A/N: This was saved on my computer and unfinished for the longest time. Just wrote the last four hundred words now, in like ten minutes - so forgive me if the end is a little rushed, haha. I decided I had to post this now or I'd forget for another few months. Whatever. Alternate ending to the movie, in which everything happens except the bomb detonation at the very end. Ps, I love reviews.
It is when she first sets foot in the room that she decides that Jason Dean no longer smells the same. The smell that always seemed to bring her comfort before everything turned to absolute shit – mystery, mixed with the vague scent of gunpowder (and probably a tiny splash of cologne, just in case) – was gone, replaced with a nauseating mix of burnt hair and chemical cleaners and claustrophobia. The walls, after all, began closing in on her in the first few seconds of her visit.
Just imagine being strapped to the mattress beneath them.
Imagine shaking violently beneath them, breathing too hard and quick, forever stuck in a drug-induced fever you can't sweat out, no matter how hard you try.
She can't see his eyes, but she assumes they're wide and dilated as hell.
She takes a few steps into the room, her heels clicking softly on stained linoleum. She considers, for just a moment, taking quieter steps, but quickly reminds herself that she doesn't care. The mess of sweaty, burnt hair in front of her belongs to a murderer, a complete and absolute sociopath who tried to kill her and the entire high school.
So what if she wakes him up? He deserves far worse.
Besides, he hasn't moved since she arrived. He's not moving now, save for the rise and fall of his chest, strained but rhythmic.
She doesn't know why she's here, carefully lowering herself into the only chair in the room and staring.
She can't see his eyes, but she assumes they're jaded and confused.
She sees his chest, covered only by a thin white scrub shirt, open and vulnerable like the night they lay together on the grass behind her house, under an open evening sky. The weeks in between that night and this seem more like years, the comfort of his arm around her shoulders distant and hazy.
His arms aren't lax and soft and warm like they were that night. Bound arms could never really be anything but tense, just in varying degrees.
She sits like that for a long while – much longer than she was intending to stay, if she's honest. To be fair, though, there's a lot for her to catalogue: his hands, the ones that gave Heather her breakfast cup of drainer and pulled the trigger on Ram, the ones that always cupped her chin so gently before he kissed her, now hanging limp, impassively over the side of the bed. His skin, the skin she once traced with her fingertips under the moon as he pressed against her, now broken and stitched and scarred from the bullets she fired into him. It's frightening, to look at a broken monster and suddenly feel something akin to sympathy.
Look, she's not sorry she shot him.
But she's sorry for something.
There's a slow movement from the boy on the cot, when that head of black hair lazily turns the other way, out towards the rest of the room. His eyes, they settle on her, the beautiful girl with her pretty hair and soft lips and a row of stitches up by her forehead that match the ones all over his body.
She can see his eyes now, and she was right.
Jason Dean never needed drugs to be insane, and now she gets to see what they do to him – her dark horse prom contender, her partner in crime, even if those crimes were not intentional on her part. Her ex-lover.
If his eyes were ever green before, they don't look green now. His pupils are larger than ever, glazed over as he glances her way. His smile is soft and small, lacking in his usual charm but making up for it in slurred, jaded honesty.
"Veronica, darling. I was hoping you would visit me. I wanted to see your face."
And he stays like that, neck crooked and bent, as she rises and steps closer, heels clicking loudly and unapologetically on the linoleum floor.
She looks past him, at first, to the chart hanging crooked on the wall before turning her eyes back to his burnt hair and patched skin and unfocused eyes.
"Well, I find that when the opportunity rises to see Jason Dean drugged out of his mind and strapped to a bed in the psych ward, it's one I wouldn't miss for the world."
The smile fades from his face, replaced by a sense of vague disappointment and overwhelming sadness.
"Tell me," she adds. "Are the shock treatments a fitting punishment for those murders?"
He squeezes his eyes shut, rolling his head back and forth on his pillow, mumbling. "No, no, no… no…."
Veronica's lips pull upwards and she continues, stepping closer and closer until her fingers practically brush the leather straps around his wrists.
"I bet all those drugs they have you on feel much better than having drainer expand in your stomach."
"Stop… please…."
"Do you think the bullets I put in you felt anything like the bullets that went into Kurt and Ram?"
"No – I –"
"You know, even strapped to it, that bed's probably far comfier than the shattered coffee table and the dirty clearing where we left their bodies to rot –"
And in that moment, Veronica Sawyer decides that nothing will ever give her a more superior feeling than her insane sociopath of an ex-boyfriend losing his dinner onto the already-stained floor. Of course, it would be a bit more enjoyable if her shoes weren't so close, but still – all she can do is smile at the sight of him, truly defeated and panting at the ceiling before he turns his watering saucer-eyes back on her.
"Sorry," he breathes, voice breaking as tears start trailing down his cheeks. "Veronica, I'm sorry."
If there is any emotion left inside Veronica, nothing on her face shows it. She simply stands over him and makes a simple observation.
"You've never said that to me before."
The confusion on his face is not all from the drugs.
"You never said you were sorry. Not for the murders, not for any of it."
He stares and stares, his eyes the size of the moon. Tear drops are starting to run off the edge of his jaw and drip down next to her shoes, and it occurs to Veronica that the long-suffering abuse this floor has seen must know no bound. The child, strapped to the bed and staring pathetically at Veronica Sawyer, takes a shuddering breath and very nearly begs.
"Veronica, I'm sorry," he whispers, his voice rough and shaking. "I'm so sorry, Veronica, I'm so, so sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm –"
He doesn't stop, not even when his chest rips open with unrestrained sobs. He doesn't stop when Veronica turns away to face the wall, not when two nurses enter the room, spare restraints in one's hand, dangling wires in the other's. Nearly drowned out by the teenager's echoing catharsis, they mention the time and speak of some special appointment. And Veronica, she's not quite sure what they mean, but J.D. certainly seems to. Judging by the sudden moment of silent realization, the subsequent struggle against his bonds, the renewed sobbing – it can't be pleasant.
Jason Dean starts to scream once they start to wheel the bed from the room.
"No, no, no!" The words tear from his throat and Veronica almost brings herself to care. Almost. She stays rooted to her spot against the wall, staring in indifferent observance. "No, no – Veronica! Please, Veronica, please! I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please! V-Veronica, ple-please! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…."
He continues to beg and cry and scream, leaving Veronica to simply stare after him as he's whisked away from her and down the hall. There's pity somewhere in her eyes, the smallest hint of sympathy deep in her chest. But then – could a murderer ever deserve her sympathy? Of course not. She quashes the feeling right then and there, grabs her belongings and clicks her heels right out of the room, listening to that sociopath down the hall scream until his voice grows hoarse. She could truly care less about his apologies. They're meaningless, superficial. So she walks out, right by his new room, and keeps going towards the door. She doesn't stop when he cries, not when he begs.
She hesitates when she hears the hum of electricity, the pained, miserable screaming of a voice that once hummed soft tunes in her ear. But she tunes it out – and she keeps on walking.