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There’s a part of Archie that’s more awake when he’s asleep, as strange as that sounds. Like when he closes his eyes he’s able to parse through the tangles of metaphor that he can’t quite seem to get through anytime else. He’s not the brightest, he knows that, has always known that, he was best friends with Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones as a child, so he knows what it’s like when people are smart, real smart. Archie isn’t that. Archie has always been aware of the chasms between him and them. Archie has always been aware of the chasms between him and everyone.
But he thinks he knows more than other people realize. About himself, at least. Thinks he knows himself more than this town has decided. And the problem is that he wasn’t trying to fool anybody. He doesn’t know how he did it. How the pedestal got underneath his feet and how it started rising; he remembers being younger and feeling like he was king of the world, but he hadn’t meant to make it a wish. If he’d known how much power wanting could have, he’d have tried to want something different. Something cleaner. But even as he thinks that—well. Archie’s impulsive. What he wants changes from week to week, and it always feels far from clean. He’s never been able to control it, the same way he’s never been able to control the burning that always, irrevocably leads to him throwing a punch at whatever moving target’s in his sights at the moment. Archie isn’t a problem solver. Archie doesn’t troubleshoot. Archie takes what makes the world hurt and beats it down. Hits and hits and hits until it can’t hurt anybody. Until his knuckles are bloody and he’s scaring his friends and all of it can only touch him. Until everyone around him and their selective memories choose to forget the tarnish on his counterfeit gold, the pedestal rising higher and higher, and each time the fall hurts more, but Archie thinks he might be jumping off it of his own volition anyway.
And maybe that’s the real thing—Betty’s convinced her DNA makes her crazy, and Jughead’s convinced his DNA makes him doomed, and Veronica’s convinced her DNA makes her corrupt, but Archie doesn’t have that excuse to fall back on. In the recesses of his mind, Archie can admit that his father is one of the only truly good people in Riverdale—and still. And still. A gun in his hand. Taste of blood in his mouth. A picnic by Sweetwater River and Hiram Lodge’s cool grip. And still.
All this to say that Archie’s dreaming again, dreaming of someone playing a cello with the same fingers she used to—and here’s where the dreams get confusing, because being able to understand and wanting something to come to light are two very different things, and if a dream is what happens when your brain is trying to very hard to change the outcome of 2+2=4, then a dream is also an elongated version of that, 2+0.000.00.0+0+(-1)+1+0+2=4, and there’s enough moving parts there that Archie can still avoid the conclusion. It helps that he’s never been very good at math.
But.
When he dreams of Geraldine, there’s always blood on her fingers. Just the tips. Right under the nails, like she’s been scratching at them, making little horrible tears in the skin, and he knows it has to hurt, and he knows it’s because of him. She touches his cheek and winces, so Archie says I’m so sorry, and she touches his shoulder and gasps with pain, so Archie says thank you for everything. She paints his body while convulsions wrack her own, and Archie stands completely and utterly still, trying to remember whether this is what it felt like when they were in music practice and she’d put her hand on his thigh.
He’s a violent person, he knows that. But he never felt that way with her. So in the dreams, he lets her touch him, and then he bandages her fingertips. He kisses each nail. But only after the gauze has been applied. He doesn’t want to hurt her anymore than he already has.
——
He thinks it all started to go bad when Jughead transferred to Southside High, which means it all started to go bad when that social worker said he couldn’t live with Archie and his dad anymore, which means it all started to go bad when FP was taken away to prison, which means it all started to go bad when Jason Blossom was shot by his own father, which means it all started to go bad when all of their parents were wide-eyed desperate kids, a complicated net of love and hate and Archie’s only ever been able to see things in black and white. He lies in bed at night trying to think back to a time when Riverdale was good, and he can only come up with sticky summer nights spent sleeping next to Jughead, or the imprint of the asphalt on his knee as he knelt in front of Betty. But Clifford Blossom is bad—was bad—and Clifford Blossom still existed in these idyllic childhood memories, so the apple had to have been rotting already. And Archie isn’t a pessimist. He doesn’t think he’d be able to fight as much as he does if he didn’t believe he could fix this town. Fix the world. Archie’s the farthest thing from a pessimist, but he doesn’t understand how somebody can be good to you and then eat you from the inside out until you wake up one day without a heart. He thinks that if he could understand, then it would be okay. He thinks if he could make others understand, then it would be okay.
Nobody believed he would ever fit in with the Lodges, but the truth is that they're two sides of the same selfish coin. Archie knows how to make himself into what others need him to be, but they all have a nasty habit of dealing in coverups. The Lodges do it to eschew blame. Archie only ever wants to take it, because that’s easier.
And maybe the way that somebody can be good to you and then slowly corrode your muscles and organs and guts and skin and teeth is by never having been good to you in the first place. He feels this sometimes and it turns his head dull like a gunshot in a diner. His thoughts become jello and it’s easier for him to take them and mold them into something he can stand to look at. He got what he deserved, or he broke things by wanting.
Because maybe, sometimes, people change their minds. You make them change their minds. People change their minds about him all the time—he’s a hero until he’s a terrorist, he’s Geraldine’s prey until he’s Mr. Lodge’s capo, he’s Betty’s until he’s Veronica’s, he’s good until he isn’t. But that doesn’t actually say anything about him, because he was only ever one thing at a time, and maybe the truest sign that he’s from Riverdale and of Riverdale is that his core is as charred as the rest of them. And maybe he wants them to see that. Except he doesn’t, because he wants to be good, and that’s the worst part. He buys into it. The hero complex. The expectation. If it were to ever stop, he wouldn’t know what to do. A hero is a scapegoat, and Archie has survived on blame alone.
So maybe it didn’t start to go bad when Jughead transferred to Southside High. Maybe it started to go bad long before either of them were born, and anything they played at was only continuing a vicious cycle of hope and betrayal and hope again. Archie doesn’t know. Archie doesn’t know much of anything.
——
Veronica worries about him in a way Jughead and Betty can’t, or don’t, or won’t. She thinks she’s ensnared him, dragged him down to her family’s level, and the idea frustrates him—he remembers when she’d told him that she needed him, his goodness, to counteract the darkness in her life, that that was the reason they had to get back together, and it had felt right enough for Archie. Love was a well of resources inside him that would always replenish, so long as somebody was taking it out of him. As bad as he thinks he is, Archie can admit there’s a lot of love trapped inside his body; the problem is that his love has to be teased out by other people, fingers deftly weaving between the cello strings of his ribcage to pick out the love, like a maze. A labyrinth, he hears Betty’s voice in his ear. Or was it Jughead who had told him about the Minotaur? Archie can’t remember who in his life taught him punishment. The comparison doesn’t really work anyway, because it’s not that Archie’s love is hidden, it’s glaringly obvious, but it comes out wrong when he’s in control of it. All he knows is that when he loves on his own terms, somebody else ends up with a bruise the shape of his fist.
“Archiekins,” Veronica mumbles against his back, and that’s how Archie can tell he’s been stuck in his head for too long. The worried lilt of her voice. “Trouble sleeping?”
He doesn’t say anything, although he can’t bring himself to close his eyes. He’s facing away from her, so it shouldn’t matter. The shadows of her room are familiar to him in the way only something you’re still getting used to can be. He stops breathing, and he knows it’s what gives him away, but knowing something is hurting your case doesn’t mean you can stop yourself from doing it.
“It’s hard,” Veronica says, “To feel so far away from everyone.”
It is, Archie agrees, although his voice is trapped in his throat, and he wonders idly whether his senses are tricking him, and he’s dreaming again. He rewrites the thought. I don’t feel far away from anyone. Better.
“I should have made it more clear what you were getting yourself into, I—I didn’t want this for you,” she drops her voice even lower, as though there’s cameras on the walls, or a spy under the bed, and they’re in the Pembrooke, which means there probably are both of those things, and this must be a confession. “Or I did. Maybe I did. I wanted you, and I wanted you to want me, and this is what comes with wanting me. And I think the more danger I told you you’d be in, the faster you’d come running, and I didn’t want you to love me as just another body in a burning house, I wanted you to love me,” and this has to be a dream, because Ronnie doesn’t talk like that. Regardless, Archie should turn to her, but his limbs are heavy with sand.
“And now—look at us. When’s the last time we sat down at Pop’s, the four of us? Betty’s disgusted by me. Which, if I’m being honest, it was only a matter of time. It only ever would have ended like that,” she says, and Archie desperately wants to ask her what she’s talking about, but he can’t, because if this is a dream, then it says more about him what he thinks Veronica means, and if it isn’t a dream, then—then he doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t want to. “I hope Jughead comes around. Or I hope you do. Whichever will patch that up quicker. I can handle the isolation, but it isn’t fair to you that my Hades of a father is pushing you into hell with him. I don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan, and you’re supposed to be Orpheus, Archie, not Eurydice. That was a joke. Kind of. I read, too. Not as much as the two of them, but I can hold my own. I have merit beyond my name.”
I know, Archie thinks, and he wishes he could have his words back. Wonders if there’s a God up there that will listen to him if he starts praying. If that will get Veronica to stop talking, because the conversation is scaring him. Nobody is pushing him into hell. Archie has made these decisions himself. Whether they’re terrible or righteous, only time will be able to tell, but he’s willing to pay for them. Hiram Lodge hasn’t made it so that Archie’s friends and Archie’s parents can’t stomach the sight of him; Archie did that all on his own. Vaguely, he thinks about Betty telling him that Geraldine cut him off from all the people he cared about, and he hopes that if the nausea spinning his head dizzy makes him throw up that at least he’ll regain the ability to talk from it.
You used to worship your father. You used to play music. You, Jughead, Betty, you were inseparable, his mother had said to him, sharp, jagged, angry, and Archie had felt the bulletholes pierce through his skin, but I’m looking at you now and I don’t know who you’ve become. Who are you, Archie?
It had been about his involvement with Hiram Lodge. So why did it feel like it was about something else? They’d all been so upset when they found out about Geraldine, despite how defenseless she was, or had seemed—but if the most powerful man in Riverdale sinks his teeth into Archie, then it must be Archie’s fault for presenting his flesh as a sacrifice.
He’s surprised by the bitterness of the thought, and he decides, instantaneously, that he doesn’t mean it.
“Archie, I only recently realized what being a part of my family truly means. I’ve been asleep for sixteen years, and I didn’t want to wake up alone. I still don’t. And I feel sick having forced you into this. Because I can’t fathom a world where you might have considered saying no.”
Stop. Stop stop stop, he wants to beg her, but he knows she needs to get this out. He wonders whether his lack of breathing actually gave him away, or whether she believes his play acting. He’s not a good liar, but people tend to buy what he sells, even when he isn’t so sure himself what that is.
“You’re brave. And you take care of me. I trust you with myself and I trust you with my family, but Archie, I don’t trust you with you,” she says, lightly, the warmth from her body suffocating Archie, and he thinks he feels corrosive smoke from a house fire fill his lungs, somewhere distantly, somewhere far away from him, somewhere right here, “I don’t trust that you would tell me if—would you tell me? If my father ever did anything to you. Would you tell me?”
“No,” he croaks, throat dry and heart panicky, and it might be the only time he’s ever said the word.
——
There’s a part of Archie that’s more awake when he’s asleep, but the rest of him is having trouble telling dreams from reality. Jughead and Betty are kissing, tucked into a booth at Pop’s, and Archie is watching them. He turns to the right, certain that Veronica will be there, but she isn’t. Nobody is. In all the other booths. Pop isn’t at the counter. It’s just him, Betty, Jughead. He drums his hands on the table. The yolks of his fingers are bleeding.
Jughead’s hand is wrapped around Betty’s ponytail in a way that cannot be comfortable for either of them, and Betty’s hand is plastered on the back of Jughead’s beanie, and the closer Archie looks at them, the more he can see all the places they don’t touch. The spaces in between. The distance between their necks, the way their shoulders repel like the same sides of different magnets. He’s sure that when he first started looking they were moving, but now they’re frozen, both of their eyes open, like a statue, one of those lions that guard the libraries. They look ridiculous, Archie realizes. They look like puzzle pieces that will never fit. Like they’re tied together, locked in an enclosure. Like if he leaves them alone they’ll pounce, and he’ll lose them both for good.
And then Betty’s hand is slipping Jughead’s beanie off his head, except it isn’t a beanie anymore, it’s a crown. And Veronica is next to him now, sipping a milkshake and wearing a hoop skirt. And there’s an old love song playing through a jukebox, and Archie feels like he’s drowning, like he’s falling through time, like he’s done this all before and he’s going to do it forever, and Jughead meets his eyes across the booth, sweater so blue it makes his heart constrict, and something burns in him, different than the other burning, if he can ever truly separate them, and Jughead reaches out to touch him, and before he can tell him that the crown Betty pushed off his head is about to hit the floor, Archie wakes up.
——
“Let me tell you a secret, Archie,” Hiram Lodge says, and the chair he’s perched on is several stories high and made of human bone, “The worst thing you can do in this world is let them know who burned you. Because that means you’re owned.”
Archie is down on one knee, neck craned up as he tries to look into Mr. Lodge’s eyes, but there’s a light blinding him. He squints against it. Keeps trying anyway.
“Sir?”
“I’ve marked you, but you chose that. Were you trying to hide the past?”
“Were you?” Archie echoes, but it’s empty. Both the room and him. Geraldine’s hand is on his shoulder, blood staining his shirt, and there’s tears in her eyes. “Who burned you?”
“It isn’t always a torch you carry. Sometimes it’s just inside you. I had to put the fire out on somebody.”
“Was it me? Was it something I did?” Archie asks, but his words keep getting distorted, like he’s screaming through a very long tunnel while being dunked underwater, which is frustrating, because Archie wants to ask if he was the first one. If he was the last one. But Geraldine is blurry before him, and her grip is solid, and he thinks his entire shirt might be dyed red now, and the stinging in his chest tells him that it’s her incisions but not her blood, not only her blood, and suddenly it’s him and Hiram again, shaking hands smeared in the stuff bodies run on, and all it ever really is is a lack of distinction between the boy who should be Archie Andrews, and whoever’s pulling the strings behind locked doors this time around. They use him and use him and use him and use him and use him and use him and use him and use him and he’s on fire now, he realizes distinctly. And he thinks he set this one himself.
“The worst thing you can do in this world,” Hiram repeats, and the bones on his throne are Archie’s, “Is let them know who burned you. That you’ve been burned—that’s fine. None of us ever get out unscathed. But hide the culprit. For your own best interest. They’ll find both our fingerprints at the crime scene, and then what will we do?”
Archie pulls back, and the place where their arms connect rips clean off, until he’s holding Hiram’s zombie limb in one hand, and the cello bow he gifted Geraldine in the other, and he’s strangling her with it, and then there’s nothing. He’s ten years old, kneeling in front of Betty Cooper and asking her to marry him, and he needs her to say yes, to save him, the way he’s supposed to save her. The edges of the storybook pages smoothen out.
“It could be worse,” Betty says instead, and a man in a hooded mask has his hand placed too high on her shoulder, “It could be family.”
—
Nobody’s ever quite free, I think, Betty tells him one night, although she isn’t talking, because they’re dancing. But he can hear her. Their foreheads are touching. That might be it. Even if we don’t know it. We’re defined by that absence, sometimes. And the thing that hurts the most is the only way to make it make sense.
I don’t want it to make sense, Archie says, I want to kill it.
I want it to end, Betty says, but I don’t think it ever will. I’m going to spend the rest of my life chasing retribution. And in the end, it won’t have meant anything. And nobody will ever know.
That can’t be all there is. There has to be more.
Are you ready to face it?
Not for me, Archie says, and he can’t hear the music they were swaying to before, I don’t care about me—
And there’s your problem. Because I do, Arch, you know? Care about you. And care about me. I care about what happened to me. I care about what my father did. I’m running towards something. And maybe I’ll never reach. Maybe I’m just as lost as you, but every decision I make is with the express purpose of ensuring that none of that ever happens to me or to anybody ever again.
You like to feel above me, Archie says, and the words taste sour on his mouth. If they were awake, if this was real, Betty would pull back, her mouth pressed into a taut line. Hurt carved onto every inch of her face. But controlled.
This isn’t real life, so Betty just keeps dancing with him, and Archie wishes he regretted the words, but he doesn’t, so he keeps going.
I know I’m not as smart as you, he pushes, and Betty guides him into spinning her, I know you think you’re bad and that makes you feel like I’ll never get anything that you’ve gone through, but maybe I’m bad, too.
Okay, Betty says, hooking her arms around her neck, so we’re both bad. This is interesting. We aren’t usually the ones fighting like this. Our fantasies are normally much happier.
You don’t seem surprised.
I think this has been a long time coming. We can only pin our one true hopes on each other for so long, before those hopes come crashing down. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?
I don’t think any of you know me.
I feel like I know myself, but sometimes the house lights flicker.
I wish, Archie starts, and then stops, because he doesn’t know how to end the sentence. Betty hums against his temple, and everywhere that they touch sears them both.
Me too, she says, Me too, Arch. You know, we’re playing the wrong roles, here. But if you were Jughead, I don’t think we’d be touching.
Would it be easier? If we were in love?
No, Betty says, and the word is like a balm to their third degree burns.
——
When he wakes up, it takes him a moment to realize his room is on fire. He sits up, watches the flames lick at his feet. Any sense of urgency has left him. He makes a move to touch it, before realizing, dimly, that he’s tied to the bed. He leans back against the headboard and watches the fire dance. He wonders what happens if you die in a dream, what the consequences are for his living body, because he doesn’t feel as though there are any consequences left that could possibly make a difference, and then Jughead bursts into the room, eyes wild.
“Arch,” he breathes, leaning over him, “Arch, we’ve gotta get you out of here.”
Archie looks down at where Jughead’s fingers are pulling at the rope, watches as the heat from the flames spreads and boils welts into Jughead’s hands, and Archie can’t help it when he starts crying. Jughead doesn’t seem to notice, preoccupied with saving him from this impossible sinking ship.
“I’m hurting you,” Archie says, quietly, and Jughead still doesn’t look up, “You have to go, or it’s going to get you, too. Jug, listen. You have to get away from me.”
“We have to get you away from this,” Jughead corrects, as if it should be obvious, as if he knows everything, and Archie wishes he did.
“You can’t,” Archie says, and he watches as the fire gets closer and closer to Jughead, to his best friend, to the boy he feels he’s known forever who is so far from him these days, who’s only ever getting farther and farther whenever Archie dares to look for him in the rearview mirror, and he wants to change the landscape of the dream, wants to scream and fight and yell what happened to us?, but he’s scared of the answer. He thinks he might already know.
Jughead pulls the rope slightly looser, and Archie slips his hands through, and if he’s slipping his hands through that means he can slip his body through, it means he’s free, but it doesn’t feel that way, and his skin is melting, and Jughead’s hands and arms are covered in his own blood, all from trying to save him, because that’s what always happens, Archie hurts people, that’s how the story goes, so he doesn’t let himself go free. He grabs Jughead’s face with his palms, instead, and the fire goes out all on its own. Somewhere beyond them, the wishbone breaks.