#anyway hal did a lot wrong but its okay i forgive him

[tibli]

im my own personal post-canon for hs, hal gets a body bc he wasnt yeeted into a fucking sprite, so he gets to experience the world once again like he was able to when he was dirk. but he has also diverged from dirk in a way that he is a distinct entity, and decides to keep the name hal to signify this. and he gets to do whatever the fuck he wants

[cooperjones2020]

Second City, chp. 12

Summary: Sometimes she worries she’s settling — for a smaller job, a smaller city, a smaller life than she’d promised herself — but that was before she found out Jughead Jones lives in Chicago. That was before she found out the final secret of Jason Blossom’s murder.

A/N: Alright, so. It's been seventeen months since I updated and my life has been turned upside down several times since then. I never intended to abandon this fic, or writing in general, and I still don't intend to but it's probably best to consider it on hiatus until further notice, as I can't promise it won't be another seventeen months before I update again. I actually had this chapter mostly written and was just sitting on it, but all further chapters are in much rougher shape so who knows. Same goes for NNK - nothing is anywhere near publishable for that one, sorry. 

I do want to say how much I appreciate all of you who kept reading and commenting and checking in with me here. It does mean so much to me and I think about you a lot, even if I don't show up and do anything about it.

Also, hopefully it goes without saying but, this fic is canon compliant through season 1 only, so Hal is not the Black Hood--none of that happened.

ao3–>https://archiveofourown.org/works/11409360/chapters/40956119

All previous chapters of Second City and Nobodies Nobody Knows under the tag #second+city and on the Who Sings Heartache to Sleep series page on Ao3

12. In which Nancy Drew discovers modern technology

Jughead doesn’t approve of her plan, but he doesn’t have any better ideas to offer her so they go with it. Neither of them really has any experience investigating cold cases, and it’s not like she has the kind of technology available to her that she had at her old job — or that any evidence exists that such technology would catch.

After he’d surprised her last night, they’d gone to Pop’s. Of course. He’d come straight to her mom’s house from the airport, barely stopping at his own to drop off his bag, so by the time he got her out her front door, he was practically foaming at the mouth.

“Jug, why didn’t you eat before your flight?”

The look he gives her is so incredulous she barely restrains her smile.

“Betty, why on earth would I eat the soggy grey hockey pucks that try to pass for burgers elsewhere when I know I’m within, like, five hours of Riverdale.”

She realizes that his detour to her basement likely added an extra hour or so onto that ETA, that Jughead Jones willingly remained hungry longer than necessary to find her, but she pushes that thought firmly out of her mind.

Now, she’s in the Blue and Gold office of both past and present, pulling old editions of the paper they wrote out of an ancient filing cabinet — thankful at the miracle that they’re still there in the time warp that continues to be Riverdale. A freckle-faced kid who insisted he was a junior but looked alarmingly young had logged into the computer for them, so Jughead is behind her, looking for digitized copies. The kid didn’t know where the records from 2017 were, so they are left attempting to cover all bases.

The office hasn’t seen many updates since she’d last been here. They’ve replaced the computers, but even these models are several years out of date. They did get rid of the microfiche reader, though. So that’s something.

Betty Cooper, who spent her freshman year pining after the wrong boy, her sophomore year solving a murder, her junior year in a fog of depression, and her senior year learning how to be a person again, never intended to come back here. But somehow, here she is. Wherever you go, there you are. Like all adages, that one is also annoyingly true.

After an hour or so of fruitless searching, Jughead sighs and comes to stand behind her.

“What are we looking for, Betts?”

“The articles we wrote.”

“I know that, but why? What will they tell us that we don’t already know?”

“Something we don’t remember. I don’t know. It was a decade ago — there could be some detail that seemed insignificant at the time but now might help point us at my father, at what he might have been up to.”

She doesn’t know what kind of records there’d be anyway, but she’s determined to look.

“Betty, we know what we wrote. And even if there’s something that was insignificant then, I’ve read reread these editions until my eyes crossed in the course of book research. I’m pretty sure I have them all memorized at this point. Hell, there’s copies back in Chicago. I could have Mike or Mary overnight them to us if you wanted.”

“I just want to be able to check the facts. I want to make sure we have all the information we possibly can.” She tries to keep the petulance out of her voice. Her success is questionable at best.

Because, truthfully, she knows Jughead’s right. There’s nothing to find here. If anywhere, whatever there is to be found must be in the remains of her father’s office, in the crypt that is her childhood home, the crypt where he mother continues to cling to the memory of the Coopers pre-Jason Blossom, pre-Jughead Jones, and pre-Betty’s “rebellious streak rearing its ugly head.” Alice would never admit to it, fond as she is of her grandchildren, but Betty would bet that that last summer before the first time their lives all turned upside down was the last summer in which her mother was truly happy and her life was something under her control.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to Betty that this can only end in a showdown between her and her mother. That Alice Cooper may be the gatekeeper of the truth — a potentiality she both dreads and wishes for as, if not, she’ll have to confront that thought that maybe there is no truth to be had.

Hal Cooper is dead. All of this might turn out to be in vain. And she can’t — she won’t — accept that.

Jughead sighs again behind her, pulling her back out of her head.

“Okay, then let’s take a break before we go see Keller. Your brilliant mind won’t do us any good if you’re totally burned out when we get there.”

Last night, with the shock beginning to wear off and the pungent grease that seems to float in the air around the diner receding behind them, Betty tried not to watch Jughead walking beside her out of the corner of her eye. At least, she tried not to whenever his head was turned toward her. The sound of cicadas slowly overcame the buzz of neon as the trees lining Elm St. enfolded them in a hazy almost-darkness. Just as she was about to give up scanning his face for signs she’d told herself she’d forgotten how to interpret, as dusk stole the details of the moles on his cheek and threads of his expressions, she heard a rustle of foil down near his hands and he popped a square of gum in his mouth.

She narrowed her eyes at him and extended her hand. “What, you don’t think I should get to escape the fate of onion breath?”

He raised one eyebrow as held the package up for her to see — “Nicorette” just visible in the fading light.

Oh.

Huh.

“I…didn’t realize you’d quit.”

“Yeah, a few weeks ago.” He scraped his hand over the back of his neck and then forward to ruffle the waves of his dark hair. “So you’re welcome to a piece if you want, but you might not like how it makes you feel.���

She shook her head and they kept walking a block or two. Then her mouth opened of its own accord, “Freshman year of college, after some insipid party at which I stayed sober — I don’t remember why. Antibiotics, maybe? — the guy walking me home persuaded me to try one of his cigarettes when I told him I’d never smoked. After nearly hacking a lung out, I got the hang of it well enough to not totally embarrass myself. But when I got home, I puked for an hour. Ugh. It was worse than the 2023 Spring Break tequila incident.”

For a moment it was silent beside her and she felt herself begin to blush — what had motivated her to share that utterly useless memory? — Then Jughead burst out laughing, doubling up and gripping his stomach and guffawing so hard she thought he’d choke on the stupid gum.

But it was catching, because soon she was laughing too, careening into the hiccups that had always signalled the fraying of the tether of her sanity.

“He — he must have thought..” Jughead dissolved into giggles again. Jughead Jones. Giggles.

“Oh Betty.” She managed to swallow a hiccup and looked up to find soft eyes on her and all of her mirth suddenly evaporated. It was a look she just wanted to sink into and wrap herself up in, to push away the reality of what they were doing here.

She shoved his shoulder then, telling herself it was because he’d laughed at her. But the flat of her palm against the soft, gray jersey of his t-shirt ignited another sizzle in her abdomen she resolved to ignore.

They try not to talk about it, this giant thing sitting in between them, preventing them from reaching each other. Or, at least, Betty does. She’s not sure if it’s a conscious effort on Jughead’s part or if they’re just totally out of sync again.

But, still, it slipped in. At dinner, he’d made an offhand about Southside High and she said, “I get it, Jug, I do. You didn’t have any chips to play. And while I wish you would have told me, so we could have figured out something together, even if that something was our breaking up, my dad held all the power. The threat to FP— to your family — was bigger than our high school relationship.” She realized she meant it. Maybe she could forgive him after all. Maybe she already had. Maybe their friendship is still intact.

He kept glancing at her and then away again while they searched, as if he expected her to break down, but by that point in the night, she had no room for anything else but undirected anger. She’d let it carry her back to the basement after dinner, where she resumed digging through boxes and poking through excel files looking for passwords or safe combinations or financial records or something.

Anything.

Many hours later, when Betty went upstairs for a glass of water and was surprised to see the house cloaked in darkness, her eyes drifted to a handful of photos stuck in cork board illuminated by the under cabinet lights. A photo of the twins in the Blossom maple grove last winter shot an arrow straight through Betty’s brain.

Glass of water forgotten, she raced back down the stairs and barely caught herself from having to hurdle over Jughead’s head.

She did it. Jughead heard the click and looked up.

“It was—it was the date that Grandpappy Blossom killed Grandpappy Cooper.” He nodded but didn’t say anything as he pushed himself up and crossed behind the desk, to join her in her corner of the floor.

Beneath passports and birth certificates, manila folders containing the deeds to the house and the Register office and bills of sale for the Whyte Wyrm and other properties her parents had acquired and discarded over the years, Betty found a handful of newspaper issues her parents had saved. She handed them, one by one, to Jughead, who scanned headlines before stacking them neatly in piles beside his left hip.

When she picked up the next issue from the stack she’d pulled into her lap, her breath caught and she felt Jughead’s eyes land on her. The cover story was a copy of her Jubilee speech from that year. She remembered her parents justifying their decision to print it in the Register, not buying her arguments about special treatment because she’s their daughter — her dad had insisted.

Rereading it, she finally felt the anger and her energy begin to ebb away, leaving behind hurt and confusion and love for her father. She couldn’t help wondering what he saved this paper for — it it was a message and if so, for whom?

Eventually, she was forced to admit that the safe, too, seemed like a dead end. She sighed and set the newspaper and manila folder for the Whyte Wyrm transactions aside before locking the safe back up. Jughead returned to his side of the office, across the DMZ of the desk and beyond any arm-span that would have allowed her to reach him.

Sheriff Keller’s secretary had headed her off earlier in the week, but today she and Jughead get in to see him, down the long hallway lined in dark wood and seafoam green tile she’s seen so often, in real life and in the dreams that still sometimes creep in. Jughead remains in the doorway, but Betty hovers while Keller makes himself a cup of coffee. When he finally sits down, sighing as his bones settle, and she takes the rickety folding chair across from him, Jughead comes to sit beside her, folding his own long legs around the legs of his chair.

“I don’t have any new information, Betty. This case has been closed for years. We examined all the footage, from both cameras. Your dad never left the bar. Clifford entered and exited through the back door. There’s no evidence your dad even knew he was there.” It’s not unexpected, but still it sets her teeth on edge.

“But why would he just go into the Whyte Wyrm for fifteen minutes at 2:30 in the morning on a night it was closed. He wasn’t doing business stuff, he never even went into the office. And how could he not have heard the shot?”

“He said he didn’t. We had no reason to doubt him. Betty, your father was a good man.” It’s obfuscation wrapped up in a pretty bow of trying to make her feel better. What Sheriff Keller is saying is that Hal was one of the right kind of people. He owned his own home and his own business, had a picture-perfect family. What Keller is saying is that he didn’t do his job.

Betty feels herself begin to vibrate with anger again and a dozen years of repressed emotions and she can feel Jughead’s eyes on her, wondering if she’s alright. “And you just bought that? That he was in the bar but couldn’t hear the shot? You didn’t ever think to test it?”

The set of his jaw tells her Keller is getting annoyed with her now. That answering questions on done-and-dusted murder investigations was not how he’d planned to spend his Wednesday afternoon. “We have Clifford Blossom on tape, we didn’t need your father for the case against him.”

As usual, Sheriff Keller totally misses her point.

Jughead speaks before she can. “But you never thought that that might be too much of a coincidence? That a man who never frequented the Whyte Wyrm, except to check up on the accounts and always during the daytime, just so happened to be in the bar at the exact moment a kid was shot. A kid he was so upset about dating his teenage daughter that he literally sent her away. You never thought they could have been together before entering the bar and then split up so you couldn’t prove it?”

Keller stares at him, bushy eyebrows drawn down over his eyes. “Then why would he let himself be caught on camera at all?”

“I don’t know, maybe he was drunk and forgot all about the cameras. Hell, maybe, in the best case scenario, he and Clifford were together when Clifford got the call from Mustang and Hal didn’t know Clifford planned to kill his own son. Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you truly believe he didn’t know that gun went off? He didn’t spend months trying to hush it up only to swoop in as the white knight for my dad as soon as I found the proof he was there?”

The sheriff’s chair squeaks as he leans to one side and then the other, scans his eyes up to the ceiling and back down to a spot on the table where the decades have left a rusty mug-shaped ring.

“Jones, what’s the point of all this? Your dad’s out and Hal Cooper’s been dead for years — sorry, Betty.”

She doesn’t understand, has never understood, how her sweet and morally uncompromising best friend can have such a troglodyte for a father.

“The point is apparently Riverdale is just as corrupt and morally bankrupt as it always was. My God, how the hell do you keep getting elected? Let’s go, Betty.”

She lets him lead her out of the police station. Her mind still whirring with the sheriff’s incompetence as yet another roadblock, yet another of the same roadblocks as they’d encountered so many years before. So she gives Jughead the keys and lets him drive her back to her house.

It’s almost alarming how quickly they slip back into old habits, old ways of being comfortable with each other she thought they’d long since forgotten. They’re in the basement again, Betty going through more boxes and Jughead trying to crack the encryption on her father’s old external hard drive when it comes to her. “Juggie, we can test it!”

“What?”

“We need to know if my father heard the gunshot. We may not be able to prove whether he knew what Clifford was up to or if they were together beforehand, but we can prove he knew the gun went off and didn’t do anything about it. We can test it.”

“You want to set off a gun in the basement of the Whyte Wyrm?”

“Why not? Your dad runs it now, right? We can do it before they open for the night so no one will freak out. I know my mom still has as gun around the house somewhere. It might not be the same caliber though. Do different gun sizes discharge at different volumes?” Betty is absorbed in her own monologue, mind jumping ahead to all the variabilities of ballistics she can remember from a lifetime of watching too many crime procedurals.

“Betty, stop. We can’t just shoot a gun in the middle of a building. What would we even shoot it at? That’s gotta be against the law and after today, I don’t think Keller’s gonna be too willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. And he definitely won’t give FP the benefit of the doubt.”

She’d begun quickly re-boxing all the papers from her parents’ refinancing in 2011 but at Jughead’s words she freezes and feels herself deflate. “I guess you’re right. Never mind. I just — I thought it might be something after all of this nothing.”

“Wait. I have an idea. You’re a genius.” He kisses her forehead and runs out before she can ask him what he means.