When Betty figures it out—because Betty always figures it out, that beautiful brain of hers—but before they fix it all, before things go back to normal (whatever normal is in this town of maple syrup, murders, and mysteries), they sit together at the table in the bunker, the typewriter between them.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been down here, how many iterations of their lives he’s penned. It could be minutes. It could be millenia. What he knows is that he’d heard a grinding noise, and then suddenly light was pouring down through the bunker’s hatch, and Ethel was gasping in shock.
Now Ethel is outside, breathing in the air, where he too should ostensibly be—now that he no longer needs to be propping up reality with his fingers clacking endlessly against the typewriter’s keys.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her.
She tilts her head; a question. He shakes his head.
“I just wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to live a happy, normal life. I thought I could give you what you always wanted, that it would make things…better, somehow.”
Her eyebrows pull together. “What do you mean?”
He looks down at the stacks of finished pages that overwhelm the table, reaches out to neaten the corners of one pile just to have something to do with his hands. His hands are idle, and he feels unsettled by it.
“I wanted to give you the life you deserved. I thought you and Archie would be—happy. That he’d be good to you…for you.”
His eyes finally rise to meet hers, and the look on her face is thoughtful. It is not angry, or disappointed. It is simply inquisitive. It is purely Betty. It emboldens him to continue.
“I kept trying and trying, but it just…it kept falling apart. I couldn’t make you both happy.”
Betty’s lips rub together and she nods, slowly. Her hands come to rest atop the table, clasped together before her.
“I understand,” she tells him. “I think there’s probably a reason for that.”
He shakes his head: for what? She continues.
“There’s a reason I was never happy like that…being with Archie.”
Jughead’s hand stills atop the pages, and his palm comes to lie flat across the text. His words get lost in his chest.
Betty clears her throat. “Well,” she says, and there is something there, in the air in the space over the table between them, something Jughead cannot see, but something that reaches its fingers into his chest and strokes against his heart where it beats steady against his ribcage. “How has it been spending time with Ethel?” she asks.
Thesomething in the air cracks, but it does not break. The crack allows him to breathe again, to lean in and laugh.
“Oh god,” he tells her, “she’s driving me insane.”
