The Smell Before Rain // Jughead Jones

Verse two: chapter four

If it makes you less sad, I'll move out of this state

Brady doesn't show her face around Pop's dinner for three days. Nor does she show up to school.

In the past when she's slept through her alarm and her mother doesn't bother waking her up she's gotten out of going with her lack of presence unnoticed. However, her latest achievements of gaining five popular friends has cost her her status of irrelevance. In the time before Jughead, nobody questioned her disappearance, but her not being at school on Monday causes many people asking her friends of her whereabouts.

Usually when she takes a mental health day, because face it everyone should take more of them, she scrolls through her phone inanely for a few hours in between periodic naps and never, ever leaving her bed. But being the rational, level headed girl that she's not she left her phone in her bag that she's been too stubborn to go and get back from Pop's. Brady knows she won't be able to time her visit so none of the gang are there. They all live there like her, because there's nothing else to do in that town besides amateur sleuthing and drinking milkshakes apparently.
Her whole life was inside that bag. Her diary, her keys, her wallet. Her phone. But not even her phone is enough motivation to remove herself from this deep funk she's found herself in since the dramatic dinner episode.

He knows how important the things in that bag are to her. He now knows how important she is to him. Like all the good things in his life he let's them all run out the door without chasing after them. Good things die in his hands.

It takes him three days to chase after her.

She lays in bed on the fourth, not moving except to shower and change into clean pyjamas, barely eating. So much so her ever busy mother starts to notice and asks if she's alright before leaving for work that day. 

On Tuesday, her second school absence weighs heavily on Jughead's shoulders. Numb to all around him, he ditches third period lit to trek subconsciously through the light rain to her window. Some where between the gates of Riverdale high school and the Southside border he's realised his fear of letting her see the darkest parts of him is futile. There was nothing innocent left in Riverdale, except her, and in his vain hope of preserving that he's destroyed all chances he ever had of his own happiness in what is one of the darkest chapters of his life.

The next street over from the border he realises he's on her front porch. A simple plaster and weather board commission house that reminds him all too well of the trailer park he resided in. Their world's aren't so far removed, he sees that more and more each day.
She doesn't answer the first three times he knocks. She knows it's him, she can see the distinct shape of his hair sticking out under his beanie in the shadow through the frosted glass on the door. She wouldn't answer at all if it wasn't for the traitorous floorboards creaking, giving away her position to the enemy.

"I come in peace, Fleetwood. Please let me in I have a lot of apologizing to do." he whispers into the wooden door frame.

She doesn't move, doesn't make a sound. If she does, she knows she'll crack and forgive him straight away. Something she swore she wouldn't just yet. She can't give in the way her mother always did when it used to come to her father.

"Look, I know I've kept you in the dark about a lot of things, but I have my reasons. You know I do."
A pause. A break.
Silence.

"I also know you heard us at Pop's. I never wanted to hurt you." he sighs, touching the only thing still holding them back from each other.
Another breath and he continues.

"I don't know what you heard at Pop's but I didn't want to tell you those things, because then it'd have to be real."

The sound of rain hitting her roof is almost enough to drown out any sound if he wasn't focusing as hard as he was to any movement or breathing coming from her side of the door. But he still almost misses it.