Chapter Text
For Betty, the panic doesn’t set in right away.
Despite the soothing green letters on the wall before her – Everything Is Fine – it’s not a good feeling, learning that she’s died. But Pop, the middle-aged man who greets her in the waiting room, has clearly mastered the art of breaking the news gently. As tears begin to roll down her cheeks, he gives her a box of tissues, and steps out of the room for a few minutes to give her the space she needs to grieve.
On the other side of his large, wooden desk, he offers to tell her how it all happened, but doesn’t push when she declines. Betty remembers that she was driving to pick up her niece and nephew from school, and that she was (thank goodness) in the car alone, and that’s all she needs to know.
When she’s ready, he shows her a video celebrating her life. She feels her eyes well up with tears again at the sight of herself dancing with her friends on the high school cheerleading team…pulling an all-nighter with her colleagues on the college newspaper staff…building a snowman with Juniper and Dagwood in the backyard. But this time, they’re happy tears. Though it was cut short, she lived a good life. And it brought her here: to the Good Place.
That bright, hopeful thought buoys her through her tour of the neighborhood, her introduction to Kevin, and her sampling of what is probably the best quiche she’s ever had (she wouldn’t know, she’s not really a quiche person), right up until the moment when she lays eyes on her new house.
It looks exactly like her old house.
She stops in the middle of the sidewalk. Pop, clearly thinking she’s frozen with awe, beams as he swings an arm towards the house. “It’s yours. Your dream home!”
Betty swallows, her fingernails curling into her palms without thought. But the familiar sting never comes. She checks her palms quickly; the half-moon marks that have scarred them since her adolescence are gone.
Huh.
“Betty?” Pop has come closer, his smile fading. There is something unsettling about his face without it, but she can’t pinpoint what. “Is something wrong?”
She looks back to the house. It’s got the red door, the rose bushes, the bay window – all the details are right. Just the way it looked before…before everything.
(Does Pop know about everything? He must. This is the afterlife, after all. But if it wasn’t enough to send her to…the Other Place…then he must have decided it was well enough to leave it alone.)
“No.” Betty shakes her head. “It’s just – it’s so familiar. It’s bringing back a lot of memories.”
A hint of a smile returns to Pop’s face. “Good ones, I hope. We thought you’d like to live again in the house where you were happiest.” He frowns again. “Do you not like it? We’ve never had to do it before, but we can always change it if you don’t like it.”
Where she was happiest? She supposes it was true at some point – when she was in grade school, maybe. And it makes sense that they’d pick and choose from the best moments of your life to cultivate the perfect afterlife for you. What if you died at a low point? It wouldn’t be fair to stick you with whatever circumstances you happened to be in at the time.
“I love it.” She musters up her best smile. “Let’s go in.”
It’s a strange moment. It gets her brain humming. But it’s not panic.
Not yet.
She comes closer to the edge when Pop interrupts what’s about to be her very first kiss with the man she is destined to spend all of eternity with, and tells her that he’s not her soulmate, after all.
It’s this other guy, Archie, standing awkwardly in her living room in a blue tracksuit.
“I’m terribly sorry.” Pop buries his head in his hands as he sinks onto the sofa. When no one else moves to comfort him, Betty sits beside him, patting him gently on the shoulder.
“Mistakes happen,” she says, trying to conceal the fact that she feels as though her heart is sinking into her stomach.
“Not in the Good Place,” Pop insists. “Our soulmate formula is calibrated to get it exactly right, every time. We’ve had a one hundred percent success rate for millennia. I don’t know what could have happened to throw it off like this.”
Jughead, who’s been pacing the room ever since Pop dropped the figurative bomb on them, waves an impatient hand. “Every system breaks down eventually. That’s entropy.”
“There’s no such thing here in the Good Place,” Pop says solemnly. “I never thought I’d say this, but I fear that there may have been some kind of…” He lowers his voice. “Outside influence.”
Veronica – Jughead’s actual soulmate, a thought that Betty pushes immediately from her mind, lest it crack her chest in two – crosses her arms. “What do you mean, outside influence?” She barrels right past his attempt at an answer. “It pains me to say this, but I’m really disappointed, Pop. This is not the kind of experience I’ve come to expect in the Good Place.”
“Hey. Guys. Let’s all calm down for a second.”
He speaks, Betty thinks, as Archie steps forward and crouches down before Pop.
“Are you sure there isn’t anything we can do, Pop?” Archie says hopefully. “You said the calculation was only off by like, a percentage of a percentage, right? That doesn’t sound so bad. Me and Ronnie have been getting along great, and it seems like Beth and Jonathan are, too.”
Betty nods so quickly she might have given herself whiplash, if she were in a setting where that was metaphysically possible. As it is, there are no such things as stretched or sore muscles in the Good Place. “We get along really well,” she says. “Super well.”
Archie grins. “See? We’re all happy with things like they are now. Maybe it was a good mistake. Like the time I made my girlfriend a birthday cake with salt instead of sugar, and she said it was okay because she wasn’t eating calories that month anyway.”
Pop appears genuinely heartbroken as he looks at them one by one. “I’m truly sorry, kids. But the rules are the rules. Soulmates are soulmates.”
At Pop’s gentle suggestion, they agree that Archie will move into this house with Betty, and Jughead will go to Veronica’s. When the front door shuts behind Pop and Veronica and Archie, a heavy silence falls over Betty and Jughead.
Hesitantly, she meets his eyes; he gazes back with intensity, and it sends her stomach swooping.
She wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s in love with Jughead. Soulmates or not – and they are, apparently, not – she’s only known him for five days.
But in those five days, she’s grown to feel something that she had never felt in all twenty-seven years and one-hundred-seventy-two days of her life: that maybe, finally, she had found someone who could understand her – who could know the dark, jagged parts of herself that she keeps hidden – and come to love her anyway.
Averting her eyes, she takes a step back. She can’t entertain these thoughts anymore. It’s not fair to herself, or to him, or to Archie or Veronica. It was only five days together, and there are infinity more ahead of them they’ll spend apart. They have to suck it up, dust themselves off, and move on.
Betty exhales a shaky breath. “Do you want help packing up your stuff?”
But Jughead, it seems, has not boarded the same train of thought. In fact, he’s on another set of tracks entirely.
He surges forward, and kisses her.
She can’t help it: she melts against him, kissing him back eagerly, clutching at his shirt, sliding her fingers up beneath his ever-present beanie and into his soft, lovely, messy hair. His hands frame her face tenderly, as though she might shatter under too much pressure. The kiss ripples like an electric current through her body, all the way down to the tips of her toes.
And even though it’s new, it feels – familiar, somehow. Like their bodies already know one another, how to fit and move together.
It’s not possible, of course. Maybe kissing is just like everything else in the Good Place: even at its baseline, a little bit better than it ever was back on Earth.
When they pull apart, his eyes are hazy. She swallows down the lump in her throat.
“Wow,” she murmurs.
“Yeah.” Jughead’s chin dips like he’s about to go in for another kiss, but at the last second he squeezes his eyes shut and slumps back against the wall. “I don’t want to go with her.” He sounds almost petulant, like a child. “She seems…mean.”
“I’m sure she’s great.” Betty clenches her fists like she had done that first day, out on the sidewalk with Pop, but there’s no relief to be found in it. “Archie really seems to like her.”
Jughead starts to speak, but she stops him with a pat to his arm once, twice, and then presses her palms against her thighs so she won’t touch him again. She tilts her chin up, and gives him a watery smile.
“This is the Good Place,” she says. “We have to do what’s right.”
Life with Archie is…different.
Different is not bad, she reminds herself at least twice a day. In fact, Archie has many wonderful qualities that any reasonable person would hope to find in their soulmate. He is kind. He is easy-going. He is messy, but not dirty, which she can live with. He is classically handsome – exactly the kind of guy she would have swooned over back in high school. And he possesses excellent self-discipline, if his six-pack and daily trips to the gym are any indication.
He’s just…very, very different from Jughead. As she learns more about him, she catalogs the changes in her head: Jughead liked chocolate, but Archie likes vanilla. Jughead devoured mystery novels; at most, she’s seen Archie page half-heartedly through a comic book. Jughead guzzled black coffee at all hours of the day, while Archie seems to mostly subsist on Gatorade. (“But only the blue kind. The good blue kind,” he assures her.)
Whenever they’d walked through town together, Jughead had been content to amble alongside Betty, adjusting his long stride to keep pace with her; Archie practically runs everywhere he goes, like an eager golden retriever chasing an invisible ball. Both men like video games, but whereas Jughead would fight with her over who got to play Yoshi in MarioKart (until they discovered that in the Good Place, you can both be Yoshi), Archie has a tendency to get sucked into Madden for the entire afternoon without even taking a pee break.
(It’s sort of annoying, Betty thinks, that of all the necessary bodily functions they could have done away with here, urination isn’t one of them. But maybe it’s to stop something like an 18-hour Madden marathon from happening?)
All this to say: there’s an adjustment period.
Whereas Jughead had felt that they should let their physical relationship develop organically, Archie seems to have no such compunctions, and in truth, neither does Betty. They’re soulmates; they may as well get on with it. But she’s surprised to find, when she kisses him for the first time, that the experience is merely…okay.
It’s obvious that Archie feels the lack of immediate connection, too. They share a handful of kisses each day – a perfunctory peck when they roll out of bed in the morning, and another when they go to bed at night. Neither makes a move towards anything more intimate.
Betty tells herself they just need to give it time. Pop said they were soulmates, but he never said anything about love at first sight.
And really, it’s not that bad. Archie always has a smile ready for her, and he never complains, or makes her feel like she is second-best. If nothing else, he makes her feel like a good, appreciated friend.
And maybe, when you’re staring down the barrel of infinity together, that’s the best you can ask for.
The invitation arrives not even a week later.
Celebrate Jughead’s First Afterbirthday Surprise Party, it reads in slanted gold letters on dark blue cardstock. Betty wrinkles her nose when she sees it, and wonders – not very kindly – if Veronica even knows what “afterbirth” is. (Betty sure does. The first time her sister Polly had gotten drunk post-pregnancy, she had spared no gory detail in describing the moment she’d brought Betty’s niece and nephew into the world.)
But she has to admit, it is a nice gesture, especially if Jughead had died so close to his actual birthday on Earth. At least, that’s what she thinks until she sees his face when he walks through the door to find his and Veronica’s grand entryway filled with streamers, balloons, and every single other person in the neighborhood.
Despite her small stature, Veronica cuts an imposing figure at the center of the group, a string of pearls gleaming around her neck as she steps towards him bearing a beautiful, two-tiered cake covered in gold leaf. “Happy birthday, Torombolo.”
Betty isn’t close enough to hear his reply, but Veronica’s words send a funny little twinge through her chest. They already have nicknames for one another? She had only just started slipping into calling him Jug when Pop had come knocking at their door.
Aside from the fact that the guest of honor seems less than thrilled by it, the party isn’t bad. Betty makes small talk with a few of the neighbors – Ethel has developed some kind of “sweet quiche” that she’s eager for Betty to stop by and sample – but mostly keeps to herself, sipping at the signature champagne cocktail that Kevin calls the “Forsythe Fizz” and fiddling with the soda dispenser that shoots out eight different kinds of fried shrimp.
Occasionally, she catches sight of Jughead. It appears that he’s doing the same thing she is: drifting about the party, sticking to the edges of the room, trying to avoid the center of attention. But whenever their eyes meet, and she tries to smile, he quickly looks away.
It feels like he’s avoiding her, and she doesn’t understand why.
Eventually she sees him peel away from the crowd and head up the split staircase to the second floor.
Betty swallows one last Bang Bang shrimp, knocks back the rest of her drink, and follows him.
The second story of the mansion is decorated in the same minimalist chic as the first, but where the color scheme downstairs was light and airy, up here the walls are painted in darker, bolder shades. All of the doors are closed. There’s no sign of Jughead.
Then Betty hears the sharp clicking of a typewriter muffled behind the second door to the left. She follows the noise, knocks twice on the door, and then pushes it open.
Jughead twists around from the desk where he’s seated. The hunch of his shoulders suggests he’s ready for battle, but the scowl on his face softens as he realizes it’s her. “Oh. Hey.”
It’s not the first time they’ve interacted since everything went down – the neighborhood is not that big, and there are planned group activities galore – but it’s the first time they’ve been alone together. Betty steps closer, peering past him at the blue vintage typewriter on the desk. The page in it looks half-full of text, but she can’t make out any of the words. The room itself seems to be some sort of office; there’s a deep green velvet loveseat to the left of the desk, and a handsome wooden bookcase lining the opposite wall. Of all the rooms she’s seen so far in this sprawling manse, this is the only one that’s felt like Jughead.
She perches on the edge of the loveseat, facing him. “Not a fan of surprise parties?”
Jughead leans back a little in his chair. “No. Also not a fan of birthdays,” he admits. “I naively assumed that you got to stop celebrating those after you literally die.”
She snorts. “Not if Veronica Lodge has anything to say about it.”
Jughead raises an eyebrow, and Betty leaps to her feet, crossing the room to examine the bookshelf so he won’t see the flush spreading across her cheeks.
“You and Veronica have a really nice house,” she says, attempting to change the subject. She tilts one of the books out from the shelf, intrigued by the title on its spine – but when she opens it, the pages are blank.
Long seconds drag on. When Jughead doesn’t answer, she looks over her shoulder. He shrugs. “It’s very large.”
“You don’t like it?”
She wonders if Pop had made the same offer to Jughead that he’d made to her. Even if he’d wanted to take it, and swap the house out for something else, there was Veronica to consider. In the brief time Betty had seen her there, she’d seemed far more at ease in the grand foyer than Jughead had.
Jughead drags his hands down his face. “It’s…a great house for Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third.”
Betty nods. A copy of Catch-22 catches her eye; this time, when she flips to the middle of the book, there are words on the pages like normal.
“How are things with Archie?”
She snaps the book shut, sliding it back into place on the shelf. “Oh. Fine. They’re good. We’re still getting to know each other.” Betty turns, pressing her back against the bookshelf. “What about you?”
“Fine. Same.”
She waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. The silence stretches on, and the ache in her chest that’s become more and more familiar these past few days expands.
Betty steps forward, ready to recite some parting pleasantries and then leave, but Jughead speaks again.
“Why don’t you ever come with Archie?”
She freezes. “What?”
“Archie is…here…a lot.” Jughead winces, like it’s painful to look at her while he says it. “Like. Every day since we switched. But you never come with him.”
Betty searches her memory for any instances of Archie informing her that he’s going to socialize with their former soulmates. Coming up blank, a realization clicks. “He’s not going to the gym,” she says. “He’s coming here.”
Jughead frowns. “Wait, you – you didn’t know?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
Betty crosses the room slowly, sinking onto the loveseat. She waits for a feeling to hit her – shock, betrayal, hurt. But it never comes.
Jughead’s hand moves oddly, like he meant to reach for her and then changed his mind. “It’s not – I don’t think they’re having an affair or anything. I mean, I don’t really know, I usually come up here and write to give them some privacy, but they’re not trying to hide it from me, I think they just talk –”
“Jug.” She leans forward, placing a hand on his knee. “It’s okay.”
He swallows, glancing down at her hand. “You’re not upset?”
“Did you think I didn’t want to see you?” She doesn’t want to answer his question. She doesn’t want to think about the fact that she just learned her soulmate has been sneaking away to spend time with another woman, and she doesn’t even care.
Jughead sighs. “Yeah. I did.”
Betty squeezes his knee in assurance. “Well,” she says. “That’s really not the case.”
Somehow, without any of them ever saying it out loud, it becomes a thing.
Every day after lunch time, Betty and Archie part ways at their front door with a smile and a wave. All the way on the other side of the neighborhood, Jughead and Veronica do the same.
(Or so Betty assumes. Maybe with less smiling and waving. She gets the impression that Jughead and Veronica are not yet as fond of one another as she and Archie are.)
Betty and Jughead meet – sometimes at the edge of the forest for a walk amongst the trees, sometimes by the lake, sometimes at the neighborhood library, which they’re both delighted to learn has not only all of the books that ever existed on Earth, but also those that never made it past the daydreaming phase. (Those ones take a little more digging through to find the good stuff.)
There is nothing untoward about the arrangement. They don’t kiss, or hold hands, or even touch. They simply spend quality time with a good friend.
Even if Betty wishes she could kiss him just one more time – even if she imagines, in the moments she finds herself alone, what it would be like to feel his hands and his lips on her bare skin – she never acts on it. After all, she is the sort of person who belongs in the Good Place. And that’s not what a person who belongs in the Good Place would do.
For a while, it works. Any doubts Betty might have about the whole situation are pushed to the back of her mind. If it’s not quite paradise, well, her mother always said you had to earn the things you wanted in life – and maybe that applies to the afterlife, too.
And then Pop announces the lecture series.
The neighborhood is full of such wonderful people, Pop explains to the crowd gathered in white chairs before the stage. Experts in math and science and philosophy. Talented singers and dancers and artists. Do-gooders who had made the world a better place.
Shouldn’t they have the opportunity to share that wealth of knowledge – to learn from one another, and continue to grow here in the Good Place?
Betty finds herself nodding along to his words, even as a gnawing, anxious feeling opens up in the pit of her stomach. She’d been a good person, sure. But she hadn’t exactly done anything with her life. Nothing worth sharing with a bunch of celebrated scientists and humanitarians. She hadn’t had the chance.
Her worry must show on her face, because Ethel stops her after the meeting, brows knitted together in concern. “Are you alright, Betty?”
Betty forces a smile. “Yes! Definitely. Just…trying to figure out what I could possibly talk about that’s as interesting as what everyone else here has done.”
Ethel wraps her in a tight hug – she does that a lot, and Betty doesn’t have the heart to ask her to stop – before pulling back to say, “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure that a story about taking your niece and nephew to the park will tug just as many heartstrings as the millions of children whose lives were saved by the vaccine distribution system Dilton developed in Africa.”
Before she can reply, Betty feels a hand at her elbow. Pop gives her an encouraging smile when she turns to look at him.
“Hello, ladies! I can see the gears are already turning about how you’ll participate in the lecture series.” His smile melts away at Betty’s stiff nod. “Is something wrong, Betty?”
“Betty’s a little nervous,” Ethel jumps in. “She’s worried her accomplishments won’t seem as significant in comparison to all of the brilliant things our neighbors have done.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Betty’s very good at giving inspirational speeches,” Pop says, a twinkle in his eye. “Isn’t that right, Betty?”
As soon as the words leave Pop’s mouth, that is the moment when Betty panics.
Because that is the moment when Betty realizes:
This is the Bad Place.
tbc