight and a life built around your straightness will take shape.

If stories could become true the more he spoke them, did it matter that they had begun as stories? Is truth born out of lies any less true?

Richie wakes up and it is still 1989. It has been 1989 for three days. He keeps going to sleep and thinking maybe he will wake up back in his life, but he doesn't. He's still here. He feels forty and thirteen at the same time. He feels old and new. Tired and ready, tired the way you are only after losing something you hadn't known it was possible to lose, ready the way you are ready only during that span of years where you don't know what it is you think you're ready for.

When Eddie blinks awake, he looks up at Richie and smiles and Richie's thirteen-year-old body hurts with fondness. Richie tries to remember sitting in a Chinese restaurant across from a man who he had forgotten until the moment he'd seen him again, and finds that the face is blurry. Finds that he can't recall any of their conversations.

Thirteen. Forty. Both. Neither?

"Eds, you know — I'm not your Richie," he blurts, half a reminder to Eddie and half to himself. "I don't know where he went. I'm sorry."

Eddie sits up, rubbing at his eyes. "What the fuck are you talking about?" he grumbles. "All Richies are my Richie, asshole. Fuck off."

He climbs out of bed, punching Richie on the arm for no reason as he slides past, and abandons Richie in favor of going downstairs to bother Richie's parents into making him pancakes. Richie sits on his bed in his pajamas.

This isn't my body, he reminds himself. This body is a ploy by an evil multidimensional bitchwizard.

But looking down at his own hands, he thinks he might forget what Old Richie's hands looked like. It is his body, insofar as he is the one living in it, insofar as it was his body once and there isn't anybody else in it now.

With a sense of absolute disconnect, Richie gets out of bed and follows Eddie downstairs. He watches him in the kitchen with Richie's mom, talking easily to her. Richie hasn't told him, or Stan, or anybody about what is happening to her brain. He doesn't remember if he ever did. He doesn't remember whether she lost him completely before or after he left Derry. He doesn't remember where she will be buried.

Both Eddie and his mom turn to look at him, quizzical. "Pancakes for you too, Rich?" his mom asks. "Your man Kaspbrak has convinced me to put chocolate chips in them."

Twenty-seven years from now Richie will sit in a Chinese restaurant with an Eddie who is not this Eddie, and Richie will love him as if he'd never stopped, but he cannot picture his face. He will love that Eddie and lose him and then come back here to love and lose this Eddie, too, all over again.

Eddie grows up and marries a woman who hurts him the way his mother had, with love that disguised its poison with care. Richie grows up and doesn't marry anyone at all.