Ao3:saintsrow2
Sleeping had always been fraught for Eddie. As a child it was a time when his anxieties saw fit to run free, his fears taking seed in the shadows and growing into vast creeping vines until it was 3 AM and he was still wide awake, staring at the dark wall as his mind raced. What if the plant he had touched when he was playing in the Barrens was poison ivy? What if the ache in his legs that Stan said were growing pains was a sign there was something terribly wrong? What if that dark shape in the corner was the leper from outside that old house, waiting for the moment when Eddie was most alone and defenceless? What if... As an adult, the fears only transformed, never leaving, the childhood worries about bullies and monsters becoming adult agonies over work, money, dissecting the possible implications of microexpressions on Myra's face in the period before an argument, when the tension in the house was so thick it was like the moments before a storm, when the air was so stifling and hot you couldn't breathe.
When he was a kid he had no real way to handle this other than to obsess over the damage to your health that would be caused by a lack of sleep, and to spend his nights counting how many hours of sleep he'd get if he fell asleep right that second. Five hours of sleep before I have to get up for school. Four hours of sleep before I have to get up for school . The rare occasions he was allowed, he found he slept better on sleepovers. This felt absurd; sleepovers were not for sleeping , they were for watching the terrible horror movies Bev smuggled out of the Blockbuster, listening to the stupid ghost stories and urban legends that Richie and Bill loved so much, eating so much junk food that you felt sick. Eddie put down the good night's rest to exhaustion, but you couldn't rely on your friends to run you ragged every night, especially not on the bad weeks when his mom wouldn't let him see people for days, trapped in his room under the veil of getting better from whatever illness he supposedly had, when he had no friends to measure the normality of his reality by and his fears were allowed to run rampant. It was ironic that he probably slept the least at times when he was supposed to be getting the most rest.
His adult response to his problems sleeping was to adopt obsessive control over every aspect of his sleeping situation. If anyone were to ask he would have called it good sleep hygiene, and Myra condoned this kind of careful eye on your health without question, and there wasn't really anyone else close enough to ask. He thoroughly researched the sleeping pills he bullied his doctor into prescribing him, he turned his phone off an hour before he went to bed, he never worked where he slept, he monitored his diet and his exercise like a hawk. Eddie tried to cut himself off from the world as much as possible, create a deprivation tank in his own home to try and hammer his brain into enough silence that he could sleep. It made... Some amount of difference. He told himself the memory foam mattress, the sheets he bought, and the white noise he had to listen to, and being in bed at the same minute of every day made a difference. He slept in a cocoon; stiffly lying on his back, earbuds in, deafened the world around him, couldn't see or hear or feel where he was, couldn't even see his wife by his side.
Maybe it helped, or maybe it was just nice to have control over something. Either way, he still had a lot of restless nights.
The first night after killing Pennywise he had slept like a rock, but that was probably because he was heavily sedated, sleeping off the emergency surgery and the 72-hours of wakefulness that had preceded it. He slept for two nights almost continuously; he woke up intermittently, tiny bursts of consciousness he didn't remember, only getting flashes of the faces of people around him, of staticy fluorescent lighting, the horrific storm whipping itself into a frenzy outside the window. It was enough to give him a lasting impression of the hospital room, of the tiled ceiling with its flecked pattern and the way the cheap pink curtains trembled constantly.
When he actually woke up the first thing he saw was Richie's face and the first thing he thought was oh. This is nice .
Richie would attest that he did not look nice. He was haggard and tired, face grey from lack of sleep, wearing several days worth of stubble, hair even more of an untamed mess than usual. His glasses were still cracked and he'd been wearing the same clothes for days, sleeping in uncomfortable hospital chairs, drinking cheap coffee from vending machines. Richie would have said he probably looked half-dead.
But to Eddie, who had been half-dead (and fully dead for a few, particularly upsetting seconds he preferred not to think about), waking up from a series of rambling, incoherent dreams filled with darkness and the childish nightmares of his youth that suddenly felt far more real and pressing than the mundane adult fears he was normally plagued by, seeing Richie's face as soon as he opened his eyes was the best thing he possibly could have seen.
"Am I glad to see you," had been the first thing Eddie had said.
"I don't know, are you?" Richie had replied, grinning to try and fight back against the tears that were threatening to spill over at any moment. It didn't really work.
"I think your face is the first thing I want to see when I wake up every day," Eddie said. His head hurt and his mouth tasted awful. He wanted to drink a lot of water. He wanted to take a long shower. He wanted Richie to smile. He was vaguely aware he was probably still half asleep and the medication was messing with his brain, but as Richie sat in the warm light of the sun beginning to peek through the storm clouds outside his window, Eddie didn't care so much about himself.
"I think your wife might have a problem with that," Richie said, his laughter a little hesitant. His eyes fixed on Eddie's face and he kept smiling, but his lips stayed parted the whole time, as though there were words waiting to be formed that he could not quite swallow back on.
Eddie didn't have a chance to reply because the others returned from whatever mission to scavenge more food and clothes they had been on, bursting into his room and filling it with the elation of being alive, surging forward with their love and their celebration.
He didn't have a chance to ask him to, but Richie was there when Eddie woke up the next morning too, asleep in the chair pulled up by Eddie's bed, head lolling against his chest. Eddie didn't wake him up, took the opportunity to drink in what it was like to watch Richie Tozier sleep. He hadn't seen Richie asleep since they were both seventeen, lying on the floor of Stan's bedroom when Eddie woke up first, that awful twilight hour at sleepovers when everyone else was still asleep and you didn't want to disturb them. Seventeen years old and lying side-by-side with Richie; teenage Richie, who was like a newborn fawn in his uncertainty of his long and brand new body, and extremely unlike a fawn in his reckless attitude, hurling himself into life and his future without any concern. In their teenage years, Eddie had become aware of some new frantic energy about Richie; he had never understood what it was and couldn't express to the others, who had been observers of Richie's high-energy mania for their entire childhoods, what exactly he saw in Richie that was new, only that sometimes standing too close to Richie made him feel like he was leaning in too close to a fire, that there part of him that wanted to lean in closer to the warmth, that didn't care at all if the hair on his arms got singed or if the heat of the flames choked the air out of his lungs, that didn't care if he breathed in smoke as long as he could watch the light of the fire dancing. He thought of all this less in words and more in choices he made almost involuntarily; he could have easily rolled away and gone back to sleep, or woken Richie up, or crept out of the room over the sleeping forms of his other friends. But that lazy Sunday morning in 1993 Eddie Kaspbrak chose to lay on the floor side-by-side with Richie Tozier, and watched Richie sleep. It would have been an easy cliche to say in sleep that Richie looked peaceful, but he didn't, really. There was still a restless energy to him. He was more coiled spring than boy at that point, a terrifying amount of potential held back only by the smallest part of restraint. With their shoulders brushing together, Eddie wondered what it would be like if Richie was allowed to spring free, to be unrestrained by anything and to be completely himself.
Twenty years later Eddie Kaspbrak lay in bed and looked at forty year old Richie Tozier as he slept. He was older, had grown up bigger and stronger than his spindly childhood self, the sharp angles of his face turning into stronger lines and shapes that felt solid, protective, defensive. There was a tiredness to him that had come with age and no doubt with stress, but Eddie remembered that coiled spring and he was sure he could still see it. Lying in bed, his head still foggy with exhaustion, the early dawn light turned pinkish by the curtains, he understood that the spark inside Richie Tozier had not gone out. In his sleep, Richie's eyes moved under his lids, chasing some dream no one but him would ever know. He smelled like cigarettes and when Eddie reached out a hand to touch his arm he didn't wake up right away but took a little while, stirring slowly out of sleep. He turned his head to look at Eddie, blinking owlishly behind his huge glasses. Then his eyes focused and his face split into a huge smile.
"Man," Richie said, "am I glad to see you."
If you looked at it one way it took a year, and if you looked at it another way it took twenty-eight years, but eventually Eddie got what he wanted. Richie was the first thing he saw when he woke up every day.
It was a morning like any morning in their home. Eddie woke up, his eyes slowly coming to focus on the doors to the balcony outside their bedroom, the blinds that hung over them trembling slightly, making the light that shone in drift in stripes up and down the hardwood floor, tracing out the shapes and highlighting the gold in the warm brown wood as it swept back and forth. In the distance he could hear the soft, faraway roar of LA traffic, the distant humming of the fridge and of the aircon, but it was almost, but not entirely, drowned out by the rumbling under his ear.
Richie snored like a car engine that needed tuning but it didn't bother Eddie. He didn't need the white noise blaring through his headphones every night anymore, had sort of forgotten he ever used to bother with it; Richie slipped so seamlessly into his life that the idea of being without felt alien to him. Lying with his head pillowed on Richie's chest, Richie's arm around him, Eddie felt a lot like he was with some enormous purring cat. When he moved his face the soft curls of Richie's chest hair brushed against his cheek.
He stretched a little, just a little, testing his legs and arms and finding ah yes, there they were, in perfect working order. His foot scratched against Richie's leg when he moved. Something popped loudly in his knee. There you are, Eddie Kaspbrak, alive and kicking. You're getting older but you're still getting. In his sleep, Richie pulled Eddie closer, turning his head to press his face against Eddie's hair. His breath was soft against Eddie's hair, strands floating across his face. Eddie let himself go limp against Richie's side, his arm curling around Richie's waist, as far as he could reach. Oh, he liked that Richie was big . He liked that Richie was big and soft and that sometimes Eddie got to be a small spiky little thing curled behind him, or he could be a sharp loud explosion taking up all the noise and all the space in the room, and either way Richie would still love him. Right then he felt like neither of those; right then he was languorous and content, warm in every place where their skin touched.
Eddie was becoming more and more awake, but he wasn't particularly possessed by any desire to move. It was 8:10 AM on a Saturday morning. There were things to do, but they could wait. They would still be there and he would still be alive to do them later. He traced meaningless patterns over Richie's stomach, fingers brushing over the downy hair that covered him, exploring the softness that lay across his hips and belly. Eddie was intimately familiar with every inch of him by this point, but it never ceased amazing him how much he liked every part of Richie. He liked his hair and his body and his snoring and the way he was so warm to lie beside it was like that spark in him, that teenage fire, had turned into something huge and roaring, like the potential was finally sprung...
"Hey sunshine," Richie said, finally waking up. "It's good to see you."
"Morning," Eddie said. He leaned his head back. "Give me a kiss."
"Mm. Demanding." Richie obliged anyway, because he always did. "Sorry. I stink. Morning breath."
"No, it's ok. I like it."
"You're so gross, Kaspbrak."
Eddie murmured noncommittally and yawned, stretched again, almost like he was indulging in it. Richie watched him through half-closed eyes, smiling to himself in a way that said he was enjoying seeing his boyfriend, even if it was the hundredth time they'd woken up together, even if it was the thousandth. Richie's other hand, the one that wasn't wrapped around Eddie's shoulders, ran down to touch the scar across Eddie's chest. Richie did that sometimes, just reached out, just touched it. Eddie had thought it was ugly, but he'd changed his mind. It was dramatic and striking and frightening, but the scar itself wasn't the bad things that had happened to him. Quite the opposite; the scar was the sign he could heal, and live. The scar was a sign he was alive. Eddie Kaspbrak was alive.
Richie yawned and the sound reverberated through his chest. He scratched idly at his stomach and it seemed for a moment like he was considering getting out of bed but he thought better of it, giving up and resigning himself to being trapped in Eddie's grasp. It was not a battle he fought particularly hard to win.
"You sleep ok?" He said.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "Yeah, I slept really good."