Chapter Text
When Jason and Cheryl Blossom were four years old, they got married.
Simply playing, as children will. An arch of roses and violets in Thornhill’s garden shadows their union while an invisible official pronounces them wed. The occasion is witnessed by an equally invisible audience of family and friends. Cheryl carries a bouquet she plucked herself. Only daisies and weeds, for their parents would be furious if they took any flowers of worth from the garden itself.
They each wear one of Penelope’s many rings, slated for return before she notices they’re missing. The jeweled bands are far too large for their little fingers. They must be continuously replaced as they begin to slip off.
Cheryl holds her brother’s hands and smiles and gives him a kiss on the cheek and tells him she loves him. And Jason decides his sister is the most wonderful, prettiest girl in the whole world.
He never changes his mind about that.
Not when he’s in the 1st grade and Archie Andrews asks him what girl he likes. He stares back at the other boy, who’s big for his age and a little scary because Jason hasn’t quite hit his growth spurt yet. He’s not sure exactly what he means. He likes Cheryl, of course. Who else?
So he says “I like my sister.”
Archie shakes his head.
“No, not like that. Which girl do you like like. A girl you want to be boyfriend and girlfriend with.” He pauses, then, with stars in his eyes, says: “I like Betty.”
Jason shrugs. He looks across the room, where his sister is competing with said Betty Cooper over who can cut out the superior butterfly from a sheet of construction paper.
As far as he knows, a girlfriend is a girl you go to restaurants (he finds the prospect of going to a restaurant without his parents quite exciting) and the movies with. You hold hands and spend all of your time together and make each other happy. He can’t think of anyone besides Cheryl he’d want to do any of that with.
Cheryl, who has has proclaimed her butterfly the superior specimen, and is now engaged in gloating over poor Betty who looks to be on the verge of tears.
“I like Cheryl.”
Archie rolls his eyes now. He laughs a little.
"That's dumb, Jason. You can’t like your sister like that.”
Jason isn’t sure why. He’s a little hurt by Archie’s words, but decides that he’s probably just jealous. Betty’s pretty, but she’s not near as pretty as Cheryl. He’s lucky. His sister is the smartest, funniest, nicest, most beautiful girl ever. He’s sure of it. No one else could hold a candle to her, and ultimately it doesn’t matter what Archie Andrews or anyone else says.
He still doesn’t change his mind, even as he grows and slowly begins to realize that the whole world agrees with Archie. No, you really can’t like your sister like that. It’s wrong. Sick. Completely fucked.
When he’s twelve years old, he receives a brief writing assignment. It’s an assignment that leaves a lot of room for creative freedom. ‘Just write me something more than a few words long’ his teacher says. That’s it. Poem or prose, meter, rhyme scheme, subject matter, are all left to the discretion of the author.
Jason sits in Thornhill’s parlor with a blank paper in front of him and an eager pen in his hand. His mind is barren.
Cheryl comes into the room to watch TV. She slides onto the couch next to him and rests her head on his shoulder and the television clicks to life.
“Hey Jason” She says, her voice soft and wonderful. His heart does all sorts of unlikely acrobatics in his chest.
His pen dances across the paper. Jason doesn’t even realize he’s writing about her until he’s halfway done with the poem. She turns to him with great brown doe eyes and asks him what he’s working on.
“Some stupid poem for English.” He chokes out.
“Can I see?”
“I’ll show you when it’s done.” He offers, hoping desperately she’ll have long forgotten about it by then.
"Come on Lord Byron, let me see!” She prods him with her foot. He recoils from her touch, desperate to escape the disgustingly welcome sensation it brings.
“No.”
She swipes at him for the poem. He reels back and pulls it away just in time.
Cheryl sticks her tongue out at him and returns to the television. He closes his eyes, swears quietly, and gets back to work.
“I bet it sucks.”
She’s not wrong.
What he has when’s done is a cheesy, amateurish love poem to end all cheesy, amateurish love poems. The rhyme is juvenile and stilted. The meter is uncertain. It’s absolutely charged with confused, youthful infatuation.
It takes every ounce of concentration and willpower in his young body to stumble through the poem before his twenty-student strong English class. He reads, backed up by a chorus of snickering thanks to Reggie, Moose, and the rest of his friends. His face flushes bright red. He can only thank God Cheryl isn’t in the class, or else his lips, tongue, and mind would probably stop working when he gets to the horrible line about ‘hair like gentle flame’.
When he finishes and stumbles back to his desk, Jason feels as if he’s just walked a thousand miles. It’s like marching through a sea of maple syrup. His mind swims. He wants to faint. He collapses back into his seat.
Reggie turns to him with a massive, shit-eating grin on his face.
“Dude, that was the fucking gayest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Fuck you.” He spits back, drained.
Reggie makes a grab for the poem. Jason snatches it away.
After class, Jughead Jones creeps up to him. That’s a bit odd to begin with, considering Jason and his friends are hardly on amicable terms with the grim-faced, would-be author.
“It wasn’t a bad poem, man.” He says. “Ignore them.”
“Fuck off, Columbine.” He seethes. Because he’s angry and sad and wants to rip and tear something and Jughead’s right there. The boy doesn’t flinch. It’s not like he isn’t used to comments like that.
“Fine.” He spits back, storming off down the hall. “Dick.” Jason watches him go. Kids like him are supposed to be mean to kids like Jughead. Kids like him are supposed to be happy and popular while kids like Jughead are supposed to brood and suffer. Kids like Jason are supposed to win football games and date cheerleaders and they are not supposed to fall in love with their own sisters for fuck’s sake.
Of course, a kid like Jughead hardly cares why his tormentors torment, nor should he. The least Jason deserves is to be hated by the likes of Jughead Jones.
Reggie walks by and cries out in faux-anguish; “Jason, Jason, wherefore art thou, Jason?”
On the way to pre-Algebra, he crumples up the poem and tosses it into the nearest trashcan.
He never writes anything like that again.
Jason spends lunch in the bathroom crying.
He stares into a mirror and into his own blue eyes, rimmed with red. God, he is so ridiculously fucked. Tears roll down his cheeks and pool at the swell of his lips. He tastes salt. Awful and bitter. He wants to gouge out his own eyes like Oedipus.
He can only imagine how Cheryl would react if she knew. She’d rightly think he was vile. She’d pull away. She’d never speak to him again. She would hate him and he would deserve it because he’s fucking scum.
He’ll keep his mouth good and shut if it kills him in the end. Because the only pain worse than this would be losing her entirely.
So he tries to forget about it. Tries to be normal. He really tries. Because he has to.
For a while, he’s dumb or desperate enough to think it’s fading. He’s becoming normal. His warped mind is straightening itself out. He was a silly kid, wasn’t he? It’s not totally unprecedented for a young child to have trouble separating romantic and platonic love. It’s simply part of maturation. He’s older and wiser now. Cheryl’s his sister, nothing more. He has to remember that.
Years pass and Jason hits his long awaited growth spurt. His baby fat melts away, his arms and body fill out with muscle, and he shoots up a foot in height. He soon finds himself swamped by female company. He makes the best of it.
The best sucks.
Cheryl grows up too, of course. Suddenly, Jason’s sister has curves. And full, pouty lips. And long, slender legs. And a voice as liquid and sweet as maple syrup.
As the other guys on the team would put it in their boorish locker room talk; “dude, she’s fucking hot!” (Actually, they wouldn’t put it like that any more, ever since Jason almost broke Chuck Clayton’s face for making a lewd comment about Cheryl, but that’s beside the point).
When Jason’s fifteen years old he takes Tina Patel to the winter formal dance. He stands in his room before the mirror, adjusting the bow-tie and the cufflinks on his tuxedo. He had to figure it out himself, of course. Cliff Blossom couldn’t be bothered. Jason slicks his hair back. He knows a lot of the other guys are taking girls in the hopes they’ll get laid after the dance. Though he won’t admit it, of course, he’s rather ambivalent about that. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.
Jason smiles.
He looks fine.
Handsome, if he does say so himself.
All black from neck to toe. He’d just seen the new James Bond movie and decides he looks kinda like the titular character. Cool. He aims an imaginary gun at the mirror and fires. It's quite lame.
“Ready to go, 007?”
God he hates it when that weird twintuition shit happens and they independently converge upon the same idea.
He jumps at her voice, killing off Jason Bond as quickly as he conceived him.
Then turns to look at his sister and finds that the most beautiful girl in the world has made a return.
The first thing that pop’s into Jason’s mind is that stupid one-liner: “Somebody call heaven. There must be an angel missing.”
Because framed in that pool of pale light spilling from the hallway, she looks positively divine. She’s like a sculpture. Impossibly perfect. All violent red and blinding white in her tailor-made evening gown. She’s so magnificent. Radiant. He wants to reach out and touch her flawless ivory skin. Wants to run his thumb over her plump, bee-stung lips. Wants to put his arms around her and pretend they’re the only two people in existence.
He forgets what Tina Patel even looks like.
Jason’s mouth dries up. His heart thunders in his chest. He suffers the familiar beating of butterflies’ wings in his gut. He doesn’t want to go to the dance anymore. He’s not sure he wants to go anywhere ever again. He wants to stay here with Cheryl and forget everything but those bewitching chocolate eyes and that brilliant red hair.
Fuck.
Archie’s voice echoes through his head. Not Archie as he is now, but the energetic, hyper six year old of all those years ago.
“You can’t like your sister like that!”
Right. Of course not.
A powerful, icy finger of guilt probes at his heart.
Cheryl locks arms with him, and they head off to the dance.
They’re supposed to pick up each of their dates, get something to eat, and then go to the formal all four of them. Jason likes to drive with the top down, but it’s not easy to do while fighting the urge to gawk at Cheryl, impossibly gorgeous with her eyes closed in rapture and the wind whipping through her lovely red hair.
When they get to her house Tina flies down her front steps and almost leapfrogs into the passenger’s seat before she realizes it’s already occupied.
“Do you want me to move, JJ?” Cheryl asks. She wouldn’t budge an inch for Tina or anyone else at Riverdale high for that matter. But she’ll move for him. Because she adores him almost as much as he adores her.
He doesn’t want her to move. But Tina’s standing there. Both girls are staring at him. So he sighs.
And he says: “Yeah. Thanks, Cher.”
Cheryl slides into the backseat, and Tina takes her place. “Hi, Jason!” She gushes. She kisses him on the cheek and it burns, damp and hot and unwanted.
At the very least, he doesn’t have so much trouble navigating the next stretch, to pick up Cheryl’s date.
Reggie fucking Mantle. The fact that he’s been Jason’s friend for years doesn’t make this any more tolerable. He swaggers down to the car with a half-grin on his face. Right now, Jason wants to knock his teeth down his throat.
Reggie jumps into the backseat, next to Cheryl.
“Hey, Cheryl.” He says, in what a sophomore might imagine is a seductive tone.
If anyone notices Jason gripping the wheel so tight the blood drains from his knuckles or him gunning the engine like a getaway driver, no one says anything.
The dance is, as most high school dances are, boring. No one really wants to go to those things. They just go because not to go is to exclude oneself from the school’s social life. Because everyone else is going. It’s what one might call an ‘emperor’s new clothes situation’.
Jason shares one unenthusiastic dance with Tina, before slipping away from the floor to sit in a dark corner with a cup of punch, wishing to God it was alcoholic. He watches Reggie and his sister for a while, chest burning with envy. High school kids’ idea of dancing is more uncoordinated convulsing than anything, but Cheryl actually looks like she’s having fun. Jason wants to rip Reggie’s throat out.
Lost in such reverie, it's a while before he realizes he’s sharing his brooding corner.
Jughead Jones stirs in the darkness. Jason’s too gutted and miserable to be frightened by the sudden movement.
“You've already ruined my high school experience, do you really have to ruin my gloomy corner, too?” Jughead asks.
“I don't wanna fuck with you.” Jason responds.
“That’s a first.” Jughead responds. He feels a little bad. But feeling bad about the way he’s treated the Jones boy doesn’t make it any better. He's such a prick. Then Jughead says: “Shouldn’t you be out there basking in the the school’s adulation with all of the other popular kids?”
Jason shrugs.
“Probably.” He pauses.
“So then what’s with the self-imposed exile? It’s expected of me. I’m the resident creepy loner everyone thinks is going to shoot up the school. But you…” Jughead waits. Jason doesn’t respond. “Don’t tell me this is one of those, ‘I’m the man who has everything but is secretly a deep, tortured soul suffering in silence because of some tragedy that only I can comprehend’ things.”
“That is exactly what this is.” Jason responds. Jughead smiles. Jason can hardly see it through the darkness. It's probably karma. "Do me a favor."
"What?"
"If you ever actually go on a murder spree, kill me first."
They say nothing more to each other.
The dance ends and the attendees file out into a frozen December night. Jason opens his jacket and lets the wind rip through him. He doesn’t mind the numbness.
Tina’s steamed that he more or less ditched her for the duration of the dance. She doesn’t speak to him all the way back to her house. Fine. He doesn’t want to talk to her anyway.
As they cross Sweetwater River, Jason has the sudden inclination to turn the wheel hard and send them all to a watery grave. Needless to say, he doesn’t.
After they drop Reggie off (good fucking riddance) Cheryl asks if she can move back into the front seat. He doesn’t respond, tearing off down the street and towards the ponderous black mountain of Thornhill. Jason storms into the house without a word and locks himself away in his room, leaving his sister to wonder what she’s done wrong.
He gropes around in his drawer for the bottle of vodka he’s been saving. Fuck it. This is as special an occasion as any.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, he downs most of the drink in the next hour.
Jason’s hardly conscious by the time a soft knock sounds at the door.
“Jason? JJ? Can I come in?”
He doesn’t respond, not in the least because he’s having trouble processing human speech. She comes in anyway. Cheryl stands in the doorway, looking sad and frazzled and contrite. And yet sill heartbreakingly lovely. He feels like a son of a bitch
“Cher…” He slurs.
She moves slowly toward him, as if afraid to frighten him with sudden movement. Sliding into the spot next to him on the comforter, she asks: “Jason, are you mad at me?”
No. God, no. How could be mad at her? How could he ever be mad at her? He’s mad at himself. He wishes he could sock himself in the fucking face until his skull caved in.
“No…no…s’fine…”
“If I did anyth-“
“You didn’t do anything!” He snaps, with more hostility than intended. She wraps her arms around him, ignoring the powerful stench of alcohol. “God…I love you, Cher. I fuck…fucksing…fucking love you.” He manages. Tears spring from his blue eyes.
“I love you too, JJ.” Cheryl responds. She sweeps aside a lock of sweaty ginger hair gives him a gentle kiss on the forehead. It alleviates the pain, physical and psychic, if only for a moment.
“No…I love you…love you too much. Too…”
She laughs, uncomprehending. Her laugh is so beautiful. It cuts.
“What do you mean?”
“Just go.” He murmurs, his face red and wet.
“But…”
“Please…get…go!”
She breaks the embrace.
“Okay. Fine. I’m sorry.” Cheryl says, somewhere between hurt and angry.
And she’s gone. He wants to cry out for her to come back. To please stay with him. To hug him and kiss him and love him even if she can never love him the way he loves her. Instead Jason buries his face in a pillow, so he can hide his tears from himself.
That’s what he does. He hides from himself.
He hides from himself in lots of places. In darkened bedrooms with girls who don’t remember his name or face any better than he remembers theirs. In clouds of acrid smoke. In bottles. On fields.
Jason likes football. It’s primal. Animalistic. There’s little room for higher thinking of the kind he torments himself with. There’s himself and his allies. There’s the objective. Nothing else. It taps into those fundamental human mandates millennia in the making. Almost as fundamental as love and lust.
Of course, she’s always there on the sidelines, cheering him on. He so wishes she wouldn’t leap into his arms after each game and shower him with kisses that violate the spirit of platonic love if not the letter. But he’d die if she did stop. After the initial excitement is done, she puts her hands on his shoulders and tells him what a great job he did today. Like clockwork, he'll smile and tell her that he couldn't have done it without her support. It's probably true. Cheryl always beams when he says that, regardless.
It's amazing, the change she undergoes when speaking to most anyone except him. The venom that she fires at her band of 'off brand Bratz dolls' as she called them once. Or the fury that animates her face when a social inferior dares speak to her. But she's never like that with him. She's always soft and gentle. And loving. It really isn't fair.
So he goes and hides some more.
Jason is still hiding from himself when he meets Polly Cooper at 17.
Okay, not really ‘meets’.
This is Riverdale, where you can’t swing a stick without hitting somebody’s third cousin. He’s known Polly Cooper since kindergarten, but as far as she’s concerned, they only have their RomCom-worthy, meet-cute moment when they’re 17.
She’s the safest option there is.
She’s pretty. Blonde. A cheerleader. Gets good grades. Smiles all of the time. Fucking Stepford robot. Just like him. Perfect. Exactly what everyone expects of him. So he corners her at her locker one day. Strikes up a conversation. He doesn’t even remember what about. Something dumb.
Within two weeks they’re an item and well on the way to becoming Riverdale High’s resident power couple. They go to all of the can’t-miss-it parties and she cheers him on at football games (and so is Cheryl but Jesus Christ he isn't supposed to look at her especially not during games) and they sit together in a booth at Pop’s giggling and smiling about stupid shit that makes him want to slit his wrists more than usual.
As far as Jason is concerned, he’s not using her. Polly gets her fluffy, sickly-sweet, all-American teenage love fantasy. He gets to pretend, for his sake as much as everyone else’s, that he’s a normal, well-adjusted teenage boy and not fucking Cesare Borgia.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Everybody wins.
When Jason is with Polly, he can forget, if only for the moment, about the perverse longing that has ruined what was supposed to be a perfect life. He can push it way down, and delude himself into thinking it isn’t even there. Just for a little bit.
Until he can’t.
Until he’s in bed with her one night, sweaty, hot, approaching climax. His head swims. He blinks, and for the briefest of moments her blonde hair is red and her blue eyes are brown and it isn’t Polly Cooper anymore, it’s his sister. And then Cheryl’s gone and Polly’s back. The loss and disgust are deeper and more powerful than ever before. He wants to gnash his teeth and cry out.
Jason finishes, and Polly whispers “I love you” in his ear and he says nothing. It sounds like a curse. Like mockery. He hears the entire world laughing at him.
They lie together in silence. She lays a hand on his bare chest. He wants to slap it away. He doesn’t.
Moonlight stabs through the gossamer curtains. Like silver spears. Would that they could pierce his chest and end him now.
This isn’t who he wants to be. This isn’t who he wants to be with.
Polly turns to him, blue eyes shining with sympathy.
“Jason? What’s wrong?”
In the moment, he hates her. He hates her so much for not being what he wants. He hates himself even more for hating her. It isn’t her fault. It’s not her fault or Cheryl’s fault or Riverdale’s or even his son-of-a-bitch father’s fault. It’s no one else’s fault that he’s fundamentally broken. And he has no right to drag anyone else down into this mire of misery and lust and double-fucked love. But he’s going to do it anyway. Because he’s a Blossom and Blossoms are horrible, horrible people.
Everyone knows that, right?
Not for the first time, he considers killing himself.
Here lies Jason Blossom. Star football player. Blew his brains out. Really, really wanted to fuck his sister.
What a legacy.
Polly snuggles up to him with a sigh of contentment.
He blinks back tears.
At least one of them is happy.
More importantly, at least Cheryl is happy and oblivious. He thinks so, at least. She must be in a fairly good mood to terrorize Riverdale High the way she does. But as his thing with Polly drags on far longer than he'd expected it to, he begins to suspect maybe Cheryl isn't that happy after all.
"Jason, do you want go to the movies with me tonight?"
"I can't." He says, voice terse and even. "I have a date with Polly."
"You always have a date with Polly." She shoots back, spitting out the name like she's glad to get it out of her mouth.
"Well I'm sorry, Cheryl, but she's my girlfriend!"
Cheryl twists her face into that vicious mask she's so good at. But he can see through it, just like she can see through him on everything except the one thing that really matters. She's hurt. Her nostrils flare a little. Her great brown eyes glitter. She looks so beautiful, even when furious.
"So? That doesn't mean you have to spend every waking moment with her!"
"I don't, I just..." His voice trails off because he really isn't sure what to say next. "I need her to keep up my paper-thin facade of normalcy!" "I need her to distract me from you!"
"Just what? God, Jason, what is your problem lately? It's like you're avoiding me! What, all for that fucking blonde airhead?"
Well, what's he supposed to say to that? Part of him wants to shout "I'm doing it for you!" But that'd be a lie. He's doing it, like most things, for himself. To spare himself pain.
"I..."
Even as he begins to lose the power of speech, she doesn't let up.
"Do you care about me anymore?"
The next words that come out don't come from any place of conscious thought.
"Of course I care about you!" He yells, much louder than intended. "What the fuck do you think this is about?"
She recoils a little. He wants to reach out and apologize. He doesn't of course.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? You won't even talk to me anymore!" Her voice, like his, comes to the point of breaking. Tears well up in her eyes. God. She never cries. Except when she's really, truly injured. He's done it this time. "Just tell me what the fuck is wrong with you an-"
"I need to go." He snaps. And he turns around and flees. Runs. Runs away, again.
"Jason! Jason!" She calls after him. "Get back here you...you..."
No possible end to that sentence, he muses, could be insulting enough.
By the time he heads off to meet Polly at Pop's later that night, he's in one of his worst moods in a while. He and Cheryl had spent the rest of the afternoon moping in their respective rooms. Not that he’ll ever try to confirm it, but he’s pretty sure they both cried.
He does not want to go on a date with Polly Cooper right now. That’s the last damn thing he wants. But he does it anyway. Because he’s fucking supposed to.
Much to his chagrin, her disposition is so wonderful she doesn’t even notice his poor humor. She smiles at him with her big, bright eyes and takes his hands in hers. She leans in to kiss him. This time, he actually does pull away a little bit. She either doesn’t notice or is way too happy about whatever-the-fuck she’s happy about.
Polly drags him to a booth. He follows like a zombie, half-dead. Sliding into the seat opposite her, Jason is struck by the sudden hunch that whatever’s got her tickled pink isn’t going to make his day much better. Jason’s face is pale and sallow and he’s clearly in less than prime condition but she’s still smiling and giggling what the hell is her problem?
“Oh, Jason!” She gushes.
He forces a weak, sickly smile. He thinks of Cheryl back home and feels ill.
“What’s up?”
She purses her lips. Leans in close. Squeezes his hands.
“We’re gonna have a baby!” She squeals.
What.
The world comes to a grinding halt. Jason’s wandering eyes drift to the silverware on the table and more specifically the knife. He could jam it into his throat right now. It wouldn’t be a quick death, but it would have to be a hell of a lot better than this. His fingers twitch. Polly’s smiling face becomes the rictus grin of some awful ghoul. The bright neon lights of Pop’s grow brighter and brighter until the light of a billion suns is exploding in his eyes. The blood howls in his veins. The world ripples and tears and spirals towards an incoherent screaming hell-void.
The last thought Jason has before the fragile foundations of his sanity crumble entirely is that rock bottom is a lot further down than he thought.