Blind Love

I'm Here

"Stop!" Veronica whimpered in her sleep.

Jughead turned over and glanced at Veronica. She had repeatedly said what had happened to her was nothing she couldn't handle, but the way she was sleep talking proved otherwise. He crawled over to her and smoothed her knotted brow.

"You're safe," he murmured. "I'm here."

"Please don't," she continued. "Please."

When Jughead saw it wasn't working, he resorted to waking her up from the nightmare.

"Mm?" A sleepy Veronica mumbled. "What's going on?"

Jughead found it unnerving that he couldn't see her eyes. Unless she responded, he didn't know whether she was asleep or not.

"You were sleep talking."

"I was?" Veronica sounded a little panicked at the information. "What did I say?"

"Tell me what happened, Veronica, let me treat your wounds," Jughead insisted firmly.

"Would you want to tell me what happened with the Ghoulies that night?" She retorted bitterly.

"There were around thirty of them and one of me. They started kicking and beating every part of me. My whole body ached. They got knives and sharp weapons jabbing at me. Penny cut off a chunk of my arm," Jughead replied with no emotion.

"Why did you tell me?" Veronica was not expecting him to actually spill.

"I had to let it out eventually, or else it will keep haunting me forever if I kept it shut in."

There was a pause before Veronica quietly said in a small voice. "I think my shoulder's dislocated."

"Jesus, Veronica! Why would you keep something like that from me?" Jughead leapt up at once to treat her arm.

Upon touching her arms, Jughead discovered it was her right shoulder that was dislocated from the way she flinched.

It took one try and one loud scream before Veronica's arm was popped back into the socket. Veronica gasped for air, shuddering at the extreme pain.

At a loss of words again, Jughead carefully stroked her good arm as comfort. "It's gonna be better when you wake up in the morning."

"How do you know?" Veronica winced as she forced out the words.

"Because I'm here."

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"Fact number fifty: I daydream every night so I can create my own fake reality. You'd probably say I can't daydream at night because it doesn't make sense, but I just lie awake and create a perfect reality in my head until I fall asleep. That's the best part of the day, in my opinion. It all just seems so real and perfect and romantic."

"Never guessed Veronica Lodge would secretly be a huge romantic at heart," Jughead chuckled, spinning his beanie around on a finger. 

They'd been stuck in the prison for two days after Veronica had last been captured. All had been silent besides the occasional creak of the cell door to allow their food's entrance. At first, Jughead and Veronica had been quite awkward and sulky until they couldn't take the silence anymore and had agreed to tell each other facts about themselves that they originally did not know about the other.

"Oh shut up!" Veronica scowled, flicking his beanie across the room for the thousandth time during the short two day timeframe. "You literally just admitted you write poems about the one and only Elizabeth Cooper, so who's the closeted romantic at heart?"

Jughead simply rolled his eyes, too lazy to retrieve his beanie. "Who isn't, to be honest?" 

"True," Veronica agreed. "We all yearn to find our true love, our soulmate. When I was a kid I was quite desperate to find my first boyfriend, and now I actually wish I hadn't dated so many people just for the sake of feeling loved."

Jughead nodded a few times to Veronica's confession. "My first love, and hopefully last, is Betty. I like that she's my first girlfriend, but it sometimes sucks that I haven't had much experience. It's kind of a disadvantage because I don't know what I should do to impress her as a good boyfriend."

"She's smitten," Veronica chuckled. "You don't have to do anything, just be yourself."

The two drifted into a comfortable silence before Jughead asked a question. "Do you ever plan on marrying Archie?"

The question threw the ice princess off guard. She seemed lost in thought until she finally came up with a conclusion to tell her cellmate. "I don't think I'm a marriage kind of person. I mean, do you see any successful marriages here in Riverdale? My parents' marriage is a huge mess. They're more like business partners than husband and wife."

"Don't make your decisions based on Riverdale," Jughead scoffed. "Riverdale's so messed up."

"As if New York's much better!" Veronica laughed coldly. "I haven't seen love at all. Everything's status, business and appearances."

"Maybe if you based love on what you read or watch in books and movies, you'd have a little more faith in love."

"Is that why you love writing so much? So you can spin out your ideal life?"

"I write because it makes my life more real. Reality feels so unreal at times. But when I write, I'm in control of my life, and by writing it down it all seems a lot realer, whatever the ugly truth is. You can forget reality any time, you can forget what happened years ago, but if you have it all on paper, you can go check it out. It's real. It's there. It shows traces of my existence. So even when I die, people will know that I was once here, on earth, in Riverdale."