Archive of Our Own ^beta

i remember the rush when forever was us
(before all of the winds of regret and mistrust)

east stroudsburg, pennsylvania

He knows he will never be able to say no when it comes to her, and he wonders if maybe she knows it too. Perhaps it’s pathetic that he can’t, just as pathetic as him staring at her from the other side of the teacher’s lounge every morning and not being able to say anything other than hey.

But he has long ago made peace with the fact that, when it comes to Betty Cooper, he is just wired in a different way.

Her eyes are set on the road and he takes this time to look at her. She looks good, different - her hair is longer and her features are sharper - but really good. He wonders what she makes of his differences when she looks at him.

(“It’s not just Polly. There are twenty-one others that we know of, and not only in Riverdale. The Lonely Highway crosses Pennsylvania and goes all the way to Derry and I- I need to go, I need to find them, and I guess I just wanted to talk to someone before I do it, and I- ”, she says, and he can see her hands still trembling at her sides. She is pacing back and forth on Archie’s doorstep, the same way he found her when he opened the door, and there is something about the scared look on her face that reminds him of the same girl who cried on his shoulder when her sister went missing a decade ago.

“I’ll come with you,” he finds himself saying before having the time to think it through. The rational part of his brain is telling him he shouldn’t do this - he has a job, he shouldn’t just all of the sudden ditch his life for her, even if only for a few weeks. But once he said those words, he can’t take them back, not when she is looking at him the way no one has in seven years.)

The ride takes them less than two hours.

He wonders if she told anyone where she was going. He thinks that maybe she told Archie, perhaps she even asked him to go with her before settling for Jughead. But then he thinks about how quickly Archie went from sneaking out of the house next door to having his arm wrapped around Veronica in the teacher’s lounge, and he is left with nothing.

It takes them less than two hours, but it feels like an eternity.

After the realization of what he has agreed to do hits him, he spends the first half of the ride wanting to jump out of the car, regretting the offer to go with her, while at the same time wanting to hold her hand so it would stop shaking, and the second half sick to his stomach. But, nonetheless, he still begs her to stop at a diner before they get somewhere to stay for the night, and she stops in front of a quaint old place just off the main road. It almost reminds him of Pop’s, the booths are blue instead of red, and the bell above the door jingles in a different way, but it’s still there.

He eats while she picks her food apart and, when he finishes, she wordlessly slides her plate over to his side of the table.

“Are you sure you want to do this? I still don’t want you to get in trouble with Tabitha or your agent.”

“It’s fine. I can write from anywhere,” he says, shrugging before adding, “Besides, Tabitha basically pushed me out of the door when I told her.”

“If you’re sure.” She gives him a stern look and he smirks.

“I’m sure,” he assures her. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s focus on Polly, okay?”

She nods and he shoves a handful of her fries in his mouth, to which she rolls her eyes. “It’s comforting to know some things never change.”

He laughs as she shakes her head, and the sight reminds him of all those afternoons spent at Pop’s, two milkshakes and two plates of chili fries, one to share and one just for him. But the girl in front of him is different, the air around them is not the same and the feelings were long locked away.

(He doesn’t know how much he believes the last part, but he can at least pretend.)

They manage to find a cheap motel just outside the town. It’s dingy, and a little sketchy, and he feels somewhat uncomfortable at the thought of Betty spending the night in a place like this, but neither one of them have much money, so he just nods as the receptionist hands them over the key.

She insists on paying and this time he can’t argue with her.

They go up to the second floor, and he can almost hear the electricity crackling between them during the elevator ride. He opens the door to the room and is pleasantly surprised at how clean it is, and then his eyes land on the only bed, and he almost snorts at the cliché they make.

They take turns in the bathroom and, soon, they are both under the covers, sitting upright against the headboard, him with an open book on his lap (he tried writing at first, but the blank page kept mocking him until he couldn’t stand it anymore, slamming his laptop shut) and her going through the files of the missing girls in the area. There is something domestic about the whole scene and when he finds his eyes steering from the book to the naked skin between her pants and her top for the fourth time, he decides to give up before his thoughts can go any further.

He closes the book, setting it on the nightstand. “I’m going to sleep.”

“I’m just going to stay up for a bit just so I can go through the files one more time,” she says, her eyes not leaving the papers in front of her. It’s something that hasn’t changed over the years, he thinks, her not knowing when to leave things alone. When they were younger, he would probably pry the papers out of her hands and slide his hand between her thighs. Now he just nods. “Can I just leave my light on? If you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” he says, turning off the one on his bedside table. “Night Betty.”

“Goodnight Jug.”

He doesn’t know if the nickname simply slipped out, or if maybe she did it on purpose, but he figures it doesn’t matter either way.

He wakes up before her. Their limbs are tangled, her head is on his collarbone and one of his arms is around her back. He should have guessed they would end up like this and he doesn’t know what he missed the most - Betty or just the warmth of having somebody to hold.

(Unlike Betty, Jessica wasn’t a cuddler.)

He breathes in and hates the way he notices she has been wearing a new perfume, hates the way he can’t help but marvel at the softness of her skin and her hair, hates himself for having any of these thoughts in the first place.

It’s the calmest he has felt in days, despite the ever-present sinking feeling in his stomach, and he wants to let himself linger for just a little longer. It registers somewhere in the back of his mind that this is the closest he has been to her since that last hug in front of her house before she walked away. The complication of what may happen afterward if she wakes up is enough to make him slip as quietly as possible from her embrace.

He takes a shower and gets ready for the day, and she wakes up sometime in between, her hair slightly messy in a way that makes him think of words such as adorable.

(He is an author, he should be more eloquent than that.)

One thing he learns right on their first day is that investigating with Betty is different this time around.

He wouldn’t describe any of the encounters they had up until now as bad, they are not bad. There is just something lacking about them. Working with Betty feels methodical, almost rehearsed. She keeps up a strong front, just like she did when they talked to the old man back in Riverdale, asking questions and taking notes.

There are moments when he can see the facade slip away, even if just for a fleeting second, but she recomposes herself even faster than she did when they were younger.

He lets her take the lead and follows wherever she takes him, always checking himself before saying anything and fighting the instinct to pull her closer when he catches the look of almost defeat in her face when every person they stumble upon doesn’t offer anything new to their investigation.

Their whole interaction drives him insane, the constant fear of doing the wrong thing, of being the one that makes her finally snap, and he eventually reaches with his hand into his pocket and takes out his flask when she is not looking.

Tabitha texts him around the time they decide to wrap it up and call it a night.

She is probably the only thing keeping him afloat in Riverdale nowadays - she is kind, she is smart, she is funny, she is pretty. They discovered they share similar taste in music over nights spent cleaning up Pop’s while listening to the radio, and she even sheepishly admitted that she read his book a couple of years ago at Pop Tate’s insistence and really liked it.

If he found her back in New York, he probably would’ve kissed her back.

But he is not in New York anymore, and despite time healing all wounds, it’s been seven years, and things still feel raw whenever he is near Riverdale.

(Or near someone, he doesn’t know anymore.)

Her text is simple, but it makes him smile, and it makes him grateful, to feel like he can maintain one good thing in his life.

how’s everything going? Then another. are u ok?

He has told her about Betty, little snippets like terrible break-up and complicated history, but not much. Yet, the way she immediately sent him off with a knowing smile when he told her about their pseudo-road-trip makes him think that she might read more between his lines than he gives her credit for.

Or maybe he is just that obvious.

He looks at the message for a while, but Betty doesn’t notice, her eyes set on the road as she drives them back to the motel.

He considers just brushing it off with a simple everything’s fine, but, for some reason - maybe because his heart has felt like it’s been stuck in his throat ever since he said yes - he finds himself typing back.

i don’t know.

They decide to do their first stakeout the next night.

They go to the same diner they went to on their first day to order some take-out food and then park the car just off the side of the road. She takes the first shift, telling him he can sleep if he wants to, so he closes his eyes but doesn’t let himself fall asleep, knowing that, if he does, she will stay awake the whole night and do everything by herself. When it’s his turn, he insists she goes to sleep too, and first, she protests, but to his surprise, her eyes eventually drop.

For the first hour, things go smoothly. He takes her notebook, thumbing the corners of the pages while he writes down the license plates of the trucks in which he sees girls climbing in, the same way she did, circling the ones in which the girls are blonde.

The first sign that something is wrong is Betty’s sudden sharp intake of breath. He looks at her, but she stills seems to be peacefully asleep, so he turns his attention back to the truckers at the end of the road.

And then, everything happens all at once.

She starts shaking violently and thrashing and sobbing, and it takes him a second to clock in on what is happening, but three years of experience, even if they were a decade ago, make him follow his instincts, putting his arms around her and brushing the hair off her face.

“It’s okay Betty. It’s me, Jug. You’re just dreaming, it’s okay.”

She flinches as he rubs a hand over her back, scrambling in her seat, pushing him back, shaking her head. She is looking straight at him now, with wide and scared eyes, and that’s when he realizes she doesn’t know who I am.

“Betty, it’s Jug, you’re safe, you’re okay. Just breathe.” His voice is strangled now, and the hand on her hair is trembling, but he still puts some space between them, giving her what she needs to come back to herself.

A few minutes pass and she is not sobbing anymore, but her breath is still shaky and her body still trembling. She reaches out to him then, clutching him, as though he might disappear if she lets go, and he twists them so she can lean on him. He opens one of the windows just a crack to let the cool night air in.

She takes a steadying breath, still shaking and crying, and he forces his previous thoughts to go away.

“Do you want to talk about it?” She shakes her head, gripping him tighter, and he soothes his thumb over the palm of her hand, asking her instead, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Could you tell me something?” she asks in a small voice, looking up to meet his eyes.

“What do you want to know?”

“Something good that happened to you in the last few years.”

“Probably publishing The Outcasts,” he says. He wished he could’ve told her something different, something she didn’t already know about, but his mind came up blank. “After I did, there were a bunch of magazines and papers that called my agent. They wanted to do articles on me, which seemed so crazy at the time. I mean, in high school, we were the ones writing the articles and, now, it all just felt so,” he trails off, clearing his throat before continuing. “I mean, all the response I got from the book was so overwhelming and there was even a newspaper that called me and a few other writers The New Brat Pack.”

“I remember, I saw that,” she says, and he looks down at her, catching the faint smile on her face. “Best and brightest young writers,” she quotes, and he chuckles.

She buries her head in his chest until her breath eventually starts to even out. He combs her hair with his fingers, the way he wished he could have done this morning back at the motel when he woke up once again with her pressed up against him.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, and he fights the urge to press a kiss on her temple too.

He drives them back to the motel not long after.

They get ready the same way they do every night, but this time he takes the files from her bedside table and puts them back inside her bag. She notices it but doesn’t comment. He opens his arms when she gets on the bed, and she follows suit, after a moment of hesitation.

It’s like a deja vu - he has been getting a lot of those ever since he moved back to Riverdale. He can still remember the night before she went to New Haven with Alice, of closing the gap between them after a whole summer apart, and wrapping his arms around her from behind, knowing back then the same way he knows now that this could be the last time he holds her in his arms as they fall asleep.

Somehow, there is more weight to it than when he wakes up to find them tangled together in the morning, maybe because that is simply an unconscious action, muscle memory, gravity, but this is not. This - this feels like something more.

Tonight, he is the one staying awake, watching her as she falls asleep.

“Do you mind?” she asks, retrieving a pack of Marlboros from her bag. It’s morning now, but this time they are still pressed up together on the bed, with him sitting upright against the headboard, her back to his chest and her head leaning against his shoulder.

He looks down and furrows his eyebrows as she takes a cigarette out, holding it between her fingers. “No, sure. Go ahead.”

She lights it and takes a drag, the smoke curling around as she exhales, flicking the cigarette on the plastic cup of water, now empty, he placed on her bedside table the night before. She glances up at him and motions to the cigarette, holding it in front of him, and he nods, plucking it from her fingers. When he presses it between his lips, he tries not to think about how this is the closest they have been to kissing in the last seven years.

(Watching her smoke shouldn’t be as alluring as it is.)

He says instead, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she retorts, raising her eyebrows.

“Sometimes,” he shrugs. “Only if someone offers me one.”

“It helps with my anxiety. Something to do with my hands,” she says, as he passes it back to her, and takes another drag.

“Is it something that happens often?” he asks. There is no need to tell her what he is referring to, the way she tenses up next to him is enough to show him she knows.

“Sometimes,” she offers simply after a beat of silence. “I’m okay now.” She looks up at him with what he knows is supposed to be a reassuring smile, so he doesn’t push. He nods instead, inhaling, exhaling, and pretends to believe her words.

bloomsburg, pennsylvania

They drive up to Bloomsburg two days later. They tried to do another stakeout before, this time deciding to sleep in during the day, so things went smoothly at night. But everything just seemed to be a dead-end so far, so they packed their bags the next day and hit the road.

He drives this time. His fingers tap the steering wheel to the beat of the song playing on the radio, and he smiles when he hears her humming under her breath.

The motel they find has twin rooms available this time, and he can’t quite figure out if her sigh when they saw the two single beds in the room was one of disappointment or relief.

At first, he didn’t know what the etiquette was after spending the night holding his ex-girlfriend of seven years. But after that night in the car, he started laying down on the bed just a little closer to her side, and she moved her pillow so it was pressed against his.

The next morning, he woke up to them entwined once again, but didn’t slip out of the bed this time.

They always go to sleep separately, but, sometimes, she still wakes up in the middle of the night panting and shaking and sobbing, and he wordlessly slips her into his arms. In the morning, they never talk about any of it.

(He likes to believe it wasn’t one of relief.)

He doesn’t really know when it became easier, but only when he grabs his computer that night does he realize how much writing he has been doing during the past few days. There is a rush in him, something he hasn’t felt since he first started writing The Outcasts, and while he may not know how or when he even had the time to do it, there is no denying the why.

Because, in the end, throughout the last seven years, even when he tried to convince himself he had finally forgotten about Betty, he had long accepted the fact that Betty will always inspire him in a way nothing else can.

(He doesn’t write about her per se - he does, late at night, but he doesn’t think he could ever show the world the pages that are really about her. But there has always been something about her laced in the words of his manuscripts. He wonders if she noticed it too in his first book.)

There is still not a clear outline of what he is writing, and he doesn’t even know where the hell he is going with it but decides to stop ignoring Samm’s pestering emails and finally finds the guts to send him the first chapter.

The reply comes through the next day.

I don't know what drugs you’re on right now, but keep doing what you’re doing. This is some of your best stuff yet.

They find a little coffee place a few minutes away from the motel. The coffee is truly awful, but they have good bagels, and they use their breakfast to regroup. The change of scenery doesn’t bring much light to their investigation and the tired and defeated look in her eyes is more prominent with each day.

“What do you think we should do next?”

“Our best shot is probably to continue cross-referencing the trucks we see picking up girls. No one on the highway seems to know what’s going on and every interview is just a waste of time,” she says, wrapping her hands around her coffee. She taps her fingernails against the cup, the pink nail polish already chipped on some of them. He lifts his gaze to her face as she speaks up again, “I don’t know what I’m going to do if we don’t find her.”

“Hey,” he says. “Look at me.” Her eyes are glassy when she does, and he covers one of the hands gripping the paper cup with his. “We will find her. And if anyone can crack this case, it will be you.”

“Sometimes, cracking it isn’t enough. You need to know what to do next, how to proceed.” There is something about the way she says those words as if she knows something he doesn’t. “God, I am so sorry I dragged you into this mess.”

“None of that. I came because I wanted to. You didn’t even ask me to do it, I offered it myself. And, as for the rest, you will know what to do. You just have to trust your instinct,” he insists.

“My instinct has failed me before.”

“Then trust me,” he says, squeezing her hand. Something flickers across her eyes, something that makes his heart tug painfully in his chest. She sniffles and wipes the corner of her eyes with the hand he isn’t holding.

“Okay.”

She is calmer when they arrive at the Highway, even though he can see her fists still clenching and unclenching while they walk side by side. She doesn’t dig her nails into her palms anymore, it’s one of the things that he was happy to find out during the trip, but he doesn’t want to think about what other coping mechanisms she might have picked up throughout the years.

He sure knows he is not proud of his, so he plays with the strap around his neck and picks up his camera to keep his hands from straying to his pocket.

He didn’t bring much with him when packing for the trip, which he figures is normal when you only get a half-an-hour notice, but he did manage to bring his camera. It’s one of the few investments he doesn’t regret making with the money from his book, and, over the years, it became a hobby for him, something that proved to be peaceful when he needed to calm down, and writing wasn’t working or he ran out of booze.

He takes photos of the trucks and the drivers when she asks, and, in turn, if something catches his eye while they are driving around, Betty pulls over so he can take a picture.

(If in some of the photos the lens strays from the trucks or the landscape and lands on Betty, it’s completely accidental.)

“You shaved,” she says, as he walks out of the bathroom the next morning. She is already ready, sitting cross-legged on the edge of her mattress.

He is surprised she even noticed it and he nods, bringing one of his hands to his face self-consciously, not really sure what to say when she keeps staring at him. “Why? Does it look that bad?” he jokes, trying to hide the nerves behind the question.

“No,” she says quickly, shaking her head. “It just- It looks good,” she says sheepishly.

He tries to fight the blush creeping up his cheeks and a small part of him wishes he had his beanie to cover the tips of his ears.

He can’t remember the last time he spent a whole week with someone without being drunk, high, stoned, or all three. With Jess, in the short whiles they lived together, which were always interrupted by another fight and another threat of this has to stop, I’m done Jones, a week wouldn’t go by without them resorting to the permanent stash of mushrooms they kept in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets and whatever else they could get their hands on.

(He knows he still keeps the flask in his pocket when he is with Betty, but it’s different.)

But he and Betty fall into an easy rhythm. It’s a kind of domesticity he misses - waking up next to each other, brushing their teeth side by side to save time, trying to comb his hair one morning while she blow-dries hers, reading a book, with her next to him going about her own routine.

(He wonders if she ever did any of those things - if she ever felt this way - with Archie.

A sinking feeling settles in the pit of his stomach - he can’t get too caught up.)

bellefonte, pennsylvania

It’s weird for him, going on a road trip with Betty.

Back when they started dating, when he first started imagining a life outside Riverdale, it was like a dream without any shape or contours. He imagined them in his dad’s truck, driving past the You are now leaving Riverdale sign, but there was no destination in sight. He imagined little things, like them spending the nights in crappy motels, and eating Chinese food on the floor.

But, throughout the years, the dream started taking shape. It was real, tangible. They talked about what places they wanted to go to - he wanted to take Kerouac’s route, she insisted that they should go on a trip that was just theirs. They both wanted to go to big cities, see all the stuff they read about in books and saw in movies, a reality that seemed so impossible when you’re stuck in a small place like Riverdale.

When he got accepted to Iowa, she insisted that they should go to New Haven and then go all the way to Iowa, so they could see their universities and the campuses, and so they could make the trip for the first time and see what it was like.

(“This way I already know where to go when I come to visit.”

“Betty, I think it would just be best if one of us took a plane.”

“Ok, maybe Juggie. But wouldn’t it be so cool to spend our summer just driving around?” )

But the dream was long gone. And, instead, they spent that whole summer tip-toeing around each other, their relationship slipping more and more beyond their reach with each day. And now so much has changed, they have spent more time apart than together and there are so many things he doesn’t know - he didn’t even know she smoked until a few days ago.

Sometimes, it almost feels like the old times, like a small part of himself is finally living the dream, and, other times, it feels nearly impossible to close that seven-year gap between them.

He takes advantage of the fact that she is driving and sneaks a drink while she is filling up the tank with gas.

But no matter how much he tries to warn himself, his instinct of taking care of Betty Cooper will always win over his own instinct of self-preservation.

“Don’t you think we should take a break?” he asks one evening after they get back to the motel that night. He opens the pizza box and sets it on his bed, sitting against the headboard while she sits on the other end, some of the files scattered in front of them. She scrunches her nose when he takes out a slice and a few crumbs fall on the sheets.

“What do you mean?” she asks, picking up a napkin to take her slice, her eyes immediately turning back to the files as if she didn’t hear what he just said.

“What I mean is that we have been working non-stop for more than a week.” He raises his eyebrows as if it was obvious, taking a bite from his pizza, and she shakes her head.

“Yes, but girls are going missing. We can’t take a break. Do you think whoever is behind this takes a break?”

“No, but you can’t overwork yourself, Betty.”

“And I am not.”

“Yes, you are,” he insists. She doesn’t look at him but shakes her head again in a dismissive way, and he finishes his slice, before speaking up again, “You know what? Finish your slice and put away those files. I know exactly where we are gonna go and I don’t want to hear any argument from you.” He closes the pizza box and puts on his shoes, taking her car keys from the bedside table.

“What? Where are we going?” He slides her coat out of the hook by the door and holds it up for her.

“We are gonna take our pizza and go to the park.”

“The park? Are you kidding? It’s freezing out there. What are we even gonna do there?”

“Eat. Sit on a bench. Stare at our shoes. Be somewhere other than our motel room and the Highway.”

She fixes him with a glare that he is sure could rival Alice Cooper’s, but he doesn’t budge, his arm still holding her coat in front of her. She rolls her eyes and eventually gets up from the bed.

“Fine,” she relents, and he doesn’t even make an effort to hide his smirk.

Talleyrand Park is quiet. It’s calm there, a kind of calm he used to associate with Riverdale when he was younger - it was known as the sleepy town for a reason. It’s so rare for him to witness moments like this, so different from the rush and dread he feels when he thinks about his life back in New York.

He looks at her as she sets down the box between them and puts her hair up in a ponytail because of the wind. It reminds him of nights spent on the banks by Sweetwater, of making out by the river to the sound of the music playing on his father’s truck, the breeze lifting her dress higher on her thighs and him placing his hands there instead to keep her warm. The sound of their laughter almost reaches his ears.

He snaps out of his memories and shifts his gaze from her to the lake. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to do when this all ends - the mothmen, the trucker, Archie playing hero. He doesn’t know if he can go back to New York, but he also doesn’t know if he can handle getting sucked into Riverdale all over again.

They sit on a bench side by side, him with his feet set on the ground, her hugging her legs and resting her chin on her knee, and the pizza box sits between them, empty now, with Jughead finishing the last slice. 

“What was the first tattoo you got?” she asks, breaking the silence previously filled by the leaves crushing against each other. “Besides the Serpent one.”

“Here,” he says, rolling up his sleeve and turning his body so it catches the light from the lamps on the street.

“Hotdog?” She brings up her finger, tracing the ink and the scar underneath it, and he nods. “Why?”

“I wish I had a better story,” he chuckles, shaking his head. “I was drunk and feeling existential, so I went to the first tattoo parlor I could find and got a tattoo of Hotdog.”

“That’s probably how pretty much every tattoo story goes nowadays,” she says and he laughs.

There’s a beat of silence between them and, before he can stop, he finds himself speaking again. “But, at the same time, I was happy I did it.” She looks up at him, urging him with her eyes to go on. “I guess I never really got to choose what went in my body - the scar from the Ghoulies, the one from the Stonies, the Serpent tattoo. I mean, I did choose the Serpent one, but at the same time, it didn’t feel like my choice, you know?”

“I have one too,” she tells him.

“Really?”

“Yes. Freshman year of college.” She brushes her hair to the side, tilting her head to the side. He sees it, small, black, right behind her ear, and he laughs. “I know, I know. I just wanted to do something, after all those years with my mother breathing down my neck. And this was the first one that came to mind.”

“Still. A bobby pin?” He raises his eyebrows with a smile on his face.

“Laugh all you want. I’m still happy I got it too,” she says, turning her eyes to look at the water again. They stay silent for a while before she speaks up again. “Ask me something.”

“What?”

“I asked you about the tattoo, it’s your turn. Ask me something,” she says with a smile, wrapping her coat tighter around herself and tucking a lock of hair blown by the wind behind her ear.

He thinks for a moment, while she retrieves a cigarette from her pocket, offering him one. He takes it, before asking, “Why the FBI?”

It’s not the question he really wants to ask, that one has been clogged on his throat ever since he said yes to this trip, but it is also one he is not ready for yet. And she is keeping this somewhat light-hearted, or at least as much as she can considering the circumstances, so he figures he might make an effort as well.

“I guess I was good at it.” She lights her cigarette, and then his, his hands so close to hers to block out the wind they almost touch. “People said I should go for it so I did. It felt like the next logical step to take.” She shrugs and adds: “I quit. Before we left Riverdale.”

“Good,” he can’t help but remark.

“You sound amused,” she points out.

“No, it’s just- Every time I imagined what you would be doing, I never pictured you in the FBI.”

“What did you imagine then?”

“Does this count as your next question?”

“Just answer it.”

He takes a drag and exhales. “Investigative journalist maybe. PI.”

“Wait, PI? What, spending my nights in bars so I can lure men and take photos of cheating spouses?” she asks, waving her hand around, leaving a track of smoke that twists into the night.

“No.” He looks down, flicking the ashes of his cigarette into the grass. “More like choosing what you work on, taking your own cases. Being your own boss, not having to answer to another person.” She nods then, slowly, but her eyes are blinking rapidly. “Your turn.”

“What have you been writing?”

It takes him a moment to answer and she finishes her cigarette in the meantime. He thinks about whatever he has been writing during the last couple of weeks, he thinks about Samm's reply, and he still can’t come up with a straight answer.

(Or maybe, he is just not ready to tell her yet.)

“I don’t really know. I’ve been having a lot of writer’s block during the past year. But I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” She nods and he gnaws on his bottom lip. “So, what did you think about my first book?” Her eyes widen at the question and she pauses for a moment. “Whatever it is, just tell me. Full disclosure. Tear my book apart if you need to.”

He can sense her hesitation when he says those words, but it’s true. He wants her to do it. Every time he looked at the final draft, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would’ve looked like if it had gone through her hands and her red pen.

She looks down at their feet and plays with the sleeve of her coat for a moment, before dropping it and wrapping her arms around her instead.

“It’s not that.” She takes a deep breath, and he can see her eyes are glassy by the way the moonlight hits them. “I just never read it.”

“Oh, that’s-” he stops, his hands rubbing the denim of his jeans. Truthfully, he doesn’t even know what to say. His lips are set into a thin line and he shakes his head, deciding not to say anything at all, before moving to get up. “We should probably get going. It’s getting cold and we need to get some sleep.”

“Jug,” she pleads, but he keeps his eyes set on the ground as he picks up the pizza box.

“Look, I just really want to get back to the motel okay? I’m tired.” His tone leaves no room for argument, and, at any other point on this trip, he would’ve probably winced and apologized for the sharp voice he used, but he stays quiet.

“Okay.”

For a few days, things between them are strained - forced interactions and uncomfortable meals.

He is not mad or angry, he doesn’t want to be. After all, he had no right to assume that she would’ve read his book, yet the thought of her not reading it just never crossed his mind. He wonders how ironic it all must seem - that there was a time when she was the only one whom he would show his manuscripts to, when she was the one he would discuss ideas and concepts with in the middle of the night, and now that it’s out in the open, she never even read it.

Even though they both can see the walls building up between them again, they never mention any of it again.

And maybe it’s best not to. When it comes to them, maybe it’s best if they just don’t reopen old wounds and risk them never healing again.

Sometimes he wonders just how caught up he got in what they were as teenagers, trying to recreate that version of themselves so badly that he didn’t even realize what he was doing, despite every warning. But last night just served to remind him once again of all the cracks between them, and it’s better (and easier) not to shatter what little they have left.

(And maybe that was their downfall that summer seven years ago, deciding to leave things as they were as to not wreck them anymore, but the truth is they will never know.)

He notices throughout the days that his flask gets emptier faster than usual, and if she notices the smell of alcohol in his breath she doesn’t bring it up. After all, for that, they would need to talk about something other than work.

They walk the Lonely Highway and they continue interviewing the truckers just like before, but now, nothing about it feels like the old times, like he thought it started to in the past couple of weeks. And maybe it never did.

Maybe he was so focused on retrieving that part of himself that he thought he left with her all those years ago, that he didn’t realize he can’t have back what no longer exists. They are different people now.

He wakes up in the morning and he can hear Betty already getting ready on the other side of the wall. He squints his eyes at the sun beaming through the blinds and buries his face again on the pillow. It’s warm and he lingers for a moment, before rolling over and looking at Betty’s bed, her things packed and most of her clothes folded.

A sinking feeling sets on the pit of his stomach and he can feel the dread rising up his throat. His hands clench the sheets on the bed and then he hears the door to the bathroom open. He lifts his eyes slowly to look at Betty walking towards her bed.

All of his previous thoughts fly out the window when he catches the distraught look on Betty’s face. Suddenly, all he can think about is that something is not right, her posture is stiffer today, her movements more brusque, but it somehow all softens when she notices he is awake.

“Another girl is missing. You should get ready,” she says quietly, and he can’t quite decipher the tone in her voice. “Check out is at noon.”

He stays quiet for a while, unsure of what to say, and then nods, picking up a change of clothes from his bag. He glances at her one more time as she opens her mouth to say something, but stays quiet, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Eventually, she turns back to her bag and the clothes she is folding, and he sighs, shaking his head and leaving her alone in the room.

altoona, pennsylvania

The ride is a little over an hour, and they somehow manage to stay on polite small talk about the cases and the new missing girl the whole time. They don’t mention the distressed look in Betty’s eyes as she tells about the girl - Nancy Woods, only twenty-two, just out of college and with a bright future ahead - or the away she grips the wheel tighter.

(He did think about offering to be the one driving, but the way she snatched the keys from his hand as they were leaving the hotel told him that maybe he shouldn’t cross her and let her do things her way.)

So they talk about work.

He fights the urge to reach out and hold her hand or to reach with his hand to his pocket. He knows she needs his full focus now. She already has so much on her plate, he doesn’t need to make things more difficult.

“One of the guys over there said he was supposed to meet Nancy the day she disappeared, he contacted her through Nedd’s List. But, apparently, she never showed. He tried texting her the next day, but obviously, she didn’t answer,” she tells him, her eyes widening in excitement as she looks over her notebook, a look he knows means she just found a new lead.

They are sitting cross-legged on her bed, the files scattered around them. Since she is not working with the FBI anymore, she no longer has official access to new files or progresses in the investigation, so all they have is the information Sheriff Keller gives her off the record.

“And?”

“Don’t you get it? It’s exactly what happened to Polly.” She waits for him to make the connection but he merely shakes his head in confusion. “She was supposed to meet one of the truckers, and then she was kidnapped. So maybe our guy doesn’t directly contact the girls-”

“He takes advantage of the ones that went there to meet other truckers,” he finishes.

“Exactly,” she says with a grin.

“So, what can we do now?”

She is quiet for a moment, before saying slowly, “I might have an idea.”

It only takes him a moment to realize what she means by the look in her eyes and the way she bites her bottom lip. “No, what? You can’t Betty.”

“Yes, I can. I can do it.”

“Betty, that’s a suicide mission. Do you know how many things can go wrong?”

“Look Jug. Every time a girl disappears, he stays in that same place for a week at least, but then he lays low for months. People didn’t notice this before, because they didn’t know all these cases were connected. But see?” She picks up three different files, showing him the highlighted dates on each one of them.

“Margaret disappeared in Riverdale the same week Trula disappeared. And then there were no kidnappings for four months. Same thing this time. Polly disappeared the same week Samantha did. And, before Polly, the last two girls were kidnapped in Derry, within a week, almost five months before. And this was the first kidnapping since Polly, three months later. He has been doing this for years now, he is confident and he can get careless. But when he finds out we’ve made the connection and that there are people out there for him, he might stop or become more careful. This is our only shot.”

She looks up at him, her eyes wide, and he vehemently shakes his head.

“You can’t possibly think this is a good idea,” he says, taking a deep breath. “Weren’t you the one talking last week about knowing how to proceed? Well, this isn’t how you do it.”

“And you were telling me to trust my instinct. This is our only shot.” Her eyes are pleading but he refuses to look at them, and then she adds more quietly, “I need to do it, I need to do it right this time.”

“This time? What do you mean, this time?” he asks, confused.

She must have realized what she said then, her eyes widen just a bit more, but she simply shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter okay?”

“It does matter,” he insists. “What are you not telling me? Is this why you’re so obsessed with the case? Why, Betty, what-”

“Because I was taken too.” She says it so quietly, her voice just above a whisper, that he almost didn’t heart it. He lifts his eyes to look at her, but her gaze is fixed on the floor. “Last year. TBK, or the trash bag killer. He murdered young women in Virginia. And I thought I knew where his lair was, and I was right, but when I got there it was too late.” He keeps his eyes on her the whole time, almost wishing this was just a cruel prank, but the haunted look in her eyes tells him a different story. “He kept me there for two weeks. Or, at least, that’s what they told me.”

His heart is beating so painfully in his chest, he is pretty sure she can hear it in the quiet of the room. He wants to reach out, to place his hand on her shoulder, to comfort her, to make sure she is here, with him, because she could’ve been-

No. She is here. She is with him.

But she could have-

“I am so glad you’re here, Betty,” he says instead. She manages a faint smile, and, this time, he can’t fight the urge to reach out to hold her hand. She squeezes his fingers. “But I still don’t think you should do it,” he says, more softly than the last time. Her mouth opens in protest and he says, “Hear me out, okay? If you feel like this is what you need to do, then do it. I could never forbid you, you’re Betty Cooper,” she cracks a smile at that, “and I will always have your back. But it’s way too dangerous. I don’t even think I could handle you doing it,” he adds.

“So what?”

“You were right. It’s not enough to find him, we need to know what to do next. And this is not the way to go. We will tell Keller what we found out and, in the meantime, we will do what we do best,” he says with a smile.

Eventually, she smiles back.

Something changes between them with their conversation. Things are easier between them.

Their night in the park doesn’t hang over them anymore, and it’s not because everything is forgiven between them, but because suddenly all of the other stuff just seems so inconsequential. The wounds are still there, but, suddenly, who kissed who seven years ago doesn’t matter as much, at least not to him.

Not when he realizes there was a possibility of him never seeing her again. Not when he thinks about the voicemail she told him about and that those words (words that were bad enough to make her think that he didn’t want anything to do with her anymore, as if he could ever want a life where Betty Cooper wasn’t a part of?) could’ve been the last ones he would ever speak to her.

And he doesn’t even remember them.

The corkboard sits on the small desk in the corner of the room, propped up against the wall. They have just finished sorting through all of the stuff she brought with her and it’s probably bigger than any of the ones they built back in high school. There are photos and post-its and arrows and lines and newspaper cutouts and pins of every color they could find.

(At first, he asked her why they needed to buy a corkboard and couldn’t just use the wall in their room and some tape. She had to remind him that what they consider normal behavior, might be seen as a little serial-killer-like for the maid that cleans their room.)

They had found out from Keller that there were teams already on alert around the area waiting to see if he tried to kidnap another woman again, so all they can do is wait and see if they can find any other lead as to where Polly and the other women might be.

He tears his eyes from the board and his gaze lands on her. She has the same determined look as she did back in high school, chewing on her bottom lip, her eyes narrowed and her nose scrunched in the same way that still makes him smile.

She looks at him, and he doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he was staring at her before. There is a soft pink tinge in her cheeks as she says, “Thank you Jug.”

He nods with a smile and they both turn their attention back to the board.

They still work during the day, but since what he now refers to in his head as the talk, there is an unspoken agreement between them that she needs to take things a little easier, so they start taking the nights off.

So now, when they get back to the motel, they both sit on his bed (because he knows how much she hates getting crumbs on the sheets), and they settle side by side, the take-out food between them and his laptop in front of them.

One day, halfway through Rebel Without a Cause, when she gets back on the bed after throwing out the take-out containers, he notices how she sits on the bed just a fraction closer.

The next day, as the opening credits of Casablanca roll on, she shifts so their feet are pressed together.

When they are watching Cinema Paradiso, he hears her sniffle as Toto saves Alfredo from the fire, and lets her rest her head against his shoulder.

The night they watch Cinema Paradiso, he wakes up once again to the sound of her sobbing on her bed, kicking the sheets to her feet. It’s the first nightmare she has this week. So he does what he now always does - sit on the edge of her mattress, help her calm down and then slip into her bed, all the while holding her in his arms and whispering words of affection into her hair. She is resting in his arms and he can feel her breath against his neck. He rubs his hands up and down her back as her crying subsides.

“Are they about TBK? Your nightmares?”

“Mostly.” He doesn’t ask what the others are about and it’s quiet for a long time, but then he does find the courage to lean back so he can look at her and ask her one of the questions that have been running through his mind for weeks instead.

“Was Archie an escape? From your nightmares?” Her eyes widen at his words and she breathes in sharply, but he stops her before she can ask any questions. “I live with Archie, and he is not exactly subtle. It was easy to figure it out.”

“Kind of.” She stays quiet for a while, before asking, “Is that what drinking is? An escape?”

“I guess,” he answers honestly, shrugging.

“It’s over now anyway. I’m not sure it ever really began. It was just-”

“You don’t have to explain it, Betty. I didn’t ask it to make you uncomfortable.”

“No it’s just- I guess it was just easy.” The look in her eyes and the way she breathes in tells him what she can’t voice aloud. Easy in a way that you and I could never be. “But, even then, I couldn’t be with him. Not in that way.” She toys with the threads on her sheets, and asks, “Have you tried to get any help? For your drinking?”

He wants to deflect, tell her it’s nothing, that having a couple of drinks don’t turn him into his father, but there is something so vulnerable in the way she presents herself before him now, in all these late-night moments they have after a nightmare, so sincere. He closes his eyes.

“It started in New York. I did a lot of stuff that I’m not proud of, stuff I don’t remember. And Tabitha tried to help me in Riverdale, but-” He sighs and opens his eyes. “It’s hard Betty.”

“I’m glad you have someone like Tabitha,” she says earnestly, and he bites back a smirk.

“Yes, me too,” he says, and then adds teasingly, “she is an amazing friend.”

She nods, giggling and hiding her face in the crook of his neck, but doesn’t say anything more. He tries not to think about the way she smiled as she fell asleep.

The call comes on a Tuesday, three days later.

They knew about the sting operation the FBI was planning. She decided to pass all the information they gathered during their road trip to Glen, one of her superiors, Jughead later learns, who accepts it, turning a blind eye at the fact that she is not supposed to be working on the case. Even after Betty quit the FBI, everyone knew she would never quit the investigation.

Her phone rings at two a.m. He wakes up with the sound and catches her rubbing her eyes as she grabs her phone from the nightstand.

The unshed tears in her eyes and the smile on her face as she answers the call tell him everything he needs to know. They found Polly.

The FBI doesn’t manage to find every girl. They catch the trucker behind the kidnappings, or at least one of the truckers behind them, and they do find seven girls, amongst them Polly. Betty and Jughead get dressed as quickly as they can, and he drives them down to the hospital since Betty can’t keep her hands from trembling. She is tapping her foot and shifting on her seat and, on any other occasion, he would find it unnerving, but he can’t. Not when he sees the expression on her face.

He has to take a double-take when he sees Polly laying on a hospital bed. Her hair is a mess and her eyes are haunting, but the look of pure relief that crosses her features when she catches them walking towards her is the exact same one Betty is wearing, and it’s enough to make Jughead’s eyes sting.

“Don’t just stand there,” Polly says, waving them over when Betty simply stands still on the doorway to the room. “At least I’m not pregnant this time.”

“Way too early Pol,” Betty says, shaking her head, but still giggles as she skips over to her sister.

“I’m going to give you two some time to talk,” he says, tugging on Betty’s shirt. “You want something to eat?”

She nods, and he walks out of the room and over to the food machine at the end of the corridor, making sure to get all of Betty’s favorite snacks, and then walks over to the cafeteria to get two large cups of coffee (he figures she needs one).

When he enters the room, he is greeted by the sight of Betty sitting on a chair beside the bed, bent over so she can hug Polly. She lifts her face from her sister’s neck to peer at him, eyes shining, and mouths thank you Jug.

They spend the whole night at the hospital at Betty’s insistence until, eventually, Polly forces them to go, saying they can come back once they have taken a shower, at which Betty rolls her eyes but concedes. He is driving them back to the motel when she speaks up.

“They are going to continue investigating the other cases, but they say there is not much hope. The ones they found were from the most recent cases and they think the other girls might be-” dead.

He nods, swallowing thickly. “And what are you gonna do now?”

“I don’t know.” She sighs, lifting her eyes to the road. Her eyes are tired, and he realizes she must be exhausted, but there is also something lighter about the air surrounding her. “There is no more FBI, so I think I will probably go back to Riverdale. Spend some time with Polly and mom. Try to figure out where to go next. What about you?”

“The same, I guess. I have nowhere else to be.”

“What about your book?” she asks, turning to look at him.

“It’s going. But I can write from anywhere, I don’t have a place that I have to be in. And it’s not like the tips I get from working at Pop’s are enough for me to up and leave either, so I’ll probably just go back too.”

She nods, and the silence stretches between them. It’s not what he wants, go back to Riverdale, and he could see it in the way that she pressed her lips together after she told him her plan that it’s not what she wants either.

(A small part of him wished he could just continue driving with her, go west, and maybe stop in Ohio to visit his dad, or maybe take the path down the east coast, or visit Jellybean up north in Boston. Fulfill the last one of their teenage dreams. But he is not naïve enough to think about any of this as anything other than silly fantasies.)

“Don’t you sometimes feel like-” he starts, but stops himself before he can go any further. “Forget it.”

“No, say it.” She tugs on his hand, and he looks at her as the traffic light turns from green to red.

“Don’t you sometimes feel like we’re in high school again? Stuck in the same town?”

She is quiet for a while, and meanwhile, the light turns green again. He is already driving when she answers. “Sometimes. We had so many dreams when we were younger and now look at us.”

“When we were younger things were different.”

“Yes, they were.” He thinks that they will leave it at that so he nods, turning his full attention back to the road, and he is not expecting it when he hears her voice again. “But, Polly is not being released from the hospital for a few days, so we don’t have to go back right away, and maybe,” she trails off, and he motions for her to continue. “Maybe we could do something to celebrate? Dinner?”

The question catches him off guard, and it takes him a moment to process what she said. When it dawns on him though, his head whips around to face her, and she has to tug on his sleeve for him to put his eyes back on the road. He does, taking a steadying breath.

It’s a weird question, considering the circumstances. After all, they’ve been eating dinner together every day for the past month. But it’s the weight with which she says the words, the shy smile on her lips, it’s the way her hands play with the sleeves from her shirt, a tell-tale sign that she is nervous, it’s the pink tinging her cheeks.

Maybe it’s not as grandiose as the road trip he envisions in his dreams, but he realizes that maybe it doesn’t need to be. The last weeks have been a whirlwind and, right now, something as simple as having dinner with Betty sounds perfect.

“Yes. Dinner sounds nice.”

He sits across from her on one of the tables near the back of the restaurant. They both know their idea of a perfect date (is this a date? is it not a date? does it count as a date if they haven’t actually dated in seven years?) would be burgers and milkshakes, and maybe a movie, but after eating off dinner food for a month, there is a need to make this evening somehow different. It’s a nice little Italian restaurant they discovered after a quick search on Google Maps, just a few blocks away from their motel.

He is wearing the nicest shirt he now owns, one he bought during the afternoon while she was at the hospital with Polly. The yellow blouse she is wearing is one he has seen before, but there is something even more beautiful about her this evening, something he didn’t even think was possible.

It’s the twinkle in her eyes, he realizes, and the smile on her face, the most genuine it’s been throughout this whole trip.

“I feel seventeen again,” she admits quietly, shifting on her seat, and he laughs.

“Well, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.” He smiles at her above the menu as the waiter comes over to their table to take their drink orders.

“Water is fine,” she says, making something twist painfully inside his chest, so he grabs her hand across the table.

“Betty, you know I don’t want you to feel like you can’t-”

“I know.” She smiles and places her other hand on top of his. “But I also know I don’t need a drink to have a good time with you.”

“Water. For both of us.” The waiter nods, walking away, and she drops her hand, so he looks down and he puts his on his lap too.

He doesn’t know when was the last time he went on a date. He doesn’t really know what a date entails. With Jess, he would go to clubs, get high at parties, and the night would always end with them tumbling through the door of his apartment, but he is pretty sure he can’t consider that a date. He doesn’t even remember the last time they sat down to have a meal together, even in their own apartment.

And now, as Betty looks at him over the rim of her glass, he couldn’t feel more out of his element.

But, the thing about him and Betty is that everything ends up falling into place with them. And this is no exception. There are none of those stilted pauses in the conversation, none of those uncomfortable moments. Things feel natural with her, they always have.

Dinner went smoothly and they are now making their way through the desert. She is still laughing from the story he told her about his roommate in college as he motions to her plate and she lets him take a bite from her cheesecake (he had already finished his chocolate cake). She raises the napkin to her lips then and clears her throat.

“So, I read your book.”

The sound of his fork hitting the table as he drops it raises the eyes of some of the people in the restaurant, and he quickly recomposes himself, nodding in apology to no one in particular. He clears his throat, which suddenly feels too dry, so he takes a gulp from the water, before speaking up.

“You did?” he asks, and she nods sheepishly. “When did you even have time to do it? And how did you manage to get a copy?”

He tries to recall when she could have possibly had the time to read it, and his mind is still blank when she answers, “Sometimes, after you fell asleep, I would stay up reading. I read it in three nights, couldn’t put it down.”

“But how did you- How do you have a copy?”

“I bought one when it first came out. And I- I brought it with me.”

“Oh.” The realization hits him suddenly. She bought it, and she thought it was important enough to bring it with her to Riverdale, important enough to bring it on the road trip, despite not having read it yet.

“Unfinished.” She pulls him out of his thoughts, and he looks at her confused. “You asked me the other day and that is what I thought.” He nods, motioning for her to continue. “It was like none of the characters really get any closure.”

“Maybe because the story between them will never really be over,” he finds himself saying before he can stop himself. “There will always be that open door, that possibility.”

“Even now?”

He knows neither one of them is talking about the characters anymore.

“Even now.”

He kisses her for the first time in seven years outside their motel room.

The last time they kissed, she kissed him as if they were running out of time. They were, they knew it.

Back then, he was so sure they would find their way back to each other someday, somehow, his heart stuck on her words (I will always love you too), but the hope faded throughout the years. It lasted until he couldn’t bear it anymore.

And he has spent so many years wondering if he would ever get the chance to kiss her again, that he realizes he doesn’t want to waste any more time stuck on the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. So he takes the chance, and he pries the keys from their room out of her hand, reaching with his hand towards her cheek, and he kisses her.

It’s unhurried and passionate and soft and the kind of kiss he has only ever been able to experience with Betty.

The keys fall somewhere between them when he reaches with his other hand to cup her neck, but he doesn’t care. And she doesn’t seem to either.

They don’t do anything other than kiss that night. They stumbled their way towards the bed, but when his lips reached her neck and the back of her knees hit the bed, she pushed him back, only enough so she could whisper against his lips. “Jug. Could we just cuddle tonight?”

“Betty,” he whispers back, and she brushes the dark locks away from his face, pressing her forehead against his. He moves, kissing her neck one more time, her jaw, the corner of her lips. “Of course we can.”

This time, he slips into her bed instead of his own, her back pressed against his chest and his hand under her shirt. There is nothing sexual about it, though. It’s a different kind of intimacy. He can feel the scar she has on her ribs under his hand, the one he discovered one night when her shirt rode up as she slept, and his breath hitches a little when he thinks about how she got it in the first place. He can still feel her own delicate fingers against the one on his forehead as a teenager and holds her tighter.

He thinks she is already asleep, but as he is tracing patterns and circles over her skin, he hears her say, “I don’t want you to think I don’t want it. I’ve just- I made a lot of bad decisions about this - not us, never us - but about-” Her voice gets lower as if she is ashamed. “Sex. And I don’t want you to think or feel that-”

“Hey. It’s okay,” he cuts her off, as he feels her heart speed under her chest. He pulls her closer and kisses the back of her neck. “We’re here with each other now, right? That’s what matters, okay?”

“Okay,” she murmurs, lacing their fingers together and pressing a kiss to his knuckles as he falls asleep.

riverdale, new york

They drive up to Riverdale three days later. They wait until Polly is discharged from the hospital and then they make the four-hour trip back. Betty drives, he takes the passenger seat and Polly sits in the back so she is more comfortable, and his fingers brush Betty’s over the console more than once during the drive.

Things are easy between them.

They drop Polly off at the Cooper house, who immediately runs up to Alice and the twins, but when Betty doesn’t make a move to get out of the car, he doesn’t either.

“Hey,” she says, and he tears his gaze from her mother and her sister to look at her. “Do you want to go somewhere? Before going home.”

“Okay.”

She drives them up to Sweetwater River and parks on the same place they used to park FP’s truck when they were teenagers. Everything is calm, the same way it was back in Talleyrand Park, the same way he remembers it being.

They sit on the river banks, and he turns to look at her, her eyes closed as the wind blows in her face.

It feels bittersweet, being back. Almost like the end of something.

“Why did you come to talk to me? The day we left. Why did you decide to tell me of all people?” It’s the question that has been bugging him for weeks, and he realizes that he is not scared of asking it anymore.

She opens her eyes as he asks the question, but doesn’t turn around to look at him.

“Because I needed some courage, and I knew you wouldn’t be like Archie or Kevin or Glen. I knew you would actually have my back, and support me, no matter what. No matter how crazy I can get,” she says, her voice quiet, almost as if she is afraid to disturb the peace around them. “Why did you decide to come?”

“I don’t know. At first, I thought it was just instinct, I think a part of me could never turn down helping you, even if you didn’t really ask me to. And the other just wanted to leave this place.”

She nods, looking down, as she says, “What you said the other day, about being stuck in Riverdale.”

“That was just stupid-”

“No, don’t do that. It wasn’t stupid.” She turns around to face him, her eyes immediately finding his. “But I want you to know that we will both make it out, okay?”

The together remains unspoken between them. They know it, but they also know it’s too early to say it.

He is overcome by emotion at her words. He looks at Betty, and her green eyes, so different yet so similar to the ones he fell in love with ten years ago, and he can’t quite pinpoint which emotion it is. He can’t say it’s love, but he also can’t not say it.

He doesn’t think he is in love with her at this very moment. There is still so much they need to talk about, so much to uncover and unravel about this new version of Betty and he can’t really be in love with someone he doesn’t know. After all, it’s only been a few weeks.

But, at the same time, it’s also been ten years, it’s been his whole life. He wants to say those three words so badly, wants to hear her say them back, because, despite everything, they are no less true than when he said them the day she left for New Haven seven years ago, or for the first time in the darkness of his trailer, and it has been so long since someone has said them to him and genuinely meant them.

But he doesn’t. Nor for now. Instead, he wraps an arm around her and pulls her closer. She looks at him, and he thinks that maybe she might understand.

fin.