#bughead magic au

[crashhale]

King and Queen

The Dark King visits his wife and brings her favorite kind of gift...

He watched as she stood, the delicate fabric of her gown floating as she walked barefoot towards them. “What wonderful gift have you bought me this time, my love?” she asked, coming to kneel before the weeping boy.

@riverdalebingo - Summer 2020 - Magic AU - 1,404 Wrods

Warning: mention of child abduction, dark themed, smut.

[darknessaroundus]

Betty opens her eyes. Her body feels warm around her, heavy and glowing. Their bedroom is filled with a dim light. It’s the afternoon sun, she realizes slowly. She wonders why she’s waking up now, why she was asleep before. She hasn’t napped for years.

Beside her, partially under the sheet, arm and one leg stretching out. is Jughead. His hair is damp, flatter than usual.  His breathing is soft and slow. Only then does Betty notice another sound, so quiet and soft she can barely hear it at all.

She turns from her back to her left side, pain flows through her body, but it’s worth it, because there, in the white bassinet beside their bed is a baby.

Just a day ago he was in Betty’s body, and now he is here in the world, and he has a name, Marcus, that still feels funny on Betty’s lips.

He starts crying before his eyes open, screaming before his eyelashes catch the strange half light of the room.

Jughead wakes to the sound and brings him over to where Betty’s lying on her side, nursing bra pushed up. Even a few feet are far for her to walk right now. Everything is healing, everything feels like it will never heal.

Getting Marcus to latch onto her breast feels like a strange dance she doesn’t know the steps to yet, but eventually it works, and she feels the sharp let-down of milk, and Marcus is quiet again.

Jughead lays down beside her again, right next to her back, without putting any pressure on it . It was a long labor, a long night for both of them in the birthing center.

“You worked so hard for this” he whispers against the base of her neck. She can’t turn to see him, but she can here is breath become shallow and steady again as he returns to sleep.

Every bit of her body feels full of love even the parts that ache and hum. Love for Jughead, and love for the life they brought into this world, love for the light dimming around the room.

Betty tries to fall asleep but the nursing hurts and she longs badly for water. She closes her eyes and imagines swallowing some cold water, fresh from the tap. For a moment she thinks she must actually be drinking water because her whole mouth feels refreshed, inexplicably, but she can’t dwell on it, because sleep comes to her again.

The first week passes slowly. Friends visit and family. There are lactation cookies on the counter from Polly, and lentil turkey soup (“High in protein, low in calories, Elizabeth”) in the fridge. The nursery contains an impossible number of onesies with cute but tacky sayings on them.

The midwives finally tell Betty she’s ready to walk around the block. Jughead returns to work and Betty finds herself in the house with Marcus and a million things to do and not to do. Time passes strangely. She has no books to edit for another six months. No meetings to attend, no bosses to avoid.

It’s fall and each day the dark begins earlier. She goes for a walk one afternoon, the baby in a pram. Betty’s admiring the leaves when the rain starts to come down so heavy and fast. Betty thinks the word stop and the rain stops. It’s a coincidence she thinks, a happy one.

She starts to notice coincidences more. Like the time she really longs for turkey broth and then she finds some in the freezer that she swore she never made.

It’s more than that, one night she wakes to a dark room, a screaming baby, and a still asleep Jughead. Betty thinks that the lights should be on, suddenly the bulb above their bed is ablaze and Betty can see the red face of Marcus.

She’s going crazy, she’s sure. It’s because the baby isn’t sleeping through the night, isn’t sleeping very much at all.

But it has come in handy, this insanity. One day Marcus is so fussy she can’t set him down, and so she discovers how to chop vegetables with her mind. A knife is involved but not her hands.

Slowly Betty discovers she can do more and more things with her mind, it’s not just good for lights and stirring soup and inconvenient weather, she can scrub the toilet or do the laundry with it as well.

It doesn’t work for everything though. Mostly the weather ignores her, and she has no control over people, only things. But still she doesn’t know how to tell Jughead.

It seems strange really, she’s shared everything with him for so long, he’s seen her at her most vulnerable, but she’s not ready to admit to him that she’s lost it. That sleep deprivation has done her in, maybe.

It’s not that she thinks the darkness inside her won, this doesn’t feel dark, but she knows logically, what she’s going insane. She looks up postpartum depression on google, but it doesn’t seem right. None of the symptoms fit.

This has to all be in her head, except it doesn’t seem to be. Jughead eats the pasta she makes. They sleep on the sheets she cleaned without physical effort. In the morning they wake to muffins she doesn’t remember making.

“Thank you.” Jug says, kissing her forehead.

A month passes and still the symptoms persist. Betty knows that she has to tell him. Jug will know what to do. He will find her the right kind of help.

Before Betty tells Jughead she makes him lasagna. Betty loves the smile on his face as he watches her pull it from the oven, cut him a slice.

He’s holding Marcus, but Betty takes their son into her own arms. Then she switches off the overhead light, the dining room is still dimly lit by the kitchen.

Jughead looks at her curiously. He hasn’t started eating yet, but there is a large slice of lasagna on the plate in front of him.

Betty takes a deep breath and then lights all of the candles she’s placed around the room with her mind. It’s a good thing she’s holding the baby because Jughead’s jaw goes slack. His arms fall limply to his side.

“What?” Jughead says the word again and again as if saying it enough will make sense out of this situation.

Betty realizes in this moment that there might be no way to make sense out of this situation. Despair thrums through her.

Jughead stops talking and when he opens his mouth again he says “You’re a witch.”

It’s a word Betty has hesitated to use. She’d thought it, but only in the dark when she couldn’t fall asleep.

“I think I might be.” She says softly.

“Since when?”

“Since the baby. I would have told you sooner, but I wasn’t sure it was real.”

A smile grows on Jughead’s face, his teeth visible between his lips even in the dim light. “It’s real.”

Later that night, when they’re cuddling in spoons and Betty’s groggy with almost sleep she hears Jughead say ‘My wife is a witch,” softly and with reverence. Even in her sleepy state, her mind manages to pull back the curtain and reveal the moon.