Malachi x OC (Lita Mae Tate)
Childhood best friends to lovers to strangers to lovers (again): a lover's timeline.
Malachi and Lita met when he was 10 and she was 11 years old on the Southside of Riverdale. They became best friends very quickly.
They started dating when he was 15 and she was 16, attending Southside High together. Neither of them were affiliated at the time (that Lita knew of).
Lita's dream was to study art in New York after high school, but she always promised to never leave Mal behind.
Until he essentially forced her to.
Lita lived in NYC for 8 years, studying art and eventually falling in love with tattoo artistry.
She apprenticed under a very well known NY artist in her final year of undergraduate school and earned her MFA from Pratt.
On break from classes, she'd come home to visit Pop, but avoided the Southside when she could.
The one time she didn't another Serpent had told Lita that Mal was gone, that he left and that she should never try to find him again because he'd moved on.
She built up her clientele and eventually decided to move back home to Riverdale where she'd have to face her past head on at some point.
She'd been back for less than a week before she ran into her former love and realized that her feelings for him never waned.
She comes to find out Mal never left; he did a sbort stint in Shankshaw for drug running and that he had been initiated into the Ghoulies before she had even left for college.
Eventually, they talk about it. They talk about how neither of them had moved on despite trying to and part of the reason she came home was for him.
She learned to deal with the fact that he was a high ranking Ghoulie.
When the tensions settled, they decided to give it another try and things have been going swimmingly ever since. (The murmurs that she's half Jones slowly died down, too).
