There’s Something In The Woods (Betty Cooper X Jughead Jones)
A/N: This was originally inspired by this blurb request that I received from @hughstheforcelou awhile back, and they encouraged me to expand on this idea, so shout out to them!
Summary: On a cross-country road trip without a clear destination, both Betty and Jughead are reveling in the romanticism of being with each other on the open road. Things get a little mysterious one night when Betty spies a figure, some strange creature, lurking in the distance.
This is based off of this song, from this themed playlist, which I highly recommend listening to as you read!
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Scene from a highway in a desert, 1989 (First Draft)
I let the car drift some, eye your uncomfortable pose and profile; the postures of long drives, shifting numb and sore parts when you can no longer sit them.
It was the summer of freedom. Real, true, unabashed freedom…it was all they had ever wanted. There would be no more overbearing mothers or fathers seeking sinners, no reputation to proceed either one of them. No Southside, no boundaries; the King finally relinquished his crown. The day after their high school graduation, Betty and Jughead pack their essentials into duffle bags that get thrown into the trunk of the old Chevelle. The two of them wouldn’t have bothered to attend the ceremonies, but there was no way Cheryl Blossom would let anyone miss her big valedictorian speech. The first day was the most exciting. There was a certain kind of welcomed melancholy that creeped up over their shoulders the farther away they got from Riverdale. It seemed like no matter where they would go, there’d always be a part of them that was tethered to the suburbs. They stop to stretch their legs, to grab a bite to eat and visit some cheap roadside attraction. Betty sits on the hood of the car and poses as Jughead takes pictures with his polaroid camera, her sunglasses are perched on the tip of her nose and it makes something ache deep in his chest. There’s a diner somewhere about an hour away, the two of them electing to skip any more 50’s-themed diners.
“Where you kids headed?” The old blue-haired waitress asks absentmindedly as she scribbles down their lunch orders.
“Nowhere in particular” Jughead reveals, sending a wry grin at the witty woman. Betty sips silently on her sweet tea and revels in the romanticism of the open road. Oh, to be eighteen and in love…
“How will you know when you get there?” Betty looks at the woman’s plated name tag, Sandra Jean, and smiles warmly up at her. The two of them both have to stop and think about it, how far could they actually run?
Foot on the dash, foot on the dash, x hours or so from some somewhere now, only half aware when I change lanes half accidentally.
Betty’s hair flows golden in the hot wind, insistent upon rolling all the windows down as she sings along to the Alanis songs that Jughead put on one of the many mix cds he made for the trip. He tries to recline as best as possible in the confines of the old car, his skinny knees pulled up near his chest as he rested his sock-covered feet against the dashboard. He pulls out a beat-up copy of Kerouac’s On the Road and Betty chuckles to herself, how apropos.
“Read to me, Jug” She doesn’t ask, but it’s not quite a demand either. Jughead hates to admit it to himself, but he would probably do whatever Betty told him to do. Oh, to be eighteen and in love.
“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.” Jughead’s voice is low and even as he reads, squinting his eyes against the bright reflection off the yellow-white paper despite his sunglasses. He thought that maybe this would be his story…he’d get home and sit down at his computer and type epochs about his summer on the road with his true love; the grit of it all, the beautiful and the ugly coming together as he waxes poetic about nights spent creating false identities as they made small talk with whatever resident alcoholics hung out around the dingy bar. They scored cheap drugs from locals and fucked on the itchy sheets of motels that looked straight out of a horror film. He’d tell Betty he loved her with his hand between her legs and then the two of them would pass out cold, having another full day of driving ahead of them.
The two of them wake up still bleary from the previous night’s activities and stand silently side by side as they brush their teeth in the cold, still bathroom. The economy of love in close quarters, a learned thing. Betty’s legs are pale and long as they poke out from underneath Jughead’s old t-shirt. She brought her own pajamas, but still always said that she liked his clothes better. It’s much later than either one of them had anticipated; Jughead guessed that the exhaustion had finally started to catch up to them. He tried not to be bitter about the setback in his perfectly planned schedule as he splashed cold water onto his oily face, noting the fine bit of stubble on his cheeks and the purple circles deepening under his eyes.
Betty and Jughead get dressed in silence and check out of the sleepy motel, filling up on complimentary cups of burnt coffee and stale muffins. It’s his turn to drive. Betty dozes off,trying to shrink herself small enough to fit comfortably into the stale, cracked leather seats. He drives and she sleeps. She sleeps and he can’t help but sneak a glance at her, taking his eyes off the mostly empty road. The sun is warm and high in the sky, casting dark shadows over Betty’s peaceful face. The car veers over with a sudden jolt and Jughead swears as he grabs at the steering wheel.
But hurtling uncertain into the inferno of forever of here, which it does to me, the desert. It has effect, makes me mark things needlessly.
“Jug, do you see that?” Betty taps a pearl-painted nail against the smudged glass window. It’s hot against her skin as she presses her face closer, needing to get a better look to make sense of what it was exactly that she was seeing. There’s a figure in the distance. Too tall to be human, but there was no animal Betty knew of to be that tall…
“Wh-What?” Jughead mutters, shielding his eyes from the setting sun as he tries to locate whatever Betty saw looming in the sparse trees and shrubs. There’s a layer of kicked-up red dust over all the windows that further obscures his vision and Jughead flicks on the windshield wipes to no avail. “Shit”
“Right there, don’t you see it?” Betty wants to roll the old window down and smear away the red dirt with her sweaty hands. The detective inside of her is screaming at Jughead to get closer, but the rational, more mature side is telling her to stay as far away as possible. There were no monsters in the real world, she tried to persuade herself, trying to leave behind her adolescent mentality that everything begins and ends in her shitty little hometown. Just as she tries to shove the thoughts away, the figure moves.
It’s dark and it is tall, with a wing-span that unfurls and reaches wider than Betty can spread her freckled arms. She can’t tell if it has feathers or if it’s fur, only that the creature is blanketed in a sort of darkness that makes it easier to camouflage itself.
Betty blinks and the figure is gone, like it never existed in the first place. “Where am I looking, Betts? You really hyped this thing up” Jughead chuckles. He notices the change in Betty’s demeanor and his expression falters. “What’s wrong?”
“Never mind, Jug…just keep driving.”
When the old Chevelle rolls through the sparse dried-up patch of forest where Betty fist saw the figure, she thought she might have imagined it; there was no trace of whatever beastly creature she was telling herself that she saw. But when the old yellowed headlights cast their dusty beams through the tree line, she sees it: The red, infernal glow of two large, round eyes.
These words that hiss and makes snake sounds. But it feels holy almost, though I don’t say so.
Betty doesn’t forget the creature for the rest of the day or the one after that. It weighs heavy on her mind and she can’t help but shake the feeling that another encounter with the winged thing would soon ensue. She swallows the bile that was threatening to creep up her throat and washes it down with another shot of the bottom-shelf tequila her boyfriend kept handing over to her. Jughead had left Betty to sit and stew alone in the corner of the bar, watching him as he bent over the pool table in a not-so-friendly competition with some locals who were starting to get rowdy after losing one too many times to someone who was simply passing through town. Jughead felt right at home among the ranks of the old, bitter men who reeks like sour beer and stale smoke. A small, immature part of him wanted to go back to the car and retrieve his well-worn Serpent jacket; show them who really was in charge that night.
Betty’s blue eyes are bloodshot and glazed over as she knocks back the warm dregs of her beer. The bartender was a girl who didn’t look to be much older than either one of them, so she gave Betty a sympathetic smile and a pint on the house as she watched the pool table knowingly. “Good Luck, sister golden-hair” The long haired girl smirks at Betty, retrieving her pack of cigarettes to duck outside behind the bar. Betty follows her, like any good detective would, not willing to lose her only confidant just yet.
“Excuse me, do you happen to know if there’s a hotel somewhere close by?” Betty asks with her tight-lipped, homegrown smile as she battled her urge to wave away the bartender’s cigarette smoke. “Preferably somewhere with vacancies” She adds quickly and watches as the young bartender rolls her eyes and chuckles.
“What, your boyfriend’s not doin’ too hot in there anymore?” The girl steps closer into the light and suddenly Betty can see, really see, her face: She’s pretty in a sad kind of way, with stringy ash blonde hair that looked like she cut it herself, sad brown eyes that looked like they’d seen too much too soon, and a small scar by her top lip. Betty can’t help but think of this girl as another version of herself, from a parallel universe a million small towns over.
“Something like that,” She reveals, the venom palpable in her voice as she thought of Jughead’s dumb idea to stop for drinks, even though he was so insistent on reaching their next destination by nightfall. This was day four of their ten-day trip and they had already called behind on their plan. Jughead waved off the notion a little too quickly, dismissing Betty’s worries with his hand. We’ll just extend the trip, Betts, more time for us before Yale. Betty was already dodging phone calls from her mother, not wanting to deal with her incessant interrogation anymore. She could only dodge Alice for so long, and since Betty had just gotten her college fund money back, she didn’t want to chance her mother having another one of her nuclear meltdowns.
The bartender raised her eyebrows, “Come on, sister golden hair, let’s get a pot of coffee on for lover-boy…” There’s a certain kind of kinship between the two women as they walk back into the dark and sweaty bar.
Betty slides the cracked ceramic mug down to Jughead, who was moping as he perched on one of the wood barstools. “You okay?” She asks tentatively, his tipsiness clouding his expression and rendering him harder to read than usual.
His head hangs low, stringy hair drifting into his eyes. “Only down about two hundred bucks, but other than that? Peachy…” He tosses his hand about with a mix of arrogance and fake nonchalance.
“Jug…” Betty chastises, crossing her arms over her chest defensively.
“Spare me the lecture, Alice, I’m more than aware” Jughead stops short, taking a gulp of the lukewarm coffee. Betty throws up her hands in defense, sitting down next to him with another one of her tight-lipped smiles. She can feel the bitter sting of her fingernails digging into the scarred-up skin of her palms, a nagging feeling.
An immortal unknowing: sacred and ancestral and real and only felt here when the sun falls. Only felt here, now, where the otherworldly haunts of coming dusk descending from immeasurable spaces, to more immeasurable spaces
He shouldn’t have been driving. Betty told him that; told him to have a glass of water, told him to have another cup of coffee, told him to go outside and sober up because he was acting like a real jackass and it was still a long drive to their trip’s destination. Staying at a hotel was a nice thought, but Jughead preferred to gamble their earned money away playing pool, as if he hadn’t been getting his ass handed to him by Sweet Pea for the last two years.
Then highway was surrounded by thick, dense woods that made it dark, made the trees look like inkblots, dark and obscured, as the old Chevelle rattled along. Betty had her seatbelt on, her long, pale legs extended onto the dashboard, toes leaving half-moons of warmth on the cool glass of the windshield. He seemed fine, he was always fine. Alanis was playing on the radio and Betty hummed along softly. Jughead laughed and tried out his best falsetto, not paying attention to the seemingly barren road up ahead.
“Jug watch out!” Betty can remember calling out to the boy, going to grab at the steering wheel herself in order to swerve out of the way, to avoid hitting that thing, that same winged creature who’s image had been singed into memory since their last encounter. Inhumanly tall, with big eyes that bore red when the headlights got close enough to bring the figure into view, yet again. It’s not a man — Betty knows that for certain, though some details had gotten a little fuzzy. Wings…it also had wings, long and wide. It was’t a man and it wasn’t an animal wither, so what was it? It was big and it was scary, and judging by the way the creature seemed to have been looming in wait for Betty, it was probably pretty mean.
The creature’s startled. Blurry vision. The sound of tires squealing. Metal on metal.
When Betty finally opens her eyes, it’s slow, dazed, like she’s not quite sure if she was awake or dreaming. She’s alone, she knows that for sure, can feel the hollow sting of fear and loneliness as she surveys the damage. There’s a screaming pain in her temple, and when she goes to inspect for damages, she pulls her fingers away from her face to find that they’re covered in sticky, dried crimson. She can feel the blood caked in her hair, can smell the metallic iron mixing with the exhaust fumes that were still billowing up from under the car’s windshield. There’s broken glass in Betty’s thigh as she tries to sit up and she cranes her neck to survey the scene. The windshield is broken, a body-shaped hole in the center that was dripping with old, coagulated blood. The metal of the dashboard is crunched and dented from when the car swerved and careened into one of the big inkblot trees. Every muscle in betty’s body is screaming as she pushes herself up, trying to kick out the glass of the windshield with one of her dirty, blood-stained keds. She army crawls on her elbows through the shards of glass as she gets up and over the dashboard, grunting as she tries to find her footing as she stumbles in the upturned earth. Jughead’s favorite beanie is hanging ominously from a tree branch and there’s smears of blood on the newly turned leaves.
An ancient, endless desert sprawl; anarchic, forever, interrupted only by this highway running west. Some wound maybe, or a bandage, depending on how you look at it.
He went that way, he had to be. He was looking for help.Betty recites the mantra as she takes off through the forest, the bristles of branches tangled in her hair and getting caught on her tattered and blood-soaked clothing. She’s not sure how she’s still going but she is. Her feet come down hard in the moist dirt; there’s so much adrenaline running through her veins that she can’t even feel the pain in her head anymore. Her breathing is rough and jagged, like she couldn’t get enough air to her longs no matter how hard she tried. But she could see the horizon line now, the world now coming to life with whispers of the sun’s dusty yellow glow. There’s sunlight streaming through the brush and the old trees with gnarled roots like old fingers come to catch Betty in their grasp. When she’s back to the highway, she runs until she sees a cat, trying her best to flag them down with her rapid arm-movements. No one is stopping for you because they think you’re fucking crazy. Betty collects herself, tries to breathe easier and ground herself. Jughead was alive and he was getting help.
An old truck stops for a moment, concerned, a grey-haired older man reaches his head out of the window to ask if she’s all right. “There’s something in the woods…It got him” Betty sobs, her bottom lip quivering as she wrapped her arms protectively around her torso.
“There’s something in the woods” the man agrees and Betty doesn’t know if he’s trying to play into her decisions or if he knows more than he’s letting on.
A guide through wider spaces than the baggage of unclaimed except in concrete; a place you might claim one day, some day.You and I, for us, when we get to wherever it is we are going
The man introduces himself to Betty as Maxwell and that was it. Under any other sort of circumstances, Betty liked to think that she would have made a joke to the old man, an attempt to ease the tension. “Now is that your first name or your last name?” She would have said. And it makes Betty laugh, not really laugh, but as much as she could muster up. It’s a dry, humorless sound that comes from the back of her throat and suddenly Betty is feeling raw in every sense of the word. Maxwell offers to take her into town towards the hospital and asserts that it’s “No trouble at all”; Betty’s too shell-shocked to think twice about the older man’s offer. She doesn’t question his motives, she isn’t building her escape plan as she’s being driven farther and farther away from the scene of the accident. The rust-colored truck pulls up in front of the General Hospital and Betty swiftly realizes that not all people are as sinister as they are in Riverdale.
Betty lets herself be helped out of the truck, her knees going wobbly and her vision going blurry as she’s guided through the double doors and met with the bright lights that cast a sickly green glow over the waiting room. She can feel her knees give out as her weight is dropped back into a wheelchair, an older female nurse pushing her into an examination room while barking questions at a helpless looking Maxwell.
“I found her by the side of the road about ten miles from here, she was mutterin’ something about the woods and after takin’ a look at her I assumed there’d been some kinda accident so I offered her a ride to the hospital. Didn’t say a word the whole way here”
Betty can feel someone above her dabbing at her blood-caked hair, she can smell the bitter rubbing alcohol and it makes her nose tickle. “Betty Cooper… I’m, Elizabeth…” She’s lethargic as the nurse shines a thin beamed light in her eyes. She swallows thickly, the sedatives kicking in through the IV that Betty didn’t even know that she had. She pulls at her arm and the nurse comes to swat away her hand. “Riverdale, my boyfriend and I were taking a road trip” Betty trails off and the nurse has to shake her back to consciousness.
“Was there a young man with her when you found her?” The Nurse throws an accusatory glance over her shoulder at Maxwell and he quietly shakes his head no. “Sweetheart, where’s your boyfriend now?” The nurses was trying to stay calm on behalf of Betty and the clear trauma that she had been through, but there were so many questions she had. First and foremost though, she needed to know if there were any more victims.
“There was an accident, when I woke up he was gone…that thing, I think it got him”
Single landmark in memorial now, and the landscape that always passes but never passes, does finally.
Betty is confined to the hospital for three days, and the Doctor calls her mother despite all of her protests. Alice is too busy breaking some big story, but she promises to make her way to the nameless little town by the end of the week. There’s a small search party for Jughead, but nothing good comes out of it. There’s no body found at the scene of the accident, nor in the surrounding area. He’s gone and no one has an explanation for it. They think the poor kid must’ve been taken by some sick son of a bitch, and Betty wanted to agree but there was no way for her to explain that the perpetrator wasn’t a who, but a what. She knew what she saw in the woods; she could draw it on paper better than she could explain it with words.
Betty is severely concussed, and it takes five staples in her forehead to put her back together. Despite her bruised ribcage and some bumps and scratches, she’s fairly well-off, and the Nurse tells her that she should be thankful for good samaritans because she could’ve been in much worse shape. There’s a part of her that doesn’t want to wait for her mother, she knows that they recovered as much as possible from the scene of the accident, all of hers and Jughead’s things that they packed for their trip. It was funny, how long ago it all seemed. She knows there’s an envelope of money in the pocket of the pair of red shorts that she packed away in duffle bag. There’s two hundred dollars less than she started out with, but Betty was trying not to be angry about that now; she saw no sense in harboring anger from her little spat with Jughead, all she wanted to know was where he was and if he was okay. There was a naive part of Betty that truly thought that Jughead was alive and well, and that any time now he would be waltzing into the sterile hospital room, a burger in his hand and a chip on his shoulder. But there was no way…she saw the wreckage of the car, and the blood, how it dripped from the dark leaves of the inkblot trees and dried in sticky puddles in the rocky dirt. Until there was a body, though, she could hold on to that glimmer of hope, no matter how naive it was.
If only she could find a car, Betty could be out of here. She didn’t need Alice, and it was clear that her mother was in no hurry to drop her workload to make the five day drive. The nurse said that by tomorrow, Betty could be cleared to go home, or at least to start making the trek back. Her head aches with every rhythmic beep of the monitors that were all monitoring her vitals, make it obnoxiously apparent that she was alive and it was looking like Jughead wasn’t. A tear runs down her face as Betty reminisces on all the plans they made, how they were going to build a life together that was outside of Riverdale’s soul-crushing confines.
There’s a business card on the side table with a phone number on it, and suddenly Betty gets an idea. Her fingers are clumsy as she reaches for the corded phone, she dials the numbers and holds the cold plastic up to her ear as she awaits an answer. The line clicks and someone picks up. “Maxwell? Hi, this is Betty Cooper, the uh, girl you saved. I just wanted to really take the time to say thank you in person, do you think you could meet me for breakfast tomorrow?”
The man graciously agrees and says that he knows a place. Betty’s all cleared to go by her doctors; she should wait for her mother to get to the hospital but that could be days from now. She lugs the duffle bags of things salvaged as she walks out of the hospital’s creaky double doors, immediately getting hit with a wave of sticky heat. Maxwell is waiting out front in his rust-colored truck and he hops out of the cab to help Betty with her bags, opening the door to the passenger’s side and make sure she was safe and secured inside. They pull up to a diner with a name that sounds like it could be someone’s grandmother’s, and Maxwell insists that Betty has to try the blueberry pancakes because they’re “the best thing on the whole damn menu”. A teenage waitress with a barbell through her eyebrow takes their order and soon Betty and Maxwell are making friendly, idle conversation. It was true that Betty did want to thank him for picking her up and taking her to the hospital, but there was also some ulterior motives behind it. So when she sets down her sticky fork, Betty gets nervous before lacing her fingers together and taking a deep breath.
“Do you happen to know of anywhere I could get a cheap car?” She hoped that she wasn’t coming across as rude, or that her appreciation was insincere. She didn’t even know why she thought that the old man would be able to help her out, but she had a feeling. “Before the accident, my boyfriend and I were on a bit of a cross-country road trip and….I think I need to finish it on his behalf. I don’t think I can move on without him unless I finish it and my mom?” Betty blows a puff of air between her teeth, “She’s more concerned with work and it’s clear that she’s in no rush to come and get me, so I need to finish the trip. For me and for Jughead, can you help me?”
Maxwell nods his head and throws a handful of crumpled up bills on the table of the diner. He drives Betty to a small ranch not too far away, and heads towards a covered overhang. Gesturing to Betty, the two get out of the car and move closer to whatever was being concealed under the blue pop-up tarps. There’s a blue Cadillac who’s paint has dulled and oxidized with time, but Betty knows a classic car when she sees one. She gets that familiar itch in the tips of her fingers, wanting nothing more than to pop open the car’s hood and poke around like she used to with her dad at the auto shop.
“If you can start it, it’s yours” Maxwell says, and the fun suddenly began for Betty as she reached for the toolbox she saw propped up idly. A few hours and some elbow grease and the car is as good as new. Betty did most of the work, but what strength she couldn’t muster up was assisted by Maxwell, who was impressed at the resilience and skillfulness of his new young friend. He refuses to take any of her money, so Betty stashes the crumpled envelope in his toolbox where Maxwell would be sure to find it eventually. He won’t let her start her journey so late in the evening, having been made aware of the horrors that came from her trip, and offers up the sofa bed for her, at least until morning.
Betty wakes up with a gasp and is immediately panicked when she can’t recognize her surroundings. She sits up with speed that makes her dizzy, and when her hand comes to touch as the sutures in her head, it’s a sobering reminder of what she had been through the last few days. The clock reads 4:30 am and the red neon glow the numbers give off is Betty’s only source of light. Quietly, she tiptoes through the expanse of the strange house, picking up her things and packing them away into her bags before grabbing the car keys that sat cold on the granite of the kitchen counter. Inch by inch Betty turns the front door knob until she can slip out of the ranch house silently. Shutting what was left of hers and Jughead’s belongings in the back seat, she starts the car and puts it in reverse.
The open road felt a little scarier than it did before. Betty white-knuckled the steering wheel with her hands at ten and two as she drove away from Maxwell’s ranch, the diner, and the General Hospital that did so much help for her. She remembers that she’s about ten miles away from where she came out of the woods the night of the accident. She wishes that she remembered where the car was. There was a part of her that wanted to sit out there amongst the wreckage until Jughead or someone else came and found her, but that would be of no use to her.
She pulls the car off the road and onto the shoulder before she gets out, ruffling away through Jughead’s things to find something for her to leave behind, to memorialize him in some way so that he could never be forgotten about. She finds his dog-eared copy of On The Road and wishes nothing more than to be able to hear his smooth, even voice as he read to her during the times where it was her turn to drive. She opens the book to the first page and scribbles “Jughead Jones wuz here” just like he used to all those years ago. She places the book on top of a moss-covered tree stump and weights it down with a small stack of smooth, flat rocks.
So I crack my window just so, and almost close my eyes and almost let go of the steering wheel, but don’t. It feels impossible to crash the car while we’re in it.
Betty’s eyes are bleary with tears as she drives away from the last place that she ever saw the one person in the world that she would move mountains for. She swiped under her eyes with the backs of her veiny hands and takes a deep breath. Alanis is playing again on the radio and the notion of it is bittersweet at best.
She continues down the road but something catches her attention. It’s a shadow that she can see looming over her, a few hundred yards ahead there was something perched in the middle of the road. Betty can feel her stomach turn as she takes in the creature’s appearance yet again. It’s inhumanely tall frame, it’s feather-like covering, it’s wings that spread farther than Betty could open her own arms. Its red eyes reflected sinisterly in the headlights, and suddenly Betty knew exactly what she had to do. She thinks about Jughead, and the blood. The body-sized hole in the totaled car’s windshield. His favorite old beanie that was hanging limply from the inkblot trees and their bloodied leaves.
Betty cracks her knuckles, her breathing even as she goes in through the nose and out through the mouth. When she gets closer to the creature, she notices it perk up, as if it had been waiting for her in order to finish what they had started. Eerily calm, almost stoic in nature, she presses her foot down on the gas pedal, and accelerates.
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