Chapter Text
Riverdale is very good at remembering the worst things.
Ask anyone about Jason Blossom and they will tell you he was handsome.
They will tell you he smiled for photographs, captained football games, wore pressed blazers, and came from the richest family in town. They will tell you about the red hair. The expensive watch.
(They would even mention how he and Archie Andrews looked awfully similar if one looked from a certain angle.)
Eventually, if you wait long enough, they will tell you he was murdered.
Nobody ever begins with the boy himself.
Perhaps that is because Jason Blossom spent sixteen years becoming exactly what everyone expected him to be.
A Blossom.
The name meant more than he did.
It drifted through classrooms whenever teachers took attendance, lingered in conversations between parents at charity dinners, sat on the lips of guidance counsellors who spoke of his legacy as though it were already his—as if inheriting the Blossom name was the same thing as becoming worthy of it.
Jason learned very young that people looked at him before they listened to him.
So he gave them something worth looking at.
He became captain of the football team.
Then captain of the water polo team.
He smiled on cue.
He learned which tie his father preferred and which subjects pleased his mother and how to shale a grown man's hand firmly enough to be remembered.
It was exhausting.
He did it anyway.
Because Blossoms were not raised.
They were cultivated. Groomed.
He was not a particularly kind boy.
Growing up in Thornhill made sure of that.
Death has a habit of sanding the sharp edges from people until all that remains is something smooth enough for the grieving hands to hold.
Jason does not deserve that sort of kindness.
He laughed when freshmen stumbled through football try-outs.
He let teammates pin boys against lockers because speaking up would have cost him.
He spread rumours because everyone else did and because Riverdale High rewarded confidence far more than compassion.
There were girls who crossed the hall to avoid him.
Boys who laughed at his jokes before deciding whether they were funny.
Teachers who mistook good grades for good character.
He was charming.
He knew it.
Sometimes he used it like a weapon.
The terrible thing about Jason Blossom was never that he believed he was untouchable.
It was that Riverdale spent sixteen years proving he was right.
His father, on the other hand, measured him in expectations.
Clifford Blossom never raised his voice unless silence had already done the work for him.
Disappointment settled over Thornhill like dust.
Invisible and constant all the same.
It coated every room.
Every conversation.
Every achievement.
Nothing Jason accomplished was ever allowed to exist on its own. It merely became evidence that the next success should be larger.
Win the game.
Win the championship.
Get the grade.
Graduate as valedictorian.
Shake the mayor's hand.
Reach the finish line.
Discover there was another one waiting.
("One day you'll own the room, Jason," His father would say.)
Jason stopped remembering what praise sounded like.
He remembered pressure instead.
Pressure become routine.
Routine became personality.
The only time the pressure slackened was when he was with Cheryl.
The only person who still called him Jay-Jay.
(Only when nobody else could hear of course.)
The only person who treated him like the child he was.
They had once believed they were the same person split between two bodies.
Children believe impossible things because nobody has taught them shame yet.
By the time they turned sixteen, the world had done its work.
They no longer finished each other's sentences.
They finished each other's performances.
She played perfection.
He play certainty.
Neither of them recognised the other once the audience disappeared.
Yet every now and then—
A look.
A joke no one else understood.
A memory from before their parents decided that twins should be displayed, not loved.
Those moments frightened Jason more than anything.
Because they reminded him there had once been a version of himself that had existed before the Blossom name swallowed it whole.
Then came Polly Cooper.
She did not looked at Jason Blossom.
She looked at Jason.
The distinction was so unfamiliar that, at first, he took it for pity.
She challenged him.
Rolled her eyes when he acted like an ass.
Told him he was spoiled. Told him he was selfish.
Told him he hid behind charm because it was easier than admitting he was scared.
He hated her for almost three weeks.
Then, quite inconveniently, he fell in love.
Love did not, however, make him a better person.
It simply gave him someone whose opinion suddenly mattered more than his own.
He still laughed at cruel jokes.
Still let teammates cross lines they shouldn't.
Still benefited from a name that opened doors other people never reached.
People are rarely transformed by love.
Mostly, they become easier to disappoint.
Jason disappointed Polly often.
He disappointed himself more quietly.
Years later, after the river had finished with him, people would insist they had always known he was different.
That he had been gentle.
Misunderstood.
A victim long before he became a corpse.
Riverdale loves that version of Jason Blossom.
He is easier to mourn.
The real Jason is harder.
He could be vain.
Impulsive.
Cruel in the casual way teenagers often are, when they have never been taught that other people's pain survives the bell ringing.
He wanted impossible things without considering who would pay for them.
He believed he could outrun consequences because, until July, consequences had never outrun him.
None of that means he deserved to die.
Those are not opposing truths.
They are simply both true.
And Sweetwater River has always had room for more than one truth at a time.