Mine (a Riverdale fanfiction)

Hope

It was Archie who came for Jughead during the raid on South Side High. He explained everything as he dragged Jughead away, and Jughead tried to listen even as he kept seeing Sweetpea and Toni—his friends, he acknowledged—handcuffed and led away because the North Side had to scapegoat the South Side for everything bad that happened in Riverdale. It was hard to look at Archie's open, earnest face and not see that blame, that hostility. Only the years of friendship allowed Jughead to look past it, and he thought maybe he finally really got how generations of bad blood kept people from being able to understand each other.

And maybe, for the first time, he didn't care. He had learned to like these South Side Serpents, learned to be one of them. It made his blood boil to see them punished for something they hadn't even done.

"Jughead, calm down," Archie urged him as he paced the aisle of Pop's.

"Calm down? Archie, Riverdale just became a police state!"

"McCoy said it's the Serpents are the ones dealing Jingle-Jangle."

That even his own best friend believed that just made Jughead more angry. "Serpents don't deal that stuff. The Ghoulies do."

"So tell Mayor McCoy that!"

"Oh, Mayor McCoy. Do you mean McCoy, the one that just arrested all my friends for no reason?" He saw that strike home with Archie, but swept on anyway, too angry to stop. "Why do you care, anyway? I thought you and Betty wanted nothing to do with me. Right?"

"I'm sorry about what happened, and how it happened. And as for Betty—you should maybe talk to her."

Fortunately, before Jughead could respond to that patent absurdity, his phone chimed. The Serpents were looking out for their own. And as Jughead left Pop's without a backward glance at Archie, for the first time, he truly felt that he was their own. He was a Serpent now, truly and completely.

*****

Betty left the meeting at her mother's with a new determination to retake her life. The Black Hood wanted her? Well, he would have to accept that he couldn't have her all to himself. Her life was important—her friends were part of that life, and she wasn't accepting this division any longer.

She took the first possible opportunity to talk to Veronica. Before she could say anything, Kevin, at his most spiteful, cut her off. "Don't even try, Benedict Betty."

"Chill, Kevin," Veronica told him. Her eyes were hard; she wasn't feeling particularly forgiving, Betty could see. "She's not worth it."

And they walked off, even as Betty's phone rang again. She ducked into an empty classroom as she answered it. "I've done everything you've asked. Why can't you leave me the hell alone?"

"Because we're not finished. I spared Nick's life. Because of me, you don't have his blood on your hands. If you don't help me, you'll be responsible for far worse. Riverdale's streets will run red."

"Help you how?"

"While Keller and his men hunt for low-level dealers, we will go after the real sinner: the drug-maker. Someone who hides behind a name. The Sugar-man. The corrupter of children, who deserves swift and brutal justice."

"The fact that you're asking me to find him means that you can't," Betty argued. "I'm a school newspaper reporter."

"Who also happens to be friends with the daughter of the Sugar-man's former supplier. Clifford Blossom. I'd start there."

"And if I find him? What will you do to him?"

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to, Betty," the Black Hood told her. "Bring me the identity of the Sugar-man and I will put down my sword."