idiot child of someone's loins

@gobeepmyself and i getting fired up about our characters tonight 

The wind shivered the windows into fear, and they lit up with horror as thunder touched the earth with an angry hand.

Richie flinched - but the motion was in his face. His nose screwed up and his glasses lifted in reaction. He felt clammy as if he’d been stuck in the rain.

“Not really,” he tells the guy, matter-of-factly. He’s meant to be buying cigarettes. Well, not really meaning but more so there’s a clown and we’re gonna try to kill it but it’s probably gonna kill me so obviously the best use of my time is buying something i gave up years ago. “I’m just not a big fan of the whole storm thing.” 

The windows quake again, as if the storm were responding with insult.

Richie hates his balcony. It’s only good for smoking. Too small to camp out with chairs and enjoy a glittering city.

Somehow it got stuck being dressed in aesthetic lights that his assistant insisted on: They’ll be so nice from below! So instagram worthy. Yeah, no fucking shit - for hipsters!

Not for some grungy idiot in his mid-life-crises-thirties with a weak stomach and some gay secrets. He huffs to himself sans amusement and leans a hip uncautiously into the railing. The way down is long and people look small, and Richie’s never been a huge fan of heights but a condo like this? It goes for chump change (for him) and it’s nice. Central. Easily accessible. 

His gaze flicks to the door behind him, and he sucks back that first, sweet inhale. It has that very significant flavor of this again? Richard Tozier, you’re a fucking failure. You quit. Big shock you’re back on this bullshit. that he welcomes in the space of his lungs. Weird how that voice sounds like Eddie. He mulls that tidbit over, legs crossed, butt to his mouth, gaze gone into the netherworld. To Richie, it lasts an eternity - in which he comes out of it with bambi legs and burning eyes unblinking. For the outside world? Just a few seconds.

He clears his throat for no one and taps the length of his cigarette to encourage the ash away. It flutters to the floor of his cramped balcony, just a sad pile, a new thing for him to stare at in consideration. Unfortunately: it tells him nothing.

So he pulls open the sliding door in two steps: first, the big head honcho door gets slipped back. Second, he pulls the screen door to the edge until there’s only an inch of uncloseable space. Calls it done and done as he resumes his dangerous lean.

“Did you know that back in the 40′s, cigarettes were like - fucking asthma aids?” Richie asks on a nicotine foggy-breath. There. No more separation between him and Eddie. Yeah - he knows it opens up some leeway for Eddie to come at him and shit on his dick about the smoking. I quit, he had told him around a restaurant table and then fucking ate those words after the whole clown-from-our-childhood-tried-to-fuck-us-up-and-ate-your-arm thing. You know. That thing that happens like, every day. He wants to roll his eyes and almost denies it. 

I think, in the RPC, there’s always been a small issue: miscommunication. And it can happen easily! So easily. Sometimes intentionally - which is a misuse of that power that somebody can have. I see and witness in public and private a lot of hearsay - which, yes, we all witness. We are all allowed to have our private opinions and feelings. It’s something we’re entitled to and despite the fact that we encourage positivity, we can still feel the opposite. I think it’s normal that not everyone will get along, or follow someone back, or anything like that, despite how much you may want that and vice versa. 

Having those private feelings are normal. And if you feel that you need to bring it forward, having the ability to bring it to the attention of the cause is great! Sometimes miscommunication is settled best that way. But mind what you say, and whom you say it to - this site has unfortunately proved that while we all entertain private feelings, some people cannot contain those private feelings in the negative zone and feel that they have to announce it but never with a forward face.

Anonymous use can be great - to confide in a secret that maybe you’re not ready to tell yet, or spread quiet love. It’s a very interesting tool, in the sense that it is also abused. Please think of the ramifications of going into someone’s askbox and leaving an anonymous message that both positively raises someone up and negatively affects the person violently. Not only to whom you send it to, but on behalf of the person you send it for. 

Picture this! Richie. With a girl on his lap.

Yeah, laugh it up. He distracts from his phone to drop a hand to her shoulder, thumbing the line of her collarbone as a comfort move. This is how it goes: shit happens in Maine - he rediscovers a flame and watches, feels it, get snuffed out. He tells himself yeah whatever it’s like I only knew the guy again for a whole five minutes and that’s what he continues to try and tell himself. But it’s rough. He knew Eddie, once. Knew him well and fucking – he adored that kid. It’s kind of hard to adore someone when they’re dead so here we are. Moving on. Maybe. It’s complicated because surprise! He feels like shit. 

Fine. It’s not going well. But Beverly is a welcomed split in the path to healing or whatever hippie mojo coincides with recovery like that. Sweet, fire glazed Beverly who looks like a God in her reclined position, mulling the ceiling whilst her hair pools over his lap and between the gap of couch and denim - she looks aglow. And he can see the difference.

When they first gathered again with fragile, shitty ass memories she was no different from a ghost. They all saw it but they didn’t say shit: the marks were loud enough. They intervened only when they had to After. And with Bev’s energy and her display of power it wasn’t much. Properly pulled from his phone, he sets the device down and trails the fingers of his other hand through her hair, flinching in quiet sympathy when his fingers catch knots and lock there.

His cigarette goes flying with a flick. It’s light enough that the wind takes it, clumsily handling it through the air with a cherry burning, all to come to a rolling stop at the tip of Stan’s boots. Very dramatic.

“I guess it’s true what they say,” is the comment he begins with, eyes squinting behind a pair of glasses he doesn’t really need. There’s no question, nor suspicion behind the gaze. Just a good ol’ casual squint - due curtsey the sun trying to peek into his macula. He shifts his weight and disturbs the dusty dirty around his own shoes. “A witch can’t resist a good spell.”

Richie doesn’t honestly know who says that, other than him, in that moment alone. But it’s something to say, and he can follow it up with a punchline - plumped up with a stupid, crooked grin: “Get it? Because I’m spellbinding.” He says it - plain as day. Kind of preens, chest puffed over it. 

It’s not a good joke, man, but nice try.

Truth is: he lacks the words to greet Stanley. It’s been a spell since he’s seen the witch, long enough that Richie’s gotten used to the pain of absence. When he first left Derry with his folks leading the way, the separation from his then-pack and then-emissary had been almost unbearable. His mother had fawned over him for days in frantic worry, sweat in her hairline and wild panic in her eyes about it as he writhed and gripped the swelling emptiness in his chest. Over the years, with the assimilation into a new pack, it had ebbed and flowed into a tiny tickle of a stream opposed to a mad-undertow ocean, but it had knocked on the door of his feelings every so often. 

Most of the others didn’t seem to remember. Mike had immunity since he had stayed. Ben and Bill had forgotten with the times and the age, maybe. Beverly and Eddie greeted him with a fondness that the wolf sharing his body reveled in, drooling and panting through it all.

But Stan? Stan was a whole other thing.

he recognizes this, these frantic messy movements that richie’s going through.  he wants to help, wants to unclip richie’s seatbelt and get him moving properly but every blink is slow and he feels like he might be wading through molasses with every motion.  the only thing left for him to do is watched with a kind of detached curiosity as richie swears at him and flails around in his seat with a sort of reckless abandon. 

richie pulls at him, tilts him this way and that and stan keeps moving to try and accommodate, his backpack hitting the ground with a dull thud, but by the time he gets there richie’s gone again.  it’s all very overwhelming.  

by the time richie frees himself he hasn’t even opened the door, and stan watches his husband spill out onto the sidewalk before reforming to smother him.  he raises his arms to finally wrap around richie and tears spring to his eyes ; he makes an incredibly pitiful sound and tries to swallow it down just as quickly, face pressed to richie’s shoulder.  ❛ sorry, i’m sorry, i’m so sorry - ❜ he repeats it over and over again, as though that’ll change what he’s done.  it won’t, stan isn’t stupid enough to think it will.  but it’s nice to try, isn’t it? nice to pretend for a moment that there are words to patch this up again.

❛ rich - ❜ stan pulls back, arms dropping because they’re shaking with the effort, and grabs at richie’s jacket, the hem where he doesn’t have to raise his arms up too high to make contact.  he needs to be anchored in, just for a second, just to get his head on straight.  ❛ i didn’t…i didn’t bring any money or anything, i barely have any clothes, i just - ❜ it’s the messiest explanation stan’s ever given, and it seems so inconsequential but he has to start somewhere, doesn’t he? here seems as good a place as any.  

❛ i’m so sorry, richie. ❜

Like a jukebox picking its next song, files click and pass in his head:

you’re a fucking idiot!

it’s ok.

i can’t believe you’re here.

These all work in context but Richie decides on nonverbal for a start. He imagines himself squeezing Stan around the middle until all the blood goes to his head and, pressurized, pops off. Even metaphorically covered in blood - Richie doesn’t and wouldn’t stop. Nice. Nice to know, man. His face is wet when he comes back from wherever his head takes him to, and his glasses are askew. Even through his shitty eyes, he can still tell Stanley is the most beautiful dude he’s ever seen.

“I love you,” he has to say it, he has to. Something in his blood and his bones and his guts are screaming for it to be out there. A hand comes up and he roughly palms at Stanley’s face, using his other hand to fumble his glasses straight so his vision is good again. Lines mark Stanley’s face that speak of exhaustion and agony. He looks unwell. He looks sad. Richie desperately wants to kiss it away. Shoo, face, shoo.

So he does.

A quick press that hurts his teeth and it probably couldn’t even be classified as a kiss but that’s what he labels it. When he pulls away, his glasses-hand moves to cover Stan’s and that’s when he feels the fine lines of curled bandage. Rich freezes and feels the ice climb up his legs, locking his knees and making him cold, so cold, with gut roil and a breath in the bottom of his throat like a disgusting hiccup. The fanaticism is back; but he’s so gentle when he extracts Stanley’s grip from his jacket, fingers slipping up the hem of his sleeve, and gazes upon what has given him nightmares consistently.