Author's Note:
Hello, all. It's been a little while, eh? I have plenty of summer content planned, which I've been working away on these past few weeks. For now, allow me to step outside my wheelhouse with a different kind of romantic story from my usual ones.
Hope you enjoy!
XO ForASecondThereWe'dWon
It was as if she was the one who'd been beaten unconscious. Betty couldn't remember who'd called the ambulance or how long it had taken to arrive. She knew they'd all been crying, howling like arctic wolves on a desolate tundra, yet hadn't been able to hear her own voice. She'd felt her cupped hands swinging like a pendulum, forward and back from Jughead's face, rusty with blood. Forward: she wanted to hold him. Backward: she didn't want to hurt him. The paramedics were a blur, the breathing checks, the stretcher. F.P. came into focus when he grabbed Betty hard by the upper arm to haul her into the back of the ambulance with him, insisting to the protesting medical staff that she was Jughead's wife. They would never believe it, however, no one made her leave; a tall dark shape in the corner of her eye that could only have been Sweet Pea gave her a boost and the door slammed.
Riding in the back of the ambulance was a nightmare. She wanted to puke. F.P. squeezed Betty's shoulder as she crouched against the wall with her face buried in her trembling knees―something she didn't even know her knees could do while she wasn't standing. It was unclear whether she was his anchor or he was hers.
At the hospital: doors flying open with nobody to catch them, like horizontal freefall; garish, vulgarly bright clinical lights shining down on her boy. No, not her boy. It was F.P. saying "boy," calling to his son, throwing promises like backyard football passes as they wheeled Jughead through doors where his family couldn't go.
"YOU GIVE HIM THE BEST FUCKING DOCTOR," her castaway companion screamed as they were abandoned on the jagged beach of their anguish. F.P. darted a glance sideways at her, quick and smart as a snake strike, and looked worried that yelling at a bunch of nurses might not be A-Okay in the Betty Cooper Guide to Manners. She held his hand, pinching the back of it with her fingernails.
"NOT THE ONE YOU BASTARDS GAVE FANGS! THE BEST," she shrieked, and kept repeating the last two words until F.P. smothered her cries against his chest, cradling the back of her head with a hand sticky with the blood of his eldest child.
She stayed there in the dark sheltered space her boyfriend's father provided until Archie arrived and gently pried her away. For a minute, Betty resisted, until she saw F.P. swarmed with Serpents eager to comfort him and knew he wouldn't be alone. Apparently, Archie had gunned it over, riding the exhaust of the ambulance, with the Serpents she'd just seen piled in the back of his dad's truck. That was the reason for the less than five minutes of holdup between her entrance into the hospital and his: with all the rioting, the Sheriff had men outside and a truck full of disconsolate gang members wasn't getting through without being questioned and forced to surrender their switchblades. Betty understood all of this the third or fourth time through; she couldn't stop zoning out and Archie couldn't stop babbling. At least she'd managed to quit sobbing. What was left was an inability to catch her breath. Only seeing Jughead again could sort out the difficulty she was having somewhere between her mouth and her lungs.
Cheryl came over at an unobtrusive creep, hunting hood lowered, then took charge when she realized Archie wasn't in such great shape either. It transpired that Betty's tempestuous cousin was actually very calm in a crisis… when she wasn't the one causing it. Cheryl steered them into chairs in what Betty became aware was the waiting room. That was what clued her in to the stage she was now living her whole life in―a method actor playing Lear on the heath―the wait. She was waiting. A waiter, like that one night at Pop's when they'd rallied to save the diner. No, a different kind of waiter. Imagine working so hard to protect a milkshake machine and a bunch of booths and then not being able to save your boyfriend. Betty was crying again and Cheryl was stroking her face; she had soft hands that smelled like nail polish. Archie knelt in front of her, holding her knees. He'd been pacing and she hadn't noticed. Motion was no longer interesting to her. She wanted her Jughead, her immobile toy soldier, who'd gone into battle against fire itself.
They let her be when she got tired. Cheryl took her red cape off completely and folded it up to be Betty's pillow when she laid down across three seats, legs bent to make a body that had lived through too much foetal again. Across the waiting room, she watched Toni reach for Cheryl's hand and saw Cheryl kiss her girlfriend fiercely instead. It was a raindrop in a desert, but it made Betty feel better. Same with the awkward kindness between Archie and Sweet Pea, loitering near an exit. Betty knew that Sweet Pea had lost his best friend tonight. It was unthinkable that Archie would do the same. She closed her eyes.
Sounds dimmed and lights dulled. Swishes that were probably made by the scrubs of briskly walking hospital staff were flattened out in Betty's mind and reshaped like origami, becoming the swish of Jughead climbing in her window past her thin spring curtains instead. Calling her 'Juliet.' There was a tissue in Betty's hand and she couldn't remember when or where she'd gotten it, but she used it just the same, cleaning up her face with her waterlogged eyes still shut tight. She wanted to look ok when she saw him. One of them had to look ok.
At some point, she fell asleep. It was comfortable, like going to sleep as a child and hearing your parents' steady voices down the hall, your door open just a crack so you could call out in case of monsters. Of course, in Betty's case, the monster had been outside her bedroom, down the hall talking to Mom, not under the bed or in the back of the closet. Now, when she was so comfortable, the monster had remembered about her. It was clicking down the hall, it was grabbing her shoulder… It was Cheryl, waking her up.
"I'm sorry, cousin," she murmured, frowning sympathetically. Betty bolted upright, almost falling off her makeshift bed when Cheryl's cape slipped sideways with her movement.
"JUGHEAD! Is he―"
"He's fine, Betty. He's fine. I'm sorry." Cheryl took her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes until Betty comprehended. She rubbed a hand across her face.
"Are they kicking you guys out for the night?" She didn't include herself. Anyone who wanted her gone would have to drag her out while she clawed at them like a wild animal.
"Well…" Cheryl looked around, so Betty did too. Serpents were sprawled all over the waiting room, fiddling with the water cooler in the corner, smoking just outside the outer doors. "I think Sheriff Keller's men decided it would be less work to just let everyone stay. So I brought you these."
She plopped a bundle of white cotton onto Betty's lap. A little unfolding revealed it to be pajamas that smelled like lavender and felt the sort of soft that comes from many washes.
"They're Nana Rose's," Cheryl explained. "I would've brought you something of mine, but I didn't think this was exactly the occasion for high-slit, deep-V scarlet satin. My sleepwear drawer is very particularly curated."
"Cheryl," Betty leaned her head momentarily against her cousin's shoulder, "thank you. But," she straightened up, "you went home? Was it safe?"
"Archie drove me. He also filled me in on a few things, which is why I didn't stop at your house to fetch pajamas."
Betty sighed, not wanting to think about the fact that her house would never be her house again, even after the police had finished combing it for evidence of the Black Hood's crimes.
"Where is Archie?" His red hair and Bulldogs jacket would've stood out in present company had he still been in the waiting room.
"I think he was going to check in on Veronica. It's been a long night," Cheryl concluded. Betty could tell there was more that she was being spared and for once, she decided to accept that courtesy and embrace the old adage that ignorance was bliss, just for now.
"I'm going to, uh, go change," Betty said, standing and blinking hard as she reacclimatized to the hospital. "Don't you want to go home and get some sleep?"
"Nana Rose is fine and, honestly, I don't want to let Toni out of my sight," Cheryl confessed. "There's no way she'll leave until she gets to see Jughead for herself."
Not knowing what else to say, Betty went to the washroom, peed, and changed into Nana Rose's pajamas. It was so strange the things that were making her feel better tonight. She put her sweater back on over top.
Everything was mixed up. Serpents lying around like black leather statues rather than fizzing like a can of shaken soda (being their usual restless selves). Betty wearing pajamas to feel more awake than she had a minute ago. Going up to a father that wasn't hers and caring more about his feelings than those of her biological one. F.P. had succeeded in isolating himself in a room overflowing with people. She sat beside him, the cool plastic chair chilling her legs through the pajama bottoms.
"Cheryl… Cheryl said that Jughead is fine." God, her eyes were already swimming. F.P. raised his head from steepled fingers and kept staring straight at the opposite wall.
"That's what the doctor said." He paused, sniffing loudly. "Came out and told me. I would've passed it on to you, but you were sleeping. Didn't want to disturb you."
"Do you…" She didn't know how to do this. Staring straight ahead didn't seem like too bad of a way to cope, so Betty copied the hunched man next to her. "Do you want to rest for a while?"
F.P. exhaled gustily, tilting his head back until it smacked the wall. "I was in there for a minute," he said, failing to acknowledge her question. All of a sudden, it didn't matter at all. Betty's chin quivered. In her peripheral vision, his fists clenched on thin armrests.
"How does he look?" She was shivering. Cold? Shock? Not real at all?
"Better without all that blood," he stated matter-of-factly, then burst into tears.
"He's ok," she promised, turning in her seat to look at F.P., even if he couldn't look back at her. "He's ok, he's ok now." Betty backhanded dribbling tears off her cheeks. F.P. nodded rapidly and they were silent for several minutes, together. There was an annoyingly loud clock overhead.
"I wish his mom was here," the Serpent leader finally whispered. Part of Betty wanted to wish her own mom into the room.
"What would she do?" she asked. F.P. sighed heavily, bringing his breaths under control.
"Sing to him," he answered simply, then covered his face with his hand.
Glancing around, Betty rose and headed down the hall towards the recovery rooms, moving like a ghost. A ghost in borrowed pajamas. It wasn't a large hospital. She would check every room. A nurse stepped out in front of her.
"Where do you think you're going?"
"To Jughead Jones's room," she said. "I'm his wife," she added after an eternal moment of standstill.
"Betty Cooper, I've known your family since before you were born. You are most certainly not―"
"That's his wife," averred a male voice she knew from more recent acquaintance.
Betty turned and saw Sweet Pea standing just behind her, arms folded menacingly. It was nice to have that threatening posture used in her favour for once. Her gaze went back to the nurse, who rolled her eyes.
"Fine, but no trouble."
Touching Sweet Pea's arm in swift yet intransient thanks, Betty hurried to the room the nurse indicated with a nod. She stopped in the doorway, flooding her hands with free sanitizer and suddenly longing to buy time.
For a second, it wasn't him. Sure, there were bandages and a white hospital gown instead of his regular dark clothes, and he had a needle taped to his hand that led to a bulbous bag of fluids on a spindly pole, but what made it not him, just for a second, was the absence of his hat. Betty's mouth fell open and she inhaled hard.
She came to the foot of his bed.
She sat in a chair beside it.
She stood next to him.
She held his hand, just the fingers, very carefully.
She did what she'd wanted to do since F.P. had carried him out of those woods, lying down on the bed beside him.
He breathed.
She breathed.
"Hi, Juggy," she said. A monitor for one of the machines, which were doing something for him that she couldn't, beeped. Was that the first beep since she'd come into the room, or had all of her energy gone into sight and walked out on her other senses until just now? It beeped again.
"I don't know what to do," she whispered, moving her head up onto his pillow. He'd never minded sharing. Even now, with her making a wet patch from complicated tears, she knew he wouldn't mind. Flittingly, Betty kissed Jughead's cheek. Like him, she closed her eyes.
"Moon River," she started, singing as softly as she could, "wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style someday. Oh, dream maker, you old heartbreaker, wherever you're going, I'm going your way."
Betty sniffled, but now she wore the smallest smile, her eyes opening and going from Jughead's face to the monitors. "I'll see you soon," he'd told her.
"Two drifters, off to see the world," she continued. "There's such a lot of world to see. We're after the same rainbow's end, waiting 'round the bend, my huckleberry friend, Moon River and me."
Breathe, she directed herself. Breathe.
"Two drifters, off to see the world. There's such a lot of world to see," Betty repeated, slower this time. Reminding him. Promising him. "We're after the same rainbow's end, waiting 'round the bend, my huckleberry friend, Moon River and me."
There was a bump against her stomach. Jughead's hand. She gasped, grabbed it.
"I heard you," he mumbled. Betty's face crumpled.
"You did?" she whispered. His eyes were still closed. She watched him work at swallowing.
"I wish Veronica was here," Jughead said.
Ok, not what she was expecting.
"Why, Juggy?"
"Because I'm In Cold Blood, but that song is strictly Breakfast at Tiffany's."
Her muted laugh rustled the crisp pillowcase.
"You can say it again when she comes, ok, Juggy?"
He mumbled again, incoherently. Betty sat up, hardly able to believe she was moving in a direction that was away from him, but knowing she needed to tell the others. Then again, what were call buttons for but to summon nurses who could pass on such information to visitors in the waiting room? Betty felt for it and pushed hard with her thumb.
"Stay," Jughead asked, not looking broken but whole and hers.
"I am," she vowed, slipping her fingers through his. "I am."
Author's Note:
P.S. Listen to the Diana Panton version of "Moon River." It's my favourite and what I was listening to after watching episode 21, which is what gave me the idea for this story.