#the 2nd one is called tom and jerry obviously

[maskedchip]

halloween asoryuus 🎃

[skinks]

hi your dilfworth fic is amazing and i love baby richie... my favourite is the tidbit about richie eating a worm that eddie gave him 🥺 obviously u don’t have to but if u have any more thoughts/headcanons about baby richie and baby eddie i would melt into a puddle ❤️

thank you, I had so much fun writing that one! and yeah, I couldn’t possibly include baby Richie without Eddie, the little gruesome twosome.

Richie probably does that a lot with stuff Eddie gives him, drawings and little bits of grass he’s braided together, and on one memorable occasion almost the little navy frogman diver that Eddie got in his cornflakes, but Eddie already had one so he gave the second to Richie. Except it’s one of those ones that swells in liquid, uh oh. Luckily Maggie snatched it away before Richie could swallow it lmao, but that’s the thing;

Richie loves the things Eddie gives him so he wants to Consume them. That’s why he was biting Went’s arm in the fic, why he ate the worm and also why he’s always gnawing on Eddie when they’re tiny, or chasing him to try and envelop him in his shirt. And it’s just one of those games, y’know? Like, Eddie can SEE it’s just Richie holding his too-big Sesame Street shirt up and open like a butterfly net or the flapping gilly mouth of a whale shark, and it’s Richie going raaaarr but Eddie still shrieks and runs! He’s giggling but it’s like, in the inbetween clock ticks, when he’s looking forward instead of back over his shoulder at Richie it’s still Pursuit, he believes in the Richiesaurus coming to get him. It always does, too, swamps him up in its flapping gills until they’re two noisy boy-lumps sharing one shirt, because Eddie lets it eat him. Because the Richiesaurus isn’t a mean monster, it’s just hungry, so hungry, and it only eats spaghetti because spaghetti is special.

Sometimes when they’re doing coloring books Richie will ask Eddie to color in his Yoda too if Richie draws some more Richie And Eddie Adventures, because Eddie’s better (not much) at keeping inside the lines. Also because Eddie’s tongue pokes out when he colors and, watching him, Richie gets this happy hungry that’s MY friend feeling that makes him lie flat on Eddie’s back until he can’t get up and give the back of his head a big kiss.

SO many naps together. They just conk out anywhere. The yard, the den, under Richie’s bunk bed, the back seat of the car as Went and Maggie drive them home from the tree farm or the public pool or Chuck E Cheese, sometimes with Stan and Bill too. Just flopped together in a pile. Richie still sucks his thumb while he sleeps and that contributes to his gaptoothed buckteeth, but Eddie carries a grey threadbare rabbit around with him or he can’t sleep. It’s called Foggy. Foggy Bunny.

One day when Eddie’s over to play, Went and Maggie are feeling indulgent and take them to the mall? Because it’s 1981 and the mall is the best? And Sonia always pulls Eddie along by the hand whenever they go, snapping don’t touch that or stay away from bad men like that but Maggie just gently ushers them from storefront to storefront and Eddie can goggle at the displays as long as he likes. Richie’s up on Went’s shoulders, and when he comes parachuting down again he says “Eddie’s turn!” Went asks Eddie if he’d like to ride on his shoulders for a little bit and Eddie nods, still not really sure how to talk to grownups, but then he’s soaring and suddenly he’s the up-highest he’s ever been.

They collect ladybugs in a shoebox one summer’s day after an aphid swarm and are carrying it carefully up the stairs, a little stumped as to what to do with them next, when Richie trips. Ladybugs everywhere, including in Eddie’s hair. Maggie comes up to see what the commotion is and makes them clean it all up, once she’s calmed Eddie down from screaming about how Richie told him ladybugs are harmless unless they go in your ears and lay their eggs.

They trade the same two lunchboxes back and forth every couple of weeks. Wacky Races for Alfred E Neuman, a roaring stock market to rival wall street. Eddie can do the Muttley laugh so easy and Richie HATES it because he can’t do that one.

Richie is the ONLY kid Eddie knows who can tell time but he always tells Eddie the wrong time. Eddie’s not sure how he knows it’s the wrong time, but he’s sure of it, and so he always steps on Richie’s laces. Then Richie just walks around with loose laces because he can’t tie them yet, but also because he just doesn’t CARE and it’s not right so Eddie always makes him sit somewhere so Eddie can tie them again. Calls Richie a butthead, but he also kinda likes it because Richie always karate chops his shoulders and says something like “I knight thee, Sir Eds-A-Lot!” and Eddie feels good and something else be doesn’t know the word for, but the word is chivalrous. He feels like he wants to do the thing in the Tom & Jerry cartoons where he puts his anorak over a puddle so Richie’s trailing laces won’t get wet.

Eddie accidentally knocks one of Richie’s baby teeth out and vice versa. Peak idiots since babiehood.

Sometimes on rainy days Maggie makes treasure hunts for them all, or just for Richie and Eddie if Bill is with his new baby brother, or Stan is at Cub Scouts. She leaves post-its with drawings and clues that lead them all over the house, and Eddie’s better at reading them but Richie’s better at problem solving... teamwork... they win a kinder egg each and Richie does almost eat his toy again by accident this time, and gets chocolate all over his shirt that’s stretched loose from being an Eddie-net so often. So he does it again, gulp, like Pac-Man. Eddie’s hair tufting out his collar and tickly on his chin, Eddie giggling and pawing his way out and hugging back instead. Because it’s not like keeping him prisoner, Richie’s not like the sea monster in Pinocchio, it’s more like a little plant taking sunshine inside it to grow stronger.

Eddie’s better at reading and he’s a fast talker unlike Bill, so he always reads the board at school and whispers what it says to Richie, sitting next to him with glasses that still aren’t quite right for school, make his head hurt and make him noisy just to feel like he’s having an impact in a room he can’t see. Don’t forget me, I’m here, I can’t see you all but I’m here too.

Sometimes on nicer days Went builds them obstacle courses in the garden, planks of wood balanced on buckets etc and Eddie ALWAYS wins once he gets over his trepidation about splinters and nails and falling a few inches onto soft grass, because he’s a nimble lil mountain goat and Richie’s laces were probably untied again. They win tinfoil trophies.

Richie convinces Eddie that a rock they find by the pond in the park one day is a dragon egg, and Eddie cradles it home to keep. Richie convinces Eddie he’s dead all the time, he’ll lie still with his tongue sticking out after a roughhousing and pretend to have little x’s over his eyes until Eddie’s shaking his shoulder with his voice gone high and reedy, and Richie will surprise him every time! Gotcha! I’m alive! Aren’t you glad I’m alive, Eddie! Weren’t you worried? I’m so important to him. And then one day Eddie brings the rock into 2nd grade show-and-tell and is stuttering about his dragon egg to the tittering class, until the teacher tells him to get back to his seat and stop being silly. Eddie stuffs the rock under his desk lid and his eyes are like dark moons with the confused hurt, and Richie feels a nasty spiky heat in his tummy that he will come to know intimately in a few years as guilt.

That day, Richie learns on some level or another how much power there is in pretending, in keeping up pretend games and having people believe you as long as you’re willing to keep it up. The thing is... he pretends so much because Eddie’s always much happier when they’re playing cops and robbers and not when he’s stuck in his stuffy church clothes and being told the whole world’s a mousetrap set just for him. He doesn’t like their teacher telling Eddie to stop being silly, he loves silly, serious, ties-laces-while-singing-bunny-foo-foo Eddie. Richie doesn’t know it, but he loves him even then. What he does know is that he’s good at pretending, and he’s safe from any big sad betrayed eyes as long as he can keep pretending he didn’t want to put a wonky, lopsided heart in Eddie’s Valentines box that year.

Eddie doesn’t talk to him for a WHOLE afternoon but then Richie draws a dragon face and wings on the rock and they’re immediately playing with it.

Eddie doesn’t have rollerskates because Sonia thinks they’re dangerous, but the others always let him borrow theirs, Stan and Richie and Bill. Richie has the closest size that would fit him even though they do have to stuff some crumpled up newspaper in the toes, but it doesn’t matter when they tie a jumprope around Richie’s middle like reins, and Eddie holds the two handles as Richie runs, and suddenly they’re charioteering at breakneck speed down the street. Eddie can feel the wind in his helmet plume as they hurtle towards the giant pile of fall leaves they spent all afternoon raking for this exact purpose, watched over by Went sitting on the porch (Went tidied the pile once they lost interest, easier for him to do since he’s not roughly half the size of the rakes.)

Their crash into the pile is a Ben-Hur epic. Eddie’s borrowed rollerskates hit the sidewalk curb and he’s airborne until he lands on soft dry crunch and Richie’s totalled body, but 6 years isn’t long enough for gravity to wreak its slow pull on your joints that makes every year harder and harder to bounce back up after you fall. They’re practically astronauts, as well as charioteers and knights and cops and robbers and monsters in love. Moonwalkers, squeaky helium laughter lifting them higher, higher than shoulders, up-highest of all.

Richie gives him the wonky Valentine’s heart, eventually. Then eats him