B E L I E V E R

Veronica tried to keep the surprise off of her face but it was almost IMPOSSIBLE. Maybe it was the social stigma of the South Side that she’d been twisted towards, but actually seeing him IN THE FLESH and deeming his peers not all bad was all kinds of surprising. She wasn’t exactly completely convinced, not when he was talking about these PREJUDICES against her father. Perhaps it was all a big MISUNDERSTANDING; but being put in a place where you could lose your home, your EVERYTHING was something Veronica was eerily familiar with, and it sucked. Business was business but people’s lives being RUINED because of theirs wasn’t something she wanted at all– her mother had assured her that nobody was going to be DISPLACED; but talking to Jughead now made her doubt it, understandably. She wasn’t going to sway her loyalty just yet, not that EASILY. “I didn’t know there was a different gang that did that,” she hummed softly under her breath. Her family gave sizable DONATIONS to charity– buying Pop’s when he needed the money, maybe he just didn’t understand her world the way he didn’t understand his.

Perhaps he wasn’t as QUICK to connect the dots, either. She wasn’t being very clear or forward about who she was, but she’d at least ASSUMED he knew who it was he claimed to hate. She sighed softly, shaking her head in response. “So you’d rather that the COMMUNITY suffer? Have old dilapidated buildings with schools used as drug dens instead of something NEW because it comes from someone else?” Veronica looked up, not quite noticing the raise in her volume just then as she cleared her throat, focusing on the way his hands were SHAKING as she shook her head. “That’s not what Lodge Industries stands for,” she sighed heavily.

“There’s a LOT about the southside you don’t don’t know,” Jughead was quick to point out, the poorer side a mystery to those who never had to worry about money or being pushed from their homes and the southside had no interest in teaching people who didn’t even CARE to learn. “If it wasn’t for the serpents, there would be a lot of people without anyone to turn to. All alone without help and they’d just have the GHOULIES. At least we try to keep something of PEACE between us even if we’re the damned scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in this town.” But who would believe that? When northside kids were caught with drugs, it fell on the serpents to pay the price. When people turned up dead, it was UNTHINKABLE someone from the north could be involved. Time and time again, they took the blame and Jughead had learned from a young age that wasn’t about to change anytime soon. Prejudice ran in their veins, poisoning even the youth, their CHILDREN and spreading like a sickness and he recalled being mocked as a kid on the playground with Betty and Archie before he cut them from his life. 

Graduating without Jughead wasn’t easy. In fact, the ripple effect of his friend’s abrupt disappearance had impacted the entirety of his future to that moment of their serendipitous meeting at Pop’s. The onset of depression following Riverdale’s upsetting onslaught of misfortune from his father’s shooting to his best friend evaporating from his life had been debilitating, leaving him with no scholarship or prospects aside from the one his father had laid out for him. But Archie couldn’t manage business or college or even relationships when the most popular circulating rumor was that Jughead had become another casualty of gang warfare.

“That’s… great, Jug,” Archie said, for lack of a better response when he was still trying to plunge his emotional drain pipe. He hadn’t felt anything for years, which was an astounding development for someone who used to cry during Titanic, every single rewatch.“I’m really happy for you, man. Are you staying or should I get your order wrapped up to go?”

@serpentfamily

Jughead hadn’t expected a warm welcome from anyone in town, anticipating a cold greeting instead. After all, he had disappeared without a word, not even a goodbye to those closest to him and leaving them to perhaps assume the worst of what had happened and in a town like Riverdale, there were numerous possibilities. Murder the most prevalent rumour as he had heard from his father upon his return. So when his little accomplishment was all but dismissed, Jughead had no room to blame the other and instead let it slide away. He was a boy returning from the dead a ma, the prodigal son come home but without the little fairytale ending where everyone lived happily ever after.

REPOST, DO NOT REBLOG.

BASICS.

name: V

age: 24 pronouns: she / her zodiac sign: scorpio. is this a surprise? taken or single: single and happy least favorite face(s):  anna kendrick and blake lively multi or single: both plots or memes?: i go for both. i prefer plots but memes can be great too and they’re just fun to get.

THREE FACTS.

i.  i'm a freak about final fantasy (as if that’s a secret) ii. i never go anywhere without one of my leather jackets  iii. i make being ace into pretty much a meme

EXPERIENCE.

platforms you used:  youtube used to be a thing, facebook, various forum sites

MUSE PREFERENCE.

female or male:  female but I love playing males as well

WRITING PREFERENCE.

FFXV starters || @bcysnextdoor

Four years past and here he was again. Just before his seventeenth birthday, Jughead had just DISAPPEARED, taking his leave from the town after everything seemed to constantly be caving in. Maybe some thought him to be another victim to the pile of corpses that plagued the town, maybe some thought he’d been kidnapped given the number of ENEMIES he had made. But it was far, far simpler than that. Just a mere case of running away from it all, just a teen seeking a new life and a new beginning. Granted, it hadn’t been easy. Sleeping on the streets and in various shelters for the first year before finding a group to stay with and work with. It was something, at least. No talk of gang violence or drugs or MURDER. Just people rebuilding.

FP tightened his lips, his jaw flexing in his cheek as he listened to Jughead recant memories that he was certain were years old by now. A surge of rage set his chest on fire hotter than any whiskey ever did and he relinquished his grip on Jughead when he skittered away in fear of hurting his boy more. His hands balled into fists beside him, yearning for contact in the least friendly way. Some asshole was going to pay for whatever they’d done to his boy be it narcotics or abuse or worse.

FP’s eyes trailed down the length of Jug’s body, accessing him for damage though the shroud of darkness before he fumbled his way through the trash of the trailer to find the flashlight he’d taken out of his tool kit some time ago when he still had a fuck to give about what he stepped on in the dark. 

“Fred’s boy has been blowing up my phone every goddamn day looking for you, Jug. I would’ve killed the line if I didn’t hope you were going to call back one of these days just to say ‘fuck you, dad’,” he groused as he flipped over an old pizza box and grabbed the light from beneath it. The concentrated beam of light was blinding in his inebriated state, but his urgency outweighed his comfort so FP simply stared at it until he saw something. Bloody, bruised, dirty. FP’s heart ached through the haze of intoxication as he scrutinized Jughead more carefully beneath the light, impulsively turning his wrists too roughly to look for rope burns and cuff marks. He flipped his palms to look for missing nails and pieces of people like it was just ingrained in him to know immediately what to look for.

He crouched a little to catch Jug’s gaze, flashing the light directly into his eyes to look for head injuries. “Things were getting better, Jug. And then I screwed up and you disappeared. You don’t remember that?”

The sudden flash in the darkness caused eyes to squint shut, the teen having adjusted to the darkness after stumbling around in it for hours before reaching home and here it was practically in his eyes. Hands went up to shield them from the BLINDING light only for them to be pulled down to be inspected, something Jughead hadn’t even stopped to do properly himself as his priority had been to GET THE HELL OUT of that basement and that cabin rather than go over his injuries. Bare arms were black and blue with cuts galore, multiple track marks where something had been injected and perfect circles around his wrists where cuffs had cut into tender FLESH. Sure, Jughead had caught glimpses but had been far from a concern when he made his escape and now the sight was far too much. OVERWHELMING and once more Jughead found himself jerking away from his father, stumbling backwards until falling right over onto the floor.

The crashing of weak body against tile sent a new wave of PAIN as he cried out from it. Where fresh wounds didn’t rest, there were SCARS that hadn’t been there before, some red and angry as they still healed but others paler than the rest of his flesh which only told a tale of how long ago they had been cut into his flesh. How long? How long had he been gone, how much time was missing from his memory? What had been irritation and weariness from his trek mere moments before now had TERROR seizing his chest, tightening around his lungs as it all sank in. Tremors had begun to run down his form as he managed to push himself to sit upright, to fight through the pain momentarily. 

“CHARITY?” Veronica repeated with a cock of her eyebrow, confusion colouring her features as she looked him over. Did he really mean that? By the looks of it, it didn’t seem like he was the THUG everyone pointed him out to be. The South Side was villainized, she got that for the most part, but it seemed like it was WORSE than she’d imagined. They were a community here, a family in all sense of the word, helping each other out the BEST they could. “Sorry– Ghoulies?” she repeated once more, a little scoff at the end of her tone as she chuckled a little, holding both hands up in mock surrender as she clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth. She’d heard about the jingle jangle; her UNFORTUNATE run-in with her ex-friend Nick St. Clair reminded her of it, but she wasn’t aware that there was another gang involved in actually DEALING the drug. “Hey, I’m not judging. I used to run a few charity events in my name back in Spence,” she hummed, watching his face, wondering if he was starting to connect the dots. “– nothing like RACES though I could imagine how that could be misconstrued–”

She sat there for a few moments, listening to hm JUDGE her– her family. And maybe they’d deserved it to some extent; but for the most part it was his OPINION versus what was really going on. “A father like what? Determined to make his family’s life better?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. Was his father not the same, making sure the Serpents kept to their own? “I, for one, am never for VIOLENCE; unless threatened,” she shrugged, lifting her gaze to meet his. She didn’t know he’d hated her that much already, and he didn’t even KNOW her yet. “Maybe, instead of drawing up your own conclusions, you gather all of the facts, get to know WHO’S involved and to what extent.”

“Donations, money, toys, food. Surprised?” Serpents didn’t just have the backs of their own kind but also the whole of the southside. It was their home and something to look after. If it fell then so did they. “No one else CARES enough to help us out so we do it ourselves. There’s a lot more to serpent life than bikes or drugs or causing trouble.” Of course, there was still the dark side an Jughead wouldn’t deny that. He had his own VIOLENT tendencies buried deep down, tremors beneath the surface. There was a lot of BLOOD on the hands of the serpents, on Jughead’s own hands, and most weren’t even remotely interested in washing it off but they were far from wholly evil. Simply when it came to the southside, one couldn’t expect to keep their nose clean forever, now when HELL could come any day now. “The Ghoulies are the more CHAOTIC gang. Jingle jangle, unnecessary violence. We got our own shit to deal with but not to that level. And the difference between your ‘charity event’ and our charity is we tend to give back out of our own pockets. There aren’t any rich people pouring out for us, maybe other family who have cans or toys to spare.”