Written before the Jan mess, indeed before much happened. Pick it up as you go along.
I've written two endings, the original one first.
I disclaim, as per usual, with cricket bats included.
The End of It All - A Short Story
It had been going on for God only knew how long and she had only just found out. There was something fundamentally wrong with that for a start. She had befriended Mimi, gossip queen of Salem High, and she hadn’t been the second to know about it. She hadn’t been the fifth to know about it.
It had gone around the school like wildfire when Penny was found weeping in the toilets, having just thrown up for the eighth morning running. Shy Girl, the one everyone forgot when thinking of classmates, the girl who’s entire personality and life had, up until that day, appeared to be beige was pregnant. Her life changed from beige to scarlet. She was a scarlet woman, a girl without a husband and with a baby on the way. No one knew who the father was. The guessing was fun though.
"I reckon it’s Shawn," threw in a slightly inebriated Jason. "He ain’t getting any with Belle, so he turned to the quiet one instead."
Jan rolled her eyes. If anyone was getting Shawn away from Belle, it would be her. "My God, could you get any stupider?"
"Yep, but I’d have to marry you to do it," Jason threw his head back and laughed too loudly.
"Shut up you moron!" Jan shrieked at him, then found herself distracted as Susan walked past. "Where’s the nearest doorway? I think we’re having an earthquake - wait, I’m wrong, Gigantor just came past."
"Shut up Jan," Susan snarled. "At least I didn’t lose my virginity to a guy twice my age!"
Jan’s reflexes were even faster. "Older men find me attractive. Perhaps if anyone had ever realised they weren’t staring at the Goodyear Blimp when they looked at you, you might realise what it’s like to have a boyfriend."
Susan’s eyes narrowed and she shook a finger at Jan. "I have Kevin, who, unlike your guy, isn’t a drunk slob."
"Hey!" Jason interrupted. "I may be a drunk, but I ain’t no slob."
"Shut up Jason!" Susan and Jan said together before returning to their argument.
Jason took another sip from his flask. "Women!" He grumbled. "Can’t live with ’em and I’m buggered if I can live without J-Lo."
"Brillo Head!" Susan snapped at her.
"Vampira’s bitch mutt from Hell!" Jan replied, rather imaginatively for her.
"Shut the Hell up both of you!" Kevin yelled from his place on the other side of Dot Com. "Penny’s pregnant and all you two can do is hurl abuse at each other!"
Jan smiled an evil grimace. "Shy Girl’s up the creek without a paddle, that’s for sure."
Susan glared at her. "At least she has a modicum of self respect left, unlike you, you corkscrew haired whore of Babylon!"
"Spawn of Beelzebub with cellulite!" Jan screeched unpleasantly, her voice sounding like nails on a blackboard.
"Evil whore from the pits of Hell with Homer-"
"Simpson or the Greek?" Kevin asked no one in particular.
"-As a future spouse!" Susan threw back, not willing to be interrupted half way through her rant.
"At least I can keep a hold on my man! I bet Kevin’s the father of Penny’s baby!" The words were out of Jan’s mouth before she had time to think. She didn’t really mean it. She thought Kevin was probably still a virgin. There was no way that he had sired Shy Girl’s kid, surely.
Susan slapped her, hard, across the face. She slapped her back, and the pair were on the floor within seconds, pulling at each other’s hair and screaming abuse.
Strong hands grabbed their arms, and before they knew it they were being pulled apart by Chloe and Shawn. Philip and Belle were standing over a rather white faced Kevin, who looked nearly as ill as Penny had done earlier.
"Kevin," Susan ordered with as much dignity as she could muster. "We’re leaving now."
"That’s right, run away," Jan yelped angrily, still not thinking about what she was saying, just responding to the situation with her usual approach of sod everyone else and go for the jugular. "Look at him. That boy’s as guilty as Satan."
"Ladies and gentlemen," Jason shouted drunkenly from his stand on the table. "We have a winner! So, Kev, you’ve cheated on your girlfriend, fathered a kid, caused a fight to break out between your bitch and mine, and nearly passed out in the middle of Dot Com, what are you going to do now?"
"Shut up Jason!" Shawn yelled, releasing Susan and tearing across the room to lay one mean right hook on him. Jason fell back in his booth.
"Oh my God, Shawn," Belle screamed. "I think you knocked him out!"
"Jesus, I’m sorry," Shawn quickly started to apologise and tried to wake Jason up.
"Are you kidding me?" Belle interrupted him as fast as she could. "I love it when you go Rocky on me! Hit Philip now!"
"Hey!" Philip protested swiftly. "I haven’t done anything!"
"Oh come on, Phil," Belle waved a dismissive hand at him. "We’ve had to listen to months of you whinge and whine about how much you love Chloe and how you’re going to make up to her whatever dumb thing you did last that damn near broke her heart, or would have done if she had one that anyone could find without the Hubble satellite. The least you could do is let my boyfriend knock you out."
"Chloe! Belle’s being mean to me!" Philip whined irritatingly to his girlfriend.
"Oh go wash your hair, you big Momma’s boy," Chloe retorted while she pulled her sundress down another few inches to show just a little more cleavage before sashaying towards Brady. "I’ve found myself a real man now."
"Chlo-ee!" Philip cried after her, following her around like a lost puppy, but he was much less adorable and more annoying.
"Philip Kiriakis, give it up. She dumped your ass more times than I count, and I’m Valedictorian." Kevin’s speech was vaguely slurred, probably from all the shocks he had during the past few minutes… and the couple of shots from Jason’s flask he had just imbibed.
"Kevin," Penny came up to him, her eyes red and puffy from all the crying she had been doing. "Kevin, we need to talk. Now."
"Sure, Pen, just give me a minute." Kevin giggled drunkenly.
"What the Hell have you been doing?" For once, Penny was anything but shy.
"Just having a little drink with my friends," Kevin put one arm around Belle’s neck, and pulled her close. Shawn’s brown eyes were going green as Kevin nuzzled Belle’s neck.
"Kevin Lambert! This is not the time for you to get horny! That’s what got me into this trouble in the first place!" Penny was shouting. The Shy Girl had grown some balls, as Jason had once crudely put it.
"What trouble?" In her sober and not lusting condition, Susan picked up on the words first. Her voice was very calm, too calm for the situation. She was like a dormant volcano about to explode. "Penny, is Kevin the father of your baby?"
"Of course he bloody well is!" Penny screamed, her hormones affecting her in strange ways. "Who else would have been stupid enough to buy the birth control from Jason sodding Welles?"
"Yep," Jason had woken up from whatever unconscious condition he had been in. "A hole in every tenth one, just like the book said."
"What book?" Penny turned on him swiftly, her eyes narrowing and her voice full of menace. "What book, Jason, and if you lie to me I swear I will rip you a new"
"Penny," Jason said with mock sweetness, "Do you really think you should be swearing like that in front of the baby?"
"Shut up Jason!" Shawn, Belle and Susan yelled at him as Penny reached for the nearest thing to hand, a Back Street Boys anthology CD and threw it at his head. She missed, so she went for the next one as Jason dodged out of the way.
Shawn grabbed her by the arms, holding them behind her back while Belle tried to sober Kevin up with some very strong espresso.
"You bitch!" Susan fumed. "You stole my man!"
"Your man? Your man?" Penny was incandescent with fury. "He has always been my man! We were going out long before you even thought he was cute! The boy is mine!"
"Do I get a say in this?" Kevin asked cautiously.
The two girls turned on him as one. "No!" They screamed before returning to their slanging match.
"This is better than the Jerry Springer show!" Giggled Jason from beneath a table where he had taken refuge from Penny’s anger.
"Shut up Jason!" Everyone in Dot Com yelled it this time.
"That’s it!" Susan screamed before she ran out of the store.
"Thank goodness that’s over." Penny smoothed down her dress as Shawn released her, and picked Kevin up by the ear. "Come on, Lover Boy, we have some things to sort out."
She was wrong. She couldn’t have said anything less true. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot.
Susan stormed around Salem Place, searching for the one shop she really needed, and stomped her way into it. How dare he lie to her? How dare they, the geek and the shy girl she had befriended and helped to overcome their image problems, turn their backs on her? How dare they have an affair and how dare that little tramp get pregnant? Susan was in a rage blacker than any she had ever suffered before. The Salem madness, usually controlled and given out in strict doses by Stefano Dimera, raged in her blood, a red mist rose in front of her eyes and she knew she needed action.
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ENDING 1
She also needed a jelly doughnut, but that would have to wait.
Gun shots rang out and there was blood on the ground of Salem Place. A lot of blood. The two teens lay on the ground, their fingers intertwined.
"That’s for all the disgusting things you called me and Penny’s pregnancy," Susan informed Jan and Jason who lay dying on the ground. She turned, seeing all of the shocked faces of the people in Salem Place. Her voice was cold and calm, not the voice of a teenage girl anymore but of a woman pushed to her limit. "You turned a blind eye on everything they did. This is what happens when people don’t care."
Susan caught sight of Penny and Kevin to her right, halted halfway through a heated argument of their own on their way to the park. She smiled grimly.
"I loved you, Kevin, I really did. I thought I could trust you, both of you, and it seems that I can’t." She sighed remorsefully.
"Susan, please, we never meant for this to happen," Penny began.
She was cut off quickly. "Oh, no, no one ever means for this to happen. They just do." She fired the gun before anyone could think of stopping her. The two bullets whizzed through the air, and suddenly there was more blood on the ground.
"Damn, there’s no one left for me to play with." Someone had forgotten to switch the self-destruct button off when they had made Susan. Raising the revolver to her own temple, her final words were, "Life’s a bitch, but then so is Jan."
The blood on Salem Place was washed away by the rain, and so was the Salem madness. No one really cared, except Mimi, that the teens had died because they had no family and the few friends they did have realised they had been crazy. Philip was too wrapped up in Chloe, Chloe was too wrapped up in herself and her opera lessons with Brady, Mimi was just pleased she didn’t have to play with them when Shawn and Belle were off doing their own thing, and Shawn and Belle, while being nice to everyone and feeling rather sad that they were dead for approximately seventeen seconds, were happy to get some time to themselves instead of being constantly interrupted by Kevin, Jan, Jason, Susan, Penny, and Mimi when Jan had got her into some fresh source of trouble.
Salem went on as it had done before, and the teens without family or any real meaning to their lives were quickly forgotten. Philip finally realised that Chloe was even more self centred than he could cope with and found that he was actually in love with Mimi, Brady rejected Chloe’s insanity and self absorption and found a new love, and Shawn and Belle lived to survive Dimera plot after Dimera plot while raising their family and coping with the fallout of having JT as their mutual half brother. Five years later, no one remembered the teens had ever lived in their world, and took part in their soap opera style lives, and that was just as it should be.
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ENDING 2
She also needed a jelly doughnut, but that would have to wait.
Or maybe that was exactly what she needed right now…
There was blood on the ground of Salem Place. A lot of blood. Two teens lay on the ground, their fingers intertwined, never having seen the attack coming. The four day old stale doughnut that had been hurled at them by an infuriated Susan, pushed to her limit by hunger and stress, was not even dented by it’s impact with Jan’s breasts which had exploded, killing both her and her boyfriend.
"That’s for all the disgusting things you called me and Penny’s pregnancy," Susan informed Jan and Jason who lay dying on the ground. She had meant the doughnut to hurt them badly, to have them die from it was an added bonus. She turned, seeing all of the shocked faces of the people in Salem Place. Her voice was cold and calm, not the voice of a teenage girl anymore but of a woman pushed to her limit. "You turned a blind eye on everything they did. This is what happens when people don’t care."
Susan caught sight of Penny and Kevin to her right, halted halfway through a heated argument of their own on their way to the park. She smiled grimly.
"I loved you, Kevin, I really did. I thought I could trust you, both of you, and it seems that I can’t." She sighed remorsefully.
Penny turned in fury, then noticed the bodies lying on the ground, the doughnut, and the box of three more doughnuts that was held in Susan’s hands. "Susan, please, we never meant for this to happen."
She was cut off quickly. "Oh, no, no one ever means for this to happen. They just do." She threw the doughnuts before anyone could think of stopping her. The two missiles whizzed through the air, hard as adamant and as unyielding as a Dimera’s heart, and suddenly there was more blood on the ground.
"Damn, there’s no one left for me to play with." Someone had forgotten to switch the self-destruct button off when they had made Susan. Raising the final doughnut, coffee filled, she bit into it, and, choking and simultaneously dying of food poisoning, groaned, "Not coffee!"
The blood on Salem Place was washed away by the rain, and so was the Salem madness. No one really cared, except Mimi, that the teens had died because they had no family and the few friends they did have realised they had been crazy. Philip was too wrapped up in Chloe, Chloe was too wrapped up in herself and her opera lessons with Brady, Mimi was just pleased she didn’t have to play with them when Shawn and Belle were off doing their own thing, and Shawn and Belle, while being nice to everyone and feeling rather sad that they were dead for approximately seventeen seconds, were happy to get some time to themselves instead of being constantly interrupted by Kevin, Jan, Jason, Susan, Penny, and Mimi when Jan had got her into some fresh source of trouble.
Salem went on as it had done before, and the teens without family or any real meaning to their lives were quickly forgotten. Philip finally realised that Chloe was even more self centred than he could cope with and found that he was actually in love with Mimi, Brady rejected Chloe’s insanity and self absorption and found a new love, and Shawn and Belle lived to survive Dimera plot after Dimera plot while raising their family and coping with the fallout of having JT as their mutual half brother before finding out that he wasn’t. Five years later, they barely remembered that the teens had ever lived in their world, and took part in their melodramatic lives, and that was just as it should be. No trace of these minor characters in Life’s Great Soap Opera remained except for the small memorial plaque outside Mrs Horton’s house warning everyone of what happened if you ate doughnuts not baked by her.