till we meet again ││ bughead ❀

❀ chapter seventeen ❀

💗 Betty Cooper 💗

Betrayal is cold, swift and brutal.

FP walks out after a few minutes of awkward silence, leaving me alone in a room with the last person in the world I want to talk to. Why? I want to yell in his face. Why would you do this to me? To our family?

He clears his throat uncomfortably and moves to sit in FP's chair just a couple of metres away from me. Oh, if I wasn't handcuffed right now.... 

"What do you want, Charles?" I seethe. 

He stares at me blankly before sighing. It's as if he didn't hear me at all.

"Why would you do this to me? To our family?" I repeat the words that I rehearsed in my head, though the tears streaming down my face made it less intimidating than I planned for it to be. 

He finally snaps.

"OUR family?" He asks, laughing maniacally.

"YOUR family put me up for adoption, Betty", he sneers, " I went through hell and back as a child. Thank heavens my father found me when he did; I could've been a cold body buried six feet under if it wasn't for FP."

My mind takes a second to take in what he just said.

"FP is your father?!" I ask hysterically. I don't believe it myself - I REFUSE to believe it. But the look on his face confirms his statement.

"You have no idea, do you?" His voice is hushed. I shrug. 

He sighs and gets off the chair, moving to stand behind it instead. I watch him hesitantly, but a shiny object in the corner catches my eye. My purse.

"Our mother used to be a Southside Serpent" He says slowly, analysing my reaction. 

I freeze where I sit. Mom was a SERPENT?!? She is such a hypocrite, I think to myself, trying to push that information out of my head. 

"Mom and FP hooked up in high school a lot", Charles starts, "but what she didn't know was that FP secretly loved her".

"Then Hal Cooper came to Riverdale. She left the Serpents and turned into a goody two shoes; she started wearing plain, pink clothes and abandoning the Serpent jacket she once wore with pride. She made FP feel worthless" He says coldly.

I try to process all of this in my brain at once. 

If Charles is FP's son and Jughead is also FP's son... does that make us related? I shiver at the thought. I didn't think I would ever have to deal with something as weird as incest.

I want to say something, but the look on Charles' face stops me. He needs to let it all out.

"A month or so after graduating, Mom found out she was pregnant." He starts pacing once again in front of me.

"Nobody wanted me, so I was taken away the moment I was born."

I look at him with sympathy. For all I know, that could've been me. Unloved and unwanted by the people that brought me into this world.

"I-i'm sorry Charles, but you know that I can't change the past" I tell him sympathetically.

He looks up at me, tears forming in his eyes.

"Yeah, I know," He says.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, neither of us sure of what to say or do in such a tense moment.