Chapter Text
Dead bodies want to stay dead.
Jughead learns this as soon as he comes to in the bunker. The ceiling pulses with blobs of black and blue and murky brown that move across his vision, so he unfocuses his eyes to watch them spark and pop into nothing.
It’s kind of peaceful, in a weird twilight-zone way. Nothing can bother him here, where his body tries to sink back into the endless black that seemed so scary a few hours ago. The only things that matter are him, the bed, and the countdown in his head telling him how much longer he can go without taking a breath.
He lies there for who knows how long until hands clutch his shoulders and start to shake. Jughead looks up (and up and up) at the figures towering above him.
They’re saying something, he thinks through the haze, but he can’t make out the words. Faces with no features stretch and contract like putty. He must be in Donnie Darko because he can see snail-trails in the air whenever one of the figures waves their hands.
One of the figures leans closer until their foreheads almost touch. It says something that sounds suspiciously like please, and the universe takes that as a sign to throw Jughead head-first back into life.
“Jughead! Say something!” It’s Betty that’s shaking him. She’s shouting. Jughead can’t breathe.
He can hear someone gasping, and that must be him, but he can’t seem to do anything about it. Every goddamn part of him is on fire. And then everything goes black.
—
The next time Jughead wakes up, it’s slower. There’s no searing pain or kaleidoscope walls—the hurt has solidified into a thin layer that coats the inside of his skin. Not better or worse, just different.
Betty is stroking his hair. She doesn’t say anything, and Jughead’s glad because he thinks any noise would throw off the cautious equilibrium he’s found.
He vaguely remembers feeling like this before. When he was a kid, he and Archie used to spend all of their time in the Jones’ treehouse. Shoulder to shoulder, they would make up stories, play with plastic army men, or just sit together and watch Riverdale go about its day.
With the amount of time they spent up there, injuries were an inevitability. One time, when they were trying to climb above the main platform to see the stars, a branch broke and sent them both hurtling downward.
Archie spent the next morning in the ER to set his broken wrist. Jughead hit his head pretty hard, but that past winter was when Jellybean was hospitalized with the flu, and their savings account still hadn’t recovered, so he sucked it up and said he was fine.
It was just a bump—no blood, even. People got hit in the head all the time.
Three days later found them back in the treehouse. Archie struggled climbing the ladder, so Jughead rigged a pulley system to bring up snacks without moving.
He was proud of himself for that. It made Archie smile, which was always a plus, but it also meant that Jughead could get the snacks from the comforting darkness of the leaves. They had been playing tag in the forest behind his backyard a few hours earlier, and the memory of sunlight was still making him ache behind the eyes.
The two of them lay next to each other on their stomachs and steadily made their way through a stack of comic books. Jughead was a faster reader than Archie, always had been, so when he’d finish a page he’d unfocus his eyes to stare at the swirls of color until Archie was ready to go.
Halfway through the new issue of Pureheart the Powerful, his eyes wouldn’t refocus. Archie nudged him to flip the page, but he couldn’t see well enough to grab it.
He wasn’t centered in his body, and his arms were moving through molasses, and Jughead was starting to freak out.
Mid-motion, he changed trajectory, making his arm land heavy on Archie’s bicep.
“Jug, what’s up?” Archie asked, and Jughead didn’t know how peaceful the silence was until Archie’s voice was driving a spike through his skull.
Brains must have been leaking out of his ears because he couldn’t think, and all of a sudden broad hands were wiping wetness off of his cheeks. Jughead leaned into the touch. It was cold, and cold felt like heaven to the fire threatening to burn him from the inside out.
The reprieve didn’t last for long. Pain shifted from his temples to his jaw, following his throat all the way down to his stomach. All he could do to warn Archie was a garbled move! before he was throwing up over the side of the platform.
Archie held him in his arms while Jughead shook apart. They must have stayed up there for hours.
When Jughead became lucid again, the sky was a dusky violet. His head was in Archie’s lap, and he was petting him with one hand while flipping through a comic book with the other.
It happened a few more times in the coming months, but he never got used to the pain. Or the aftereffects.
Jughead was always left feeling like he had been hollowed out with a soup spoon.
He feels the same way now, in the bunker with Betty, and for some unknown reason, he yearns for the same thick, calloused hands that used to touch his face. Betty’s hands are too soft; they feel like nothing when they drift down his jaw.
Jughead turns, shoving his face into her stomach, and tries to fall back asleep. He doesn’t want to have the conversation he knows was coming.
It doesn’t work.
—
After the second time it happens, Jughead knows he can’t ignore it anymore.
Betty was unofficially chosen to babysit him until he can go topside, apparently, since she’s been in the bunker ever since he got here, except to go to school or sleep in her own bed. It’s important that Alice doesn’t get suspicious.
The war in Jughead’s head has been getting increasingly worse since lunchtime. At first, it was just his jaw twinging every time he took a bite of his sandwich. Then, he had to put down his book when he found himself rereading the same sentence five times in a row.
Now, he’s curled up in a ball on the cot with no brainpower left for shame. That’s how Betty finds him.
She climbs down the ladder like she always does, but this time Jughead can feel the metal rattling in his bones. A moan escapes before he can bite down on his fist.
Thank god, the movement stops. “Jughead?” Betty asks, concerned when she doesn’t get an answer.
Jughead tries to answer. He really does. He thinks he manages to twitch a hand in her direction.
“Hey.” Her voice is quiet despite the fact that he can feel breaths puff against his face. “You’re really freaking me out, Jug, can you tell me what’s going on?”
He forgot that shaking his head makes the fireworks ricochet around his skull. More pitiful noises get trapped in the pillow when he burrows deeper into the scratchy army blanket left over from the Doileys. Betty must have realized he’s a lost cause.
The world starts to come in fragments: a rush of cold air as the blanket’s ripped away and replaced with something softer, the rustle of pages, the scratching of nails across his scalp.
He didn’t think it would, but it helps. Jughead feels a little less alone.
—
Jughead’s breakdowns—or whatever the hell you want to call them, he’s not a doctor—become part of their routine.
Sometimes he has them three days in a row, and sometimes he goes a whole week without one. Most of the time he’s able to work on the Stonewall Prep conspiracy board.
If Betty prints out documents so he can avoid screens, neither of them mention it. Just like neither of them mention the stack of Nancy Drew novels in the corner that only get touched during Jughead’s bad days.
The only time they acknowledge anything is wrong is right before Veronica and Archie come to the bunker for the first and last time.
It’s fine that they don't visit, really; it would be suspicious if all of his friends suddenly started going to an abandoned bunker in the middle of nowhere. Jughead was built for being alone, anyway.
Betty gets there before anyone else, because of course she does, and Jughead sits her down and begins to pace across the room.
“Spit it out, Jughead,” she says, not unkindly. Jughead wishes she’d be a little less understanding sometimes.
He wrings his hands together. It’s been three days since his last episode, and he wonders hysterically if that’s something to be proud of.
“You know, how—you know. I’ve been a little different since our run-in with the Stonies.”
“You mean how sometimes you lose it?”
Despite everything, that gets a humored huff out of him. His hands are still shaking.
“Yeah. I think it would be best if we kept that between us. Archie and Veronica have enough on their plates, and they should focus on finishing their senior year. Not whatever new thing is wrong with me.”
Betty looks like she wants to say something, but she bites her tongue. Tension crackles through the filtered air as she inspects her cuticles. Jughead kind of wants the pain to start up again so he doesn’t have to worry about her answer.
“Jug—”
“Please. I never ask you for anything.”
Their eyes lock. Narrowed blues meet twitching browns, and when Betty looks away first, Jughead knows that he didn’t win—Betty is humoring him.
“Yeah. Okay. But if anything goes wrong, I spill everything immediately.”
He nods. That’s doable; he’s hidden worse pain for worse reasons. The only reason Betty’s been witness to all of this is because he trusts her with everything he has.
At least, that’s what he tells himself. It’s easier to believe that he has any of this under control.
—
Jughead hasn’t had any episodes since they finished compiling evidence against the Stonies.
It must have been a placebo effect, he thinks as he pushes open the door to reveal Brett and Donna’s shocked faces, this is exactly what I was missing. I did what I needed to do, the bad guys got what they had coming, and now everything will go back to normal.
He’s started to convince himself that Betty’s stopped worrying about him. She offers to have him move into her room—they’ve been sharing a bed every other night for the past three months—but it feels dangerously close to intruding. FP heads off to Toledo, and Jughead moves back to the trailer.
It’s nice to have his old place, even if the metal walls ping whenever it rains, and remind him of being stuck in that stupid fucking bunker and his stupid fucking head.
A few blankets and a new set of curtains later, Jughead feels like a bona fide person.
He doesn’t think about the Nancy Drew box set tucked away in the furthest corner of his closet.