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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

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Your Love Song (Fangs Fogarty x OC)

Summary: Fangs kisses Ari’s palm and that’s the end of it. They sit comfortably in the car for a little while, side by side as they basked in the warmth that felt a lot like love.

A/N: Many thanks to my friends for encouraging me to post, special thanks to my editor/beta reader/graphic maker/script-supervision, @thebetterjonesboy

Word Count: 4,383

I want to be awake / I want to stay awake with you / I want to say your name / I want to hear you say mine too

“Are you still awake?” It’s a 1am whisper into the phone receiver, with heads ducked under sheets just to make things a little quieter. Ari yawns and turns over in her bed, hugging her pillow just a bit tighter to her chest. She had been on the phone with Fangs since after her mom went to bed (much earlier that evening). There’s a rustling on the other end and she thinks that Fangs might have fallen asleep on her.

“Still awake…” Fangs mumbles, low and sleepy, the sound enough to make Ari’s stomach erupt in a flight of butterflies. “But barely”

“You can go to sleep, Fangs, I’ll literally see you in a couple of hours.”

“That’s so long, though,” He pleads. “Talk to me”

“What do you want to talk about, mon trésor?” Ari asks with a quiet laugh. The two of them had been on the phone for so long that she couldn’t help but run out of things to talk about. There’s a beat of silence as Fangs thinks for a moment.

“How was your day?” He asks, plain and simple, like it was reflexive. Ari liked that he checked in with her; he always asked how her day was going, or how it went; if she was okay, what was on her mind.

“I already told you about my day” She replies with an eye roll, though Fangs can’t see it. She cradles her phone between her shoulder and her ear as she picks up a tightly rolled joint from the crevice in the windowsill. Ari lights it and drapes her arm out of the crack in the window, letting the smoke billow and twist around her ring-covered fingers. She’s overcome by a wave of warmth and she knows it’s Fangs, not the steady stream of THC running through her system. It’s the quiet part of the night, when everyone and everything had startled to settle down. Ari can hear her younger brother Gus snoring through the wall, loud and even. There’s a certain kind of stillness about the Katz household that was welcoming and sort of uneasy. It felt like time was suspend in molasses, moving slower than it should. Usually this feeling would creep up over Ari’s shoulder and lay cold at the pit of her stomach, but for now she was okay with being suspended in time with Fangs.

“No, you didn’t. You told me about your day yesterday. It’s officially—“ Fangs trails off and Ari can only assume he’s checking the time, “—it’s officially 1:23 in the morning. It’s a new day.” He’s so matter-of-fact about the whole thing, Ari’s holding her hand over her mouth to muffle her giggles.

“So,” Fangs starts again, “Cariño, how’s your day?” He hums as he sits back with a squeak of his mattress, tucking himself back under his flannel sheets. Fangs lays his phone next to him on the pillow and listens intently until his eyes flutter closed and his breathing evens out. It takes Ari a moment to realize that Fangs really had fallen asleep this time. She was too busy narrating the events of a dream she had the night before, and usually Fangs would laugh and comment about how impressed he was that Ari could remember her dreams a day after she had them, let alone remember them at all.

“Fangs?” She whispers his name and is only greeted with a small snore. The clock on Ari’s bedside table reads 2:05 a.m. in it’s harsh, red-lit numbers. She squints in the harshness of the light and can feel the fatigue enveloping her. Knowing that she didn’t have the heart to wake the boy after he had just fallen asleep, Ari rolls over and lets herself be lulled to sleep by the static sound of Fangs’ breathing.

forget everything / forget everything but you

When Fangs meets up with Ari at her locker after school, it doesn’t take much to realize that something’s wrong. She’s too quiet, quieter than usual at least, and when he asks her about it she brushes it off. But he knows Ari better than she thinks he does; Fangs can see through her hollow smile and he knows what her real, true laugh sounds like. He doesn’t push on the subject for too long, just offers to carry Ari’s physics textbook and locks his fingers with hers as they bound down the front steps of Riverdale High. They don’t say much as they weave their way through the students getting on their bikes or into their cars. Ari always parks her car in the staff parking lot (no matter how many times she had gotten in trouble for it), she tugs Fangs by the hand and the two of them throw their backpacks into the backseat before getting into her junky old car. He can tell that Ari’s hands are shaking as she fumbles with her tape deck.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Fangs keeps his eyes trained out the window, watching the grid-work of neighborhoods and local businesses give way into the sparseness of Midtown.

“Not really” Ari reveals. Fangs can’t help but be shocked at the sound of her voice and how much he seemed to miss it in her silence.

“Well, if you want to, you know…I’m here” He shrugs and reaches for Ari’s hand over the gearshift.

“I know” She answers, her thumb rubbing small circles over the back of Fangs’ hand. When she was ready to talk about what was weighing so heavy on both her heart and her mind, he would be the first person to know. He was the only one who seemed to understand her these days.

Ari turns her car into the cul-de-sac of houses that seemed so far away from the parts of town that really mattered. When she pulls up in front of the Katz household, she puts the car in park but doesn’t get out. She looks at Fangs and then looks away, wringing her hands nervously around the steering wheel. “What are you supposed to do when you’re so painfully aware that no one is listening to you?”

Fangs doesn’t need an explanation to know what she’s talking about, it had been a point of contention between Ari and her best friend Nadya for a while now. Ari understood that her best friend had been through a lot recently, and that the road to healing was full of bumps and detours, but Nadya wasn’t the only person who was going through a rough time. She tried her best to take things in stride, to not get upset when the conversation fell flat, when Nadya’s mind was someplace ugly and far, far away:

“How’re you?” Ari would ask, hoping that today would be better for her friend and that slowly but surely things could have the ability to feel normal some time again soon.

“Oh…you know” Nadya answers, her voice soft and guarded as she stared out the window, giving her friend a broad, half-hearted gesture.

Ari feels foolish for hoping that the conversation could turn to her now, because there were times when a girl needed her best friend to check in and make sure her head was on right. She wanted Nadya to ask her how she was doing, how her day was going or how it went; if she was okay, or what was on her mind. When Ari realizes that this was as far as their conversation was going, she picked up her backpack from the desk next to her and slings it over her shoulder, walking out of the French classroom without bothering to say goodbye.

“Forget her” Fangs says, tethering Ari back to reality. She looks over at him with a quirk in her eyebrows, squinting her eyes from the rays of late afternoon sun that glowed bright against Fangs’ silhouette. “Forget everyone! Who needs ‘em?”

“Forget everyone” Ari responds in tandem, though lacking the same enthusiasm. She tries her best to laugh but it’s a feeling that’s too dry in her throat. She gives Fangs a convincing enough smile that he’s appeased for the moment and the two get out of the car.

If I could only preach what I practice, I’d be on the other side / Hoping when you hear it, you lap this up, you laugh at every line / After all, it’s your love song, not mine

After school on Fridays, Ari and Fangs made it a habit to go to Pop’s for a milkshake and some fries. They would pay with sweaty, crumpled pocket-change and smile at the waitresses who told them to have a nice weekend. Ari would pull a joint out of her glasses case and would pass it back and forth between Fangs and herself as they walked through the brush that led over into Midtown. It was light and easy, usually. Ari would walk on her toes, balanced carefully on the train tracks that led shipments from the Blossom Family Maple Farm in and out of town. They’d talk about everything and nothing at all: weekend plans, funny anecdotes about their friends and family, but today things were different.

“Are you really going to be mad at me right now?” Fangs looked over at Ari incredulously as she walked a few paces ahead of him. He sighs, tightening his grip on his messenger bag and speeding up to match her stride.

“Actually yes, I am” Ari scoffs, tossing the comment over her shoulder. The two had been walking through the brush-line to go hang out by the train tracks, a makeshift clubhouse and safe space for Ari and the small population of people who were in the know. Ari holds back a wiry tree branch as she ducks under it, letting go of it as she passes under instead of holding it back for Fangs.

“Now that’s just wrong…” Fangs mumbles, swatting the leaves away from his face and scrambling to keep up with her. His footfalls kick up little clouds of brown dust that make Fangs cough as he catches back up to Ari. “You know I didn’t mean anything by it, right?” He pleads, stopping dead in his tracks.

“If you didn’t mean anything by it, then you would’ve waited for me to talk to her like I planned to…” Ari rolls her eyes, still refusing to look back at Fangs as she continued her walk down to the tracks.

Things got tense at lunch that day.

It was the first time in a long time that things seemed somewhat normal, until they weren’t anymore. Nadya seemed livelier then usual, her feet kicked up on the desk next to her as she whispered something to Sweet Pea. The Serpent boys looked out of place in the French classroom, with Fangs keeping one eye out the door for Ari, who was usually tasked with watching over her mother’s class during the lunch period.

“Might as well make yourself comfortable, she’ll be awhile.” Nadya smirked knowingly as she unwrapped herself from Sweet Pea.

Fangs raised his eyebrow at Nadya, unsure of what she meant. The two of them weren’t friends, but they weren’t not friends either. It was a slippery slope, trying to navigate a sort of relationship with their best friend’s significant other.

“Thursdays she has ballet class” Nadya tried to explain, her manicured brows knitting together as she watched a smirk form on the corner of Fangs’ mouth, like he knew something she didn’t. “She probably did so many plies that her legs are broken” Nadya laughed uneasily, looking from Fangs, to the still-closed classroom door, back to Fangs again. Nadya was accosted with the feeling of white hot sickness that came with not being in on the joke; she knew something is wrong but she doesn’t know what exactly.

Fangs shook his head. Nadya stiffened up like she was bracing herself for impact, her outer shell becoming as hard as she could make it to prepare her defenses against whatever was coming next.

“She quit dance, like, a while ago.” Fangs remarked, with enough bite that Nadya couldn’t help but recoil. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

Sweet Pea frowned at the comment, his large hand coming to rest protectively on Nadya’s shoulder. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean, man?”

Just as Fangs was prepared to sink his teeth into Nadya, just as Nadya found herself wishing to be anywhere but in her own body, the door to the French classroom was opened abruptly by none other than a very winded-looking Ari Katz. She bursted into the classroom on a wave of swear words, cursing her English teacher for making her late and apologizing profusely. The energy in the classroom was so tense that Ari could feel the hairs on her arms standing up as she looked between her best friend and her boyfriend, confused as to what had happened mere moments before. She looked over at Nadya, who suddenly seemed so small and fragile under the washed-out lights.

“What’s wro—“ Ari started to ask (something that was second nature to her at that point) but was only met with Nadya’s raised hand, stopping her from continuing.

“How long ago did you quit?” Nadya asked the question so matter of factly that Ari knew that there was no getting out of this one.

To anyone else, this might have seemed like an overreaction, but Ari knew it was an origin story coming to an end. It was their origin story. The Riverdale Recreational Center was a place of solace for a freckle-faced girl in a house full of little boys; in the ballet for beginners class, she made a friend in the small blonde in the front row, liked that the girl didn’t sound like anyone else that Ari knew. They would sit in butterfly position for hours and Nadya would re-tell all the old stories from her homeland, holding Ari’s chubby fingers as she applied a too-thick coat of pink glitter nail polish. The two girls grew up and Nadya eventually lost interest in dance, but it was Ari who really had the grace and skill for ballet. Sure, Ari would complain about going to class, or the tape that was constantly around her bloodied toes, but she loved it, right? Nadya couldn’t believe that she had become so far removed from her own best friend’s life that Ari had made such a serious decision without even mentioning it to her.

Ari gulped, staring down at a scuff mark on the tile floor. “Three weeks”

With that, all of the color drains from Nadya’s face and she scrambles for her schoolbag before storming past Ari out of the classroom with Sweet Pea hot on her heels. If Ari could quit ballet so easily, without a second thought, what could that possibly mean for the fate of two of them?

“I was going to talk to her, you knew that!” Ari voice gets a bit higher, her throat constricting with emotion. She hadn’t wanted Fangs to be involved in the process. He was supposed to be her salvation from the bad things but this time, he was the one bringing trouble.

Fangs chuckles haughtily, low and venomous and humorless. “You were gonna talk to her, really? Do you know how many times I’ve heard you say that? Nadya’s been making you feel like shit for a long time now, all you do is rant and rave about the fact that you’re the one putting in all of the work lately!”

The two of them stop in a clearing that’s free of trees and tall grass, not too far away from where the old train car had derailed all those years ago before the Midtown kids could make it their second home. That was supposed to be their Friday evening plans: a late lunch at Pop’s, a smoke and a walk through the woods, where they would proceed to hang out in the tin-can train car, smoking weed and making out until it got dark. Fighting wasn’t on the radar today, or ever, really.

“But that’s not your job to tell her! It’s mine. Things are, they’re complicated, Fangs… More than you really get. I should have been the one to bring up how I was feeling, and I was going to!” Ari tries her best to defend herself, though she can feel the tears threatening to spill over. Her first instinct is to wrap herself tight around Fangs, let herself melt into the comforts that he usually gave. But this time was different. He was so quick to preach about Nadya not being mindful of Ari’s feelings, that he was completely unable to realize that he was doing the exact same thing.

“Whether it be on my own time or what, I was going to talk to her about how she was making me feel, and you took that away from me! And to make things worse, you made her feel like shit about it too”

“You couldn’t do it, so I did. I’m sorry that your friend got upset in the process, but I won’t apologize for defending you.” Fangs shrugs off his actions arrogantly and stomps out what was left of the soggy joint they had been sharing.

Ari lets out a frustrated sigh and can feel hot tears starting to stream down her cheeks. She’s frustrated because he’s right, but he’s also oh so wrong. “Just…” She takes a breath, trying to compose herself more.

“Just go home, Fangs”

I woke up today / In a twin-sized without you / I guess I’ll go away / If that’s what you want me to do / I’ll just disappear, just disappear

Fangs was always a firm believer that Sundays were the worst days of the week. If it wasn’t because of the fact that he had to get up early, put on his starchiest dress shirt, and sit at mass with his Abuela, it was because Sunday led into Monday, beginning the vicious cycle of days all over again. Fangs had been thinking a lot about time recently. He didn’t have to wonder who influenced him in that. He noticed how slow time seemed to go by when the world around him felt stagnant. Most of his weekend was spent in his bed, sick with worry that he had just fucked up one of the only good things that had happened to him in quite some time. When Fangs checks his phone, he hopes that there would be a text from Ari, but he knows that there isn’t. But it’s been almost three days of the full silent treatment and he was starting to go crazy. He sits back on his bed with a deep sigh, running a hang through his already-tousled hair.

‘Read 5:48 PM’

Fangs pops up from his bed suddenly, feeling the need to occupy himself and distract himself from the worry of the waiting game. All of his homework due Monday was done earlier that weekend. His brother smacked him upside the head, calling him a nerd under his breath as he walked out of the house, actually having plans that weekend and not sulking around at hime like Fangs was. He has the first page of his midterm essay on the Salem Witch Trials done and was waiting on the library book he needed to pick up at school tomorrow in order to finish it. He was running out of ways to distract himself. He ducks his head out of his bedroom door and looks out into the hallway, seeing if anyone was in the kitchen because his assistance was always needed there.

“You need me to do anything?” He asks timidly, looking at his mother as she clutched at her sore lower back. She had been feeling okay lately, the medications were working but flare-ups were inevitable and Fangs always could tell when Jaimina was hurting more than she was letting on.

“What, you lookin’ for things to do around the house? Cause I got a whole list I can get for you right now, mijito” Jaimina pokes at Fangs’ side as she walks past him, flicking the dishtowel over her shoulder. Her intuition knew that something was wrong. She knew her sons like the back of her hand and could recognize that something was weighing heavy on Fangs’ heart, but she didn’t want to pry. The boy smiles in jest and its enough of a response that she knows he’ll be all right in time. He takes the dishtowel from her, pushing up his sleeves and standing at the sink as he tackles the pile of plates and forks.

It’s almost 10PM on Sunday when Fangs finally had enough. It was late enough in the evening that all of the members of the Fogarty family had retired to their respective bedrooms, leaving Fangs to be alone with his thoughts (which was what he had been avoiding this whole time). Time seemed to move too slow, like he was the one controlling the speed at which it moved. Fangs tried to go to bed early; he tossed and turned until he got the bright idea to listen to some music, but all of his favorite songs were Ari’s favorite songs and that made him sad because there was a part of him that didn’t know if things between them would be salvageable. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He digs the backs of his hands into the his eye-sockets until he’s seeing stars. It wasn’t his place to intervene between two friends and he knew it, and his sense of loyalty came off as both condescending and controlling, which wasn’t what he meant at all. He tucks his hands behind his head and gazes absent-mindedly at the ceiling, counting the cracks. Not wanting to lose any more time that he already had, Fangs sits up with a huff and unlocks his phone, beginning to compose a text.

In a different part of town, Ari Katz wasn’t doing too much better. She spent most of her weekend in bed, worried that she lost her best friend and her boyfriend in the span of a few hours. Her pink-lit bedroom was cold with the breeze of outside air that slipped through the gauzy curtains and Ari finds herself pulling up the hood of the puffy sweatshirt she had stolen from Fangs ages ago. It still smells like him and it feels like him and Ari is accosted by a melancholy wave of missing Fangs and everything about him. She bites at her thumbnail and thinks for a minute before unlocking her phone and opening up their text thread.

And that’s when she notices it. Three little grey dots. He was typing. With a soft gasp, she tosses her phone to the other end of her bed where she can ignore it until she hears it buzz with the promise of an incoming text notification. Ari’s pink-polished fingers are shaky as she reaches for her phone and unlocks it (her passcode was Nadya’s birthday, but she tried not to think about that in the moment).

[10:08 PM]: I’m sorry that we fought… that was so stupid of me

[10:10 PM]: I care about you a lot, you know that right?

Ari watches the little grey dots disappear and for a minute she thinks that Fangs has given up.

[10:15 PM]: Can I see you?

Without a second doubt, Ari taps the ‘call’ button and lifts her phone to her ear, letting it ring as she grabs her keys and puts on her shoes. Fangs answers on the third ring and doesn’t say anything but that’s okay. “Will you come pick me up? I’ll sneak out my window.” It’s less of a question and more of a demand, but Fangs gives in easily, relieved that she even wanted to see him. The two make a quick plan and Ari throws the rest of her things in her backpack, stepping up onto her windowsill clad in her pajama shorts and her boots, body engulfed by Fangs’s old sweatshirt. It’s a calculated maneuver that Ari had mastered over the time, how to duck out her window, where she needed to catch her leg in order to push herself onto the garden trellis. She knows where her brother kicked a hole through the old wood, uses that to her advantage as she climbs down low enough to jump, landing gracefully on the grass. Ari sits on the curb as she waits for him, sweatshirt tented and pulled over her bare legs. She hears his car coming; he cuts the lights and the engine.

“What’re you doing, it’s cold outside” Fangs points out, noticing Ari’s bare legs. It’s instinctual, how easily he finds himself caring for her. He opens the car door for her and turns the heater on full blast. An awkward silence settles over the car and Fangs is hit with a pang of anxiety because usually a silence like this was nonexistent.

“Do you hate me?” He asks in earnest.

It takes Ari a second to formulate a response. “I could never hate you, Fangs” She looks over at him, sliding her hand towards his over the gearshift. “I just wish that things didn’t go down the way that they did.” Honesty is a bitter pill to swallow and Ari knows that there’s plenty of damage control that will need to be done, but it was better to address things sooner rather than later.

Fangs shakes his head softly. “I’m sorry that I made things worse.”

“You were standing up for me when I wasn’t” Ari tries to shrug, knowing that he his intentions were pure.

“I’m still sorry”

“I know you are”

Fangs kisses Ari’s palm and that’s the end of it. They sit comfortably in the car for a little while, side by side as they basked in the warmth that felt a lot like love.

#IM SO PROUD OF THIS ONE COURT #YOU DID THAT #FOLKS PLS PLS PLS READ #PLS SUPPORT MY WIFE #UGH UR MIND

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

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Nighttime (Fangs Fogarty x OC)

Summary: He gets a call one evening when she needs him the most. She doesn’t say much, but that’s okay. A lesson in comfort is made less scary by the comfort of nightfall.

Word Count: 781

A/N: Special thanks to @reggiemantleholdmyhand-tle for making the moodboard for me and just always being so open and interested in my ideas. Thanks, Vannah!

Fangs answers his phone on the third ring.

“Everything okay?” The panic is evident in his voice and Ari almost felt bad for waking him up.

“Everything’s fine, mon trésor, I didn’t mean to worry you…” Ari whispers into the phone to avoid waking up the rest of her sleeping family.

“I like it when you call me that” He reveals, still half-dreaming.

“Mon trésor” She repeats to him again, slow and steady. Fangs hums in response, still clouded in that thick blanket of sleep. “Can I come over?” Ari whispers, as though she feels embarrassed for even asking. There’s a rustle on the other line as Fangs tried to wake himself up. Ari heard the creak of his mattress as he stood up, can hear him rustling around for his keys.

“I’m coming…bring a jacket, it’s cold out tonight” Fangs adds, grunting as he put his boots on.

They hang up quickly and Ari grabs her essentials before burrowing herself in a sweatshirt, tucking her shoes under her arm as she tiptoed around her room. She tries to unlock the window as quietly as possible, knowing that her mother’s ears were attuned to mischief. There’s a beat of silence between all of her movements as to not attract attention to herself. She knows that there’s a hole in the trellis that’s about the size of Gus’s skinny foot, and Ari uses it to her advantage as she strategically climbs down from her window to scale the side of the house. Fangs pulls up just as she sticks the landing; he kills the lights and the engine at the bottom of the driveway and Ari jogs over to his junky car.

Instinctively, she can’t help but look across the cul-de-sac at her best friend’s house…although Ari wasn’t exactly sure about where she stood with Nadya at this point. Of course, she sees the blonde beauty hanging out of her window, quietly trying to have a cigarette as she loomed under the pink glow of her bedroom lights. The two girls lock eyes, but Ari looks away first, using it as an excuse to duck into Fangs’s car and shut the door behind her. As they drive away, Ari thinks she sees Nadya smirk before asking her cigarette on the windowsill and retreating inside, shutting her lights off behind her.

Ari doesn’t go for the radio like she usually would, instead she revels in the quiet and holds Fangs’ warm hand over the gear shift. It’s a quiet drive back through the Southside and into the rusty gates of Sunnyside Trailer Park. Fangs maneuvers the car through the grid-work of spaces, pulling uo quietly in front of his house and shutting off his car. Both him and Ari are wordless as they gather their things and lock up.

Fangs feels it in his bones that something isn’t right. Ari’s too quiet, and she never calls him this late…especially not for an impromptu sleepover (though he wouldn’t mind it becoming a habit). He walks groggily over to the passenger’s side and wraps his strong arms around Ari, pulling her close to his chest and trying to silently let it out into the universe that he was there for her, that he wasn’t going anywhere and that she didn’t have to hide from him. She melts into his touch and suddenly she seems so much smaller than she actually is.

“Lets get you inside” he mumbles into Ari’s hair, keeping her close as he fished his keys from the pocket of his sweatpants.

They navigate through the darkness with minimal difficulty, with Ari holding back a giggle when Fangs nearly trips over his brother’s skateboard. He opens the door to his bedroom just enough so that they could enter without the old wood lurching and giving their presence away. Fangs’ room is warm and inviting, even in the moonlight. Ari kicks off her shoes and slips under his flannel sheets, reveling in the traces of body heat still barely warming up the pillows. Fangs clambers into bed beside Ari and the two of them fight for enough blankets before falling into a tired comfort. He slots his arms around Ari’s waist and holds her close. He can feel the tension in her body release, as if Ari could only relax and untangle herself from everyone else if she was in his presence.

Her breathing events out and he can’t help but stare at her, his calloused thumb running over the apples of her cheek as he counts constellations in her freckles. Something blooms deep inside his chest and Fangs can’t help but feel some sort of cosmic shift.

#I LOVE THEM #we stan #COURT U DID THATTTT™️#pls support my wife

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

Photo

yearbook paraphernalia 1989-1993

made by me DO NOT STEAL IT

hermione’s pros and cons list by @halcooper

senior quotes influenced by @fredsythe @penelopeblosscm @halcooper

casting of west side story by @penelopeblosscm and @halcooper

superlatives by all of us :-)

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

Note

Could we see a little Fruthie snippet about whatever you want to lighten our spirits? 🙂

ruthie drags her feet as she walks up the driveway to the jones’s house at 111 elm street, shoulders slumping as she turns her key in the front door lock.

with the current state of the world, hiram lodge had shut down most of riverdale for the purpose of reducing the spread of infection, though he wasn’t very happy about how much money he would be losing in the process. for the first time in years, decades even, the doors of pop’s chock-lit shoppe would be closed, it’s lights off, unable to be a beacon of comfort and community in such a troubled time.

unfortunately, this meant that ruthie (amongst many other people living in the southside) were out of work for an undetermined period of time, with no answers to their questions. she tried to forget it as she took her shoes off at the door, hanging her coat on the rack between jughead’s favorite jean jacket and fp’s riverdale sheriff’s department windbreaker.

turning the corner into the kitchen, ruthie’s surprised that no one’s taking up shop at the sink washing up the dishes from dinner. the dish rack is full and drip-dropping wish sudsy water, leftovers already placed in tupperware containers left to cool on the counter before going into the fridge. it’s not a strange sight at all, there had been many nights where ruthie had shown up late in the evening after a long shift, but a naive part of her thought that everyone else’s lives would be at a standstill too, not just hers.

ruthie’s ears perk up at the low, even sound of laughter, knowing that the source was no other than fp jones himself. following the sound, ruthie heads towards the family room, where she’s affronted with a wholesome, funny sight:

there are bedsheets and blankets clamped to the old pool table that was standing as the base of the makeshift fort. the blankets are pulled taught and tucked between the wall and the couch, the other end being secured by the armrest of fp’s recliner chair, making a shoddy kind of canopy. the cushions from all of the living room furniture had been pulled off and arranged as a base layer of padding against the hard floor. it looks like fp pulled out the big camping sleeping bags from the garage, ruthie laughs as she spots jellybean’s skinny legs poking out of the humble blanket fort, her dad laying next to her in his dark blue flannel pajamas. the lights in the family room were off to preserve the ambiance, the blue light from the tv lending a cinematic feel to the room and engrossing the two into whatever old movie they were watching.

ruthie doesn’t interrupt the father-daughter bonding moment, but she slips her phone out of her back pocket and snaps a few pictures of the two of them because she knows it’s something that fp would want for later.

she retreats from the darkness of the family room just as quietly as she entered, slithering upstairs to change into some comfortable pajama pants and to send a text to sweet pea to check in, telling him to make sure to thank fangs’ abuela for letting him spend the night.

ruthie knows which creaky stairs to avoid as she makes her way back downstairs quietly. she can hear fp explaining some baseball fact that somehow related to the movie, but it sounded like jb was genuinely enjoying her dad’s tidbits of information. rifling though the pantry, ruthie finds a bag of microwave popcorn and sets it to cook, rushing to stop the timer before it could go off at 0:00. she tiptoes into the living room toting a filled glass bowl.

“it’s not a real movie night without popcorn” she pipes up, loud enough to grab their attention from the movie playing on the tv.

“ruthless,” fp lilts, leaning up to look at her from under the cozy shelter of the blanket fort. “when’d you get here, pretty girl?” he asks and ruthie can’t help but laugh as jellybean scrunches up her nose at the term of endearment.

“not all that long ago, just didn't wanna disturb movie night” ruthie smirks as she crouches down to admire the fort’s handiwork and (lack of) structural integrity.

“that’s what the pause button’s for” jb raises a curious eyebrow at ruthie as she sits up quick enough to grab at her temple when the blood rushes to her head.

ruthie laughs, her heart warming at the teenage mannerisms that echoed her brother’s back in he day. “how’s it goin’, jb?”

she pulls her knees up to her chest and has to think about the question for minute. “people are talking like the apocalypse is about to happen but i dunno, at least i don't have to run the mile next week...” the young girl’s features are awash wish a relatable mix of relief and unease.

when it was clear that jellybean was going to give no further clarification, ruthie looked to fp:

“school’s cancelled. two weeks, at least” fp chuckles, though he himself was unsure how he would go about entertaining his teenage daughter until riverdale middle school made it’s transition to online.

“right on” ruthie gives jellybean a fist-bump. “can i join you guys?” she wanted to make it clear that it was okay to decline; that she would understand if this was time that they wanted to spend together alone.

“well there’s only twenty minutes left but here’s the cliff notes—” jellybean doesn’t even wait for ruthie to sit down and get comfortable before she launches into an animated, well-detailed summary of the previous hour’s events. ruthie lets out a big breath, overwhelmed at the information being thrown at her and the she-said-what’s and the wait-who-did-that’s.

fp looks at ruthie in the lowlight of the still room and he doesn’t think about the still world outside him, or the scary uncertainties that were plaguing his thoughts and making him worry about himself and others. because even in the darkness of the room, it’s warm and it’s bright and it’s lively. he doesn’t want to look at it like quarantine; it’s making up for lost time.

#THIS IS SO SWEET #YES COURT #thats my wife bitch #pls support my wife

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

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apricots (fangs fogarty x oc)

(moodboard by @hughstheforcelou, song is ‘apricots’ by diet cig!)

i wanna kiss you in the middle of a party / i wanna cause a scene

it was easy springtime love, sunset orange and peach schnapps flavored kisses. ari lifted the bottle from the back aisle of the grocery outlet, fangs was too scared to get caught but she promised him that no one was watching to begin with. the two of them walk to the quarry hand in hand, taking turns puffing on a long joint rolled tightly in cherry-flavored paper. ari wears her floral sundress with a pair of combat boots; she liked being pretty in a rough and tumble sort of way. fangs loops his tanned arm around ari’s freckled shoulders as he tells stories to the younger ranks of serpents. she’s not listening to him anymore, but she watches the way his eyes light up as he talked. she can’t help it anymore, she’s drunk enough to have the confidence to lean into fangs, kissing his cheek and leaving behind the ghost of a lipstick print. they don’t care who’s watching when they kiss and that makes everything better.

i want everyone to know that you were with me / we’ll dance to our own beat

once every few weeks the midtown kids and the handful of lucky people in the know would all crowd into robbie macdermot’s basement to drink cheap beer and dance to the music by dead ophelia. ari’s brother built the band from the ground up, so needless to say she was their biggest fan. fangs doesn’t like being a stranger on someone else’s turf— he’s so used to rich northside kids turning up their noses at him that it’s almost surprising to find out that there were still good people left to meet in their shitty little town. ari leads fangs through a crowd of faces that only she was familiar with. she stops to introduce him to everyone important, “this is fangs, my boyfriend”. he doesn’t know if he’s drunk, in love, or both. there’s a sticky leather couch in the corner of the garage that ari calls the ‘vip section’. she’s nursing a beer with her legs thrown over fangs’ lap until the band starts playing a song that makes her ears perk up. when she decides that she wants to dance, fangs goes with her and they don’t miss out on a single one of the fast songs.

and i don’t care if anybody’s watching me

the two of them met up at pop’s earlier that day. they didn’t get a bite to eat, but ari grabs fangs by the hand as she leads him through the brush line around the diner, walking with one foot in front of the other as she balances atop the rusted metal rungs of the train tracks that separated the two warring sides of town. fangs swears that one of these days he wouldn’t get lost when he tries to find his way to the tracks. ari had to hand it to him, though, the broken down train car was hard to fine, hidden away in a forgotten neighborhood of the small town. ari looked at fangs as he laid with his back against the stiff, dirty material of the mattress that laid over the floor of the reclaimed train car. the sunlight pours in through the trees, its thick beams of warmth streaming through the glass window panes. it casts an orange glow against fangs’ face that makes him look even more beautiful than he already was. “i can feel you staring, you know…” he smiles, eyes closed and hands clasped behind his head as he laid on his back. ari’s phone is balanced haphazardly in a cracked glass, using it as a makeshift speaker despite the layer of cigarette ash that dusted the ceramic bottom. “can’t help it” she says it like she’s revealing a secret, laughing as she attempted to roll a joint.

when i’m homesick / i go to the supermarket / i buy all the things i think my mom would get

ari texts fangs after lunch and they ditch sixth period to get high in the bathrooms by the chemistry labs. they were barely in use anyway, and there was a sign-up sheet in the front office that said which classes would be there when… making it much more convenient for ari and her friends to engage in their fair share of on-campus mischief. fangs has a bad case of the giggles, but the two manage to duck out of the school’s double-doors without attracting too much attention to themselves. ari parks her car in the staff parking lot no matter how many semesters in a row she’s gotten in trouble for it. it’s a quiet, hazy sort of car-ride over to the little shopping center that surrounded the midtown neighborhood. “want me to push you?” ari asks, looking up at fangs from under her blunt-cut bangs. getting fangs up into one of the shopping carts was definitely more than a two-person job but ari pushes him around the ‘grossout’ with ease. they find peach rings and ice tea and manage to eat most of the bag before they make it to the checkout stand, too busy rolling down the columns of people-free aisles, singing along under their breath to the 80s classics that were always playing over the PA system. the two of them are in there for so long that fangs forgets to pick up milk and eggs before he goes home, like he was supposed to.

why did i buy four apricots? / i’ll never eat them before they rot / they’ll just become an afterthought

#THIS IS SO SWEET IT GAVE ME A MOUTH FULL OF CAVITIES #CORNTEA YOU DID IT AGAIN #GOD UR MIND #I LOVE THIS #pls support my wife

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

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keep me close (fangs fogarty x oc)

if someone was to ask for a word that described the two of them, it would be ‘careful’. adjective. making sure of avoiding potential danger, mishap, or harm; cautious. done with or showing thought and attention. they were almost textbook definition. if someone were to ask the two of them where it started, they’d say at the tracks; when emotions were at an all-all-time high and the aura of confusion was almost as thick as the haze of smoke. they’d say it started with a head on a shoulder, a listening ear.

it started before that, though. in the second to the last row of english class. ari sat in the column of desks all the way on the right, fangs on the left. fangs noticed the freckle-faced girl in the corner, hidden behind blunt-cut bangs and a tight-lipped stare. he wondered what she thought about. she didn’t talk that much but she looked like she always knew the answer. on one of the days mr. román was droning on a little too passionately about the great gatsby, a debate broke out between the bald-headed man and jughead jones. the holden caulfield wannabe was arguing about the portrayal of wealth inequality in the great gatsby because new money and old money hit too close to home, and jones was stuck in the valley of the ashes. ari muttered something under her breath and she hoped that no one could hear it. “white savior” fangs had thought that same thing for awhile now so he couldn’t help but laugh. her head whips around to find the source of the laughter. they lock eyes and fangs nods at her. ari smiles.

what “it” was, was complicated. but it started in english class. ari was late to class on the day that project partners were assigned and by some grace of god-jesus-whatever, they were paired up together. fangs noticed the relieved expressions of his classmates around him, but he was used to people keeping their distance from snakes. trapper-keeper in hand, he walked timidly to ari’s desk, very aware of the sound of his footfalls. “hey, how’s your day going?” his voice was shaky, but she smiled at him again. that damed smile. “rough entrance” ari laughed, light and airy, “but im okay now. how’re you?” she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked up at fangs waiting for his answer. he blinked dumbly before answering; “i’m doing good, yeah. i’m great”. and he meant it.

it was vodka and pineapple fanta. walking hand-in-hand to the park and seeing who could jump the highest off the swings. fangs wins every time, and will never miss a chance to gloat about it. “how many times has it been now?” he has a shit eating grin plastered on his face, though his back is covered in points of tanbark from the fall he took from the jump. ari would giggle, and shake her head,“don’t ask questions you already know the answer to!” fangs extend his arm, hoping that ari would pull him back up to his feet. she didnt. instead, she grabbed his outstretched hand and laced her fingers with his, taking a seat next to him as he laid on his back and she cradled his large hand between hers. a few minutes later, ari untangled her long legs from under herself and stretched out on her back next to fangs. put her head on his chest. smiled when fangs started running his fingers through the expanse of her hair. they shared a dreamy silence, pointing out the constellations and wondering who was gonna initiate the first move.

things were clumsy: words never spoken in the right order, feelings never communicated correctly. touches were lighter: ari’s fingertips tracing over the scarred-up ridges of fang’s knuckles, or his thumb barely ghosting her cheek. it was innocent, trying to find footing.

it was getting too high and walking to the grossout, stocking up on snacks and being pushed around in shopping carts while all too acutely being aware of the presence of time. fangs says he can never tell how long it’s been since they set foot inside, “it could be have been ten minutes or a whole half an hour, i wouldn’t know the difference anyway”. one time ari decides to time them, sets her stopwatch from when they walked through the double doors to when they finally hit the check-out counter. neither one of them were really sure what to make of their answer.

friendship always came with a side of something more for ari and fangs — like a milkshake with a side of french fries.

fangs has his arm outstretched over the cafeteria table as he gazed around absentmindedly, people-watching as he often did. he has just finished telling an animated story about something stupid that sweet pea did, his big brown eyes lighting up as he joked about his best friend. ari watches him and smiles, looking up from the math homework she never really committed to finishing. She pulls out a marker from her pencil case; the expensive drawing markers that are thin tipped and dry quickly. leaning towards fangs, ari takes her purple marker to the skin of his palm. she writes her name in three thin, clear letters. her ‘i’ was dotted with a heart. blowing on the nearly-dry ink, ari softly closes fangs’ hand and smiles.

“keep me close, okay fogarty?” she asks and he laughs.

#CoURTNEY #YOU DID THAT!!! i love axf ugh #u rlly did that #ugh ur mind #pls support my wife

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thebetterjonesboy · 4 years

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There’s Something In The Woods (Betty Cooper X Jughead Jones)

A/N: This was originally inspired by this blurb request that I received from @hughstheforcelou awhile back, and they encouraged me to expand on this idea, so shout out to them!

Summary: On a cross-country road trip without a clear destination, both Betty and Jughead are reveling in the romanticism of being with each other on the open road. Things get a little mysterious one night when Betty spies a figure, some strange creature, lurking in the distance.

This is based off of this song, from this themed playlist, which I highly recommend listening to as you read!

Word Count: 5,442

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Scene from a highway in a desert, 1989 (First Draft)

I let the car drift some, eye your uncomfortable pose and profile; the postures of long drives, shifting numb and sore parts when you can no longer sit them.

It was the summer of freedom. Real, true, unabashed freedom…it was all they had ever wanted. There would be no more overbearing mothers or fathers seeking sinners, no reputation to proceed either one of them. No Southside, no boundaries; the King finally relinquished his crown. The day after their high school graduation, Betty and Jughead pack their essentials into duffle bags that get thrown into the trunk of the old Chevelle. The two of them wouldn’t have bothered to attend the ceremonies, but there was no way Cheryl Blossom would let anyone miss her big valedictorian speech. The first day was the most exciting. There was a certain kind of welcomed melancholy that creeped up over their shoulders the farther away they got from Riverdale. It seemed like no matter where they would go, there’d always be a part of them that was tethered to the suburbs. They stop to stretch their legs, to grab a bite to eat and visit some cheap roadside attraction. Betty sits on the hood of the car and poses as Jughead takes pictures with his polaroid camera, her sunglasses are perched on the tip of her nose and it makes something ache deep in his chest. There’s a diner somewhere about an hour away, the two of them electing to skip any more 50’s-themed diners.

“Where you kids headed?” The old blue-haired waitress asks absentmindedly as she scribbles down their lunch orders.

“Nowhere in particular” Jughead reveals, sending a wry grin at the witty woman. Betty sips silently on her sweet tea and revels in the romanticism of the open road. Oh, to be eighteen and in love…

“How will you know when you get there?” Betty looks at the woman’s plated name tag, Sandra Jean, and smiles warmly up at her. The two of them both have to stop and think about it, how far could they actually run?

Foot on the dash, foot on the dash, x hours or so from some somewhere now, only half aware when I change lanes half accidentally.

Betty’s hair flows golden in the hot wind, insistent upon rolling all the windows down as she sings along to the Alanis songs that Jughead put on one of the many mix cds he made for the trip. He tries to recline as best as possible in the confines of the old car, his skinny knees pulled up near his chest as he rested his sock-covered feet against the dashboard. He pulls out a beat-up copy of Kerouac’s On the Road and Betty chuckles to herself, how apropos.

“Read to me, Jug” She doesn’t ask, but it’s not quite a demand either. Jughead hates to admit it to himself, but he would probably do whatever Betty told him to do. Oh, to be eighteen and in love.

“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.” Jughead’s voice is low and even as he reads, squinting his eyes against the bright reflection off the yellow-white paper despite his sunglasses. He thought that maybe this would be his story…he’d get home and sit down at his computer and type epochs about his summer on the road with his true love; the grit of it all, the beautiful and the ugly coming together as he waxes poetic about nights spent creating false identities as they made small talk with whatever resident alcoholics hung out around the dingy bar. They scored cheap drugs from locals and fucked on the itchy sheets of motels that looked straight out of a horror film. He’d tell Betty he loved her with his hand between her legs and then the two of them would pass out cold, having another full day of driving ahead of them.

The two of them wake up still bleary from the previous night’s activities and stand silently side by side as they brush their teeth in the cold, still bathroom. The economy of love in close quarters, a learned thing. Betty’s legs are pale and long as they poke out from underneath Jughead’s old t-shirt. She brought her own pajamas, but still always said that she liked his clothes better. It’s much later than either one of them had anticipated; Jughead guessed that the exhaustion had finally started to catch up to them. He tried not to be bitter about the setback in his perfectly planned schedule as he splashed cold water onto his oily face, noting the fine bit of stubble on his cheeks and the purple circles deepening under his eyes.

Betty and Jughead get dressed in silence and check out of the sleepy motel, filling up on complimentary cups of burnt coffee and stale muffins. It’s his turn to drive. Betty dozes off,trying to shrink herself small enough to fit comfortably into the stale, cracked leather seats. He drives and she sleeps. She sleeps and he can’t help but sneak a glance at her, taking his eyes off the mostly empty road. The sun is warm and high in the sky, casting dark shadows over Betty’s peaceful face. The car veers over with a sudden jolt and Jughead swears as he grabs at the steering wheel.

But hurtling uncertain into the inferno of forever of here, which it does to me, the desert. It has effect, makes me mark things needlessly.

“Jug, do you see that?” Betty taps a pearl-painted nail against the smudged glass window. It’s hot against her skin as she presses her face closer, needing to get a better look to make sense of what it was exactly that she was seeing. There’s a figure in the distance. Too tall to be human, but there was no animal Betty knew of to be that tall…

“Wh-What?” Jughead mutters, shielding his eyes from the setting sun as he tries to locate whatever Betty saw looming in the sparse trees and shrubs. There’s a layer of kicked-up red dust over all the windows that further obscures his vision and Jughead flicks on the windshield wipes to no avail. “Shit”

“Right there, don’t you see it?” Betty wants to roll the old window down and smear away the red dirt with her sweaty hands. The detective inside of her is screaming at Jughead to get closer, but the rational, more mature side is telling her to stay as far away as possible. There were no monsters in the real world, she tried to persuade herself, trying to leave behind her adolescent mentality that everything begins and ends in her shitty little hometown. Just as she tries to shove the thoughts away, the figure moves.

It’s dark and it is tall, with a wing-span that unfurls and reaches wider than Betty can spread her freckled arms. She can’t tell if it has feathers or if it’s fur, only that the creature is blanketed in a sort of darkness that makes it easier to camouflage itself.

Betty blinks and the figure is gone, like it never existed in the first place. “Where am I looking, Betts? You really hyped this thing up” Jughead chuckles. He notices the change in Betty’s demeanor and his expression falters. “What’s wrong?”

“Never mind, Jug…just keep driving.”

When the old Chevelle rolls through the sparse dried-up patch of forest where Betty fist saw the figure, she thought she might have imagined it; there was no trace of whatever beastly creature she was telling herself that she saw. But when the old yellowed headlights cast their dusty beams through the tree line, she sees it: The red, infernal glow of two large, round eyes.

These words that hiss and makes snake sounds. But it feels holy almost, though I don’t say so.

Betty doesn’t forget the creature for the rest of the day or the one after that. It weighs heavy on her mind and she can’t help but shake the feeling that another encounter with the winged thing would soon ensue. She swallows the bile that was threatening to creep up her throat and washes it down with another shot of the bottom-shelf tequila her boyfriend kept handing over to her. Jughead had left Betty to sit and stew alone in the corner of the bar, watching him as he bent over the pool table in a not-so-friendly competition with some locals who were starting to get rowdy after losing one too many times to someone who was simply passing through town. Jughead felt right at home among the ranks of the old, bitter men who reeks like sour beer and stale smoke. A small, immature part of him wanted to go back to the car and retrieve his well-worn Serpent jacket; show them who really was in charge that night.

Betty’s blue eyes are bloodshot and glazed over as she knocks back the warm dregs of her beer. The bartender was a girl who didn’t look to be much older than either one of them, so she gave Betty a sympathetic smile and a pint on the house as she watched the pool table knowingly. “Good Luck, sister golden-hair” The long haired girl smirks at Betty, retrieving her pack of cigarettes to duck outside behind the bar. Betty follows her, like any good detective would, not willing to lose her only confidant just yet.

“Excuse me, do you happen to know if there’s a hotel somewhere close by?” Betty asks with her tight-lipped, homegrown smile as she battled her urge to wave away the bartender’s cigarette smoke. “Preferably somewhere with vacancies” She adds quickly and watches as the young bartender rolls her eyes and chuckles.

“What, your boyfriend’s not doin’ too hot in there anymore?” The girl steps closer into the light and suddenly Betty can see, really see, her face: She’s pretty in a sad kind of way, with stringy ash blonde hair that looked like she cut it herself, sad brown eyes that looked like they’d seen too much too soon, and a small scar by her top lip. Betty can’t help but think of this girl as another version of herself, from a parallel universe a million small towns over.

“Something like that,” She reveals, the venom palpable in her voice as she thought of Jughead’s dumb idea to stop for drinks, even though he was so insistent on reaching their next destination by nightfall. This was day four of their ten-day trip and they had already called behind on their plan. Jughead waved off the notion a little too quickly, dismissing Betty’s worries with his hand. We’ll just extend the trip, Betts, more time for us before Yale. Betty was already dodging phone calls from her mother, not wanting to deal with her incessant interrogation anymore. She could only dodge Alice for so long, and since Betty had just gotten her college fund money back, she didn’t want to chance her mother having another one of her nuclear meltdowns.

The bartender raised her eyebrows, “Come on, sister golden hair, let’s get a pot of coffee on for lover-boy…” There’s a certain kind of kinship between the two women as they walk back into the dark and sweaty bar.

Betty slides the cracked ceramic mug down to Jughead, who was moping as he perched on one of the wood barstools. “You okay?” She asks tentatively, his tipsiness clouding his expression and rendering him harder to read than usual.

His head hangs low, stringy hair drifting into his eyes. “Only down about two hundred bucks, but other than that? Peachy…” He tosses his hand about with a mix of arrogance and fake nonchalance.

“Jug…” Betty chastises, crossing her arms over her chest defensively.

“Spare me the lecture, Alice, I’m more than aware” Jughead stops short, taking a gulp of the lukewarm coffee. Betty throws up her hands in defense, sitting down next to him with another one of her tight-lipped smiles. She can feel the bitter sting of her fingernails digging into the scarred-up skin of her palms, a nagging feeling.

An immortal unknowing: sacred and ancestral and real and only felt here when the sun falls. Only felt here, now, where the otherworldly haunts of coming dusk descending from immeasurable spaces, to more immeasurable spaces

He shouldn’t have been driving. Betty told him that; told him to have a glass of water, told him to have another cup of coffee, told him to go outside and sober up because he was acting like a real jackass and it was still a long drive to their trip’s destination. Staying at a hotel was a nice thought, but Jughead preferred to gamble their earned money away playing pool, as if he hadn’t been getting his ass handed to him by Sweet Pea for the last two years.

He said he was fine.

Then highway was surrounded by thick, dense woods that made it dark, made the trees look like inkblots, dark and obscured, as the old Chevelle rattled along. Betty had her seatbelt on, her long, pale legs extended onto the dashboard, toes leaving half-moons of warmth on the cool glass of the windshield. He seemed fine, he was always fine. Alanis was playing on the radio and Betty hummed along softly. Jughead laughed and tried out his best falsetto, not paying attention to the seemingly barren road up ahead.

“Jug watch out!” Betty can remember calling out to the boy, going to grab at the steering wheel herself in order to swerve out of the way, to avoid hitting that thing, that same winged creature who’s image had been singed into memory since their last encounter. Inhumanly tall, with big eyes that bore red when the headlights got close enough to bring the figure into view, yet again. It’s not a man — Betty knows that for certain, though some details had gotten a little fuzzy. Wings…it also had wings, long and wide. It was’t a man and it wasn’t an animal wither, so what was it? It was big and it was scary, and judging by the way the creature seemed to have been looming in wait for Betty, it was probably pretty mean.

The creature’s startled. Blurry vision. The sound of tires squealing. Metal on metal.

When Betty finally opens her eyes, it’s slow, dazed, like she’s not quite sure if she was awake or dreaming. She’s alone, she knows that for sure, can feel the hollow sting of fear and loneliness as she surveys the damage. There’s a screaming pain in her temple, and when she goes to inspect for damages, she pulls her fingers away from her face to find that they’re covered in sticky, dried crimson. She can feel the blood caked in her hair, can smell the metallic iron mixing with the exhaust fumes that were still billowing up from under the car’s windshield. There’s broken glass in Betty’s thigh as she tries to sit up and she cranes her neck to survey the scene. The windshield is broken, a body-shaped hole in the center that was dripping with old, coagulated blood. The metal of the dashboard is crunched and dented from when the car swerved and careened into one of the big inkblot trees. Every muscle in betty’s body is screaming as she pushes herself up, trying to kick out the glass of the windshield with one of her dirty, blood-stained keds. She army crawls on her elbows through the shards of glass as she gets up and over the dashboard, grunting as she tries to find her footing as she stumbles in the upturned earth. Jughead’s favorite beanie is hanging ominously from a tree branch and there’s smears of blood on the newly turned leaves.

An ancient, endless desert sprawl; anarchic, forever, interrupted only by this highway running west. Some wound maybe, or a bandage, depending on how you look at it.

He went that way, he had to be. He was looking for help.Betty recites the mantra as she takes off through the forest, the bristles of branches tangled in her hair and getting caught on her tattered and blood-soaked clothing. She’s not sure how she’s still going but she is. Her feet come down hard in the moist dirt; there’s so much adrenaline running through her veins that she can’t even feel the pain in her head anymore. Her breathing is rough and jagged, like she couldn’t get enough air to her longs no matter how hard she tried. But she could see the horizon line now, the world now coming to life with whispers of the sun’s dusty yellow glow. There’s sunlight streaming through the brush and the old trees with gnarled roots like old fingers come to catch Betty in their grasp. When she’s back to the highway, she runs until she sees a cat, trying her best to flag them down with her rapid arm-movements. No one is stopping for you because they think you’re fucking crazy. Betty collects herself, tries to breathe easier and ground herself. Jughead was alive and he was getting help.

An old truck stops for a moment, concerned, a grey-haired older man reaches his head out of the window to ask if she’s all right. “There’s something in the woods…It got him” Betty sobs, her bottom lip quivering as she wrapped her arms protectively around her torso.

“There’s something in the woods” the man agrees and Betty doesn’t know if he’s trying to play into her decisions or if he knows more than he’s letting on.

A guide through wider spaces than the baggage of unclaimed except in concrete; a place you might claim one day, some day.You and I, for us, when we get to wherever it is we are going

The man introduces himself to Betty as Maxwell and that was it. Under any other sort of circumstances, Betty liked to think that she would have made a joke to the old man, an attempt to ease the tension. “Now is that your first name or your last name?” She would have said. And it makes Betty laugh, not really laugh, but as much as she could muster up. It’s a dry, humorless sound that comes from the back of her throat and suddenly Betty is feeling raw in every sense of the word. Maxwell offers to take her into town towards the hospital and asserts that it’s “No trouble at all”; Betty’s too shell-shocked to think twice about the older man’s offer. She doesn’t question his motives, she isn’t building her escape plan as she’s being driven farther and farther away from the scene of the accident. The rust-colored truck pulls up in front of the General Hospital and Betty swiftly realizes that not all people are as sinister as they are in Riverdale.

Betty lets herself be helped out of the truck, her knees going wobbly and her vision going blurry as she’s guided through the double doors and met with the bright lights that cast a sickly green glow over the waiting room. She can feel her knees give out as her weight is dropped back into a wheelchair, an older female nurse pushing her into an examination room while barking questions at a helpless looking Maxwell.

“I found her by the side of the road about ten miles from here, she was mutterin’ something about the woods and after takin’ a look at her I assumed there’d been some kinda accident so I offered her a ride to the hospital. Didn’t say a word the whole way here”

Betty can feel someone above her dabbing at her blood-caked hair, she can smell the bitter rubbing alcohol and it makes her nose tickle. “Betty Cooper… I’m, Elizabeth…” She’s lethargic as the nurse shines a thin beamed light in her eyes. She swallows thickly, the sedatives kicking in through the IV that Betty didn’t even know that she had. She pulls at her arm and the nurse comes to swat away her hand. “Riverdale, my boyfriend and I were taking a road trip” Betty trails off and the nurse has to shake her back to consciousness.

“Was there a young man with her when you found her?” The Nurse throws an accusatory glance over her shoulder at Maxwell and he quietly shakes his head no. “Sweetheart, where’s your boyfriend now?” The nurses was trying to stay calm on behalf of Betty and the clear trauma that she had been through, but there were so many questions she had. First and foremost though, she needed to know if there were any more victims.

“There was an accident, when I woke up he was gone…that thing, I think it got him”

Single landmark in memorial now, and the landscape that always passes but never passes, does finally.

Betty is confined to the hospital for three days, and the Doctor calls her mother despite all of her protests. Alice is too busy breaking some big story, but she promises to make her way to the nameless little town by the end of the week. There’s a small search party for Jughead, but nothing good comes out of it. There’s no body found at the scene of the accident, nor in the surrounding area. He’s gone and no one has an explanation for it. They think the poor kid must’ve been taken by some sick son of a bitch, and Betty wanted to agree but there was no way for her to explain that the perpetrator wasn’t a who, but a what. She knew what she saw in the woods; she could draw it on paper better than she could explain it with words.

Betty is severely concussed, and it takes five staples in her forehead to put her back together. Despite her bruised ribcage and some bumps and scratches, she’s fairly well-off, and the Nurse tells her that she should be thankful for good samaritans because she could’ve been in much worse shape. There’s a part of her that doesn’t want to wait for her mother, she knows that they recovered as much as possible from the scene of the accident, all of hers and Jughead’s things that they packed for their trip. It was funny, how long ago it all seemed. She knows there’s an envelope of money in the pocket of the pair of red shorts that she packed away in duffle bag. There’s two hundred dollars less than she started out with, but Betty was trying not to be angry about that now; she saw no sense in harboring anger from her little spat with Jughead, all she wanted to know was where he was and if he was okay. There was a naive part of Betty that truly thought that Jughead was alive and well, and that any time now he would be waltzing into the sterile hospital room, a burger in his hand and a chip on his shoulder. But there was no way…she saw the wreckage of the car, and the blood, how it dripped from the dark leaves of the inkblot trees and dried in sticky puddles in the rocky dirt. Until there was a body, though, she could hold on to that glimmer of hope, no matter how naive it was.

If only she could find a car, Betty could be out of here. She didn’t need Alice, and it was clear that her mother was in no hurry to drop her workload to make the five day drive. The nurse said that by tomorrow, Betty could be cleared to go home, or at least to start making the trek back. Her head aches with every rhythmic beep of the monitors that were all monitoring her vitals, make it obnoxiously apparent that she was alive and it was looking like Jughead wasn’t. A tear runs down her face as Betty reminisces on all the plans they made, how they were going to build a life together that was outside of Riverdale’s soul-crushing confines.

There’s a business card on the side table with a phone number on it, and suddenly Betty gets an idea. Her fingers are clumsy as she reaches for the corded phone, she dials the numbers and holds the cold plastic up to her ear as she awaits an answer. The line clicks and someone picks up. “Maxwell? Hi, this is Betty Cooper, the uh, girl you saved. I just wanted to really take the time to say thank you in person, do you think you could meet me for breakfast tomorrow?”

The man graciously agrees and says that he knows a place. Betty’s all cleared to go by her doctors; she should wait for her mother to get to the hospital but that could be days from now. She lugs the duffle bags of things salvaged as she walks out of the hospital’s creaky double doors, immediately getting hit with a wave of sticky heat. Maxwell is waiting out front in his rust-colored truck and he hops out of the cab to help Betty with her bags, opening the door to the passenger’s side and make sure she was safe and secured inside. They pull up to a diner with a name that sounds like it could be someone’s grandmother’s, and Maxwell insists that Betty has to try the blueberry pancakes because they’re “the best thing on the whole damn menu”. A teenage waitress with a barbell through her eyebrow takes their order and soon Betty and Maxwell are making friendly, idle conversation. It was true that Betty did want to thank him for picking her up and taking her to the hospital, but there was also some ulterior motives behind it. So when she sets down her sticky fork, Betty gets nervous before lacing her fingers together and taking a deep breath.

“Do you happen to know of anywhere I could get a cheap car?” She hoped that she wasn’t coming across as rude, or that her appreciation was insincere. She didn’t even know why she thought that the old man would be able to help her out, but she had a feeling. “Before the accident, my boyfriend and I were on a bit of a cross-country road trip and….I think I need to finish it on his behalf. I don’t think I can move on without him unless I finish it and my mom?” Betty blows a puff of air between her teeth, “She’s more concerned with work and it’s clear that she’s in no rush to come and get me, so I need to finish the trip. For me and for Jughead, can you help me?”

Maxwell nods his head and throws a handful of crumpled up bills on the table of the diner. He drives Betty to a small ranch not too far away, and heads towards a covered overhang. Gesturing to Betty, the two get out of the car and move closer to whatever was being concealed under the blue pop-up tarps. There’s a blue Cadillac who’s paint has dulled and oxidized with time, but Betty knows a classic car when she sees one. She gets that familiar itch in the tips of her fingers, wanting nothing more than to pop open the car’s hood and poke around like she used to with her dad at the auto shop.

“If you can start it, it’s yours” Maxwell says, and the fun suddenly began for Betty as she reached for the toolbox she saw propped up idly. A few hours and some elbow grease and the car is as good as new. Betty did most of the work, but what strength she couldn’t muster up was assisted by Maxwell, who was impressed at the resilience and skillfulness of his new young friend. He refuses to take any of her money, so Betty stashes the crumpled envelope in his toolbox where Maxwell would be sure to find it eventually. He won’t let her start her journey so late in the evening, having been made aware of the horrors that came from her trip, and offers up the sofa bed for her, at least until morning.

Betty wakes up with a gasp and is immediately panicked when she can’t recognize her surroundings. She sits up with speed that makes her dizzy, and when her hand comes to touch as the sutures in her head, it’s a sobering reminder of what she had been through the last few days. The clock reads 4:30 am and the red neon glow the numbers give off is Betty’s only source of light. Quietly, she tiptoes through the expanse of the strange house, picking up her things and packing them away into her bags before grabbing the car keys that sat cold on the granite of the kitchen counter. Inch by inch Betty turns the front door knob until she can slip out of the ranch house silently. Shutting what was left of hers and Jughead’s belongings in the back seat, she starts the car and puts it in reverse.

The open road felt a little scarier than it did before. Betty white-knuckled the steering wheel with her hands at ten and two as she drove away from Maxwell’s ranch, the diner, and the General Hospital that did so much help for her. She remembers that she’s about ten miles away from where she came out of the woods the night of the accident. She wishes that she remembered where the car was. There was a part of her that wanted to sit out there amongst the wreckage until Jughead or someone else came and found her, but that would be of no use to her.

She pulls the car off the road and onto the shoulder before she gets out, ruffling away through Jughead’s things to find something for her to leave behind, to memorialize him in some way so that he could never be forgotten about. She finds his dog-eared copy of On The Road and wishes nothing more than to be able to hear his smooth, even voice as he read to her during the times where it was her turn to drive. She opens the book to the first page and scribbles “Jughead Jones wuz here” just like he used to all those years ago. She places the book on top of a moss-covered tree stump and weights it down with a small stack of smooth, flat rocks.

So I crack my window just so, and almost close my eyes and almost let go of the steering wheel, but don’t. It feels impossible to crash the car while we’re in it.

Betty’s eyes are bleary with tears as she drives away from the last place that she ever saw the one person in the world that she would move mountains for. She swiped under her eyes with the backs of her veiny hands and takes a deep breath. Alanis is playing again on the radio and the notion of it is bittersweet at best.

She continues down the road but something catches her attention. It’s a shadow that she can see looming over her, a few hundred yards ahead there was something perched in the middle of the road. Betty can feel her stomach turn as she takes in the creature’s appearance yet again. It’s inhumanely tall frame, it’s feather-like covering, it’s wings that spread farther than Betty could open her own arms. Its red eyes reflected sinisterly in the headlights, and suddenly Betty knew exactly what she had to do. She thinks about Jughead, and the blood. The body-sized hole in the totaled car’s windshield. His favorite old beanie that was hanging limply from the inkblot trees and their bloodied leaves.

Betty cracks her knuckles, her breathing even as she goes in through the nose and out through the mouth. When she gets closer to the creature, she notices it perk up, as if it had been waiting for her in order to finish what they had started. Eerily calm, almost stoic in nature, she presses her foot down on the gas pedal, and accelerates.

#CORNTEA #YOU DID THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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