## Preface

is this what you always want me for?
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/56314669.

Rating:
  Mature
Archive Warnings:
  Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Category:
  M/M
Fandom:
  Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Relationships:
  Kurt Kelly/Ram Sweeney, Jason "J. D." Dean/Veronica Sawyer
Characters:
  Kurt Kelly, Ram Sweeney, Veronica Sawyer, Jason "J. D." Dean
Additional Tags:
  Angst, Character Death, Kurt Kelly/Ram Sweeney Centric, Crying, Blood, Gunshot Wounds, Scene Rewrite, POV Veronica Sawyer, POV Third Person Limited, Secret Relationship, Established Relationship, Relationship Reveal, Unhealthy Relationships, Hurt No Comfort, Whump, the unhealthy relationships tag is about jd and veronica klsfjgjdks
Language:
  English
Stats:
  Published: 2024-06-02 Words: 2,055 Chapters: 1/1

# is this what you always want me for?

by messilymoonlit

Summary

> JD and Veronica go to exact their revenge on Kurt and Ram— though the word 'revenge' means something very different to each member of their pair— but things go a little bit differently before they end the exact same.

> Set in the Heathers: The Musical (2014) version of the Heather's universe AKA the off-broadway version.

Notes

> thank you so much to my friend Gabe (Filthy_Fanfic_Troll on here) for reading this as i worked on it, beta reading it, and for letting me infodump to him ^w^ <3

> fucking with the tenses (ie past-tense, present-tense, omniscient future-tense) in the way i ended up doing so was kind of a pain in the ass, but i think it came out okay! here's hoping you think so too :3 [tysm to gabe for helping me stay consistent with all the changes as well gklkfgjd]

> Title from the song "Cemetery Drive" by My Chemical Romance

See the end of the work for more notes

## is this what you always want me for?

Statistically, what’re the chances that a cruel joke made at someone's expense hits close to home. Generally? Probably pretty high. But, when that joke is part of a fake fake-suicide plot intended to make the victims look bad? Likely pretty low! Which is why Veronica can’t quite wrap her head around what she’s seeing.

In no reality would she have guessed that “gay lovers hiding their relationship from a missaproving world” would hit the nail on the goddamn head when it came to these two shitty jocks, but here they are.

Which begs a lot of questions: like “Why did they agree to a threesome in the first place if they were gay?” and “How could they be gay when they’d seemingly slept with so many of the girls at school?” To which answers bubbled up in Veronica’s head, unbidden: “Maybe they just wanted to jump at the chance of a socially acceptable form of intimacy between them,” “Rumors can go a long way,” and “Maybe they swung both ways?” Not that any of it matters anymore.

Around an hour before dawn, JD and Veronica had arrived at the cemetery, preparing for their revenge. The weight of a gun in her hand was unfamiliar and she couldn’t quite decide how she felt about it, exactly. Logically she knew there weren’t even any real bullets in the gun, but the cold metal pressing against her hands accompanied by the overwhelming smell of gun oil made it very hard to remember. She really hoped that Kurt and Ram would be too distracted to notice anything was off.

The sun starting to peek up from the horizon marked the imminent arrival of dawn. JD hid behind a tree as Veronica smoothed her skirt with her free hand. Her other hand held the gun JD had given her, with the barrel desperately angled away from her in an attempt to make herself just a little bit more comfortable with the situation. Before she had any time to consider all this further, and maybe decide to dip altogether, the sound of heavy footsteps broke her out of her thoughts. She became aware of a distant chattering that was just barely on the wrong side of too loud, yet was somehow still not comprehensible over the sudden sound of blood rushing in her ears.

As their victims came into view she took a deep breath and put her best fake smile on. She didn’t let her eyes wander to the tree she knew JD was hiding behind. From where she stood she could see him, but the other boys shouldn’t be able to.

“Hi, Veronica…” Kurt was the first to speak, sounding almost bashful.

“So do we just whip it out or what?” Kurt smacked Ram as soon as the words left his mouth, who flung his hands up as if asking ‘What? Why’re you hitting me, what’d I say?’

Veronica steeled herself internally. Here goes nothing.

“Take it slow, Ram. Strip for me.”

The two boys looked at each other for a moment— in disbelief?— and nodded.

“Ok!” Came Ram’s response, and they divested themselves of their clothes quickly and eagerly, leaving them in piles on the ground, though Ram’s were better described as ‘haphazardly strewn’ than as being in one distinct pile.

As the two stood there in just their socks and underwear she couldn’t help but notice the glances they kept shooting each other. Glances that lingered for just a millisecond too long, especially given the girl right in front of them.

She’d thought it was weird in the moment. Now it just felt sad.

“Okay…” Kurt parroted, drawing out the ‘a’ sound, “What about you?”

Veronica fake giggled hoping it didn’t sound overly saccharine.

“Oh, well, I was hoping you could rip my clothes off me, sport.” She said, overemphasizing the ‘t’ and batting her eyelashes.

“Yeah, we can do that.” Came the response, Kurt’s tone strangely sage and serious, completely at odds with the context. It almost made her burst out laughing; the strange contrast would’ve been enough to alleviate the tension she’d been feeling if she didn’t still feel the weight of the gun in her hand and the cold steel against her skin.

“One…”

“Two…”

“Three.” She had time for one last vague fleeting panicky thought, and then pulled out the gun from behind her back just as JD stepped out from behind the tree and shot Ram squarely in the heart.

The sudden gunshot had made Veronica jump, which made her miss. Fuck. Kurt let out an absolutely horrified scream. He nearly tripped as he jolted away from her, seemingly torn between getting closer to the Ram shaped heap in the grass and getting as far away from JD and Veronica as possible.

“HOLY CRAP!” Kurt’s voice broke as his body and brain finally seemed to sync up and he started running in the opposite direction.

“Stay there, I’ll get him.” JD’s voice snapped from its usual flat indifference up towards unbridled rage very suddenly. “KURT? KURT!”

Everything happened all at once as JD took off running and Veronica knelt by Ram.

“YOU KILLED MY BEST FRIEND,” Kurt wailed in the distance.

“Ram?” It’s stupid, to address an unconscious body. It didn’t matter though, she was freaking out and did it anyway— had to do something— refusing to believe the blood trickling down from the hole in his chest was exactly what she knew it to be. Yesterday, JD had said the bullets would just break their skin enough to make it look like they’ve been shot, but Ram was losing a lot of blood all at once.

“WHY ARE YOU CHASING ME?” More screaming in the distance from Kurt, coming closer this time instead of getting further away. She barely registered it.

“Ram? You're just unconscious, right? Ram?” He didn’t respond. Couldn’t respond. Her blood ran cold as she realized she wasn’t kneeling beside Ram; she was kneeling beside Ram’s corpse. “Ram!” The only response she got was more blood oozing its way onto the grass.

It was then that Kurt broke his way back into the clearing and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her and Ram’s body. She snapped her head up to look at him, and for one terrible moment they made eye contact. And then another gunshot rang out.

Kurt flinched— hands flying to his head— and collapsed to the ground.

For a second Veronica thought him dead, but his body hadn’t stopped moving and she didn’t see any blood. Behind him stood JD, just a couple feet away— definitely close enough to aim accurately. He was just toying with him at this point, seemingly having shot just to the side of his head.

“I don’t understand.” Kurt was full on crying now, the tears making their way down his face relentlessly. He hiccupped a little bit from the force of his own sobs.

“Did you just actually fucking kill Ram?” Veronica stood up and faced JD, furious and terrified all at once. JD looked at her, face painted with innocent confusion.

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know.” JD waved the gun around in a ‘come on, you KNOW this’ gesture.

“I’m not pretending, what the fuck do you think you’re—” Veronica didn’t get to finish her sentence as Kurt chose that exact moment to take a deep breath and scream at them, voice breaking. His next words ripped out of him, almost sounding like they’d come out of his mouth against his own will. Maybe they did. Maybe he’d lost all control of himself.

“YOU KILLED MY BEST FRIEND. I WAS IN LOVE WITH HIM AND YOU KILLED HIM.”

He was already stripped down to his socks and underwear in a graveyard and being shot at with a gun, his lover dead on the ground a couple feet away, what else did the man have to lose?

Veronica and JD froze, mid-argument, and turned to stare at Kurt, completely lost. Veronica’s thoughts kept going 100 miles a moment.

‘Holy shit, we just killed another person.’

‘How the fuck were we right about Kurt and Ram?’

‘What the fuck is happening?’

‘There’s a dead body in front of me. Again.’

‘JD still has a gun.’

‘JD still has a gun.’

‘JD still has a gun .’

Kurt clearly noticed their hesitation, starting to inch towards Ram. When neither of them reacted immediately, he scrambled the rest of the way towards the other boy’s body.

Veronica turned back to JD and took advantage of his blatant confusion to take the gun from his grip and throw it to the ground. His head snapped back to her and he gave her a pained and uncomfortable look, like she was a child embarrassing him during a public outing. Neither of them actually said anything, slowly turning back to where Kurt knelt beside Ram’s body.

Which brings Veronica back to the present.

Kurt’s sobbing has gotten a lot quieter, the occasional sniffle still escaping him as tears and snot pour down his face silently for the most part.

They both watch as Kurt wraps his arms around Ram and holds him against his chest, cradling him more gently than Veronica would have ever even thought him capable of before now. He holds onto him for dear life, burying his face in Ram’s hair and mumbling his name over and over again while rocking them both back and forth ever so slightly.

Veronica thinks she might see him pause his babbling for a second to press a kiss to the top of Ram’s head.

JD leans down and picks up his gun, taking a few steps until he’s on the other side of Ram’s body and holding the gun to Kurt’s forehead. Kurt doesn’t even try to get away from it, just presses one last kiss to Ram’s forehead before he gets a hole in his.

The shot doesn’t even startle her this time, but the sudden absence of Kurt’s sniffling and babbling does. His body goes limp against his boyfriends, the two locked in an eternal embrace after death.

“Who would’ve guessed we’d be so right?” JD chuckles.

Veronica glares at him with all the vitriol she can muster.

“What the FUCK have you done?”

There’s a beat of silence where he stares at her, eyes piercing.

“I worship you; I’d trade my life for yours. We'll make them disappear— we’ll plant our garden here. Our love is God.” He says it like it’s obvious, like it explains everything.

She stares at him in horror.

“Our love is God.” He repeats.

Veronica can barely think right now.

“Our love is God.” She echoes back at him.

JD smiles and wraps his arms around her from behind.

“I knew you’d understand.” He says and she nods, numbly. He kisses the top of her head and the vision of Kurt doing so to Ram, moments ago, rises unbidden in her mind. Veronica feels sick.

“Now we just need to position them correctly and we can leave the rest to the cops.” She can hear the grin in his voice as he talks into her hair.

“Right… yeah.” She turns in his arms and puts her gun in the pocket of his trenchcoat almost on autopilot, and they move to put everything in place.

Veronica gingerly tucks The Note into one of the pockets of Kurt’s discarded varsity jacket while JD pushes the jocks’ arms around until he’s seemingly satisfied, at which point he steps back to admire his work.

Kurt’s left hand has been moved to rest on Ram’s stomach, Veronica’s gun gripped in his hand, and Ram’s right hand lays haphazardly on the ground— like it would if it had very suddenly dropped— with JD’s gun slipping out of its grip. It paints a picture of the two boys holding each other for the last time, the first gun pressed against Ram’s chest and the other held up to Kurt’s forehead.

As she gazes at them, Veronica realizes she’s finally decided on the topic: she does not like the weight of a gun in her hand.

Regardless of her own wants and preferences, the scent of gun oil will cling to her hands through the coming days, heavy and unyielding.

It won’t matter, she’ll have bigger problems at that point anyway.

## Afterword

End Notes

> BY THE WAY. i started writing this before i went back and rewatched Heathers (1988) for the first time in 6 years so i did NOT remember that the whole "Kurt runs back to Ram's body and freezes when he sees Veronica beside it" thing actually happened in the movie AT ALL. INSANE!!! still hate their movie versions though, fuck those guys

> also, i was going to borrow more details from the movie but ended up keeping my headcanons about where they were shot because a friend of mine (Gabe, actually fsdflkgdskjg) pointed out i'd accidentally stumbled upon some really interesting symbolism! kudos to you if you know what i'm talking about, because i sure wouldn't without an explanation :P

> you can find me on tumblr at messilymoonlit as well as at moonlitkilljoy, where i post about Heathers sometimes!

> i've also been posting videos comparing the off-broadway and west-end versions of Heathers: The Musical over on youtube, which you can find here!

Please drop by the Archive and comment to let the creator know if you enjoyed their work!