Reddie Oneshots

depressed richie

this shit hits real close to home
trigger warnings: depression, slight mentions of suicide, and the big sad.
ao3, by tozierbrak

-

Sometimes Richie felt empty. Some days he woke up with glazed over eyes, and hair that was a mess, and a gaping hole in his chest, and some days he was fine until some kind of switch inside of him flipped and he suddenly shut down, unable to feel anything through the thick haze surrounding him; either way he could never see it coming. Some days his head felt like it weighed a million pounds and his skin felt tight and his face felt fake.

Days like those, Richie didn't really feel up to living. Days like those, Richie wasn't in control, not really. Days like those his body dragged itself out of bed and through his daily routine like some kind of puppeteer; he was on autopilot. Days like those it felt like he was trapped somewhere inside of himself- somewhere cold and dark and completely alone. He felt like he was trapped, and needed someone to break him out of himself, only he didn't really even care enough to shout for help.

It was one of those days.

The thing was that when he was like this, no one could even tell. Call it self preservation, call it instinct, but he carried on without himself. His body still drove itself to school, still picked up Eddie and Bev along the way. His mouth still spat out comebacks to Stan's snippy remarks at the lunch table ( "Richie, what the fuck did you do to your hair today? It looks like something I pulled out of my shower drain." "Your mother wasn't complaining last night when she was holding onto it for dear life, Stan the Man." ), still poked fun at Ben when he blushed over Bev. His arm still slung itself around Eddie's shoulders in the hallway in between classes just to irritate him into shoving Richie away. His body went through the motions so that nobody would notice that Richie wasn't really there, and then he went home and dropped boneless into his bed to stare at the same wall (plastered with curling posters, a bookshelf with more cds and records than books shoved up against it, an empty guitar mount because Richie never put it back when he was done, dim shadows cast by a strand of lights haphazardly lining the ceiling) for hours on end.

He'd done this so many times that he had it memorized at this point, plastered with curling posters, a bookshelf with more cds and records than books shoved up against it, an empty guitar mount because Richie never put it back when he was done, the dim shadows cast over it by a strand of lights haphazardly lining the ceiling (Eddie's voice played in his head, telling him to unplug those lights, idiot, you can't have them rubbing up against all these posters like that; do you even know how much of a fire hazard this is? ). He tried to will himself up to unplug them before he inevitably dropped off into unconsciousness, but his body felt like it was made of lead and his eyes were already slipping shut, so he just allowed himself to sink into the fog.

---

Richie woke up to the sound of his bedroom door opening but didn't open his eyes because they still felt heavy.
"Hey, Richie, your mom let me in- beep beep in advance, because I know you have some kind of comment to make about me and your mom. But I just remembered I let you take my math notebook so you could copy last night's homework and you never gave it back, and I need it back so I can do tonight's homework, so..." Eddie trailed off, because Richie hadn't even moved to acknowledge Eddie's presence in the room. He lay motionless on his side, back facing the door, blanket drawn up so high that only his mop of dark matted curls stuck out at the top. Eddie's brow creased. "Rich? Are you sick or something? It's five in the afternoon, why are you in bed?"

Shit, Richie thought, because he didn't think he would have to pretend like everything was good anymore today, and he had already turned off the performance. But now here Eddie was, catching him off guard, mid depression nap, in bed like an invalid lump, because Richie forgot to give him back his math notes. I left his notebook at school, Richie thought distantly, and for some reason his eyes were suddenly prickling. Fuck. He burrowed deeper into his blanket. His chest felt tight. He kept his eyes shut.