Work Text:
i. past
It’s just past four o'clock in the morning and everyone else on the bus is asleep. Jellybean is a small, warm, heavy weight against her side, but Gladys presses her cheek against the chill of the bus window until it numbs.
“Leave tonight, or live and die this way,” she keeps repeating to herself, watching for the glow of the city to appear as the bus barrels on through the night.
The boy will make it, she repeats to herself. He’ll be fine without me. He’ll be better off.
She doesn’t know if she really believes that, or if she just can’t stand to see that look in his eyes anymore – not disgust, not anger, not betrayal, but an open question: why are you letting this happen?
Maybe she’s running away as an answer. Maybe she’s just trying to get away from that question.
It was like that thing that the talk shows always said -- you have to put on your own oxygen mask first, and then put it on your kids. You have to look out for yourself first. You have to do what’s right for you, even as your heart and brain and every sinew of your body scream at you that you’re doing the wrong thing.
Gladys has never even been on a goddamned airplane.
Jellybean shifts, half-stirs. Gladys pets her head, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. “Go back to sleep,” she says.
“Jug?” Jellybean asks sleepily, breaking Gladys’s damn heart.
“Go to sleep, baby,” Jellybean’s eyelids flutter for a moment, then shut.
And now it was time to agonize again. Did I make the right choice? Not leaving Riverdale -- leaving had to be right. Seventeen years was long enough. Almost half her life.
But leaving Jughead -- this had been the waking obsession, night after night.
She had to leave fast, and she had to leave cheap, and it would be so much harder with the teenaged boy, and...
It wasn’t that Gladys thought Jughead was too much like FP. It was that she feared Jughead was too much like her. Too giving, too willing to sacrifice, too much like her to make it in life. He learned everything bad from her. He worked too hard to save something irreparably broken. And by staying, she had taught him that was the right thing to do.
FP could teach him how to be a man. All she could teach him was how to be a pushover.
Back to the window. Back to the dream of things getting better. Away from the tangled mess. This was her choice, for better or worse.
Well, sure I’ll go to hell for this, but where else have I ever been?
ii. present
“Fine. I’ll get my stuff,” Betty says, and something inside of Jughead twists and curls up on himself, like the last embers of a fire going out.
As she goes to the bedroom, her mother hovering at her shoulder like a vulture, his eyes are glued to her back, waiting for her to turn around, waiting for her to give him a sign. Waiting in vain.
Once the door to the bedroom closes, FP exhales noisily and gets up from his seat. Jughead knows without even asking that he’s going to the kitchen and crack open a beer, the first of many, and in a few hours he’ll be lost to the world.
“What are you thinking?” Jughead hisses venomously. “How can you let Mrs. Cooper take her?”
FP, unlike Betty, pauses for a moment. “She doesn’t belong here, Jug,” he replies. “Her mom’s a tough broad and she’ll take care of her.” Those utterly inane platitudes delivered, he resumes his trek to the refrigerator.
“Not with her brother there. You know what he’s capable of. How could you let this happen? How could you let her go?”
FP stops again, at the refrigerator door, but this time there’s something harder in his eyes. “How could you?”
Jughead opens his mouth, then closes it. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t notice you making any objections.”
“I’m -- you’re the adult! Mrs. Cooper would listen to you!”
“Boy,” FP says with grim humor, “Mrs. Cooper has never listened to me a day in her life. But I wasn’t talking about her, I was talking about your girl. Betty. I didn’t see you making any fight for her.” He open the fridge door and cracks open a beer, a sound Jughead knows in his bones. “If I know anything about women -- and the jury’s out on that -- it’s that you have to show them every day that being by your side is better than being on their own.” FP takes a long drink. “Lord knows they could do much better than us.”
“Dad,” Jughead says again. Stops.
“Be honest, boy. You really want to end up like me?” FP salutes him with the near-empty bottle. ”You gotta make a decision. Or live and die this way. Your funeral.”
Jughead replays the last few minutes of the conversation with Mrs. Cooper in his head. Thinks about his own silence, how it didn’t match every screaming fiber in his own head. How he wanted to make sure Betty made her own choices. How scared he was every single day that her choices would suddenly stop including him.
He thinks about when he told her to go. About when he asked her to stay.
The bedroom door creaks open. Mrs. Cooper strides out, Betty’s duffel bag in her arms. Betty follows, head down.
“All packed up in there,” Mrs. Cooper announces. “Betty, anything else?”
Betty picks up her backpack, her coat, the book she was reading. “This is all.”
“I’ll drive back with you,” Jughead offers. “Help you unpack.”
Mrs. Cooper gives him a look. “You’re not moving in with us. While you might be used to housing every sort of riff-raff, our house is family only.” Betty snorts softly.
“I just want to help,” Jughead says.
Mrs. Cooper gives him a hairy eyeball for a few moments longer, then abruptly shoves the duffel at him with her immaculately manicured talons.
Behind her, Betty gives him a small smile, and Jughead breathes for what feels like the first time.
---
“I didn’t want to leave,” Betty confesses quietly to him, when they’re in a moment of semi-privacy (unpacking Betty’s bag in her bedroom with the door wide open, but while Chic and Mrs. Cooper engrossed in a Scrabble game downstairs that Jughead is pretty damn sure Mrs. Cooper is letting him win). “I just...I left the house because I needed to get away from Chic. But I can’t stand the thought of my mom alone with him. What he might do to her.”
“I understand,” Jughead says, and he does.
“I liked living with you, though,” she says, even more quietly. “Even with your dad around. It was...nice.”
“It was,” Jughead says. Swallows. “I liked it, too.”
“Maybe someday,” Betty starts, then stops at hearing heavy feet in the hallway. Chic is there, his weirdly gormless face blank. He stares at the two of them for a moment, then walks away.
Betty shudders once he’s gone. “I need a new lock on my door.”
“I can install one,” he says. “Anything you need. I’ll be there, anytime.”
She leans against him. “Anytime?”
He wraps his arm around her shoulder. “Always.”
iii. future
JB smokes on the back porch, because that feels right. It’s only the third time she’s smoked a cigarette that she herself has lit -- most of the time, she smokes at parties, where someone else will get it going for her.
The door opens, and she knows without even turning around that it’s her older brother, leaving his own housewarming party to check in on her.
“Hey,” Jughead says, pointedly not commenting on the cigarette. “Enjoying the view?”
“I can’t fucking believe you own a house now,” JB says. “How do you sleep with all these fucking birds chirping?”
“With ear plugs,” Jughead replies cheerfully. He’s always so fucking cheerful lately. “How do you like it?”
“It’s the middle of nowhere. None of your friends without cars will ever see you again.”
“Drama queen much? We’re on a rail line.”
“Yeah, commuter rail,” Jellybean snorts. “In the suburbs. It’s like a fucking forest out here.”
Jughead makes a move to ruffle her hair (purple now), but she ducks away. Her friend Liz can blow smoke rings -- she wishes she could do that now, impress the hell out of him. He’d probably blow a whole smoke dragon if she did.
“You owe Betty an apology,” Jughead says finally.
“Do not.” JB inhales impatiently.
“Counterargument: the number of times you’ve called her ‘Stepford-esque’ this visit.”
“It’s a good movie.”
“It’s a horror film, Jelly.”
“Yeah, but the remake was a comedy.”
“Okay, Cooper-Jones house rule #1: we do not speak of remakes here.” He’s got that easy smile on his face, the humoring-the-baby-sister smile, and JB’s suddenly sick of it and sick of him.
“Fine, I’ll go.” JB straightens up, defiantly taking a bigger puff than she’s used to, manages to keep from coughing.
“Wait. No. Please.” The smirk drops. “Can we talk? You’ve been mad at me since I told you about the wedding. I’m sorry we didn’t invite you, but it was spur of the moment, we eloped, we didn’t invite anyone.”
“You think I wanted to go to that -- “ Jellybean draws in another drag, trying to remember the word from her reading. “ -- celebration of the bourgeois?”
She could feel him laughing next to her. Goddamnit. “It’s pronounced boor-ZHWAH.”
“Cool. That’s what you are. Have fun.” She stamps out her cigarette, ramming it into the painted porch rail. Hopes it leaves a burn mark. She turns away.
“What's really wrong, Jelly?” Her big brother is right there, the way he was when they were kids. How he hasn’t been, not really, not since her mom took her away, and even now that they’re adults and she’s in fucking college, he’s never really there for her anymore. How, now that he’s married, he’s going to be a father someday, and isn’t it all so fucking ridiculous, so fucking --
She means to say something cutting, something that will hurt him to the bone, but it comes out as a wail instead. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to be like him?”
Now he puts his arms around her, comforting, calming. The same brother she remembers tucking her into bed at night. “All the time.”
"What do you do about it?"
Jughead pats her on the shoulder, looks over her head. JB looks up to see Betty looking back at him through the screen door, hand over her belly like some fucking Madonna. "Try to be better. That's all I can do."
"Well, I'm never going to get married," JB says. "This family's mistakes end with me."
"If that's what you want," her brother says. "You make your own choices, the best you can. And I'll be here, no matter what."