#my reasoning for jughead being in tokyo makes no sense but i couldn't bring myself to make him a washed up actor lolol

[imreallyloveleee]

For the trope mashup: 57 + 63, bughead

(tropes: forgotten first meeting + everyone knows / mistaken for couple)

 “Can I get you another whiskey, Mr. Jones?”

Jughead nods, and the bartender turns to Betty. “And you, Mrs. Jones?”

“Oh, I’m not –”

This man doesn’t care, she realizes abruptly. She could be his wife, his girlfriend, his sister, his hired escort – no one cares. “Vodka tonic.”

Jughead does nothing to acknowledge the mix-up, but Betty holds her hands in her lap as they wait for their drinks, twisting the rings on her third finger around and around.

     He’s a writer, he tells her that first night, in Tokyo for the most improbable of book tours.

“That’s because I’m not famous,” he laughs, when she admits she’s never heard of him. “The book barely even cracked the top fifty in the U.S. But my publisher was already on the hook for a series of translations, and…” Jughead shrugs. “It took off here.”

Betty’s story has only a fraction of the glamour, and none of the twists. Her husband, Archie, was in a moderately successful band with a growing fanbase in Japan; her own career as a beat reporter was cruising on autopilot towards its dead end. So when Archie had given her the opportunity to join him on tour for the summer, she’d taken it.

At first it had felt thrillingly exotic. She’d thrived a little, even, on that off-kilter feeling of living in a country not her own. Tokyo was like New York in some surface-level ways — big, crowded, concrete and glass – yet utterly foreign in even more. Most of the time, she liked that.

The city itself was not the problem.

      They end up in his room, laying side by side on his bed, a full foot of space between them.

Betty tries to keep her eyes trained on the television screen, but it’s hard, her focus made fuzzy by the drinks. She’s hyperaware of her body, and his; every twitch of his fingers, every slight shift against the mattress, makes her tense in anticipation for something she isn’t sure she doesn’t want.

There is nothing untoward about this. They’ve never even touched. She tells herself this over and over again.

Her eyes wander the room, inevitably, though she forces her gaze away from Jughead himself. On a chair in the corner of the room there is a hat – gray, woolen, weathered.

“You were wearing that the first time I saw you,” she says, pointing towards the hat with her foot.

“I was?”

She nods. “I remember because it was like, eighty degrees out and I thought you were crazy.”

Betty finally allows herself a glance at him; he’s looking back, like she knew he would be. Something coils warm and low in her belly. She slips her hands beneath her thighs, palms pressed against the comforter.

Jughead shakes his head. “But the first time I saw you was on the elevator.”

“Really?”

The side of his mouth curls into a half-smile that’s already grown familiar to her, though it can’t have been more than three days now, maybe four. Archie left for Hokkaido on a Tuesday, and it’s the weekend now. She’s having trouble keeping track of the days.

“Really.”

Betty turns onto her side to face him, tucking an arm beneath the pillow. “I don’t remember.”

Jughead mirrors her position, bringing them closer together, just by an inch or two. If she bent her knee she could brush her foot against his bare ankle.

“I don’t remember what you were wearing,” he says. “I just remember that you smiled at me.”

“I did?”

“You did.”

Betty clucks her tongue. “I must have thought you were some other famous American author.”

Jughead laughs.

      She falls asleep there. When she wakes the next morning, she’s alone in his bed, the side of the comforter that he’d been laying on folded over her body like a blanket.

Jughead is asleep on the sofa in the adjacent sitting room, long legs folded awkwardly on the cushions. For a few minutes she just watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Her phone buzzes on the nightstand, and she silences it quickly. He doesn’t stir. The notification blinks up at her: two unread texts from Archie.

Betty turns off the screen, and closes her eyes.

#bughead #bughead fic #betty cooper #jughead jones #riverdale #i watched lost in translation last weekend and it inspired this #(i borrowed a few lines of dialogue from the movie too!) #my reasoning for jughead being in tokyo makes no sense but i couldn't bring myself to make him a washed up actor lolol #arsenicpanda #loveleee takes fic prompts #fic