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They’re ecstatic when they find out.
They’ve been married two years (officially. To hear their friends tell it, they’d been married since they were sixteen.)
It’s a surprise, somehow. They hadn’t been using protection and they hadn’t been chaste, but it’s still a surprise when he comes home and slides his arms around her waist as he usually does, and she leans into him with a sigh and a soft breath of “I think I may be pregnant, Juggie.”
She is, and they both cry when the stick turns pink.
She starts showing at sixteen weeks. It’s barely noticeable, but she wakes him up excitedly to show him, and he passes shaking fingers over the barest of bumps, then presses her into the mattress and her thumbs wipe the tears away as he gasps out “I love you, god, Betty, I love you.”
(It’s a perfect moment, which is good, because two weeks later, she lifts her shirt to reveal a slightly larger bump with teary eyes, and comments how fat she looks in a teary exhale. He assures her she looks beautiful and skinny as ever. It was, apparently, not the right thing to say, because she bursts into tears and he stumbles over some explanations about how he’d been conditioned to tell her she looks skinny, she looks beautiful, he loves her, anything he can think of, but she turfs a pillow on the floor for him to sleep on, and cries “Juggie, god, can’t you even see it?!”)
They set the nursery up in the fourth month. Or rather, Jughead attempts. But cribs should come with built-in engineers, and his original plan to surprise Betty, to do this for Betty, had two hours later crumbled to the mess that is him, on the floor, with tears in his eyes, and that is how she finds him.
Because she’s Betty, she lays down with him, laces her fingers through his, and runs the other hand through his hair.
“I wanted to show you, Betts,” he mumbles. “I wanted to show you that it’s...it’s not going to be like me and my dad. I’m going to be better for our baby. Better than he was. Better than our parents were.”
It triggers a wave of tears from both of them. She presses her forehead to his, tries to imbue the touch with all the love she feels. When she pulls away, she lays kisses down his wet cheeks and smiles.
“We’re not our parents, Juggie. We’re not our families.”
He is struck, for the millionth time, by how perfect this woman is, much as he knows she’d hate that word, and he tucks her into his chest, breathing deeply.
They make love on the floor, and the trip back to the baby store for a new carpet is made with red cheeks and downcast eyes.
It’s good, it’s all such an unprecedented streak of good.
But there are times .
Betty is strong, she is fierce.
She has faced down multiple serial killers and solved more murders by 18 than the Riverdale police have solved in as many years.
And sometimes, it’s just hard to reconcile that Betty with the Betty that cries in the grocery store because they ran out of the fabric softener brand with the teddy on it, and she can’t buy the one with the baby on it because “he looks so mean , Jug!”
It’s hard to imagine that the Betty that beat a pair of psychopaths at their own game is the same Betty who spends an entire afternoon sobbing on the couch about a commercial she watched involving an old man not being able to make his grandson’s baseball game due to a bladder condition.
(It is truly Betty that her response is to donate nearly an entire month’s income to the Bladder Cancer Foundation, and apparently agree to work in some kind of telethon.)
The Betty that graduated from Yale is apparently the same Betty who is waiting behind the door when he comes home, brandishing two empty ice trays like they were a mistress’ underwear.
“How dare you,” he hears her growl, and much like everything nowadays, he submits himself to whatever it is he’s done wrong.
He had not been aware, but not fully replacing all the ice was akin to an act of war, and the two nights he has to spend on the sofa are hardly enough penance for her, because she replaces his sugar with salt, and doesn’t tell him until two full weeks of drinking foul coffee later.
The cravings are odd too. She mixes pickles with hot sauce, in bed. He has long since learned to stop protesting, because the “you did this to me” card was played with almost as much frequency as the “I am carrying your child, I do what I want” card. She douses her apple pie in grape juice. She eats literal dirt.
(That one is the result of a mineral imbalance, they later learn but...his poised, professional wife eats dirt. And he is expected...nay, obliged, to either watch and say nothing, with a completely neutral expression on his face, or bring her more dirt.)
There are perks, of course. He adored his wife’s body before, and he adores it even more now. He gets to feel his son or daughter kick through his wife’s belly. The baby loves Lovecraft poetry and he’s not sure how to feel about that, but the baby is also an excellent sounding board for his latest chapters.
Once, the baby gives a hard kick that nearly wakes Betty, and he discovers his kid is a harsher critic than his editor.
And then there’s the sex. Look, they were having sex before. Had, in just about every way imaginable. He finds his wife ridiculously sexy, and this has only amplified it.
Sex during pregnancy, it turns out, is insane, in the best way.
But on the Tuesday where he flops down on Archie’s couch, it’s not difficult to identify the look of absolute exhaustion on his face.
Lolling his head to the side, he fixes his gaze on Archie. He locks eyes with Archie, sustaining an amount of eye contact that is, frankly, slightly troubling.
"Arch," he says. "I need you to do something for me."
Archie saves the video game he’s playing (he had offered to cut Jughead in but the man looks raked over from head to toe.)
"Yeah, man, anything." Archie frowns.
Jughead takes a deep breath. "Archie, I need you to have sex with my wife."
(The sip of beer Archie had taken right before that sentence was a mistake, because suddenly, Jughead’s shirt is covered with beer and he barely seems to care.)
“You...you want me to... what ?”
He’s joking, surely. He must be joking. Or Archie’s hearing is finally going, but surely, he hadn’t said what it sounded like.
“I need you to go have sex with Betty, Arch. You remember Betty? She’s nice, pretty, smart. One looks for these things in a sexual partner, and I need you go to be her sexual partner.”
“I’m... why ?”
Jughead groans, scraping a hand over his mussed hair and pale face.
“It’s the horny stage of pregnancy, Arch. And it started out great. I mean, it started out really great. But she is insatiable . I obliged her six times last night, Arch - six ! And she is still raring to go, and I am scared for my health. So - “ he indicates Archie with a wave of his hand. “I need you to take one for the team, because if someone doesn’t do it, you do not want to see angry Betty. More accurately, I do not want to be the sole target of angry Betty.”
Archie looks flabbergasted. Absolutely gobsmacked. He’s convinced that he has exited the world of reality, to be in a place where his best friend is begging him to sleep with his wife.
“I just…” Archie rakes a hand through his hair. “Shit, dude, I never thought I’d actually say this, but...while I appreciate the offer to have sex with your wife, I am not going to do that, and you do not want me to do that.”
Jughead releases a long groan, and Veronica, as if sent by the heavens, presses an espresso shot into his hands.
“You’re right, dude. I...you know, there will come a time where I will be absolutely ashamed of myself for asking my best friend to sleep with my wife, as if she has no agency in this, but I am too fucking tired for thoughts right now.”
He downs the expresso in one gulp and lays his head back, eyes closed.
“Can you smell colors, Arch? Because I’m pretty sure I can smell colors right now.”
Whoever called it morning sickness, Jughead knew of at least one pregnant woman that would call that term into question. It comes and goes in waves, but Betty throws up in any and all places. He’s actually started keeping a list on his phone of the weirdest places she has vomited.
The top choices are:
- The Costco garbage bin right next to the sample lady (they had bought two boxes of whatever she was selling out of pure guilt.)
- The top drawer of their dresser (he has to drag it out to the curb, smell and all.)
- The coat closet at Archie and Veronica’s. She doesn’t tell him until three days later, and that is a red-cheeked admission when Veronica calls after the cleaner had smelled it and thought a dead body was rotting in the closet.
(“In my defense,” Betty tells him. “We’re from Riverdale. There could have been a dead body there.”)
Pre-pregnancy, he associates throwing up with an aversion to food, but it’s quite the contrary. If anything, it stokes Betty’s appetite to throw up. He’s gotten into the habit of offering her pizza while he holds her hair back.
And while people have accused him of eating constantly, pregnant Betty has him well and truly beat. She eats constantly. He adds cleaning out every storage space of food in their room to his cleaning regimen, which has been militant since The Ice Cube Tray Incident.
Their son.
He has a son.
William Forsythe Cooper Jones, and he is perfect.
He is worth every second and he, Jughead Jones, is a father.
They spend minutes, hours, days staring at their son, and the first piece of sage, fatherly advice Jughead can think to give his son is “always replace the ice cube trays.”
Well, maybe the second piece of advice.