#aandrews

“AND LASTLY, RIVERDALE High and its River Vixens want me to wish you all a very lucky Valentine’s Day.” As if the seductively indolent slurring of her words wasn’t already saturated in sexual innuendo, Y/N Y/L/N then drops her left eyelid into a cocky-wink-unhinged-jaw-combo. Archie struggles to contain the dance of his thin lips, as if a sudden jerk or spontaneous movement could shatter the frangible moment between best friends, but then wolf-whistles, hoots, and hollers erupt from his classmates, and he’s left with shards; a television in the corner of the room, the outro of Riverdale’s Morning Announcements, a fading screen, a teacher shushing his now animated peers.

Irises fabricated of molten gold and honey veer to his left, where Betty Cooper sits in their homeroom class, where she’s always sat in their homeroom class. Luck would have it that the pair’s surnames were alphabetical neighbors, and in a time like this, Archie is grateful for the blonde serving as his focal point. Betty rolls her pinkened brims into her mouth and shrugs, physically saying, ‘sorry the best friend you’re in love with is such a slut!’ The blonde, herself, would never verbalize such a statement, but he’s sure she’s thinking it. She’s probably had more than a slick thought or two about the trail of flings and shortcomings the River Vixen’s left behind since the unfortunate demise of her boyfriend, Jason Blossom—especially upon discovering that Y/N was the friend Archie chose to fall in love with, and not the girl who actually loves him back.

It’s all been very messy, this year (problematic might be a better word, a word Y/N would say), a continuous thread of nadirs that ought to break under the weight of their own misfortunes. He’s seen Y/N heave sobs over an open casket, heard her voice go raw as she spoke of Jason, watched her die all over again when she learned that her boyfriend was not the golden boy mask he’d woven for her; and she’s seen Archie break, enveloped him in her arms and allowed him to mourn a relationship that never should’ve been, listened, and comforted, and bent over backwards for him when she could hardly stand upright for herself on most days. Somewhere amidst the timeline of glueing themselves back together, it cracked down on him like an epiphany: She’s his favorite person.

And what better day to tell someone that than V-Day?

Betty tethers Archie’s cognition back to his current surroundings with a flick of her toe to his ankle. “Bell rang,” she says, gathering her books into the crook of her arm. Only after he’s stood from his seat and swung the straps of his backpack across his shoulders does the blonde ask, “You gonna tell her today?” Unprompted, she continues, “Yanno, that you like her?”

He’s become so accustomed to denying it over the months (no, they’re just friends; no, she’s dating someone else; no, he isn’t interested in her like that) that his tongue’s sputtering out a ‘what?’ before he can even process it.

Identical brows, somewhat darker than the flaxen waves growing out her scalp, perk. “Don’t tell me you’re chickening out, Archie. It’s Y/N’s first Valentine’s Day without Jason, you have to make it memorable for her.” Betty gesticulates when she’s passionate; Archie has to duck his head to miss a flying hand.

“I’m not–I’m not chickening out, Betty. I’ve” —Passersby stumble their way around Archie, who’s abruptly stopped feet away from Y/N’s locker— “actually got something planned.”

The blonde follows the jut of Archie’s head over to the woman of the hour. She hasn’t neared her locker yet, still on the adjacent side of the hall, immersed in conversation with Valerie Brown and Josie McCoy. Archie knows even the vaguest of outlines of her, though, knows the coiled tendrils that plummet past the nape of her neck, knows the silver hoops that always dangle from her lobes, knows her toothy smile like diamonds embedded in her gums, knows the laugh he spends most of his time with her goading. Betty does not know her in a similar fashion, and only recognizes Y/N for who she is once she’s fumbling with her padlock—and then steps aside so Josie can do it for her.

The following seconds are so agonizingly tedious that Archie’s heart swells in anticipation.

One: Y/N opens her locker.

Two: Y/N’s full lips part.

Three: Quaking fingers extract a bouquet of yellow petals bound in ribbon.

“Those are the roses you gave me and Ronnie.”

Archie grins. “Yeah.”

Betty reiterates her previous statement, stringing her words together in that patronizing way reserved for naughty and aloof children. “Those are the roses you gave me and Ronnie.” Archie doesn’t know why she repeats herself. “Yellow roses mean friendship, Archie.”

Huh. That’s certainly not the message the ginger wanted to get across.

The curve of his lips falters gradually, and then all at once. “I didn’t know the colors had meanings!”

“Didn’t you ask the florist?”

“Florist? One of my dad’s employees was selling flowers out of his trunk.”

“You bought me, Ronnie, and Y/N trunk flowers?”

“Archiekins!”

Matching flushed countenances swing to Y/N’s beaming disposition. Fluid as the water, as all her movements are, she jumps him, limber legs fastening around his waist and long arms clasping at his neck. The friendship roses, still entangled in her digits, rest on his shoulder. “I lovelovelove the flowers sooo much. And the card, it’s too fuckin’ cute!”

“Card?” Betty echoes. The singer’s embarrassed to admit he’d forgotten the girl was there.

A dimple hollows into Y/N’s cheek. Archie’s grip underneath her thighs tightens, determined to keep her balanced even as she unfurls one hand from around him to showcase the cheesy Valentine’s card he printed online. The Guy Fieri meme had seemed like a good idea in pretense—she likes the cooking channel, she likes memes—but the slow arch of his friend’s eyebrow is a silent shit on that thought.

“Ay, lil mama, let me go down to your Flavortown?” she reads, an amalgamation of disgust and what the fuck? weaving her words together with a pretty bow. “Archie!”

“Isn’t it so funny?” Y/N interrupts, unperturbed by the girl’s exasperated timbre. “I haven’t even seen that one on Twitter.”

For all it’s worth, Betty does force the corners of her mouth into a polite grin. “Very funny,” she agrees, then shoots daggers above Y/N’s head. “Not very romantic, however.”

“'Cause it isn’t supposed to be romantic, Betts. Me and Archie are just friends. See? Yellow roses mean friendship.”

The ground opens up and swallows him whole.

(Or, at least, he wishes it had.)

Smack! Thwack! Thwop!

It’s a scene straight from a teen romance movie; his hand is bent at the wrist, thick digits enclosed around the fourth pebble he’d found by the Y/L/N siblings’ tree house, when the girl divides her baby pink curtains. Ignited is the pulse in his chest, the mere sight of her bathed in her bedroom’s warm lighting sending his heart into a flurry of rampant thumps. Y/N appraises him for a beat and then lifts her windowpane.

“What is your childhood trauma, Archibald Andrews? Do we know?” Archie isn’t foolish enough to be disheartened by the slice of her tongue. He’s witnessed the uncoming and, later, redoing of the girl too many times to shy away from her at her most vulnerable. And it’s sweet, he thinks, in their own sort of way. Everyone gets Y/N, the River Vixen or Y/N, the Femme Fatale, but he gets the Y/N that sheds her falsified smile and overzealous antics, and just is. She’s so busy compelling her peers to forget she was one wedding ring away from being a widow that she rarely is.

The material of his button-down stretches across his shoulders in a boyish shrug. “Too many 80s movies with my dad, I think.”

“Evidently,” she remarks, tucking her chin into her soft open palm. “I find it hard to believe you couldn’t find a date tonight.”

Truthfully, he hadn’t been searching for one. “Didn’t want one,” he shouts. “I wanna spend tonight with my best friend.”

Y/N dips her head, ponytail sliding against her right cheek. “That’s sweet, but I’m not gonna be a good time.”

“Shit, I always have a good time when you’re around.”

“It’s gonna take me hours to put on my makeup, get dressed, find the right shoes.”

“Then don’t.”

“You really should be getting to second base with a girl right now, Archiekins.”

“You’re the only girl I want.” Shock blesses the apathetic hue of her eyes. Her lips part, and her brows elevate, and she just looks at him, like she’s waiting for the punchline. Archie delivers: “To be with. Tonight. You’re my best friend and you, you need someone. You need me.”

Her stiff posture alleviates. He can breathe again. “Meet me by the front door.”

(The second crack.)

Riverdale's—the town with pep!—greatest woe is the girl they’ve swallowed under passing vehicles and manicured lawns and streets that turn desolate after midnight, under colonial homes and suburban families with 2.5 kids and a golden retriever. She’s destined for events better than graduating high school, and enrolling in the next town over’s community college, and returning to begin the mundane life of the previous generation’s. So if anyone breaks out of this town, it’s going to be Y/N. While he has her, though, Archie’s just gonna count his mini blessings.

Their mode of transportation to Pop’s is Mr. Andrews’ junky jalopy. A month and a half of strenuous labor (chores), busting his ass at construction sites, and maintaining a high B average was a fair exchange for the chance to drive Y/N around for once. It isn’t that Archie’s uncomfortable or emasculated by the girl in the passenger seat being a year older than him—believe you him, it takes a lot more to even bruise his ego—but he wants today to be special. It’s his last opportunity to bury her memories of Jason with his body.

“What are you thinkin’ about over there?” the sophomore inquires, shifting his gaze from the road for a well-deserved glimpse.

She segues into a different topic. “This your song?”

Pride clutches the boy’s sharp features. She can recognize his voice. “Yeah. You like it?”

Y/N hums, a discernible tune from his guitar. “You’re good with words.”

“Thank you. What are you thinkin’ about?”

She says it, and he slams down on the breaks. Their automobile lurches forward; his seatbelt thrusts him back into the torn pleather seat; Y/N nearly slips out of her own.

(“I don’t think Jason loved me.”)

Archie Andrews has never heard a bigger load of bullshit in his life.

He wishes he had—really, he does. How easy it would be if Jason hadn’t loved Y/N, if she’d been another name scrawled in their 'fuckboy handbook,’ as Veronica labelled it, if he’d hit it and quit it and left her. This agonizing uphill battle that seemingly never plateaus wouldn’t exist. Y/N would be his girl, and he’d be her guy, and who’s Jason Blossom? His existence would be like grains of sand slipping through the interstices of their fingers. He wouldn’t have to see her die every fucking day; Cause of Death: Grief. Y/N is so overraught with grief some days that God, does he wish Cheryl’d been an only child.

Of course Jason Blossom loved her. Jason Blossom had to love her. Because nothing is ever delivered to him with a golden spoon in its mouth.

Because she is Y/N Y/L/N, and it is utterly impossible to not be bewitched by her.

“And you said you passed your driver’s test?” she asks, her shade-too-innocent tone delineating a joke. Archie’s lost his appetite for jokes.

“Is that what you’re spending your Valentine’s Day thinking about? Y/N, he loved you. If there’s an afterlife, he still loves you. And maybe it hadn’t started out that way, but that’s the way it is now. Look, th-there’s a lot of stuff being dug up about Jason, and he isn’t who any of us thought he was, but what we can’t dig up—what no one can dig up—is that he didn’t love you. You know this.”

Curious gaze scans his profile, absorbing the thin line of his lips, the skin between his brows marred with creases, the eyelashes that dust the apples of his cheeks with every blink.

“Do you love me?”

Archie’s spine straightens, head tilting to meet her wide optics. This is the shot he’s been waiting for—"you know the answer to that, too"—but he decides against taking it. It isn’t a question of when he’s ready to tell her just how much he adores her, it’s a question of when is she? And she isn’t ready, not quite yet.

He’ll wait.

He was willing to wait 'til he was 18 to make his relationship with Jennifer public.

He can wait for Y/N.

“You’re good with words, Archibald Andrews. Very good.” Her lips curve into a glossed crescent, the most honest smile he’s ever spotted on her delicate countenance. “And you’re my favorite person.”

Cloud 9 looks like the effervescent pull of his lips. “You’re my best friend.”

So, it goes like this:

“Thanks for the best V-Day ever, Archiekins. I mean it.”

“Of course, anything for you.”

“And thanks for paying for all the fries I ate.”

“I, uh, I didn’t pay? I thought you did.”

“I left my wallet in my car, I thought you did.”

“Well, it looks like we don’t pay for food anymore.”

Curls fall down Y/N’s backside like rivulets as she tips her head and laughs. She then shifts her weight to the tips of her beaten-down converse, puckers an already full pout, and misses his mouth just centimeters to the left, designating a kiss at a pink corner.

REGGIE MANTLE’S YOUNGER sibling is hot now.

The news sweeps through the sleepy town with the sort of velocity reserved for level 4 hurricanes. The Instagram video your brother uploads on a beach in June goes high-school-jock viral (which isn’t viral-viral, but garners enough views to decimate any doubt that Reggie is not one of the most popular men within the confines of Riverdale High), though his six-pack, for once, is not the main attraction. You’re the cynosure, in all your post-puberty, swimsuit-model glory. His comments range from complimentary to explicit; two hours after the initial posting, Reggie deletes it.

From the day your surname legally changed, you’ve been your brother’s baby and the passing six years has only strengthened the bond. You two swap texts daily (having rooms adjacent one another be damned), share explicitly embarrassing moments of the other on Snapchat, and act as the other’s support system no matter how popular (football) or dorky (debate team) the event. Peers are still left slack-jawed at the contrast of personality when you aren’t in the oldest Mantle’s proximity versus when you are. He’s your protector, your shield, and the last face a person’ll see if they ever utter a murmur of disrespect toward you—which is more than a little ironic considering he has so little respect for anyone outside of his social circle.

(Within the hour of your return from your family’s annual trip to the Bahamas, Jason Blossom gets his face bashed in.

He also winds up dead two weeks later.

Reggie insists that there’s no correlation.)

September welcomes a follow from Cheryl Blossom on every social media platform, Chuck Clayton sliding into your DM’s bi-weekly, multitudes of party invitations, and a River Vixen’s uniform. Your popularity is as good as notorized, though you don’t think it’ll feel official until Archie Andrews pulls his head out of his ass and acknowledges your seemingly overnight glo-up. But the male’s always been a little more than slightly oblivious; Betty Cooper’s decade-long manhunt for his heart makes sense now that you stand in her Penny Loafers.

Or, to be more literal, your panda slippers that have seen better days.

But still, you get the attraction.

Because the absolute worst thing about your brother is not his knack for miscreance, not his aggression or his unsavory inability to play nice with others—it is Archie Andrews, his right hand man since the aforementioned boy’s unveiled talent for football, and it is that he is on your porch sometime after midnight, on the swing with the creak you frequent when your brain’s too wired for slumber, comforted by his guitar and lyric book. His back’s to you, nothing but broad shoulders and back muscles and tousled red mane, and you can make out the outline of a pencil between his teeth. Dexterous digits strike a chord that either pleases or concerns him because he abruptly ceases playing afterward.

“I thought normal people slept at this time,” you say. Your cadence, however soft it is, still renders him scared, and you’re pretty sure he jumps at least six feet off his seat. Now that? That’s viral-viral Instagram video material.

Archie chances a look at you, which is a feat in and of itself considering you can probably count on one hand how many times this guy’s ever taken notice of you. “You’re out here,” he says before swinging his eyesight back to his guitar.

You’re really growing sick of these monosyllabic conversations with him.

“Well, I’m not normal.” This time when his irises turn to you, they lingers. “Oh yeah, Reggie never told you?” you continue. “The Mantles adopted me from a vampire family. Sweet people, but don’t test ‘em, they bite.”

The corners of his mouth quirk into the beginnings of an amused grin. “You aren’t very pale for a vampire.”

You wave a loose hand around. “Stereotype.”

“And I’ve seen you out in the sun,” he counters.

“Sunblock.”

“You don’t sleep in a coffin.”

“Now that’s just racist.”

Archie snickers. It’s a sound you think you’ll always know but never get used to, like hearing your favorite song when you were a child years later. “I should, uh, I should get back to bed.” He raps his knuckles against his instrument once, yet makes no attempt to stand.

“I wasn’t aware anyone was making you,” you remark in a thinly-veiled attempt to mask the disappointment that threatens to crack your timbre. You’re hot now—have got the midnight texts from potential booty calls to prove it—and he still doesn’t desire to be in your proximity for longer than a handful of minutes. For a flicker of a moment, you ponder that it could be your personality he simply isn’t attracted to.

“Uh, n-no. No, no one is,” he stammers over his words in a way that can only be considered boyish. Even when he’s humiliating you, you find him charming. “I just thought that—I don’t know—you might wanna be alone, and I’m, you know, playing my music, and it isn’t that great yet, and–”

“I’d love to hear it.” Archie pauses mid-sentence, lips parted and tongue heavy with incomplete ramblings. You’re practically watching him mentally replay the five words, disect the syllables, make something of the meaning, and come up short. So you repeat yourself. “I’d love to hear it. If you’re okay with an audience.”

“It’s kind of a cheesy love song.”

You raise the shoulders clothed in a flimsy, white v-neck. “I like cheesy love songs.” You’re quick to add, “But if you don’t want to play it for me, that’s fine.”

A beat. Then, “I’d love for you to hear it.”

The pale pink hue of his pout gradually stretches until the two rows of blanched ivories usually hidden beneath are revealed. And you think, as you stand in the threshold of your front door, arms and legs pimpled with goosebumps, you think his smile could rival the moon’s. You’ve never seen a smile like that on anyone. It isn’t until your third date that you’ll learn he was thinking the same of you.

Your delight is delineated with two claps of your hands and a shrill squeal as the cherry on top. Party Panda emits soft thumps as you bound across the porch before situating your frame before the singer. Long and limber legs fold at the ankles, and similar to a kid you envelop your knees with your arms, intertwining your lithe digits.

Archie waits for you to settle.

And then, he just waits.

His honeycomb irises absorb your very being; they take in the hair atop your head, notice your curious eyes and nose, scan birthmarks and freckles, snag on your lips. You forget to inhale. You forget to exhale. You’re just holding your breath.

He breathes first, a rush of air compressing his lungs and traveling past his thin brims. He nods once, adjusts his arms, glances at the spiral notebook beside him, and sings. “You’re giving me fever. You’re making the pressure rise at night right through my veins. You’re making my heart sing.”

Your initial reaction to Andrews’ breathy, almost sexy, crooning is that you are so grateful the boy can sing. His timbre is virginal, inexperience dripping from every word he croons. It’s rugged, it’s unpolished, it magnetizes you in like skin-and-bone gravity, clinging, and suffocating, and, and—

—and like your favorite childhood song playing years later.

Archie Andrews is that song.

“My mind’s awake all night, daydreaming. When will you be mine? You’re making my sleep wait.” You have diary pages saturated with the loops and swirls of your handwriting about this boy. The time his shoulder brushed against you in the hall, the grazing of hands at Pop’s when you both reached for napkins, and now this—the timid glimpse underneath his lashes as he sings the last lyric, almost like it was dedicated to you. It is everything to you.

“Thinking of you is taking all my nights away, way, way. I really do adore you.” This moment doesn’t need to be inked into pages to be remembered. The feeling of butterflies building a home inside your stomach, the tickle of your mouth, the stretch of your cheeks, all of it is seared into your brain. You are going to die with this moment on the inside of your lids. “I really do adore you, my lovely. I really do adore you.”

Archie unceremoniously completes his song with a sheepish “that’s all I got.” You want to tell him that it was more than enough.

Instead, you say, “Play that last part again. The chorus.” The sophomore crooks a brow, though doesn’t debate. He reaches the very last 'adore you’, and you join in. “And I adore you, too. I’ve been thinkin’ that your love is kinda special. You should know that I adore you, too.”

You aren’t as choppy of a singer as him. The Mantles wasted a total of no time in signing you up for the extracuriccular activities a kid raised in an orphanage only experiences through the lives of fictional characters in books or television. You sing, you dance, you even spent a summer away for calligraphy camp. Everyone in Riverdale knows this, like another fact in their daily life (The car is parked in the garage, I have two kids, and Y/N Mantle is a modern-day Annie.) Archie still stares at you.

(It isn’t your voice that has him doing mental backflips.)

(You have to wait a while to learn that, too.)

“Well?” you prompt. “Was that good?”

His snort is subtle but charged. “You know you’re good at everything, Y/N.” It feels like the first time you’ve ever heard your name.

Your head cocks to the side. The bridge of your nose crinkles. A dip forms in your cheek. “You think I’m good at everything?”

“Nah,” he says, but his smile’s a tell. “I think I just adore you.”