𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐅 𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐄

ONE

The first bang, Veronica didn't think much of.

A growl of protest from an overworked water heater. An ill-fated bird crashing into the window. A particularly punchy gust of wind knocking a branch against a wall. It could've been anything—

Pop's was a creaky, old building with a lot to say.

The second bang made her glance up from her receipts.

She stared up the stairwell to the shadowed diner above, eyes unblinking over the sharp edge of her glasses. The cellar-turned-makeshift-office beneath Pop's remained silent around her, haloed in the quiet light of her desk lamp. Seconds stretched into minutes, and when no other sound followed, she chalked it up to coincidence. Resumed the thoughtless twirl of her pen between her fingers.

The third bang made her jolt in her seat.

It was the loudest of the three—a taunting, aggressive sound that sent a current through the building's foundation—and the vertebra of her spine stacked into a stiff line. It was one in the morning. She'd closed up the diner an hour ago. As far as she knew, she was completely alone.

Her mind immediately raced through a menu of possible scenarios, each one more unnerving than the last. Someone was trying to rob the diner. Someone was trying break in because they thought no one was there. Someone was trying to break in because they knew she was there.

She glanced at the locked drawer of her desk—a gun she'd stolen from her dad's office a few months ago was stashed inside it—and felt her pulse spike up to a sprint. She'd shot one once before during Archie's fight with the Serpents, a thunderclap warning aimed high above her head, but that was different. That was into the air. She'd never actually aimed at a person.

She reached out and swiped up her phone instead, unsteady fingers instinctively navigating to Archie's number. It took her two rings to remember he was in juvie. She blinked rapidly at the stupidity of the oversight, thumbing to the next contact in her 'favourites' list, and her fingers froze when she saw 'Home'.

For a second, she merely stared at it.

She couldn't call them. She couldn't call her own parents. For all she knew, they could be the ones behind it.

Razed by the reality of how fucked up her life had become, she swallowed thickly, deflecting the thought into some remote corner of her head. The names Betty, Kevin, and Reggie skimmed across her screen, tauntingly accessible, and she felt herself grow a little panicked: Kevin was out of town for the weekend, Betty was visiting Polly, and Reggie had been coming onto her pretty aggressively ever since Archie had gotten locked up so she'd been avoiding being alone with him.

The weight of her isolation pressed into the slopes of her shoulders. She'd never realized how few friends she'd actually made since she'd moved from New York—or at least, how few friends she'd made that she could consistently count on. Riverdale was a town of ransom notes and murdered classmates, and the shared trauma of it all made it easy to think she'd been forging iron-clad bonds with the people around her.

But what about when the trauma wasn't shared anymore? What about when she was the sole target?

Were those bonds really cast in iron, or were they just spiderwebs wrapped in foil? A frantic spider spinning a home out of the corner it was backed into?

Her heartbeat slid up a steady incline as she scrolled further and further down her recent texts, feeling more alone by the second. Aside from Betty and Archie, her relationships with people were shifting, mercurial, conditional upon what the latest headline in the paper was, what new scandal pitted who against who. Sometimes, especially lately, Betty wasn't even an exception to that.