Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They wouldn't let him cross back, that much was clear. When he walked along the tracks, they mirrored his movements on the other side, making sure he stayed on the Southside.

"Are you seeing this?" Dilton said.

The others didn't listen. Chuck and Reggie were jeering. Jason was looking worried.

"Aren't you going to try and go in?" he called out to Jughead.

Jughead did not answer.

"I wanted him to go in," Jason told the others, biting his lip. "I wanted someone to figure out this water thing." Then, catching sight of what Reggie was holding: "I don't think you need a bat."

"Hey, in case he tries to come back and bother nice people," Reggie said, shrugging.

Jughead said nothing. If he walked until he got to Pop's, maybe Pop would come out to the back alley, see this, and help him. That felt like his best bet.

"We should stop," Jason said. "We did it. It was funny. But he's just walking, that's it, so--"

"No way," said Chuck. "We have to make sure he stays over there. That's where he belongs."

"Are you guys seeing this?" Dilton demanded.

Jughead could hear when they stopped walking. He sped up in response.

"Jones!" he heard Dilton yelling after him.

"Jughead!" Jason was shouting. "Jughead, look at what's falling on the track!"

He didn't know why he looked. Jason had gagged him, after all. But it hadn't been a tight gag -- he'd gotten it off. That was how Jason worked. He was among Riverdale's worst (Riverdale's best, if you talked to anybody who wasn't Jughead), but he was kind of a shamefaced participant. He could never commit to anything truly mean. Maybe that was why Jughead trusted him when he said to look.

"Look down," Jason said excitedly. "At the tracks."

Jughead looked down. He saw railroad tracks.

"You have a shadow!" Jason said. "Jughead! It's there!"

Bile rose in Jughead's throat. He did not have a shadow. Even if he'd been a normal person he couldn't have had one. There wasn't enough sun for it. It was practically night already, and fog was rolling in around him, fog and cold.

"Sure I do," he told Jason bitterly. "So does Reggie. His shadow's you."

Reggie looked briefly dumbfounded and Chuck snickered. Jason's pale face went as red as Jason's hair. He snatched the bat from Reggie.

"Fine," he snapped. "Stay over there, then. Dilton, where's your camera? We should maybe show this shadow to the Mayor. It's all the proof we need to show how weird he is--"

But Dilton hadn't brought his camera -- he'd thought Chuck was bringing his. As they bickered, Jughead heard the whistle of the train.

This was his chance. When the train rushed past, he could jump into a run and they wouldn't be able to see him, which might give him enough of a head start to get to Pop's before they did. Admittedly, he was a pretty terrible runner. They would definitely beat him to Pop's if they had him in their line of sight. But if he got a head start, well--

Well, no, then they'd still beat him to Pop's. They were still faster than he was. But he wanted to pretend that he could get away, mostly because the shadow trick had opened up a great fearful pain inside him, one he didn't want to stick around and examine too hard. He took a deep breath. The train came rattling closer.

When it reached him, he fell into a sprint. His mind protested the action almost immediately -- he hated running. And his shoelaces, he realized, were still untied, and that was bad. His chest was burning and for some reason even his limbs and hands hurt, and he couldn't figure out whether to breathe through his mouth or through his nose. Worst of all, the fog and dark was closing in fast, too fast. When the train had passed completely he had to stop and wheeze, hands on his knees, for at least a full minute.

He couldn't hear the others anymore. But he couldn't see Pop's across the track, either. Actually, he couldn't see the track, the fog was that thick and disorienting. People said the Southside was a ghost town, a place spirits roamed. Maybe they just meant this fog. Jughead could hardly tell what direction he'd come in. He tried backtracking tentatively. He backed into a tree.

A tree?

He tried to remember what he knew of the Southside.

Abandoned, like him. Haunted. Dangerous -- because sometimes the sheriff would pull a drifter out of the place and it would turn out the drifter had stolen something, or was illegally carrying a pocket knife. Sometimes people would walk in and never come back. Sometimes people would walk out, which was worse. Those were mad people, the kind of people who could live in a ghost town -- and more often than not they would have to be arrested and put away before they hurt somebody. They always seemed to want to hurt somebody.

But as far as Jughead knew, very few people lived in the mist-shrouded wilderness beyond the tracks. So the danger couldn't be that great. Archie had crossed the track and walked two blocks into the Southside once, on a classic Reggie Mantle dare. He'd come back disappointed, saying it was just a bunch of empty, dilapidated houses, like something out of a creepy video game, and that there was nothing much else to see.

Jughead didn't even see houses. Just forest.

Once, coming back on the bus from a field trip to the city planetarium, he'd heard Archie's father tell Archie a story about this place.

"Long time ago, when they founded this town," Fred had said thoughtfully, "the families that founded it wanted it to be a good place. Prosperous. Happy. With the people in it treating each other right. And it is, son. It is. Because they marked a place where the ground met the water, and they said, 'This is where the evil will go.' You have a bad thought? It goes there. You get hurt? It goes there.'"

Archie had been quietly snuffling off to sleep. He had tumbled off of a raised display on Neptune's atmosphere and fallen onto Jughead. He had not been hurt. Jughead had been left with a cracked wrist. No one on the bus had really believed it was really a cracked wrist, though. Hardly anyone in Riverdale went around cracking their wrists -- just Jughead Jones.

"And they took all the evil in themselves," Fred had continued, "and they buried it in the ground there, and that's where it's stayed. And that's why we're safe in Riverdale, son. Because the bad -- that we put out by the Southside. So if it looks scary, don't you mind it. It's just holding our bad for us, Archie. It's holding your bad for you, so you don't have to suffer with it."

Fred wasn't the only person who said stuff like that. But Jughead, who'd spent most of his life avoiding the Southside because people said he might be from there, had always quietly wished that maybe, just maybe, the Southside would be the way Archie described it. Boring. Empty. No real evil in it, no threat. Just a lot of quiet, watchful nothing.

He slid down the tree, still trying to gather his breath. He found himself sitting in a pile of golden-brown leaves. It was cold here, colder than on the Northside. He knew that. But for once he didn't feel cold. On the North, he was often so cold he needed a jacket. Here, he was warm enough that a jacket would do, even though a stiff, frigid breeze shook more leaves from the trees.

Jughead watched them float down.

He was experiencing an autumn. That was another thing Fred said, Betty's parents said. In other places, you got an autumn, a slow dying of everything. Riverdale never got that. They had banished it to where the ground met the water.

The fog was thinning, and the forest was dreamy, quiet, and dead. Jughead sat in the leaves and wished he had one of the computers at school, or even just his pencil and notebook.

"In the darkness on the edge of town," he tried, addressing the trees, "they put their evil deep, deep inside the ground, and expected that it wouldn't ever rise again."

Something rustled the leaves. A squirrel, maybe.

"It always rises," Jughead decided, with satisfaction. "Evil can't be buried--"

He thought of zombies rising at the Bijou, ragged hands clawing the ground--

"--it always finds a way. It lurks like mist, waiting to invade the sunshine--"

Something touched him. Something cold and dry, curling white fingers around his ankle. Jughead screamed, shoved it off, scrambled up against the tree. For a moment he thought his mind was recreating Tombs of the Blind Dead, with caverns overrun by eyeless zombie knights. But the hands that sprouted up from the ground were whole, streaked only by a bit of dirt. Black fingerless gloves, leather sleeves studded with metal. Jughead gaped.

Men were climbing out of the ground. Mostly young ones, decidedly living ones. The forest was alive with them, with their half-open shirts and slick, pale white bodies, with their sharp smiles and the skulls painted onto their jackets. Jughead backed against another tree and found it carved with skulls.

GHOULIE TERRITORY,
someone had painted onto the tree.

The one that had grabbed his ankle looked at him. He was shaking the dirt off of his black velvet pants.

"You're new," he said. "Some kind of Northsider. And I touched you. But you know the Ghoulie motto. That touch is gonna be bad for you, baby."

He licked his lips. His teeth winked, plated with gold. The other men were straightening, their eyes swiveling to Jughead, every eye a black hole, like a skull's. It was makeup, Jughead realized. It was fake, like in the movies. But they'd come out of the ground.

"How long have you been here?" said the one that had grabbed him. "You can see us, so you must have been trespassing on our territory a while. Must have used up an hour or two on our turf, acting like it's yours--"

Jughead shook his head mutely. His chest hurt worse than when he'd been running. He could no longer tell how long he had been on the Southside. These men had climbed out of the dirt and now they were slowly walking towards him, grinning. Their teeth cut jagged lines of reality into the misty fog.

Jughead turned and ran again.

With whoops and shouts, they were after him. His stomach felt tight and painful, his chest burning, so he could barely make out their chant:

G H O U L I E S,
G H O U L I E S,
THIS TOWN'S OUR ONLY HAUNT.
YOUR HOUSES ARE OUR HEADSTONES,
SO WE'LL KILL YOU IF WE WANT.

They caught up to him easily, earthy-smelling hands grabbing at his jacket. One lifted him off the ground. For the second time that day he was overpowered, and this time he missed Jason, Reggie, Chuck, and Dilton. He would rather be back across the tracks with them, being punched, than here with these metal stud zombies that laughed amongst themselves as they ground his face into the dirt.

"How deep, Ghoulihand?"

"Six feet under, boys."

"What'll sprout from him, Ghoulihand?"

"Evil, boys. Pain, boys. Some house on the North missing its son. Where'd he go? Where'd our little baby go?"

Hoots and jeers, worse than any Northside classroom could offer. Jughead felt like the cold was finally getting him, spreading into him wherever the Ghoulies held him down. He could hear a shovel hitting the ground, again and again. Dirt was tossed near his head. They were going to bury him. They were going to bury him because they thought he had a family that might miss him, and he didn't, and either way he did not want to be buried.

A whistle cut through the jeers.

Ghoulihand, the one that had grabbed Jughead, swore.

"Water worms," he said. "Fuck. Kill 'em boys."

"Eels!" said another Ghoulie. "Kill 'em!"

"Snakes! Kill 'em!"

"Messing in our business! Our catches!"

Jughead could hear the sound of revving bikes. The Ghoulie holding him down pushed off. Jughead lifted up his head carefully and saw this Ghoulie pull out a knife. Around them, the other Ghoulies were doing the same, all with the same mutterings: snakes, worms, eels. Serpents, snakes, water-slugs.

"They need to stick to their turf," Ghoulihand was saying. "This is our turf -- the boy's our catch--"

Light and sound exploded into the dark, misty forest clearing. Artificial light, purring engine sound. Motorcycles. Jughead stared around at them fearfully. There must have been ten or so, enough to match the Ghoulies.

"You're on our turf," Ghoulihand was muttering. "I'll wake up more, I will--"

"Wake up whatever you want," said one of the men on a motorcycle. "But you're handing over the kid, Ghoulihand."

When he climbed off his bike, Jughead, squinting through the light from the headlights, could see that the new man was about middle height, and wiry. His leather jacket made him look bigger than he probably really was. Unlike the Ghoulies he wore no spikes or studs or velvet, no makeup or decorative skulls. He looked realer than the very real Ghoulihand. He had stubble on his jaw and shadows under his dark eyes.

"You kill one of their kids," he said. "One of our kids dies too, Ghoulihand, whichever one is twinned to him. It's the way this works. We rise and fall together--"

"They rise," Ghoulihand said bitterly. "We fall."

The newcomer nodded, like he didn't disagree. But he didn't back down either.

"Gimme the kid, Ghoulihand."

Ghoulihand stretched his mouth into a skull grin.

"Or what?" he said. "We fight, FP? We fight and one of us dies. And if one of us dies, one of them does, too. So I still win, FP. Ghoulies still win. We get death on the Northside and the Southside both. Death always wins."

"Gimme the kid."

Ghoulihand launched himself at FP. The Ghoulies followed his lead. Jughead felt himself trembling uncontrollably, his body reacting even as his eyes could barely process the chaos. Punches, jabs, Ghoulies reaching into the dirt and pulling out more Ghoulies. The newcomers had snakes on their jackets, Jughead thought dimly. Snakes versus skulls. Hard to see who to root for -- they both looked bad.

He thought the snakes would lose, because the Ghoulies could very literally appear out of the dirt. But maybe the snakes weren't fighting to win. They were fighting to get to Jughead. FP hit Ghoulihand so hard that the skull grin went slack and dead, and so he reached Jughead first despite having a nasty gash in his side. He hoisted Jughead up. Jughead reacted on instinct, trying to get away.

"Trying to help you," FP snapped. "Don't be dead weight now, boy. Be smart!"

He pulled Jughead to his bike and practically tossed him at it, pulling off Jughead's beanie despite Jughead's protests and replacing it with a helmet. FP put a few fingers to his mouth and whistled, and the snakes fell back to their bikes.

"Hold on," he told Jughead, leveling a finger at him. "You fall off and get killed before we get you to the Northside, one of ours goes, too. I'm not here to see that happen."

He climbed on and made Jughead hold him, then started his bike. FP smelled wet and metallic, like marshes and liquor and iron. This, combined with the speed of the bike tearing them out of the forest, left Jughead light-headed. He could feel sticky blood oozing from under FP's t-shirt.

Jughead didn't think he'd ever seen anybody hurt like this before. Just him, sort of, that time with his wrist.

"Hold on," FP kept telling him. "Hold on, kid."

He could hear the other bikes behind them, and the outraged screams of the Ghoulies. He held on.

They emerged on an ugly street, hemmed in by small houses that faced the forest. Their windows emitted a faint light. They seemed very occupied for the Southside. Their yards were piled with old washing machines, trash bags, pickup trucks, dogs, cheap plastic children's slides, cheaper plastic lawn chairs. Refrigerators and American flags. FP tore up the street and swerved at the railroad tracks, his bike giving a screech of complaint.

Gingerly, he detached Jughead from his midsection. His blood was still sticky on Jughead's hands when FP pulled the helmet off and handed Jughead back the beanie. Jughead grabbed for it and jammed it on his head. He felt like he'd never catch his breath back. FP shoved him gently at the railroad track.

"Go on now. And don't come back. I've gotta hope you didn't find your match and touch him, so maybe there's no harm done. And you'll have some family that misses you, back there on the Northside."

He didn't.

"I don't," Jughead said. He looked back at FP. Something about FP's face felt strangely right, the way the gloom and the autumn of this place felt right. FP looked at him, and for a moment he looked shocked about something.

Behind him, the other snakes were climbing off of their bikes.

"What'd the kid say?" said one. It was a woman. She pulled off her helmet and a riot of shaggy blonde hair tumbled out. She shot Jughead a grin.

"What was that about your family, honey?"

"I don't have--"

"We don't need to talk to the boy, Snake Charmer," FP growled. "Just gotta get him where he belongs." He shoved Jughead at the tracks again, this time so hard that Jughead almost stumbled. He righted himself and crossed.

On the other side, inexplicably, all was sunshine. He turned, and the snakes were standing in sunshine. Jughead blinked at them. It had been dark and fog-riddled a moment ago. It was dark and fog-riddled right on the other side of the tracks, but from here you couldn't see that.

As the snakes climbed back on their bikes, a hand closed on his shoulder. Jughead looked up. Sheriff Keller frowned down at him.

"I've gotta talk to you, boy, about a fire at the school. Got four other boys saying they saw what you did."

-

They did find a place for him. Halfway to the city, beyond the town limits -- a detention center. The Mayor seemed relieved. She said maybe they should have tried to send him to the city to begin with. He did seem to be from there. Certainly he wasn't from here.

They made a little bed for Jughead down at the station, while they waited for the state police to come pick him up. Just in one of the holding cells, but they left the door open, because he was ten. Archie came to see him. Betty was not allowed. Archie was only allowed to stay a bit. They had to get to Mr. Feebly's funeral.

The town was in shock, Archie's father said, shaking his head, because poor Mr. Feebly had fallen somehow and hit his head when he was looking for the source of the fire, and now he was dead.

So no one should have had much pity left over for Jughead, with what had happened to Mr. Feebly. But Pop had it. Pop came, and brought him a milkshake and a burger.

"I talked to that Mayor," he said, tugging anxiously at his cap. Jughead felt how warm the old man was sitting next to him, how warm the cell was, and wondered why here he was always cold. Always cold and always hungry. The burger couldn't fix how hollow he felt.

"I talked to her," Pop was saying. "I told her where you were born. I found you, after all. Saw the blood all left over. Cleaned you up and cleaned up the booth. This is your town, Juggie. This one. I know people don't listen to me, and I'm just an old man. But this thing with them trying to push you on the city. It isn't gonna stick. You've been meant for this little town since you were a baby, and here's the place you belong."

"Jeez, that's really Hallmark Christmas movie, Pop," Jughead said.

He worried, after all, that Pop was wrong.

The night before they took him away, someone stepped out of the shadows and walked into the holding cell. Jughead stared up at him. Somehow he felt like he'd known he would come.

"You can see me, can't you?" FP said. He sounded oddly proud. "Been here less than an hour, and none of them can see me, but you can. You'll see what's there, I bet. No matter what side of the tracks you're on."

He reached out a hand to Jughead. Jughead backed against the wall on instinct. A shadow passed over FP's face, and he pulled his hand back.

FP sat gingerly on the edge of the prison cot. After a second, he pulled off his leather jacket. Jughead saw that, beneath the edge of his t-shirt, he was all bandaged up.

"You killed Ghoulihand," he blurted out, for lack of anything better to say.

FP nodded slowly.

"That's why this other one's dead," he said. He spread his jacket out between them and grabbed Jughead's hand very suddenly. Jughead tried to squirm away, but FP didn't let him. He made Jughead trace the double-headed snake.

"That's what we're all like," FP said. "Connected. You hear of soulmates, boy?"

"Romance novel stuff."

"No," FP said, a hard edge to his voice. "Romance is pretty. And this is ugly, ugly stuff, kid. Look at this snake. One head for the underworld, one head for the world above. One for the water, one for the ground. One for the North, one for the South. Everything's got its mirror, my boy. Here they may tell you that's pretty, that's romantic. On our side of town we know it's not. We suffer for our mirrors, Forsythe."

Jughead looked at him, astonished.

FP looked back. He had dark, dark eyes, not at all like Jughead’s. A part of Jughead clung to the difference, was relieved by it. Another part was almost disappointed.

"Not you, though," FP said, his voice heavy. "I didn't want that for you. That's why--"

He reached out a hand. This time Jughead didn't pull back. He was surprised by the weight of it, by how he could feel FP's warmth through the knit of his hat.

FP was pawing his other hand through his own hair, eyes darting around to take in the cell.

"This isn't what I wanted," he said bitterly. His gaze darted to Jughead, all anxiety.

"You believe me, don't you?" he begged. "Don't you?"