Sodium Hydroxide

The digging took hours. His back felt like it was breaking and he was growing tired. But the pit had to be deep enough.

When it was, he planted the shovel and pulled the body in, feeling the vibration of the orange tarp in his hands as it rolled over some small pebbles in the dirt. Trying to resist him. But failing.

With one last groan, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he managed to get the body of the bleached blonde punk-ass drug dealer plopped into the pit. The one who had made problems for her. Alice.

He stood up and stretched his back. But only for a second.

The bag of lye he had brought with him that night was waiting. Open. Ready to do its job.

"Dad, Betty and her mom are in trouble," Jughead had told him anxiously earlier that night.

"What are you talking about boy?"

After Jughead explained that Alice and Betty had the body of a drug dealer that needed disposing of FP realized that it wasn't just he who was dragging his son down into a life he may not escape from. The Coopers were too. He needed to fix this. This time he could fix it. Right?

Unbeknownst to him, Jughead had been researching ways to dispose of bodies online before he even came to him, and he went back to his laptop once he had. He only said something to him again once he thought he had found something promising.

"Dad, what about sodium hydroxide?"

"Lye? What about it?"

"Well, it says right here –"

"What are you doing, boy?" FP practically bellowed once he realized what Jughead was up to. "Put that away – don't you know that they can trace your history? You don't want to be found researching that."

Jughead turned a little green and powered down his laptop.

FP knew all about lye, caustic soda. Why hadn't they used it with Jason? Could have saved him a lot of trouble.

FP grabbed the brown paper sack of pellets carefully, keeping his hands on the outside of the bag. Lye was caustic - just as one of its monikers implied.

The dust rose up a bit as the pellets hit the body and he turned his head away, not wanting to breathe it in. But it got all over his leather jacket.

Then he leaned forward to gather up the tarp so that he could wrap up the body, the white pellets of lye slipping over his hands. They were so very slippery. But he didn't feel any burn, no sting of the corrosion that the warning label cautioned of.

He paused for a second, thinking of what these innocuous looking caustic soda pellets would do to this man and suddenly realized why he hadn't used them with Jason. Jason's body had been recoverable – and given enough time, this man's would not be. It would just become a pile of goo, organic flesh dissolved away by a relentless, unforgiving chemical.

He knew he couldn't have done that to Penelope Blossom. Even though deep down he had probably known it could lead to him getting caught for his part in the cleanup, he couldn't bear to take away a mother's chance to say goodbye, to know that her son was really gone, and not just missing. He knew he couldn't bear the uncertainty if it was Jug . . . or Jellybean.

But this man? He didn't know him.

FP wrapped him up and began the arduous task of shoveling all that dirt back on top of him.