Chapter Text
He never expected it to end like this. With a bomb clutched tightly to his chest.
Maybe he should have. After all, when did life go well for him? How had he thought that this time would be different? How had he deluded himself into thinking he was powerful enough to change this shitty world? How could he, who can’t even cleanse the world of his father, think he was a God?
How could he think he was worth anything when he couldn’t even get her?
She watches him, too far away to hold, to embrace. Tears are streaking down her face, but her eyes are resolute. He had done everything for her, and yet he still couldn’t save her from the evils of the world. He couldn’t save her, just like he couldn’t save his mother.
All he can do now for her, for the world, is remove himself from it.
He looks at the timer. Ten seconds to go.
“Our love is God.” He says once, twice.
He thinks he hears her repeat it before everything is light and pain, and his body is no more.
JD wakes up with a jolt, sitting bolt upright on his mattress. He looks around; he’s in the same cramped, drafty bedroom that he’s called home for the past six weeks, unharmed and distinctly alive.
A dream then; yesterday was all a dream.
Good, he thinks, good. He’s still weirdly shaken by the dream; it felt so realistic at the time — like it had all really happened — but now that he’s awake, he can already see flaws in the vision.
Clearly, it had been his mind picturing some fantastical worst-case scenario. Veronica wouldn’t go against him like that, not when she saw him suffering. Yes, she had dumped him, but she wanted this world too — she’d told him so, a world that was beautiful, not controlled by the whims of Heathers. Now he had come up with this plan, she would understand — he had known this going to bed last night, and nothing has changed since. Their perfect world was still theirs for the taking. All he has to do is see the plan through today, for real this time.
He gets up, automatically grabbing the gun from under his pillow, and moves towards his desk to get to the box of makeshift bombs he was putting together last night.
He freezes.
The bombs are not there.
Where are his bombs?
Had his father taken them? Surely not. There’s no way if Bud had seen them in his room he wouldn’t have shaken him awake and shouted at him for stealing materials — and even if he somehow had not, his father is unable to enter a room without stomping and slamming a door; he wouldn’t have slept through that.
JD frowns, looking around his room, picking up, for the first time, that there appear to be other differences from last night. The suitcases are in the middle of the room, not shoved in the corner; there are fewer clothes sprawled over the floor, his bedside table is emptier, the book of Emily Dickinson poems Veronica had gifted him is not there…
A terrible thought comes into his head. No, it can’t be, it can’t be. But he has to know for sure. He runs downstairs, opens the door, and grabs the newspaper the paperboy has haphazardly flung on their porch.
He reads the date.
September 18th, 1989.
No.
NO.
He shuts the door with shaking hands and staggers back into the lounge, collapsing weakly on the couch.
It’s September 18th. His first day at Westerberg. Four days before he even spoke to Veronica.
He didn’t just dream the events of one day, he dreamed the entire nearly six weeks. He dreamed every day he went to that shitty school. He dreamed the Heathers, and Kurt and Ram, and what it felt like to pull a trigger and kill. He dreamed the petition, and the bomb, and…
The realisation slams into him, cold and painful.
He dreamed Veronica.
Veronica Sawyer does not exist. She was just a figment of his imagination. He never saw her smile, never heard her laugh, never tasted her lips on his, never smelled her soft hair, never felt her arms warm around him as he moved inside her.
Less than an hour ago, he had thought he would die useless and unfulfilled, but this is worse. A world where Veronica Sawyer is not there, never existed in the first place, is the cruelest life he can ever imagine.
He wipes his eyes furiously, he’s long learned that crying will only get him more pain in this house, though thankfully his father is nowhere to be seen — he vaguely remembers that he had an early job the first day he went to Westerberg — and tries to work out what to do. There is nothing to do, not really. It’s just another school, just like all the others, where he will go to his monotonous lessons, with his detestable classmates, and then spend the evening freezing his brain with slushies. His life will be just like he never met her, because he never did.
There’s nothing really for it. He may as well face yet another day in his empty life. He eats a few dry handfuls of cereal, pulls on some clothes, and then gets on his bike for school.
It is not hard to find Westerberg. Once you get on the main road, there are signs pointing you in the right direction, but even so he navigates the journey with surprising ease for somewhere he has never been before. The roads he drives down almost feel familiar — but this is middle America, and doesn’t everything look the same there? — He’s mostly just pleased that the route is easy when his mind is so elsewhere.
The school itself feels familiar too, but they all do, really. Westerberg is one of those concrete block schools, probably put up in the fifties — created to efficiently funnel children through their halls like prisoners and to offer no further personality. JD has been to at least seven other high schools that look just like this one, and even more middle schools — no wonder when he dreamed it he got the look so accurate. The receptionist, predictably a sullen middle-aged woman with thick glasses and her hair in a tight bun, barely looks at him as she hands him his timetable and tells him to hurry up so he can make it to registration.
It’s only when he gets to homeroom that he really notices. His homeroom teacher — a balding, bespectacled man, who introduces himself as Mr Morris — is the very same man who ran his homeroom sessions in his dream. JD might not pay much attention in class, but he can recognise a face he’s been having to respond to almost every day for the past six weeks. The other students too, the ones who keep a safe distance from him, but nonetheless are forced to be in his presence, look familiar too — so familiar he can even name some of them: Courtney, Al, Shannon...
But how can this be? It is impossible. It must be his mind playing a trick. He read a book once — in the library of a particularly boring school. Seattle? Boston? — about how the mind and human memory are far more suggestible than one might like to believe. It’s how, when the police are deciding to be particularly shitty, they can lead witnesses to incorrectly describe the guilty party. If the mind doesn’t remember something too correctly, it can implant false memories, false faces, on them.
This must be what is happening now. Dreams fade fast — they always do, although this one he remembers as if it really were the past month and a half of his life —- he must be supplementing his memories with details he sees now.
The deja vu continues all morning — familiar faces, familiar classrooms, people whose names he knows even when he has no reason to — he even thinks he passes Kurt and Ram at one point in the hallway, though they don’t unpleasantly leer at him like they always used to, so probably not. It’s more annoying than anything, though he supposes it’s at least something to keep him entertained from the usual tedium of school life. He guesses he should just be grateful it was all a dream; while there were certainly some incredible highs in it, it’s not like these false memories proved anything except that he was a loser who could never win.
When the bell goes for lunch, he gets the usual indistinguishable slop that the canteen serves up—he eats it though, grateful for anything that isn’t pasta he had to buy and cook himself — and sits at an unoccupied table in the corner, like he does in every school, to read a book and quietly observe.
And that is when he sees them.
They enter in a group. All three of them. Red, yellow, and green. The red girl in the lead, nose stuck up to the ceiling, stalking over to the central table, as everyone in her way parts like the red sea. The other two girls rush behind her, the girl in yellow tripping over herself to keep up, smiling at any of the popular guys who look at her, the other more sullen, book in one hand, sitting down beside her friends as if the whole action takes her considerable effort.
Around him, the air is disturbed — they have caught the attention of not just him but the entire canteen. He can hear various murmurings and whispers, but only one word makes it through the ringing in his ears:
“Heather.”
It was not a dream.
And if it was not a dream, if the Heathers are real people that exist, then it won’t just be them; it will be…
Where is she?
WHERE IS SHE?
She’d come into the lunch hall with them on his first day of school, hadn’t she? Yes, he’s sure he’d seen red, yellow, green and blue the first time he’d laid eyes on them. Even if it hadn’t been until Friday that he’d had a chance to see and speak to her on his own, he had been seeing Veronica with the Heathers all week.
So where is she now?
Surely, surely, the universe in all its cruelty couldn’t be this cruel? To give him everything he saw except her?
But no, there she is, running in the canteen right now — face a little red, looking slightly dishevelled — but unmistakably his Veronica.
She’s alive. She’s real. She exists.
Nothing else matters anymore. Just that she is here, not just a wonderful figment of his imagination, but a real flesh and blood girl, that he can see and hear and touch. His eyes follow her, not caring if anyone else notices that he is staring, as she rushes over to the center table. Heather Chandler scowls at her —they’ve clearly been having some kind of argument — and, after a few sharp words that JD cannot catch, Veronica rolls her eyes and takes a seat at an empty table on the other side of the room from him.
Good. Heather Chandler was a terrible influence on Veronica anyway. He’s glad Veronica has shown some sense this time and decided to challenge and avoid her.
Though… why? This day seems to be going the same way for everyone else except him? No one else is freaking out with the same sense of deja vu. Everyone else has not remembered the past six weeks except for him — and now Veronica is finally challenging Heather Chandler like she always should have. Can she, like him, remember everything too?
It hits him, with a sudden jolt of elation. Of course she remembers. Of course she does. This whole thing is because of them. It must be. He was never meant to fail the first time. Never meant to die unsuccessful. The universe has sent him and Veronica back to set everything right. The universe knows they have a greater purpose than just to sit around and let the bullies and jerks ruin society. They have been granted the power to fix things together.
Across the canteen, Veronica has noticed him staring at her, not surprising really — he’s hardly been subtle. But she doesn’t look scared at all; instead, she smiles shyly, because she recognises him, because she too has realised that they are meant to be changing the world together this time.
He gets up like he’s in a scene from an old-timey movie. He walks, as if in slow motion, across the hallway, ready to greet her again in a world that they can change…
Which is when Heather Chandler walks in front of him, getting to Veronica's table first. She says something, still sharp, but it’s clearly enough to get Veronica to pick up her stuff and follow her back to her table. Veronica leaves without a second glance at him, but he swears that Heather Chandler — just for a second — throws him a smirk.
God, life was so much better when she was dead.
He retreats to his table, slightly annoyed, but unperturbed. If he’s learnt anything from last time, it’s that a revolution takes time and effort. Veronica is scared, but he knows that if he wasn’t right, the universe wouldn’t have granted them this second chance.
He will save her, and then they will save this world together.
Because their love is God.