"Drop the gun, Hal." FP Jones demanded, slowly taking a few more steps into the house, Jughead following.
"FP." Hal tried to protest.
"Drop! The! Gun!" FP shouted from the living room.
"You drop yours!" Hal shouted back. "Do you two see what you've done? What you've created?" He gestured to a, still, horrified Chic. "First him...now another one? And who even knows if Betty's mine? Or Polly."
"Hal, be serious." Alice rolled her eyes again, slowly standing with Betty at her feet. "The only one who cheated in our relationship was you. And you're the only one of us here who's committed murder."
"Nah ah ah." Mr. Cooper pointed his gun to Chic again. "Remember him? And you went and covered it up."
"We all covered it up!" FP confessed as Hal pointed his gun back over to the Jones men.
"Well, I can't say I'm surprised." The male journalist lifted his free hand to hold the gun with both of them as he planned to shoot FP first. "What? Did Alice come to you for help?" He mocked.
"No, actually...I went to him for help with it." Jughead spoke up, handling his first gun surprisingly well.
"What? Do you have surveillance on my wife and daughter? Or is there just an emergency Jones button that I don't know about?" He chuckled. "How'd you know to come here anyway?"
"There's an emergency Jones button that you don't know about." Chic joked from the corner with a grin.
"Chic." Alice began.
"Alice texted me saying that Betty needed to go to the hospital. Jug and I came right over to pick them up." He looked over to Alice with a large grin and she smiled back. "She knows I'll drop anything for her." He kept his eyes on Hal as the grip on his gun grew tighter. "Which is something you never did."
"Why don't you go back to your gang of criminals? You might wanna spend as much time with them as you can because once I'm done with the Northside's loose ends, I'm coming for your territory." Hal threatened.
"Oh yeah?" FP laughed. "That's definitely not gonna happen." Jughead laughed behind him.
Finally, Betty began to stir and Alice bent over again, helping her stand as slowly as possible. The teen groaned when she realized this was not a nightmare. This was real. "Mom?" She mumbled.
"Yes, sweetie?" Alice asked with her hands on her daughter's shoulders.
"Jug?" She said when she saw her boyfriend, his dad, and her own dad pointing armed weapons at each other. It was silent for a while as they all waited for her to speak. Her eyes drooped a little and she furrowed her brows to try and ease the pain in her head. "Dad...how could you have done all this? How could you live with yourself sleeping under the same roof as me, knowing you were ruining all of my friendships and almost killing them?"
"The real question is...how DID you do it?" Alice asked. "Really. I'm curious. How did Hal Cooper, of all people, become the Black Hood?"
"Well, as the owner of our town's newspaper...I knew more secrets than pretty much everyone. Betty writes a lot in her diary and this town gossips more than the baptist church. If you're asking specifically, well...Once Betty gave her speech at the Jubilee, I looked around at everyone in the room with us, I remembered that Veronica had told Betty about her mother's little fling with Fred, which was pretty obvious since Fred and Hermione were beginning to be seen everywhere with each other. I looked at Archie and remembered the night that Alice told me about Geraldine Grundy and her sick activities with that boy. And Moose and Midge? Well...when Alice was writing her expose on Pop's closing and the drug dealing that began to go down there that night, she texted me with photo evidence that those two were receiving Jingle Jangle and I drove to Pop's, stayed in the parking lot and waited for them to leave to follow them up to the hill where they parked." He shook his head for a moment as he remembered the bigger picture here. "This town really IS full of demons. Betty was right. I should've never stopped what I was doing. If I hadn't....maybe none of this would be happening. Maybe Chic would've never come here. A man would've never been murdered right in that living room and it would've never been covered up."
