Work Text:
Dear Diary, Betty writes, and then stops, her pen hovering over the page.
Betty has kept a diary since she was seven, and still keeps all her old ones in a box under her bed. Every day of her life meticulously dissected and memorialised, caught like a snowflake on a glove before it can melt and kept forever. She’s poured her heart out over Archie, about her mother, about Polly... but today, she doesn’t know where to start.
She thinks back to the strange incongruity of Jughead at her breakfast table with her mother, to the sharp tone of her mother’s voice every time she said his name – a nickname so much a part of Jughead she forgets it was given in insult and claimed for his own, with all the fierce pride of a boy who, injured, bites back – it all comes flooding back in the dismissive pause her mother takes before each Jughead. Her mother weaponises silence the way she weaponises everything else in Betty’s life.
She tries to write about Polly, about the dark oppressive silence (it too a weapon) which surrounded the convent, about how small Polly looked with her swollen belly, like she was being consumed by something so much larger that she was. She understands – but will not condone or rationalise – the fear her parents have, the way her mother spits out “what that boy did to our Polly.” Polly whose child can only be as gentle as she is, who will have kind hands and a soft voice, and Polly who seems still younger than she is, trapped like a caged bird in a convent, but also by what she and Jason have made.
And now she is alone.
Betty’s hand shakes, and her pen makes a thick dark line across the page.
And then there’s Jughead – gentle Jughead, who stood behind her through all of this, who always came back, always cared. Jughead whose lips had pressed so suddenly to hers, whose voice had broken like he’d snapped –
She wonders if that’s it after all. If the sight of Polly, who Betty loved, and their family so broken had caused something to snap within him. Whether the ragged edges she kept (by choice, or by force? She can’t remember) soothed in gentle pastel so they wouldn’t stick out too much had resonated with him more deeply than she’d given him credit for. She’s not stupid – she knows Jughead is broken too.
What she doesn’t really know, is why.
And with the ragged kaleidoscope of her family’s mess splayed out in front of him, she wonders why he’s pulled closer instead of running away.
It all comes back to the kiss.
She tries to write about it; when Betty Cooper hits a snag she makes lists, she itemises, she solves, but this won’t balance and her thoughts keep turning over and over in a heaving mess that she can’t settle down. Her skin feels too tight for her body, (maybe I am crazy), and she remembers the sensation of his hands on her face, his body so close to hers, his lips –
She wonders if this is how Polly felt, if she’s standing on the edge of the same precipice her sister has jumped from. They’re intertwined, after today, her feelings for Jughead and Polly and Jason: when he kissed her she fell, too taken aback to act, too overwhelmed to stop her own racing mind, or the sound of her mother’s voice – ever present – that boy
She knows, intellectually, they’re not the same at all. But Polly has grown up, and maybe, today, so has she. After all, she still feels the taste of him on her lips. She’s fallen away from Archie (she should have known, after how easy it was to dismiss him at lunch, to skip his performance), and into the orbit of something more dangerous (less wholesome?); or, perhaps, simply more grounded than her childish fantasies.
She wonders when they all became so broken.
In the end she gives up trying to get it all down on paper and shoves her diary back into her bedside table drawer. She nearly calls Jughead twice – suddenly realising that he’s the one she’s turned to consistently for the past few weeks – but thinks better of it. Or, rather, chickens out of demanding answers to questions like, “why did you kiss me?” or, the slightly more pathetic, “is everything going to be ok?”
Instead, she calls Veronica.
She picks up on the first ring.
She’s also crying, which is something Betty wasn’t really expecting.
“Hey,” Veronica says, sort of low and hollow, in a way Betty feels but can’t quite articulate.
“Hey yourself,” she replies, softly. “Today sucked.”
Veronica lets out a low bark of laughter. “Yeah, yeah it did.”
“Can –,” Betty pulls at a thread on her bedspread nervously. “Can we meet?”
“Sure, cariño,” Veronica says. “I was hoping you’d ask. Pop’s?”
Betty’s already shrugging on a sweater. “Yeah. I’ll probably be there in twenty.”
---
For the first time, the lights in the diner seem almost garish. Betty’s already ordered them a couple of milkshakes, and she sits low in the booth waiting for Veronica to get here.
When she does, Veronica nearly flings herself into the booth, chucking her purse against the wall with enough force it bounces back and off the bench onto the floor.
“Wow,” Betty says.
“I have had the worst 24 hours,” Veronica replies. “You won’t believe –”
She stops as their milkshakes arrive, managing a polite smile for Pop before savagely scooping a helping of whipped cream straight into her mouth.
“Did you see me sing?” she asks. “I didn’t see you in the crowd.”
Betty winces. “No, sorry. Jughead and I, –” she pauses, the memory of the kiss flashing hot across her skin, “uh, we found Jason’s car. And I saw Polly.”
“Shit,” says Veronica. It’s the first time Betty’s heard her swear. “Holy shit. Betty, I – I’m so sorry. Here I am, thinking about me –”
Betty actually laughs at that, and feels the tiniest bit of tension in her shoulders begin to unwind. “It’s alright. Tell me about your terrible day. Maybe I can help?”
Veronica gives her a close look over the top of her milkshake. “You sure? We can do you –”
“I’m sure,” Betty says. “I’ll go after. I don’t…. I don’t really know how to talk about it. It’s just a lot.”
Veronica, as she does with most things, manages to accept that with the precise amount of calm practicality that Betty needs right now.
“Right,” Veronica says. “Well, Archie’s dad is dating my mom.”
“Shit,” Betty says, with feeling. And Veronica bursts out laughing.
---
It’s two am and they’ve finished their milkshakes, slouched in their seats, and Veronica’s switched over to Betty’s side of the booth so they can hold hands. Betty’s pretty sure her mother hasn’t noticed she’s gone yet by the way her phone still sits silently on the table, and, on a high of relief over being able to talk about everything and, probably, sugar, she feels a bit like she’s floating.
“I should’ve called you sooner,” says Betty.
“Probably,” Veronica agrees. “But, then again, so should I. I needed this. We needed this.”
Betty’s head is resting on Veronica’s shoulder, and her feet are propped up on the seat on the other side of the booth (she feels a little guilty doing it, but she knows Pop’s seen and he doesn’t seem to mind).
“What are you going to do about your mom?” Betty asks quietly.
She feels Veronica shrug. “My mother will do what she wants,” she says, flatly. “What are you going to do about Polly?”
“I have to find her,” Betty says. “But I can’t help wondering… what if my parents are right?”
“Hey, we’re all a bit crazy,” Veronica says. And it’s an almost eerie echo of Jughead’s words. It’s enough to make her sit up.
“There’s something else,” Betty says, fiddling with the straw of her empty milkshake. “Jughead kissed me.”
“Jughead?” Veronica echoes, and Betty’s almost offended by the incredulity in her voice. Or she would be, if she didn’t still feel quite so blindsided by it herself.
“So,” after a beat Veronica says, “what does this mean?”
“I don’t know,” Betty says, dropping her head into her hands. “We never talked about it. I remembered the car and we went off looking.”
Veronica starts chuckling. “You remembered the car while he was kissing you?”
“Shut up,” says Betty, dropping her head down to the table and revelling in the sensation of cold plastic against her forehead.
“Oh my god,” says Veronica. “Was it that bad?”
“No.”
“Well it clearly wasn’t good,” Veronica says. “Not as good as me.”
“Not the time, Veronica.”
“So, are you, like, serious about this?”
And that, Betty thinks, is the question. Is she? “I don’t know. It just kinda happened.”
Veronica has a way of seeming to know exactly what people need before they’ve clued into it themselves. Always one step ahead with a solution and a clever retort; Betty loves this about her. Because if there’s one thing Veronica Lodge does, it’s read people.
“Right,” she says, businesslike. “Walk me through this, Betty. From the top. When did this start?”
Betty pulls herself upright. “We’ve been working closely together on the Blue & Gold.”
“Close as in ‘long looks and unnecessary touching of hands’ close? Or just together a lot?”
“The first one,” Betty admits. “But I don’t think I noticed.”
Veronica looks like she’s going to laugh again.
“Ok, and when he kissed you, what did you feel?”
Betty can feel herself blushing at that. Veronica grins. “Fine, that answers that.” Then she shrugs. “Look, it’s really this simple: you need to talk to him. You need to either say, ‘hey, great kiss, let’s do it again’, or ‘sorry, dude, Veronica was better.’”
“I don’t think I’m going to say either of those things. Ever.”
“I was, though, wasn’t I?” Veronica asks. “I mean, I must have been better than Jughead.”
“What’s wrong with Jughead?” Betty asks, surprised at how immediately defensive she is (but hasn’t she always been? Even when they were little).
“Nothing,” Veronica says. “And I’m pretty sure all this is answering your question.”
“I don’t think now is a good time for a relationship.”
Veronica nods. “He’ll get it. And, if he doesn’t, I’ll run him over in Cheryl’s ridiculous convertible.”
Betty sniggers and sinks low in her seat again, putting her feet back up on the opposite bench. “Thanks.”
Veronica wraps an arm around her and drops a light kiss on her head. “Anytime, mi cielito.”
“Do you ever feel like the world’s never going to stop feeling so much bigger than you are?” Betty asks, quietly.
Veronica frowns and squeezes Betty’s arm. “You can’t expect to just deal with all of this at once, Betty. Polly isn’t your responsibility to solve, and neither is undoing all your parent’s mistakes.”
“She looked so young,” Betty says quietly. “Younger than me. And so broken when I told her about Jason.”
Veronica goes very still beside her – even her breathing seems to still.
“I mean, I’m happy for her – a baby! But I don’t know how to do any of this.”
“You shouldn’t have to, Betty.”
“She used to look out for me,” Betty says. “She used to help, with mom – and we had everything planned out, college and jobs and everything. And it’s all just… gone.”
“Hey,” Veronica says gently, nudging her on the shoulder. “It’s not gone. She’s pregnant, not dying. Honestly, I think sometimes your mother has wedded you to this barbie-doll version of yourself that no one could ever be. Polly made a mistake – but that doesn’t mean it’s all over. Hopefully your parents will see that for themselves.”
After she’s climbed back in her window, drenched from the rain but smelling like Veronica’s perfume, she writes those words down, as best as she can remember them, in her diary. Then, underneath, she writes.
Today I found Polly.
I am not crazy.
---
Jughead is trying to work on his novel, scrunched into a corner of the school library with his headphones on, when Veronica strolls up and sits down in front of him, nearly on his feet.
He slams the screen closed and whips off his headphones, scowling. She has the audacity to arch an eyebrow back and shove his feet off the windowsill so she has more room to sit.
“Aren’t you meant to be irritating somebody else?” Jughead asks.
“No,” Veronica says. “No, we’re gonna have a little talk, you and I.”
Jughead doesn’t know what to say to that, so he simply blinks. The thing is, Veronica is an anomaly. He’s watched her worm her way into their lives utterly seamlessly, sat across from her in a booth in Pop’s and watched – sometimes with a mixture of fury and admiration – her relentless self-composure and self-confidence convince everyone around her that she belongs.
She’s omnipresent, unforgettable – and she usually ignores him.
“It’s about Betty.”
At that he feels the beat of his heart change, his skin prickle with nervous anticipation, and he fights down the urge to bolt. Betty, it would seem, has talked. For half a heartbeat he considers the possibility that he’s being rejected via the medium of a former NYC socialite, perched primly on the edge of a dingy windowsill, but he quickly puts that aside. He’s seen Betty this morning, in the hall on the way to class. And Betty isn’t callous – if anything, she’s unfailingly polite, always considerate. Betty would probably give him a burger and shake and apologise a hundred times before finally saying ‘no’.
Veronica is still staring at him, so he manages, “what about Betty?”
She sighs, rolling her eyes expressively. “Let’s cut to the chase: I’ve spoken to Betty, I know what’s happened between the two of you, and I’m here to give you the shovel talk. And, well, to talk.”
“What?” It’s about all he can manage.
“Shovel talk first!” she says, slapping her knees. “If you do anything to hurt Betty –”
“Are you serious?”
“Or screw with her, or humiliate her, or pressure her, or do anything I don’t approve of –”
“Veronica,” he says, putting his hands up as if he’s stopping this entire mental speeding train he’s somehow found himself on, “I’m not going to –”
She holds up a finger to stop him talking, and he’s torn between fury and an impulse to laugh. “I wasn’t finished,” she says. “If you do anything to hurt her, I will make your life a living hell. Got it?”
He glares furiously. “You done?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Great, thanks.” He musters as much sarcasm into those two words as he possibly can, and practically spits them at her.
“Now,” she says, ignoring him completely. “About Polly.”
“What about her?”
“Look, I care for Betty. You obviously care for Betty. Or, at least, I’m assuming you do otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to stick your tongue down her throat –”
“Seriously, what the hell?”
“And she’s beyond freaked out by this whole thing.”
“Yeah,” Jughead says, shifting uncomfortably. “Well, she’s not the only one.”
“I want to help,” Veronica says. “I should have offered before now.”
Jughead shrugs. “Take it up with Betty.”
“I already have. Now I’m taking it up with you. You obviously work as a team, and you shut Archie out pretty damn effectively yesterday. I’m asking you to let me in.”
Jughead sometimes wonders why he feels so compelled to write a book about this chapter in their lives: about Jason Blossom’s death and everything that’s come after. He’s rationalised it several ways, that he wants to remember this watershed in their lives as clearly as possible, that he wants to step back and analyse, to remove himself fully (as he himself had been excised, cut from Archie’s life before he worked his way back in) and look at it as an unbiased, authoritative source. Because he wants control.
Veronica steps into a new situation and makes it bend around her, like a black hole she shifts the gravity of the group to sit herself at the centre. And now, she’s pulled on him, bending him to her will.
Veronica’s name is all over his book – all with epithets riddled with equal measures of admiration and contempt. He watches her pull his friends into her orbit so effortlessly, and then work her way into his text, ever present, boldly throwing herself across his pages even when he can’t quite work out how she fits into it all. After all – she wasn’t in town in July.
When he writes this up afterwards (half for ‘posterity’ and half just to be able to parse it), he recognises how brilliant it really was to leave it in his hands. Because, of course, how could he say no?
---
Veronica watches him like a hawk in the offices of the Blue & Gold. But she’s brave, and she’s smart, and she has resources, and Betty lights up when she’s there. Jughead’s eyes follow Betty, and Veronica follows him, and Betty sits, tense and bundled up with a ponytail so tight it stretches the skin at her temples, and just frays.
And suddenly, he and Veronica have common ground. Because they’re both going to be there to catch Betty when she comes apart.
“You know,” Veronica says one evening, while Betty’s out on a coffee run, “I never see you go home.”
Jughead freezes like a deer in the headlights, and, willfully, forces all of his limbs to relax and meet her gaze. It’s knowing. She’s leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, just watching him.
“And my mom works at the diner, so, I know you spend most of your time there.”
He tries to swallow but he can’t even seem to get that working right. His own heart beats a frantic tattoo in his ears and he feels just as cornered by Veronica as he does by Reggie and his thugs when they really go off on one. He bristles the same way too, clawing around his own my for a sarcastic and cutting retort that will turn this into a fight.
“I need a favour,” she says. “My mom and I aren’t seeing eye to eye and you are precisely the sort of person she’d not be keen on my bringing ‘round. So, if you ever want to crash somewhere for whatever reason, let me know. We’ve got a guest room.”
He blinks. Then blinks again.
It’s utterly transparent and he’s sure they both know it. But she’s not said anything outright, and she’s given him an opening.
“You want me to come and sleep over to piss your mom off?” he says, flatly.
She nods, then pulls out her phone scrolling through it lazily. “You’d be doing me a favour. None of my usual methods are working and it’s time to up the ante.”
“Veronica,” he says – but he has no idea what to say. Thank you? Fuck you? I don’t need pity? But this isn’t pity. This, like everything else Veronica does, is carefully orchestrated, well thought out, and – he begrudgingly admits – sort of graceful.
“Do you have any tattoos?” she asks.
“What? No.”
She sighs, putting her phone back in her bag. “Shame.”
He swallows down the words thank you, his tongue heavy and thick, and feels both grateful and worthless at the same time. Veronica gives him a gentle half-smile and says, “and you can help me with my plans to move Betty out of that hellhole she lives in if I have to punch her mother in the face myself.”
He can’t help it, he laughs.
---
Betty has filled a week’s worth of pages in her diary, and not once addressed the kiss. It looms heavily in her mind. She’s been working with Jughead, and – of all people – Veronica, who seems to have taken it upon herself to play George Fayne to Betty’s Nancy Drew. Veronica who seems to have pulled Jughead into the fold (or Jughead and Betty out of the fold they’d been hiding in? Betty’s still not sure), and who seems to be inching her way closer through his layers of prickliness and snark.
For Betty’s sake.
And yet, while Veronica seems to be working tirelessly to sort Betty’s life out, Betty herself has barely done anything. She can’t even pretend to herself that her throwing herself head-first into figuring out how the car got torched isn’t a way of ignoring the way Jughead’s eyes follow her around the room and the way her skin prickles when he gets close.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to him about it, it’s just that she doesn’t know how.
So, he remains conspicuously absent from her diary while Betty parses and parses and runs round and round in circles in her own head drawing herself forever back to Jughead. Jughead who looks sort of hollowed-out in a way she resonates with, whose summer she knows nothing about (and he’s now the only one, after interviewing damn near the whole school). Jughead who seems to live in the Blue & Gold offices.
The problem is, she’s not sure what she wants. Every time she thinks about it – about the gentle sound of Jughead’s voice, the sarcasm he wields like a scalpel but drops the second she needs support, the way he seems to linger always just in her frame – she comes back to Polly. She wonders if her mother has destroyed her: if any thought of romance will always be tinged with the fear of failure.
But Betty Cooper doesn’t want to be broken. And she doesn’t want her mother’s legacy.
So, screwing up her courage, she writes, Dear Diary, Jughead kissed me a week ago and it’s about time I talked to him about it.
She punctuates this furiously in the hope that it’ll drive her to do something. Then, out pours an absolute mess of feeling, so quickly her pen can barely keep up with it as she tries to capture everything she feels.
It’s cathartic – which, really, is the reason Betty keeps a diary in the first place. Without decompressing she wonders if she might simply implode under the weight of her own feelings.
Then, before she can lose the momentum she’s gathered, she texts Jughead.
What she doesn’t expect is an invitation over to Veronica’s.
---
Veronica’s spare room, like the rest of her house, is opulent but with a level of tastefulness one might expect from an expensive hotel. It looks equally un-lived in, despite Jughead’s backpack propped up in the corner and a messy pile of dirty clothes half-spilling out of the hamper.
“How long have you been living with Veronica?”
She sentence sounds insane even as she says it. The world has tipped on its axis – Jughead and Veronica, Veronica and Jughead.
He shifts, every iota of his posture uncomfortable. “I’m doing her a favour,” he says. “Some kind of turf war with her mother.”
“Yes, but Veronica,” Betty says helplessly, gesturing around the room.
He’s looking steadfastly at the floor. “Home’s not the best at the moment.”
She can almost hear pieces falling into place and she feels sick. “Jughead,” she says slowly, then stops – not really sure what to say after that. “Jughead.”
He takes a step back, his arms crossing across his front protectively, and he looks small, like Polly
Betty shifts, feeling like she’s been shattered – she’s spent a week so wrapped up in her own head she’s missed what Veronica had so obviously seen, spent a week wondering if she cares and not caring enough...
“Betty.” Jughead’s voice does the same small break it did before he kissed her. She’s across the room and kissing him before she can stop herself. It’s a curious mirror image of their first kiss: held in fragile suspension in the midst of their world’s falling apart. She feels like she’s made of sharp edges, like she can’t even get this right, like she’s caused more damage –
But Jughead pulls her closer, his lips warm on hers, and his hands cup her face gently like he can’t quite believe this is happening.
She doesn’t think about cars this time.
---
Veronica finds them curled up on the bed later, Jughead’s arm thrown around Betty’s shoulders, while Betty runs back through their list of possible suspects, ticking them off on her fingers.
“Oh good,” Veronica says. “You’ve kissed and made up. Now stop detecting without me.” She flings herself down on the edge of the bed, toeing off her heels.
Betty smiles brightly at her, and Jughead manages a sardonic smirk, his face half-hidden in Betty’s hair.
“You’re both idiots,” she says, affectionately. “And I’m still the best kisser.”