The Vow
It was twenty years ago. A chapter in her life buried under years and months and minutes and hours but as she sits across from her daughter, spluttering out a passionate monalogue and singing the praises of the girl she loves, Hermione Lodge can't help but concede a stream of peviously unshed tears.
"I love her mom. " Veronica had sobbed into a gravy-stained napkin that formerly nestled between her fork and her plate, "I love her so much and I don't want anyone else but her. Please, please tell me you understand."
She understood. She understood all too well because Veronica wasn't the first of the Lodge women to fall under the spell of a Cooper.
Of course she was Hermione Cruz back then. Back when her mornings were spent ushering the girl with a wild blonde mane out of her room via her rediculously small window, just managing to toss her the South Side Serpents Jacket that lay crumpled in the corner of her room before her mother came bursting in while the smug little shit in question blew her a parting kiss before hastily making her descent.
She missed the days when all of her mornings were like that one.
"Mija." She was released from her daze and took Veronica's hand, the hand on which a gold band cowned with a magnificent emerald that Hiram had gifted her on her fifteenth birthday encircled her index finger. "I want you to be happy, I do. I know you think you love Betty now but-"
"NO!" Veronica lurched forward almost knocking her seat back. "Don't do that! Don't tell me this is just some flight of fancy, a fleeting crush, a phase, I love her! I really love her, I don't want anything else in this life, just her." Her volume dwindled mid-way through her impassioned declaration but the elder woman had no retort, no words with which to contend because it had just, in that very moment, occured to her.
Veronica was her twenty years ago. Vying for her mother's acceptance.
"I...I..." Hermione grappled for a words of comfort, a word of wisdom but nothing came. Nothing but air that burned like whiskey on its way down but carried no words. "I want this to work for you Veronica. I want you to be happy. As a parent that's all you can hope for but I don't want love to scorn you the way it did me."
Veronica stalked over to the seat closest to her mother and knit her eyebrows, "I know daddy's recent endeavors have been of a less than savoury nature but-"
"Oh I'm not talking about Hiram!" Hermione yelled as the seams of a twenty year oath came undone before her child, "I...I loved someone once...a long time ago, and something happened that meant I couldn't be with them."
Veronica was beginning to get pins and needles in her legs. The varnished Ebony chairs they sat upon were a beauty when beheld by the naked eye but sitting on them for an extended period of time was a marginally more unpleasant experience.
"It broke me, and I don't think I've ever had the capacity to heal. I don't want that for you, I don't want Betty to ruin you like-"
Hermione thanked whatever diety was listening that she stopped before the name Alice slipped from her mouth. Nightfall blanketed Riverdale, the only light emitting from an ocean of infinate shadow was the milky sea of stars illuminating a darkened land.
"Tell me mom." It was but a whisper so thin it almost went unregistered, like a feather that refused to yield unto the laws of gravity, "You had no reservations when you thought I was into Archie so why is Betty such a problem for you? Is it because she's a girl?"
"Of course not." If only you knew, mija.
"Then what?!" A spoon clattered as Veronica slammed her hand on the table and Hermione pursed her lips and took a swig from her glass, she got up to walk off but as she did the floodgates opened and two decades of repressed memories and asphyxiated desires came pooling to the surface.
Hermione turned sharply, soft wisps of jet black lashing her face. The action so abrupt that Veronica visibly flinched."Because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! She will hurt you, she will make you love her, blindy so. She will make you feel like you can't live without her and should there come a time when that may well be a possibility you'll find yourself willing to give up everything to save her. Even give give up her!"
A thick, heavy silence ensued.
Veronica felt like she was paralysed. She stared at her mother, lips slightly parted. She felt as though she'd been punched in the gut by some nameless phantom in the midst of her mother's rage, the gift of speech wrenched from her throat. "What do mean 'the apple doesn't fall far from the tree'?" Veronica prodded for an answer, searching for a sign of submission on her mother's face.
It turns out Hermione's silence and refusal to pry her eyes from the floor was all the confirmation Veronica Lodge needed.
"Oh my God." She made a sound, something between a scoff and a gasp as Hermione scrunched her eyes shut.
"It was a long time ago, mija."
Like that makes it any less bitter a pill to swallow.
"You and Alice Cooper? And...and you were ready to give me an earful about being with Betty?" Veronica fumed, pointing her finger with the gold band at her mother.
Hermione ignored the finger that jabbed the air between them, a finger with a nail coated with the blackest black to match her daughter's temper, "Yes. Me and Alice Cooper."
In truth, Veronica was expecting some dramatic confrontation to follow, an age of pent up wroth she'd half expected to implode before her very eyes or at the very least a door-slamming storm off. Instead her limbs jerked forward without the consent of her brain and locked her arms around her mother's willowy frame before her knees could sink into the cream sea of their carpet.
"That's why you didn't want me dating Betty. Because you dated ." Hermione nodded weakly. she wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her middle finger and clutched onto Veronica's arm.
"I loved her Mija. So much that nothing mattered to me other than being with her. My mom hated her." A small chuckle whistles through the parting of her lips as nostalgia curls them into a smile.
"As far as I was concerned she was it for me. Of course Mami and Papi had a few choice words about me dating 'South Side Trailer Trash'." Hermione remembered her mother's scowl, the way she turned her head and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration when she'd yet again discovered the black and blue mounds that peppered Hermione's neck and knew she'd been marked by the serpent. "We thought we were unstoppable."
She smiled again fondly and shivered as she imagined she felt Alice's fingers ghosting back and forth across the hollow of her cheeks as they lay in her bed entangled in eachother's limbs, just like they did the morning before Hermione would do the unspeakable and forfeit the love of her life.
I honoured my vow didn't I? Why are you doing this to me?
"What made you break it off?" Veronica asked innocently.
"Love." A simple answer to a question with so many implications but the real answer made her bones ache down to their deepest depths. "Everything I did, I did for love...For Alice." hot wet tears splattered onto Veronica's arm in drips and drabs, she began to wonder if she should press the matter any further when the older woman continued, "It was over twenty years ago...I never thought I'd speak speak of this again, let alone explain all of this to my own daughter."
They moved to the couch next to the fireplace, it was homely and warm and inviting as opposed to the ice that usually radiated off the walls of the Lodge residence. "Mom, if this is too hard for you-"
At this Hermione chuckled, a twisted wheezing mirthless tangle of air, Veronica thought the Devil had claimed her at this point but she looked into the ink black pools of her daughter's eyes. "It's a little too late for that don't you think? Veronica, I haven't told a soul what I'm about to tell you." The River Vixen nodded but Hermione knew she could never, ever comprehend the magnitude of her sacrifice.
"I swear to God Veronica, it doesn't leave this room. Ever."
She took her mother's hand. "I promise, Mami."
Veronica could hear how her mother's breath shuddered as she inhaled. "Alice and I dated in High School. She was my first love. My first everything. I adored her, but my parents, not so much..."
*Flashback*
Hermione sat rigidly on the couch of their living room, back agonisingly straight and legs resting perfectly against each other as her mother towered over her with a look of undiluted contempt.
"It's bad enough that you smuggle that girl into my house at all hours of the night but you don't even have the decency to be descreet." She hissed as the vein by her temple throbbed and her neck reddened at the mention of Alice Smith. It was the third time that week that she'd been met with the sheepish smile of her daughter's South Side lover as she was attempting to sneak out of the house."She'll have you running around with her brood of vagrants next!"
Hermione jolted up, ready to defend her girlfriend without a sliver of hesitation,"The Serpents aren't that bad mother! And she makes me happy."
"She's a hood-rat. A filthy little urchin." Her mother spat.
"I love her."
"On your own head be it, Hermione. But I won't have her in this house, I dread to imagine what the neighbours think."
She looked her mother in the eye. "The neighbours can fuck themselves." The words dripped like venom off her tongue but her eyes held a malice far more potent. With a brisk hair flip and an angry bounce in her step she left for school.
*End Flashback*
"Not that I cared what they thought. I loved her and she loved me, we came from completely different worlds but that didn't matter to us, I even thought about joining the Serpents since we spent more time at the White Wyrm than anywhere else." The firelight cast it's glow across her face and Veronica could see her mother smiling fondly, "I thought this it, she the one I'm going to be with for the rest of my life."
"So what happened?"
"She almost died."
Veronica's stomach dropped."What?" It came out a frantic whisper and suddenly not even the roaring flames could heat the frost that chilled her blood.
The older latina continued,"She was supposed to come over to my house one night, we made plans but she said she and the Serpents had to take care of something first. Some rival gang turfing up at The Wyrm, I don't know. She said 'I love you and I'll see you later.' I thought nothing of it because the Serpents were always doing things like that, getting into brawls, even the girls, hell especially the girls."
She stared off into the distance, completely lost in the memory of that night. She shifted her position on the couch and creamy white cushion plumped back up at the loss of contact. This was always the part in the story that she dreaded, the moment that made her chest tighten and her heart clench if she thought about it for too long, "Later that night I got a call from FP. Telling me Alice had been stabbed six times.." Her breath shudders as an involuntary onslaught of tears descend, "Four times in the abdomen, once in the leg and...and once in the chest."
Veronica says nothing from the other end of the couch and stares at her mother with a sympathy such as neither woman has ever known , "I raced to that hospital, and when I got there the doctor told me that she'd lost so much blood it would be a miracle if she made it through the night.."
"Mom, you don't have to..."
"No..no I do beacuse if I don't say it now then I never will. You went digging Veronica so now you're going to hear the whole truth, so help me God." Their was a flash, only a fleeting flash of anger in her voice, half of her hated that Veronica was forcing her to breathe life back into the worst night of her life but the other half was glad that she was finally able to speak about it after all the years she was forced to live without Alice, suffering and solitude her only company.
She remembered every awful detail about that night. What she wore, what FP wore, him giving her Alice's Serpent Jacket and saying 'she'd want you to have this' , but there was one memory that she was convinced would haunt her to the end of her days: The sight of Alice strewn across a hospital bed, her face more blood than skin and her wild blonde hair a tangled blood-splattered mess that fanned out across a shoddy little pillow. To anyone else the girl on the bed was just another Serpent who pushed her luck, but to Hermione that was Alice, her Alice, her soulmate that teetered on the brink of death.
"I did the only thing I could. I went to the little chapel that they have a few corridors down and I prayed. I prayed like I've done before, Ronnie. I honestly thought she was going to die, and I wasn't ready to be without her, so I dropped to my knees, I clasped my hands and I said 'Please God let her live, please! I'll do anything'" ,
Both women had tears streaming down their faces at this point. Veronica swore she could hear her mother's heart shattering. "I needed God to hear me, I said 'I promise I'll be a good Catholic. I'll live a good chaste life and find a good husband, just please don't take her away from me!'"
There was nothing holding Hermione back now, twenty years of being choked by the proverbial noose of her reverse faustian deal with God undone by the inquisitive mind of Veronica Lodge, "I made a vow. I gave her up to save her life. And to this day she has no idea." Hermione's voice cracked before she could even finish the last part.
There was so much Veronica wanted to say, and more still that she wanted to ask but she feared if she opened her mouth then vomit swirling around in her stomach would come gushing out. An abrupt vibration coming from her pocket made both women jump,
"It's Betty." She felt very awkward saying her name in front of her mom. She expected a display of fiery opposition and flailing arms and flaring tempers but All Hermione Lodge did was put a loving hand on her cheek and smile like the day she was born, "Go to her Mija. It's okay. We didn't get our happy ending, but maybe you and Betty can."