#(did we time skip to our muses married? lets still write the wedding scene)

[stxriesfromasharchive]

Ngl i kinda want wedding plots

[cooperjones2020]

Second City, chp. 4

Summary: Sometimes she worries she’s settling — for a smaller job, a smaller city, a smaller life than she’d promised herself — but that was before she found out Jughead Jones lives in Chicago. That was before she found out the final secret of Jason Blossom’s murder.

A/N: In my brain, they have three drinks over a period of 4-5 hours, so Jughead is fine to ride the mile or so from the bar to his house. I even calculated it and his peak BAC without food is .046.

A/N 2: This chapter is just a continuation of the previous scene because it got too long, so I reprinted the end of it if you don’t remember :)

ao3–>http://archiveofourown.org/works/11409360/chapters/25805820

Second City one / two / three

Nobodies Nobody Knows one / two (ao3)

In which Jughead Jones turns the tables

(Previously on Second City:

“Did your routine change? Anything in the physical process of how you wrote?”

“Definitely. Being an established author has conveyed a huge privilege on me. The Final Fissure was written in spare time at school or late nights at the diner. I’m still a nighttime writer. I still can’t write at home, I need people around me to observe. But writing gets to be the focus of my day now. I’ve also gotten better at letting other people see my writing. As a teenager, I was obsessive about making it perfect first.”

“Oh I remember.” They’re both facing ahead, so the recorder has a better angle, but she can see him smiling at her out of the corners of her eyes.

“But now, sometimes it’s just get it on the page and send it off, especially if I’m under a deadline. Still, though, I like some feedback if only to reaffirm my own conviction that I’m headed in the right direction. Actually, Archie looked at a few chapters of Sweetwater Subtext pretty early on.”

“Really? I can’t see him as a particularly dedicated editor.”

Jughead’s laugh is big, his head is thrown back and his shoulders shake. “No, definitely not. But it was more feedback on the content I was looking for, than the style. Whether I was crossing a line with anything.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

“Good.”

She takes a risk. “I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.” It hurts. She knows it shouldn’t. She knows it makes sense. But it does. Because it sounds like ‘I don’t think about you.’

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.” Way to ruin it, Betty. “On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.”)

She manages to recover, even somewhat gracefully. They speed through the rest of her questions. She barely has to look at her notes, except as an excuse to break eye contact when the butterflies get too intense. She realizes, wounded pride aside, that she’s actually having fun.

“Okay, let’s get back to Sweetwater Subtext for a second. As we’ve said, The Final Fissure had an obvious ending point with the reveal of the murderer. I know you can’t give me any spoilers, but what’s next for these characters? Will there be a third entry in this series?”

“Unclear.” She lifts her eyes to his and they seem to burn into her, like he’s trying to tell her something she’s afraid to translate.

“Oh. Um, okay. Any idea what does come next then?”

“Well, The Final Fissure is gonna be a TV show. We’re still working out if I’m going to be involved, though right now I’m leaning no.”

She pulls the hair tie off her wrist and moves to put her hair up, then lets it slide out of her hands when it’s shorter than she expects. She knows she has enough material, knows this is going to be good, but she doesn’t want to stop. She feels drunk off Jughead’s words, like she’s a teenager sneaking champagne at a cousin’s wedding.

He interrupts her while she’s still formulating her next question. “Would you mind if we took a break? I could use some food.”

“Oh of course, I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize, I was just on a roll earlier and skipped dinner.”

“Jughead Jones voluntarily skipped a meal?”

“I wouldn’t call it voluntary. Sometimes the muse is actually a slave driver.”

It’s now closing in on 11, which means the dinner menu has been replaced by the late night menu, so they order baskets of a variety of fried things.

“I didn’t mean it like that earlier. It’s just, I don’t know, I think it would be kind of weird if me and Archie talked about you. That whole same-ex-girlfriend thing.”

Betty lets out a soft sigh. “Sometimes I even forget we dated. It was such a weird, hazy time in my life. I fought so hard for so long to be my own person, not Polly’s sister or Alice’s daughter. By the time senior year came around, I was tired of fighting everyone’s expectations. Veronica was back in New York, you were on the south side. We were the only two left, of the core four, and it just made sense, you know? So we went to the back to school dance together, and then homecoming, and then winter formal. And before you know it was prom and we’d been dating for eight months.”

“I always thought you two would get married and have the 2.5 kids and white picket fence thing. You know, even when we were dating, I think I thought that in the back of my mind.”

She rolls her eyes. “I know. It wasn’t in the back of your mind. I seem to recall a certain speech in a certain red-headed person’s garage at a certain other person’s birthday party.”

“God, I’m never going to live that one down. Once I managed to go an entire eleven months without thinking about it, and then the memory just crept back in. Here, Jughead, you think you’re making progress on your social skills, well remember this?”

Betty laughs. “Well that was never in the cards for me and Archie, and I didn’t want it to be. Dating him was just…comforting you know? Comfortable. And I could really use that then.”

“Do me a favor and promise me that you will never tell Archie that. You guys may be best friends and he may be ass over elbows for Veronica now, but no guy wants to know that sex with him was just comfortable.”

She holds up a pinkie and waits for Jughead to take it. “I promise.”

“I was surprised, when I walked into Mary’s and found you.”

“I had gathered that. Though you were probably no more surprised than I was.”

“What made you decide to move?”

Betty exhales, nervous about answering truthfully but wanting to nonetheless. “I was just so sick of New York, sick of my job. I was running on a cycle of adrenaline—benzodiazepines—caffeine—melatonin that was unsustainable. I got home from a stakeout one morning at 5 am and I realized I was doing important things for other people, breaking big stories, but as a result I missed out on doing important things for myself. I was making decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have made.

“Then I got a call from Cynthia—my editor—offering me the job here. It was a deus ex machina, just what I needed at just the right time dropped out of the sky. It felt like a good time to pull the rug out from under myself. To look for a new dream.”

She’d worked so hard to get to a place where could break those big stories, doing the investigative journalism she’d always wanted. But it wasn’t what she’d imagined it would be.

“And that’s okay, you know? I feel like the hardest part is telling other people, people who knew me then. Like I’m afraid they’re going to think I’ve compromised, but I’m happy. Dreams change. Well, at least for most of us,” she ends by nudging him with her elbow.

Jughead looks at her like he believes her, like he doesn’t pity her.

“I think you probably filled your quota of breaking big stories before you even left high school. I’m glad you realized you weren’t happy and did something about it.” He pauses and takes a big breath. “And I’m glad you’re here. Glad we could do this.”

She smiles at him, the corners of her lips curving down. “Me too.”

Time for a change of topic. “Polly said Jellybean works at Pop’s now.”

“Yeah, for about a year.”

“Does that mean you get free burgers?”

“No. Only half-price. But yeah, she mentioned last week that Polly and your mom come in sometimes with the twins.”

Betty can’t help the goofy grin that breaks out at the mention of her niece and nephew. “Yeah. Her and my mom have gotten a lot closer the past couple years. Since my dad died.”

“Oh, Betts, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. He’d been sick for a while. We…made our peace with it. With each other. But you know what’s sick? My mom’s been happier since. Like thirty fucking years and I’m pretty sure they were both miserable almost the whole time. How do you get to the point where it’s not even worth trying to go after happiness?”

“Sometimes you fall into a pattern that isn’t worth the effort it would take to break. Not everyone is as brave as you. I’m certainly not. And they had other things they were living for. Polly. You. I think that’s something I’ve learned since FP got out. My mom died, too, before— well, before. I think that’s that one thing that really fucked my dad up. That he didn’t get a chance to make it right with her. I’m sure it’s why he’s been a model citizen ever since.”

“No, Juggie. He was always so proud of you. I’m sure it’s for you. For what you’ve done for him, and for Jellybean.”

“Did Archie ever tell you about Thanksgiving our sophomore year of college?”

“No. That’s the first one he spent here, right?”

“Right. Mary and Mike had just moved in together, in the house they’re in now. I don’t think he was quite ready to see Mommy share a room with someone other than Daddy. Over the course of the morning, his face got redder and redder until it matched his hair. Then, when we were about to sit down for dinner, he flipped out and somehow wound up spraying mashed potatoes all over the table.”

“What! Oh no!” Years later and Betty feels the burgeoning heat of secondary embarrassment for her best friend.

“Yeah, it was great. Mary locked him outside.”

“I would have too.”

“And while all that was going down, I was upstairs, face timing with Jelly, who was still in Ohio then. I came down to Archie outside, Mary crying, and food everywhere.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, after we cleaned up the worst of it, Mike and I ate like nothing was wrong. Archie and Mary made up after a few hours. I never did get any mashed potatoes though.”

“Obviously the worst part. Oh god, the twins had been in their terrible threes that year. I spent the whole day going back and forth referring their screaming and then my parents’.”

“Mine’s worse.”

“It is. Which means I will get us the next round of drinks.”

“That is an offer you will never hear me turn down.” Her heart stops when he smiles at her, one dark curl dropping in front of his face.

She lifts her empty water glass up and twists it back and forth in her fingers, swishing the melting ice cubes around. He looks at her upturned palm for a beat too long, and she realizes he’s looking for her half-moon scars.

“I don’t do that anymore. I…haven’t since college.”

“Can I ask what made you stop?”

“I had to de-escalate. It didn’t work at first. I just switched to picking at my skin—my nails or acne or scabs. I still have pretty bad scars on my shoulders. But when I got to college, I was able to see a therapist who my mom couldn’t interrogate so that helped. She told me to hold an ice cube when I have the urge to do something destructive.” She doesn’t know why she’s telling him all of this, but for the simple fact that he seems to genuinely want to know.

“An ice cube?”

“Yeah, to cup it in the palm of my hand. Anyway, I’m a work in progress.” She’s been looking at her hand, but she switches to his face. “Wait. How did this turn into you interviewing me?”

“Well technically we’re still on our dinner break.”

“Okay, whatever.” She turns the recorder back on and asks him a few more perfunctory questions about release dates and promotional schedules. His answers are just as perfunctory, so his must be too.

“I should probably go home soon.” He just stares at her. When she begins to pack up the recorder and her notes, he snaps out of it and signals to the bartender to bring their check.

When it comes, he moves to take it but she swipes it before he can. “Nope.” She pops the p. “My interview, my expense report.”

Outside, he tries to convince her to let him take her home again, but she refuses. “I can expense the uber too and my house is way out of your way this time.”

He tries to argue with her, but she stands her ground. She believes him when he says he’s fine to ride but that doesn’t mean she wants him on the road any longer than he has to be.

He takes her phone out of her hand and minimizes the uber app. “Fine, then text me so I know you got home safe?”

She agrees and lets him hand her into the car when it comes. Then, as she turns to look at him out of the rear window, she realizes he’s given her his phone number.

When she gets home, she texts him: “home and locked in where the bad guys can’t get me.”

He responds with: “don’t forget to check under the bed. sleep tight, betts.”

She locks the deadbolt, then turns to lean against the door, her phone pressed to chest. Fuck. This isn’t good. She should feel awkward. She should feel the weight of delayed embarrassment at her reckless oversharing of her life. But she doesn’t.

Instead, she listens to the tape while she washes her face, flosses her teeth. She only gets through the first half an hour to forty-five minutes before she’s too tired to pay attention anymore, but she can already tell it’s good. It’ll be the best thing she’s ever written. The last thing she thinks before she falls asleep is that he’s always brought out the best in her.