Beronica Oneshots

Time with you, stands still.

Betty Cooper probably isn’t a good person.

Or maybe that’s not fair. She wants to be—she tries to be—but it still feels like… like at least some parts of her aren’t. Sometimes Betty feels hijacked, like she’s doing everything she can to hold it all together and somehow there’s someone else inside her calling the shots.

(“Betty couldn’t make it, so she sent me instead.”)

That person—whoever she is—she’s… well. Betty’d like to think that’s not her, is all. Deep down.

(“I could expose him in the pages of the Blue and Gold! Yeah, I can do that!”

“No. Spoken like a true good girl who always follows the rules.”)

But Betty is also pretty sure true good girls don’t fantasize about choking people.

To be honest, until recently she’d thought it wasnormal. You hear it all the time, don’t you? People complaining, saying they got so annoyed they just wanted to strangle someone. That’s—it’s a thing people say. So when she would fantasize about taking Cheryl Blossom by the neck and finally, finally shutting her up, about grabbing Archie andmaking him see her, well…

Maybe it wasn’t a thing good girls did, but even good girls have bad thoughts sometimes, right?

But at least with them, she’d felt mad. Frustrated. Betrayed.

Veronica’s not like that. God, even when Betty’d been mad at her, she’s never felt anything but safe and seen when she’s with Veronica.

So Betty has no excuse for the way her eyes always catch on the string of pearls that hangs delicately from Veronica’s throat, the way she thinks about tangling her fingers in that necklace and pulling, just enough, just until Veronica gasps, just until the pearls leave bulleted bruises across Veronica’s soft skin, a dark ellipsis trailing off to… to…

“Earth to Betty—you still with me?”

Betty blinks hard, and focuses to find Veronica beaming at her. Oh, god. “Sorry, I just… tuned out I guess. What were you saying?”

It’s getting ridiculous.

Two truths and a lie:

Betty didn’t get any sleep after that night at Ethel’s hot tub. Instead, she stayed up until dawn writing her expose for the Blue and Gold. She doesn’t remember what happened.

…trick question. Two of those aren’t true. Or at least, not completely.

She’d finished the article around 4 AM, only to find that flashes of what they’d done—the cuffs, the heels, crushing pills into a decanter and the smell of chlorine in the air—wouldn’t get out from behind her eyelids, the inside of her nose, under her skin.

It scares her, a little. Not what she did to Chuck—she still thinks he deserved it—but Veronica’s face while she did it. That combination of intimidation and wanting at seeing Betty be dangerous, at seeing Betty take charge.

It scares her how desperate she is to see that look again.

It scares her how easy it is to imagine Veronica agreeing to it. Maybe even asking for it.

And for so many reasons, too. Because Ronnie trusts her; because she still feels guilty about those seven minutes in heaven with Archie; because Betty’s not blind, she sees the way Veronica looks at her, even on a normal day. Not hungry. Just… aching.

Betty could fix that.

So she lets herself imagine it. The two of them, safe at the Pembrooke, away from her mother’s prying, laid out on Veronica’s bed. She’d start by throwing Veronica’s words right back at her—“Don’t freak out. Just trust me.”