In the past-future, Cheryl and Julian mourn Jason. Cheryl grieves for a brother that was never born but whom she loved dearly; Julian for a brother he never met, the man he might (and perhaps should) have been. He remembers Jason, because he was there when Angel Tabitha showed them the happy memories, but since he wasn't born in the future-past, he remembers everything like a story told to you so many times you forget it isn't your own.
Julian asks Cheryl, once and only once, if she ever wishes he were Jason.
It's 1987, and they're fifty-one years old, sharing a glass of maple whiskey the night before Julian launches his presidential campaign.
He's running as a red-blooded Republican because if he set foot in the DNC, everyone would think he's following in the footsteps of his Soviet mother and traitor father. He doesn't have high hopes of becoming president even if he wins the nomination, but the good he could do with the office and his knowledge of the future make the gamble worth it.
He doesn't know it yet, but he will win, and the media will call it divine intervention, and they will be right, in a roundabout sort of way.
Cheryl has a streak of white in her hair that appeared in their twenties after Nana Rose died. She looks distinguished. Appropriately powerful for the power-broker she's become in DC. She looks at him and sees not-Jason, he believes, and it kills him.
He shouldn't ask, but he does, and he waits for his twin sister to crush him beneath the custom red-bottomed heels she was too impatient to wait for Louboutin to invent in the 90s.
"Do you ever wish I were Jason?" Julian asks, tasting maple in his mouth like blood.
"No," Cheryl says. She doesn't think about her answer, which means she has thought about the question a lot. It's been thirty-two years since Angel Tabitha showed them their past future in the Babylonium. Thirty-two years is a lot of time to think. To fester. "Do you ever wish you were?"
"I think so," Julian whispers.
"Well, don't." Cheryl fixes him with eyes that don't so much reflect the fire beside them as gobble it up. She used to have phoenix fire running through her veins, and the body remembers. She was always cold when they were children, and their parents could never figure out why. "He left me."
"He died." Julian corrected.
She shook her head. "He left me first. Chose Polly over me. Left me alone with Penelope and Clifford in that house of horrors. He died after that."
"He would have come back for you," Julian says, because that's what he would have done. He can't imagine leaving Cheryl behind for anything. "I would have."
"And this is why I don't wish you were Jason." Cheryl leaned forward, resting her wrists on her crossed knees. "Because those are both lies. He wouldn't have come back for me, and you would never have left. I miss Jason. I don't miss him as much as I would miss you."
In the morning, Julian will stand before flashing cameras with his wife beside him, his children beside her - triplets, the first ever Blossom triplets - and deliver the speech the Riverdale High class of 1956 wrote for him. Its thesis is the headline of almost every article written about his candidacy and presidency and is quoted for decades to come.
"Bend towards justice," Senator Julian Blossom says, and the timeline does. Not because he wills it — although he does — but because he works for it. And he is not alone in that.
