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“Richie, Richie, Richie,” Eddie’s little voice always strains to sing in the mornings - a song to wake his boyfriend up just as much as it is to have him snoozing deeper. A song like a happy, hay farm hen, to let Richie Tozier know with the birds half of how loved he really is. It’s part of their gentle, sunrise routine, now that they sleep most nights together; now that Eddie will go kitty-cat-crawling out of his bathroom window with a sneaky, butter-up chin kiss to his momma and a pink paisley pillow left wedged under his covers, now that he’ll stuff his clothes up in his backpack and press note after note of ‘went out early ma’ all sticky green on the headboard. And by the time his head’s gone whizzing under every star down the sidewalk, and his boyfriend’s crooning at him like a pigeon to, “c’mon up, tiny baby!” from the Toziers’ brown-beam window ledge, it’ll be morning. Eddie’s favourite; the warmest part of the day, where it’s all so easy to pretend that they are married and far away, and that they have all the time in the world. Where Richie will grind his teeth in his sleep and Eddie will nuzzle the knobble of his jaw all giggly to stop it, and the day is fanned out clear in front of ‘em and everything’s perfectly calm and slow and okay.So Eddie’ll swipe the soft end of his pinky finger ‘round the curve of Richie’s funny, snuffly nose with all this gratitude high in his tummy, and push a curl or two away from his ear, and keep on warbling, “you’re lookin’ mighty pretty, and waking you up’s a pity, but your legs keep kicking up my bum ‘n’ your breath is smellin’ shitty.” The second little chunk of Richie and Eddie’s morning routine extravaganza is at this point where Richie starts drooling on his boyfriend’s fingers, and Eddie will give him a clip ‘round the ear and cackle like crazy, and Richie will blush beetroot as he blinks awake and makes sense of it all, before snorting it off and pulling Eddie’s tiny, morning-curled head up against his heart. The part where they go and eat French dippy toast in ketchup and poke their feet at each other under the breakfast table through funny soccer stockings - apart from on the mornings where they don’t. Apart from mornings like this one, Saturday morning, where Eddie’s little voice comes peeking up around the covers like a happy cockerel as soon as the sun does, too, and all it gets back is a teeny tiny whine.A bad morning; they’ve had their fair share of these, as well, you see.Eddie pushes himself up on his elbow from where Richie’s laying on his side, steep curve in his spine up under Eddie’s nose and half-asleep face pointed up towards the drawings pasted into the wall; ‘me and my kitten’ reads one of them, atop a crayon car crash by ‘rich tozier, 2nd grade’. Sweetheart. That kitten, now a very fat, sleepy orange cat, is currently curled up snoring under Richie’s neglected computer desk, and his crayons half chewed somewhere down the back of it. Eddie runs a sugarplum finger over the arch of his shoulder and sings again, more quietly this time, “is my baby still sleeping?” Richie’s nose comes poking around slowly, swollen cheeks all grey and eyes only half-open; been awake for over an hour, just still as a leopard slug. His fingers are jittering all funny and his lips are squeaking instead of a little ‘nuh uh! Wide awake!’, “it’s gone all funny again, Eddie, my head’s gone funny,” with a hiccup at the end. And Eddie understands almost immediately, as his boyfriend croaks from under the funny pink bedspread with the embroidered froggie faces ‘round the thick of it, that this is one of his bad mornings. Dis-funk-shun, executive; a funny pair of words Richie learned young from behind the green-and-yellow beads of a doctors’ surgery abacus, and Eddie learned when Richie birdie-fed it all back to him on the playground after his mom had dropped him back in after lunch. She’d taken him down to the doctor that morning in a quiet fit of worry, surely the one hundredth this month, after Richie had been too tired to change out of his pyjamas for four days, and had cried every time she’d tried to give him a bath or put him in the shower. “I can’t do it, mama,” he’d sob over almost everything - brushing his teeth, eating his lunch, picking a pair of socks to wear. “It’s makin’ me all sore between the ears. I can’t do it.” The boy full of August sunshine and tangerine pulp had seemingly flattened out cold overnight, but apparently, however frightening, this was actually very normal for little boys like Richie; boys so bright and bouncy and wired curly and coloured and tight, that, sometimes, their bodies just give up.But Eddie never does. God, no, he never did. Even on the playground that first day, when everyone was pointing and snorting over poor, sad, silly Richie Tozier, at school half-crying in his goose-print jammies, whispering away, “it’s like I can’t barely get out of bed! And I forget how to spell my name and spill milk all over my tummy, s’a nightmare, Spaghetti.”Eddie-Spaghetti just took his hand, like he always did when it didn’t carry any weight, and wasn’t cause for any awful names spat at ‘em in the science lab corridor. “I’ll just write your name for you ‘til you’re better, yeah?” He suggested gently. “And I can wipe off your tummy when you need it. We can go to the bathrooms and get a paper towel stash up in my pocket.” And that saw Richie’s first, banana peel smile of the week. They’re seventeen now, right at the back end of it, but Richie is still getting yanked at the ankles by his executive dysfunction every so often, and so Eddie still takes his hand this morning like he did back then above the crisscross of the hopscotch chalk. His hands are very clean and they smell like hotel cotton; s’usually the first step to calming Richie down. When he’s woken up feeling all fuzzy and dreadful and grumpy, a little touch from his boyfriend is like a teeny tiny bit of earth back in him. Like he’s floating ‘round up above the moon where the air is thin and black and scary, and, with Eddie, his toes just dust the ground by the teeniest tiniest inch, and he knows home is never too far away. He knows he’ll never start rocketing off into the cold of space forever; Eddie won’t let him go. “Well, okay, that’s okay,” comes his soft, buckwheat voice. “Is it screwed on tight enough to tell me how y’feel?”A wonky hand comes up above Richie’s chest, and twitches side to side, as to say ‘not really’.Eddie leans his chin on his boyfriend’s shoulder. Tickles a little kiss onto the divot of it between the words of, “you wanna play the ghost game?” and giggles behind his teeth when Richie’s hand comes up again with its knuckles all pink and chewed-on, but then drops on second thoughts in exchange for a shy nod. The teeniest, tiniest pinch of colour comes up into his boyfriend’s cheeks; the teeniest, tiniest show of happiness. He likes to play games. “Gotcha,” Eddie says, pushing Richie’s hair back as it comes swooping down to hang stringy in his face again. He does a funny scope of the room with his eyes all crossed and taps his fingers ‘gainst the curve of his boyfriend’s neck in mock nerves; knows it makes Richie smile the biggest when he acts it out all goofy. World’s tiniest ghost-hunter, he always hails him. World’s tiniest and prettiest. “Alright ghost, one click-clack for yes and two click-clacks for no. Capeesh?”Click-clack - one from Richie’s tongue. Eddie swears he hears his little snickers under his own. “Clever! Clever! This must be a professor ghost or somethin’. What on earth’s he doing haunting this teenage boy’s stinking bedroom? Hanging out with all these dirty undies, huh!” Eddie teases, hands coming down very slowly and cautiously under Richie’s arm to knead on his tummy, much like that chubby orange cat does when he joins the pair of them in the nighttimes for a cuddle. When they’re all wrapped up like bats in Maggie’s woolly blankies and their bums have gone numb for camping up in each other’s arms for so long, and up comes a pair of wiry whiskers and green, fishy eyes - peanut, that’s what Richie calls him; peanut, pork-pie, poop-face. He’ll purr all his nicknames into those funny orange ears, as peanut curls right up comfy under Eddie’s chin, and it’s so consistently adorable that Richie has to take a grainy, thumb-smudged picture on his phone every time for them to marvel at. “Has this ghostie got a headache?”Click clack. “Ah, axe to the head, that’s what my - uh - files say. Does he think he can get out of his bed? Are his legs easy to move?”Two, this time - well, three, if you count the quiet one where Richie’s tongue got all confused against the back of his lip and had him trying again. Holds up his fingers in a frantic but excited little ‘two’, to keep on playing ghost. Getting a smidge of energy; having a smidge of fun. “And is he a sad little ghost? His heart isn’t feeling too fresh, either?”Eddie is careful to look at Richie this time, as his hands start up their gentle little biscuit-making presses and his nose draws in close enough for the tips of both boys’ to touch. The idea of Richie feeling sad or as though he doesn’t like himself frightens Eddie more than anything but, still, he keeps those teeny tiny, loving little quirks up at the top corners of his lips; keeps on playing at the ghost game, pushing his invisible papers about and straining his ears for signs of anything spooky. He’s good at that - staying strong. Especially for Richie, ‘cause, for Eddie, he is always, always strong right back. Like when Eddie couldn’t stop crying midway through the Christmas time school dance, ‘cause his mom hadn’t wanted him to go and she’d cried and cried and cried and he had nobody to dance with and he’d thought his tummy looked funny in his button-up shirt and his pants had ripped ‘round the back of his knee and - oh, god, every teeny tiny stress under the sun. And Richie, who jumps and whines and wrinkles up his nose when a car comes past his window too loud, just held him, still and strong as an ancient, Japanese tree. Just held him so tight ‘til it was like all the wobbly, broken bits of him had glued right back together. Click-clack.“Oh, sweetheart…” Eddie slings his legs over Richie now, too; wraps all of himself around all of his Richie from the back and squeezes, squeezes, squeezes until the pair of them have gone achy in the tummy. Richie usually gets nice ‘n’ comfy up between his big spoon boyfriend’s thighs, and rests his curly head right over the top of his belly button, tucked up as small as he can, but it’s bad mornings like these where he likes more than anything to really, properly be held. “Makes me feel, like...pretty?” He’d once admitted, pink in the nose below the rim over their rainbow-curve fairy lights and funny strings of old, beaded curtain. “I don’t know...like I am sort of silky and nice to touch. When you touch me I imagine what you can feel and it feels nice. It’s silly.”“It’s beautiful,” Eddie had corrected him. Today, he tickles a figure of eight ‘round the bottom of Richie’s chin; phase two of calming him down. If you scratch him like a puppy or tickle him he’ll know he’s very loved, and he’s still himself, and that there’s still plenty reasons wrapped ‘round his tummy to throw his head back and giggle. “We can stay at home today. We can stay at home and I’ll do my work and you can put your head in my lap and dribble absolutely all over me, and then...then we can paint each other’s nails or something,” he soothes, itching all nice up in the hair behind Richie’s ear and making his boyfriend all but purr. “Get your face all nice and clean and brush your hair all slow mo and stuff when your legs and arms feel better. Then if you’re extra better we’ll make dinner together and I’ll sit on the counter and touch your butt when you walk past. How’s that sound?”Richie is making a very sluggish little turn on his hip to try and face his Eddie as he’s held; try and wriggle down so he can listen to his boyfriend’s heartbeat, or even play that funny game where he sneaks his head up under Eddie’s shirt (although Eddie only ever pretends not to notice) and blows raspberries ‘round his belly button to make him jump. He’s feeling a little bit more up to that, now that he’s all stroked and warm and looked after. Not like the old days. Not like having to get out of bed at the cracka dawn when every teeny tiny inch of his body was all turned to stone, all exhausted, and go to school and forget how to pronounce ‘toilet’ when he puts his hand up in class, forget how to put his shorts on for gym, forget how to open his lunch bag and lean his tummy ‘cross the table to feed his Eddie heart-shaped crackers. Not like having to absolutely split his brain in half and be laughed and poked at all the while. No, these days are much different, he thinks, as Eddie pulls him right around in assistance and cards his stubborn curls back away from his forehead, fixing ‘em all bobbly there so he can press one, clean kiss onto the crease of Richie’s cupid’s bow. Then two more on the creases of his cheeks, the parts where Eddie’s got dimples and Richie’s got a zit or two, and on the disc of skin on the snub of his nose. These days are much different indeed; these mornings. ‘Cause instead of crying, or burying himself back under those covers and not thinking ‘bout anything all day (apart from when he inevitably wakes up in the middla the night all panicked to draw all over his walls, formulate an entire gymnastics routine and dress up like a fairy-mermaid-ninja-solider), Richie manages to kiss his baby right back. Chapped and shaky and cold, but a kiss, clear as heaven and planted surprisingly neat between Eddie’s eyebrows, and into the curve of it, a slur of,“sounds like the best day I ever had, bubba.”