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i wish i believed you when you told me this was my home
By the third time Jughead has tripped and nearly fallen over some invisible obstacle on the forest floor, he’s ready to call it quits. Whatever’s out in these woods – a mothman, missing girls, Polly Cooper – he’s not going to find them with a twisted ankle.
He’s about to suggest they turn around when a few feet ahead of him, Betty stops and pivots, the beam of her flashlight nearly blinding him. “Did you feel that?”
Feel what?, he starts to say, but before he can get the words out, he does: a cold, wet splash on the back of his hand. It’s starting to rain.
Rain hard. Not even a minute passes before the heavens open up, and his jacket and jeans are already soaked through. It’s been at least forty-five minutes since they left their cars parked in a clearing off Route 44. In a storm like this it’s likely to take them even longer to make their way back, and that’s if they even manage to head in the right direction.
Cursing under his breath, Jughead does some quick mental calculations, shoulders slumping slightly in relief as he realizes where they are, and what’s nearby.
“Did you bring an umbrella?” Betty has to move closer and raise her voice just to be heard over the rumbling thunder. He can tell from the pitch of her voice that she’s worried.
“Little late for that.” He shakes his head. “It’s not safe, the river’s already high this time of year. I know where we can go. Follow me.”
The bunker seems more or less untouched since the last time he was there seven years ago. It’s not surprising – their group of friends had been the only ones left who were even aware of its existence, and he can’t imagine why any of them would have had reason to use it since leaving town – but it’s oddly comforting nonetheless. Jughead heads straight for the rusty filing cabinet against the far wall, and sure enough there are several pairs of his old pajamas right where he left them. They’re not much – just the rattiest ones he hadn’t bothered packing up to take to Iowa – but they’re dry.
Betty changes in the bathroom while he shucks off his wet clothes. When she emerges, her long, damp hair has been twisted up atop her head with a worn hand towel.
He’d been surprised the first time he’d seen her, a little more than six weeks ago. She wears her hair longer and wavier now than she had as a teenager, flowing around her shoulders. That in itself was not a surprise, but paired with the fact that she was now an FBI agent-in-training, he’d expected something a little more practical from the adult version of Betty Cooper.
Just another factoid to add to the growing pile of evidence that he no longer knows her at all.
He averts his eyes as Betty treads lightly across the room to the ladder, where she hangs her damp clothing over the rungs. The old pajamas are perfectly modest – they hang overly-large on her slim frame just as they had back in high school – but it’s too weird seeing her wear his clothes again.
Betty clears her throat as she adjusts the wet sleeve of her blouse. “I never thought I’d be back in here again.”
Something about the way she says it rouses his defensive instincts. Without ever intending to, Jughead had at some point developed a sense of propriety over the bunker. Whether by choice or necessity, he had spent more time in here than any of them, save perhaps Dilton Doiley, who had surely never imagined how his doomsday escape hatch would one day be coopted by his classmates in his absence for their own needs: shelter, solitude, solace.
In a strange, pathetic, disturbing way – it’s home.
Still, he forces himself to tamp down the feelings, just as he’s been doing ever since they all arrived back in Riverdale at Archie’s behest. Whatever happens here – today, tomorrow, for however long it takes to solve this case – it’s all temporary. One final moment for their paths to cross, before they all part ways for good, barreling along separate tracks towards whatever futures await them.
He aims low: humor. “Whereas I always knew someday I’d heed its siren call.”
Her quiet laughter plucks at his ego. If nothing else, he can still make her laugh.
For some reason Jughead can no longer remember – maybe just the habit he’d picked up after months of living in Alice Cooper’s house – he’d made up the bed before leaving for the last time seven years ago, which he’s now grateful for as he settles sideways onto the mattress, letting his back rest against the cement wall. Betty sits on one of the metal chairs at the table beside it, turning it towards him. She checks her phone, then places it face down on the table.
Jughead lifts his own phone towards her. “I’ve got a few bars down here, if you need to call anyone.”
He doesn’t want to say it, but she looks perplexed, so he clarifies: “Archie. If you want to let him know where you are.”
Betty’s face relaxes, but he doesn’t miss the slight flush in her cheeks when she says, “No. That’s – um, not necessary.”
Jughead shrugs, turning his attention back to his phone. Whatever arrangement she and Archie have got going on, he doesn’t need – or want – to know the details.
“Do you need to call anyone?” she asks. “I could go back in the bathroom for a moment, if you need privacy.”
Now it’s his turn to look confused. Jessica had broken up with him weeks ago, which Betty already knows because he’d shown up in Riverdale with half of his worldly possessions crammed into a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
“Who would I be calling?”
“I don’t know.” Betty crosses her legs, looking uncomfortable. “Tabitha, maybe.”
“Tabitha?” He repeats it before he can stop himself.
“You spend a lot of time together.” She crosses her arms, too. She sounds defensive.
“Yeah, time investigating why some bizarro mothman creature is threatening her family’s livelihood. Which, by the way, I don’t think we were going to track down out there tonight, even if it hadn’t started to monsoon out of nowhere.”
“Well, it’s not like mystery never opened up the door to romance before,” Betty mutters.
Jughead has no idea what to say to that.
Thankfully, Betty presses on. “I think we’re off the scent, too. I didn’t want to call it too soon, but…I had a feeling. There’s nothing out there. Not tonight, anyway.”
“A feeling?” Jughead raises an eyebrow. “Is that what they’re teaching you about in the FBI? Feelings?”
For the first time since they’d set off into Fox Forest hours ago, Betty smiles. This is her comfort zone now, he realizes. Not investigations, not exactly. Work.
“They teach you a lot of things at the Academy,” she says. “How to load a Glock. Negotiation tactics. So many acronyms. But the most important thing you learn is that you’ve either got good instincts, or you don’t.”
“That hardly seems like something you’d need to go all the way to Quantico to find out.”
“Maybe not me.” Betty smirks. “But most trainees didn’t spend their teenage years identifying their own family members as serial killers.”
The back of his neck prickles – he can sense they’re on the verge of tipping into a conversation that’s very, very dark. Once he might have indulged that feeling, pressed his thumb into the wound until they both cried for mercy.
But he’s older now.
“I never thought I’d see the day Betty Cooper became a fed,” he says lightly, leaning back against the wall, letting his legs stretch out before him. It’s a small bed, and there’s nowhere else to sleep in this concrete bunker, but he’s not going to think about what that means yet.
She makes a face like she doesn’t believe him. “I was in the Junior FBI Training Program.”
“But you never liked following the rules.”
She tilts her head; he knows it means, fair enough. “Maybe that was my mistake.”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It was just a surprise. To me.”
And I know you best of all: the words hang in the air, unspoken between them. He’d feel smug about it, if the same weren’t true of her and him.
“You don’t surprise me at all,” she says softly.
Jughead’s face darkens. It shouldn’t come as a shock – it’s not the first time he’s heard such a sentiment, and it won’t be the last. Coming from Betty, though – that stings.
“No, I guess I wouldn’t. Rudderless single guy with writer’s block and debt collectors chasing him down? Sounds like a Jones, alright.” At least I don’t have a kid to benignly neglect, he doesn’t add; it might sound too much like an accusation.
Betty sits up in her chair, looking stricken. “That’s not what I meant.”
Knowing he’ll regret it, he says, “So what do you mean?”
“I mean – you’re a college graduate. You’re a writer, a published author. I found your book on the same shelf as James Joyce, Jughead.”
“They probably mis-shelved it,” he mumbles – most bookstores file the novel under Mysteries & Thrillers, not Literary Fiction – but it’s impossible not to hang on to the implication. “So – you’ve read it?”
Again, she looks at him in disbelief. “Of course I read it.”
He’d imagined it, of course, probably hundreds of times – the way she always bit her lower lip as she worked through a particularly engrossing passage, the notes she might scribble in the margins. But he hadn’t even had the guts to send her a copy. “What did you think?”
Betty tugs the towel around her head loose, letting her damp hair tumble around her shoulders. She folds it carefully, placing it on the table beside her phone. “I thought it was good. Really, really good.”
He waits for her to say more – she had never been shy about picking apart his work back in high school – but she doesn’t elaborate.
“You can be honest,” he presses. The reviews had been middling-to-positive; the last time he’d checked his page on Goodreads, which he did more frequently than he’d like to admit, it was rated a 3.31. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”
“I liked it. Really.” She hesitates. “I think – I think I didn’t realize how deeply I’d hurt you, until I read it.”
It is the last thing he’d expected her to say, and not only because they’ve both been abiding by some unspoken agreement these past six weeks to never broach the fact that they’d once been dizzyingly, desperately, devotedly in love.
“You broke my fucking heart, Betty,” he lets slip.
Her eyes are suddenly wet with tears, and he can’t help but wonder how they got here.
“I know.” She sucks in a breath, lifting her eyes to the ceiling as she runs a careful finger under one eye. “I know I did.”
His heart pounds in his chest, even as his stomach turns. He can’t have this conversation – not here, not now, not with her.
“I want to go to sleep.” It’s barely past eight p.m. He knows he’s being curt – rude, even – but he doesn’t know how else to navigate this. Not without breaking down himself.
“Okay.”
He stands, gesturing uselessly towards the bed. “It’s small, but there’s nowhere else, so – I don’t know how you want to do this.”
“You tell me, Jughead.”
In an instant, it’s like they’re back in that summer again – his silence, her sad acquiescence. It was so unlike her that he hadn’t known how to respond every time she said, it’s your move, Jug. It’s your decision.
So he just…hadn’t.
“I know you have an opinion, so just – be honest.”
“Whatever you want is fine. Honestly,” she adds.
“Fine.” He tugs the covers loose with a little more force than is necessary, and slots himself along the edge of the bed closest to the wall, his back turned towards her. “There’s only one pillow, so – you can have it.”
Jughead squeezes his eyes shut, and waits. Eventually he hears the scrape of Betty’s chair against the floor, the soft shuffle of her footsteps, the gentle click as she switches off the overhead light.
The mattress dips behind him beneath her weight, and it’s a familiar feeling. His body tenses. The muscle memory is in him still, telling him to roll over and fold her into his arms, pull her back against his chest, rest his lips against the crown of her hair.
Seven years ago, he’d realized early on that it had been a mistake to come back here, where memories hung in the stale air like a thick, slow-moving fog. But he hadn’t had much of a choice, unless he wanted to make his way to Ohio, which was both unappealing and required far more effort than the inertia that had landed him here in the first place. He’s got that same feeling now, heavy in the pit of his stomach. They should have just headed back to their cars, taken their chances with the lightning, the flash flooding, the elusive mothman.
“I’m not with Archie.” Her voice floats over him, out of the darkness, just a touch above a whisper. “I know you saw us at Pop’s, and – we did try, but. It’s done. It never felt right.” She pauses. “It never has.”
Jughead swallows. His mouth feels dry, his heart like it’s about to pound out of his chest.
“Then why’d you do it?”
He can tell, from the little hitch in her breath after he says it, that she knows what he’s really asking: the question he hadn’t been able to bring himself to speak aloud, back when it had all happened. Back when the answer really might have mattered.
“I don’t know.”
Jughead forces himself to breathe. In, out, in.
He can’t stop himself from saying, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Betty doesn’t answer right away, and he wonders if she’s doing the same thing he’s been doing: forcing herself to take it slow, to inhale, to exhale, to count to ten before she says something that might rip back open one or both of their hearts.
“I mean I don’t know.”
“So you blew up our lives for no actual reason.” He doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh, or cry.
Betty pauses again before she says, “I didn’t do that alone, Jughead.”
“No, you did it with my best friend.”
He hears her sharp intake of breath. “I did it with you.”
Somehow it’s easier to let himself be angry with her in the dark like this – in the bunker, it’s so pitch black that his eyes have nothing to adjust to. He turns his head to look behind him. He can’t even see the outline of her body beside his, inches away.
“I can’t believe you’re going to pin this on me. I forgave you. I forgave you both, I – god, I couldn’t have been more understanding.”
“But you didn’t even know what you were forgiving me for, because you never let me explain.”
He presses his face to the mattress in frustration. “Explain what, Betty? You just said you didn’t have any reason –”
“That’s not what I said. I said I didn’t know –”
This time he does laugh – sharp, short, maybe cruel, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. “You know that doesn’t make it any better, right?”
“I was so confused.”
He can tell that she’s crying now, and god, despite everything he still feels it, that urge to touch her, hold her. It’s complete and utter bullshit and it’s who he is, it’s some fundamental part of him that will always reach for her, no matter what she does or how much it destroys him. He’s never believed in soulmates, but nothing has made him come closer than this terrible, inescapable feeling, this piece of him that is still bound up with her seven years later in some unknowable, immutable way.
“I thought – everything was changing, and – you almost died and I didn’t – everything felt so wrong. It felt like it was spinning out of control, and – and Archie was just there, and maybe I thought that was what would make it all normal again. Like when we were kids again. I don’t know, it’s – it’s so long ago, now.
“I knew it was a mistake as soon as I did it. Everything still felt wrong. But I couldn’t – I knew if I told you, I’d lose you. And that was so much worse than the guilt, Jug. I knew I could bear the guilt as long as I didn’t lose you.”
Jughead wipes uselessly at his eyes. The stiff, cheap bedsheet beneath his cheek is wet with his own tears.
He’d been so afraid of her answer that he’d never asked the question. He had planned to. After he took Archie to the bus stop that sunny summer day, he thought he’d have time to himself on the ride back home. Time to collect his thoughts, fine tune his words, plumb the depths of his feelings. But Betty and Veronica had shown up in the jalopy. The three of them had chased after Archie, said their goodbyes, and then retreated to their booth at Pop’s, lingering there for hours.
It was late by the time they got home, alone together for the first time since that morning. Betty had caught him by the wrist as he stepped towards the bathroom for his nighttime shower. “I thought we were going to talk,” she’d said.
He’d squeezed her hand. “I’m beat,” he’d said, “tomorrow?”
But they never talked; he never asked. And now he knows that her answer held none of the things he’d feared: I wanted him.
I loved him.
“Please say something,” she whispers.
With effort, he shifts onto his other side to face her, careful not to touch. He swallows. “I don’t know what to say,” he admits. “All I ever wanted was for you to tell me why.”
She sniffles, her words coming out thick and stilted. “But – you never gave me a chance.”
He closes his eyes, though it makes no difference in what he sees. “You had endless chances. You had all summer.”
“You shut me out.”
“Because you broke my trust.” He makes himself take another breath. “It was on you to fix that, Betty. Not me.”
“But it had to be on your terms, Jug.” She sounds frustrated. “I couldn’t force you to have a conversation you didn’t want.”
Jughead shifts onto his back, staring up into the endless dark. “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
“No.”
The sudden touch of her hand on his forearm makes him jump. Her fingers fumble uncertainly, finding his shoulder, then his cheek. She cups his jaw in her palm. It takes all of his willpower not to lean into it.
“I want to talk about it.” He can imagine the determined set of her chin, the piercing gaze in her green eyes. “I want to fix this. I want to make it right.”
His palm folds over her hand on his cheek, uncertain if he wants to thread his fingers through hers, or pull them away. “Why?”
“Why?” she repeats.
“What is it you want to happen here?” He drops his hand, letting it fall to the bed between them. “You don’t even live here anymore. I’m a fucking disaster, I – we’re not who we used to be.”
Her weight shifts suddenly on the bed, dragging the covers down to his waist. “Can I turn on the light?” she asks abruptly.
He squints as the yellow-tinted light floods the room again. When Betty returns to the bed, he’s unsurprised to see her pretty green eyes are puffy and rimmed in red; he’s sure his own look much the same.
Her gaze is soft as she cups his face again, fingers so light against his skin they almost tickle. “I meant it,” she says, “when I said I’d always love you.” Her eyes follow the path of her fingers as she traces faint lines between the moles on his cheek. She stops, letting her knuckles rest gently against his jaw as she meets his eyes. “Did you?”
Gazing up at her, he knows there’s only one answer. “Yes.”
She looks back at him for a long moment, eyes searching, and for the first time in a long time he wishes he knew what she was thinking.
For the first time in a long time, he thinks it might be the same thing he is.