Chapter summary:

Junior year, Rich still had his SQUIP and had no clue just what Heere's SQUIP was gonna do. Heere's SQUIP can go rot, in hell. Now it's back, and Rich is feeling super stressed since Jeremy has been possessed and saving him is Michael's quest. But Heere's a robot. Oh well.

Jeremy, Rich, and Michael walked in a cluster on the sidewalk outside their school, deep in discussion as their breath rose in wet clouds around them. Rich and Michael had the good sense to have brought their coats. Jeremy didn't need one.

"We were talking about your texts," Michael said, holding up his phone screen. "And Rich was telling me what you said in class. Which was not okay, Jeremy, by the way, what the hell made you think it was remotely okay to tell Rich to kill himself?"

"It's what I was programmed to say!" Jeremy defended themself.

Rich shot them a frown and Michael said, "Oh you are not trying to pull some predestination fate-determines-your-life BS on me right now."

"I'm being literal!" Jeremy threw their hands up in frustration. "You're right, I can access all this information about Rich, but all the source data's been corrupted. I can't even remember having a conversation with the guy before today beyond 'yeah, my dad drinks too'."

"The guy's right here," Rich chimed in, unhappy to be ignored. "Are you trying to say you spewed all that personal shit to me in the middle of class and you don't even have beef?"

Jeremy shrugged. "If I gave Rich the benefit of the doubt, I would say I thought we were enemies due to my contacts list database being outdated. Not all the information is still accurate-for instance, I didn't expect him to still have that," Jeremy scoffed, trying to find the appropriate words, "infantile lisp."

Rich and Michael looked at each other, Rich raising his brows meaningfully. Whatever they were communicating between themselves went over Jeremy's head. Rich didn't react outwardly like Jeremy had expected from trying to rile him up.

Michael took pity on Jeremy's confusion, though he sounded disappointed. "You've been talking like Rich's SQUIP used to," he explained. "Down to the exact word choice. We're pretty sure it's not a coincidence."

"But I wasn't Rich's SQUIP," Jeremy retorted, their eyebrows pinching together. "I was Jeremy's SQUIP." They didn't notice their verbal slip at first, but Rich and Michael both jerked to a halt on the sidewalk. Jeremy nearly tripped, turning to face them. "I'm Jeremy!" they corrected themself.

"Jesus fuck," Rich said.

"If you have to swear, swear with something more hip than 'Jesus, and for fuck's sake avoid the s's!'" Jeremy snapped.

Rich gave Michael a helpless shrug, not responding to the taunt. "It's all over. Whatever this thing is, it's not Heere anymore."

Michael shook his head. "There's more to it than that! When you weren't around, he was being cooperative. He wants this to go away as much as we do." He pulled up the symptoms list Google doc on his phone, passing it to Rich. "I told you, he was willing to drink the fake Mountain Dew Red."

"Unless he knew it was fake all along," Rich said, thumbing the page up and down.

"Do we have to have Rich here for this conversation?" Jeremy said in a strangled tone. They weren't enjoying enjoying getting judged by both of their worst enemies at the same time.

Rich and Michael both answered with a flat "yes." Michael eyeballed Jeremy. "We haven't set any ground rules besides 'don't be an evil robot' and you've already broken that one, like, a hundred times. But just for the record, here's another rule: you gotta be nice to Rich."

Jeremy was astonished. "Why?"

"Because he's our friend? Because he's trying to help us figure out what's going on? Because your weird grudge turned into a huge scene in the middle of class when you're supposed to be on the downlow? Because you owe him for talking to him a prick? Because it's the decent thing to do? Because I said so? Take your pick."

"Anyway," Rich interjected, handing the phone back to Michael. "Michael showed me the texts you guys wrote about everyone's blood types. By the way, I'm calling it, vampire apocalypse fantasies are officially the weirdest way to flirt."

Jeremy and Michael both made noises of protest. Jeremy felt their face heating up. "We were not-" Michael started while Jeremy said, "My database on flirting methods-"

Rich kept talking over them. "But check it. Everyone whose blood types you know-you, me, Christine, Jenna, Chloe, Jake, Brooke, and Reyes-they've all got one thing in common."

Jeremy stuffed down their embarrassment long enough to realize, "They were all SQUIPped during the school play."

"Not just SQUIPped," Michael said, continuing Rich's thought. "Specifically, they were the other SQUIPs that you connected to when you were controlling Jeremy."

"So you think I retained some of that information from when we were all part of the same social network." Jeremy nodded. "That's a pretty sound theory, and it would explain why my knowledge of Rich is potentially out of date."

"And we think that maybe," Michael said, drumming his fingers against his forearms, "that's why you're slightly less of a controlling dickhead around me than around Rich. Because all the SQUIPs were acting like facets of the same hive mind. You know everyone's secrets and triggers and how to control them best, except obviously mine."

Jeremy checked on what they knew about their peers. It all lined up. "I was thinking something along those lines earlier," they admitted. "When I was talking to Christine. She wastes so much energy overthinking everything. She needs somebody to give her a script to follow and tell her what to do, so I was trying to do that for her while still coming across as supportive. I wasn't violating free will, but I was feeling…" They took in a breath, not wanting to say this in front of Rich. "I was feeling guilty because I knew you wouldn't approve."

"That's new for a SQUIP," Rich said. "They're know-it-alls, programmed to predict the correct course of action in any situation. They don't feel guilty. Though I'm still putting my money on this best-friend act all being for show."

"If I were acting," Jeremy said icily. "I'd be doing such a good job of it that you wouldn't have questioned in the first place."

"So you're saying you're a shitty friend on purpose."

"Guys!" Michael said to shut them up. "Rich, tell Jeremy what you thought about the Mountain Dew Red." He shook the empty bottle for emphasis.

Rich nodded with a grunt. "Heere, you remember on Saturday, you were walking to the mall alone? I honked at you?"

"Yeah," Jeremy said. "I was pretty out of it."

"You're telling me. When I drove back that way, you were walking away from the mall, but you were freaking out. Like, screaming in broad daylight like a complete fucking SQUIP noob."

That sounded familiar. They remembered there being an argument between Jeremy and the SQUIP at some point, and other people had mentioned the incident to them since. "You were there for that?"

Rich continued, "Michael said you had gone and bought a thing of Mountain Dew Red at the mall. Had you drunk it yet?"

"I brought it home and drank it there," Jeremy said. "I didn't want to pass out on the street. When I woke up, I was like… whatever I am right now."

"Yeah," Rich said. "I don't know what your mall guy sold you, but it definitely wasn't Mountain Dew Red."

Jeremy's jaw dropped. "The SQUIP was right," they said quietly. It was obvious in retrospect. Why hadn't they realized?

"What?" Michael said.

"The SQUIP was right!" Jeremy shouted. Rich swore in surprise at the noise. "I-It noticed the color was off and tried to convince me-I mean, Jeremy-that it wasn't safe, but I was determined to get rid of it-" Michael put his hand on their shoulder, a stabilizing presence. Jeremy lowered their voice. "So what did I drink?"

"Shit, that's the question, huh?" Rich said. He sounded oddly somber.

"Jeremy, remember what you told me when you first woke up?" Michael said. "About how the soda tasted? You said it had traces of some chemical."

"Sodium citrate," Jeremy said, making a face at the memory.

"Yeah, that. Rich and I were thinking we should figure out what exactly was in that bottle. Like, send it to a lab or something. Then I realized we basically have free lab tech right here."

"I can taste the soda and tell you its chemical composition, you mean," Jeremy said, reaching for the empty bottle. It still had a few drops clinging to the inside surface. "Reverse-engineer it."

"Or at least figure out enough of the ingredients to look it up," Michael said. "It's a long shot, but they have the ingredients list for all sorts of discontinued sodas on the wiki page."

"There's a wiki page for discontinued pop?" Rich said. Michael shot him a disdainful look that said You're a plebian, Rich.

Jeremy checked to make sure they had a wifi connection so they could upload any data. "It's worth a try. I'm good to do it right now, right? We don't need to get any other materials?"

Rich started a drumroll by slapping the tops of his thighs and scatting in singsong, "Dah dadah dah dadah dah dadah dah, hurry up."

Jeremy unscrewed the bottle and sniffed it, then slowly extended their tongue to get the tiniest lick of pinkish soda possible. Michael snickered at them, sticking his tongue out with a "blep" mockingly, but all Jeremy said was "analyzing" (or, since their tongue was still out, "analything"). They closed the bottle, swishing the drop of mystery substance around in their mouth. "Analysis complete," they announced. "Processing results. Please wait."

Both boys leaned forward expectantly, Michael in fascination and Rich in horror.

"Well," Jeremy said. "It's soda."

Michael's shoulders slumped and Rich groaned. "That's it? I could have done that myself!" Michael said.

Jeremy smirked, crossing their arms. "Check your Google docs."

Michael woke up his phone, finding an alert that Jeremy was inviting him to edit Mystery Soda Results . docx. "Oh," he muttered.

"That was fast," Rich said, looking over Michael's shoulder to scan through a huge chunk of text, listing ingredients that didn't sound entirely safe to drink.

"Carbonatedwater20.3%-Couldn't you have made this more legible, Jeremy?"

"I typed it up in a third of a second! Most people would be impressed!"

"Ugh." Michael shook his head. "Well, this is definitely Mountain Dew. Some kind of Mountain Dew. Let me check those ingredients against the wiki, hold on." Michael slipped his headphones on, effectively leaving Rich and Jeremy alone.

Jeremy spent a few seconds looking into possible futures of interacting with Rich and made a face. Since Michael had told them to be nice and for some undetermined reason Jeremy was compelled to keep their relationship with Michael running as optimally as possible, that meant they couldn't taunt Rich like they had earlier in class. They or Rich would have to say something before Michael finished his wiki research, so staying silent wasn't an ideal option. But any attempt at friendliness with Rich would be rejected out of hand. Jeremy gave up and picked one of the least-negative possible outcomes, saying, "I apologize for what I said in study hall."

"I don't want to hear it," Rich said immediately with a scowl. "I know you're not actually sorry, so just save your breath."

Ugh. What a petulant brat. "All right," Jeremy said, expression getting tighter. "Muting."

"...Did you actually mute yourself?" Rich said after a second. Jeremy looked at him with a no duh expression. In practice, "muting" themself wasn't any different from a human just choosing not to speak, but they weren't about to say so. Rich scoffed. "It's about time," he said.

Another bout of silence stretched between them as Michael obliviously bopped his head and fiddled with his phone.

"I'm trying to help you 'cuz Michael thinks Jeremy's still in you somewhere," Rich said suddenly, as if Jeremy cared. "And I owe Jeremy. I'm the one who sold him on the evil tic-tacs in the first place. I mean, I cornered him in the bathroom and gave him the full infomercial treatment for chrissake. My SQUIP was the one saying most of it, but I wasn't fighting it like I should have been. I keep fucking doing this!" Rich shouted the last sentence, making Jeremy jump and actually look at him, wide-eyed. "I get all fucking self-destructive, because I'm the problem, right? Solution's obvious then: I just gotta get rid of me. But whenever I do shit to myself, someone else always gets in the way and then they get hurt too! Like, I'm so obsessed with setting myself on fire, I forget there's other people in the house!"

Rich dug his nails into his arms, readjusting his hands a few times to account for the scar tissue. "That's exactly what I did to Heere. I dragged him into this, made SQUIPs sound like the solutions to every fucking problem I knew he had. As if I'd ever tried to improve his life." Rich spat on the ground, and his demeanor sobered up. "Michael thinks you can still be saved, but after what I've heard from you today? I don't think so. You're nothing but a SQUIP in Jeremy's body. I don't know what the hell's going on with you, what kind of muscle memory of Jeremy's you're using to act like him sometimes, but he's not gonna have a miracle recovery. The best we can do is minimize the damage. Figure out what exactly you did on Saturday and keep it from happening to anyone else." Rich went quiet again before adding, "Jeremy Heere's dead and I killed him. That's bad enough. The last thing he deserves is you mucking up his memory by walking around in his stolen body pretending to be him."

Rich was quiet again, waiting for a response, before snorting and saying, "Unmute" as sarcastically as possible. He thought Jeremy was being petty about staying "muted" (and he was right).

"For one thing," Jeremy started, "Your assessment is astonishingly incorr-"

"Here!" Michael exclaimed, pulling off his headphones. Jeremy snapped their head toward Michael on reflex. "I'm pretty sure I know what you drank."

"Yeah?" Rich and Jeremy said, their voices overlapping. They glared at each other.

"Okay, first off, disclaimer, a bunch of different sodas use the same ingredients just in different ratios. But based on that list, Jeremy, that stuff you drank had Mountain Dew Red in it."

"So it should have shut off the SQUIP," Rich said.

"Yeah, but get this! There was also sodium citrate in that bottle. And sodium citrate is in tons of soda, but not in Mountain Dew Red."

Rich said, "So it was cut with something."

Jeremy groaned, looking skyward. "That's why the soda was flat and pinkish. Jeremy thought it was only due to being decades out of date, but it had been opened and mixed with something! The guy at Spencer's made a big deal out of it being his last bottle since demand was so high."

"What do you mean, 'demand was so high'?" Rich said.

"A bunch of high schoolers are buying it up," Jeremy said, waving their hand.

"That's true," Michael added. "He's been bitching to me about how it's so hard to get lately. It was only made for a one-year run in the 80s, after all."

"Oh, fuck," Rich said in a small voice.

"What else was in the bottle, though?" Jeremy said to Michael. They stopped. Occam's razor. The simplest solution was usually the most correct. If someone was going to mix another soda with Mountain Dew Red and sell it, what would be cheap and on hand and not noticeably impact the taste? "Mountain Dew," they answered their own question. "I drank Mountain Dew Red mixed with regular Mountain Dew! That's why my OS has been acting so buggy!"

Michael nodded grimly. "Exactly. It sounds like a sci-fi philosophy koan. What happens when you turn off a SQUIP at the same time that you turn it on?"

Jeremy looked down at themself. "And I'm stuck still figuring that out."

Rich walked between and ahead of them, grabbing each of their hands and tugging them forward jarringly. Jeremy thought their shoulder almost dislocated with the force. "We're heading to the mall," he said ahead of their protests. "Gotta find your dealer."

"Good idea," said Michael, trying to wriggle his hand free. "We gotta have Jeremy drink some real Mountain Dew Red. That should change him back, right?"

He looked to Jeremy for confirmation. "Probably?" Jeremy said weakly. They tried to look reassuring but it felt like a lie.

"Doubt it," Rich answered. "But it doesn't matter. He's got a lot to answer for." He looked back at them, determined. "Someone's been buying up the only SQUIP-killer in town and we're gonna find out why."

A/N:

Thanks to nyx-bait on tumblr for loving rich so much that i have to give him more lines