Chapter Text
If there’s one smell of food that could never make Jughead feel sick, it’s the scent of waffles that seems to permeate everything belonging to Archie Andrews.
As he buries his face in pillow, he realises that this smell is nowhere to be found in his room at the hostel, and neither is this level of softness, his semi-conscious brain making an assumption that his eyes confirm once he manages to blink them open blearily. He’s in Archie’s room, band posters and football pennants littering the wall and that nostalgic, comforting scent lingering in the air.
He’s alone, and, checking the time on Archie’s alarm clock, has been asleep for just over five hours, meaning that he should probably feel rejuvenated, but instead his limbs feel like they’re made of lead, and he’s got gaping hunger in his stomach. Underneath the covers, he can feel he’s still wearing his jeans, but his jacket and hoodie are slung over the back of Archie’s desk chair, and the domesticity of it makes him smile involuntarily. Archie has had the sense to not take off his hat.
“Knock knock?”
The boy in question is at the door, accompanying his greeting with a superfluous real knock and a glowing smile, and Jug summons all of his strength to pull himself up to a sitting position, the air cool around his shoulders through his worn t-shirt.
“Ready to rejoin the world of the living, huh?”
The mattress dips as the redhead sits himself down, tentatively, and Jug rubs the sleep from his eyes, pulling his hat more firmly onto his head.
“Barely,” he says, wryly, “I feel like I could sleep forever.”
And as Jug yawns and stretches, bodily, hem riding up, he can see the way Archie’s eyes dart around him, like he’s not sure where to look, and he settles for looking at his lap, light blush dusting his cheeks as he replies.
“I was going to cook you something, but…”
The proverbial elephant in the room appears as Archie’s speech fades, unsure, and Jug can hardly blame him for not knowing how to approach the subject, but something still clenches in him at Archie’s nervousness. He and Archie work on a basic level of lifetime familiarity, their mutual, semi-psychic companionship consolidated in years of treehouse summers and impromptu sleepovers. A companionship that lets them sit in silence, without a need to fill the negative space, a kind of grounding anchor that Jughead is paranoid has shifted, whether through his admission of illness, or the addition of something ‘romantic’ into the mix. Jughead doesn’t want ‘romance’. He doesn’t want it if it means dancing around each other in a messy, unsure, attempted replication of what you see on a Hallmark card. He just wants Archie.
He inhales.
“Archie?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you make pancakes?”
He can see him physically relax; pancakes are something Archie can do easily, and deliciously, and Jug thinks that after almost 12 hours of not eating properly, he’ll probably be able to keep them down.
They’re the food of weeknight sleepovers, of the morning before Archie had perfected the recipe and they ended up with floury lumps in every one, and enough batter to feed an army. They managed to eat it all between them at the breakfast table, sun streaming through the windows, making themselves late for school and leaving the kitchen in a state that Jug is sure Fred wasn’t best pleased about. It was March, Jug remembers, and the weather almost definitely wasn’t as bright as he thinks, but all of his memories with Archie are sun-kissed.
“Sure.”
And before he’s really aware of what he’s doing, Jughead’s leaning forward, a hand on Archie’s shoulder as he presses their lips together, slow, simple, uncomplicated, and probably lacking in any skill whatsoever, but neither of them seem to mind. He grounds himself on the warmth of Archie radiating through his shirt, and feels a hand come up to rest on the side of his torso, hyper- aware of the way his ribcage presses through his skin, the fundamental juxtaposition of Archie: made for human contact, solid and tactile, and Jughead: comprised of angles out of something brittle and not for touching.
It’s his first kiss. There are no fireworks, and he’s too hungry to feel butterflies, but there is a slow, glowing heat in his toes, and the security of Archie’s hands on him, ready to catch him if he should fall. For once, Jughead feels like the edge of the cliff isn’t so close.
They break apart after a minute that feels like a year. Archie grins, sunshine boy, and Jug finds the wherewithal to mimic him, disused muscles straining in his cheeks at the widest smile he’s pulled in months.
“I’ll get started on those pancakes, then.”
He pulls back, and Jug is surprisingly tempted to reach after him, but instead sits in some sort of daze on the bed instead, catching the soft, clean pyjamas that Archie tosses to him from his dresser: a silent invitation for him to stay the night.
It’s only then that the wider world seems to seep through the edges of Archie’s self-contained oasis of a room: the clothes he hasn’t been able to wash in over a week, the single, narrow bookshelf of his belongings back at the shelter, the image in his head of the last time he stopped round to see his dad, prone and unconscious on the couch in his trailer.
He’s managing, that much is true. Helpful synonyms include ‘coping’ or ‘surviving’, but it’s exhausting, treading water, sinking below the surface every other day in his singular struggle to stay afloat. He wants something stable, needs it, before he drowns.
And tonight, stability is sitting on Archie’s counter, watching him cook, flour dusting his hair and cheeks. Stability is not thinking about what he’s going to eat tomorrow, not thinking about where that food is going to end up; it’s letting Archie stand between his legs and kiss him, and laugh, and kiss him again until kissing has carved its space in their normality, is something they do without thinking.
Stability is the following day they take off school, the phone call from Reggie, partly to reassure him that his truancy is the opposite of worrying, partly to hear the animated recount of how “She hugged me goodbye, Jug! Hugged me!”. It’s him, swimming in one of Archie’s gym shirts, and the redhead beside him, playing their fourth time through Dragoncide, legs twined together on the couch.
He’s not better.
He’s not better by a long shot.
He still can’t make it through a meal at Pop’s without feeling nauseated, though his portion control is improving, and he tries to cook his own food more, with Reggie’s help. The first three sessions Betty sets up with the only crappy therapist his insurance can cover end with him storming out in varying degrees of anger or tears, throwing himself into the passenger seat of Archie’s truck, feet on the dashboard and arms knotted tightly over his chest. The longest he’s gone without vomiting is five days. But he’s getting there.
And he still has good days, and bad days, though the balance seems to be evening itself out. The day he leaves the hostel, for example, is a shining good day, handing his key back to Midge and moving his things into the Andrews’ spare room; they celebrate with Archie’s pancakes, because what else?
The day he tells his mom, about moving out, about everything, is a bad one, not because the outpouring doesn’t make him feel better than purging ever could, but because he can’t stand to be the reason for the pain in her eyes.
It’s a good day the day he sees Midge and Reggie holding hands in the corridor, and winks at them, to which they both return middle finger, and he smirks because they’re such a perfect fit.
It’s a black, miserable, no-good, very-bad day when his doctor gives him a prescription for Prozac, and a written diagnosis that feels like a brand seared into his forehead, and he shoves it to the bottom of his bag, orders three burgers from Pop’s and brings them all back up.
So yeah, he’s not better.
But he’s getting there, and he’s trying, and he makes his own salads for lunch now, though Reggie tells him he feels like he’s been put out of a job. And Archie’s learned not to comment on the way his clothes hang off him, but to just hold him when he needs it, and leave him when he doesn’t, and yell at him when he’s being a brat and won’t take his medication – which is starting to become less often.
Because he doesn’t want to be sick anymore, wrapped up in himself until he’s screwed and twisted the way he sees the world. He doesn’t want to be the invalid boyfriend Archie Andrews has to look after, the distant brother that Jellybean can’t talk to, the complete, pathetic, fuck-up of a human being he’s in danger of becoming.
Jughead Jones wants to be well.
And he’s getting there.