#in retrospect writing a new fic on a seven-day work week was... a Choice

[glorious-blackout]

Current writer problems: my need to procrastinate is too strong and I am oh so sleepy 😴

[iwaxpoetic]

fic: like you’d get your knuckles bloody (betty/archie, riverdale)

fandom: riverdale pairing: archie andrews/betty cooper, barchie There were so many choices that felt so small at the time. It seemed as if she blinked while getting a refill of her milkshake at Pop’s and woke up in a forest, covered in her boyfriend’s blood. She had been so many Betties between them - in a bunker, at the farm, chasing down a masked killer, in a black wig, holding Chuck Clayton’s head under water —

Standing beneath her porch light, her heart in her throat while Archie Andrews said, “I can’t give you the answer that you want.”

Was that the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?--

Betty Cooper, before-and-after.

Her sense of narrative structure made her wish it was as easy as a before-and-after.

There was such clarity in a defining moment, in being able to spot the time when everything changed. There was a Cheryl before and after Jason died; a Jughead before and after he slipped on the Serpent jacket; the Breakfast at Tiffany’s Veronica before she turned In Cold Blood.

There was no clean before-and-after for Betty Cooper. There were so many choices that felt so small at the time. It seemed as if she blinked while getting a refill of her milkshake at Pop’s and woke up in a forest, covered in her boyfriend’s blood. She had been so many Betties between then - in a bunker, at the farm, chasing down a masked killer, in a black wig, holding Chuck Clayton’s head under water —

Standing beneath her porch light, her heart in her throat while Archie Andrews said, “I can’t give you the answer that you want.”

Was that the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

——

The old Betty, wherever she began and ended, was characterized by her discipline.

Every day, she suited up in her prim cardigans and slick ponytail, ready for another day as the dutiful daughter, the doting sister, the star student. She could handle any pop quiz, any turbulence in the Cooper household, any pressing deadlines at the Blue and Gold. When the pressure got to be too much, she would clench her fists and breathe through it.

And every night, she looked out her bedroom window at what she really wanted. Second floor, second window from the back, calling to her like a lighthouse. Archie’s window was lit up at all hours of the day and night, whether he was strumming his guitar or dozing off with a movie on. It was her nightlight. She fell asleep to its comforting glow, knowing their time would come one day.

She had to be disciplined, because she was hungry. Sometimes it scared her, how strongly she felt. There was a bottomless pit of want inside of her and she tiptoed around it, testing the edges but never letting herself fall in. Betty didn’t want to be the kind of person who was dragged around by her id. She wanted to be the person that other people thought she was. Sometimes that meant sleepless nights helping Polly learn her cheer routine, piling more volunteer hours on top of her already packed schedule, turning the other cheek to another Blossom insult.

Season five Betty Draper, Cheryl had once called her, as if she knew the half of it.

——

Betty had never thought Archie would love her in the exact way that she loved him.

She knew that love took different shapes in each container. She could see the way her mother and father fit together, pushing and pulling but ultimately a team, making each other better - a real laugh, in retrospect. One of her favorite memories was being eight years old, when Alice had just broken a big story. The pride lit her up from the inside and Hal’s beaming face reflected it right back. But she had also watched from next door as the Andrews fell apart. Fred and Mary lost something that seemed sweet and steady and kind, and then Fred puttered around that big house alone.

She thought about what that love might feel like, when it finally came.

Archie was all sweetness. Being his girlfriend would mean never walking to school alone, sporting his letterman jacket at games, and dancing together at prom. It would be afternoons working on a jalopy in the garage and nights cuddling together on the sofa. He would write songs about her and she would proofread his college essays and they would move to New York together after graduation.

It would be an awful lot like being his friend had been since they turned 13 and their parents had put a moratorium on sleepovers, except that she would get to touch the abs that had been taunting her. The heart that beat under those defined pectoral muscles was pure gold and it was an even better prize.

Something murkier lay beneath the surface for Betty. Sometimes she wondered if she loved him or if she coveted him. She wanted to know every thought in his head, every dream in his heart. Long before the school hallways had started to echo with Archie got hot!, she had been daydreaming about ways to get his hands on her. There were no dibs on a person, but she saw him first and had seen only him since.

Betty had never thought that Archie would burn for her, but she basked in his steady glow. Archie lived closer to the surface - he wore his heart on his sleeve and an easy smile on his face. That was one of the things she loved about him. They would be so happy together, but his devotion would never match hers.

It wasn’t until she was standing at the edge of a shallow grave, looking down at his terrified, resolved face with a shovel in her hand and a gun to her head, that she realized they may have misjudged each other.

——

A dam had broken in Betty Cooper earlier that fall.

It could have been one thing or any number of things —  Veronica Lodge sweeping into town, Polly’s mysterious disappearance, Jason Blossom’s body washing up in Sweetwater River. It was an unusually active September, especially by Riverdale’s sleepy standards.

For Betty, it felt like the foundation had been cracking. With one firm tap, it was gone.

You are so perfect. I’ve never been good enough for you, I’ll never be good enough for you.

The careful balancing of what she should want versus what she did want is what had kept her in check for all these years. No one else seemed to have the same qualms. Betty couldn’t imagine Cheryl or Veronica denying themselves a thing. In fact, she knew they wouldn’t. Veronica had talked a big game about turning over a new leaf, but after less than a week in Riverdale, Veronica had seven minutes in a closet and Betty had a box of Magnolia cupcakes.

Only Betty had the discipline to decide to be something and then become it. It had gotten harder for her to see how that was a good thing.

— —

Jughead’s interest in Betty was both a balm and a sting.

Boys had never been interested in her. She wasn’t sure if it was because word of her strict parents preceded her or because her crush on Archie was so obvious that it was not worth getting their hopes up. Whatever the reason, she had made it sixteen years without being asked to the drive-in, having a note slipped in her locker, or having rocks thrown at her window by someone who wanted to date her. She did all those things with her best friend and had become aware that it was not the same.

Until Jughead crawled through her window and gave her her first real kiss, she didn’t realize exactly how different it was.

Being on the other side of the equation was a revelation. It was amazing to think that there was someone who liked her more than anyone else, who thought about her when she wasn’t around, who wanted to kiss her and hold her hand and maybe more one day. Jughead was a good person - he was cute and smart, with a wicked sense of humor that tickled at the dark side she kept such a lid on - but what made him special is that he thought she was special. Betty had never come first to anyone before and she dove into intimacy with the same enthusiasm and determination that she put into any task.

But it was her way to acknowledge the cloud even while she focused on the silver lining. Besides her, Jughead was Archie’s best friend in the world. If other boys had avoided her due to some unspoken claim, surely he would find her to be even further off limits. If Jughead liked her, it was because Archie never would.

Somehow it was more devastating than the rejection itself. A dramatic showdown in formalwear still fit with the narrative that she had imagined for Archie-and-Betty. Power couples faced obstacles. Even after homecoming, even after Melody, even after Veronica, a part of her still though she should be patient. It was the utter lack of drama in her courtship with Jughead that made it real. There was nothing to be dramatic about.

She made her peace with it, first with her nails dug into her palms but then genuinely. The pieces of her heart felt like they were rearranging. Jughead had burst his way in and made his home right in the center. The part that housed her feelings for Archie was smaller, but the scars had made the walls thick and tough.

She would always love him and now she knew what shape it would take. She felt lucky to have enough love in her life that she could feel the difference.

It took a few months, but Betty started to think Jughead might be her soulmate. They both felt a personal obligation to clean up Riverdale’s seedy underbelly, loved books and old movies, and, most importantly, they hated the same things about her. On his lips, “perfect” was scornful. After all of those years pursuing perfection, she wasn’t too fond of it herself.

——

People gave you a wide berth in the aftermath of a showdown with a killer.

Betty was distracted and distant in the weeks following the altercation with Joseph Svenson. People around town stared and whispered even more than usual, but they looked at her with pity and awe in their eyes. Even her mother and Jughead gave her space, assuming that she was reeling after weeks of cat-and-mouse.

When she was alone, Betty didn’t think about Joseph Svenson at all. She thought about Archie Andrews.

It wasn’t about the kiss, although it was hardly the one she had scripted for them long ago. She thought about the way that he had grabbed her hand as she put the pieces together and started to spiral, the only thing tethering her to this earth. She thought about how instantly he had responded to Get in the coffin or I’ll shoot her in the head right now.

To be willing to die for someone was the kind of sweeping statement of love and dedication that was easy to say because it was so unlikely to be tested. It was reserved for the most important people in your life, the ones that you would do anything to protect. When she was in danger, Archie hadn’t batted an eye. When she closed her eyes, all she could see was him lowering himself into a coffin for her. She had been looking at that face for years and years, had known it when it had a beaming smile of mismatched baby teeth, had admired its changing angles. His jaw was clenched but his eyes were as warm as ever when the lid closed over him.

It was unbelievable to think that only weeks ago, kisses and milkshakes had made her feel special. It wasn’t fair to hold up a high school romance against the ultimate sacrifice, but the tectonic plates of her life had shifted again. It was a secret humming under her skin. It was heady to know that there was someone in the world who would do anything for you.

In a way, the showdown with the Black Hood was the most romantic night of her life. That was Riverdale for you.

— —

Betty stopped thinking about Hal Cooper almost as soon as he was locked away. She had spent so much time pouring over the Black Hood and puzzling over her family secrets that when she tried to align the man with the father, none of the pieces fit quite right anymore. After the loss of Hal and Polly, the Cooper family structure coalesced neatly around Betty and Alice as if it had always just been them.

Compartmentalizing and moving on was another discipline that Betty excelled at. Most of the time, anyway.

She thought about Fred Andrews all the time. The lights were out in Archie’s room for the first time that she could remember, but she knew that he was home. The loss was unspeakable, so she never tried.

— —

Even for someone good at compartmentalizing, it could be hard for Betty to separate the way she felt about Veronica from how she felt about Veronica Lodge.

The simple truth is that they were friends because Veronica had decided they were friends. Betty had been skeptical but a little bit flattered. She had written Veronica off at first, sure that she would move on and nestle in at Cheryl's side like two rich bitch peas in a pod, but she had persisted.

No one had ever wanted to be her friend that desperately. Despite what her frilly pink sweaters might imply, she had never been much of a girl’s girl. Her only real friends were Archie and Kevin. That had always been more than enough for her, but there was something to be said for having Veronica in her corner.

But the only person better at compartmentalizing than Betty was Veronica Lodge. Veronica could claim that she was destined to be Betty’s best friend while snatching her lifelong crush out from under her. She could disavow her family’s shady business dealings, then join Lodge Industries and keep quiet about their plans for the Southside. She could love Archie, then sit by while her father destroys his life.

Betty had been tap dancing around questions of morality for a while. One did not get to make too many principled stances when their boyfriend was a gang leader who once partially skinned a woman, and she tried not to throw too many stones from inside a house where she had once blackmailed Cheryl Blossom into testifying on behalf of FP Jones. As she started to shed more and more of her Nice Girl persona, Betty thought she had become more understanding of all the gray in the world.

In a sweltering court room after Labor Day weekend, Betty had found the thing she could never forgive. She watched stupid - noble, self-sacrificing, stupid - Archie jump at a plea deal for a crime he had not committed, all to spare them another trial. Veronica had cried and dropped her head into her hands, but Betty could still see flickers of her in Hiram Lodge’s satisfied smile.

Betty held her friend as she cried and clamped down on her latest intrusive thought - none of this would be happening if it weren’t for you. From learning to read to wrestling him from Ms. Grundy’s clutches, there had never been a problem Betty could not solve for Archie until he crossed Hiram’s path. There was nothing Betty wouldn't do for Archie, but there was nothing she could do for him now, so she averted her teary eyes and tried not to let in the darkness that always seemed so close to the surface now.

Meeting Veronica Lodge was the worst thing that had ever happened to any of them.

— —

When Betty used to dream of Archie as the leading man in every romance, she had imagined kissing him with a frequency that made her blush to think about even now.

She had been inexperienced and was not even sure what she was longing for. In her mind’s eye, she saw him in everything -  the foot pop at the end of The Princess Diaries, the foggy window in Titanic, on the dock in The Notebook - hell, even Spiderman dangling upside down in the rain. It was a collage of images that she could not quite attach a sensation to, but it made her blood run a bit hotter.

When Betty tried to flesh out her fantasies, she relied on a few tangible things she did know - the smell of his cologne, which she had picked out; his increasingly hard biceps, flexing under her fingers when they linked arms on the way to school; the way his hair felt when she playfully ruffled it; the slow drag of his fingers across her back and stomach, when he was winding up to tickle her.

It was almost like an out of body experience when she flung the microphone to the ground. Betty was somewhere else in the garage as she and Archie sang, circling the microphone, their traded glances growing less playful and more searching, until he swung the guitar behind his back and reached for her.

The touch of his hand was like it had always been, the tether that held her to earth and made sure she didn’t miss a thing. Betty had never been more present. After all those years of patience and restraint, she couldn’t get close enough.

— —

There was no clear before-and-after for Archie Andrews.

He had come a long way from being the boy-next-door. He had been the star football player and the sensitive musician. He had been groomed by his music teacher and apprenticed at the foot of a mobster. He had started a youth center for the underprivileged and shattered his hand pulling Cheryl Blossom out of a frozen river. It felt like a lifetime ago that it had just been Betty and Archie in a booth at Pop’s, but Betty didn’t feel like he had changed at all. When she looked into his eyes, she saw the same person staring back at her that she always had.

When there was such a bone-deep understanding, how could she ever feel like he was different? With every step he took, she was right there too.

It dawned on Betty that maybe her before-and-after had happened long before she started looking for it. There was a Betty Cooper before she loved Archie Andrews and she had been living in the after since she was 11 years old.

She flipped through her diaries, years and years of little choices. Her next one felt big.

[jenroses]

Sometimes it’s really hard to write about other people’s happy times when it reminds me of when I was strong and thought I could do almost anything. 

Sometimes it’s an escape, but sometimes it’s just a really rough reminder of how hard I’m struggling right now. 

The true answer to “How are you” behind the cut. It ain’t pretty.

The nausea is bad right now. Every week it’s a little worse, Saturdays. The dosage hasn’t changed, once a week I sit on the toilet lid while my husband is in the bathtub, and I swab alcohol between the stretch marks on my belly while he reads some old book or another (literally old, he’s on this kick and I think he’s up to the late 18th century? Maybe 19th? Idk.) 

I swab the top of the tiny vial of vile chartreuse poison. It’s thick:  in the little glass container it rolls thinner than honey, but thicker than oil. 

I pull out a syringe and draw .8 ml of air into it to push into the vial, in order to not create too much suction inside when I’m trying to pull the thick liquid into the needle.

The flashback comes when I get ready to inject, every time. When I was pregnant, I pushed a much larger amount of fire into my belly twice a day, every day, for most of ten months. It hurt, it bruised, and it kept me from clotting, and it meant that I survived a pregnancy without clots, long enough to give birth to a bundle of ornery sunshine. 

Methotrexate does not keep me from clotting. This is poison, and it’s only once a week, and the needle doesn’t even hurt going in. It doesn’t hurt pushing the medication in. But I know what’s coming. 

I do this before I head to bed. It’s almost always six or seven in the morning, because I dread it, and I want to milk the last of the “feeling okay” I’ve finally managed to achieve by the time I’m six days out from the shot. So I stay up too late, and then collapse into bed and cease to function for the rest of the weekend.

I sometimes think that I’m making too much of it. It’s only a little bit of chemo. For cancer, it would be 10-25 ml, not .8. It could be worse. I could be taking it orally and killing off my gastrointestinal tract. With the blood thinner I’m on, that seemed like a bad idea, so shots it is. 

When I let myself think that way, I do ill-advised things like decide I can fix shit and push through, like I did today when there was a crisis in the house over the fact that a DVD had come from the library as a blu-ray, for which we have no player. So I went to a store that had no electric cart to buy things that are literally way more expensive than a season of Game of Thrones could ever be, and came home to discover that there was literally no way to install anything on the computer that was supposed to get it. I sat there for an hour trying, on the wrong chair, which I should not have done, and then spent another hour trying to figure it out on a different computer. I emerged victorious, with a migraine and a blossoming fibro flare. 

I take... take feels like the wrong word. I subject myself to methotrexate in order to keep my immune system under control, to prevent my body from waging war on my gut, my liver, my salivary glands, my lacrimal glands and the membranes around my knuckles. It doesn’t work nearly as well as steroids at making me feel good, but might have fewer side effects long term? It’s hard to say. Something is going to kill me, and whether it’s the rheumatoid arthritis or the medications to fight the rheumatoid arthritis, or the blood clotting disorder, or the meds I take to prevent clots from forming (when the real problem is that once clots form, they just don’t STOP)... I don’t know. My grandmother lived to be 101 and right now that feels like too damn long. 

I have children. I have a husband. They need me, god knows why, and so I stay. I spent most of my time with my son today yelling at him. He’s five and it’s absolutely not his fault that my skin is so sensitive that touch is painful to me. I’m sure there’s probably a more graceful way to tell him that I just spent every last bit of energy I had making a couple of eggs that may or may not stay down and no, I don’t have the energy to deal with him wanting a new packet of salami and cheese when he hasn’t finished the cheese from the last one. He spent most of the day hanging out with his dad and his oldest sibling. My daughter is fortunately well cared for. We are protected from each other, but I wonder often what she thinks of our new reality, where she always has someone, but it’s almost never her mother because I can’t risk her feet or her teeth, because I can’t risk my temper or my lack of coping. Because I can no longer lift her, this child that I carried on my back for three straight years because she hadn’t learned to walk yet. I only stopped because I ended up with a clot and couldn’t lift anything. 

Writing has been hard this week, because when I write I draw on my experience, and right now it hurts to remember that once, I was a dancer, once I was a competitive swimmer, once I stood in front of people trying to ignore a bigot and roused them to speak out against him.

When I write I remember the things I could do and the places I went. I did so much. And it feels like that is over. The last convention I went to hurt. I had a scooter, and pillows, and a hotel room to retreat to, and it hurt so, so bad that I now associate conventions, which were fun, once, with blinding pain. 

The last one I went to was just before I was diagnosed. My joints were on fire. I thought I would need a wheelchair forever afterwards. 

I’m afraid to go back to the doctor and tell them how much the methotrexate is hurting me because the alternatives are thousands of dollars per month.

We can afford it, I just hate being that much more of a burden. That money was supposed to let us enjoy my husband’s retirement. But the idea of going on a cruise? I don’t see it happening and I don’t know how to break it to my husband that it might not be possible. 

I keep feeling like there are things I should be doing, like I should be trying, TRYING to exercise, like I should be trying to do something about my weight even though I know that trying to do something about my weight is not actually going to result in making healthier choices. There are barely any foods I can eat. No foods that are unambiguously healthy for me. The last thing I need to do right now is tell myself I can’t eat the few foods that don’t actively make me sick.

But today I tried to push through and I feel like I’m going to lose the entire week to it. 

I have no extra resources for social niceties. I’m completely social-scripting my responses to comments on my fic (please keep making comments, it matter so much, just understand if my responses are short.) I’m making huge social errors because I’m misreading things because the only way I social is by applying cognitive effort and I just don’t have it right now. 

I hear about people living and doing relatively normal things with RA. But my RA was not correctly diagnosed in a timely fashion. In retrospect, I think it started in 2014, but they didn’t have the right test in common usage so they shrugged and attributed my symptoms to “I don’t know some sort of inflammatory process probably related to EDS” and so by the time I was diagnosed, 29 joints were on fire and the antibody levels were so high they could not be accurately measured.

A lot of people with RA just have RA. 

I have RA, EDS, Hashimotos, Sjogren’s, fibro, sleep apnea, allergies, IBS, and Factor V Leiden. I’m probably autistic, definitely neuroatypical, with massive sensory issues and a brain that does amazing things in a lot of areas and is utterly inept at the things people expect to be easy. If I write people well it’s because I’ve been studying human beings like an anthropologist since I was three years old. (I gave my mother a sheet of paper on which I’d drawn a wide variety of facial expressions because I was trying to understand facial expressions.)

Someone asked me once, “Have you considered that your problems might be psychological?” I laughed in his face. The idea that I could, via mental illness, magically clot the blood in my veins or sabotage my own thyroid? I mean, I absolutely have anxiety and intermittent depression issues, but ffs, those things don’t make my salivary glands swell to the size of golf balls. I get tired because my body is attacking myself, and exercise makes that process worse because it fucks with my immune system which is pretty good at fucking its own self up.

Someone asked me once why I pursued so many diagnoses. The answer was, “Maybe if they figure out the right one, they can fix something.” It’s not because I *like* collecting diagnoses. I miss being able to eat normally. I miss being strong and physically fit. I used to swim 10 hours per week. I used to ride horses. I used to go camping and loved it. I used to be able to build things with my hands. 

I have to remind myself not to do those things.

I have to, because pretending I’m not sick makes me sicker.

Every shot I take seems to push me into a flare. Not a huge flare, just a few joints reminding me that this isn’t over. That this will never be over.

I got through the twice-a-day-Lovenox routine because I knew it was finite and i knew there would be a baby I wanted very much at the end of it.

I will be on methotrexate or something like it for the rest of my life. 

It feels like poison. The sneaky poison that you think isn’t poison until your lips go numb even though you didn’t drink it. And then I sleep and think, “Well, at least I can sleep.”

And then I wake up and my whole body hurts, and the exhaustion pulls at me so hard, and I’m supposed to eat something so that I can take the small dose of steroids I’m still on, and I don’t want to eat because my stomach is on a boat. 

Saturdays might as well not exist. Sundays aren’t much better. By Monday I can drag myself to physical therapy. By Tuesday I can drag myself to the grocery store. By Thursday I start to think, “I really should exercise” and on Friday I fight dread about the coming shot. 

This morning my husband said, “I blame Trump.”

And I said, “You might as well. Stress increases inflammation, and most of my stress in the last six months has started with That Man.”

It is no mystery to me that so many people died last year.

The mystery is how we keep going when it’s hard.

“How are you doing?” asks a cashier. They all ask this. Everyone, locally. It’s a reflex thing.

And my brain won’t let me give the flip lie of an answer. I can’t say I’m fine. I’m not fine.

“I’m doing,” I echo. (Right now this feels like a lie, too.)

Sometimes they say, “How are you today?”

And I just say, “I’m here.”

Sometimes what doesn’t kill us just doesn’t kill us (yet). 

I’m not stronger, I’m just not dead.