## Preface

Missing: Heather Chandler
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/27628256.

Rating:
  Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
  Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Relationships:
  No Romantic Relationship(s), Heather Chandler & Jason "J. D." Dean
Characters:
  Heather Chandler (Heathers), Jason "J. D." Dean
Additional Tags:
  Unhealthy Relationships, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicidal Heather Chandler, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Off-Screen Murder, Hurt/Comfort, dont quote me saying this is a hurt/comfort fic, Blood, Underage Smoking, Angst, Angst with an Open Ending, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Platonic Relationships, Character Study
Language:
  English
Stats:
  Published: 2020-11-19 Words: 2,495 Chapters: 1/1

# Missing: Heather Chandler

by skittykitty

Summary

> After killing seven of her peers and running, Heather is stuck alone with her thoughts and the man who had saved her from the police.

Notes

> This was heavily inspired by Cipherdoodles' animatic "Ballad of Heather Chandler || Animatic"!!

See the end of the work for more notes

## Missing: Heather Chandler

“Why did you save me?”

Heather stared out the window. The stars were miles away, and even as JD continued to go well past the speed limit they never seemed to move. Even in the wake of what she had done, the stars still shined.

The world continued to move, even if seven high schoolers were now dead.

The world didn’t care.

“We’re… the same,” he eventually admitted. “You just acted on the urges… when I hadn’t.”

“You got in school fights a lot, didn’t you?” Blood drenched her dress, though it was long since dried. Her dress had been beautiful.

(She had gone shopping with her mother. She had never asked what Heather wanted, only had told her to try on dress after dress until one was perfect.)

The dress had loose straps around the shoulders— she would have preferred strapless— and was a loose ballroom gown. It had been beautiful and shocking.

For a moment, maybe she could forget. (Forget the blood on her hands, forget how Veronica never struggled.) For a moment, she could smile and pretend the bloodstains were polka dots.

McNamara would be able to pull off a polka dot dress, but not her.

Never her.

“Only at the start of school,” he muttered after a pause. “I met Veronica early on, she kept me sane.”

She had never had anything like that.

“That must have been nice,” she muttered bitterly. No one had ever told her no before. It had always been one push after another— be perfect, Heather— you need to be Prom Queen, Heather— demands from her parents, from her peers.

JD didn’t expect anything from her.

“It was,” he whispered. “She was amazing. I might have loved her someday, but I guess that’s not possible anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

(Where are you, young lady.)

(I’m so disappointed, Heather.)

(Turn yourself in.)

(You deserve to die for what you’ve done.)

“Yes,” Heather stared at her blood crusted under her nails. It would be hell to remove it. “I regret killing Veronica.”

The car slowed slightly.

“Only her?” He sounded amused.

“The rest deserved it. She… she didn’t struggle. All the rest had something to live for, some big ambition, but I don’t think she did.”

Veronica… hadn’t wanted to live.

Maybe she had been suicidal, maybe she had wanted it. But what right had Heather had to kill her?

Veronica… hadn’t deserved it like the others had.

The others… they had done everything in their power to be better than Heather, to drag her down to hell with them.

Veronica simply hadn’t cared. About life, about death, about Heather Chandler.

And maybe that was why… why she had done it. Heather had pushed her under the pool, sure, but she had gotten off of Veronica before it was too late.

But Veronica had just stayed there and died.

At that point, it hadn’t been murder. Veronica had wanted to die, so why did Heather blame herself?

(It was her hands that were already so deeply buried in others’ blood. Why did she care for the death of one suicidal nobody?)

“Was she suicidal?” Heather whispered, tugging an uncooperative strand of hair around her finger.

JD hummed, as he flicked to signal right. A stop was coming up. “Maybe, I wouldn’t know. We didn’t talk about those kinds of things.”

“What did you talk about?”

The silence lasted for a long moment. They had never turned on the radio. Normally with her parents, the radio would be used to deter any conversation, so the sound of silence was new to her. It was nice.

“Mainly writers we both enjoyed. Robert Frost and the like,” his eyes were firm on the road, even though no one would be driving through nowhere at four in the morning. “Are you suicidal?”

No was her instinctual answer, for when school counselors, her parents, and friends would ask. It only happened once, in elementary school when she had been caught tearing at her skin with her nails.

The counselor had smiled and asked how her family treated her. They love me, she had said. The counselor had frowned, and she couldn’t understand how that could be the wrong answer.

Of course, her parents loved her, they gave her money and they occasionally gave her words of encouragement!

(But they never went to any school event she was a part of. They never wanted to be near their daughter. It was a responsibility that was forced upon them.)

Her parents loved her.

(Her parents wanted her gone.)

“No,” she began, before backtracking quickly. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“It’s an easy question, Heather.” JD reached down to the compartment underneath the radio, grabbing a cigarette. The cigarette sat between his lips for a moment as he lowered the car window slightly and grabbed a lighter.

“Do you want to die?” He looked away from the road for one precious second, to stare into her eyes. His eyes were dark and seemingly endless.

JD turned away to light his cigarette and the moment was over.

“I’m stopping at a gas station to get some stuff,” he offered after a moment. “Do you want anything?”

For a moment nothing came to mind.

“Water?” He nodded and waited for her to continue. “Maybe some different clothes.”

“Size?”

“Medium,” she muttered, already looking back out to the sky. They were fairly close to a stranded gas station.

“Alright,” he sighed and blew smoke out of his mouth to the cracked open window. “Slide down your chair to the lowest possible and stay down.”

She watched him leave and waited for his return. It was his van she was in, and she couldn’t get anywhere without him.

(Without him she would be dead with dozens of bullets in her body.)

(She was still bitter he had saved her.)

Was she suicidal?

She wasn’t exactly trying to die, but she didn’t have an aversion to death as most others did. Maybe she would be like Veronica in her final moments, not struggling, happy.

Would a sense of euphoria overtake her body? Would she go limp and smile at the uncaring world and for a moment— would she simply… not care?

Not care how people viewed her, if people were staring, if she was doing the right thing.

One moment of freedom.

Was that worth the end of her life?

All of her life had been leading up to that moment. A moment where her parents would stand there and cheer . Heather had finally gotten what her parents had been asking for all her life. She was finally prom queen, and they could be a normal family now.

And she had won.

Votes for the dead couldn’t be counted.

Maybe she was still being sent demeaning text messages by her parents. Maybe she was being hunted down by the police. But it was all worth that one amazing moment.

Standing there with the sash and crown, turning in circles, a large smile on her face.

It was beautiful.

It was the happiest she had ever been.

(Then the police had broken down a nearby door.)

(Then JD was next to her, pulling her away.)

Now, all she had was some faint memory of euphoria and all the regret it brought.

Heather chuckled, tears prickling at the edges of her eyes. She deserved to die. Why had JD even saved her?

He should have left her there, let her get shot by the police.

It was justice.

She looked up to the glass windows of the gas station, and, upon seeing JD checking out, laid back down. Heather laid back down on the flat seat, not willing to be caught by random footage of herself.

After a few moments, JD walked to the car.

“Give me a moment,” he said after opening the car door. “I need to get some gas, then we can drive out of here.”

She nodded and stayed perfectly still. Minutes passed in complete silence until a click sounded outside the car.

There was a moment where he was readjusting everything before JD stepped into the car. He handed her a bag filled with an assortment of items and told her to stay still.

As he drove out, a faint sense of unease went through her. She may have once been a “bad boy” who did drugs and drank alcohol underage, but driving without a seatbelt still gave her a rush of unease.

Heather had seldom trusted her drivers before, and even now she didn’t.

JD drove for a minute or two, before pulling over on the side of the road. “You can sit up,” he muttered. “Hand me the baby wipes.”

She rummaged through the bag, passing by a container of Oreos, a pair of scissors, a shirt, and some pants before finding the baby wipes at the very bottom.

Heather handed them off to the other, seeing her bloodstained hands taunt even more.

“Hand me your hand.” JD had pulled out one of the baby wipes, and his dark eyes stared into her own. With little hesitation, she gave him her left hand.

With surprising care, he began to glide the wipe over her hand. Slowly working away at the blood, with some extra pressure he got bits to begin to pull away after a few moments.

He hummed quietly, staring at the blood under her nails. “Do you mind if we cut your nails?” At her confirmation, he asked her to find some fingernail clippers in the bag. Honestly, it wasn’t surprising she hadn’t been able to find them in her earlier search considering how tiny they were.

He worked in silence, slowly chipping away at both the blood on her hands and under her nails. After what she hoped was merely ten minutes, her hands were clear of any prior wrongdoings.

All that was left now was her dress and… her hair.

Somehow, during the murders, blood had made its way into the tips of her hair. Her hair had been up in a ponytail.

God, some people just made murder so difficult.

“Heather, there are two options here.” JD took off his seatbelt as he stared contemplatively at her. “Both involve going outside. Either we cut your hair first or you take off that dress and we get rid of the blood still on your skin.”

Which was first?

She wound up standing in a grassy field in the middle of the night with almost no clothing on next to a man she had just met that night.

It was interesting, to say the least.

JD didn’t seem to care that she had stripped and was attractive, unlike hundreds of guys before him. Maybe they could’ve worked well as a couple once, but not now.

Not when she was holding onto him tight as her only source of sanity. Not when he was treating her like glass, and she was. She was one bad remark from shattering and jumping out of the car.

But he was calm and kind, and she hadn’t given in to the urge.

JD slowly peeled off the dried blood on her legs and stomach. It was intimate in a way she hadn’t experienced before, in a way completely separate from sex and romance.

JD cared about her but didn’t want anything in return.

She could just… relax and let him put her broken pieces back together. He would be able to fix her where no one else had been able to.

(Maybe he’d twist her, break her in new ways. Maybe she should never have trusted him. In this moment of intimacy where there was silence and trust in the air was there any other choice but to trust the man who had saved her life?)

After he had cleaned off the dried blood suitably well, he handed her a white shirt and pants to change into.

“I’ll turn around,” he offered as he walked to the car. It was odd, he had already seen her everything. What would seeing her change into clothes do to stop that growing intimacy?

As she changed into the slightly baggy clothes, he rummaged through the bag, drawing out the scissors.

Her hair had been long for her whole life, carefully maintained to be the most pleasing to others. The perfect length for her mother’s perfectly manicured nails to glide through. (The perfect length to fit around a fist.)

“How short do you want it?”

She could see that image of herself, of that perfect Heather everyone had wanted out of her.

“As much as you can.”

Her hair was patchy and poorly cut, leaving tufts almost completely cut to the root while other parts stuck out like a weed.

Heather loved it.

Her parents would have hated the look and forced her to fix it. Looking at the pile of strands on the ground, Heather smiled for the first time since she had run from the school.

“What do you want to do now?” JD sat in the passenger's seat of the car, holding a cigarette in his hand. The wind began to pick up, lifting the remains of her old life into the air towards the distance.

Even as her attention drifted, JD said nothing. With a hand keeping the door open, fighting the wind, and the other holding the burning cigarette. In the darkness, the idle lights of the car were the only light.

(JD was her lighthouse in the storm.)

What did she want?

She didn’t want to go home and she didn’t want to hurt anyone.

“I want to…” For a moment, she had thought of a plan. Of living in the middle of nowhere, just the two of them. But that wasn’t feasible. “I want to live my life the way I want to.”

“Okay,” JD said softly. He blew the smoke out of his mouth as a small smile began to show itself. “What do you want to do right now?”

“I want you to drive us as far away from Westerburg High School as possible.”

JD smiled for real as he began to chuckle. “Us?”

A flicker of doubt went through her. “I want to stay with you.”

He tilted his head slightly as he exited the car, walking towards her. “I won’t abandon you, Heather. We’ll go together.”

Once he was close enough she clutched onto his trench coat, a whisper of a sob echoing in the back of her throat. “Thank you,” she choked out as tears began to fall down her face.

The two of them stood there for a long time, holding onto one another as her reality finally caught up to her.

It may have been five minutes or an hour. JD didn’t seem to care how long it had taken her to calm down, as they were on their way across the country within minutes.

She had no idea where they were heading.

(Heather liked it that way.)

## Afterword

End Notes

> I hope you enjoyed!!

> You can find me on my tumblr where you can pester me to finish half-thought out ideas and scream to me about fics!!

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