Work Text:
Bullshit, you fucking miss me
There, I said it, I guess I'll talk to you in a few months
Sitting drunk on the sidewalk
I guess I'll get up, I guess I'll go for a walkYou weren't the only one who thought of us that way
I spend most nights awake, wide awake- "Your Graduation" (Modern Baseball)
In hindsight, it only seemed fitting – in light of Jughead’s recent string of bad luck – that during the after-school teachers’ meeting, at the exact point when he was starting to seriously consider jumping out of the window, Archie Andrews burst in the door shouting, “There’s a flood!”
Every single head in the room turned to look at him, heads swiveling in tandem like the girl from The Exorcist.
“Well, not exactly a flood – yet – but, uh, the boys’ bathroom sink is clogged. Again.” Archie grimaced.
A collective groan resounded throughout the room, and Jughead figured that was his cue to get the fuck out. He slipped out the door while Archie was still fielding questions, grateful for Archie’s obliviousness to his surroundings.
In the hallway, Jughead passed a kid wearing a soccer uniform who was trying (and failing) to hold back laughter, and yeah, it wasn’t really hard to figure out what had happened with the sink incident.
Grateful for the excuse to ditch the meeting, Jughead decided to leave the school building altogether and get a head start on grading his students’ most recent writing assignments. There were a few students whose writing he genuinely looked forward to; thankfully, he’d been graced with a couple of kids who actually cared about writing and had some pretty creative ideas. Even though some of those kids’ spelling and grammar got their grades docked in other classes, he was lenient about the bells and whistles – after all, he’d rather read ten jumbled-but-creative stories than one more dry-ass book report written in perfect MLA.
Jughead checked his phone. It was only 3:53. Plenty of time to make a pit stop before settling in to do some grading. As he headed out the back door of the building, crossing the parking lot, he glanced left and right to make sure the other teachers and parents had all cleared out. Even though he wasn’t a high schooler anymore – he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d even done this – the secretive, slightly-paranoid exhilaration of sneaking off to smoke in the woods was basically muscle memory.
Cutting through the trees lining the football field, Jughead made his way over to a little bridge over a river at the very edge of campus. He was relieved to see that everything still looked mostly the same: the bridge led to a little brambly pathway, which wound its way down a hill to a small, abandoned playground. The Serpents had snuck off during lunch a million times to hang out there and share a single shitty joint of someone’s trash weed.
Sure enough, the playground was still there, in all its beat-up glory. Jughead felt a little more self-conscious about hanging out there now that he was a teacher, both because he’d be in deep shit if he got caught and because it probably looked weird for an adult to be sitting on a playground.
Then again, he wasn’t a student, so the administration probably couldn’t do a whole lot about his decisions off-campus, as long as he wasn’t coming into work high – and he had his shit together enough to know that was a stupid idea. Plus, the elementary school that had originally owned the playground was long gone, replaced by a row of McMansions that lay just beyond a thick wall of pine trees, so it wasn’t anyone’s property.
Basically, he wasn’t bothering anyone, and it wasn’t anyone’s business.
With one final glance around the perimeter to make sure he was alone, Jughead looked for a place to sit. The benches were all wet and nasty from rain earlier in the day, so he thought fuck it and shook off one of the swings to sit down.
After a few minutes of peace and quiet, he felt comfortable enough to finally root around in his satchel for the Altoids tin he kept hidden safely underneath the bag that usually held his lunch. He popped the tin open and pulled out a joint and a lighter, holding the end of the paper over the flame until it caught fire and started to burn evenly.
He settled into his seat and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke out in a white plume. Only after a few minutes, when his throat started getting dry, did he realize he’d forgotten to bring a water bottle. Whatever. He’d finish up quick and go home.
As Jughead started to take another hit, something rustled far off in the bushes. He craned his neck to try and see up the path, but it was too leafy to see whether someone was coming. The rustling got closer, until he could hear clear footsteps coming down the pathway.
“Shit,” Jughead whispered under his breath. He tapped the ash off the end of the joint and tried to hold it out of sight, praying that it was a runner or something just passing through so he could be left in peace. He knew from experience that hiding the joint didn’t really do jack shit if the other person could still smell the smoke, but at least it felt a little more courteous than huffing and puffing right in someone’s face. As the footsteps neared, he took a deep breath and tried to look sober – as much as an adult sitting on a child’s swing, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, could.
An arm reached out of the forest, swatting aside branches like a zombie reaching out of a grave, and then Archie emerged at the edge of the clearing. He glanced around, and once he noticed Jughead, started to walk over slowly.
“What are you doing out here?” Archie asked.
“What’re you doing out here?” Jughead parried. “This is Serpents turf.”
Archie quirked an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you’d marked your territory.”
“I mean, not really, but we always used to come out here. I’ve never seen a Bulldog out here in my life. Don’t tell me the jocks co-opted it,” he groaned.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Archie said. “Toni brought me out here a little while ago.”
“Oh,” Jughead said, more to himself than to Archie. “Cool.” He cleared his throat. “What’d she bring you out here for?”
In lieu of an answer, Archie walked over and sat down on the swing next to Jughead, nodding at his left hand. “Same thing as you, looks like.” He pulled a drawstring bag off his shoulder and fished out a fancy-looking little black tin. Jughead couldn’t figure out what it was at first – that is, until Archie pulled out a lighter and a water bottle, and slid open the tin to reveal a neat row of rolled-up papers.
“Really? You?” Jughead asked, clapping a hand over his heart.
“What, are you surprised?” Archie asked.
“I mean, yeah. Can you blame me? Archie Andrews, Purple Heart and rescuer of kittens from trees, partakes in the devil’s lettuce?”
“Okay, please never call it that again.” Archie laughed and shook his head.
He lit the end of his own joint and peered at it carefully, blowing on it until it was burning uniformly. With a more solemn expression, he looked back over at Jughead. “Also, I’m not a Purple Heart, but I am a veteran, obviously. And medical marijuana’s legal, so…yeah. Supposed to help me deal with PTSD.”
Jughead took another hit and blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, trying not to catch Archie in the downwind. “Guess I’m old-fashioned, I still get it from a dealer. It’s not like I can afford thirty-five a gram or whatever the fuck they charge you at those places. I prefer my coping mechanisms cheap and dirty.” He winced slightly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Archie laughed. “Yeah…it’s not cheap. Maybe you should remind me to get your dealer’s number sometime.”
“Sure,” Jughead said with a shrug. After a minute, he asked: “So, if you smoke, how come I’ve never smelled it in the house or anything?”
“Uh, same reason I’ve never smelled yours, I’m guessing. I’m a decent human being who doesn’t like making other people’s living quarters reek.”
“Fair enough.”
“That’s why I’ve been coming out here more often.”
“I usually just go on a walk,” Jughead offered. “But same, I didn’t want to – especially in your house. It would’ve felt rude.”
“I appreciate that.” Archie sounded genuine, if a little stilted. “Although I think my dad would be proud,” he added.
Jughead half-laughed. “Really?”
“Yeah, actually,” Archie replied. “When I first came back here, I was helping clean the place out, and I came across his old stash in the basement. I always knew there was a reason it smelled familiar.”
“Wow,” Jughead mused. “I never would’ve guessed. Although it kind of makes sense, now that I think about it.”
“Yeah, I thought so too.” Archie turned to blow out a lungful of smoke, coughing a little. When he pulled a water bottle out of his backpack, Jughead thanked the heavens that Archie had thought ahead.
“Can I get some of that?” he asked once Archie’s coughing fit subsided. Archie nodded and handed it over wordlessly.
After taking a sip and handing it back, Jughead asked: “So…did you get rid of it, or, like—”
“Nah, I smoked it. It’s what my dad would’ve wanted.”
“Good choice,” Jughead said wryly. “Celebrating his memory.”
Archie nodded without saying anything.
The conversation was veering a little too close to ‘deep shit’ for Jughead’s current comfort level. “Was it good, or…”
“Yeah, no, it was shit.” Archie laughed, which quickly subsided into coughing, making Jughead burst out laughing too. “Don’t know what I expected from seven-year-old weed, but yeah. Gross as fuck.”
Jughead winced sympathetically. “Been there.”
As they both stared off into the distance, the conversation dissolved into silence, and some of the lightness in the air did, too. Jughead took one last hit and winced, then stubbed out the flame carefully before chucking it into the woods. Archie hesitated for a second, then followed suit.
They settled back into their seats and Jughead kicked off the ground, swinging back and forth slightly, the swing's rusty chains creaking and drowning out the awkward silence. Occasionally, he glanced over at Archie, who seemed to be deep in thought.
After a few minutes, Archie shifted in his seat. Jughead turned to look, thinking he was about to leave, but instead, Archie just sighed and sat back down.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Me either,” Jughead replied. “Feels weird to be twenty-five years old and still smoking out here.” He laughed half-heartedly.
“No, I mean, like, in general.”
“Oh.” Jughead was quiet for a second, then added: “I think that’s the most honest thing I’ve heard you say in a while.”
“The thing you said about the Purple Heart, it reminded me—”
“It was just a stupid joke, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve if that’s something you don’t wanna talk about.”
“I know. It’s fine.”
“Okay.”
Archie continued: “But actually, you’re not that far off.” He paused for a second to look over at Jughead. “How familiar are you with military terminology?”
“What do you think?” Jughead asked, a little sarcastically.
“Right, fair enough. Well, General Taylor – my boss, pretty much – showed up at the door the other day. He told me I was getting a medal, for my bravery and loyalty and all that stuff. Basically ordered me to accept it.”
“Um. Well, congratulations,” Jughead replied. He’d been starting to feel a little hazy, comfortable numbness setting in with the high, but the serious conversation was forcing him to snap out of it.
“The thing is, that mission was a disaster. I lost ten men.”
“Shit,” Jughead said quietly.
“Yeah. So much for my bravery. And then the other day, I got a call from a fucking journalist, telling me she’s investigating General Taylor. She thinks he set me up, like, the mission was supposed to fail. That I was supposed to die there, too. The only reason I didn’t was…honestly, just dumb luck.”
“Fuck. Are you serious?” Archie’s predicament sounded like an episode of a soap opera, but considering what Jughead had recently been through in his own life, maybe that was the new normal.
“Yeah. It seems like he was trying to take me out, but since I survived, now he’s trying to cover it all up. Trying to make me feel like I did something special, when in reality, I was just another target. A chicken who escaped the slaughterhouse.”
“Jesus.” Jughead said solemnly. “That’s dark.”
Archie kept going. “The whole thing is really messing with me. The army was good for me, you know?”
Jughead didn’t, but he nodded anyways. It had always made sense to him, in an Archie sort of way, even if he’d never understood why someone would want to enlist.
“It was structure, discipline, purpose…basically, everything I needed and didn’t have when I was coming out of high school. It’s not like I thought I was saving the world, and honestly, there are better ways I could’ve contributed to society, but. At least I knew what I was doing. At least I could wake up every day and do what I needed to fulfill my duty. And I was good at it, too. As fucked-up as that sounds.”
“I think I get it,” Jughead replied.
“And now…I’m here. Back in Riverdale. On the same exact football field that the Bulldogs used to get their asses kicked on, and now we’re getting our asses kicked all over again. It’s the one thing I thought I’d always known how to do, and I’m still floundering. Seven years later, and I’m teaching at my old high school, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing or where I’m going. And now it turns out the one thing I thought gave my life meaning is actually just as fucked-up and corrupted as everything else.”
“Well, I’ll try not to take the ‘teaching at my old high school’ thing too personally,” Jughead said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean, like…I always thought of myself as the stuff I do. If you’d’ve asked me who I was back in high school, I would’ve said, y’know, football player, musician, all that stuff. And if you’d asked, like, anywhere from seven years to three weeks ago, I would’ve talked about the army. That was who I was. And then I got myself injured, and got ten of my guys killed, and the guy I was supposed to trust with my life had a hit out on me all along. And everything disappeared, just like that.”
Jughead just nodded.
“I think that’s why I started the fire department, and started coaching and teaching at the same time. Inertia, or something like that: if I keep moving, keep doing things, I’ll be okay. But if I stop doing things, I don’t know what’ll happen. Outside of my job, and the stuff I do for other people, I…don’t actually know who I am.”
Jughead ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. That’s…yeah. I hear you.”
Archie turned to look at him, then. “How did you do it? How’d you figure out who you were after high school?”
Jughead raised his eyebrows. “Um…that’s a big question.”
“I have time,” Archie responded.
“Well. Getting stood up by all my friends for several years straight was a great character-building exercise.” He returned Archie’s stare levelly. “And don’t – don’t apologize for that, if you were about to. Not because it’s okay, ‘cause it wasn’t, but…I don’t want to have the same conversation we had in high school. Not right now. I’m sure you had your reasons, or something like that, so let’s just…not get into it.”
Archie nodded. “Okay.”
“But seriously. Within the span of a couple months, my family moved away, you enlisted, Betty and I split up, and then I got to be a new person in a new town. I got to start over. Being…ghosted, for lack of a better word, basically solidified what I already knew: I didn’t have anything to come back to here. I didn’t have anyone or anything else to rely on to know who I was, so I had to figure it out.”
Jughead shrugged and continued. “It wasn’t easy, it’s not like I just got lucky and came out of the womb with a fully-formed independent identity, but when you get thrown in the deep end, you either learn how to swim or you drown.”
Jury’s still out on which one I picked, he thought to himself.
“So, yeah,” Jughead said with a sigh. “I know that’s not the most uplifting advice, but it’s real. When all your supports get ripped away from you – that’s when you figure out who you are. Jesus, I sound like a TED Talk,” he laughed.
Archie met his eyes for a second, then glanced away. “Huh. Well, good to know it’s not just me.”
“It’s definitely not just you,” Jughead replied. “But it is something you have to do on your own. That’s kinda the whole point. No one else can figure out who you are for you.”
Archie made a noise of affirmation, but didn’t say anything else.
“You know,” Jughead started, keeping his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. “Speaking of figuring out who you are. And leaving things behind. When I first moved to the city, I got an apartment in the East Village. Well, a lot of it is gentrified now. Turns out, when you try to escape your hometown, you end up finding a lot of the same shit everywhere.”
“The East Village,” Archie repeated. “That’s where I always—”
“I know,” Jughead said. “That’s why.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t even know you were in New York at the time. I figured you were overseas, god knows where. Didn’t stop me, though. I dunno how many times I almost had a panic attack on the train ‘cause I thought I saw you.” He laughed dryly.
Archie didn’t respond. Jughead wouldn’t tell him about the rest: the endless bars and parties at strangers’ tiny, smoky apartments, and his string of Groundr hookups with guys who were always just a little off: too spray-tanned, abs too defined, hair too red, or not red enough.
“Guess I didn’t really realize I hadn’t moved on. Writing a book about Riverdale didn’t exactly help. I thought I was leaving it behind. That’s what I told everyone, that I was doing it for closure, but it was just an excuse to re-live it every day. For ‘inspiration.’ Once it got published, I was pretty much aimless, too.”
Jughead sighed and shifted in his seat. He hadn’t expected the conversation to end up there, but if it was personal sharing time, he was damn well gonna get some stuff off his chest too.
“It was the one thing I’d been working on for so long. Part of me thought I’d just never finish it, like it was my white whale. But I did, somehow, and then it got published, and then I realized that…I don’t know. It was just a book.”
He glanced over at Archie, who looked away. “And then I had no clue what to write about. Didn’t know how to come up with my own ideas. All I’d done was write about things that’d happened to me and my friends. So I guess I know what you’re talking about. Honestly, I’m still kind of in the same place. Thought I was gonna get some big burst of inspiration coming back here, but…well, it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Who knows,” Archie chimed in. “Maybe it still will.”
“Maybe,” Jughead repeated.
As they sat on the swings in silence, the wind started to kick up around them, sweeping the dead leaves off the ground, only to float back down again.
“I think it’s supposed to rain again,” Archie said.
Jughead looked up at the dark blue clouds slowly converging over the afternoon sky. “Shit, you’re right.” He looked around, mentally checking that he wasn’t leaving anything behind. “Guess it’s time to head out.”
Archie followed suit, grabbing his bag off the ground and slinging it over his shoulder.
“Do you—” Jughead started to ask.
“I have my car, if you—” Archie said at the same time, then cut himself off.
“Yeah, could you?” Jughead asked, grateful he wouldn’t have to walk home in the rain. Not like it was a huge burden for Archie to drive him back to the house they both lived in, but still.
“No problem. I’m definitely sober enough to drive, so, yeah. We’re good.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
They made it halfway across the football field before the clouds unleashed a torrent of rain. Archie yelped and broke into a sprint, and Jughead tried to keep up as they neared the parking lot.
“Dude, I don’t know where your car is! Come back!”
“Oh shit,” Archie said, and slowed down to a much more manageable power-walk for the rest of the distance to the car.
“Sorry in advance for getting the seat wet,” Jughead said with a grimace.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve definitely had worse in here.”
Jughead laughed. “I don’t know if I should ask.” He peeled off the sweater he’d been wearing over his shirt and tossed it in the backseat, along with his briefcase, once he’d checked inside to make sure his papers weren’t wet.
Even though they both knew the route like the back of their hand, Archie drove slowly, hunched over the steering wheel to peer out the windshield through the deluge of rain.
For a split second, Jughead thought Archie looked older, like Fred when he forgot his glasses, and the realization made something bittersweet inside him twist. Something about the comfort of familiarity, something about being safely ferried home to the Andrews’ house during a storm, settled some of the unease that had been building up ever since he’d returned to Riverdale.
Thankfully, it wasn’t rush hour yet, so the roads were empty and they made it home without a hassle. Once they parked, they both sprinted up to the front door. Archie shook his head like a dog, making water fly everywhere.
“Dude!” Jughead shouted, jumping away. “Just for that, I call dibs on the first shower.”
“Fine,” Archie replied, mock-exasperated. He held the door open for Jughead, then locked it behind himself.
As Jughead darted upstairs, the memory of Fred’s voice rang through his ears, from every time he and Archie had played in the sprinkler as kids and run back inside still soaked: watch out, Mary’ll throw a fit if you get water on the wood floors. It was their house now, technically, and their floorboards, but taking care of the place felt like taking care of the memories it held, too. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
After showering, Jughead walked back downstairs to get started on the pile of grading that awaited him. As he was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing the first essay, Archie walked in.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Jughead replied, looking up from the stack of papers.
“I gotta go do some stuff for the fire department, but I was thinking we could eat dinner together tonight. If you want. I was just gonna make spaghetti, not really anything special, but—”
“Yeah,” Jughead said simply. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Okay. Good.” Archie said, offering a small smile. “Maybe, like, seven? I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
“You got it.” Jughead nodded in return and turned back to his grading. “I’ll be here.”