Flatline ((Jughead Jones)) 3

4

"What are you thinking about?" Jughead asked me as we lay bare in Dilton's bunker. Strange figures hung above us, made of sticks with even more abnormal drawings littering the walls. My arm was over Jughead, my head on his chest.

"Don't you think it's a bit ghoulish for us to be crashing in Dilton's bunker like this?" I asked him, sitting up and pulling the blanket over my chest to cover myself. We had slept together in the bunker belonging to the boy who just killed himself over the very game that was played here. Yet here we were, acting like none of that happened.

"This bunker is the only place in town we can get a modicum of privacy." He stated.

That was true. Jug's dad had told him not to look into G & G at all, only raising our suspicions. However it only meant that the ex serpent was watching over us all the time, checking on what we were doing, making sure we weren't getting deeper into the game.

"My dad's watching us like a hawk." He stated, and I nodded to him.

"We need to find the players manual. Everyone who played it talk like there are rules, but there is not rule book." I told him. He got out of the bed and stood in his boxers by a large board of drawings of the Gargoyle king. Jug faced me, an idea clear on his face.

"Maybe that's the key to this whole thing. Ben, Dilton and Ethyl spoke about the game like it was a religion, a cult. And every cult has it's king." Jug replied, facing the drawings again. I had a feeling that would be our next adventure. We would be hunting the Gargoyle King.

After a day off school for me in exchange for a physio session, Jughead returned home to see me curled up in bed, reading. He crossed the small distance to get to me, sitting down on the end of the bed and brushing a loose piece of my red hair behind my ear. I put my book down and looked at him. Jughead and Betty were going to try and speak to Ethyl about a manual, so by his face I knew that he had news.

"How'd it go?" I began.

"Ethyl said she has the scripture, as she called it, and that I would have to play a round of G&G with her to get it." I was about to ask if I could come. No I was about to demand to be present while the game was played, but Jughead could sense my question and told me that I had been invited to play as well. "It was strange, Ethyl said to me, 'bring the Angel of Death you call Queenie too' but I didn't think anyone outside the serpents called you that."

That concerned us both. When strange things happened in the 'Town with Pep', bad things always followed. The Serpents calling me Queen or Queenie was an inside joke, I guess. The Serpents had reason to call me Queen because I was with the Serpent King. Ethyl wasn't a Serpent. No one at school had reason to say anything like that to me, so why Ethyl would so casually call me Queen to Jug was a mystery. But I guessed that a game of G&G tonight would solve that.

"Anyway, my Queen, how was today?" Jughead asked, leaning down to place on kiss on my lips before leaning back to let me tell him.

"I'll still need crutches for the majority of the time, but he said that they want me to start walking without them, build my strength up. As long as I don't push myself too far, I'll be fine." Jughead nodded, smiling. I knew he was happy to see me recovering. It seemed that we would never have a normal year in Riverdale where no one gets injured and no one gets murdered and nothing goes wrong. In fact, it seemed that since my brother's death, everything had started to go downhill.

By the time we had to go out to meet Ethyl, I was a little more than excited. I didn't know whether it was the fact I would play the game or the fact that I could find out answers that had been bugging me for days.