Work Text:
That first night, in the corner of the train car they hopped onto, Archie can’t sleep. It’s not the noise (though that’s definitely part of it), and it’s not Jug’s light snoring (the train-sounds drown it out). Mostly, it’s his own head.
Juvie turned him into a worrier. Probably the entire year prior to his juvie stint, too. Archie, despite his habit of going on late night runs and the many recent ups and downs in his life and general mental state, never used to have much issue falling asleep. He knocked out hard and usually pretty fast. Betty, who was cursed with her mother’s spotty insomnia, and Jug with an over-active imagination and night-owl tendencies, always gave him affectionate grief about it. Once the clock strikes ten p.m. you’re out, and then it’s just me and the late-night infomercials, he recalls once Jug complaining over a spread of eggs and pancakes the night after a sleepover. Plus you snore.
Not so these days.
Archie feels exhausted most of the time, but when he finally lays down to sleep suddenly he’s wide awake and waiting for something bad to happen. That’s how it was in prison. How it was that murky, dark stretch of time after his dad was shot. How it is now, in the corner of this stuffy train car, bedded down behind crates of what smells like some kind of grain or seed or something. The train rushes by, carrying them further from Riverdale with each moment, but he sits there and worries about what will happen when it stops.
His mind supplies him with a steady stream of things he would rather not think about: how Veronica’s breath hitched when she started to cry on the phone, the disappointed slant of his dad’s eyebrows, the way his dad probably felt when he found out Archie was gone, the harsh bare-knuckle crack of fist against cheekbone. Hiram Lodge in the school gym and in the courtroom and in the stands of the pit, chin raised in smug, serene triumph.
Jughead shifts in his sleep a little, mumbling something unintelligible. Archie looks at his best friend, curled in an oddly comfy looking sprawl on top of his jacket, using his backpack as a pillow. He looks kind of peaceful for someone sleeping on a metal floor. Lord knows Jug’s slept in worse places. The high school janitor’s closet, for one. The projection booth, for another. The tube of their old elementary school playground. Archie doesn’t know where else for sure—when he’d asked where Jug had stayed before he got the drive-in gig, Jug had started listing off more and more ridiculous and sketchy-sounding places, just to make Archie squirm, until Archie’s reaction had crossed some unknown line and Jug suddenly didn’t find it funny anymore.
Archie knows they’re in for some rough, uncomfortable nights. But that’s okay—he doubts anything ahead of them will be worse than what they’ve already been through.
Jug stirs again, after a bit, eyes cracking open. They find Archie’s in the dark almost immediately. Archie doesn’t bother pretending to look away.
“Hey, Arch,” Jug murmurs, voice thick with sleep. It sounds like a whisper in the noise of a moving train. “What’s up?”
Archie swallows. “Just keeping watch,” he says, feeling stupid.
“There’s no one else here.”
You don’t know that, Archie wants to snap. We’re here. Anyone else could have had the same idea. Hiram Lodge could be sending one of his capos after us right now.
The quiet carries. Jug gazes up at him steadily, some somber, wistful sort of look in his eyes. Betty looked at him like that back in the bunker, like she couldn’t believe he was there. Like she hadn’t seen him in years.
“You should try to get some sleep,” Jug finally says. And then, when Archie doesn’t move: “Do you want me to keep watch?”
It’s a genuine offer, no snide edge of sarcasm or even a little teasing. Jug’s trying to offer him some feeling of safety, Archie knows, like Archie’s the kind of person who can’t sleep without someone else keeping watch now. Maybe he is.
“No,” he says, harsher than he means to. “No, thanks. You’re right, there’s no one else here. I’ll go to bed in a bit, okay?”
Jug just keeps looking at him for a long moment. Archie knows he can’t be seeing much in the dark, but it still makes him feel like Jug’s maybe seeing too much.
“Okay,” Jug murmurs. A moment of hesitation, and Archie feels a clumsy pat on his leg before Jug is burrowing back into his backpack-turned-pillow. “Night, Arch.”
“G’night.”
Jug’s breath doesn’t even back out into sleep for a long time. Archie doesn’t close his eyes until the sun is well on its way up.
The next day finds them following the train tracks on foot again.
Jug fills the silence on and off as they go, catching Archie up on the various everything that’s been going on while Archie was away. Gryphons and Gargoyles. The speakeasy. All the stuff Betty told him about how all their parents used to be friends. The ever-shifting dynamics and sleeping arrangements within what Jug has taken to calling Tent Camp. Even Sweet Pea's dating life. Archie makes sounds at the appropriate moments, thinking the whole time about how much went on in two and a half months and how much will go on for the rest of however long he’s away again. How different everyone and everything might be whenever—if he ever—goes home again.
He realizes Jug has lapsed into silence and is sending him periodic concerned little glances, like he thinks he’s being subtle about it. Archie lifts his head and says, “Sounds like I’ve missed a lot.”
Jug’s mouth twists in sympathy, anger, discomfort. He gives Archie one of his heavy claps on the shoulder.
“Not that much. I’m sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel here.”
“No, I like to hear it. I missed you guys.” The words aren’t really enough to convey how crushing and all-consuming it had been, the missing. How he’d started to think it was probably better to stop missing. How he’d been preparing to cut himself off from thoughts of home for the next two years because it hurt too much,
“We missed you, too, Arch.” Jug bites his lip a little, an apologetic tilt to his mouth. “Sorry I didn’t come to see you. Veronica said you didn’t want visitors and I was…caught up in some stuff. But I should’ve visited—I would’ve, eventually.”
“No, it’s okay,” Archie says, and means it. He hadn’t wanted Jug to come. He knows how hard it had been for Jughead to go visit his dad in prison every Sunday; he didn’t want him to have to see his best friend the same way. “I didn’t want any of you guys to see me like that. I didn’t want Veronica to see, but she came anyway. Besides, I liked your letters.”
Jug gives a bashful little half-grin, ducking his head. “Really? ‘Cause if I’m being honest, I did not really proof-read any of those before I sent them.”
“Yeah, I could tell,” Archie grins.
To be honest, Archie wouldn’t have cared if they were the same three sentences typed over and over again. He was just happy to read them. Jug head sent him exactly two letters in Archie’s little juvie stint—or at least, Archie had received two before they started cutting off his access to his dad and his friends.
They had both been lengthy, stream of consciousness, type-written letters. Easier to read than Jug’s usual writer’s scrawl even with the few typos, catching Archie up on the latest at school. A movie he and Betty watched on TV the other night that he thought Archie would like. A few cynical comments about the justice system. Inquiries about how Archie was settling in, if he was getting along with the other Serpents in lock up, if the food was better or worse than the stuff the cafeteria gave out at RD High.
Reading them had made him feel a weird mixture of nostalgic and sad. He could picture Jug rambling out the words on the drive home from school, or, more recently, from Archie’s house to Tent Camp.
Archie didn’t answer either of them. He’d had no intention to, and in hindsight doubts that Warden Norton would have even let him. But he kept them folded up under his pillow alongside the one picture of Ronnie he was able to bring.
He wonders what the prison does with the belongings of escaped convicts. Because it’s just Jug, he asks: “What do you think they did with all my stuff?”
Jug winces a little. “No idea. Trashed it, maybe? Or—maybe released it to your dad, if you were really exonerated.”
The mention of Archie’s dad brings the already-low mood way down.
Silence marches dutifully alongside them until Jug tries again, joking: “I hope your dad doesn’t read my letters. I definitely sound crazy in the last few.”
Archie can’t help a bitter laugh. “Don’t worry, I only got the first two. The warden probably burned the rest.”
Jug leaves him to his sulking for a while after that.
There is a feeling in the air like something is going to happen. Archie thinks it might just be that time of year, weather-wise—the last traces of summer fading away but autumn not totally here yet. He also thinks he might be paranoid. Is it paranoia if they’re really after you? he wonders, and thinks wryly that he sounds like Jughead at age, like, eleven, when he was really into spy-fiction.
It really is very nice out, weather-wise. In a town like Riverdale, there’s never been any question of whether or not he’d be spending as much time outside as he could if it was a nice day. School sports, his late-night runs, breaking concrete with his dad over the summer. Archie never realized how much of a gift it was to be outside until his only outdoors time was supervised by prison guards and shared with over a dozen other guys in one little courtyard.
Archie’s never been this far north of town before. There are endless trees. Leaves changing colors, rustling in the wind. The sound of birds and squirrels and probably other things too. They aren’t far away from civilization—they see the occasional smattering of houses up the road—but it feels like they’re a world away from Riverdale.
Honestly, he had been a little worried about how long the supplies Jug packed for the two of them would last, but he shouldn’t have. Jug knows his budgeting.
Over the next few days, they barely have to dip into their meager cash at all. Jug knows how to stretch a small wallet, knows how to build a decent meal from cheap gas station finds, knows the best free places to crash for the night and what kinds to avoid. Of course he does, Archie thinks, reminded uncomfortably of the not insignificant amount of time Jug had spent homeless. Managed to keep it to himself. Archie hadn’t had a clue.
(He thinks sometimes, guiltily, that he could have had a clue if he had been paying any sort of close attention to his friend. He knew Jug more than maybe anyone else in the world other than Betty. He’s sure he could have noticed that something was going on, if he had cared to look closely. But he hadn’t. And he knows Jug would never have told him if he hadn’t caught him in the locker room that morning.)
“I do have to say,” Jug says offhand one night, the two of them eating soup from little tins by a small fire, “The nomadic camping aspect of this is a lot more fun than squatting at the drive-in ever was.”
“I’m amazed you haven’t started complaining about how much you miss Pop’s yet,” Archie says, neatly sidestepping the residual guilt about Jug’s last summer living situation.
“I’m saving the Pop’s-reminiscing for whenever we run out of soup and have to forage for food in the woods.”
“You’re planning for us to run out of food?”
Jug quirks a wry smile around his spoon. “Yeah, you know, for a little enrichment. Just in case you get bored.”
“Me? So I’ve gotta do the hunting in this scenario?”
“Obviously. I’ll, uh, I guess skin and cook the thing afterwards? Whatever it is.”
Archie imagines he and Jug in a Flintstones situation—animated and everything—living in a cave or maybe building a little house out here in the middle of the woods; Archie coming home at the end of a long day of hunting and Jug pausing in his writing (using a bird feather and ink instead of a laptop) to roast the day’s spoils over a big open fire like they do in the show. Or at least he thinks that’s what they do.
He shakes his head to clear the image. “Fire-roasted squirrel, huh? I don’t know if I trust your cooking skills like that. I don’t want—what, salmonella?”
“Salmonella’s from undercooked chicken. No idea what sorts of diseases undercooked squirrel could give us.”
Archie makes a face at the thought. Jug snorts a laugh.
“C’mon, even squirrel’s gotta be better than prison-food. I doubt the renowned chefs at Leopold & Loeb have upped their game since I got out.”
Jug’s last few words draw Archie up short, spoon halfway to his mouth. He almost asks since you got out? and then remembers, like a slap in the face, the three months Jug was missing from school in fifth grade after he got caught “trying to burn down the elementary school”. He had forgotten about that, about Jughead’s ten year old juvie stint. Archie was terrified at seventeen; he can’t imagine what it all must have felt like at ten.
Archie has this sudden flash of horror at the thought of tiny, ten year old Jughead being hosed down and ushered into the prison yard. Ten year old Jug getting beat on and tossed around.
“You went to L&L?” Archie asks uselessly, feeling startled. “I didn’t see any kids there. Like, little kids, I mean.”
Jug shrugs a shoulder. “They keep the younger kids separate, I think.”
“And did they—? I mean, were you—?” Archie doesn’t know how to put into words the awful feeling in the pit of his stomach. Captain Golightly and his bone-rattling baton. Jug was always such a skinny kid, a tiny thing back before his growth spurt.
Jug’s face goes all soft and kind of worried. Archie wonders what sort of freaked out look is on his own face.
“I was fine,” Jug assures. “It was scary and all, but not even the world’s least experienced gambler would ever recruit ten year old me for their weird, illegal teenage pit-fighting ring. They wouldn’t even recruit me now.”
But Archie can’t joke about it. The updated image in his head is just as bad: watching Joaquin collapse, blood splattered on the white swimming pool tiles, but instead it’s Jug. Like how he looked on Riot Night, limp in his dad’s arms, nearly dead.
Archie puts his can down. Jug does not, but he looks like he’s considering it.
They lapse into silence for a bit, both of them staring into the fire crackling between them. Archie has shared plenty of companionable silences with Jug over the years, but there’s something new in this one.
He’s glad to have Jughead here with him, of course. Part of him feels bad that Jug dropped literally his whole life to run away with him, but Archie doesn’t know if he could do this on his own. And it’s Jughead, his best friend, here for him like he always is.
At the same time, Archie feels this…vastness between them. Like last summer but different. Deeper and wider. Even back when they were fighting, they still saw each other around town. Even when they were caught up in their own things, they still ate lunch together and crossed paths in the halls or at Pop’s. Archie would hear about Jug’s current case or crusade from Betty or, later, catch him hanging out with the Serpents in their after-school club. Even at their worst, most fractured moments, they had seen each other. Even if they didn’t always like what they were seeing.
Archie knows he wasn’t even away for that long. But it feels like years. Like something about the time apart—Archie’s time away—has changed them both. Or maybe just changed Archie. He feels different in a way he doesn’t understand. He feels like some whole new thing, removed from his best friend and the sense of normalcy Jughead brings. Like he’s entered another world and can’t come back to this one.
But Jughead, he’s come to realize, has always already lived in this world. One with violence and pain and people doing awful things to each other, one where the people in power hurt the ones they have that power over for no other reason than they can, where adults don't always have your best interests at heart. Jug has always seen the worst in the world and has never been shy in pointing it out. Archie was always just too naive and stupid to listen.
And then Jug reaches across the vastness between them and says, “D’you remember that time we went camping up by the lake? With our dads and Jelly?”
And Archie does, in that blurry, warm haze he remembers a lot of his happier childhood moments. “She was what, five? Your dad was worried she would wander off into the woods.”
“She totally would have if we didn’t watch her,” Jug cracks a fond smile. “I ate way too many marshmallows that night and threw them all up.”
“I thought you were dying,” Archie laughs, remembering as he says it. Jug had spent the night recounting to him the plot of various horror movies he’d caught on late-night television—some camping-related, most not—including The Stuff and The Blob, which had combined into a yucky goo-like monster in Archie’s head. “I thought some freaky goo-monster got you.”
Jug laughs, too, ducking his head a little. The shadows of their little leaves-and-twigs fire dance across his face. It makes Archie think of summer camp. Jug came with him once when they were in elementary school. Makes him think of swimming in Sweetwater with his best friends and of sprawling out on that light blue picnic blanket with Geraldine on the Fourth of July. Good and bad nostalgia swirling into one.
They go on like that for a while: tossing camping-related memories back and forth, trying to make light of the situation they’ve found themselves in. It doesn’t make Archie feel any better, really, but it makes that vastness between them seem smaller.
After all, what are a few months apart in the face of all these years of history?
It’s a testament to how messed up things are that after everything with Laurie and the almost-run-in with Hiram, Jughead barely tells him off about it. Doesn’t even say I told you so, even though he totally did, doesn’t bring up the fact that he knew they should have moved on, that they probably shouldn’t have even stopped in the first place.
To Archie’s own confusion, he finds himself getting mad about it. Jug is going easy on him. Jug only ever goes easy on him when he’s trying to look out for him or—worse—when he feels bad for him.
I know, Jug had said in response to Archie’s frantic I could kill him, I could. I know you could.
“You’re not gonna say you told me so?” Archie finally snaps, once they’re a good hour-long trek away from Athens.
Jughead, for his part, just sighs. He’s definitely been thinking about it, then. “No, I’m not. We both already know I was right.”
Archie doesn’t know why he wanted to hear Jug say it out loud. It doesn’t make him feel any better.
Jug sighs again. “Just—no more relying on the kindness of strangers, okay? We’ll keep to ourselves for a bit, in case Hiram’s putting out feelers. Maybe catch another train.”
Part of Archie wants to snap at him some more. Tell him to go home, let Archie figure things out on his own if he’s such a stupid idiot. He wants Jug to stop looking at him like he’s scared he’s going to lose him, like Archie might disappear or get himself killed or, like, immediately kidnapped again. Which is probably what would happen, somehow, if Jug did leave him alone.
Archie settles for huffing and looking away. Looking at his own two feet walking on.
It’s not Jug he’s really mad at, anyway. It’s barely even Hiram.
They do end up hopping another train. Archie barely sleeps that night, an awful repeat of that endless first one. He can’t stop thinking about home. About his dad. About how badly he wanted to kill Hiram in that barn. About how, if Jug hadn’t been there to stop him, he really might have tried.
The train takes them up to Defiance, Ohio and then it's, supposedly, a few days of walking and the occasional bus ride (if Jug’s phone ever picks up service long enough to look up the local schedule) to Toledo. For now, they follow the river. So closely, in fact, that Archie takes a wrong step on a rock and slips, ends up falling into and flailing around in the water, backpack and all. His sleeping bag is soaked through, still damp and unusable by the time they settle down for the night.
The rest of his clothes are in a similar state. Jug helps him hang them up to dry from the low-hanging branches of the nearby trees, but here’s nothing to be done about the sleeping bag.
Archie prepares himself for a night on the forest floor. Jug thinks he’s being ridiculous.
“We can share mine,” he says, like it’s that simple.
Archie almost laughs. “We won’t both fit.”
“We made it work the time Vegas took a piss in your sleeping bag.”
This was the same eventful trip where the Jughead eating and then throwing up an entire bag of marshmallows incident took place.
“Yeah, when we were like twelve.” And we were probably too old back for it back then, too, he doesn’t say. They are way too old to be sharing a sleeping bag now.
Jug flinches like he’s heard it anyways. Archie knows if it were the other way around—if Archie were the one offering to share his sleeping bag—Jug probably would make a comment about them being too old. Jug always used to be more sensitive to that stuff than Archie was, before high school came around and hierarchies shifted and Archie got sensitive to it, too.
Archies busies himself clearing his space of rocks and loose tree branches. He can use his backpack as a pillow like he’s been doing this whole time. If he scooches closer to the fire he maybe won’t be so cold. (This is a blatant delusion; the damp coolness of the dirt below his is already seeping through his jeans.)
He eventually lies down on the ground and looks up at the stars, or what little he can see of them through the thick curtain of forest. Silence reigns for a long moment. Jug sighs.
“Come on, Arch, don’t sleep in the mud,” his voice is soft and imploring, but also with an edge like Archie is being ridiculous. Jughead scoffs when Archie doesn’t move, sounding so much like the scornful Jug of early sophomore year. “If it’s really that big a deal, you take the sleeping bag. You’re the one recovering from a literal stab wound.”
Jug’s halfway out of the sleeping bag, frowning, and Archie doesn’t want Jug to have to sleep in the mud because of his sudden issues.
“Jug,” Archie says, defeated, “You don’t have to do that. I just…don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“I’m offering,” Jug frowns at him. “It’s really not a big deal.”
It shouldn’t be. Jug is right: they used to share beds all the time when they were kids, whether it was a sleepover at Archie’s or a night in the treehouse or even nights like this, camping in the woods with their dads who were both knocked out, the fire growing dimmer and the night growing colder and Jug not yet finished with whatever spooky yarn he was spinning.
Even last year, after Geraldine and Jug’s arrest and everything. That brief, nostalgic run of months when Jughead was living with them, crashing on Archie’s floor like a permanent sleepover the likes of which their ten year old selves used to dream of. Archie had bad nights and so did Jug, and a few times they had ended up under the same covers of Archie’s bed, talking softly or sometimes just lying there in silence, offering wordless comfort.
But that was then. They’re grown now. It feels like they’ve both aged years in the last one. And besides, before that brief span of extreme-closeness, things had gotten strained and distant between them, partly because of the changing dynamics of high school, partly because of Geraldine, partly because of reasons that neither of them will probably ever speak out loud.
He still feels that strain sometimes. Feels it now.
But, he thinks. Things are different than they were last summer. Archie had and now doesn’t have Veronica. Jughead has Betty. He’s with Betty and loves Betty. There’s no risk of…anything (and here Archie can’t even think of what anything might mean) happening. Just his best friend offering to help him out.
It’s not a big deal. This is the thought that pushes Archie into crawling awkwardly into the open seam of Jughead’s sleeping bag.
It’s a tight fit, two teen boys in one adult-sized sleeping bag, but it’s immediately way better than the forest floor. There’s a bit of awkward shuffling as they try to get comfortable, and then Jug huffs an annoyed sort of scoff-laugh under his breath like they’re being ridiculous—probably ‘cause they are—and then the tension is broken. Archie laughs, too, louder than is probably necessary, and then they’re settling in, Jug wiggling onto his side, filling each other’s gaps like they’re ten years old again, huddling for warmth in Jughead’s treehouse.
A moment of hesitation on Jug’s part as they try to figure out where to put their arms—the vastness between them threatening to swallow Archie up again—and then he’s tossing an arm over Archie’s chest and wiggling onto his side. Archie’s protest dies in his throat. Jug’s arm is warm, hand curling loosely against Archie’s shoulder. It feels suddenly like the center of the whole world.
Archie’s hasn’t been touched softly in what feels like a very long time. For the last few months, touch has meant pain. Has meant harm. Has meant he has to fight. Betty’s gentle hands on him, and later Jug holding him tight, astonished and horrified, had made him feel sort of like crying. He sort of feels that way now.
He takes deep breaths to keep it together, but it’s kind of ruined by how close he and Jug are pressed, shoulder to thigh, Jug’s breath on the side of his neck. Jug startles a little, moves like he’s gonna pull away—so Archie moves instead, shifting onto his side. He doesn’t know where he’s trying to go, only that he doesn’t want Jug to stop touching him. He can’t look his friend in the face right now, so he settles for below Jug’s chin instead, throws his own arm over his friend’s waist and tugs him closer and commits to—whatever this is. Safety. Comfort. Familiarity.
Jug, for his part, doesn’t make any sort of sarcastic quip about bros cuddling or personal space, even though Archie can feel it on the tip of his tongue. He just holds Archie. He’s more solid than he was even a year ago, both of them more men than boys now. Too old for this, certainly. This fact does not make him pull away.
There’s no one here to see them, which is always the biggest concern in as small a town as Riverdale. There’s no one else here. It’s just Archie and the moon and Jughead, who he’s known since he was eight and who used to let Archie hide his face in his shoulder during horror nights at the drive-in and not even call him a baby for it.
“It’s okay, Arch,” Jug says, a little awkward but sincere, caring in his own blunt sort of way. “You’ve been through it. It’s okay if you’re scared. I’m scared. But it’s gonna be fine.”
He doesn’t know that, of course, can’t know that. Archie would make a joke about how crazy things must have gotten to have Jughead trying to be the voice of optimism. But if he opens his mouth he might really cry, and if he starts really crying he might not be able to stop.
So Archie swallows it all down. Keeps it in. He closes his eyes and lets himself find solace in his best friend’s hands, rubbing worried little circles against his back. Things are okay, he thinks to himself, tries to believe it. They might not be okay forever, or even for very much longer, but at least they are right now.