Finding Love ➸ Bughead

four ♡

❝ when you love someone and it goes
to waste, could it be worse.. ❞

j u g h e a d j o n e s

One time, when Jughead and Betty were in third grade, they went to the beach to see their very first solar eclipse. There were hundreds of other families on the beach, making a picnic of it, spreading out blankets on the sand while the disk of the moon moved lazily toward the sun, like a magnet pulling slowly toward its pair.

Jughead could remember Betty squeezing his hand and whispering, "Look. Look, Juggie, it's happening."

Jughead remembered too, that moment of darkness: when the sky turned to textured gray, like chalk, and then to twilight, but faster than any twilight he had ever witnessed. Suddenly they were all swallowed up in shadow, as if the world had opened its mouth and they had fallen down its black throat.

Everyone applauded. There was a small constellation of flashes in the dark, miniature explosions while people took pictures. Betty put her hand in his, squeezed, and began to cry. And Jughead's heart stopped. In that moment, he thought they could be lost forever he in the darkness, suspended in a place between night and day, sun and land, earth and the waves that turned earth back into water.

Even after the moon rolled off the sun, and the daylight came again, a bright and unnatural dawn, Betty couldn't stop crying. The families that passed by would speculate and form their own conclusions; maybe she fell, maybe she tripped over something while they were engulfed in the night.

But Jughead understood why she was crying. Because in that moment, he'd felt it too; a sheer, driving terror that the darkness was permanent, that the moon would stop its rotation, that the balance would never be restored.

You see, even then, Jughead knew. He knew that while everything could be going just as planned, a small change could trigger the most unwanted of events. The light will shine, but the darkness is also just as breathtaking; just not the kind of breathtaking everyone wishes to experience.

*

Jughead looked longingly at the brown couch against the far wall in his trailer. If only he could close his eyes for an hour—even half an hour—he would be ready to tackle the rest of  his rough draft for his article on the car crash of Veronica, Toni, and Cheryl.

He trudged to his desk, staring at the stack of papers he needed to work his way through before making another trip to the hospital and then heading home. He should have been finished by now, but in the middle of the night Archie had called about Veronica and needed comfort. Jughead had attempted to give him the best advice he could, which ended up putting Archie to sleep; his snores were incredibly loud on the other end of the phone. Jughead let out a sigh of relief before falling asleep. Archie was very sleep deprived, and he needed to get some rest.

The sight of the rough draft on the desktop screen taunted him to get to work. Jughead knew Betty would like to see a copy of his rough draft before he began to write the article itself. So much to get done before the next day. As he sat in his desk chair, he rubbed his blurry eyes, then clicked on the rough draft. The scattered words and ideas popped up, the computer's cursor moving hypnotically. When his head started dropping forward, he jerked it up. Not even two pots of coffee were helping him to stay alert.

The door into the trailer opened, and his dad entered. He had went to go check up on the Serpents the night before. They were slowly gathering back at the White Wyrm after the huge riot that had occured two months prior. FP also brought back Pop's, and without speaking a word he set a box containing three cheeseburgers on the kitchen table.