Chapter Text
when you try to think back on how it happens, later, you only remember broad detail.
you remember hiram, dangerous even staring down the barrel of a gun.
you remember hiram saying surely you can’t expect to enforce an exile without an enforcer. not looking at you, but looking at you. saying didn’t you think of that?
(you did, of course you did. you've been thinking about it ever since reggie produced his evidence and the texture of the air in the car changed in a way neither you nor veronica tried to address.
or maybe you've been thinking about it for years, how you'll never once rest easy knowing hiram is out there, somewhere out of your sight. how you'll always be haunted, how riverdale will never be safe in any true or permanent way.)
hiram sneers at betty's so-called field office and jughead is looking at you in pain and shaking his head but you can't comprehend anything he or anyone else is saying anymore. you don't look back at him again, because you're stepping forward.
i’ll do it.
you're not sure who you're saying it for, who’s looking for you to make grand heroic gestures anymore. but it's a relief, almost, how the chaos hushes as soon as the words are out. eye of the storm.
and then hiram laughs, and everyone starts talking again. but you put the right amount of authority in your voice and say he's right and if that’s what it takes to keep him away from riverdale for good, i’ll do it. i’ll go with him.
veronica releases her hold on your arm when you turn to her and say you know this is the only way to be sure.
she doesn’t try to stop you after that, but then she’s never done much to keep you out of her father’s path. you find yourself forgiving that, easily; she must have been young when she had to outgrow the instinct to try to save everyone.
you can’t envy her that. you’ve never wanted to survive badly enough to give anybody up. (and that’s the thing about grand heroic gestures: survivors don’t make them, martyrs do.)
--
was this your plan all along? you feel compelled to ask him. you’re at his flank, following half a step behind as you both walk out toward the interstate.
it reminds you of your discontinued trail runs, putting your feet into his shadow and matching the rhythm of your breath to his and feeling all the time that you’re being taught something about yourself, something essential (something you instinctively turn from even as you are drawn toward it).
but it also reminds you of what betty’s told you about her work in the past months, mapping all the places along the lonely highway where truckers and truck stop girls slip away together for what they don’t want to do in the cab of a car (and where women have died, have been torn apart).
so it's understandable that as you watch hiram’s shoulders flex with his walking, under the tailored knit of his sweater, you think about sex and then about violence.
(the gun veronica gave you as you left, the same one she killed her husband with, fits uneasily in your grip; it’s clearly made for smaller, surer hands.)
you catch the flash of hiram’s teeth in the glare from a passing car’s headlights as he glances back at you. you would seem to have the upper hand right now, archie, so why ask me a thing like that?
--
in the safe house, hiram finds himself a change of clothes. he strips down like you aren't there with him, watching in the doorway.
there've been many times in your life you've moved through the world with the sensation of hiram's eyes on your body. this should feel like a reversal, but it doesn't.
he looks strong, bigger even than he’d been those years ago when he’d knocked you bloody in the ring. and yet you held him down hours ago, folded over the desk as his arrest warrant was read, and he just let you, no resistance.
hiram leafs back through the closet and then you have to work not to draw back when he presses a fresh outfit to your chest, socks on top. you take it from him and look at the little h.l. monogram stitched into each cuff instead of at his face as he passes.
he doesn't stay to watch you undress. you should call him back, keep him in your sight (make him turn away but be unable to avoid thinking about the play of your shadow on the wall and the sound of cloth on skin), but you don’t. the clothes fit like they were tailored for you.
this whole situation fits like it was tailored for you.
you’ve spent the past year back in riverdale waiting for a trap to spring, and now you consider whether you’ve missed it.
--
there’s an open bottle of lodge label rum on the kitchen counter. hiram didn’t leave you a glass, so you heft it in your fist and drink straight from the mouth. (you’re so anxious you’re buzzing, alert like you haven’t been since you landed back on u.s. soil. you’re trying not to let it show - but hiram knows you.)
hiram makes a sound under his breath at you, more exhale than syllable. but an acknowledgment.
what are you planning? you ask him, even though you've never once gotten a straight answer back from hiram lodge. your voice sounds oddly plaintive to your own ears. it makes you clear your throat, straighten your posture.
he narrows his eyes. all you get is a question for a question: why not take it moment by moment for a while longer, archie?
as though that isn't what you've been doing every day for the past year, anticipating hiram around every corner. as though you haven't been a dog on a chain, pacing your yard on guard against - nothing you can name specifically.
(if he asked to, you know you would let him close his teeth over the most delicate part of your throat just to get it over with, just to know what it's going to be like when it happens.)
you drink again like you’re trying to drown something, feeling the tension coiling in your shoulders and getting angrier and angrier until hiram says look, it’s not a plan, per se. i’m alert for certain opportunities.
he’s looking at you sideways and you wonder if he’s wondering how to manage you, if you’re unpredictable to him now (if maybe you seem as changed to him as he seems unchanged to you).
you probably do. you hope you do after seven years, ten years. you rely on hiram to pay attention to you, to notice things about you the way no one else does, even if you’ve never known what to do with that. you appreciate it better now that you’ve realized how impersonal, how transactional the rest of the world nearly always is.
you appreciate it better, now that you’ve learned that most other people will just put you aside after they’ve compromised you.
that’s probably why you let him take the rum away from you now, why you make a conscious effort not to react when he reaches out to carefully loosen your grip. the last person to catch your hand in theirs was veronica, hours ago. hiram moves more deliberately, like he’s defusing something.
you wonder if he might think, briefly, of shattering the bottle on the counter’s edge and feeding it to you shard by shard (until his fingertips are slicked red with your blood and he’s decided you’re punished enough), but he just sets it out of arms' reach by the microwave.
don’t fault me for playing my cards close. let’s not pretend we can trust each other just yet.
(i blame archie for this, he’d said, right before he'd redrawn the shape of your life again. i blame archie.)
you think about the tactical considerations and then discard them, mostly. you make a decision.
take this then, too. you offer him veronica's gun, warm from the waistband of your jeans. this is what you want, isn't it?
you hold it out to him and say now you have the upper hand like it means anything whether you’re armed around hiram lodge or not.
he goes unreadable and still in that way you know means he's calculating, too. he takes your hand again and then the pistol from it, finally. maybe it should be a relief to give it up.
what about your phone?
your stomach turns sour, but you’ve committed now. you empty your pockets on the countertop: cell phone, wallet, keys. the things that tether you to riverdale.
hiram takes them all from you, and then he stands motionless and lets you kiss him once on the mouth, face tipped up to yours, before he says archie again in the tone of voice you’ve been expecting. before he sets you back a step and says take a nap and sober up, there’s a helicopter coming in a few hours.
--
you've almost dozed off before you realize he's in your room. but by then there’s a hand covering your mouth, pinching your nostrils shut, and you can't breathe.
you find yourself struggling with him at first, not understanding.
you’re pinned by your forearms, then, and by a solid weight on your body and hiram is saying no, shhh like a command. you finally become aware that you’re lying on top of clean sheets, not in the mud at the bottom of a trench.
this is a different kind of familiar, something out of a dream.
you search hiram’s face in the dim light and get caught on his eyes assessing you, waiting. after a moment you can make your limbs relax, little by little.
good, archie, hiram says, that’s good. his tone is pleasant, and you're almost prepared when he cuts off your air again.
it isn’t the hardest assignment hiram has given you, by a long stretch. you find yourself relieved that this is all it is after so much waiting even as the spots start to swim across your vision, making hiram's expression hard to read. you don’t move except to curl your fingers until your nails touch your palms.
mija, hiram calls you then.
you hear him say my good girl over the buzzing in your ears, and everything gets more challenging from there.
you make a protesting, uncertain sound but you’re already running at hiram’s pace and the momentum carries you. you let him wedge one knee between your thighs and he laughs, low and unkind, when your body goes faster than your brain, when your hips automatically tilt to meet him where the friction is.
that's good. he’s giving you space for air under his palm but not enough to fix the ache in your lungs or properly focus your thoughts. and then without warning that changes, he lets your mouth open and you’re gasping, loudest sound in the small room. he holds you by your jaw so you can’t turn your face away, so you have to keep still.
he makes sure you're looking up at him when he says tell your daddy you'll be good from now on, mija and you know you’re being given an order.
daddy? you stumble on the word, meaning it as a question - or perhaps not, because you do understand this. you're hyperventilating and you're dizzy with liquor and the headrush of new shame, but you get that you’re being asked to make a choice, to cross a line.
you get that it’s a point of no return. but it's too late to go another direction. you say yeah, i'll be good. i'll be good. you help him lift your shirt. you say yeah, okay and kiss back when he puts his mouth to yours.
(you can’t ever think for a moment you aren’t a part of this, that you aren’t responsible.)
the way hiram touches you makes you think of (makes you feel like you could be) veronica again and again, makes everything disorienting and out of bounds. you lose your bearings when he puts his hands around your waist like it's delicate.
he cups your pecs like they're something to hold and you squirm, but you don't try to pull away when he moves his thumbs rough over your nipples, works them into peaks with his tongue and teeth.
he's speaking to you all the time he's taking off your clothes so you can't forget what you're doing or who you're doing it to (so sensitive, mija, such a good girl) but it flows in and out over your humiliating awareness of everything else, how hard you are and how you find yourself choking out yeah and please and opening your legs as he lubes his fingers so you get wet enough for me.
hiram doesn't do anything without a reason. hiram doesn’t do anything without a reason and this means something, you know that. you know you're not paying enough attention.
he fucks you. (he makes you ask him to fuck you and you do, of course. it's a relief to know you don’t have to wonder if you should say no, because you can’t.)
he makes you press the heel of your own palm against your abdomen and try to feel him there, changing the shape of your insides until you’re sickened, you’re woozy with thinking about it. when you cum it’s with the sensation of being branded, scarred, permanently marked by him again.
then hiram keeps fucking you, knocks your protective hands away from your cock and says good girls get to have at least two. so you lie still and chew your fist and try not to make broken, ugly sounds when he touches you where you're painfully sensitive, where you know it will ache until it starts to feel good once more.
he's right, you have a second one. and then finally he cums, too, inside of you and you catch your breath underneath the weight of him and try not to be conscious of the fact that you’ll never know what to say to veronica again, if you ever see her.
--
daddy, you say again experimentally, when hiram's settled beside you. it's stuck on your tongue uncomfortably, like the lyrics to a song that's just gone off the radio.
he says be careful with that one, archie in that tone like he's laughing at you, but fondly, and you're relieved it's not so serious or so committed. it's more like a statement he had to make, or a game he was playing with you.
--
in front of the pilot he does call you mijo, though, easily and without inflection. you carry all of the bags to the helicopter, and find the physical exertion of it makes you feel calmer. this is familiar. this is almost routine.
in front of the pilot he offers you your phone back, too, like an afterthought (like a tease, like a dare, like a thumb dug into the center of a fresh bruise). you shake your head and you don't watch as he shrugs and puts it back into his lapel pocket.
you think about how if you got access to somebody else's phone you know the coopers' home number from memory and yours (frank's now, jughead's until he moves out). you think about how if you dialed either of them you wouldn't have anything to say, and then about how hiram should trust you better, now.
you start to feel alone but only for a moment, because the pilot turns around in his seat and then hiram grazes the backs of his fingers over your knee.
you might be made of liquid how easily you tilt in his direction, how easily your legs fall splayed. how easily you rush to figure out and follow the rules.
the helicopter blades start spinning, blocking you into your ear protection and the navigational white noise over the radio before you think to ask hiram where you're going beyond north. you decide that's alright. you decide there isn't an answer that would change anything for you.
(but you wish you knew, all the same. you think you understand what it means for mistrust, that you don’t.)
--
i’m not a teenager anymore is something you feel like you have to say to him, later.
the hotel suite has two bedrooms and so you’ve unpacked into two closets, smoothing the creases out of hiram’s shirts with the self-consciousness that comes from being watched.
the last time you handled another man’s clothes like this, you were sorting your dad’s things for the salvation army pickup. you remember it by feel mostly, the act of blindly shoving frayed flannels and pairs of paint-flecked jeans into plastic garbage bags and thinking all the time how good it was that your mom didn’t have to be the one doing this.
the texture of your dad’s wardrobe had been as soft and well-worn as hiram’s is crisp, light, fresh with the tags just clipped.
now your things are all like that, too: new in the effortless way only luxury goods are ever new, not in the way of back-to-school sale clothes or the heavy military dress uniform that became a burden to be managed from almost the moment you first tried it on.
hiram’s pen has stopped on the page, you hear but don’t see. have i been treating you like a teenager, archie? there’s a suggestion of a smirk in his voice, of something you know you should be shamed by.
i just mean, (veronica would probably sort neckties by color. hiram would probably prefer them sorted by color. you hang them in the order they come out of the bag.) i know there’s more to do, and i can do more. once you trust me.
you meet his eyes, square your shoulders. you still have to actively resist the instinct to step into parade stance in moments like these. you let hiram study your face, your neck, how the clothes he gave you hang over all the parts of your body he’s covered already with his own hands, all the parts you’ve already helped strip bare and offered up freely.
once you know to trust me, you repeat, voice almost level, and he nods with something like thoughtfulness, the barest lift of his chin.
we’ll see.
--
(and then he says hey, come here.)
--