Chapter Text
A pair of fifteen year olds huddled in a broken down treehouse, rain drizzling around them.
“I don’t want to leave. I mean, I do, but I also don’t.” Jughead frowned, wrapping his arms tighter around his best friend, who was leaning against his side.
“It’s what’s best, Juggie.” Betty said, her voice a whisper, and reached up to squeeze his hand. “You deserve a home.”
“I know. But there’s still stuff I’ll miss here.”
He doesn’t say he’ll miss her, but she knows. She doesn’t say she’ll miss him, because he knows, and she knows if she tells him, it will only make him even sadder. Betty sets an alarm for five am on her phone, and they fall asleep in the treehouse. Jughead has pulled her into his flannel to keep her warm, and it reminds her intensely of when they were kids. When Jughead still lived just a block from her and Archie, and she’d spend every moment her mother would allow up in this treehouse. The time they were ten years old, and all three of them had fallen asleep out there, and there had been hell to pay from Alice the next morning, but for the first time Betty almost hadn’t cared. The night Gladys left, and Betty had found a crying Jughead in the treehouse and pulled his head into her lap and let him sob until they both fell asleep. That one had gotten her grounded for a month. It had been worth it.
At five am, Betty goes home for all of two hours. Just long enough to wake up in her own bed and walk downstairs, so no one knows where she was all night, and then immediately she leaves for Jughead’s trailer to help him finish packing and say goodbye.
Archie is there, and Veronica, and Kevin, and even Cheryl. But there’s a silent agreement that, even over Archie, Betty gets the last hug goodbye. There are tears, and there are promises to keep in touch, and there is a soft, unspoken lingering as Jughead and Betty’s hands slip apart as he gets into the bus to Cleveland.
They all mean it, when they say it. That they’ll keep in touch. But there’s so much to run away from in Riverdale. Betty holds out the longest, still texting Jughead when her family elects to leave Riverdale right before her senior year, in a desperate bid to fix Hal and Alice’s crumbling marriage.
It doesn’t work. They get divorced mere months into the move Rochester. Betty gets emancipated, and convinces Polly to move out with her.
Time passes. People lose touch. Life moves on.
But sometimes, fate has other plans.
And sometimes, fate has to get creative.