#ariona

        On the first day of kindergarten, he met Richie Tozier.

        Richie Tozier was a whirlwind of a child, running into class and speaking loudly to anyone who didn’t immediately tell him to shut up. For the entire first day, Eddie witnessed him go from one person to the next, chatting their ears off and moving on with ease when they grew tired of listening to him and turned away to start coloring or something instead. The teacher had told them the ground rules when they showed up and gave them the rest of the day to decorate the labels for their cubbies, where they’d be keeping their backpacks during class. While they colored, she encouraged them to make friends and ask her any questions they needed. Eddie was plenty content to just sit by himself and color in peace, but his attention was grabbed time and time again by the tornado kid with glasses flying around the room.

        By the time Richie got to him, he had finished his drawing (in reality, it was a mesh of colors and vague shapes, but if someone were to ask, he would have chirpily explained that it was a picture of the garden in his front yard) and was simply swinging his feet back and forth and looking at all the toys available to play within the corner of the room. He was just about to get up and find something to play with when Richie plopped himself down in the chair next to Eddie, his wide, toothy grin a little lopsided, a bright band-aid on his elbow and a smudge of dirt on his knees. Eddie had merely blinked in mild shock at his sudden appearance, and didn’t have time to process something to say before Richie was spouting out the first thing that came to mind (in this case, something about dinosaurs and the color purple, though Eddie can’t remember the specifics of the conversation anymore) and their futures seemed to fall in place.

        Out of every kid Richie went up to that day, only a small handful of them actually stuck with him and became his friend, Eddie proudly being one of them. And Eddie adored all of his new friends, loved the way Bill spoke with a confident glint in his eyes even when his words came out choppy from his stutter, loved how Stan liked to pretend to be a big kid before sitting himself down in the dirt to build little castles out of sticks and leaves, but he found himself standing by Richie’s side from day one. He often declared to his parents that his best friend Richie was his favorite person in the entire world, and Richie never failed to return the sentiment to Eddie’s face, never once sounding ashamed or embarrassed by it. Not even as they got older and the kids in the grade above them started teasing them for how close they were, for how close their entire friend group was. Eddie didn’t like being made fun of, but he knew that whenever Richie laughed, he couldn’t help but to laugh along, and seeing his friends having fun and enjoying each other’s company was more important than anything anyone had to say about them.

        In fourth grade, Eddie got his first black eye.

        The punch had been childish and clumsy, but Bowers had a target and he hit it dead on, and Eddie found himself sprawled on the floor with a throbbing ache in his skull and a tenderness around his eye that made him flinch when he tried to blink. Bill was already holding back a livid Richie, who was spitting harsh words and curses far too vulgar for kids their age, while Bowers slinked back to his friends with a sinister snicker much darker than what should be possible for an eleven-year-old boy. Stan was frozen to the spot, jaw dropped in shock, before snapping back into action when Eddie shakily pushed himself into a sitting position, sucking his lower lip into his mouth and clamping his teeth down on it to hide the way it was starting to tremble with barely held back tears, anger bubbling beneath his skin that made him clench his jaw slightly, almost breaking the skin of his lip. Quickly, Stan appeared by Eddie’s side, instantly asking him if he was okay, and he looked closer to crying than Eddie felt. That almost made him laugh, but then he brought a hand up to prod at his eye and let out a hiss of pain at the stinging sensation that followed. At that sound, Richie stopped trying to go after Bowers and ducked out of Bill’s hold to practically slide across the floor to Eddie’s other side, no doubt skidding his knees in the process.

        “Are you okay?” Richie asked, his already magnified eyes looking hilariously wide behind the frames of his glasses, a mixture of anger and worry and something too complex for Eddie to get a proper understanding of shining in his gaze. Eddie nodded, releasing his lower lip to offer a slightly wobbly smile that probably wasn’t very convincing to look at, but it seemed to help ease some of the tension in Richie’s shoulders as he scanned over Eddie’s features repeatedly. “He wasn’t supposed to punch you,” Richie ended up stating after a moment, looking more serious than Eddie thought he was capable of. Absently, he noticed that Bill and Stan were making sure no one in the hallway bothered them, both sporting squared shoulders and upturned noses like some kind of bodyguards. Not for the first time, he almost let out a giggle at the sight, already forgetting about the pain, but he didn’t get the chance to laugh as Richie fully sat on the ground and said, “My dad told me about mean kids and bullies a while ago, and he said that sometimes they’ll take it too far. He said that there might be a bully who will want to hit me and hurt me and that I have to choose if I want to fight back or let it happen, ‘cause I might get in trouble with the school if I fight back but I might get more hurt if I let it happen, y’know? And I kinda knew Bowers was gonna be one of those bullies, I just didn’t know when, but he wasn’t supposed to be one of those bullies to you guys.”

        Eddie frowned, unsure of what Richie was trying to imply with that statement, and looked back at him with mild incredulity. “What does that mean?”

        “He was supposed to punch me,” Richie explained simply, seemingly unbothered, not even blinking when Eddie’s jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out in horror. “I was gonna let it happen, but only if it happened to me, ‘cause I don’t mind getting punched. I mean, I almost broke my leg once, and I can’t remember what it felt like ‘cause it was when I was four, but getting punched can’t be any worse, right? And I always make Bowers mad, and I try to just make him mad at me, so he won’t want to punch anyone else, but he did. He wasn’t supposed to, but he punched you instead, and I’m sorry.”

        “He’s not s’posed to punch anyone!” Eddie quickly exclaimed, a rush of adrenaline flowing so suddenly through his veins that he almost jumped to his feet just to make his point more clear, to shout his words louder, to make sure Richie really heard what he had to say. “He’s not s’posed to punch me, or you, or Stan, or Bill, or anybody. And you shouldn’t be saying sorry ‘cause he did!”

        For a moment, Richie seemed rooted to the floor, lips pursed in thought and brows pinched together, some kind of consideration flashing over his features that caused a flurry of wariness in Eddie’s chest, before he carefully replied, “I don’t want to see any of you get hurt.”

        And Eddie did laugh that time, a bit too loud and a little forced, a product of disbelief rather than humor. “We don’t want to see you get hurt, either, Richie!”

        “But when you get hurt, it feels like I get hurt,” Richie quickly defended, huffing out a frustrated breath and crossing his arms over his chest in childish defiance. “And then that makes two people hurt instead of one! It’d be better if it was just me, ‘cause then it’s only one, and that one is me, so there.” Then, as if to solidify his point, he stuck out his tongue in Eddie’s direction, drawing a helpless laugh from the pit of Eddie’s stomach, and the tense atmosphere shattered in an instant, argument dissipating and the punch becoming a vague memory in the form of a bruise around his eye that completely faded within the following week, becoming a forgotten memory lost among thousands of others.

        After starting middle school, the bullying got more violent, with Belch and Victor and Patrick mixing in the bunch, spurred on by the evil glint in Henry’s eyes when he realized he could get away with throwing kicks and punches and whatever other tactic of causing pain he could think of in the moment of an attack. They learned quickly the right way to push their buttons, even more so when the group of four losers turned into seven, giving them more people to target, more potential to wreak havoc. If they wanted to draw blood, they knew where to hit, who the go for first to draw the biggest reaction and create the largest effect in retaliation. Eddie can’t count how many times he had to angle his head to the side to avoid his mother spotting the slight bruises blooming in places hard to hide, but it had been manageable. Survivable. There had been an instance where Bowers unintentionally pressed a little too hard and nearly broke Eddie’s arm, but even that hadn’t been too bad.

        When Eddie was seventeen and soaking in the summer sun before his senior year, Richie became the sole target for one of their attacks, and Eddie thought his heart was going to give out.

        It had been an average day, starting with the seven of them meeting up at the Aladdin to watch whatever movie that Ben and Mike had been so excited to see, though the other five had to admit they didn’t pay much attention to what was happening on screen and only pretended to be impressed in order to appease their friends once the movie was over. They’d been heading through the barrens, seeking the shade of the trees and the refreshing chill of the Kenduskeag, when Patrick seemed to materialize behind the group and immediately wrapped an arm around Richie’s throat to keep him still. A long moment passed before the others even realized something was off, the six of them still trucking through the bushes and pushing aside low hanging branches until Stan tried to ask Richie a question and happened to look over his shoulder and see what was going on. He instantly froze, feeling his blood run cold, and murmured a strained, “Guys,” to get everyone else’s attention. From there, the situation only managed to escalate, becoming worse and worse with every passing moment.

        If someone were to ask Richie now what had happened that day, he would say that all he can remember is feeling something sharp and hearing someone scream. He still refuses to admit it had been his own scream he heard, but his friends can confirm that it had been. They can also testify that  moments after Richie screamed, Eddie had screamed as well. Because Richie got really hurt that day, at the mercy of Patrick’s twisted mind and the blade he had in hand, the others wanting to interfere but feeling certain that Patrick couldn’t actually go through with something too bad. Sure, they all went home with their fair share of busted lips and bruised noses, but they had all seen the panic in Henry’s eyes when he thought he had actually broken Eddie’s arm, and they were so sure that any lasting damage would be avoided, if only to steer clear of facing the repercussions of their actions. It had been scary, having to stand idly by while Patrick threatened to plunge his switchblade into Richie’s side and twist it until something snapped, but even Richie didn’t think Patrick would follow through. He wanted a reaction, that was all.

        In the end, Patrick did as he promised, and he slinked back into the shadows with a satisfied smirk as Richie fell to the ground, an agonizing wail ripping from the back of his throat. Eddie lurched forward as soon as Richie began to fall, and his entire body thrummed with adrenaline and fear and his stomach twisted painfully in what he assumed to be worry but felt a little too physical to pass as that, making him cry out as well as he skidded to his knees and helplessly tried to assess the damage done. Rocks broke the skin, and perhaps it’s that pain that stopped him from crumbling in on the blinding heat of something awful and horrible flaring in his side, distracting him enough that he was unable to make the obvious connection right before his eyes. At that moment, he could have lost a limb and his focus still would have stayed on Richie, shaking hands pressing against the wound and trembling voice promising that he was going to be just fine. For a long moment that day, Eddie had been scared that Richie would die.

Richie likes to say he’s too annoying and stubborn to be killed by a psychotic bully, but on that day, he was scared he might die, too. He’d been preparing his last words in his muddled brain when Mike succeeded in waving down someone who could call for an ambulance, and he was sure his final breath would be taken on the way to a hospital that could have saved him if they had just gotten there sooner. The worst part was, he wasn’t too upset about it – if anything, he was just pissed that he was in too much pain to tell his friends he loved them before fading away. And he thought he really did die, at least for a minute there, because he ended up blacking out when the ambulance reached them, and it wasn’t until he woke up in the hospital later that day that he understood he was gonna live to see the sun rise again.

        At the age of twenty-three, Eddie really does break his arm, and it’s not at the hands of a high school bully or crazed Derry psychopath. It’s at the hands of two guys trying to mug a poor kid behind a dumpster in New York City, startled when Eddie overhears them and tries to interfere. The injury isn’t even intentional, merely a product of them ducking out of the alley too fast and accidentally shoving Eddie to the ground a little too hard. The kid that had been the target of their harassment is the one who goes to call 911, and he’s the one that waves down a taxi when Eddie, through gritted teeth, tells him that he doesn’t need an ambulance and cradles his arm to his chest the entire way there, trying not to make a noise when every sharp turn and every pump in the road causes the pain flare up some more.

        It’s a quick process once he gets to the ER. They set the bone back in place, give him some pain meds to make the searing hot agony fade into a dull ache, and set him up with a cast. It isn’t until after the doctor lets him leave with a prescription in hand and the instruction to come back for a check up on a certain date that he takes out his phone with the intention of letting his friends know what had happened. He was on his way to a movie night at Mike’s place when everything went down, after all, so he figures they must be at least curious as to why he never showed up, if not already concerned. What he finds, however, is a spam of texts from everyone telling him to meet them at the hospital. It takes a minute for him to figure out the reason, but he finally finds a somewhat legible explanation from Beverly, telling him that something’s wrong with Richie and that they had to rush him to the ER. He feels his heart stutter in his chest in a blind panic and silently thanks every higher power that there may or may not be that he’s already at the same hospital as them, quickly rushing down to the waiting room to see what’s going on.

        The first person he spots is Mike, who’s leaning against the wall and chatting idly with Ben and Bill, the three of them looking fairly relaxed and at ease. That should be a sign that Richie’s okay, but it does nothing to slow his heart rate or battle the anxious twitch of his fingers. Beverly is on her phone beside them, also unbothered. As Eddie nears, the first person to notice his approach is Stan, who immediately lets out a little sigh of relief and gets to his feet with a friendly greeting. Without bothering to say hi back, Eddie comes to a stop beside him and asks, “What happened?”

        “Oh, uh—” Stan shakes his head, brows pinched together as he tries to piece together the right way to word his explanation. After a minute, where Eddie is impatiently shifting his weight from foot to foot, he finally says, “Nothing really happened, is the thing. We were just waiting for you to get there so we could start the first movie, and then Richie just screamed all of a sudden, and he started crying and couldn’t tell us what was wrong, so we just brought him here because we didn’t know what else to do. The doctor wasn’t sure what was up at first, but after Richie calmed down, she finally figured out what was going on. Apparently, nothing’s wrong with Richie, but—” Stan smiles slightly, looking a little bit amused, and turns back with the intention of sharing an amused look with the rest of their friends, only to find all of them are staring intently at Eddie. Stan falters, then follows their gazes, finally taking in Eddie’s full appearance – including the cast on his arm. Paling slightly, he breathes out a quiet little, “Oh, shit,” and averts his eyes to the ceiling instead.

        “What?” Eddie asks, confused and feeling even more worried as all of his friends avoid meeting his gaze. A frustrated noise rumbles in the back of his throat. “What the fuck is going on?!”

        There’s a long moment where they all look at each other helplessly, silently urging someone to be the first to speak up, but none of them get the chance to before a doctor pushes open the door, sees Eddie standing there, and gleefully chirps, “Oh, you must be the soulmate, then!”

        Eddie blanches. “Um—”

        “Looks like you already got fixed up, which is good,” she hums, raking her gaze over his cast before looking down at her clipboard and scanning over the words written there. “Your boy is fine, kind of shaken up about the whole thing, but I’m guessing the pain went away whenever you got your pain meds. Good timing, too, because I was real close to giving him some of his own just to help him calm down.” She flips to the next page, scribbles something down, and then looks up at him with a smile, either not noticing or blatantly ignoring the way that he’s staring at her – eyes wide, jaw unhinged and face drained of all color. “Do you wanna come back with me? He’s free to go since there’s nothing actually wrong with him, but he’s still pretty shaken. Maybe seeing you is just what he needs before leaving.”

        Dumbly, Eddie only nods, briefly glancing around at his friends, who only offer him small encouraging smiles, before following her through the door and down the hall. The walk is short, but it feels like a year goes by with how muddled Eddie’s thoughts are, trying to make sense of the situation, trying to rationalize it all and assure himself that there must be some kind of understanding. There’s no way that his soulmate is one of his best friends and he’s never managed to figure it out, right? The two of them have gotten hurt on plenty of occasions, surely he would have connected the dots if it were true. Then again, they mostly got hurt in high school, and it tended to happen at the same time due to the Bowers gang, so they likely wouldn’t have noticed if they were feeling each other’s pain as well as their own. Actually, now that Eddie’s considering it, it kind of makes sense.

        He thinks about his father’s story, about how he once burst into tears when he was a kid over a pain in his leg that had come from his soulmate. Then, kind of faint and far away, he recalls Richie’s words from elementary school, from the day Eddie got punched: I mean, I almost broke my leg once, and I can’t remember what it felt like ‘cause it was when I was four, but getting punched can’t be any worse, right? And, a few moments later, when Richie had said, But when you get hurt, it feels like I get hurt.

        He thinks of the day Patrick attacked Richie, the harsh glint of his switchblade reflecting the bright summer sun, the way his lips tugged back in a smug, cocky kind of grin when he walked away. Eddie had hurt a lot that day, but he remembers the real pain, beneath the panic and the scraped knees and the fear of Richie losing his life. He remembers the way his side felt like it was on fire like he had been the one who got stabbed, the agony hidden under the adrenaline rushing through his veins.

        He thinks of how he can’t help but smile when he sees Richie smile. How he always laughs when Richie laughs. He thinks of the moments he’s seen Richie at his lowers and felt that heaviness in his chest that felt a little too harsh to call sympathy. He thinks of many things, and he thinks…

        Above all else, he thinks that there’s no one else in the world he’d rather his soulmate be.

        When Eddie walks into Richie’s hospital room, he feels a little bit scared. Richie seems kind of out of it, kind of exhausted, whether it be from the pain he felt or the emotional toll that came with it, but he smiles when he sees Eddie, and Eddie smiles back because he’d be a fool to do anything else. And it goes a little bit quiet as the doctor leaves the room, Eddie still standing a couple steps inside the doorway, trying to think of the right way to bring this up. The right way to tell Richie.

        But Richie beats him to it, gaze trailing down and landing on Eddie’s cast. He only falters for a second before his smile grows wider, eyes flickering back up to meet Eddie’s. “Huh. So, you’re the one who did this to me,” he muses, holding up his right arm and stretching it out in front of him, as if to make it even more clear what he’s talking about. After a moment, he lets his arm fall to his chest and hums lightly. “Figures. I should have known.”

        And Eddie doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he doesn’t, at least not at first. He only moves forward, a little slow and timid, until he can sit on the edge of Richie’s bed, still staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Then, unsure of what else to say, he murmurs, “I felt it when you almost broke your leg.” Richie blinks, slow and languid, as Eddie explains, “I should have figured it out when you told me about that because my dad always told me about that time when I was four and I started screaming bloody murder. And then you told me you almost broke your leg when you were four, and I should’ve—”

        “I told you that when we were nine,” Richie interrupts, shaking his head with an amused little grin. “You were a smart kid, but no nine-year-old is smart enough to connect those kinds of dots.”

        “But I should have,” Eddie insists, his body moving faster than his mind as he takes his uninjured arm and reaches forward to grab Richie’s hand in his, intertwining their fingers. Richie looks at their linked hands in some kind of awe as Eddie tells him, “I should have known sooner than this. It should’ve been obvious. I can’t believe I’ve known you since I was five and never realized.” Huffing out a light laugh, he shakes his head and looks down at his cast to add, “Actually, I can’t believe it took a broken arm to figure it out. A sprained ankle or something would have been a lot easier.”

        Though Richie chuckles along, that statement seems to be enough to finally bring him back to full alertness, pushing himself into a sitting position as he looks at the cast, lips tugging down in a frown, equal parts concerned and sympathetic. “What happened?”

        Eddie only shrugs. “I stopped some assholes from mugging a kid. When they pushed past me, I fell over and landed on it wrong. It wasn’t that bad, to be honest.”

        “Wasn’t that bad?” Richie repeats with a snort, looking at Eddie incredulously. “Eds, I literally felt your pain with this, and let me tell you, it was hell on earth. You can’t just say it wasn’t that bad and expect me to believe you when I almost blacked out from how much it hurt.”

        “Well, maybe my pain tolerance is just higher than yours,” Eddie tells him, lips twitching up into an amused smile at the offended noise Richie makes in return. He watches as Richie parts his lips and closes them a few times, trying to think of with a good response to that, only to come up empty-handed again and again. Unable to help himself, Eddie starts to laugh at the bewilderment on Richie’s face, but the laugh doesn’t last too long when, apparently giving up on trying to figure out something to say, Richie resorts to action instead, and Eddie barely has time to register Richie’s hand on his jaw before he’s guiding Eddie’s face closer and their lips are pressed together.

        If Eddie wasn’t sure about this whole soulmate thing already, then this kiss would convince him wholeheartedly, because every cell in his body seems to react to the feeling of Richie’s mouth on his. He feels his heart stutter and start and speed up and slow down erratically, feels his fingers tremble when he lifts his good arm and curls his fingers around the back of Richie’s neck to pull him closer, goosebumps rising along the expanse of his skin when Richie pushes against him to deepen the kiss a little bit further. Time doesn’t matter to him right now, and when they part, panting into each other’s open mouths, he isn’t sure how long it’s been since he walked in here. He doesn’t really care, either.

        Sucking in a harsh breath, Eddie trails his hand around until he’s cupping Richie’s face in his palm, keeping his eyes closed as he leans their foreheads together. A little airily, he says, “I’m sorry it hurt that bad when I broke my arm.”