Playlist for the Apocalypse (Sweet Pea/Betty)

Track One: Holding Out for A Hero

February 2019

It's been eight months since Betty and her travel companion have seen an humans.

No, that's not quite right. It's been eight months since Betty and her travel companion have seen any living humans; as compared to the multitude of corpses scattered on the ground like leaves, as compared to something even worse- the walking undead. It's been eight whole months since she's talked to someone else, sans her companion, and nearly nine months since 'this' (whatever 'this' is) started.

It's been nine months and Betty has just begun to realize the whole world is fucked and it's never going back to the way it was before.

And isn't that something?

That's at least what Sweet Pea would say.

May 11th, 2018

The end of world did not end with a bang. I did not end with a whimper. The end of the world ended as normally as ends of the words can be.

One day it was, one day it wasn't.

Of course, Betty is sure that it's much more complicated than that. She knows if she still had internet to look over things, she'd be able to chart the ways it was all leading up to it and no one knew. She's sure that someone had to guess it somewhere, even if it was those previously-thought-to-be-crazy survivalists, who she thinks are somewhere out there, but in all likelihood doing much better than she is. She bets those people in their tin bunkers are laughing it up right now, alive and well, while the rest of the world burns above them.

But to Betty and to everyone in Riverdale, it simply ceased to be their world anymore in the span of 24 hours.

In the chaos of their town, what with her father being revealed as the Black Hood and Archie's arrest, they were all to preoccupied with their own minimal problems to look at what was happening outside of their city limits. But, even if they had, would any of them have ever been prepared? At least right now, Betty can pretend like if she'd known she'd been better off, instead of the reality that nothing could have ever made this situation okay. No amount of color-coded notes or carefully stocked supplies would have made the end of the world easier for Betty Cooper.

It's in moments like this, when she reflects, that she thinks of Jughead. She thinks that she cannot even accurately begin to describe the change of those hours in any real way, she's only able to look at it from a journalist's logical and detached mindset. She can report hour to hour the happenings, but she would have fumbled if someone asked her to vividly tell them about her fear, her hunger, or the rush of adrenaline as she fought for her life. She thinks that if the world ever does end up righting itself and if Jughead is somewhere still alive out there, the novel he writes about this happening will be a bestseller.

The truth of the matter, whenever Betty thinks hard back to it, is that they were all worrying about Archie and nothing seemed more pressing than the fact that her best friend was being accused of a murder Betty is pretty damn sure he didn't do. One Betty hopes he didn't; they'd all seen him run after the buglar, but when he'd come back, he didn't have the eyes of a killer. Maybe he's a better actor than she cares to admit. Maybe being trained under Hiram all that time, even as a way to get the better of him, darkened his soul in ways that was inevitiable. Maybe he did kill that boy, Betty wonders, and she won't say it outloud but she wonders how they'll go on after that? She remembers sleeping over at Veronica's house, consoling her.

"It's my father, I just know it. I just know it and I feel so helpless," Veronica paced around her room, throwing anything and everything at the wall. Her clothes, balls of socks, jewelry, and finally a bottle of perfume that shattered, leaving a little puddle on the ground and the aromatic scent that Veronica once wore everyday hanging in the air.