When he wakes up, she's gone. Not that he goes to check on her or anything. He figures she's gone on a run, something he knows she does almost every morning, having met her in the yard while he's having a pre-breakfast cigarette more than once.
Something about his dream is eating at him. He can't remember more than snippets of it, and he's not sure if the blonde hair being swept under the white water was supposed to be Betty or Polly or someone else entirely, but he can feel Sweetwater calling to him. It's like a siren song, and the voice in his head is smokey and feminine and vaguely familiar.
He takes the truck again, Fred having offered it and already left for work in the company van earlier that day. He shouldn't know the way so easily, but as his mind wanders his hands glide over the steering wheel almost of their own accord. Before he knows it, he's pulling up to the rocky bank that Jason was dragged from all those months ago.
A flash of bright blue catches his eye.
With a jolt, he realizes that flash was the movement of Betty's top in the early morning sunlight. The jolt turns into a knife of panic as he finally spots her, waist deep in the water. Her hands sit on the choppy surface, the waves spraying up between her fingers and her back is to him so he can't see her face. He calls her name, but she doesn't respond, doesn't even turn.
For a moment he's so sure he's still dreaming that he just stares.
Then she takes another step forward, the river rising around her waist as her feet find the deeper slope, and he's running before the thought fully forms in his mind.
The water is icy, it soaks his jeans immediately. The cold is a hundred needles piercing his skin, and he wonders how she can bear it. Her shoulders move as she takes another step forward, and he's there, he's almost there.
And then she's gone.
One moment the peaking morning sun is bouncing off her ponytail, and the next he's reaching out and grasping at empty space. The ice breaks his skin, clawing at his chest, this time from the inside.
"BETTY!"
And there, just for a second, he sees a flash of gold under the blue and he won't let her slip through his fingers again. He dives.
Jughead has never been much of a swimmer but he's barely even aware of the water as he kicks through it, off the sandy bank and into the deeper current. It only takes a few seconds to reach her, his eyes making out no more than a dark shape in the murky silt, and his arm loops around her waist, dragging her up until they both break the choppy surface.
It's not until he reaches the shore that he realizes how loud his breathing is.
And that he can't hear hers at all.
"Betty." He hauls her onto the shore, both spent and electrically charged, notes the blue of her lips and how her skin is so pale he can almost see through it. She doesn't move, doesn't breathe. "Betty." His fingers tangle in her hair as he tilts her head up, heart beat a deafening roar in his ears. "Fuck."
He has had very few things to thank his father for, but as he lays Betty flat on the sand tilts her chin toward him, he thanks God and FP for the practice with CPR.
He's spent a lot of time wondering what she tastes like, but he can't taste anything but the metallic tinge of his own fear as he presses his lips to hers.
Breathe, he thinks. Prays. Says harshly out loud, though he knows she can't hear him. Breathe, breathe-
And then she coughs.
He doesn't hear it so much as he feels her body convulse beneath him and he turns her on her side immediately. Water bubbles out from beneath her lips, a little, and then a lot, and then she opens her eyes with a gasp so deep it almost hurts him.
"Betty," he says, a little sickened at the realization that he almost never saw that bright blue again. "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah," she rasps. But she's still not there. Her eyes are staring straight through him, like he's not even there, like she's talking straight to the sky, and he has to quell the urge to shake her again.
"Betty," he says again. The rough sand is digging into his knees through his jeans and he's fucking freezing and he needs her to look at him and be there, needs this to be a nightmare, just wants to hear her voice. His fingers curl around the base of her neck and it takes a moment to realize the wetness there is warm. His hand comes away red. "Jesus christ. You're bleeding."
Head wounds bleed a lot. He read that somewhere. So when he very, very gingerly sits her up so he can get a better look at it, he's actually relieved to see that there's a fairly minimal amount of blood, gritty with sand, right at the nape of her neck. It seems like a shallow cut, probably scraped on a rock when she went under. His finger sweeps a little of her hair aside to get a better look, and that's when he hears it.
"Ow."
It's faint, even though she's now sitting on his thighs, but it sounds a hell of a lot more like Betty than it did a few seconds ago.
Jughead lets the curtain of her dripping ponytail fall back down, and twists her in his lap so he can see her face.
"Betty? Are you okay?"
She blinks, and he can finally see her in there, confused and a little afraid, but alive. The vice in his chest lets up a little.
"Um," she shakes her head slowly, then winces. "I think so."
With the fear ebbing away, a new emotion roils in to heat his blood, burning even in the numb tips of his fingers.
"What the fuck were you doing?" He doesn't need to shout, given their proximity, but he really can't help himself. He's raw and painfully wired and completely out of control. "You scared the shit out of me. You almost drowned!"
The tiny bit of colour that's begun to return to her cheeks disappears.
"I don't know," she whispers. Her eyes are huge now, and he feels like he's drowning this time, in a blue much deeper than the one sweeping along beside them. He's never seen her look so scared.
"What do you mean you don't know?" He's still mad. He's not sure he'll ever stop being angry, because the alternative seems to be that guttural fear still ghosting in his insides, and that's something that would drive a man insane, he suspects, pretty quickly.
She's shaking now, because she's cold, of course she is, he is too but he's so fucking distracted-
"I didn't mean to, Jughead. It was like I was dreaming, and I couldn't stop, and there was something-" She breaks off suddenly, eyes dropping to her closed fist. When her fingers uncurl, slowly, like they've forgotten how to work in the cold, he sees a pink rock resting on her palm, stark against the white of her skin and the silver of her scars.
"What's that?"
"I don't know," she says again, but there's a note in her voice, tinged with frustration, that suggests maybe she thinks she should.
"You risked your life," Jughead says hoarsely, feeling fairly confident that he is in no way exaggerating, "-for a pink rock?"
She turns it over in her hand, thumb rubbing against it, eyebrows furrowing in concentration. He can almost hear her brain whirring, the voice in her head saying remember, remember.
If it were anyone else, he'd think she was crazy. If it were anyone else, when she looked up at him with those big blue eyes and said "I don't know where, but I've seen this before", he'd placate her and try to distract her and leave the talking of sense to after he's had someone look at her injury.
But it's her, and he's so fucked in the head when it comes to Elizabeth Cooper that he just sighs, and pulls them both gently to their feet.
"Let's get you warmed up. I didn't go diving into Sweetwater just so you could die of hypothermia."
Her lavender lips turn up, a hint of a smile, but when he lets go of her to dig for the keys to the truck in his pocket, she wobbles.
"Woah." His hands are back on her in an instant. "Okay, hold on."
He sweeps her up in his arms, a proper bridal carry, and walks her over to the truck. She pulls the door open without prompting, and he sets her inside, grabbing a blanket from the box Fred keeps under the bench to throw over her. She's shaking almost violently now, hand still clenched around that rock, and Jughead's own hands are unsteady when he finally sparks the ignition and starts the drive back to the Andrews'.
"I don't even know where to start," he says eventually, because he kind of just wants her to say something. "What were you doing at Sweetwater in the first place?"
"I run there, in the mornings." Her voice is broken by the staccato chattering of her teeth. "I ended up there by accident once and I just…kept going back. It felt like there was something there, something important."
His knuckles turn white over the steering wheel.
"How long have you-"
"A few weeks." She doesn't sound even a little apologetic. Just tired. "Jughead, I think I'm losing my mind."
The truck swerves a little, and he glances over at her then, at the way she's pulled her legs up on the seat, holding them to her as she shakes and chatters and she really does look broken then. He thinks about the panic attack she had after her mom almost caught them, how the feeling of not knowing how to fix it had been suffocating.
"You're not." He says. He's sure of it. Maybe because he needs her, and so he needs to believe that, but he is sure. Her gaze slides over to him, and the tears clinging to her bottom lashes refuse to fall.
"Do you promise?" She asks.
"I promise." He's promising a lot more than that, the words weigh a million pounds on his tongue, but it's still somehow effortless.
He is so fucked in the head when it comes to Elizabeth Cooper.