#its a can of worms that ive been trying to keep the lid on for years

[hxneyfarm]

i think its time for me to start being honest about my gender identity but its haaard because i thought i had it figured oooouuut

[cooperjones2020]

Second City, chp. 9

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.

ao3–>http://archiveofourown.org/works/11409360/chapters/26199753

Second City one / two / three / four / five / six / seven / eight (ao3)

Nobodies Nobody Knows one / two / three / four / five (ao3)

In which Betty finds out where the bodies are buried

It’s almost impressive how the universe has decided to screw with her. It’s also just sick. She realizes, looking at the date stamp on the printout, that it has been 12 years to the day since Jughead left her, one year and seventeen days after Jason’s death.

She feels him enter the room behind her. And (she might be imagining it, but) she feels the air pressure change when he realizes what she’s holding.

“Betty—”

“What is this, Jughead?”

She turns and he’s leaning against the doorway, wearing only the towel from earlier wrapped around his waist. His arms are crossed so tightly the tattoo on his chest bulges and she can see all the veins in his forearms.

“Security footage.” She glares at him and he sighs, his whole body sagging, before scrubbing his hands over his face.

“You remember the tape?”

“Of fucking course I remember the tape.”

“Well it didn’t show…all of it. Hal was there.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

She tosses all the photos but the one back onto the desk and moves to push past him, but he grabs her arm. “Where are you going?”

“To get dressed.”

“What?” For just a second, he squeezes her wrist so tightly it hurts. Then he drops it like a hot coal.

“You are going to tell me what this is. But I’m not talking about it while we’re both practically naked.”

She rushes to the kitchen and shoves her jeans back on her body, dropping her bra in the tote still sitting on a chair. When she returns, Jughead’s bedroom door is closed, so she sits on the couch and pulls her hair up into a tight little ponytail on the top of her head.

When he comes back out, he drops his beanie on the coffee table and sits in the armchair to her right. He pulls a comb out of his pocket and proceeds to brush his hair. He does all this while staring at the wall over her shoulder.

She waits silently. Eventually he lets out a deep exhale and stands, throwing the comb down on top of the beanie. He disappears down the hallway and comes back with two mugs, a chemex, and an electric kettle. He leaves and returns with spoons, a jug of milk, and a roll of paper towels.

She lets him fiddle with his props a while. When he’s folded a paper towel into a square and set a steaming mug of coffee—prepared the way she still likes it, only with milk—on top, she lays the photo down on the coffee table between them and says, “What was he doing there, Jughead?”

“I don't know. I've been trying to find out.”

She thinks of the laptop, the notebook, the manuscript. “And you were what? Going to write about it?”

Out of the swirling vortex of emotions her mind is currently unable to process, anger emerges and she clings to it like a buoy. Except for the moment he grabbed her wrist, he has been so calm. She wants a rise out of him. She wants some indication he’s feeling even an iota of what she does. This situation is so unbearably familiar.

“Yes! No. I don’t know.” His hand clenches around the handle of his mug. She watches the tendons pop out then fade again. “I’ve definitely thought about writing about it.”

“And you weren’t going to tell me?” The look he gives her would be funny if they were in any circumstances but the current ones.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we haven’t exactly been on speaking terms the past dozen years.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Your father’s!”

“What?” Anger gives way to an anxiety that bubbles in her stomach and claws its way up her esophagus. For the first time in a long time, she has difficulty keeping her hands from balling into fists. She snatches up the paper towel Jughead had placed her coffee cup on and commences shredding it into smaller and smaller pieces.

“I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing there—what he knew—since it happened and—”

“What do you mean since it happened?”

He looks confused at her interruption. “Oh. No, not it as in Jason. It as in us. Since my dad’s trial. Do you remember Viper? He started bartending at the Wyrm the fall after we broke up. Told me there was another camera that Keller fucking missed. Helped me and the lawyer pull the footage.”

“Wait the lawyer? What about Mary?”

“She couldn’t represent FP. She doesn’t do criminal law and her bar license had lapsed in New York. The Serpents had their own lawyer, anyway.”

“Okay. But why was my dad there? What does this have to do with us?”

“Can we maybe just focus on the Jason Blossom murder plot for now?”

“Fuck no. You’re not wiggling your way out of this anymore. What. Is. It.”

Jughead stares at her for a moment and at first she can’t tell if he’s angry or annoyed or what. She sees his jaw working back and forth. But then she watches the decision to tell her wash over his face. She couldn’t tell you the moment, couldn’t tell you what individual feature change made it happen, but it’s as if a mask he put on in the parking lot of Pop’s twelve years ago finally comes off. Every plane of his face is etched in pain but the flint in his eyes tells her his fury simmers under the surface.

“You know how Southside got out of school a week before Riverdale that year? Well, one day I was hanging around the Wyrm waiting for it to be time to pick you up from school and your dad showed up. He said—” Jughead laughs but the sound is sharp, bitter. “God, I remember it exactly. He said, ‘Your relationship with my daughter has gone on long enough, don’t you think?’” His eyes cut to hers.

“He told you to break up with me? And you listened to him?”

“Actually, he threatened.” A roaring noise fills her ears and she becomes aware that she’s breathing way too fast. Jughead is staring at her as if he’s either expecting her to start crying or to explode. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to touch her. She’s sure if he did she would cry, she wouldn’t be able to stop the panic tears she’s only barely restraining now. He just waits a minute for her to get herself under control, then picks up the photo.

“He WHAT.”

“Well, he did try bribing me first.”

“What the hell did he trying bribing you with?”

“Nothing I wanted. So he showed up again later that summer. I asked you once how far your dad would go to protect Polly. To protect you. And I found out. Betty, he said — he told me he was there, that night, at the Worm. The night Clifford Blossom shot Jason. He said he was willing to testify that FP was an accomplice. That he didn’t just clean it up but that he helped Daddy Blossom plan it. It would have meant fifteen years, Betts.” His voice cracks on her name.

They argue their way around his apartment. In the kitchen, he gets her a glass of ice then turns to wash the dishes they’d just created. When his back is turned, she pulls out a cube and moves to stand next to the trash so it won’t make a mess as it melts. He tells her about finding the video too late. Two months after she’d stopped calling him. He tells her about the night Sheriff Keller brought her dad in for questioning. He tells her her parents own a stake in the Whyte Wyrm. That that’s why Hal said he was there. That Keller bought his story. That Hal smirked and nodded at him as he left the station. Like they were in cahoots. Like they had a deal.

When they leave the kitchen, she moves her bags with them, if only to keep having something to do with her hands. Then she stands outside the bathroom while he replenishes the store of toilet paper under the sink from the closet. While he refills the hand soap, he tells her about FP’s trial. About her dad’s testimony. He tells her and she hates that she’s not surprised she didn’t know any of this was happening.

He leads her back into the spare bedroom. He gets down on his knees while she tries not to stare at the photos she’d tossed so haphazardly across the desk. They seem indecent now. Like crime scene photos. Which they sort of are. Only the crime isn’t just Jason Blossom’s shot and leaking body, it’s this moment and that moment and all the moments in between in which she wondered what she did wrong.

What she did was be born to the wrong parents. And FP paid for it. Jellybean paid for it. Jughead paid for it.

He slides a banker’s box out from under the desk and sits with his legs spread around it as he lifts off the lid. She drops down beside him. He hands her a manila file folder off the top. It’s FP’s record. Tampering with evidence. Obstruction of justice. Mishandling a body. Perjury. Five years.

They’re details she already knows but it’s as if she’s had the outline sketch and now he’s suddenly filled in the color. “You didn’t put any of this in the book.”

“What? No, no I didn’t.”

“That’s a pretty fucking important thing to leave out, don’t you think? You wrote about everything else. You wrote about Clifford Blossom’s suicide. You even put some of the trial stuff in the afterword. You wrote about…” But her voice cracks and she can finally feel the tears coming, so she stops. She blinks quickly to keep them from falling.

“I didn’t want you to find out that way. I didn’t want you to find out at all, but definitely not that way.”

“So you lost your father so I wouldn’t have to lose mine?”

“I was losing him anyway. FP was guilty, Betty. Keller’s a dick but he was right. FP did let the Serpents kidnap Jason. He did tamper with the evidence. Hell, he tried to toss the body. And I knew I’d get him back if I kept my mouth shut. You couldn’t un-know this. I always knew who FP was. I always knew he wasn’t a good guy. If you knew, you’d lose Hal forever.”

“But I still did. Don’t you get it? I still lost him. I’d already lost him. I lost him when he sent away my sister. And I lost you.”

Betty fights to control her voice, her hands, her tears. The whole time, Jughead keeps his head down, looking at the file on her lap. She didn’t need him to protect her from who her parents were.

“I wouldn’t have judged you for picking FP over me, Juggie. I would have told you to.”

“I know that. But I didn’t want you to have to. It wasn’t a choice you could make for me. It—and the guilt—were mine. I couldn’t let you absolve me of them. By the time the trial was over, you hated me. I hated myself. And I had no cell phone and I was being babysat every fucking second of the day. For months I thought of nothing but coming after you and telling you what I’d done. But then when everything kept coming up roses for your dad—If there was even a chance he could come up with some evidence, they could always try FP again. It’d be a new charge. I couldn’t risk calling his bluff.”

“So you let him bully you. You let me believe you didn’t love me anymore. You let me give up on us.”

“What did you want me to do, Elizabeth?”

In some small corner in the back of her mind, Betty has been marvelling at how incredible this conversation is. She can still hear the picnickers on the boulevard outside. Shafts of sunlight and laughter swing between the billowing curtains. But inside, in the shadows of his apartment, Jughead is quietly and methodically dismantling everything she’s known about her life. Except for the occasional cracks, everything has been measured, calm. Now, though, now his anger begins to bleed through.

“You should have told me.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference! I still would have had to choose.”

“But I deserved to know! It would have made a difference to my life. My dad was the guilty one, Jughead.”

“He was your father.”

“He was guilty. How can you stand there and defend him?” Her anger is feeding on his and all she wants is to whip them both into a storm that will purge them of a dozen years of hurt and anger and betrayal and longing. But he’s right. She can’t un-know. And again, he manages to put the lid back on.

“I’m not. God, believe me I’m not. But I have had a bit more time to process this than you. I hate him. I will always hate him. But I can’t blame him for doing everything in his power to protect you, even though he thought he had to protect you from me. I would have done the same.”

She’s suddenly aware that the wooden floor has been digging into her knees. She shifts and draws them up against her, massaging out the lines the floor has cut. Now, though, they both lean against the wall, nearly shoulder to shoulder.

“You were right.”

“What?”

“I told myself it was for your own good. To protect you. That it was inevitable anyway so I was just setting you free. But that wasn’t it. I don’t know if I was more afraid of taking your dad’s offer or rejecting it. It didn’t matter, I was afraid of screwing up. So I let him choose for me.”

It’s what she’s always known, but somehow it hurts more to hear the words aloud. Somehow the explanation hurts more than the excuse.

“But don’t you get it? I had to. I had to do it, Betty. Even if you’d known. If Hal had come after us. Me. If he’d come after FP and you knew—you would have tried to stop it. We would have done stupid things to try to stop it. This wasn’t just breaking into convents and finding abandoned cars. I couldn’t get through it if I had to be worrying about you every second of the day too.”

“And that’s it, isn’t it?” she says quietly. She’s been fighting it off, but the pain swamps her then. It whooshes through her. Concussive. Massive and totalizing in its intensity. She stands and staggers back into the living room.

“What?”

When he follows her, she continues, “You know, there are a million reasons it didn’t work out with Hunter, but one of them was that no matter what I did or what I achieved, he always treated me like I was something fragile, something to be protected. You didn’t. Or I thought you didn’t, but I guess I was wrong. So I just need a minute—” She squeezes her eyes shut and wills herself, once again, not to cry. Not over him. Not where he can see. But it would take more than a minute to fit the broken pieces of her heart back together again.

He remains in the doorway to the spare bedroom, as if the liminal space, somewhere in between knowledge and memory, past and present, truth and fiction, will somehow protect him.

“When I was deciding to call off my engagement, I thought about all the men I’ve loved in my life. Hunter. Archie. My dad. Kevin. Even Reggie and I were pretty close friends at one point. And I realized, even Archie and Hunter, I loved them like I loved Kevin. Like I loved Reggie. I thought maybe the butterflies and the fireworks were just because we were in high school, that real life, that grown up love didn’t look like that. I thought maybe I didn’t get to have it. But that’s not true. What’s true is that apparently I’ve never been in love with anyone since you. And even you didn’t know me well enough or care about me enough to know that I didn’t need you to protect me. I just needed you to be honest with me. To pick me. To trust me. You should have told me.”

“God, Betty.“

“I have to go.”

“What? Betts, no—”

But she’s already out the door.