Chapter Text
He shows her the guns. There are two of them—pistols, straight out of an action movie or one of her dad’s spy novels.
“Are they real?” Veronica asks.
J.D. shifts on the bed beside her. “Yeah, but we’re filling them with Ich Luge bullets.”
“Ich Luge?”
He smirks. “My Grandad scored them in World War II. They contain a powerful tranquilizer. The Nazis used them to fake their own suicides when the Russians invaded Berlin.” He holds up the gun, aiming at a poster on Veronica’s wall. She traces his line of sight directly to Christian Slater’s head. “We’ll use them to knock out Kurt and Ram long enough to make it look like a suicide pact. Complete with a forged suicide note.”
Veronica smoothes out the paper in her hands. “Ram and I died because we had to hide our gay forbidden love from a misapproving world.”
“Perfecto,” J.D. says with a lopsided smile. With far more swiftness than one would expect from a seventeen-year-old, he loads both of their pistols with the nonlethal bullets. “For you,” he tells Veronica, passing one along.
She turns the gun over in her hand. Her blood boils at the memory of Kurt and Ram harassing her, and the things they’d called her at school earlier that day. J.D. is right—they deserve a taste of their own medicine.
And she won’t lie: there is something deeply endearing about J.D.’s protective streak. The way he loves is unlike anything she’s experienced before. There are no guard-rails, no reservations. His unapologetic honesty might make him detestable to the rest of the town, but Veronica can’t get enough. After seventeen years growing up in civilized suburban Sherwood, Jason Dean is more refreshing to her than any Slushie in the world.
There is still, of course, the issue of Heather’s death—if J.D. hadn’t jokingly spiked a drink with drain cleaner, Veronica wouldn’t have accidentally served it to her former boss-slash-friend-slash-enemy. But he couldn’t have known that his joke would yield such lethal results. Really, it could have happened to anyone. Veronica and J.D. were just smart enough to get away with it.
She scoffs at the idea of Kurt and Ram trying to pull off a similar cover-up. Forget forgery—she isn’t even sure those idiots know how to read. Maybe they’ll finally have the free time to improve their literacy, once they’re relieved of their social status. And wouldn’t that just be beautiful?
“Ich Luge bullets,” Veronica repeats, raising the pistol to her own head. She tugs at J.D.’s sleeve and waves to her partner in crime.
He snatches the gun away. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“It was just a joke!” Veronica laughs, although she makes no effort to reclaim the weapon. Her warm smile thins at the sight of her boyfriend’s horrified expression. “And anyway, even if I did pull the trigger… they’re non-lethal, remember?”
Something crosses over J.D.’s face. “They are non-lethal,” he confirms. “But I still don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Veronica nods. That’s fair. She’d be upset at the sight of J.D. holding a gun to his own head. “Sorry,” she says, putting a hand on his arm. “Really, I am.”
He looks down at her hand and sighs. Gently, he holds it and adorns it with a kiss. A shiver runs through Veronica’s body at the display of affection. This J.D. is still relatively new to her—a softer, sweeter side of his typical tough-guy persona.
Something has changed within him in the past few hours, revealing a vulnerability that he hasn’t let show before. They ditched school together after hearing Heather Duke spread those rumors with Kurt and Ram. Veronica cried, for obvious reasons, and J.D. comforted her. But he’d opened up, too. And in the midst of their shared anger and pain, he’d proposed a way to get revenge.
Present-moment J.D. mutters unintelligible words into Veronica’s hand, his lips still pressed softly to her skin. She can’t hear what he’s saying but it’s as solemn as prayer. As a kid, she didn’t know what romantic love would look like—probably how it was in the books, mass-produced narratives delivering catharsis to the widest possible demographic. But she’s pretty sure that if she tried to publish the details of her love story with one Jason Dean, it would not play well with general audiences. Also, it would get them both arrested.
J.D. clears his throat as he releases Veronica’s hand. Instead of returning the pistol, he tucks it inside his trench coat—to be fair, a likely place for a handgun to be. “I think I’ll hold onto this for now.”
“Come on,” Veronica pouts, leaning her entire body weight against him. “You of all people cannot be revoking my firearm privileges.”
That gets a smirk from him. “Maybe I’ll give it back once you’ve earned it.”
“Oh, I intend to earn it,” says Veronica, already removing her blazer to J.D.’s obvious delight. He straightens up on the bed, allowing her to straddle him just how she likes. In the meantime, he places his own pistol down on the bedside table.
“Hi,” Veronica says, looking down at J.D. as he caresses her sides. She takes his hands and puts them on her breasts, a move bold enough to capture his full attention. Then in one swift movement, she reaches into his coat for the second pistol.
It doesn’t work. Her hand slips and J.D. overpowers her easily, gripping her wrists and shoving her onto her back. “Stop,” he growls, transferring her wrists to one hand and pinning them both down. With his other hand he blindly reaches for the gun at his side, then tosses it all the way across the room.
His eyes burn into her, furious and frantic and… afraid? Veronica tilts her head slightly. Why is J.D. so afraid of wrestling around a non-lethal weapon, anyway? Neither of them have ever objected to rough play before, so it’s bizarre to see him draw the line now. Especially since between the two of them, J.D. is not the person Veronica would expect to draw any sort of lines.
But it’s been twice, now, that he’s shown caution around a weapon that they’re planning to use on other human beings. Kurt and Ram are massive jerks who deserve to be taken down several pegs, but they’re still people. And Veronica does not want them dead.
She looks up at J.D. He watches her, seemingly waiting for an apology. But as she considers the logistics of a harmless sedative bullet, an apology is the last thing on her mind.
“How exactly can a bullet be non-lethal?” she asks, trying to keep her tone as casual as possible. He opens his mouth, but she can’t stop herself from elaborating. “I mean, to deliver the sedative, it would need to pierce the skin. With great force, from an actual gun. What if we hit major organs, or the wounds get infected? What if we leave them unconscious and they bleed out?” She bites her lip. “And if they don’t bleed out, if they do wake up… what’s stopping them from pointing the finger at me? Even if they’re humiliated or whatever, the cops will still listen to what they have to say. That would place me at two crime scenes, both involving suicide notes. And there are people who know I’m good at forgery, like Heather Duke and Martha and—”
“Nothing will happen to you,” J.D. interrupts, releasing Veronica’s wrists and kissing her lips. “I promise.”
She leans into his touch, comforted by his certainty. But a familiar voice in her head—vaguely bitchy, slightly hoarse—instructs her to focus.
“I don’t think you can promise that, though,” Veronica says, pulling away. “As soon as Kurt and Ram wake up, they’ll tell everyone I was involved.”
And surely, J.D. knows that too. He isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t make promises he can’t keep. That eagerness to please is something she’s always adored about him, especially when he’s vowing to fight for her. But this specific promise sets off every alarm in Veronica’s head—because if J.D. isn’t stupid, and his promises are made to keep, that can only mean one thing:
He doesn’t expect Kurt and Ram to wake up.
Bingo, bitch, says the ghost of Heather Chandler. She toasts to the truth with a cup full of poison.
J.D. recoils at Veronica’s expression of dread. He sits back too now, mirroring her on his knees.
“Did you know?” she asks, looking him dead in the eyes. She realizes, in this moment, that she isn’t talking about the bullets. “Did you know that I had the wrong cup?”
To his credit, J.D. does not look away. He doesn’t even flinch. He just sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “I kinda thought you already knew.”
She scrambles away from him, her back hitting the headboard. She feels stunned as she processes this new information. It had been so easy to distract herself in the weeks since Heather’s death—with J.D., with schoolwork, with the ridiculous way her teachers and peers had responded to her faked suicide note. In Veronica’s mind, she and J.D. had been victims of circumstance, two stupid teenagers who’d made a fatal mistake and used their combined smarts to cover their tracks. Forgivable morally, if not legally, because it could have happened to anyone, and there was no point in sabotaging their lives just because Heather lost hers.
J.D. watches her carefully.
Veronica leans over the side of the bed, pulls out a small trash can, and hurls.
“Oh Veronica, don’t—”
She holds out a palm, stopping him from coming any closer. “Stay the fuck away from me.” She’s broken into a cold sweat. She feels like she can’t breathe.
“Just lean back, okay? I don’t want you to—”
Veronica pictures Heather Chandler’s corpse lying on the bed with them. She shrieks and jolts backwards, slamming her head against the wall.
“Stop it, you’re going to hurt yourself!”
Everything feels fuzzy. Her vision begins to blur. There are two J.D.s in front of her, both wide-eyed with concern but hesitating to advance. She wonders if this is how Heather Chandler felt when they poisoned her. She wonders if she’s dying too, and realizes that she isn’t entirely against the idea. She’d be better off, really, because then she wouldn’t have to live with this.
Christ, her head hurts.
Veronica passes out.