Welcome to Night Vale: In Character

FP & Alice

settling in at home

It had probably been wrong of FP not to directly reach out to Betty before Alice had shown up, but he had honestly meant to. Time had just gotten away from him, and, although he had told Jughead that Betty was welcomed to stay with them, she had chosen to stay with the people that had taken her and Jughead in when they had arrived. He probably could have pushed harder on the matter. Betty had been through a lot, though, and he felt ill-equipped to deal with it. He was sort of glad he hadn't put his foot down and insisted that she live with them, especially after reading what she'd said to her mother on the network. FP didn't know much about how the FBI worked, but he remembered Fred bitching about some Agent Adams dude, whom the Register had informed him had ended up dead on Riot Night, and FP really didn't want Alice to die because she'd said things she shouldn't have said. He could supplement the knowledge he'd gleaned from Fred with his drunken absorption of crime show dramas. What? The trailer didn't have cable and he'd had to watch something while he was in a stupor. FP didn't want the things that happened to those women on those shows to happen to Alice. Plus, Betty was a child. Wasn't Alice constantly writing articles for the Register bitching about how important it was to let children have childhoods? No. Not telling her had been the right decision. The last thing FP would have wanted was to have had the kids involved in an FBI investigation.

That didn't mean he wasn't still seething inwardly at the entire debacle. He had obtained a house that had entirely too many bedrooms for three people, and he wasn't going to be surprised if the occupancy dropped down to two. Why would Jughead want to stay with them when he had another option? Nothing FP had ever done was good enough, not even his current decision to sell out entirely and become the sheriff and move into the house Gladys had bought with her dirty money, ruining his relationship with Alice in the process. Even here when he'd forced himself to live in the house instead of a trailer for the sake of the boy, he spent most of his time away from home.

FP drew in a deep breath and forced himself out of the depressive funk he'd put himself into. "Here we are," he said to Alice, as he lit up another cigarette. "Home sweet home. You can have the master," he added. "I sleep on the couch."