[ With a comforting prescience wrapped around him, a calm settles over his ever-thrumming nerves and twitchy synapses. (Home, he’s been saying since he arrived, home but not the place — the people, the person.) Pressed against Richie’s chest, Eddie realises this is closer than he let his wife linger in the last five years — closer than he likes to be with people, generally, with how claustrophobic affection feels (no, not affection, just whatever murky thing he mistook for it).

Here, now, Eddie wants to lose himself in Richie, already relaxing his grip on that terrible shirt to let the weakening and currently-IV-bound arm coil around Richie’s waist. It helps that he could watch Richie colour and grin, hair sticking up and glasses smudgy, all night. ]

I can’t believe you said I was right.

[ That’s going up there with I love you. Hell, slot it just above Richie’s long fingers under his chin (so careful with him, fuck). All it takes is the initial push for Eddie to open up with a sigh, still tasting a bit coppery beneath the sheen of mint toothpaste. If this is the updated material, he’s gonna be kiss-dazed for the rest of his stay. ]

You should sleep. [ But he smiles right back into a renewed kiss, savouring the gentle drag of stubble, mapping Richie’s mouth with his tongue in turn. His inner arm is still free to wander, besides, half-propped against Richie’s chest so he can skim his fingertips over the lovely column of Richie’s throat to curl into the hair at the nape of his neck. Because Eddie can touch — wants to touch. Isn’t that new and strange and wonderful? ]

There’s way too much of you to not need sleep. [ says the guy mid exhausted-babble. ] Yeah, all six hundred feet of you is gonna collapse, and then who’s gonna mack on me, huh.