go west ( reddie )

chapter five

Eddie drives for almost five hours and burns out just before St. Louis. It's not an unusual thing for him, driving until he can't feel himself. In Derry, he used to spend whole nights burning rings around the city limits, testing the edges of their cage. Sometimes Bill would come with him and they would drive passed certain places, the Ironworks, the Neibolt house, the kissing bridge, and they never knew what they were checking for, just that it was important. His hands would be numb when he finally got home and he would go to bed and slide them up and under his pillow to get them warm again.

Here, he's not checking for weak spots or cracks in the world, and he's not cold, not numb, he's just driving. Because it's easier than stopping to think. Until it's three in the morning and they come to a motel and he's so tired he can barely keep his eyes open. The city glitters in the distance. Richie hardly seems aware of what's going on at all. He's been asleep most of the trip, mumbling under his breath and shuffling around in his seat and being altogether distracting and annoying and... distant. A separate entity to Eddie. A whole other person. Asleep while Eddie drags his worries down the road, under the tires, for more than three hundred miles. They were supposed to take this stretch slow. They were supposed to go to a waterfall. Eddie feels chewed up and spit out.

"C'mon," he says, opening the passenger side door after he's paid for the room, kicking at the tire. "Bed."

Richie blinks at him. "Eds," he says, sticky with sleep, and a smile breaks out across his face, dopey and earnest. "Where are we?"

"St. Louis, almost. Come to bed."

"Come to bed," Richie echoes, and he laughs, rubs blearily at his cheeks. "We're not supposed to be in St. Louis for like... a year."

"Says who?" Eddie's grip on his keys is almost painful, the metal teeth digging into his palm. "Because I was driving, not you, so. And... and there's nothing, I mean, what did we miss? There's nothing between here and Chicago anyway, so... fuck it."

"Fuck it," murmurs Richie. He looks tired and confused and it's... annoying, mostly. Because his hair is falling into his eyes and his hands are soft and loose. Eddie knows that if Richie touched him right now, if he reached across the space between them and touched Eddie's arm, the inside of of his elbow maybe, he would be gentle and curious, and it would be.... awful. Just the thought of being touched like that, like he's made of glass, makes him want to scream.

"Stop," he mutters, before Richie can do anything, and he turns away. He walks around to the back of the car and opens up the trunk, hauls their suitcases out. Richie follows him, doesn't say anything, just takes his case without a word and scrapes his shoes across the pavement as he follows Eddie to their room.

It's the shittiest motel they've stayed in so far. Everything is gray or sepia, stained like coffee rings on a table. Eddie ignores it. He heads to the bathroom and washes his face, thinking that he'll clean the road off him, but it doesn't work. His eyes are gritty with tired and his head feels like it's sinking into his neck. He brushes his teeth, spits, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The mirror is rust stained, blotchy, and Eddie looks... pale and wired, distorted in the warped glass. Stan would have a fit about this place. Eddie should really care more too. About bed bugs or black mold or whatever the fuck is on the bathroom floor of a twenty four hour motel just outside of St. Louis. He doesn't though, he's too tired, he just wants to sleep.

Richie is already asleep when he goes back out, face down on his pillow, tangled up in blankets. Because he doesn't care about like... oral hygiene or not being disgusting. He's cultivating a particularly awful sort of morning breath. Eddie should really... Eddie should really think about him less. Just, in general. It's hard when you spend every waking moment together though. He sits down on his bed, takes the polaroid from the front pocket of his backpack and looks at it. It's not even a good photo, the sun has blown everything out and Richie's a little blurry, a smudged human being, bleeding at the edges like a watercolour painting. It's sloppy. He should throw it away. He slides it between the pages of a book instead, an old paperback he's read so many times the cover is soft and lined. He puts the book in his suitcase, shoves that under his bed, crawls between the covers, and falls asleep.