WHO Cullen and Richie •
WHERE Chakrabarti Clinic •
WHEN Tuesday morning
"You’ve got the posture and eye-strain of a man who’s not slept in a week or more."
WARNINGS Discussions of suicidal thoughts, traumatic experiences, and drug use.
Richie was pretty used to feeling dejected, and sad, but this was like - a whole other level, he had to admit. When he first arrived in Vallo he’d been suckerpunched by losing Eddie, and Stan, and tried to find a way to cope with it and build something new for himself in place where magic was real (in a lot better way than he was accustomed to, anyway) and the sky seemed limitless. And he’d been doing okay - really, he had been.
Until Eddie showed up here, and in the span of two weeks had come back from the dead, confessed that he was in love with Richie and jealous of Max (now Richie didn’t even want to introduce Max to Eddie at all, which also made him feel like shit), that he had to get rid of a little piece of the clown in his head, and also blurted out on the network that he was gay after like, one therapy session. Where the fuck this all was coming from, Richie didn’t know - he knew how he had once felt about Eddie, but had no idea the sentiment was returned or that Eddie was even gay at all (he barely knew that about himself, retreating further and further into the closet with each passing year). He also had no idea how he was supposed to process any of this or if he was allowed to have feelings about it at all, if he was allowed to be angry - that was why he thought maybe talking to someone could help.
First he stopped at Jacked Up, got a hot coffee to go, and found his way to the clinic - it was 9:00 AM on the nose when he arrived, so he figured he’d leave his leather jacket on and fold his lanky limbs onto a chair in the waiting room, which had a few people in it already too. The coffee was clutched in his hands and his vision was blurring as he stared at the ground, but he snapped out of it and shoved his fingers up under his glasses to wipe at his eyes. He felt even more dead inside than usual, but maybe he was tired too. Not like he’d been sleeping well.
He didn’t have to wait long; Cullen Rutherford maintained punctuality as an addiction and rehabilitation counselor just as much as he had when he was commander of an army. He took a look in the waiting room at 9:01, saw Richie sitting there, and approached quietly but made sure Richie would be able to catch sight of him moving even though Richie was looking down at his shoes. Back at the Sanctuary in Ferelden, Cullen was usually working with former Templars, many of whom were not entirely in control of themselves, and coming at them too quickly or loudly when they were focused elsewhere was a good way to end up with a situation that required de-escalating.
“Good morning,” he said, even though it was clearly not a good morning for Richie, because conventional politeness was the way of the waiting room. Most everyone preferred not to get started on potentially falling to pieces in front of whatever strangers happened to be present.
"Morning," Richie replied, index finger pushing his glasses up on his nose, and he attempted a smile - but he was getting to the point where even literal, actual sunshine felt cold and something dramatic like his soul was a bowl of dust or whatever. He just couldn't carry on like that, however - he had people here he really cared about, and him as a fucking idiot sagging under the weight of depression wasn't who he wanted to be either.
So he got up and followed Cullen, wherever they were set to go. "Think this is the first time I've been to the clinic. It's nice." Shiny. And brand new.
“It always feels a bit too bright to me,” Cullen admitted as he led Richie through a door and down a small stretch of hallway. “I’m still not quite used to electric lights.”
It was accordingly unsurprising that in his own office he made no use of the overhead fluorescent light. He hadn’t gone so far as to rely on candlelight, but the room he brought Richie to was lit with a few warm lamps that kept the space a little more comfortable for himself, and for visitors who were often feeling overwhelmed by the world. The furniture, too, was meant to be comfortable - a squishy secondhand sofa against one wall, a worn blue armchair across from it, an oversized red beanbag for people who preferred something closer to the floor, and a thick leaf-patterned rug under it all for people who preferred the floor itself. A box of tissues and a small stack of cloth handkerchiefs sat on the low table in the middle of everything, in easy reach of most of the seating. On Cullen’s desk was a pitcher of water, accompanied by a pair of drinking glasses, and his own coffee cup. People who were learning to live without the comfort of a substance ought to be able to be comfortable in other ways, at least.
“Have a seat wherever you’d like,” Cullen said, making a general gesture toward the space.
Oh. Well - this was pretty cozy? Richie debated for a second, coffee in hand (it was still hot enough to where he had to sip slowly and keep the lid on - he'd ordered it black with room for cream and some sugar, because while he wanted the caffeine jolt and was in the mood to smell colors, he didn't want to drink road tar to get there). If he selected the beanbag, it'd be a throwback to the 90s and he'd never be able to get up - teenage him could pop up and down like a gangly jack-in-the-box but forty-year-old him? Not so much.
He went for the sofa instead, sinking into the cushions. Now he just - had to think about where to begin. Christ.
"Um, so like - " The shit with the clown would probably come up eventually, if they were going to talk about Eddie. In fact, they'd probably cover the whole gamut of Richie's fucked up life, he apparently had until noon to spill his guts. "I guess my first question is - how would you handle your best friend telling you they hate that you're happy? I mean - " Richie backpedaled a second. "They didn't come out and say it, but it was basically like...oh yeah, super happy you found a guy you like and aren't ashamed of liking him, but oh, by the way I'm jealous and am moving out because I can't stand to look at you with your boyfriend."
Sorry. That was a hell of a way to begin. He’d just sip his coffee and let his ears, and cheeks, turn pink.
Well, that was a difficult one, certainly. Cullen picked his coffee up and took a seat in the armchair. His own friendships had never taken on quite that character, and anyone he might have once called a best friend was long dead. Cullen hadn’t any idea what he might do in such a situation - but then, despite Richie’s question, it didn’t really matter what he would do. He was just here to help Richie figure out what Richie should do for his own peace of mind.
“All that at once...that’s a lot to try to make sense of in one go,” he said, and that was something Cullen actually did know something about. “I can see why you needed to talk to someone.”
"I guess I should start at the beginning. Like, you know - context," Richie said, and he took a deep breath, letting it out slowly to get some sort of zen going. Usually he wasn't much into the idea of meditation and deep breathing because, hey, ADHD - he couldn't sit still for very long. But maybe there was something to it.
He needed oxygen, at any rate. "We grew up in this shitty small town where being gay got you an ass beating or worse," he began. "Didn't help that it was the site of this...shapeshifting Eldritch horror from space crash-landing there before it became Derry. The form it took most was a clown named Pennywise, to scare kids. It infected the town with evil, put a haze over it, and it was just - a lot of adults who didn't give a fuck about kids disappearing to feed the monster, and police who couldn't be fucked to investigate crime. But we had our friends and - I loved Eddie before I even really grasped what love was."
It was true. It had been heady and exciting in a way that was difficult to put into words - but it was also childish, a love wrapped up in being best friends and knowing just about everything about each other. "After we put the clown into early hibernation, we all graduated and left Derry. Pennywise's magic meant that the further away we got, the more we forgot each other. I didn't remember Eddie at all. I just...felt like something was missing. I was like that for awhile, afraid to be myself and I knew I didn't want to get married and have kids or whatever but..."
Richie blinked, pausing to take a drink of coffee. He couldn't imagine coming out publicly after one therapy session. Maybe here he hadn't really attempted to hide that he was gay, but he sure as fuck wasn't going to announce it right now either. Or ever. If he did, he'd need to put to rest decades of self-loathing and fear, and that just - took some time. For him. But he supposed everyone was different.
It was a good thing Cullen had become friends with Dorian before coming here. Otherwise he would have been even more confused by the entire concept of homophobia. In the south of Thedas, no one gave a damn about the gender of a person’s bedmates unless they were of the class that had titles and land they wanted to keep in the family.
It was also good that he had some experience with shape-shifting horrors. This Pennywise was undoubtedly not exactly a demon as Cullen knew them, but he sounded enough like a demon for Cullen to establish a frame of reference. Battles with such creatures frequently left adult soldiers permanently scarred, mentally and physically. Facing them at nineteen years old had nearly been too much for Cullen to come back from. For genuine children, it must have been even more damaging.
“No one is ever really the same after something like that,” Cullen said. That he knew from experience. “Did you forget only each other, or the experience itself?”
Maybe coffee had been too acidic of a choice, because Richie felt scalded on the insides now - his stomach was tender and doing flip-flops; he might cry, which he wasn’t necessarily ashamed about but he’d try not to be a blubbering mess. Just reached for a tissue anyway. "We forgot the whole experience, forgot about growing up in Derry. It was like this black hole in our minds, one I kept prodding with a stick because I just couldn't remember and I was grasping," he said. "We didn't start to remember until Mike, one of our friends, he called us all when Pennywise returned. Reminded us of the oath we made to come back to Derry if that fucking thing ever started killing kids again."
Thinking of what happened after that brought a different kind of melancholy to Richie - plants wilting in their pots, scraggy grey clouds rolling in. He wouldn't ever be the same after the second time they faced Pennywise either.
"That second time, when we fought IT...Pennywise? That was when Eddie died, after he saved my life. It was - I don't think I can describe how much that sucked." How much it hurt. How traumatized he'd been from it. He still was - he hadn't really stopped blaming himself, despite how Eddie had shown up here alive. And then piled a bunch of other shit on top of everything else.
“You don’t have to,” Cullen quietly replied. He knew already. There had been so many friends lost on the cold stone floors of Kinloch Hold. “How long did you have, between losing Eddie and coming here?”
Time was the only thing that really made much difference, and even that could only do so much. The reference point seemed important, though - a month after the Circle fell, Cullen had still been entertaining thoughts of suicide, a year later he’d been determined to prove how completely fine he was, five years and he was avoiding standing duty on the apprentices’ floor at Kirkwall, ten years and it was mostly just when he was left with his own thoughts for too long that his mind went back there. Richie might not have gone through the same things exactly, or progressed through stages at the same rate, but it would help to know how close the trauma was.
"A - a couple weeks, not long," Richie muttered, squishing the tissue in his hands. He sniffed once, deciding not to pulverize that tissue, but to use it to wipe his nose instead - he could feel it building, those tears. Welling up against the dam. "We all left Derry but didn't forget each other. We kept in touch." They got on group texts, they tried to return to their lives, they told Myra that Eddie wasn't coming back and received the brunt of the wrath and Richie couldn't even blame her. Fuck knew he blamed himself plenty.
And Patty. They were there to console Patty too. "One of our other friends, he - I mean, none of us handled the trauma well but he...when Mike called him, he couldn't face coming back. Slit his wrists in the bathtub," Richie continued, rare softness from him. His tone, his demeanor - he wasn't telling a joke or hiding behind humor. "I wanted to do what he did. Not like that, but - I wanted to go back into the wreckage where Eddie was. I would have, if our friends didn't drag me out."
So he was still at that point, then, when he got dropped onto a magical island, and barely any time after that, his friend magically appeared back from the dead. And now...Maker’s breath, it was no wonder the man was half a wreck. Anyone would be.
“There is no shame in any of that,” Cullen said, because he wished someone had told him that more than a decade ago. “Not in your friend taking his own life, not in you wanting to do the same, and not in you deciding to continue living.”
Richie wasn't sure if he believed it, but he was glad to hear it. Shame had been an old and familiar friend for him over the years - he felt it when he noticed how good-looking some guy was, felt it well up in him when he went home with that same guy to scratch an itch, felt shame for liking it. Like he wasn't supposed to. Like he was - built wrong, somehow. In Vallo, it felt good to let go of some of that. He thought he'd been doing pretty good until 'I'm jealous' made him feel ashamed once more.
"I've been trying, you know?" The tissue was soggy and he tossed it into the trash can, taking another. The rest of his coffee was cold in the paper cup but he'd get to that later. "I got here and found people." Enola, who had been with him basically from the start. And Max - it wasn't that he was over Eddie or forgot how he felt about him. But he didn't want to care about Max like how a teenager would, or even like the man he'd been when he returned to Derry. He wanted it to be free and fearless and simple. And it was.
"But I also feel like I'm wrong, for...trying to live?" he said, and he didn't know if that made sense. "I don't know what Eddie was expecting when he dropped all these truth bombs. That I should have felt the same way automatically? That I'm selfish? Am I selfish?"
“For having feelings that weren’t the ones he wanted?” Cullen shook his head. “Certainly not. Nor for trying your best to go on with life after losing so much. Survival is not selfish, though it can feel that way when you’re in the midst of it.”
That was the first priority of things to address - Richie clearly needed to know that none of this made him a bad person - but not the only thing. “As for what Eddie expected...even he may not know the answer to that. Recovering from the kind of experience you two had can often lead to some flailing about without thinking through where it may end up.”
Maybe that's what it was - Richie felt selfish for surviving. For wanting a life and wanting to know what it was like to be happy. He had never been happy - not really, anyway. Maybe in some fleeting moments here and there, and when he was on stage making people laugh that brand of attention felt good, but overall, a feeling of contentment was like a goddamn pipe dream.
"I guess so," he murmured, shifting on the sofa a little. He'd been angry before, but right now he was just tired - opening up and being one giant raw nerve, feeling so exposed, made him feel fatigued. Not in a bad way - opening up was good. But it still kind of rattled him a little.
Still, feeling the cathartic cleanse of tears and word vomit was - okay. It was okay. "Is it - are you gonna give me an assignment too, to announce my gayness on the network?" he asked, clearly kidding. But, uh. Please don't do that, Cullen.
Cullen’s head tilted to the side in a faintly puzzled expression. Making a public announcement didn’t seem like something that would help Richie - it seemed more like the kind of thing Richie did to avoid thinking about what happened to him. Actually, so did making a joke about an assignment, now that he thought about it.
“No, if I gave you an assignment at all, it would probably be to take a good long nap,” Cullen said, blunt as ever despite having learned more about managing trauma. “You’ve got the posture and eye-strain of a man who’s not slept in a week or more.”
"It's only been a day or two," he protested. "And I slept...some." An hour? Maybe three or four? Definitely not enough for many proper REM cycles. Maybe he should take a nap here at the clinic, apparently there was a room to do that in. Since no one seemed to get any fucking sleep around here. Insomnia was an ever-present beast.
Regardless, a snooze was better than a tell-all confession, so he could probably follow that assignment to the letter. "I've got some time before work tonight so I'll take one," Richie promised. "Thanks - for like, listening and stuff. Is there...anything else?"
He didn't know. He'd never sat in an office and told someone about IT, someone who kept a straight face the whole time.
There definitely needed to be an anything else, Cullen thought, but there was no way Richie was going to work through all of that in a single cup of coffee. Cullen remembered the first time he’d spilled out what happened at Kinloch to someone - he hadn’t had it in him to talk any more about it right then, or for days afterward. It had been the same when he had a bad day of lyrium withdrawal; there were things he needed to talk about but couldn’t yet. He’d seen it in plenty of other people, as well, and it seemed likely that Richie would be the same.
“The basics of looking out for yourself are a good start,” Cullen said. “Sleeping, eating, that sort of thing. And while addiction and recovery are my usual purview...maybe you’d like to come by here and talk again? Sometime before you’re on the very edge of falling apart? You’ve come through an awful lot, and you might find it easier to take it all on a bit at a time rather than either trying to do it all at a go or shoving it in a trunk and ignoring it for the next decade or so.”
But shoving it into a trunk and ignoring it for a decade was just so easy. "I used to do a lot of drugs," he admitted, and maybe that was just another fun spoke on the wheel entitled Richie Tozier's Issues. "Let's just say Pennywise had a lot of influence even when it was in hibernation and even after we left Derry. But, uh - yeah. I can come back. For talking."
He scratched his scruffy cheek, thinking - maybe it would be a good thing, talking more about IT and what it was like not remembering a damn thing about your childhood. And forgetting his friends, the ones he stood with and the ones who fought against some terror that had no real name or shape, but would morph into whatever they feared the most. Remembering them was painful too, especially now when he couldn't even reach out to them. But he was a Loser and he always fucking would be - he wanted to be the best Loser possible, damnit.
"Like once a week, is that good?"
“Once a week is good,” Cullen replied, giving Richie a nod and a faint smile. He was always glad to see someone willing to give working themselves out a try. It tended to work out so much better than trying to ignore the trauma or bury it under drugs or drink. People tended to live longer. “If Tuesday mornings are good for you, you can carry on bringing your coffee here just like this.”
"Okay, I can do that." Bringing coffee here and coming for a chat sounded better than slogging his sorry ass to the therapist's couch to sit and cry for an hour. He grabbed his coffee cup (he didn't have much left but wouldn't bother to reheat what had gone cold - even an not-sophisticated asshole like him knew it ruined the flavor profile) and stood, giving a little stretch.
Oh, and there was something else too. "And Plants vs. Zombies - it's still on," Richie added. He'd put it on Cullen's phone and they'd work through the first installment, before moving onto the sequel. You wouldn't think a video game about cute zombies and cartoon plants was therapeutic too, but here they were.
It was better than sticking your face into a mountain of cocaine, anyway. He wasn't going to go down the drug-fueled road again, now that he had a much better support system. And if there was one thing to be grateful for? It was definitely that.