Awnings (Reddie Modern AU boyxboy)

Chapter One: Awnings

It was nights like these that Richie liked to be up here. The sky was dimly lit by the crescent moon, a deep navy blue cascading over his neighborhood and the only orange supplied by the street lamp just in front of his house. The streetlight hummed into the otherwise silent night. He looked at it. The bulb was eye-level from where he sat on top of the grey awning that juts out just below his bedroom window.

Richie used to be afraid to sit on this rooftop that supplied shade to the side porch. Back when he was much younger, the idea of crawling out onto his awning like they do in movies and books always tempted him. Then, when he was thirteen, a hole that had been forming in the awning for years had suddenly grown huge overnight after a particularly troublesome storm. His father had him crawl out of his window and scoot on his bum towards the hole to cover it with a tarp and some bricks to hold it in place. It was terrifying. Richie felt as though he'd fall through the roofing and onto the porch with wood and shingles showering down towards him once he landed. He could feel how fragile the awning was under his toosh and hands and feet as he crab walked back in. He knew if he stood straight up he would have fallen through.

But Richie is seventeen now and his family had saved up enough to get all of their roofing redone last year. He wasn't afraid to stand up on his awning these days. After fixing the problem, the awning felt strong beneath his feet and he came out here on nights when he just wanted to think clearly because it was less distracting out here than in his room.

He was thinking now. Right across from his awning was his neighbor's. Richie typically didn't mind the proximity of their awnings - a space of about a foot between them since all the houses in this neighborhood were squeezed until they were practically on top of each other. His old neighbors used to never really use the room that led to their awning (they were an elderly couple that slept in a bedroom on the bottom floor and the top floor bedroom was only used when their relatives came to visit) so Richie never got distracted by the window across from his. His old neighbors finally moved out last week to a retirement home and the new ones were moving in today.

A light flicked on in the two windows of the bedroom Richie was sitting in front of. He could tell because even though curtains blocked his view of the objects within the room, they didn't seal all of the light from escaping. A stripe of golden light ran down Richie's face and chest. He grumbled and scooted closer to the street down below on his left to get the light out of his eyes. He could have gone to the right so he wouldn't be so close to the edge, but then his view of the moon would be blocked by the neighbor's house, and besides, he wasn't too afraid of falling down anymore.

He hoped that the neighbors wouldn't be using that room too much, at least hopefully not at night because then they would see him out here and that would be weird so he wouldn't be able to come out here anymore and the stars were so pretty tonight and he wasn't sure how in Astronomy his teacher said that the different colors could be seen with a naked eye because all of the stars just looked white to him-

"Jesus Christ!"

Richie whipped his head around in alarm. He half-expected the voice to be coming from the window that was closest to him, but it came from the furthest end of his neighbor's awning. A head was poking out of that window. "Geez, you scared me," the figure said.

"Uh.." Richie blinked and then scooted back more towards his house and further from the street. He had jumped so much at the voice that he felt like he could've deep dived off the edge. "Sorry," he said, but it almost came out like a question.

The head peeking out of the window shook from side to side, "Don't be," he said, "I'm probably the one that scared you. I just thought you might've been some like burglar or something."

The figure was backlit, but Richie could make it out enough to recognize him now. The voice was also ringing a bell now that Richie's adrenaline was simmering down. Richie and his family brought over a bundt cake earlier that day to them and it was a puppy-looking boy who had answered the door to accept the offering. This boy was curious. "I don't think anyone's said 'burglar' since 90's television, Dude." Richie said, chuckling at this point. The figure crossed his arms against the base of his window. "Why don't you come to the other window so we can talk like normal people?"