Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Richie Tozier is sat in a Derry parking lot smoking a cigarette when he sees Beverly and Ben. He can’t see them well at this distance, in this lighting, but as soon as he catches sight of them, he knows they couldn’t be anyone else.

He’d been sat out here a while, waiting for someone else to approach the Orient before he did. There’s a gut deep instinct that he would be the only one to show up, that he’d be left at an empty restaurant table like a sad, forgotten child at an unattended birthday party. Ignored invitations and the pitying eyes of adults who know better than him.

But here are Bev and Ben, hugging it out. It’s not going to be just him, even if they’re the only three to show up to Mike’s shindig. So he stamps out the butt of his cigarette, drops it to the ground and grinds it under the heel of his shoe. He breathes deep and approaches them, stepping into the ‘Trashmouth’ persona as easily as flicking on a light switch.

“Wow. You two look amazing.” He interrupts their hug, waits for them both to turn. “What the fuck happened to me?”

They enter the restaurant as a group of three. As they’re led to their table – tucked away in some hidden corner – Richie notices how close Ben stands to Bev and he remembers. He remembers conversations together with him over their mutual yearnings, but he doesn’t know who they were talking about. Well, it’s clear that Ben was talking about Bev, obvious in the ways he looks at her now; all lingering gazes and wide, soft eyes.

Richie doesn’t know who the fuck he was talking about though.

The mass of twisting stems in his lungs shifts and he does his ample best to ignore the tightening sensation – the ever-familiar feeling of the space behind his ribs filling up. He’ll almost definitely have to throw up again later. He isn’t looking forward to it, but he’s grown used to the routine.

They reach the table, cut off from the rest of the restaurant by decorative room dividers. Richie sees a gong and before he can stop his twitching, impulsive fingers, he’s got his hands on a mallet and is hitting it. Announces their entrance as loud as he has always been.

Then Eddie Kaspbrak turns around and Richie doesn’t hear a god damn word he says because blood is rushing in his ears and all he can think is, “Of fucking course it’s you. How could I have ever forgotten you?” as he mouths some stupid joke so he won’t have to talk and reveal how he’s suddenly breathless from the flowers blooming in his chest.

Because of fucking course he’s been pining over Eddie Kaspbrak for thirty years without ever being able to place a face and name to the feeling. Of fucking course he has.

Richie Tozier has Hanahaki Disease.

He was eventually diagnosed at seventeen when he was blessedly still on his parents’ health insurance. But he’d bet anything on it starting at fourteen.

Though, if he were forced to think about it, there’s other moments. Like when he saw Eddie in his bright red running shorts at thirteen, but that might have just been teenaged confusion. Or maybe even another time that same year Ben had finished building the clubhouse that ended up becoming their groups own secret sanctuary. The memory of Eddie hauling himself loose-limbed into the hammock is vivid now in Richie’s mind – even the part where he ended up with socked feet being shoved in his face. All sense memories of that afternoon, and many that followed, converged specifically on a hyperawareness of all points of contact between his body and Eddie’s.

Or maybe it even started when they first met, Richie breaking his glasses in kindergarten and Eddie helping him look for the two disconnected halves in the untended grass. A steady blooming that he didn’t become aware of until it was already overgrown.

However, the moment when he was fifteen is when he first became aware of it. When he couldn’t ignore it.

Ever since they fought It, Eddie has been stuck in a back-and-forth with his mother, trying to pry any agency he can from her controlling grasp. Richie encourages him when he can, but Eddie often ends up losing to the simple fact that she is an adult and he is a child. What Mommy says goes, and Eddie needs to follow the rules if he doesn’t want to deal with the punishments. This results in Eddie being forced to stay home for a lot of the summer lest his mother call the police and have officers sent out to search for him. It’s happened before, when Richie encouraged him to sneak out, and it clearly isn’t an experience Eddie wishes to repeat.

Richie, however, does not need to follow Sonia Kaspbrak’s rules. Richie can do whatever the fuck he likes.

His parents don’t care where he heads out to and they leave him to his own devices. A lot of the time, they simply forget about him. But it’s fine. Right now, it even works in his favour.

One night in July, Richie stands in Eddie’s back garden with a backpack and a will and he throws the smallest stones he can find at what he has long since learnt is Eddie’s window.

When Eddie opens the window, he puts on an annoyed front, but there’s no hiding how pleased he is that Richie is there. On his way through the window, Richie catches the rolled-up cuff of his jeans on a wayward nail. They spend the next few minutes bickering and trying to unhook the fabric without ripping it to shit, with Eddie whisper-shouting as he curses Richie out while staying quiet enough that he doesn’t wake up his Mom. Richie, on the other hand, grins down at the furrow creasing Eddie’s forehead like some kind of lunatic and forces back his own brewing laughter.

They end up in Eddie’s bed, huddled beneath the duvet and talking under torchlight, their heads close together on the same pillow so they can hear each other while keeping their voices low. When Eddie wants to talk at length, he’ll wiggle onto his side and press his lips right up close to Richie’s ear. He’ll pitch his voice quiet and intimate, just for Richie. Maybe that’s what does it in the end.

Richie had felt chest pains before that, small little twangs of feeling when his eyes or his thoughts lingered on Eddie for too long. But this new one is different. It’s a twisting, aching, sharp thing. It hurts.

It leaves him scared and vulnerable. Breathless as Eddie continues whispering in his ear. Inattentive to anything other than the sensation of warm breath ghosting over his skin. What scares him is that he likes it, likes it far more than he should. What scares him is the idea of trying to figure out what it means. What scares him is that he already damn well knows.

He falls asleep with a lump in his throat and a tightness in his chest. When he climbs out of Eddie’s window early the next morning, he throws up petals into the bushes outside. At first, he doesn’t understand. He stares out at the limp pink little things and he doesn’t think anything. Head empty of all thoughts.

And then, all at once, he understands too much.

He doesn’t tell anyone. At least, he certainly doesn’t intend to.

Unfortunately for Richie, Ben is the one to slot the puzzle pieces together.

It’s been six months since it started and they’re all back at school again. Richie is skipping almost as many classes as he attends in a poor attempt to keep everything hidden. He knows the rest of the Losers know that something is wrong, but he’s still clinging to the sense of control he gets from them not knowing exactly what’s wrong. And he’ll be fucked if he ever tells them. He’d honestly rather take his chances with choking to death.

One afternoon, he gets to the bike racks after school before everyone else and doesn’t wait. They’d been talking at lunch about heading to the quarry or the clubhouse, but Richie grabs his bike from the rack and pedals as fast as he can away from the school. He doesn’t consciously plan to go to the library, but as soon as he gets there he knows it’s where he was always intending to go.

After too long spent trying to understand how the shelves are ordered, he finally bites the bullet and asks the librarian where he can find the medical books. She patiently waits through his stumbling explanation about how it’s for a school project – clearly not caring about a single word that rambles it way out of his mouth – before she mercifully points him in the right direction.

Halfway through the contents of a third outdated medical journal, Richie is caught.

“Richie?”

He freezes, shoulders tense and eyes darting immediately to the source: Ben, standing at the mouth of the aisle with a thick book tucked under one arm and the other hand gripping the strap of his backpack up near his chest. Richie slams shut the book he’s holding and forces a grin onto his face.

“Heya Benny-boy!” He greets him like it’s a pleasant surprise they bumped into each other. “Fancy seeing you here!”

“Yeah,” Ben says, hesitant as he steps towards him. “Richie, what are you doing here? I thought you, Stan, Eddie and Bill were heading to the quarry.”

Richie blows air dismissively through his lips, waves a casual hand through the air.

“Eh, screw that. A fella can’t head to the library and expand his mind instead?” He stacks the three books he’d collected on top of each other and struggles to force them all onto the overpacked shelf at once. His hands shake. “Anyway, I was just heading off.”

One of the books falls from the unstable stack, hitting the floor with a resounding smack. Ben hurries forward to pick it up before Richie can stop him. Ben holds it in his hands and flicks through the open pages, frowning down at them.

“Why are you looking at stuff about Lover’s Lungs?” Ben asks him.

“L-like I said,” Richie takes an uneven step backwards, readying himself to bolt. “I should head off—”

Ben looks up and catches his eyes in a gaze that has Richie frozen. He knows, he thinks, as fear fills every inch of his body. Ben looks down at the book, then back up at Richie again. Fucking god shit, he knows. He knows. He knows—

“I can help you find more books. If you want, I mean,” Ben offers, and it’s so kind and genuine that it catches Richie off guard. He can’t turn him down.

They end up on a secluded table in a corner of the library with an ever-growing stack of books that Ben helps him filter through for information. Both of them take notes from them, loose lined paper and pens and highlighters spread on the table before them. Richie’s leg jumps up and down nervously beneath the desk as he scribbles down what factoids seem relevant, and Ben is kind enough not to ask about it. Ben doesn’t ask a damn thing at all in fact. He just sits there, quiet and taking notes, as Richie buzzes with tightly coiled anxiety in the chair next to him.

They learn this: Hanahaki Byou (also known as Lover’s Lungs, Flower Sickness, and any other number of names) means he’s going to be puking flowers until Eddie reciprocates his love, which just isn’t going to happen. But if he doesn’t confess, he’ll choke to death on the flowers that take root in his lungs. It’s a bad deal no matter which way you cut it. He’s in the early stages, which means it’s just a few petals here and there for now whenever he thinks about Eddie too much, too long. People don’t usually live more than five years if they don’t say anything – even less if they really bottle their feelings up or outright deny them.

There are experimental surgeries to take the roots out, but the side effects are severe. You can lose a lung, the roots can grow back if they miss even a little bit during removal, and they still can’t figure out how to take them out without removing the love too. Best case scenario: you lose your love for the person. Worst case scenario: you lose your ability to love entirely.

Not fun! And Richie doesn’t have the slightest clue what in the fuck he’s going to do about it.

He does know this though: he can’t tell Eddie. Eddie can never know. Ever.

He can’t be a burden like that. He can’t just force Eddie to love him because he’s sick with his own desire. But he doesn’t want to stop feeling what he feels either. It’s downright horrible and he hates it, but he can’t imagine looking at Eddie and never feeling anything ever again. Just looking and feeling… nothing, nothing at all. It’s wrong. Richie doesn’t want that.

It’s getting dark out.

Ben shuffles their notes together, lining them up neatly and sliding a paperclip over the pages as Richie places their stack of books on one of the return trolleys to be re-shelved. Richie doesn’t make eye contact when he takes the notes from Ben, just keeps his chin tilted down and quietly tucks them into his backpack. They leave the library in silence.

They’ve made it all the way to their bikes, where Richie proceeds to struggle with his piece-of-shit bike lock, when Ben breaks the silence.

“You have it,” Ben says, simple as that. His voice is as soft as it ever is.

Richie swallows, eyes still on his clammy hands curled around the lock. “Yeah.”

Ben is silent for a moment, considering. Then, “Eddie?”

Richie feels the spit in the back of his throat welling before he feels the nausea well and truly hit him. Sick to the core at the idea that he’s so fucking bad at hiding this, that twice now Ben has looked at him and just known. That all anyone has to do is look at him and they’ll know exactly what he is.

He lurches, throwing up next to the back wheel of his bike, barely missing the gears. Ben makes a sound of shocked distress, then starts digging around in his backpack. Richie squeezes his eyes shut and focuses on the sound of shifting papers until it stops and Ben presses a water bottle in to Richie’s sweaty palms, plastic cool against his skin. He clutches it like a lifeline, breathing open-mouthed and panting until he finds the will to open his eyes.

Petals float in the puddle of his vomit. They look like rose petals, but ragged around the top edge. They’re white and bruised.

Peonies, his mind supplies, though he’s unsure from where.

He barely registers the feeling when Ben begins to rub soothing circles between his hunched shoulders. It helps, he thinks, maybe. Especially when Ben whispers, “It’s okay.”

Richie shakes his head, eyes still on the petals.

“It’ll be okay,” Ben says again.

“It won’t,” Richie croaks. “I can’t—you can’t—”

“I won’t,” Ben reassures, easy as that. “I won’t say anything. I wouldn’t. Ever.”

Richie sags, tired of worrying. The nausea is gone now, and he lets himself tip backwards onto his ass on the ground. Ben joins him a second later, tucking his legs under himself.

“Fuck,” Richie wheezes.

“Fuck,” Ben agrees. He nudges the bottle against Richie’s shoulder. “Drink some water.”

And Richie does.

The next day, he finds a book of flower meanings placed carefully in the centre of his school locker. On the inside cover, there’s a note from Ben saying it might help to know what the flowers mean. Richie doesn’t know how analysing the petals in his own vomit will help anything, but it somehow manages to make him feel better anyway.

Peonies mean ‘beauty’, apparently. They also mean ‘shame’.

The day after Richie’s seventeenth birthday sees him taken to the hospital after his Dad catches him throwing up flowers two days in a row.

The night before, he’d had a sleepover for his birthday. Just him and the Losers watching bad horror films in the living room while his parents did their own thing upstairs. Eddie had fallen asleep at some point after midnight, his head tipped over onto Richie’s shoulder and his mouth open as he snored. Richie had watched his eyelids flutter instead of whatever was happening on the television. He watched his face until everyone started getting ready for bed. And then Richie woke Eddie up, hand gentle on his shoulder and his voice soft, because he knew Eddie would hate it if he woke up and realised he’d fallen asleep without brushing his teeth.

They file into the bathroom in pairs, except for Eddie who refuses to share. The last ones to get ready, Beverly stands next to Richie as they brush their teeth. She locks eyes with him in the mirror, then she spits into the sink.

“So,” she draws out. “You and Eddie.”

Richie chokes on toothpaste and Bev grins like this is a particularly funny joke. But then he keeps choking, coughing as she moves to pat him on the back like it will help him.

He tries to get it under control but, as soon as he feels something inching up his throat, he knows what’s happening. Hand over his mouth, glasses pushed back so they’re keeping his hair out of his face, he stumbles towards the toilet.

“Rich?” Bev hesitates as he sinks to his knees.

He shakes his head, waves a hand at her, trying to wordlessly communicate, “Go, leave me alone.”

But instead, she closes the door and sits right there on the floor next to him. Smooths his hair back fully and takes his glasses off his head, folding the arms carefully and placing them on the counter next to the sink. She holds his hair and rubs circles into his back as he sobs and gags and she doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t say a damn thing and Richie loves her for it.

He coughs up a whole daffodil.

It’s not new that he’s coughing up whole flowers now. But usually it’s a handful of daisies here, a mouthful of buttercups there. Small flowers. Manageable. A few pansies at the very worst. But this… this is big.

Bev continues to rub his back and say nothing as he stares down at it.

“You’ll need to brush your teeth again,” she says softly, when he finally leans back from the bowl. He laughs weakly at that, rubbing knuckles over his eyes to rub away the tear tracks.

“Yeah,” he replies, quieter than he’d like.

“I won’t tell the others,” she promises him. She presses a kiss to his sweaty forehead and tells him, “I’m here if you need to talk.”

Bev leaves and Richie brushes his teeth all over again, not making eye contact with himself in the mirror. He takes one last look at the daffodil and flushes it down the toilet. He already knows what it means. When he leaves the bathroom, Wentworth is stood outside, shorter than him now but his face as serious as it’s ever been.

Second day in a row is apparently too much to ignore. The next morning, they see everyone off, and his parents immediately drive him to the hospital. They tell him what he and Ben already read at the library.

“It’s rare,” Dr Hale says. “Surgery is something we’d prefer not to do. You should tell her, son.”

Richie winces and says nothing and Dr Hale gives him some pills that are supposed to help somehow – something to do with oxygen, but Richie isn’t listening much at all. When he asks if there’s a way to stop throwing up, Dr Hale gives him a sympathetic look and tells him it’s better to ‘clear out his airways’.

Health insurance covers everything, but he still has to avoid his Dad’s glare in the rear-view mirror.

“Just tell her,” his mum says. “It’s not that hard.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, replying because if he doesn’t they’ll get into a fight about it. “Sure.”

It’s harder to hide it from the rest of the Losers after that. It’s like it’s triggered something. When he’s around them – around Eddie – he’ll end up throwing up a handful of times a day. Because Eddie is right there and he’s forced to think of him, of how he feels for him.

Once, when they’re hocking loogies off the cliff overlooking the quarry, he and Eddie get into a contest and then an argument and then Richie is overcome with a sudden surge of emotion that has him throwing up his guts over the side of the cliff.

Eddie squawks in disgust, jumping back on instinct along with Stan and Bill while Mike stands there frozen. Bev, however, is quickly dropping to her knees next to him – surely skinning them on the rock, she shouldn’t do that for him – and pushing his hair out of his face while he can hear Ben searching in his backpack behind them. To find water, probably. They really are made for each other, those two; they both show their love for him in the same sure, quiet ways.

Not like him and Eddie. They’re too different. The sudden thought that this disease causes him to embody the very thing Eddie hates most of all has him sobbing through the waves of nausea.

Bev sooths him, mumbling quiet words as she smooths his hair with both hands. Then another, smaller hand joins hers in the space between his shoulder blades. It rubs in tight, shaking circles. Hesitant to touch at all, but still making the effort.

“You should have told us you were ill, idiot,” Eddie tells him.

Richie laughs as he finally opens his eyes and tries to ignore how he’s grown used to the sight of vomit dripping from his nose.

“I didn’t know,” he lies.

“How can you not know if you’re ill!” Eddie shouts. “What kind of a moron do you have to be—”

Richie laughs harder and tries not to throw up through it again. Behind him, he hears Mike say, “I’m not jumping in that.”

Richie doesn’t blame him.

He can see the flowers caught on the outcroppings of cliff below them. Geraniums. It usually is when they argue. Comfort, stupidity. That about sums it up.

“You keep throwing up,” Stan tells him, like he wasn’t aware.

It’s rolled all the way around to summer again. Bill had moved away at the end of the school year, fucked off to do his senior year somewhere else. He hadn’t said where they were heading, but he’d promised to stay in touch. They haven’t heard from him since. Bev has been talking about how her Aunt (who has been looking after her since her Dad mysteriously died) hates it in Derry and wants to move back to Portland – Richie feels selfish for not wanting her to go. Mike says he’s staying on the farm to keep helping run it with his Uncle while he figures his options out for College and travelling. Stan, Eddie, and Ben have been talking about Colleges and Universities. New York, California, Chicago. All places far, far away from this shithole.

Richie doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to do yet. All he knows is that he wants to get out of here as soon as he possibly can. It’s wishful thinking to hope he and Bev can run away together, hit the road and never look back. He’d try to convince Eddie to run away with him instead, but Eddie seems to be hoping University will be his final out to get away from his Mom once and for all. So far, Richie’s best plan is that he’ll pack a backpack and hitch a ride, go wherever the person driving is headed. It’s selfish for him to want to follow Eddie, so he won’t let himself.

But for now, they’re all sitting in the clubhouse (minus Bill) and Stan has decided to finally call him out. Richie is sitting in the hammock, pretending to read a comic book as all eyes slide over to look at him. The only sound is the creak of the swing where Mike is rocking it back and forth. Richie keeps his own eyes firmly locked on the inked pages.

“Sure do,” he replies.

“That’s worrying!” Stan wheezes, exasperated. “How are you not worried about that?”

“Saw a doctor,” Richie shrugs, turning a page even though he’s not finished reading it.

“But it’s still happening!” Stan throws his hands up, like it helps prove whatever point he’s making somehow.

Eddie shifts. He’s leaning against one of the pillars the hammock is tied around, patiently waiting for Richie’s ten minutes to be up – as if Richie has ever willingly got out of the hammock before. He’s still the only one other than Richie who doesn’t wear one of Stan’s stupid shower caps, even though Richie knows he’s scared shitless of spiders. He looks over at Richie, eyes wide and doe-like.

“Did you get a second opinion?” he asks.

Richie can’t resist.

“Yeah, I asked your Mom about it last night.” Eddie groans, and Richie waits a bit before his grin stretches wide across his face. “While I was fucking—”

“While you were fucking her, yeah, I fucking get it, dickhead.” Eddie punches Richie in the leg. “Fuck me for worrying about your health, I guess.”

It’s nothing new for Eddie to worry about health, but still. It’s Eddie worrying about his health. Worrying about Richie. The familiar twisting feeling grows behind his ribs. He squashes it down and forces a joke.

“’Fuck me’, huh? Well Eds, if you insist. But I don’t put out on the first date.”

Eddie chokes and flushes a wonderful pink from the apples of his cheeks to the tips of his ears. Richie watches it spread, mesmerised, even as Eddie looks at him with a frown and eyebrows furrowed deep over his pretty doe eyes and tells him to shut the fuck up.

“Bucket,” Bev says, and Ben grabs it.

It’s on the floor next to the hammock a second before Richie leans over the side and starts gagging.

The full flowers have stayed constant, larger than ever. It’s never pleasant. He’s not looking forward to stems. He might just off himself before that happens.

Eddie is the one to smooth his hair back this time, pushing it back from his forehead with a soft palm, a tense sigh, and a half-hearted comment about how he needs to get a haircut. At some point, Richie thinks he hears him say something about how all the acid from being sick is going to ruin his teeth and he remembers his Dad saying the exact same thing. Like he was more worried about Richie’s teeth than he was about Richie’s lungs, than he was about Richie.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” says Mike, eyes flicking between the six of them.

“Tell me about it,” Stan mutters. He eyes Bev and Ben. “Seems like some of us know more than others, doesn’t it.”

“What?” Eddie looks up.

His eyes follow Stan’s and land on Bev and Ben, who Richie is ashamed to say are looking guilty enough to give it away immediately. Ben looks shaken, unwilling to break a promise, but Bev looks directly at Richie across the room, eyes calm but sure.

“Which flowers?” she asks.

Richie groans and rolls onto his back in the hammock again. Eddie steps away from him, out of the way of the movement, and continues to look wildly out of his depth.

“Flowers?” he repeats, voice high.

“Mallow, I think?” Richie says, unsure. He peeks over the side of the hammock to get a second glance at the blossoms resting at the bottom of the bucket, petals wet and bruised. “Yeah, mallow.”

“Deep in love,” Ben tells him, like he can’t help it. Walking encyclopaedia, that one.

“Wait,” Mike says, like something is dawning on him. About time – took everyone long enough. Richie Tozier: A Mystery Solved. “You have Flower Sickness?”

That’s around the time Richie decides he should head out. He swings his unsteady legs over the side of the hammock, gets out and leaves the comic book resting between the folds of fabric in the centre.

“Hey Eds, would you look at that? It’s your turn in the hammock!” He claps Eddie on the shoulder and his hand burns with the contact simply because it’s Eddie. “Lucky you. I’m gonna head off.”

“Rich,” Mike says softly, “how long have you had this?”

“C’mon,” he shrugs, easy smirk in place. Still, someone could easily notice the tension that runs through every movement. He backs himself up carefully, each small step taking him closer to the ladder – the one exit out of the clubhouse. “It’s not that serious.”

Stan and Eddie both sputter at the same time.

“Not that serious?” Stan demands, at the same time Eddie’s face turns a new kind of red for a whole new reason.

“How is it not serious when you’re throwing up fucking flowers, Rich?”

Richie grins, all panic and clenched teeth. “Trying out a new fragrance for the ol’ Trashmouth.”

Eddie stomps up to him and punches him in the shoulder, forcing him to take an instinctive step back to steady himself. It actually hurts.

“Take this seriously for once in your fucking life. Do not fucking joke about this shit.”

Richie feels his hands start to shake and clenches his teeth together harder. He says nothing, because if he says anything he thinks he’ll start crying. He doesn’t even know why.

“How long?” Mike asks, voice stark with how gentle it is in the wake of Eddie’s outburst. Richie doesn’t answer, so Ben does for him.

“Three and a half years. At least, I think.”

Richie is strangely thankful for it. God knows he wouldn’t have been able to say anything himself.

“Shit, Rich…” Mike breathes.

“This is fatal, you know that?” Stan’s voice shakes as he says it. Richie can see the panic building in him, see it in the way he clenches his hands in to fists at his sides. “You could die from this.”

Richie can’t help it. He chokes around a laugh, shocked right out of him. “Shit, Stan, you know what? I didn’t! Fucking wild that the doctor didn’t mention it. He saw flowers growing in me and he didn’t tell me I’m going to die in two years. Fucking fantastic doctor! Highly recommended—”

“You’re what?”

He freezes with his mouth still open. His eyes flick over to Eddie again, stood before him and looking pale. Richie’s false bravado loses wind and crumples immediately, and he feels an aching growing inside him again. Looking down at Eddie, he doesn’t feel anything other than guilt and shame.

“I need to go.”

It’s said desperately, his limbs moving before the words have finished coming out of his mouth. His panicked limbs are halfway up the ladder before anyone reacts, and after that he’s bolting through the woods as fast as they can carry him. If anyone tries to follow him, they’re not able to catch up, even with him being as uncoordinated as he is.

He stops when he reaches the creek, doubles over and wheezes for breath through the spasms in his chest. Two bouts so close together is rare, but maybe the anxiety is adding to it – the whole fear of conflict and confrontation. Or maybe he’s just getting worse.

In the aftermath, he watches bellwort blossoms drift in the sluggish current and wonders if he should just run away now and get it over with.

In the back of his mind, he hears Bev’s voice urging him, “Tell him.”

A memory of them sat on that cliff and passing a cigarette from a half-smoked pack she’d shoplifted between them. The air shifting his hair, and his lungs burning for a reason that was at least within his control. Her looking out at the clear sky and telling him like she knew all the answers, like it’s just that simple.

“Tell him, honey. You have nothing to lose.”

Somehow, running away seems easier.

It’s unclear whose round of shots it is, they’re that many in. Richie has the fantastic idea to lean down, wrap his lips around the glass, and just throw it back like that.

Look, Ma. No hands.

Maggie Tozier would be so proud.

The glass clinks against the table when he spits it out, rounding on Eddie and not missing a beat.

“So wait, Eddie – you got married?”

He’s grinning, but he knows it’s accusatory. Eddie still has that same furrow between his eyebrows. God, he hasn’t changed a fucking bit.

“Yeah. Why’s it so fucking funny, dickwad?”

“What, to like a woman?” Richie toes ever closer to a line he knows he shouldn’t cross.

Eddie jabs a lone chopstick at him in response. “Fuck you, bro.”

Fucking ‘bro’. Since when the fuck had Eddie started saying ‘bro’? Presumably at some point in the past two decades Richie hasn’t known him. God, did he pick that up from New York? Did this little flashbang of a man talk to his co-workers like this? What else has Richie missed out on? What parts of Eddie has he failed to know? Why is he suddenly mourning a man sat right in front of him?

No answers.

Instead, he grinds his teeth together and grins wide in a grimace before shouting “Fuck you!” right back. He tries to ignore how it feels like Eddie has betrayed him somehow. Tries to ignore the burning in his chest that has nothing to do with the alcohol, but he still tries to convince himself it’s because of that anyway.

“Alright. What about you, Trashmouth?” Bill smirks at him across the table, leaning in to make eye contact. “You married?”

“There’s no way Richie got married!” Bev cries, utterly disbelieving.

And then she pauses, food held firm between raised chopsticks as she stills. Caught in a memory.

Richie has a feeling he knows exactly what she’s remembering. It’s a blessing nobody has asked about it yet, brought it up. Thank god at least Bill never knew. So he leads everyone neatly into a joke at the expense of Eddie’s Mom that has Bill snorting beer out his nostrils. Bev laughs along with it, but her eyes keep meeting his across the table like she’s dying to ask him a question.

But Richie knows what she’s going to ask and he doesn’t want to answer it, doesn’t even want to acknowledge it. He keeps his trashmouth running and deflects as hard as he can, putting on a show so everyone’s attention is focused on the loudest part of himself – the part he wants them to see, distracting them from the part that hides behind it.

And when that doesn’t work, he deflects onto Ben.

And then Ben deflects onto the man who isn’t there.

Stan.

The chair sits vast and empty between him and Eddie.

He’s still considering it when Eddie changes the topic, and Richie just can’t help pushing his buttons again. Decades apart and Richie still craves Eddie’s attention (good or bad) like he’s a plant that photosynthesises off the shit. He wears it around him like a warm coat, a comfortable second skin.

Then Bev’s toasting the Loser’s club.

Then he’s sliding into Stan’s empty chair and he and Eddie are arm-wrestling. Everything is moving too quickly, and Richie’s whiskey-addled brain is having a little bit of trouble keeping up with it all.

“Let’s take our shirts off and kiss!”

He knows Eddie only shouts it (Ben chanting “Take them off!” and hitting his fist on the table from the side lines) as a way to distract him. He knows and he tries not to think too hard about what Eddie knows. What Eddie sees of him that tells him that shouting that is an effective way to distract Richie.

In the end, Richie lets him think he’s going to win before soundly slamming Eddie’s hand down and beating him. And then he does more shots. And then some more! Fuck it, why not?

He continues to catch Bev’s eyes. Watches her in his peripheral vision as she whispers behind her hand to Ben, all the while her eyes following him.

Richie knows she notices when he sneaks away from the table, towards the toilets, when the pressure in his chest binds too tight. It’s all he can think about in the back of his mind as he throws up whole flower blossoms into the toilet. He hunches over the bowl on his knees, shoulders curled around himself protectively. The fingers of one hand grip the rim of the toilet tight while the other hand holds his hair away from his face with practiced ease. He watches petals fall into the water and all he can think is, “She knows. She knows. She fucking knows and she’s probably telling everybody right now.”

Yet, when he returns, she says nothing. Nor does anybody else.

After that, their attention is elsewhere, focused on all the Pennywise bullshit. Learning about Stan’s death and grieving a man without knowing what he even looks like now, every single one of them picturing a teenager’s face in their heads.

In the end, Bev catches him on the sidewalk next to the Orient. Richie doesn’t feel fantastic about shouting at a child, and he keeps playing the kid’s reaction over and over in his head and wondering how he became such a mess. He thinks about himself throwing up in the restaurant bathroom and connects it vaguely to the idea that he never really says what he wants to say. Bev comes to stand next to him on the curb while Richie stands in the road, his hands balled into fists and pushed deep into the pockets of his jacket. Her voice is soft, quiet and unobtrusive when she talks. Careful like she knows he wants to run away and avoid the situation all together.

“You never told him, did you?”

Richie shrugs, ignores how the pain in his chest has been more constant and demanding since he walked through those doors and laid eyes on Eddie Kaspbrak once again. It’s like the whole thing had been put on pause, only for it to start up again in full force once they met again.

He offers her a sideways smile – a small, fragile little thing – and says, “It never felt like the right time to bring it up, and I never wanted to worry his tiny little brain about it anyway. In the end, running was just easier, I guess.”

Bev nods. She looks over at Eddie across the road. He’s arguing with Bill, Mike, and Ben about something. Richie watches with her, eyes fixated on the motions of Eddie’s hands as he gestures with them.

“You should tell him,” she says. She has always said it like it’s simple. It’s not.

Richie snorts. “I’ll pass.”

She blinks at him, raises a questioning eyebrow. Richie shrugs.

“Like, I’ve lived with this shit for thirty years, right? I’m a god damn medical mystery! It’s not like it’s gonna kill me now, just because I’m back here.” He says it like he knows, even throws in a little smirk to show that he’s confident about it. He isn’t.

“Sure,” Bev says, slowly.

Richie’s eyes stay on Eddie and the pressure continues to build behind his ribs and he knows, he knows he’s fucking wrong about this. But Bev doesn’t need to worry about his sorry ass – she has more shit to worry about than him shoving his way back into her life and being an idiot again. He saw the bruises on her wrists. He knows what that means, and it means she’s got shit of her own going on. She doesn’t need this too.

She looks like she’s going to try pushing him on it, but Mike waves them over to regroup and talk about something and the moment is lost.

Good riddance. Richie doesn’t want to deal with it right now.

Richie Tozier runs away from Derry the day he gets his diploma because he’s a coward.

Despite popular belief, Richie isn’t an idiot. If anything, he’s smart. Somehow, he graduates as valedictorian. But being smart is just another facet of himself to cover up with something louder, because quiet smart kids who wear glasses get bullied. It’s a weakness. Richie is fucking sick of being bullied and he’s sick of having weaknesses.

Everybody at school knows now, knows about the flowers.

He had to get a doctor’s note for the beginning of senior year to excuse him during lessons when he needs to go throw up. It took a screaming match with his Dad before the school year even started to get it; his parents demanding over and over again that he suck it up and just confess his feelings to whatever girl he’s pining over, and Richie shouting back that he can’t, he just fucking can’t, alright?

Richie tries to only throw up during lessons. Not after school, or during break or lunch. It’s easier to deal with it alone. He doesn’t like when Stan or Mike sit with him in the stall to keep him company or pat his back or hold his hair out of his face because he knows it worries them. There’s always that sympathetic scrunch to their eyebrows, the concern in their voices whenever they say, “You should tell her.”

Richie hates that.

“Tell her.”

Like it’s that easy.

Because of course everyone thinks he’s got the hots for a girl and if he would just ‘man up’ and tell her then this would all go away. The teachers sigh whenever he flashes his doctor’s note and he knows they’re all thinking the same thing too.

Hanahaki is a romantic disease! It just shows the person you love how strong your feelings are. Weird for a boy to have it though, isn’t it a girls’ disease?

Like emotions have a gender.

And it’s not easy, because Richie has been shoving down his love – the way he expresses love – since the first time he got called a slur. It’s a long time. You don’t just get over that. You don’t just come out the other side of it without some deeply ingrained fears tied directly to your sense of identity.

The way he loves isn’t wrong. It’s hard to convince himself of it, and he doubts himself a lot, but it’s something he logically knows. But even if he knows it, other people still think it’s wrong. And because people think it, Richie can’t help but think it too. He hopes beyond hope that nobody stops to think too long about why he insists he can’t confess to the person of his affections. He hopes nobody looks hard enough to see.

Worse than Stan and Mike joining him in the toilet stall is Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak with the edge sanded off his sharp tongue by worry, his soft moisturised skin and his gentle chiding words. His hands on Richie, touching even though Richie is sick and wrong. Richie knows it’s hard for him to be there, to sit there with Richie being such a clear embodiment of illness. Because Eddie hates illness and Richie is sick with his love for him.

All the extended kindness serves to do, in the end, is to make the flowers come harder and thicker. By the time he’s coughed up everything in him – shocked every time that the roots don’t just come up with everything else too, end him then and there – the bowl of the school toilet will hold a full bouquet.

Richie will stare at it every time, on his knees at a base shrine of his own love for Eddie Kaspbrak. Roses in a rainbow of hues. Lilacs, cleome, phlox, camellia. Whole stalks of lavender. He’ll stare at them and he’ll know the meanings of every single one.

Love, passion, desire, friendship and falling in love. First love, not as bad as I seem, trying to please you, longing for you. Silence and devotion.

They speak his heart even when he refuses to, display all those disgusting truths about himself that he tries to bury deep. A sick longing and all its little hidden nuances.

Eddie will look at it and see nothing. He will see Richie, red-faced and crying, and a flood of flowers for someone Richie clearly loves with the whole of himself but won’t tell anyone about, and he won’t know what it means. He’ll pass Richie tissues to wipe his face, and he’ll reach around Richie to flush the chain.

He doesn’t know.

But to Richie, it feels like Eddie is seeing his insides and deciding to throw them away. Rejection in its purest form.

Bev and Ben are the only good bathroom companions. They worked it all out themselves without Richie having to say a god damn word, but they’re content enough with just knowing that they never try to pry anything more from him. Bev will tell him she’s there if he needs her, and Ben will offer his own longing in exchange for Richie’s. Bev understands that sometimes he just needs to be silent with someone, and Ben understands what it feels like to love someone so much it hurts.

They know him. Maybe that’s alright, though. He knows them too.

He misses them when he leaves.

Richie graduates.

Then Richie goes straight home, leaves his own parents and all his friends at the ceremony and rides his bike all the way back through silent streets and suburbs. He packs a duffel bag and a backpack with everything he thinks he’ll need. Passport, birth certificate, driver’s license – all those important documents. He hides an envelope with $5000 in cash (saved from every single birthday and Christmas, every allowance and chore, every part-time job – all since the summer of ’89) inside two pairs of socks at the very bottom of the bag.

He throws everything in the back seat of the car his parents passed down to him when they finally had the money to buy a new one. He looks over his shoulder, paranoid, as he straps his bike to the back. But who around he would even care that he’s leaving? And who would know? He hasn’t told anyone.

He jumps into the driver’s seat and stares out of the windscreen for a long moment. He takes a deep breath, squeezes the steering wheel once, then pulls away from the curb.

He parks on the Kissing Bridge and, for the last time, he traces the initials he’d carved when he was 13. Deepens them with a pocket knife.

Then Richie picks a random direction and drives.

Within a week, he’s forgotten the colour of Eddie’s eyes.

In two, his face entirely.

After a month, Richie Tozier doesn’t remember Eddie Kaspbrak at all.

Still, the flowers bloom.

“This isn’t normal,” the doctor says, a tight sideways frown pulling at her mouth. “It’s actually quite concerning.”

“Oh,” Richie says dumbly. That’s what he gets for ignoring his problems.

He’s twenty-four. The new job he’d scored at a bar in New York blessedly near his apartment came with healthcare benefits. There’s no dental, but this is the first time Richie has actually been able to afford to see a doctor since he left home, and it’s only because it’s a perk of the job – fuck minimum wage bar work, but at least he’s not working for tips anymore. Another perk of the job is that they let him have a regular fifteen minute spot on stand-up night every Thursday, but that’s slightly less relevant right now.

When he first came in for the check-up, Richie had told Dr Baynes about the flowers. She’d wrongly assumed that him knowing about them meant he had the situation under control.

When she’d rested the stethoscope between his shoulder blades, cold against the skin of his back, and told him to breathe deep, he’d got a flash of… something. A memory? He doesn’t remember it. But he remembers the feelings.

A cool hand on his bare back, water lapping at his feet, wind and pollen and breathing it all in, the warmth of someone by his side, fingers almost touching, palm pressed firm to the grit of the rock underneath him. He can’t place a face or a name to who he’s with. It’s all just sense memory.

Either way, he’d choked on the in breath and coughed on the out breath. And then he kept coughing, coughing and coughing until Dr Baynes was holding a kidney dish under his face. He spat out two whole roses into it. Yellow and lavender, sitting there side-by-side. He had been suddenly grateful he’d never had one with a stem. Other flowers, sure, but no rose thorns just yet.

He’d put his shirt on after that, feeling sheepish and cold and far too exposed.

“How long as this been going on for?” Dr Baynes asks him.

Richie hesitates, wringing one hand over the other. “Like, the full flowers or the flower thing in general?”

Dr Baynes raises an arched eyebrow and clasps her hands over a crossed knee. “Both.”

“I got diagnosed at seventeen, but uh, I think the first time I was fifteen? No, fourteen? Maybe,” Richie shrugs. The memories are unclear. There are a lot of gaps where his childhood should be. “My Dad took me to the hospital when I uh… threw up my first real whole flower, so yeah, whole ones since seventeen.”

When he looks back at Dr Baynes, her eyebrows are raised even higher. He’d been avoiding eye contact by looking at a chart of the digestive system stuck on the wall just behind her head, so he hadn’t seen their slow, incredulous ascent. She uncrosses her legs and places both feet flat on the ground, heels clicking against the flooring.

“And you’re sure about those dates?” she asks him. It’s a polite way of her saying that she thinks he’s lying.

Richie shrugs again, feeling awkward. “I mean, yeah. The diagnosis should be on my medical records. We had to drive from Derry to Bangor for the appointment because Derry didn’t have a proper hospital.”

She hums. The mention of his medical records seems to appease her. “And you’re twenty-four now?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s at least seven years of suffering from this. A decade if you really were fourteen at the time of your first episode.” She says the words slowly like she’s explaining something particularly difficult to a child.

“Ha ha, yeah. Long time, huh?”

He tries to awkwardly joke about it, but he’s too self-conscious. The hand he rubs against the back of his neck looks more nervous than charming. He’s sweating, he realises, when his palm comes away damp.

Thing is, it really has been a long time. Richie has grown used to throwing up flowers, especially in the mornings, usually after dreams he can’t seem to remember no matter how much he tries. He wakes up in tears and choking more nights than he doesn’t. He’s tired of it.

“Patients with Hanahaki disease are lucky if they live five years after the onset of their first episode,” she tells him, serious. “If you’ve lived double that, I believe you may be something of a medical mystery, Mr Tozier.”

Richie very suddenly wants to go home to his shitty little New York studio apartment and lay supine in his bed for the rest of the week.

“Huh,” he says, instead. What else is there to say?

Dr Baynes spins in her chair, fingers coming up to type on the mechanical keyboard at her computer, the keys thick and heavy. Richie draws further into himself at every distinctive ‘clack’.

“I’m going to refer you to a specialist, Mr Tozier,” she tells him, eyes still on the screen. Richie resists the urge to squirm.

“Is it really that serious?” he asks her.

She looks at him, face looking like she’s unsure whether she should be shocked or incredulous. “Mr Tozier, you are – as far as I know – the only recorded case of a patient with Hanahaki disease living past the five-year mark. According to your own account, you’ve been in the later stages of the disease for seven years now. This is incredibly serious. We don’t know the long-term effects that this may have on your body, what effects it may already have had. We don’t know the damage to your throat and lungs, we don’t know if you’re getting adequate oxygen.”

Richie cringes more with every word, curling his fingers tightly into the stiff fabric of his jeans. Dr Baynes sighs at him. When he looks up at her, her eyes are sympathetic. He’s 6’3” and she’s a generous 5’5”, but he feels small with how she’s looking at him. It’s pity.

“I know it’s scary, Richard,” she says gently, “But if you don’t acknowledge a problem, it can’t be fixed.”

Richie swallows, looks away. “Yeah.”

She prints some things off and writes him a series of prescriptions. Something for the pain, something for the oxygen, and then other things that he doesn’t ask about or listen to as she explains them. His mind is valiantly attempting to separate itself from his body. He doesn’t know how any of this works and he doesn’t want to, it’s why she’s the doctor and not him.

She hands him a printed sheet of paper. Details for his appointment with the specialist.

“Please make sure you go,” she says, and it sounds like she’s genuinely worried that he won’t.

Richie forces a smirk and holds up his little finger. “Sure. Pinkie promise, Doc.”

She gives him a tight smile and stands to show him to the door, then closes it behind him.

In the quiet of the hallway, he folds the prescriptions and the appointment letter in half, collected in a little bundle, and shoves them into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. His hands shake and he slides them into his jacket pockets, trying desperately to talk himself out of having a panic attack in the doctor’s surgery bathroom.

He walks down the little hallway, hunches his shoulders up near his ears and tries to make himself small as he walks out through the reception. Richie ignores the way one patient, a younger looking guy, seems to follow him with his eyes as he hurries his way out. Richie stares at the floor and puts one foot in front of the other.

And when Richie gets home, he crawls under the covers of his bed despite it still being light outside. He doesn’t have a shift at the bar until tomorrow. Doesn’t have anywhere he needs to be, or anyone he needs to see.

He wraps the covers around himself and cries. He doesn’t know what – or who – he’s crying for. He doesn’t even feel all that better for it, but the tears still come.

After that, there’s a good deal of being poked and prodded, doctors and surgeons and various specialists trying to solve him like a puzzle. It gets old fast. He nearly regrets keeping the pinkie promise.

Eventually, Richie gets sick of it and moves to LA – he wanted to move to LA anyway, kind of hated New York at a base level even if he loves his job at the bar. Besides, he’d been picking up more attention for his stand-up routines lately. LA seems like the obvious choice. Unfortunately, moving means he needs to meet a whole other new doctor to deal with what they’re calling a ‘chronic illness’.

Dr Handor, Richie thinks, seems like he tries too hard to come off as friendly. Thinking that makes him feel a bit bad though; maybe New York has made him suspicious of people being nice. He reminds Richie of someone, but he can’t for the life of him remember who.

The doctor gives Richie the cursory once over, mouth twisting into a little frown that Richie has become intimately familiar with when he asks Richie to breathe in.

Local twenty-something can’t stop throwing up flowers but somehow hasn’t died yet; doctors hate him!

“You’ve been sent for x-rays in the past six months, yeah?” He asks and Richie supresses a sigh.

“You gonna send me for more?” Richie asks. “I got some about three months ago, a week or so before I moved out here.”

“And nothing big has happened since then?” Dr Handor asks. He sits back in his well-padded desk chair and swivels to type on his computer.

“You mean other than moving.”

Dr Handor snorts. “Yeah, other than that. And less life events, unless it’s to do with a special someone.” He winks at Richie as he says this. “I’m more, like, concerned about managing your symptoms.”

Richie winces. It must be pretty noticeable because Dr Handor turns in his chair to face him, expression curious.

It’s not that Richie’s symptoms are worse. That’s part of the problem. They’re exactly the same as he always remembers them being, that constant base level of bad. He takes his pills and he manages his pain and he forces his brain to slow down for long enough to at least attempt meditation like his previous doctors kept suggesting. Hell, he even does his damn breathing exercises. But nothing Richie does seems to have any effect on the illness.

He can’t even make sense of what triggers a bad episode. He’ll think of a creek in the summer, sun hot on pale skin. The chemical tang of sunscreen. He’ll see a runner wearing bright red shorts. Fuck it, he’ll see the ugliest god damn fanny pack he’s ever laid eyes on, clipped around the waist of a headless mannequin, and even that will have him gagging up roses.

Warm hot chocolate with cinnamon. The sight of his own bottle full of painkillers, a half-popped sleeve of Advil. A pale-yellow sweatshirt, thread worn and fraying at the hems. Someone out in the waiting room with a cast covered broken arm. The gesturing of frantic palms, one hand slapping distinctly down against the other. Dog-eared vintage comic books. Hammocks.

They don’t link to anything at all, but they’re all tied to an overwhelming sense of familiarity. They fill him to the brim with a sense of nostalgia so strong is has him choking on it. But he can never place a face or a name to the phantom memories. It doesn’t make sense; this is a disease borne of loving someone, and Richie doesn’t have anyone.

“There isn’t a special someone,” Richie finds himself telling Dr Handor, scratching at the inside of his wrist. “I mean, I can’t confess to get it to all go away because I’m not even in love with anyone.”

Dr Handor pauses, then makes a note on Richie’s patient records on the computer. He hums uncertainly, then rests his palms flat, one over the other, on his desk. “Says here you were diagnosed at seventeen.”

Richie nods, movement stiff.

“Richard,” Dr Handor says it slowly. When he looks at Richie, it’s with that same familiar pity. “You’re twenty-six. Twenty-seven this year.”

Richie grits his teeth, stuck on whether he should make a joke or be indignant about it. He keeps his eyes set on the cuffed bottoms of Dr Handor’s jeans. “Really, man? Hadn’t noticed.”

Dr Handor whistles, breath pushed through teeth. “Yeah, I deserve that,” he says. Richie watches the movement of his feet as he turns away from the computer. Watches the wheels twist on the office chair. “But there’s really no one? And I need you to be honest with me because I’d like to be able to actually help you.”

“There’s like—,” Richie lifts his head, flits his hands around in frustrated movements like he’s trying to bat away distracting thoughts, “—these sense memories. Flickers of things that I guess are… comforting? I think? But it’s never, like, a face or someone I know, nothing like that. Just this… overwhelming emotion attached to objects and places and senses. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all. It’s weird. I dunno.”

Crossing his arms, Dr Handor raises one hand to lean his chin on it.

“Strange,” he says slowly. “Cases of Hanahaki are always linked to a strong romantic attraction to someone and that attraction either being unexpressed or unreciprocated. But for you, that’s not the case.”

Richie simply shrugs. He doesn’t know what else he could even say.

Dr Handor hums, then unfolds himself to fiddle with his computer. After a moment, he turns the computer screen so Richie can look at it. They’re x-rays Richie has seen a million times before at this point. Old news.

“The roots on your x-rays from three months ago are a perfect match with the roots on the x-rays from six months ago,” he explains.

Richie watches as Dr Handor manoeuvres the images on the screen so they overlay each other, the shadows in the scans of his lungs overlaying each other nearly perfectly. He pulls up another image, does the same with it. Another match.

“And guess what, they match the roots on your first x-ray from two and a half years ago too,” Dr Handor says.

Richie keeps his eyes on the screen. He feels like he’s realising something important, but he’s not entirely sure what he’s realising. Dr Handor continues on.

“Sure, the flower blooms change but that’s to be expected; they change based on what you’re feeling at any given point, the hormones your body makes. But the root system seems to stay completely stagnant. In any other person, we would be seeing it getting progressively worse. But with you, it’s not doing that. It never gets worse and it never gets better.”

And it’s true.

Richie doesn’t realise it in the moment, but it is. It never gets worse, and it never, ever gets better.

Thirty sees him sets and sets of x-rays in, the roots for every single one near identical. A spot-the-difference puzzle where nothing ever changes. The growth has stagnated, but it never reduces no matter what they do. But Dr Handor never pushes him to get the surgery to remove them like the doctors in New York tried to do, so at least there’s that. Richie had his limelight being a medical mystery and he’s grateful that the novelty of him seems to have worn off for the most part.

Richie has been in LA for nearly five years now. His career when he moved from New York was decent – he got gigs and had a small following, made enough to get by and still have money left over. Eventually, he’d had enough money to get an actually manager, who had almost immediately encouraged him to move out to LA and transferred him into the hands of his current manager, Steve Covall. His first job in LA had come after two weeks of unpacking in the form of a regular spot hosting radio until Steve could set him up some proper stand-up gigs.

Turns out, Richie likes radio. He likes talking a lot, and most of his shows end up being late-night anyway so he isn’t forced to have too much of a filter. He likes being able to argue with the nutcases who call up to complain about his awful music taste, like he’s the one who curates the playlists and not someone else behind the scenes. Richie is just a voice talking into the void between songs and he likes it that way.

The arguing with callers gives him an outlet, gives him room to be funny on his own.

More and more, Steve has been giving him material rather than demanding that Richie hand over pages of his own. Richie will write jokes, will still hand over pages for Steve to read.

“Hey, I wrote some stuff,” he’ll say, trying to play it off as casual. What he really wants is for someone to tell him it’s good, that he can write. To tell him that he is actually funny on his own and not just a mouthpiece for someone else’s jokes.

“Mm,” Steve will hum and nod. He’ll take the pages that Richie holds out to him and tap them against the table of the coffee shop near the agency office they’ve long since settled on meeting up at. “I’ll have the guys look over them.”

And he’ll say nothing more of it.

Richie doesn’t know who ‘the guys’ are; he’s never met the people Steve pays to write his jokes. Richie won’t say a word though, even when he later reads over the script for his next set and finds that while some of his jokes have made it in, sure, it’s still mostly stuff that ‘the guys’ have written. He won’t even complain that his favourite bits haven’t made the cut. Won’t say anything about how, more and more, the jokes that Steve gives to him seem to be centred around an imaginary girlfriend that Richie doesn’t have.

So, Richie likes radio. Radio lets him do the Voices. Steve absolutely hates the Voices, abhors them, but Richie thinks he’s got pretty good at some of them. He’s particularly fond of the Homicidal Bag Boy, but Kinky Briefcase is the only one that gets Carol – the tech who oversees all the audio stuff Richie doesn’t have a clue about – to laugh behind her little soundproof window, covering her mouth with a hand even though the microphones won’t pick her up anyway.

On a Wednesday morning in May of 2006, Richie answers a call just after midnight and can’t force back his immediate growing giddiness.

“This is Richie ‘Trashmou—”

“Your music taste fucking sucks.”

A vaguely New York accented voice cuts him off before he even gets through his usual greeting. Richie grins wider than he has in weeks, his leg jumping up and down underneath the desk. He runs his fingers over the metal base of his microphone and thinks to himself that this may be the most beautiful voice he’s ever heard, if only because of the opportunity it presents him with.

“Oh, that’s not the only thing about me that sucks,” Richie coos into the microphone.

The caller doesn’t hesitate for a second. “Stop playing fucking Springsteen and play music that’s actually good.”

“Or,” Richie drawls, cupping his chin in his palms and leaning his lips close to the pop filter, “Darling stranger, you could tell me what you’re doing so far from home.”

“What?”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Or New York, I guess. That’s what I’m hearing, right? New York?”

A pause. Then, “Oh, right, yeah. Uh, here on business. Anyway, the music—”

“But stranger,” Richie almost sings it. “Art is subjective. Now, tell me what you do for work so I can make fun of it.”

The stranger snorts out a laugh down the line, like he finds the idea of being ragged on by Richie secretly hilarious. “None of your business, bro. Now shut the fuck up and stop playing Springsteen, asshole.”

With that, the stranger hangs up and leaves Richie with a strange buzzing, fluttering sensation in his stomach. It’s quickly joined by a sinking feeling, rock dropped off a cliff, as the pleasant fluttering becomes an insistent, familiar burning in his chest. He swallows it down.

“Well, the man made himself clear now, didn’t he?” Richie looks down at the song list that had been provided to him. He grins at it, even as the aching in his chest gets worse. “This one goes out to you, Mr New-York-stranger-here-on-business-in-LA. This is Bruce Springsteen with ‘Glory Days’.”

As soon as Carol gives him the thumbs up that the song is playing and his mic is switched off, Richie turns sharply to his right and throws up in the waste bin under the desk. After a moment, he can hear Carol through his headphones asking if he’s okay, worry clear in her voice. Instead of answering, he throws her and ‘okay’ hand sign over the rim of the table.

A few minutes later, she brings him a bottle of water. He hasn’t moved, is just staring down at the new contents of the waste bin. Even though he knows she sees them, she doesn’t say anything about the flowers. Nothing beyond, “Well, could smell worse, I guess” which only serves to make Richie laugh weakly.

An array of zinnia. Magenta, scarlet, white, yellow.

Richie switches over at 4am, leaving the studio in the capable hands of the morning crew. He walks Carol to her car and she tells him to get some rest, presses a worried hand against his bicep and squeezes. She gets in her car and drives away. Richie lingers in the parking garage for a moment, watching the lights from her car fade, before he shakes himself out of it and heads home too.

When he returns to his empty LA apartment, he’s thinking of New York. Maybe it’s because of the stranger who called, maybe it’s because his apartment here feels exactly the same as his apartment there had. Empty. No matter how much stuff Richie shoves into empty spaces, onto barren surfaces, hangs in the blank spots on the walls, it still feels lonely. He’s still, at the end of the day, alone. He comes home and is reminded of that fact everywhere he looks.

Richie doesn’t eat. There’s no point. If he had an episode during the radio show, he’s definitely going to have another one when he inevitably dreams. Better to have just the flowers come up.

In the end, he shouldn’t have worried. He only gets two hours of sleep in before his landline is ringing shrilly from his bedside table and he’s forced – bleary-eyed and reluctant – back into the world of the waking.

Smacking his hand imprecisely at the handset, he rolls onto his back and brings the receiver to his ear.

“Fuck you, asshole. It’s barely 7am, who the fuck calls this early?” He says in lieu of a real greeting, voice hoarse as he spits it out. Whoever is calling doesn’t deserve anything more.

There’s nothing for a moment, then the voice of Wentworth Tozier comes from the receiver.

“Good morning to you too, Richard.”

After over a decade, Richie’s parents have decided to get in touch.

Richie finds himself back in Maine, though thankfully in Portland rather than the backwater town he grew up in. He’d flown out to see his parents, all special and just for them, and because they told him to. Even now, after so long spent out of touch, he doesn’t want to get on their bad side. They’re his parents, after all.

Richie sits awkwardly in their living room. It’s cosy but spacious. He’s sat in a worn armchair that he doesn’t remember seeing before, while his parents sit adjacent to him on a sofa he definitely remembers from his childhood home. At least, he thinks that’s where it’s from. He avoids making eye contact with them, gaze instead taking a walk around the room to take everything in. Bookcase filled with books, well-loved and well-read, and what look like photo albums. A cabinet filled with knick-knacks – Richie doesn’t remember his parents having knick-knacks before – with an entire shelf dedicated to commemorative plates. Richie’s eyesight is too poor, even with glasses, to read what they’re commemorating.

“I had to get your number from your manager,” Wentworth complains. Richie keeps his eyes on the plates. “You’d think a son would call his parents, get in touch every now and then.”

Like triggering a latent instinct, Richie hunches his shoulders, curls in on himself. Curls around the cup of coffee Maggie Tozier had made for him when he first arrived. In the peripheral of his eyesight, he sees her sip her own, mouth a stern line when she lowers the mug.

“Why did you run away, Richie?”

Her voice isn’t gentle when she asks him, like he’d once imagined it would be when he thought about them asking about this in the past. It’s not harsh, but it hides an unspoken bitterness in its tone.

“Derry was bad,” Richie shrugs. “I got out.”

“You could have left a note, Richard,” Wentworth states firmly. “You could have given us at least an indication of where you were heading.”

Richie rolls his eyes at that, finds the courage to unfold himself a little. “I didn’t know where I was going. What would I have even said? ‘Hey Mom and Dad! I’m fucking off because this town sucks major ass and I hate it here. Hugs and kisses’?”

Wentworth scowls at him. “Well, it’s very clear that you haven’t grown up in the time since we last saw you.”

Richie finds it in himself to grin. “Sure I did! I pay taxes. Sometimes.”

Maggie sighs loudly, clearly broadcasting her disapproval, and moves the conversation towards something more genial. Richie does his best to behave himself after that. She tells him – in no uncertain terms – that he’s staying for dinner, so he does. They catch up. It is, surprisingly, not the worst.

His parents don’t seem too impressed by his career choices, only really pleased with the fact that he’s doing radio even though it’s the stand-up comedy that’s really been taking off lately. But they’re happy he’s making a living off what he’s doing, which is more than Richie had hoped for.

Maggie insists he takes the guest room, even though Richie had been planning on (and looking forward to) grabbing a hotel room and fucking off early the next morning. He stays anyway, because his Mother tells him to.

Richie waits until the house goes quiet, laying on top of a duvet cover nearly as old as him. He waits until he’s certain they’re both asleep then, just like he would as a kid, he sneaks downstairs.

He doesn’t leave. He just sits in the living room in silence, a single dusty lamp on and the door to the hallway shut just in case he makes too much noise. He sits and is uncertain what drew him down here.

Until his eyes come to rest on the bookshelf he saw before. On the shelf filled with photo albums.

Richie stands, pads barefoot over to them and reaches out a hand to skim a finger over their spines. He follows the movement, reading the dates written on the slips of paper sheathed in their plastic pockets. Without knowing why, he plucks the album labelled ‘85-90’ from the shelf.

It’s filled with childhood pictures, which is about what he expected. Christmases with his Mom’s side of the family, Hanukahs with his Dad’s. A very good picture of what must be him at nine or ten years old wearing his Mother’s heels, his Father's tie, a bra sitting askew over his wild hair, Maggie herself laughing in the background. Mother’s days, Father’s days, Easters. Birthdays.

Richie remembers being unpopular, knows distantly that he was bullied a lot. He doesn’t remember the specifics, just remembers it being about his teeth or his glasses or him being too smart for his own good. Sometimes, because he’d looked at a boy for too long or in the wrong way. He remembers, always, the itch in his mouth, the gnawing need to get in the last word, to have the last laugh. Richie knows that being a loudmouth probably made the bullying worse overall, but there’s still a lingering pride in the fact that he’d never cried until after his bullies had finished beating him up.

Still, he has birthday pictures, he had people who actually came to his birthdays. Birthdays nine through fourteen all in this one album. He can’t remember the names of any of the people in the photographs. That’s strange, he thinks, because the same three boys are with him in all of these. They’re laughing and smiling at the camera in each one, wearing awful cheap party hats and eating from paper plates piled high with food.

In one, the shortest boy of the three, is shoving Richie’s face into his own birthday cake. Richie doesn’t remember it. How can he not remember this?

If he stares long and hard enough at the photograph, really focuses, Richie can almost convince himself he hears the muffled sound of children laughing; feels the push of a small hand in his messy hair; tastes the cake frosting, even as he desperately tries not to get any up his nose. It makes his head ache to think about it for too long. The memories are fake, or at least the way he’s forcing himself to remember them is, he’s sure of it. He moves on.

Three more kids join their small group for the final birthday of the album. In one picture, a redhaired girl and that same boy from before are kissing him on either cheek, Richie’s own younger face beaming out at him, eyes crinkled with mirth behind coke-bottle glasses. In the next, they’re both shoving cake slices in Richie’s face and leaning back with the force of their own laughter.

There’s a lot of laughing, Richie realises.

He looks happy in these. He doesn’t remember feeling happy like that, not in the way he looks like he was. For a comedian, Richie doesn’t laugh all that much anymore.

Tucking the photo album under his arm, Richie finds himself gravitating in a daze to the next. ’90-’95 holds much of the same – family gatherings and holidays. It also holds birthdays fifteen through to eighteen. That same, final group of friends are there for each and every forgotten birthday captured on film.

Richie steals the photographs.

He leaves the ones that aren’t his, that aren’t of him. But he finds an empty envelope in the drawer of a cabinet and pilfers the photographs of his misplaced memories. He lingers on the two cake photos, finding himself smiling at them. They join the others in the envelope. He tucks the flap in instead of sealing it and then he slips the envelope into the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

Then Richie puts the jacket on and he leaves.

It’s only when he’s halfway through the drive back to the Portland airport that Richie realises he’d left the photo albums open on the couch in his parents’ living room. Then, in a rush, he realises that he’s a horrible son and that it’s four in the morning and his flight isn’t for another six hours.

He parks on the hard shoulder, pulls over on the empty road and presses his forehead against the cool upper rim of the steering wheel. There’s a sickness cloying in the back of his throat and his head hasn’t stopped hurting yet.

It’s strange. This is the normal type of sick. It’s been so long since he’s been normal nauseous. He’s so used to being flower sick that a return to the bog-standard nausea is almost novel to him.

It stops being so novel when he opens the driver’s side door and throws up – plain and simple, no flower blooms – on the concrete, barely missing the foot that he’d flung out in a last-minute attempt to balance himself.

Richie thinks about the boy shoving his face in a birthday cake on his thirteenth birthday and presses his sweaty palms to his face.

“For fuck’s sake,” he whispers to himself. “Can’t just have a normal fucking day, huh Tozier? Can’t just visit your parents like a normal ass son. Gotta uncover some repressed memories. Fucking bullshit. Dickhead.”

For a long time, he stays like that – half in, half out the rental car – as he tries and fails to centre himself.

Still, he thinks of a hand in his hair, thinks of cake frosting up his nose.

Richie doesn’t sleep well at the Derry Townhouse. Maybe it’s something to do with being in an unfamiliar bed, or maybe it’s to do with the latent, suffocating fear that a fucking clown could jump out at any moment and strangle him to death with a balloon string. Who can say, really?

He chain-smokes cigarettes while leaning out the shitty hotel window, using his shoulder to keep it open because it won’t stay up. He smokes and he tries to push everything deep, deep down.

At some point, the thought comes to him that Eddie’s room is next to his. All Richie would have to do is knock and Eddie would open the door, sleep-hazed, and bitch him out about how Richie had fucked up his circadian rhythms or whatever the fuck. And Richie would listen to Eddie bitch and moan happily, lay down on the bed next to him and they'd fall asleep together.

It would be just like those nights after IT the first time, where Richie would sneak out and throw stones at Eddie’s window until the other boy gave up and let him in. Two teens pressed close on a twin sized mattress; Eddie’s arms linked around Richie’s too-slim waist as he insisted that he was just holding on so Richie wouldn’t fall out of the bed. They both knew that wasn’t why.

Richie stamps out the final cigarette of his pack on the window sill and pulls his shoulder out from underneath it, letting it drop shut sharply.

His chest hurts. He’s getting sick of it aching this badly all the god damn time. He feels like he’s seventeen again with how bad it’s getting. Any stray thought or flickering glance at Eddie is enough to set it off.

Eventually, Richie climbs back under the scratchy hotel sheets and closes his eyes. At some point, he sleeps, because when he opens his eyes the sun has risen.

And at some point, the six of them end up at the clubhouse. Once more, Richie is brought face-to-face with that fucking hammock.

Fuck that hammock.

It is – next to Eddie’s little red short-shorts – possibly the singular thing most responsible for his teenage sexual awakening. Richie feels guilty for even looking at it, like acknowledging the existence of a piece of fabric is a shameful act in and of itself.

Well, it’s not the hammock really, is it? It’s what the hammock represents.

Richie going out of his way to mess with Eddie. Finding any way he could to have a plausible excuse for them to touch each other. It’s not even dirty. It’s not even anything. Just two boys sitting in a hammock together, Richie reading comic books while Eddie glares at him. A hand on his calf, hot palm lingering on bare skin. A socked foot against his forearm. Legs tangled under and over each other.

Even when there was no one else around, just the two of them in the clubhouse, they’d find some way to fight over the hammock. It didn’t matter if it weas Eddie or Richie who had climbed in first and broken the ten-minute rule. Neither of them ever willingly got out, instead using it as the excuse it was to climb in next to the other and press their bodies close.

Just looking at it makes Richie’s chest hurt. Actually thinking of it, dealing with the rush of memories it brings back, has flowers blooming behind his gritted teeth. He swallows them back, does everything he can to avoid them coming up in front of everyone like this. He really doesn’t need them to think he’s more pathetic than they already likely do.

He zones out with how hard he’s focusing on keeping himself together. When he tunes back in, Bev is giving him a worried look and Mike is rambling on about tokens.

Tokens. What a bunch of bullshit.

They should not – under any circumstances whatsoever – break up the group. Every single horror movie Richie has ever seen is screaming at him, begging him to have even a grain of common sense. The minorities always die first. Mike doesn’t have any token to find. Richie is not going to be the first motherfucker to die just because he’s gay.

As a group, they argue over it. Even after all this time, Eddie still takes his side. Maybe it’s blind loyalty, maybe it’s because they’re on the same wavelength, maybe they’re the only people in this group of assholes who are in possession of any amount of braincells.

“Fuck this,” Richie mumbles as the group finally decides to break up, each of them wandering off in their own separate directions.

He leans against a tree, closes his eyes, and listens to their retreating footsteps and the crunch of their shoes on the forest floor. He breathes through the swelling in his chest, keeps it under control until he thinks everyone is out of earshot. Then he hunches over and removes himself from the sensation of his body bringing up the flowers that have been steadily growing in the depths of his chest.

Distantly, outside of himself as he coughs and gags, Richie wonders if he should be worried; it seems like it’s getting worse. He feels physically weaker, but it’s a toss up whether that’s due to the whole flowers-growing-in-his-lungs thing or if it’s because of the evil clown fucker from out of space that seems intent on torturing them.

“Fuck, man. You still have that?”

Richie startles hard, nearly falling, hand slipping where he uses it to brace himself against the tree. The bark is gritty and slightly damp under his palm; he focuses on the texture of it pressing grooves into his skin instead of thinking about how Eddie has caught him in a moment he really would have rather kept secret.

When Richie turns to look at him wearily, Eddie is closer that he thought he would be. The other man’s hands are raised up, bracketing his chest and shaking, hovering like he’s uncertain what level of touch is allowed between them now that they’re adults. Now that they don’t know each other anymore, not really.

Richie leans his sweaty forehead against the tree trunk and stares sown at the flowers at his feet. Pink camellias, pink carnations, pink peonies. There’s a small crack across the sole of one of his converse, the left one, at the point where the shoe flexes when he walks. He can feel the damp seeping in through that crack and soaking into the fabric of his sock. Richie focuses on that, ignoring the aching waves that roll through his body.

“Yup,” he eventually forces himself to answer Eddie. “Still got it.”

Eddie hesitates, still lingering like he’s debating what he should do.

“Are you okay?”

He asks it like it’s something he should be worried about asking. Though, in Eddie’s defence, Richie hasn’t got a very good track record when it comes to his reactions to people trying to help him. He tries to give Eddie a casual ‘okay’ sign, but his hand shakes as he lifts it.

“Peachy,” he clarifies, just in case.

“How are you still alive?” Eddie blurts, and his face betrays that he didn’t really mean to ask it. Man, it feels weird to have Eddie walking on eggshells rather than arguing with him. Richie shrugs instead of answering, so next Eddie asks, “Do you think it’s something to do with Pennywise?”

No, I think it’s because I’m in love with you, you utter buffoon, you absolute certified moron, you clueless fucking idiot, Richie thinks to himself, but does not say. I think it’s because I’ve been in love with you for over thirty years now and forgot for most of it because of stupid fucking clown magic. But ever since I laid eyes on you again, it’s been coming back with a vengeance. So that’s your fault, fucker. Take some responsibility, you fucking asshole.

But perhaps clown magic erasing all your memories, including those of your childhood crush, and thereby putting your terminal flower puking disease on hold actually counts – broadly speaking – as ‘something to do with Pennywise’.

“Maybe,” Richie says instead, shrugging weakly.

Eddie frowns at him. Richie stares at the wrinkles that crease his forehead.

“Did it go away when you left Derry?”

Richie grimaces but doesn’t have the energy to come up with a lie. “No. Sort of? It didn’t go away but it didn’t get worse. It would just be triggered by random things. Y’know, memories and shit.”

“So you never told them?” Eddie looks sad, somehow.

“What? Dude, fuck no, of course I didn’t,” Richie replies.

He lifts his sleeve to wipe his mouth on it, but Eddie stops him with a hand on his forearm and passes him a travel pack of wet wipes instead.

“Why?” Eddie asks, still with that stupid sad doe look in his eyes as he watches Richie clean himself up.

Richie stares at him hard, trying to communicate through his eyes alone what he doesn’t want to confirm with his words. If he says it, he could lose Eddie, and he’s only just got him back. If he says it, it’s true. But if Eddie says it, well, he’d be the one bringing it up first. If he says it with hope, then they’ll have found themselves in a rare win-win scenario. Unlikely. More likely is that Eddie says it with disgust, but because Eddie will be the one saying it first Richie will have plausible deniability, will be able to play it all off as a joke.

Eddie doesn’t say anything though. Instead, he stares right back at him.

Richie sighs and slaps his hand – the travel pack of wet wipes still held in it – against Eddie’s chest, giving them back to him. He ignores how their fingers brush when Eddie reaches up to catch the packet before it falls to the ground. If he lingers too long on every little thing about Eddie then he’s never going to have a moment back in Derry where he isn’t puking flowers.

“Whatever, man,” Richie says as he pushes past Eddie. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket and focuses on the dampness that seeps into his left sock. “I’ve gotta go find my token, or whatever shit Mike was talking about.”

“What about sticking together? Not splitting up?” Eddie asks.

Richie shrugs.

“Gotta do some shit alone, don’t we?”

Eddie frowns at him, clearly not pleased with the answer. They walk together back to town, following the same path and settling into an uneasy silence, until they have to part ways and go to where they somehow know their tokens are. Eddie drifts towards the pharmacy on the main strip, and Richie watches him for a moment before starting the trek towards the suburbs. Towards the Tozier family home.

His house is long abandoned when he reaches it. Nobody wants to move into Derry any more – why the fuck would they? – so it’s no wonder whatever estate agent his parents sold it to couldn’t sell it on. All people want to do is get out of this small-town shithole. Nobody wants in.

Richie rips the poorly nailed planks off the front door to his childhood home and shoulders it open, forcing it from where it’s stuck to the frame because of how the wood is swollen with damp. He climbs the stairs to his old bedroom, surprised at how unchanged it is.

Beneath a loose floorboard under the frame of what was once his bed, wrapped up in a plastic bag, Richie finds exactly what he’s looking for.

A palm sized book of flower meanings with a spine cracked from how many times it has been read, the ink smudged and the pages dog-eared and uneven. Richie smiles at it, folds back the front cover. Right there, is the note from Ben. Careful cursive to a scared boy telling him he hopes the book helps somehow.