Chapter Text
Toronto, Canada – 5 months post robbery
Joaquin is exhausted from work and the weather. The winter winds are in full force near their condo building, and he is pretty sure that half of his skin has been removed by the sheer power of it.
Yet he makes it inside and up to their still anonymous looking condo, and Kevin is cooking in the kitchen and singing along to the music he is blasting.
They didn’t even have to leave the states. Joaquin hasn’t spent a cent of the money yet (but it is nice to have it – he even did the super villain thing, and rolled in it), but Kevin got a good job offer, and Joaquin can be a teller anywhere, and so they moved.
Joaquin loves the way Toronto is vibrant and in flux, less polished than New York, but more sprawling. He loathes the winter weather. Every one of his co-workers have told him that NYC is just as bad, but he’s lived in both places now, and so his opinion is the only honest one.
Joaquin puts away his gloves and scarf and toque (he’s been informed that in Canada there is no such thing as beanies), he takes off his coat and hangs it up. Kevin still hasn’t heard him, that’s how into the music he is. Joaquin shakes his head and he can’t stop himself from sneaking up on Kevin and covering his eyes.
Which was a mistake because Kevin was stirring pasta sauce, and in shock he throws up his hand holding the spatula and the very hot sauce gets all over both of them. After a lot of apologizing (on Joaquin’s part) both of them manage to laugh about it. Although Joaquin makes a mental note not to try that particular move in the kitchen again.
Saigon, Vietnam – 9 months post robbery
“Can I get another beer?” The tourist sitting on the table nearest the bar asks, and Sweet Pea nods and goes back to the tap to pour another mango IPA.
He hands it to the man then wipes the bar down. It is almost closing time. It’s been dark out for two hours now, yet the air is still full of heat and humidity.
When Sweet Pea first arrived in Vietnam, the idea was just to stay for a month, drive around the country, get drunk, see the sights, have fun. He had done this in Thailand and Mexico and it had panned out pretty well. Toni had been with him for part of Thailand before she flew off to India.
Two weeks into exploring Vietnam, Sweet Pea got restless, lonely. He drove back to Saigon, booked a ticket to India (he had made so much fun of Toni a few months earlier and here he was doing the exact same thing). That was when he met Bian, in this very bar.
Two of the other patrons had gotten drunk, and belligerent, and Bian stepped between them even though she was half their size and asked if they would please leave. She actually said please. It didn’t help the situation much, so Sweet Pea (over a head taller than everyone else involved) intervened.
Bian gave him a free beer for his troubles, and just like that he canceled his flight. They hadn’t even made plans and he had canceled his flight, that’s how much he liked her. So, he kept going back to the bar, he even got a job there, and just when he had worked up the courage to ask her out, she kissed him, during a shift no less.
He had never met anyone braver, or more stubborn. That was six months ago now. In NYC he had failed at both holding down a job and dating anyone for more than two nights and here he had managed both happily. And he didn’t even need the job. He was beginning to understand the whole monogamy thing. Not that he was about to admit it to Jughead (not after all these years).
Bian entered from the back, where the actual brewing happened, and she placed a hand on his side.
“How’s it going?” She asks. Her accent making all the words sound shorter than they really were.
“Good. You can see we only have three customers.” Sweet Pea gestures out at the bar floor. It’s not a big room but two hours ago it was packed, and now one of their few customers was sleeping on the table.
“Last call.” Bian shouts.
The tourist finishes up his drink and throws some money down. The other two men, both regulars who had already paid, just left.
Sweet Pea turns off the music that has been driving him nuts all night, off. Then he closes up the long row of doors opening onto the patio.
“Do you ever miss it?” Bian asks.
“Miss what?”
“New York. America. Home?”
Sweet Pea had to think about it for a second. There were certainly things that he missed about New York. There was a reason musicians had written so many songs about it. He loved the people watching, he loved walking from one side of the city to the other. He missed the diners and having breakfast of eggs and bacon at 3 AM with his friends. He has grown to like hot soup for breakfast, but it isn’t the same.
There were arguments for the states as a whole too. But what he missed most were people. He’d lived all of his adult life with Jughead, Joaquin, Toni, and Betty. Seeing them all at least once a week. Sharing meals with them, watching movies, and drinking. Not to mention working. He taken them for granted. He complained about them regularly, to their faces and behind their back. But he missed them terribly right now.
When you really knew somebody, or in his case, a whole group of somebodies, your shared history was always there, below the surface, ready to make everything better (or occasionally worse). You didn’t have to speak in full sentences half the time, or explain jokes. He didn’t realize how much he took that for granted till now.
If he was lucky he would get that with Bian, but that would take them years to build towards. But even if he could go back to NYC (if legal factors weren’t an issue, and they may not be), the people he loves aren’t there anymore. Not one of them. They have plans to re-unite, but they are just temporary, a sort of strange extended vacation.
“A bit. Mostly I miss friends. Why?”
“You never talk about home. Or friends. ”
“Hey, I’ve got friends.”
Bian laughs. “Do you have family?”. Bian has lots of family, he’s met 4 sisters and there are 2 brothers, somewhere, and so many nieces and nephews and in-laws he has entirely lost count of them (not to mention the cousins, there are a shit-ton of cousins).
Sweet Pea’s dad is long gone, and his mom who he did love is dead. He is sure he has a cousin or three out there in the world but he’s never met them. He has told Bian about his mother, but the rest doesn’t seem worth going into. “The friends I miss, they were family.”
“So I will meet them some day?” She asks.
“Oh yeah.” He says. He feels like he is missing some sort of important subtext.
“So you are serious about me?” Bian surprises him sometimes. She is a big fan of direct questions and making honest statements (the whole culture here is – he’s never heard so many opinions about his appearance in his life).
But he thought she already knew the answer to this one. He thinks he’s been pretty damn obvious about it.
“Hell yes. I’ve never been this kind of serious in my life.”
“Good.” She says with a smirk that he just has to cover with his lips.
Delhi, India – 10 months post robbery
Archie scans the crowded arrivals section of the airport. He had just gotten off his flight and was both woozy with exhaustion and stir crazy. Sitting that long was just un-natural.
He didn’t really know who or what he was looking for in the airport, so he scanned the crowd and read all the signs that people were holding up, till finally a loud whistle caught his attention. He looked towards the sound and saw a tall older women with blond hair waving at him. Alice Cooper was a long way from home, but she still wore the same outfits she had worn as a small town parent.
Yet it was clear pretty quickly that she had acclimatized to the local culture, weaving them expertly through the airport and into a car. She wasn’t driving though, she claimed that it was too much for her nerves. All she would tell him in the airport was that they were going outside of the city.
Archie’s only experience of Delhi ended up being driven through it. The traffic and the mad dashes of pedestrians were too much for his nerves. The smell too was overwhelming. Archie had never left the states before so everything was new. Even the layover in Paris (where he hadn’t even had time to leave the airport) was a lot to handle.
“Where are we headed?” He asked Alice, now that they were in the relative privacy of the car he was pretty sure she would tell him. He still felt guarded around her. Though clearly Betty and Jughead had trusted her enough for her to be there.
“To Woodstock.”
Archie felt confused. The Woodstock he knew was in upstate New York. Alice answered his unasked question.
“It’s a school in Landour, in the mountains. A prestigious school, mixed boarding and local kids. Elizabeth and J bought a house nearby. The kids are attending it as day students. It is a couple days travel from here, but we will take breaks.”
“Elizabeth and J?”
Alice shrugged. “That is what they are going by now.”
“That will be an adjustment.” Archie said with a shrug.
Alice laughed “Tell me about it. And to think I wanted her to go by Elizabeth in the first place.”
“So how are they? I see them over messenger all the time, but they can never go into details of course.”
“Good. They actually love it here. Elizabeth’s gotten really into motorcycles too and they spend a lot of time on trails in the mountain on them. I think they got a bike for you, if you want to join them.”
“And the kids?”
“They love the school. They are doing well here. I never thought I’d say this but it’s been an easy adjustment.”
“Even for you?” Archie asked. He doesn’t know what Alice has been doing the last few years, but he can’t imagine that it was anything like her life here.
“Elizabeth and J let me in now, far more than before. I get to see Parker and Lucy most days and the twins are planning to enroll as boarders next year.”
Archie smiles. He’s been nervous about this trip ever since he received the ticket in the mail. It wasn’t accompanied by a card or a note, just with a tiny picture of a treehouse sketched on the inside of the envelope. Not just any treehouse, the one he had grown up with.
Even over messenger they hadn’t talked about the ticket. But they must have assumed he was going to use it because Alice had been there at the airport waiting for him (after a far from short commute).
“How long are you staying?” Alice asked
“I don’t know. They didn’t send me a return ticket.”
“They’ll buy one for any date you want.”
“I’ll probably stay the whole summer than. School doesn’t start till the second week of September.”
“That will make everyone happy.” Alice says with an approving nod. “How have you been?”
“Ok.” Archie thinks that is the right word to describe the monotony of his everyday life right now. He missed the Joneses, they had left spots empty in his weekly routine, and while he had other friends, their relationships were far more surface level.
“I heard about what happened with Veronica. I am very grateful that you rescued Parker and Lucy from her. Thank you.” Alice met his eyes when she said this, and he could tell how much she meant it.
“Of course.” When he had read the file Betty had left him back in early October, the one that detailed Jughead and Betty’s criminal identities and Veronica’s true employer, he had known right away what he was supposed to do. He assumed he might feel different later, conflicted or guilty maybe. After all he had been falling in love with Veronica. But it turns out that being betrayed by someone to that degree, being in what for all intents and purposes was a fake relationship for one of the involved parties, made it a whole lot easier to fall out of love and into anger.
He supposed that the whole situation only added to his trust issues. He had not dated seriously since then. But he never once debated the morality of what he had done. Archie had sided with his family, and in retrospect it had seemed absurd to him that Veronica had imagined any reality where he would not.
Sienna, Italy – 10 Months Post Robbery
Toni is walking home from the market when she sees a blond ponytail. She actually sets down her bags in preparation to greet Betty, when the women turns around and is revealed to be nothing more than a teenage tourist in a summer dress.
She had done the same thing two weeks ago with a small child that resembled Parker so much it was almost impossible for her to believe that he wasn’t Parker. She went straight home and video chatted with the kids, only then realizing that the child on the street resembled last year’s Parker, not the bigger more athletic version that existed now.
Toni picks up her grocery bags and continues on her way home, through the Plaza and up the steep stone path.
She’s already been to India once since Betty and Jughead relocated there, but six months seems too long ago now. Betty had made it clear that she could come anytime, that she could move there if she liked, but Toni had fallen in love with Italy. Not with anyone in particular in Italy (although that would be nice), but with the way Tuscany was so easy going, so charming.
Toni will always be an outsider here, she doesn’t look like the locals (something they occasionally make abundantly clear to her), she doesn’t live in a house that has been owned by generations of her family, she doesn’t have a contrada she belongs to. But she does have a house a little outside the city walls with a small pool and a dog to call her own.
She takes photos every day. Everyone goes on and on about how beautiful Tuscany is in the summer, and it is beautiful, but some of her favorite days were in the winter, even with the chill in the air. She would make a fire in the fireplace, and go for a walk or a ride (she has grown to love her Vespa even if it lacked the speed she was accustomed to) through the empty countryside.
It was spring, almost summer now, and with the weather came tourists. She hadn’t spent a summer here yet, but all the locals talked about them as if they were a necessary plague.
As she starts to walk outside the city walls she admires the view of the valley below her. Even though she has taken this photo a hundred times before she can’t help setting down her bags, fishing out her camera, and taking another.
This is what she’s known for now - photography, not violence, not robbery, not drama. She wonders what her teenage self would say. Probably just roll her eyes and dismiss the current version of Toni as boring. If only she could tell her teenage self how happy she would be.
Springfield, Illinois - 10 months post Robbery
Veronica sat at her desk in her tiny cubicle in the basement of the FBI offices in Springfield. Prior to her reassignment here she had 1) never done desk duty, 2) never knew there was an FBI office in Springfield Illinois, and 3. never spent so much time in a basement.
Now her life circled around her small apartment, a bar that didn't really believe in wine, and this room, surrounded by pale co-workers who did not like interacting with her (she had made the mistake of name dropping the wrong name on the first day of work).
Sometimes at night when depression was closing in on her, she reminded herself that things could be much worse - she wouldn't have been able to handle the life that Agent Smith had now (yes, she had heard the rumors but she had seen the reality, and the reality was much worse).
She tries not to think about how bad things would have been if Archie had not relieved her of the kids. Her fate would certainly have been worse than Agents Smiths.
Landour, India – 10 months post Robbery
Betty is making cookies in the kitchen when the kids come home from school, bags flying, uniforms rumpled.
“I thought you had football?” Betty asks Parker as he hugs her.
“I wanted to hang out with Uncle Archie.”
“Me too!” Lucy says, scanning the living room and the verandah as if he was hiding here, somewhere.
“He is going to be here for almost three months, there will be plenty of time to spend with him. You spent most of the past two days with him.”
“Where is he?” Parker demanded.
“And when will the cookies be done?” Lucy added. Betty had already mixed all the ingredients, all that was left to do was to roll the individual cookies and place them on the tray.
“Archie is out with your dad on the bikes, and twenty-five minutes for the cookies.” Betty answered. She broke off a section of the dough and rolled it into a ball, before placing it on the wax paper lining the tray.
“Can we play video games while we wait?” Lucy asks. Betty doesn’t want to reward Parker for skipping practice, but the kids have not used up their screen time this week, so there is no real point in stopping them.
“Sure.” She says and they exit the kitchen and lay down on the floor of the family room, came controllers in hand.
They are all excited to have Archie visiting. They’ve actually adapted well to the move and have had an easy time making new friends, mostly with the teachers and other parents at school. Life here is much more low key, and the kids walk to school with friends most days.
Betty is working again, she sold her own company (she didn’t want to be tied down to those hours, and she was worried that it might get caught up with legal issues post robbery) and was working long distance for the second largest investment firm in the world.
She places the cookies in the oven and sets a timer. Archie has struggled a little with acclimatizing to the local food, and she is hoping that this taste of home will help. After all these are the same cookies she grew up making for him.
Jughead and Archie enter through the front door, both dirt covered and grinning.
“Outer layers off” Betty shouts. Both men pull of their jackets and the cover up pants they are wearing, then take off their shoes. “How was the ride?”
“Great. I think I might have to buy myself a bike when I get home.” Archie says smiling, and Betty mentally makes a note to buy him one. If she ships it to Fred’s it could even be waiting for him when he gets home. “I can see why you guys love it here.”
“As long as you steer clear of the monkeys.” Parker says. Both kids have abandoned their controllers and are standing in front of Archie now.
“Yes. They can be dangerous.” Lucy says. “They only look cute.”
“Noted.” Archie says with a nod. “Do I smell cookies?”
“They are in the oven right now.” Betty says.
Jughead comes over and picks her up from the waist in a snug hug and whispers “I love you Baby.” in her ear.
This is the first time in their life together that they have had very few outside stressors. No other gangs haunting them, no government agencies surveilling them. She had actually worried that without the outside pressure their relationship might shift and somehow lessen. After all they had always been forced to rely on each other to a degree that outsiders couldn’t understand. Yet here they were, happier than they’d ever been.
“I love you too.” she said turning around so that she was facing him so that they could kiss.
“Yuck.” said Lucy.
“Please stop.” said Parker.
Betty laughs and pulls her mouth away from Jugheads, although his arms remain around her body.
“Wasn’t it nice before they could talk?” Betty whispered to him. He laughs lightly into her ear.
“We can hear you!” Lucy is indignant.
“Do you want to play with us?” Parker asks Archie, gesturing towards the abandoned screen.
“After I eat cookies.” Archie says. “I have priorities.”
“Five more minutes.” Betty remarks. “It is so good to have you here.”
“As good as it is to be here, it’s also weird.”
“Weird how?” Jughead asks.
“I don’t know how to explain it, exactly.” Archie pauses “But not that long ago you guys were in a big house in Westchester and you seemed so established there, I never thought you would leave, and now you seem the same way here, except this is a strange country, with a foreign language.”
“Actually most people speak English.” Lucy interjects.
“Yes, but there are all sorts of different customs and food. But you guys just seem to have found a way to make it home. I don’t even think you miss it.”
“School here is much better.” Parker says.
“So much better!” Lucy adds. “The kids are actually interesting. I have real friends.” That almost makes Betty laugh, as if the friends Lucy had back home were fake, when they weren’t. They just had different priorities. In New York kids seemed to grow up a lot faster than here. This speed seemed more natural for her kids. “I miss going to Broadway shows sometimes. I miss the city.”
“I miss beef.” Parker says with a sigh.
“I miss it more.” adds Jughead. “I dream about hamburgers every night.”
“Priorities.” Betty says, rolling her eyes. “We miss you Archie, and people. But here works too. It’s a whole different adventure.”
“Do you ever miss what you did there?” Archie asks. Betty can tell that he’s asking about the bank robbing and not the company running.
“Sometimes.” She says
“A lot.” Jughead adds.
“Do you think you might do it again?” Archie asks.
“Maybe once the kids are in college.” Jughead says.
“Are you guys talking about robbing banks again?” Lucy asks.
A surprised expression covers Archie’s face. “You know?”
“Yes.” both kids say.
“It’s the only exciting thing our parents have ever done!” Lucy adds. Betty is pretty sure she says that because she doesn’t know about the mystery solving or the drug dealing (and hopefully they will never learn about the latter).
“When did you tell them?” Archie asks.
“When we left the U.S. There was no way around telling them.” Betty said with a shrug. The timer went off for the cookies and she pulled them out of the oven.
"We are not allowed to talk about it though." Lucy says with a huff.
"Me either." says Archie, with a sigh of fake protest. He attempts to steal one of the cookies from the tray, but they are still too hot, so Betty lightly slaps his arm away.
"It doesn't effect you at all!" says Lucy with a sigh. "Our parents have done one cool thing in their whole lives and we are not even allowed to talk about it."
Archie laughs and with a wink he says "That's where your wrong. Anything parents do is automatically not cool. Even robbing banks."
Jughead offers up an offended "Hey!"
Lucy smiles at that. "I guess your right."