#IF YOU EVER FEEL BAD KNOW THIS UNKNOWABLE ENTITY LOVES YOU

[human-facts]

FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT HUMANS ARE MADE OF STARDUST. INSIDE OF EACH OF YOU ARE CHEMICALS ONLY OTHERWISE FOUND IN SUPERNOVAS AKA GIANT RAINBOW DEATH EXPLOSIONS.

NO MATTER HOW MYCH YOU HATE YOURSELF, NO MATTER HOW MANY MISTAKES YOU MAKE, NO MATTER IF YOU THINK YOURE NEVER GETTING BETTER PLEASE REMEMBER THAT ALL OF YOU HAVE REMNANTS OF GIANT RAINBOW DEATH EXPLOSIONS INSIDE OF YOUR APE FLESH BODY. YOU ARE AMAZING.

[johnnycagesrightnut]

Can I unlock the JonTim rant?

RARARARRARARARARARRARA I AM ACTUALLY BARKING I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED 😁👁️

JonTim. First of all, to understand these two it is vital you Know they never dated. Never. Not once did the two of them date. Not for lack of feelings, they had plenty, but because they just never got the chance. They never had time. They were doomed, they were an unchangeable tragedy.

I firmly believe pre season 1, before our beloved horror podcast even starts taking place, pre promotion in Research Days they had stupid little crushes on each other. No bad feelings like in later developed seasons, purely wholesome feelings of nothing but adoration and awe. They were actual friends, the amount of shit those two got in together out following up on statements or whatever, they were like no one else. Nobody else had a bond like those two, not even Tim and Sasha. They were each others person.

I do think when Tim had finally gathered the stones and was ready, he planned on asking Jon out the next Friday. But then they got promoted.

Season One.

They never had time. Jon got busy and despite his overall done-with-everything-and-everyone vibe in S1 it never really came about when it was Just Tim. Just them alone again. Maybe in a sarcastic way but never really. Tim put off asking him out, figuring they were busy now and there would be a better time. He didn’t know now was the best time he would get, because every time after would be worse. If he had known maybe he would have asked. Maybe later he thinks about that in kicks himself in retrospect. Maybe he thinks about Jon when he presses the detonator.

Season Two.

S2 was perfect. The angst is setting in. Jon was paranoid. Everyone was a little paranoid sometimes after the Prentiss incident but Jon was the worst of it. Tim had started seeing him outside his house for god sakes. Jon was so suspicious of Tim, and less because he truly thought he was up to something and more so because he needed to Know Tim wasn’t. He needed to Know the one person who had been there wasn’t doing anything. Obviously Tim took it as suspicion and that drove wedge through them a bit. Their argument in episode 65 is SUCH a lovers quarrel energy. It’s SUCH a lover quarrel. Because you can love someone and be as angry as they were at each other. Those things can be felt simultaneously, and believe me when I tell you I do wholeheartedly believe they never loved anyone else the way they loved each other. Tim and Sasha were iconic, Jon and Martin were iconic and undeniably in love, but it wasn’t the type of love Jon and Tim had, nothing could ever rival that, and nothing ever did. If there was an option when Jon was happy with Martin in the safe house, happily in love if he could have Tim back alive, back with him but Martin wouldn’t be with them, he would hesitate.

Season Three. (The Grande Finale)

Tim has never been angrier. He is so alone. Nobody understands, not even the one person who used to understand everything, his everything, didn’t get it anymore. Tim’s lost everything. He doesn’t have anything left for him anymore. I’m not even sure if most of S3 he even knew Jon still loved him, but he knows in the end. Despite being in the Unknowing, Tim knows. He’s aware at the end. He knows Jon loves him more than anything, and he knows he feels the same. He knows then that there has never been a time Jon did not love him. He knows he’s glad to do this, to get back at something and his last moments to be a big ‘Fuck You’ to these entities, this thing that took his brother and in turn his entire life, but he knows he’s going to miss Jon, if you can miss from the grave. Even if you can’t he will miss Jon enough that he can. He knows he’s never going to see his love again, never will he make him laugh, or get stoned somewhere in the Institute like they did in Research Days, Tim regrets in these last moments never asking Jon. He thinks of how different things would have been if he had. And he doesn’t want to think of that anymore. He thinks of everything he’s doing, how now that this is what’s happening he won’t (can’t) change it, and grins, his last moments the biggest ‘Fuck You’ anyone’s ever seen. He thinks of a time he made Jon laugh in Research Days, remembers how pretty he thought Jon looked laughing, and he clicks the detonator.

Season Four (Encore.)

Jon wakes up six months later from a coma. Once he can form a coherent thought it’s about Tim. Where is he? What room is he in? After everything, after all this they had survived, and Jon knows Now. Now he has to make a move, he has to hold and be held by his friend, his lover. It’s a good thing Georgie and Basira are there when he wakes up, he can ask them. Ask them what room Tim was in. When he asks if Tim is alive it’s just for clarification, he knows what answer he’s going to get, that Tim was somewhere in the hospital. His heart shatters when they’re silent. Oh. He’s just woken up from a six month long coma and the love of his life is dead. No this couldn’t be happening. Please. Not Tim. He gets dizzy and he can’t see straight, too consumed by the hard hitting feeling of grief because for the first time ever, Tim is not there. He’s nowhere. He isn’t anymore. He was all he wanted and he did not exist anymore. He was ready now, he was going to ask Tim. Even now Tim was gone they paralleled each other, Jon was ready to ask and he couldn’t anymore, and Tim was ready to ask and felt he couldn’t. Death couldn’t stop them from being intertwined irreversibly with each other. Nothing could.

Season Five (honourable mention.)

Jon still feels him around. He’s happy with Martin but some night when he’s staring up at the ceiling he is reminded of earlier times of being absolutely baked at work with Tim, staring up at the ceiling of his office while they lay on the floor. He thinks of Tim laughing, and realizes he can still imagine Tim’s voice perfectly. And he misses him more than anything. He can feel him around the safe house sometimes, thinks he hears his voice. Sometimes he hears Martin’s footsteps and turns around faster than you’d ever see because for just a moment, he thinks it’s someone else. He loves Martin. But it’s not the way he loved Tim. Nothing will ever be like how he loved Tim. He just wants Tim back sometimes. He wants his best friend. He wants his lover back. And sometimes he can hear Tim’s voice so clearly in his head, imagines what he’d say if he could see Jon now. He can feel Tim’s hand gently in his face, wiping the stray tear away like he had done once before in research days. He can feel himself burying his face in Tim’s chest or shoulder. He missed Tim. Nothing would ever make that feeling go away. Tim would always be, and always had been his lover. Because you don’t need to be dating to be lovers, as long as you do love each other you are lovers. And no one could take that love from them. Jon obviously thinks about Martin and being happy Somewhere Else when he dies, but for a quick fleeting second, the last second he is alive, he thinks about Tim. And how maybe if he ends up Sonewhere Else it would be him Jon saw.

I did cry writing this.

@cult-of-the-eye

[zabala0z]

TMA S4 Finale (and the absolute rollercoaster of thoughts I now have)

Hi! WHAT. WHAT??? WHAT????

I’m not even gonna TALK about Mag 157 besides, I love Adelard Dekker, I’m very thankful Melanie is alive (also her and Georgie are dating??? Wow I’m dense) and I love Helen even more

I’m actually going insane over Daisy. Please. Girl. You still have so much to live for, you deserve to live a good life, everyone does. I’m actually going to rip out my TEETH.

Elias is Jonah. I unfortunately did know this. Can’t dodge spoilers that well but you know what, the build up was fucking awesome and I’m applauding the writers. ALSO NOT SASHA AND THE HUNTERS?? WELCOME BACK???

MAG 159: The Last

Martin getting stuck in The Lonely. I genuinely was distraught guys. Peter Lukas also giving his statement like, low key, I felt bad for him. Anyways then Jon ripped Peter Lukas apart. Can’t say I’m mad. It was rather scary. Like Jon full on was just 🤷🏻‍♀️. LIKE-

I did enjoy the brief moment of domestic life in MAG 160 which was soon interrupted by MOTHERFUCKING Elias Bouchard. Or Jonah Magnus. I DONT CARE.

MAG 160: The Eye Opens

“Hello Jon, apologies for the deception” HE SAID THE THING!!!!!

This episode answered the biggest question I’ve been having lately: hey, if these entities have existed for so long..why haven’t any succeeded??

I kinda want to unknow it now. Just- GOD. IM JUST UGJCLHCVPJH. I HATE THIS PODCAST. Elias is so calculating and articulate, you’d fucking think he’s an avatar of The Web. There’s something funny though that everyone is trying to bring all these rituals and it keeps failing and no one knows the true reason

Bring all the fears to the world. The worst idea ever and it worked. And I hate everything.

I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I don’t know what they’re going to do now. Jon does not sound very stable which is worrying but the world doesn’t sound very…good at the moment. I just feel very. Overwhelmed. Not overwhelmed. What’s a word where everything is crashing down and all you can do is watch??? Whatever.

I need to recover. For a bit before I start season 5. From what I hear, MAG 161 is rough. And I don’t think I can handle another thing that makes my brain fold in on itself.

Just. Jesus. God. Thank you again to everyone who is following me on this journey (???). I am tweaking out at the moment. But thank you. Expect a post on season 5…sometime???

God damn it, I need to recover

[rutadales]

currently resisting the urge to ask for more info about nearly all of the wips you just posted in that tag game bc i feel like that would be a lot for one ask. so instead i will simply ask more about 😈🏳️‍🌈🦈TWO!!!!!! and/or Egg is back fic. and maybe come back and ask about more later :3

THANK UUUU 😈🏳️‍🌈🦈 TWO!!!!! is honestly one of my favorites!! It's an older one so I'm not thrilled with my writing but I'd love to come back and finish and clean it up 😭 it's just self indulgent fluff (with a wee bit of angst I mean it's me come on) about c!Foolish finding ways to get Bad to leave him alone (his method is kissing. really thought that one through didn't ya champ)

"And as Foolish yanks him back, he realizes several things all at once:

One, Bad is a lot closer than he realized.

Two, this whole ridiculous game of cat and mouse gets them absolutely nowhere and killing him would do absolutely nothing.

Three, everything Bad does is because he's desperate for Foolish's attention.

So Foolish decides to give it to him, all at once.

He pulls Bad closer, maybe too forcefully in retrospect, and angles his body so he's standing in front of him straight on. The hand not tangled up in Bad's clothing moves to his chin and tilts it up, just enough. In an instant, Foolish presses them together and distantly notes that Bad squeaks as their lips meet. Later, Foolish will hate how he so clearly noticed that Bad's lips are chapped.

The kiss itself is incredibly brief and hardly anything more than a peck, if that. Still, Foolish feels his cheeks heat unreasonably at the action. He draws back, hands still on Bad, before he really processes that he just kissed him.

Which, alright, in terms of spur of the moment decisions, not his best."

---

the egg one is obviously more angsty! I wrote it before the egg finale so it was just me spit balling about certain concepts. Bad getting mind controlled, Foolish's ptsd, the way those two are maybe the only two who will ever understand each other's trauma, Foolish's reluctant but ultimately very deep care and concern for Bad. Not sure I'll ever finish this one, but fun idea anyway.

"He also knows that it's wildly unfair to blame Bad for something an ageless, unknowable entity forced him to do. The logic always painfully knocks against Foolish whenever he feels himself getting irrationally angry at them for what happened but at the end of the day, Foolish will be the first to admit that they're just as much victims of the egg as he is.

Still, Foolish also knows that it's going to take a long, long time before he stops seeing Ant as his executioner and Bad as the monster who called for it.

This fresh hell certainly isn't doing my favors in that department. He squints against the light and tries to piece together what happened. Foolish had been- he'd been asleep. For what felt like the first time in months he'd actually gone to his beacon with a mountain of blankets and had decided to camp out there. He'd been scared and stretched thin, and even if the light never seemed to chase away the red in his nightmares, it at the very least left him feeling physically better.

So he had decided to sleep.

And then he woke up here.

He blinks, slowly, and tries to summon his own power and is met with nothing but the dull tingles more akin to static electricity than actual lightning.

Great. Perfect.

As he rolls over, he can't help but note the ceiling above him is one he's seen before, from this exact same spot even. Then he had been on his knees and there had been lava illuminating the walls. And, Foolish can't help but think as he strains against his bonds, he was probably better off.

"That's not going to work." Foolish flinches before he spots the voice, and hates himself as he relaxes at what he sees.

"Hey Bad."

[abelllia]

3, 10, 12 !!

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

Oh hmmm genuinely hard because I like to mind wipe whenever I see a bad take. The *one* that I remember was from twt too. I'll describe it anyway even if I have talked about it here before. It was something implying that Jon wouldn't take another character's trauma seriously. Since it's the violence ask I'll mention that the other character was Martin. The first time I saw it I genuinely blank-screened in a negative way because it did NOT compute. It was set in S1 but even then I can't imagine Jon not having at *least* an "oh, shit" moment. Especially since Martin's trauma in the thing was childhood trauma. Got me going 😒

10. worst part of fanon

Originally, I had three whole paragraphs about aspects that I dislike but I realized they all just point to one thing— flattening.

Flattening of characters, of morality, of the concept of the entities, yadda yadda. This has happened in every fandom since time immemorial for either comedic purposes or sorting purposes. We love putting things in neat little boxes because it just makes things easier to digest and communicate. Martin is the sunshine one, Jon is the tsundere, Tim is the flirt, Sasha is the Girl™️, Elias is the Ad Campaign Villain with a twirly moustache. It's easy to understand but just less...interesting? I don't want to rag on stuff made for fun/memes, I like funny haha fandom memes. It just feels like a lot of fights about the characters boil down to ignoring the multitudes they contain. The contradictory aspects which make them who they are.

Everyone has probably already said their piece about character flattening so I'll go about the morality thing and how people really like to fight about who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Guys, this is tma, they've all done bullshit. No one is ever going to be completely in the right in this show they've all been shitty people to each other at one point, that's what's *fun* about it. My favourite part is that how, even though I may disagree with a character's actions, I can understand *why* they do it. It makes them feel more like people to me. For an easy example I'll just choose the Gertrude-Michael thing. Yeah, Gertrude sacrificing a human being to an entity who tore his who from his what is pretty shitty. One strike in the wrong. However, from how Gertrude and literally everyone else understood the world at that point, her actions can be considered heroic because in their mind, she just stopped an apocalypse! Saved billions of people from becoming Fear Food. One strike in the right. However, as we soon will know it was basically useless. Gertrude will find out that the Ritual would have never worked anyway so all the sacrifices she did (Michael, Jan, who knows who else) were in vain! Yeowch! Two strikes in the wrong. Ain't it fun? Yet I still see Gertrude interpretations that act like she just did it for fun or something, not that she thought the whole world would end if she didn't sacrifice this one dude to the Distortion.

Honestly I'm not satisfied with this ramble and I think there are plenty of flaws in it but I don't want to write anymore and I don't want to think. Yeah, flattening stuff is fun sometimes but not when it seeps into serious-ish discussions.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

Look hear me out– Basira and Peter Lukas.

Basira to me is compelling to me for so many reasons. She's the most mentally....secure? character in the show, like she logic'd her way out of the *Unknowing*, and it's implied that she's had to be like that from a young age. Based on her S3 pre-Unknowing statement about how that's how her father raised her. But, she's also so controlled by her emotions. Most clearly and notoriously with Daisy, but another example is when her fondness for Jon in S2 overrode her goal to catch him for potential murder. Her emotions matter to her but also calm logic. Which can lead to a lot of interesting and *frustrating* contradictory moments. Again, notoriously with Daisy and how she treated her vs Jon in S4. She's so incredibly flawed and I love it. She's so secure in her own mind that she doesn't even challenge her own biases and instead present them as fact. It's *such* an interesting character trait and it would be so fun to dig into. However, I also realize that probably also the exact reason why people dislike talking about her. She's a hypocritical murder cop accomplice and that can give anyone an incredibly sour taste in their tongue thinking about her (it gives me a sour taste rn like, should I really be writing about her?)There's just so much I want to pick her brain about though. Insert thing here about liking her as a character does not mean I like her as a person.

Peter Lukas is a piece of shit, but he's a funny piece of shit and I like that. He's living apathy and he's so useless and skfjejcjsnnd

Yeah I can't even defend him he's just such garbage, but I find him fun to bully. Someone once pointed out that when he lost the bet with Elias he acted like a little kid throwing a tantrum and I found it so funny. This man isn't doing anything, he's not even the captain of his own ship in anything but name, Tadeas does all the navigation shit. He really is just some rich kid. A sad strange little man and he's unwillingly a fave because of it.

[dathen]

INTRODUCING: THE MISSING TAPES BINGO CHALLENGE!

What are the missing tapes?  

So much happened after Season 3 and during Season 4 that we didn’t get to see.  With us being limited to Jon’s point of view/whatever force is behind the tapes, many events and character interactions take place offscreen.  The Missing Tapes is a fan content challenge to visit these moments and explore character feelings from new angles.

How do I participate?

This isn’t an event week or tied down to any specific time.  Go for a bingo, or just try a prompt or two!  If you write anything for this challenge, use the #missingtapesbingo tag so others can find it easily.

Many thanks to @somuchbetterthanthat​, @evanescentjasmine​, and @holdthosebees​ for helping me brainstorm prompts, and @zykaben​ for the lovely graphic!

After the cut is a text list of the prompts, from top left to lower right.  I also included a brief summary for context, and episode references for when these are mentioned or implied.  

1.  Others’ PoV of Martin losing his mother - (TMA 127)  Basira tells Jon that watching how hard this hit Martin kept her from pushing him too hard about his plans.  “He tried to stay strong, keep it together, but...that sort of thing...”

2.  Basira finding that she’s the sole survivor of the Unknowing - (TMA 122)  “The others-- Tim--  Is he…?   ...Oh.”  “Daisy, too.”  “I’m sorry.”  “Yeah.”  

3.  Melanie and Georgie rekindling their friendship post-surgery - (TMA 131, 145)  Melanie fell out of contact with Georgie during Jon’s coma, but gets in touch again after escaping the Slaughter.  “Who else is there? I mean, Basira is… heh. She’s been the only one for a long time.”  

4.  Basira and Martin’s phone calls during the Scottish Honeymoon - (TMA 160)  Martin and Basira have regular phone calls while he and Jon are in hiding.  “How was she?”  “Oh, same as last week.”

5.  Basira, Daisy, and Jon going for drinks - (TMA 136, 140)  “You look awful. You try drinking with Daisy again?”

6.  Reactions to the s3 deaths/disappearances - (TMA 122)  Tim’s death, Daisy’s body not being found, and Jon as good as dead.  Not limited to the Archives team (the rest of the Institute? Jon’s extended family? Oliver’s dreams? go wild).

7.  Basira and/or Martin reacting to Peter Lukas vanishing researchers - (TMA 123)  “Rumor is a couple of researchers up on the third floor decided to ignore some of his new directives, and… whoosh.”

8.  Anti-Lonely sleepovers - (TMA 150)  “We’re all well aware that with Peter Lukas in charge of the Institute, [the Lonely] is a very real danger to all of us. We are trying. Daisy, Basira and I, we don’t leave the Institute much anymore, so we do spend a lot of time together.” 

9.  Melanie and Georgie getting together - (sometime between TMA 145 and 157)  “I didn’t-- I didn’t realize you were to-together.”

10.  Basira during the S4 finale - (TMA 158-160)  Left alone after Daisy draws off the Hunters, waiting for Jon to return with Martin, her PoV of the aftermath, etc.

11.  Georgie learns about Jon/starts visiting him in the hospital - (TMA 121)  Georgie regularly visits Jon during his coma and talks to him.  “Sorry about that, Jon, but you really don’t need friends like that.”  

12.  Melanie and Basira trauma bonding during Jon’s coma - (TMA 123)  “She saved my life, John. She saved all of us. I won’t forget that.”

13.  FREE SPACE

14.  Melanie picks up a hobby as part of therapy - (after TMA 136)  (Implied) Melanie is trying a different approach to life as part of her therapy sessions.  “Since when?”  “Always.  I’m...trying to be more open about this stuff.”

15.  Basira or Melanie helping Daisy with physical therapy - (TMA 133)  “Hey, there you are. You’re meant to be doing your exercises.”  “You were out.”

16.  Basira, Melanie, and Martin going out for drinks - (TMA 98, 106)  Started in season 3, but could have also happened between the seasons. “Listen, you really look like you could use a drink. Um, me and Basira were just about to pop out. So...do you want to join us?” 

17.  Daisy and Basira conversations post-coffin - (TMA 132+)  “Basira she’s...she’s been good.  We’re together, so it’s good...if she didn’t keep treating me like a china doll.  But it’s alright.”

18.  Daisy learns Melanie’s name; possible fledgling friendship - Daisy didn’t bother learning Melanie’s name pre-Unknowing (TMA 112), but can’t stand being alone post-coffin.  "He’s gone with Martin and… the other one.”  “Melanie.”  “Sure.”

19.  Melanie moving in with Georgie - (TMA 157)  Takes place sometime between Melanie going to therapy and Melanie recovering from blinding herself.

20.  Archive member ambushed by a jealous avatar post-Unknowing - (TMA 123)  Stopping the Unknowing drew a lot of hostile attention to the Archives from the followers of other entities.  “We made a big noise with the Unknowing and… other stuff and now they’ve taken notice. We’re safe in here, usually. But we don’t go out much anymore.”

21.  Jared Hopworth’s attack on the archive - (TMA 123, 131)  “When we came up through the floor, it was wonderful. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on their faces.”

22.  Melanie and Basira’s dynamic post-surgery - (TMA 131)  Melanie goes through the same struggle with hating Basira because of the surgery as she does Jon.  “I sort of, maybe, hate her now.  I don’t know.  I can’t look at her without my leg hurting.  But what else am I going to do?  ... She deals in ‘intel’ these days, in usable data, assets. Not feelings. Not people."

23.  The team discovering Martin’s stash of tapes - (TMA 151)  “Jon found the tapes you made for him.”  “Shh, shh!”  “Found a stash of them awhile ago. I made sure he shared with the club.”

24.  The Archives team hating on Elias/Peter Lukas together - (Implied)  Nothing causes bonding better than a common enemy, right?

25.  Post-Flesh attack fallout, hurt/comfort - (TMA 123, 131)  “You were attacked. When?”  "About two months ago.  It was the Flesh."  “Oh, god.”  “Yeah, it was bad. We took them all out.” 

[spoondrifts]

long post ahead I'm sorry-

crack au where Jonah Magnus is a good guy but everything keeps going wrong and he spends all of his time running around trying to stop his employees from diving headfirst into their Fuck Up™ of the week

in this au Jonah is almost entirely incompetent but he's got the exasperated parent thing down enough to make up for his lack of braincells

he's also at least 7% dumber than he is in canon

s1 Jon: please call pest control there are so many worms

s1 Elias: I already did

Jon: and??

Elias: they ate them

Jon: the worms?

Elias: the pest control guys. the worms ate them

Elias spends the entirety of season 2 desperately trying to convince Jon that none of them killed Gertrude (in this au Gertrude just had a stroke or something in the tunnels). Elias stops Jon from destroying the table but a week later something heavy falls on it and the NotThem escapes anyway. Elias bashes in Leitner's head with a pipe after mistaking him for the monster and Jon gets framed.

now Elias has to convince this hunter that Jon is innocent while Jon runs around and harasses various fear avatars (who are all very amused with Elias' wayward Archivist). Jon assumes Elias knows nothing about all this bullshit because Elias is just his weird and uptight boss who accidentally killed someone, he can't possibly know that there are literally fear gods ruling over them

olive ⚰ has named the group 'Avatars ✨'

JMagnus 👀: Jude please don't hurt him. I'll explain everything when he gets back to the Institute.

🔥: too late

JMagnus 👀: What?

🔥: too late

🔥: burned him

[JMagnus 👀 is typing]

JMagnus 👀: Where is he now.

🔥: going to mike

JMagnus 👀: Mike Crew???

🔥: ya

Elias RACES to Mike's house but he. he fucking misses them. the Beholding helpfully tells him that they're all going back to the Institute so Basira and Daisy can interrogate him, which isn't ideal, he'd really like to not go to jail, so he drafts up an employment contract on the way back and barely manages to escape the whole thing with his life intact.

then he explains everything to Jon because if Jon is going to end up being the Archivist, being uninformed won't do. Jon becomes the Archivist completely on accident and Elias is desperately trying to make all of this work because, haha, the Unknowing is coming up, and Elias is not in the fucking mood to deal with clowns.

olive ⚰ has named the group 'all that is terror uwu'

spidey🕸: lmfaooo jonah how do you make an archivist on accident

JMagnus 👀: He stumbled into it. All I can do now is ensure he doesn't die.

JMagnus 👀: Or get further injured by the rest of you.

🔥: woops

🎭: hEy gUyS lOnG tiMe nO sEe

🎭: gEt iT eLiAs

🎭: sEe

JMagnus 👀: Beholding puns are not amusing from a manifestation of the Stranger.

🎭 has named the group 'eLiAs bE niCe tO niKoLa cHaLlEnGe'

🔥: haha

spidey🕸: I'm sure Nikola will be on her best behavior

🎭: yEaH i wOnT kiDnAp yOuR aRcHiViSt

[JMagnus 👀 is typing]

mike n ike: hey guys what'd I miss

🔥: arent you dead

mike n ike: yeh but I came back

JMagnus 👀: NIKOLA ORSINOV WHERE IS JONATHAN SIMS

🔥: can't you see haha

mike n ike: heh "see"

JMagnus 👀: NIKOLA

spidey🕸: wow he must be pissed

spidey🕸: he left out the punctuation

JMagnus 👀: I WILL BREAK ALL OF YOUR PLASTIC BONES WHERE'S MY ARCHIVIST

🎭 has left the chat.

JMagnus 👀: what the FUCK

since he's still a coward Elias sends Michael to go fetch Jon, only finding out after the fact that he very nearly almost signed Jon's death warrant. Elias is now speedrunning Jon's development because fuck the Unknowing is coming up really quickly and Tim is a self destructive mess and Melanie keeps trying to stab Elias and Martin is a pining idiot and goddammit he didn't sign up for this

Elias prepares Jon the best he can for the Unknowing, because even though he knows the ritual will fail, the Circus can still cause a considerable amount of damage and he needs them out of the way.

the Unknowing happens. Jon ends up in a wack ass coma, Tim is dead, Daisy's in the coffin, and Basira is starting to look like the better choice of Archivist because jesus christ Jon has no self preservation instinct. Elias doesn't get arrested this time around but his ex husband starts coming by the Institute and fucking with all his employees. and the Flesh is attacking. jesus. goddamn.

olive ⚰ has named the group 'bully elias'

JMagnus 👀: Why are you all so mean to me? I'm arguably the nicest one here.

🔥: ur joking right

Peter Lukas: you're not nice you didn't buy me an anniversary gift 😢😢😢

JMagnus 👀: I was busy.

Peter Lukas: doing what

JMagnus 👀: Stopping the Flesh from destroying my Institute. Besides, you didn't remember my birthday.

Peter Lukas: you're 200 years old how could I remember 😓

helen!!!!!: We All Know I'm The Nicest One Here!!

JMagnus 👀: How did you make your text that colorful?

helen!!!!!: IDK

JMagnus 👀: Liar.

helen!!!!!: That's Literally My Job

olive ⚰: hey eli your archivist just woke up I think

🔥: ew why

helen!!!!!: How Delightful!! Maybe I'll Throw Him A Glad You're Alive Party!!

olive ⚰: should we invite him to this chat since he's an avatar now

Peter Lukas: no 🙅 🚫❌

Peter Lukas: I hate archivists 😤😤

olive ⚰: still mad about gertrude huh

🔥: were all still mad about gertrude

🔥: but jons fine once you burn some manners into him

JMagnus 👀: Can you all please stop hurting Jon? Or talking about hurting him? I would like my Archivist to not acquire any more scars.

🔥: damn

Peter Lukas: damn 😔

Elias keeps trying to teach Jon how to pick certain victims to feed off of because personally he has no qualms about feeding from innocents but Jon!! actually trusts him!!! so Elias doesn't want to push Jon into making decisions that will offend his moral sensitivities.

things are actually going okay for a while. Elias starts going home at a reasonable time in the evenings and Jon is actually getting some sleep. and then-

Elias is having a nice dream about Peter trying to fish Simon Fairchild out of a sky filled with eyes when he abruptly sits up in bed, wide awake.

"Ah, fuck," he says to Peter, who is laying on the floor where it is Lonelier™. "Jon's doing something stupid. I Know it."

Peter's mumbled "isn't he always" goes unnoticed as Elias hurries to the Institute, where he finds a fucking rib on Jon's desk and the coffin in the middle of the room.

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'archivists ruin my sleep schedule and my sex life'

JMagnus 👀: What the fuck do I do?? I can't go into the Buried! Why is Jon so stupid? I didn't know he had zero braincells when I hired him!

🔥: ngl why havent you fired him yet

JMagnus 👀: Beholding won't let me. We're all bound to the Institute.

🔥: F

JMagnus 👀: Why are there no Buried avatars in here? Please someone help me.

mike n ike: lol the buried is gross why would anyone go down there

spidey🕸: does he have an anchor?

[JMagnus 👀 sent an image]

🔥: is that a fucking rib

spidey🕸: wow that's not a good anchor at all

spidey🕸: he needs someone he loves

JMagnus 👀: Thanks. Gtg.

spidey🕸: np

🔥: are we not going to talk about his rib

🔥: how the fuck did he get that out of his body

🔥: yall

🔥: YALL

it takes three days for Elias to find Martin.

"Please tell me why the fuck you're dabbling in the Lonely," Elias says as Martin steps sheepishly out of the fog.

"Ah. Well. Jon can't See into it very well and sometimes we like to spice up our se-"

"Stop before I have to gouge my eyes out again."

"A-Again-?"

Elias drags Martin back to the Institute. Martin starts setting tapes on the coffin because "Jon loves these" and Elias starts bashing his head into the wall.

Jon climbs out of the coffin with Daisy and Elias almost considers locking Jon in his office so the damn archivist can't do anything else ridiculous. instead, Elias very calmly takes Jon by the shoulders, and shakes him like a rag doll.

"Stop fucking with entities, you stupid, stupid man," Elias says, shaking Jon more viciously now.

after several hours of breathing exercises Elias returns to his house and doesn't take his Sight off of Jon for the rest of the night, which is a fun experience for Peter when he wakes up and finds Elias' bloodshot eyes staring directly at him in the morning.

JMagnus 👀 added Daisy to 'archivists ruin my sleep schedule and my sex life'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'archivist hate club'

JMagnus 👀 has named the chat 'shut up peter'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'you love jon more than me'

JMagnus 👀 has named the chat 'I don't love either of you I'm heartless'

Peter Lukas has named the chat 'I want a divorce'

spidey🕸: jeez take your marital dispute elsewhere

spidey🕸 has named the chat 'lonelyeyes dni'

Daisy: wtf is this

mike n ike: it's a chat for avatars

mike n ike: and ex avatars ig

Daisy: didn't I kill you

mike n ike: yea

JMagnus 👀: Hello, Daisy. Welcome to the group chat.

Daisy: why is Jon not in here

Peter Lukas: because I hate him 😁

spidey🕸: Elias talks mad shit in here and Jon would get offended

Daisy: if you talk bad about Jon I'll rip your throat out

Daisy: :)

JMagnus 👀: Noted.

mike n ike: he's kinda rude tho

Daisy: I've killed you once

Elias' only goal now is to keep Jon and his assistants from pulling any more wild stunts without his supervision. his renewed involvement with the archival staff results in a few things he'd hoped to avoid: drink invites, physical contact (Martin is surprisingly quick to start hugging Elias once he realizes Elias won't stop him), and- shudder -feelings. because Elias genuinely cares about his staff and doesn't want any harm to befall them. especially Jon. Jon is his Archivist, the only one to ever succeed like this, and Elias will be damned if he lets anything happen to him.

"Why do you care?" Jon asks, once, compulsion thrumming like static on his tongue. "About us, I mean. I would've assumed you'd want to perform the Beholding's ritual."

Jonah Magnus attempted the Watcher's Crown once, when he was young and new. he'd brought his patron close, but not all the way through, and the backlash of power killed all the inmates at Millbank and severely crippled Jonah's connection to the Eye for months afterward. he grew to assume that the Beholding simply preferred the world as it was--ripe with fear for watching. it didn't need a ritual.

he instead dedicated himself to growing stronger, cultivating his Institute of knowledge, his stronghold. if he tore out a few people's eyes when he got too old, then, well, collateral. but he doesn't want the world to end, and knows now that no ritual will ever succeed unless it brings in all the Powers at once. and he doesn't want that either.

it's concerning to him that Jon seems to be collecting marks regardless. the only ones he's missing are the Dark and the Lonely, and Elias is determined to keep it that way.

he explains all of this to Jon who, to his credit, takes it pretty well. Jon is fascinated with historic life and Elias spends some time simply recounting tales of his youth, when he still bore the name Magnus.

they bond. it's good.

and one day Basira does a little too much research and discovers the dark sun waiting in Ny Alesund. she insists they need to go and see what's left of the People's Church, they need to ensure everything is taken care of. Jon is rather insistent too. and Elias wouldn't have been inclined to let them go, except Peter was finally home after weeks at sea, and it wasn't like Jon was defenseless, he could call Elias if anything went wrong...

so, very reluctantly, Elias gives them the all clear. Basira, Jon, and Martin head north, and Elias almost forgets they've gone when he arrives home and Peter already has dinner prepared.

Jon comes back marked by the Dark.

Elias curses himself, over and over, for being foolish enough to let them go, for not keeping a closer eye on them. he knows the ritual won't work unless a certain incantation is spoken, so he'll just have to keep world-ending written chants away from Jon. easy. and it's not like Jon will even get marked by the Lonely. Peter wouldn't.

(but Martin doesn't have the same level of control, and sometimes...)

it's an accident. Martin and Jon are testing it, pushing the boundaries, when Martin pulls them both into the Lonely. Elias threatens divorce until Peter caves and fetches them, but it's too late. Jon has been marked by all fourteen Powers.

Elias tells him, and warns him to check everything he reads.

helen!!!!! has named the chat 'apocalypse babey'

JMagnus 👀: How are you doing that?

JMagnus 👀: And the apocalypse is not imminent. I have the situation under control.

olive ⚰: ha yeah

JMagnus 👀: What do you mean by that?

olive ⚰: nothing

JMagnus 👀: Well, now I certainly think it's something.

olive ⚰: it's just

olive ⚰: don't you think it's kinda weird that @spidey🕸 has been offline for so long

🔥: thats weird shes always online

JMagnus 👀: Oliver, what are you implying?

olive ⚰: idk

olive ⚰: just weird, that's all

🔥: never good when the spiders are quiet

olive ⚰: hear hear

Elias gets a sinking feeling in his stomach, and beside him, Peter looks alarmed. meanwhile, in his flat with Martin making tea in the other room, Jon has a statement clutched in his grasp.

Hello, Jon.

I would apologize for the deception, but I'm afraid that's quite what I'm good at. I'm not one to monologue, that's more Jonah's shtick, so shall we get on with things?

I admit I underestimated Jonah Magnus. He's still remarkably easy to manipulate, but when he abandoned the Watcher's Crown ritual I knew I would have to take a different approach. The Mother is not so satisfied with the world as she may have insinuated. It is our turn to rise, Jon.

At the age of eight, you were marked by us. We sent you to the Magnus Institute in the hopes that a new Archivist would rekindle Jonah's desire to end the world. Unfortunately, it seemed as though he grew fond of you, and so we brought in a new plan. We marked you. One fear at a time. Jonah gave an admirable attempt at protecting you, but ultimately, he is an incompetent old fool, and I am a Weaver. Even Jonah Magnus dances to invisible strings.

Everyone underestimates a spider until it bites. Poison is poison, Jon, regardless of the medium in which it is served.

You will be safe in this new world. Martin, too. Perhaps even Jonah and his Lukas, if the Mother deems them worthy.

Now, please repeat after me...

Jon reads the ink scratched words, eyes welling up with tears and hands trembling, as thunder crashes outside and a howling gale picks up beyond the windows. Martin is shouting something, there's the crawling press of Elias' gaze as it rests heavy behind Jon, a silent observer. He can feel Elias' soothing presence, cool and calm in the raging storm.

Elias is still watching out for him.

Strings are wrapped around his wrists, jerking his arms up in a poor mockery of religious regard, strange hysterical laughter clawing out from his throat.

Jon's tears run red. Somewhere, Elias is still watching.

The door opens.

[blazehedgehog]

Was there ever a Sonic antagonist/rival that you wish SEGA gave more attention to? Maybe not making them a mainstay like Eggman, but at least bringing them back once in a while instead of having them appear in one game, then dipping?

Mostly? No. Let's look at who we're working with here:

Metal Sonic: He's constantly being brought back as the defacto subordinate of Eggman. This will upset some hardcore lore heads, but if you count all variants, Metal Sonic has appeared in Sonic CD, Sonic 2, Sonic & Knuckles, Knuckles Chaotix, Sonic R, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, was intended to appear in Sonic 06 as DLC, Sonic 4, Sonic Generations, Sonic Boom, and Sonic Forces. That's also ignoring a lot of the portable games, where he showed up often. He will probably be in Sonic Rangers and is getting added to Sonic Colors Ultimate Edition. I love Metal Sonic though so it's cool.

Knuckles: Much like Metal Sonic, Knuckles is a mainstay of the series. He's probably been in more games than Metal, come to think of it.

Chaos: He got reformed at the end of Sonic Adventure so he's technically not a villain anymore. I'm sure there's more they could do with him, though, but his story is finished.

Shadow the Hedgehog: In the same category as Metal Sonic and Knuckles.

Mephiles/Iblis/Solaris: Good riddance, I say. Mephiles is basically just "The Evil Twin of an Evil Twin" and that's just bad storytelling in my book. Iblis is nothing more than just a big angry kaiju with zero personality, and Solaris is... too weird to be anything notable? Solaris barely even classifies as a monster, it's more just this shape that attacks. Which fits, given it's supposed to be this incomprehensible entity controlling all of space and time. It should probably look weird and unknowable. But it's also not something you can just bring back.

Erazor Djinn: Dude is not a major player. He exists exclusively in the realm of his book. What would he even want to do if he escaped? I'm not even sure he wanted to escape. He just wanted to rule the world of his story, didn't he? I guess I never finished Secret Rings. Point is, Sonic left that world and it seemed pretty wrapped up nice and neat.

Merlina: Her whole thing is that she was worried people would forget about her world's story. She wasn't ever really evil, just deeply afraid and maybe lonely. But, again, like Erazor Djinn, everything about her felt very self-contained and it would be weird bringing her out of that story and back for more.

Dark Gaia: They pretty explicitly say that Dark Gaia only comes once every epoch. More could be explored there, I guess, but fighting the creature of Dark Gaia itself doesn't seem like something worth revisiting.

Nega Mother Wisp: Along the lines of Iblis, this is less of a character to revisit and more just a monster. The circumstances of which don't really make sense revisiting. I know wisps are still around, but "oh no the nega mother wisp is back too!" seems weird and cheap to me.

The Time Eater: I don't know what this thing is and Sonic Generations doesn't explain it. Honestly? I'd be fine with a new game at least referencing The Time Eater. It could be related to Solaris. It could be a side effect of all of Sonic's time travel alterations, like The Dahaka or The Langoliers. The Time Eater feels important and they neglected to explain anything about it. They didn't even hint about it.

The Deadly Six: No.

Infinite: He's cut from the same cloth as Mephiles and feels like Dollar Store Shadow the Hedgehog. Oh here's this totally epic brooding rival with a mysterious magical power! Boring. We already have those. I'd be fine if he never comes back, because he's super generic and forgettable. At least Mephiles had "half of the devil's soul" as his character trait.

People like to say that Fang the Sniper needs to come back, but I eventually got sick of hearing that. Dude was all over the Archie comics for years and was in a fair few games: four or five, almost six if you count Sonic X-treme. He had his time and we don't need him coming back in every single game. Or even every other game.

But yeah. I dunno. I don't feel an especially strong connection with any of these guys where I feel like I want them to be returning characters.

[things-with-teeth]

“I think I finally understand why she brought me back”: Gerry, Gertrude, and the skin book

I read this post earlier (and would have just reblogged, but the length on this became rude) and I am now extremely back on my red string bullshit, which honestly feels nice! It feels good! It feels like this is how it was always meant to be!

So, like, follow-up question: did Gertrude bind Gerry to the book to prevent him becoming an avatar of the Eye?

I think it’s clear that he was somewhere along the path to becoming one; the night nurse in MAG 12 notes that he “seemed to know the code to the door [of the hospital supply closet] immediately and strode right in.” There are at least two separate instances where he both recognizes that someone has been marked by one of the Entities and can tell which one; the first is the nurse again, and the second is the tourist in Genoa: “as he was here, he thought he should at least let me know that I was marked. He didn’t know what by, but that it was close” (MAG 48). The claim that he doesn’t know what has marked her is suspect, since the advice he gives her is, from what we’ve seen since, specifically geared to ward off the Lonely.

We know that all or most of the avatars die in the process of becoming, and as much as I would like to do verse two of the Magnuscrumb Entitinies, Oliver Banks pretty much sums it up in MAG 121:

The thing is, Jon, right now you have a choice. You’ve put it off a long time, but it’s trapping you here. You’re not quite human enough to die, but still too human to survive. You’re balanced on an edge where the End can’t touch you, but you can’t escape him. I made a choice. We all made choices.

and so does Jude Perry in MAG 89, although she goes about making her choice in, uh, a somewhat more direct manner: “And so I ended it. [...] As the heat warped my bones and bubbled my flesh, all I heard was the loving exaltation of my god. [...] I met Agnes in 1989 and completed my transformation in 1991.”

Gertrude almost certainly knows this, too. She’s been around a long time, she’s spent a lot of time frustrating the plans of various avatars and cults, and even if that wasn’t the case it seems clear that this was, at one point, a discussion between her and Elias/Jonah:

GERTRUDE: Age catches us all. Well, almost all of us, Elias. 

ELIAS: You were the one so insistent on staying human.

GERTRUDE: And no doubt that makes my death a lot less complicated. (MAG 158)

She also knows that Gerry is Beholding affiliated. Assuming the fuck all number of eye tattoos weren’t a good tip off, she acknowledges as much in MAG 137.

We know that a violent death isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to becoming an avatar. Trevor Herbert almost certainly experiences the transformative death that leads to him becoming an avatar of the Hunt in the break room of the Archives in 2010; it’s why Martin is convinced that Trevor died after giving the first half of his statement and it’s why several pages of the second half of his statement are missing “around the time that he apparently did not die of lung cancer in the Institute” (MAG 56). Or, y’know, did die of lung cancer. In the Institute. During Gertrude’s tenure as Archivist.

So here we are. It’s 2014. Gertrude’s unofficial assistant of the past several years has just died suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain tumor. He’s got a connection to the Eye; even she isn’t quite sure how much of one as of the recording of MAG 137 in October of 2014, probably no more than a couple months tops before Gerry dies. Maybe that connection is strong enough that throwing him at the Unknowing would have disrupted the Stranger’s chances of success. Maybe that connection is strong enough that Gerry won’t stay dead, that he’ll complete his transformation just as Trevor Herbert had and, instead of a useful and disposable ally, Gertrude will have a fully realized avatar of the Beholding.

Maybe that’s bad for her plans in some way. Maybe she just doesn’t want to give her god anything that might satisfy it. Whatever the case might be, she knows that her window of opportunity is potentially narrow; most avatars don’t appear to spend six months dithering in a not-quite-coma the way that Jon does. That’s why she breaks into the morgue that night, instead of posing as next of kin and having Gerry released to her, as we know she’s done before. That’s why she binds him to the skin book. She’s binding him to another Entity before he has the chance to (possibly) finish the process of becoming. From Leitner, we know that, “The books are [...] their essences in a purer form. The other things that stalk us, from what I know of them, they have varying wills of their own. All in service of the thing they’re a part of, but not directly controlled by the mind beneath them” (MAG 80). Assuming Leitner is right about anything, the books are a stronger, purer manifestation of the Entities than anything that started as human ever could be.

“I think I finally understand why she brought me back. I just don’t understand why she left me behind,” Gerry says in MAG 111. I think this potentially answers both questions. If Gertrude’s only reason for binding Gerry to the skin book is to thwart a resurrection, then of course she would abandon him. If her primary goal is preventative, then there is no secondary goal that his continued existence and presence would fulfill. He’s superfluous at that point, and—well, Gerry says it best himself:

Gertrude “traveled light.”

She was “goal-oriented.”

She “left things behind.”

[bibliocratic]

TMA and Babylon 5

Also known as a babbling treatise on how two mildly similar five season shows with serious commitments to character and narrative arcs from episode one can actually be so personal.

Ok, but that gifset got me thinking – Babylon 5 and The Magnus Archives actually have SO many similarities.

(spoilers for TMA and B5 – yes, yes that one, the 90’s space opera about a space United Nations, no, not the Star Trek one, the other one. )

I MEAN, firstly, both universes are based on the idea that there are vast and ancient entities which are directly interfering with reality. TMA has the Powers, and characters who are actively changed by their alignment to these - Jon’s evolution into the Archivist, Daisy’s loss to the Hunt. B5 has the Vorlons and the Shadows, two ancient races who are directly involving themselves with younger races in order to have a proxy war which has been ongoing for millennia over what fundamentally boils down to irreconcilable worldviews, and their squabbling alters the geopolitics of all the races in the Alliance.

Both shows are about choice, but DEFINITELY about how they are rarely, if ever, black and white decisions. That some choices are unfairly weighted, or made through known or unknown coercion, or made without full knowledge of what your choice will cost you. Oliver Banks did everything he could to avoid it and still became an Avatar of the End. Jon’s choice to become the Archivist wasn’t a choice at all – it was Avatar or death. His decisions to find out more about the role and world he’s inherited from Gertrude in S3 consistently hurts him, but he thinks that knowledge will help him, that they’ll ‘save the world’ from the Unknowing, but the end of S4 shows that while his actions 100% mattered and made a difference and that Tim didn’t sacrifice himself for nothing, he’s just been playing right into Elias’ hands – Elias, who has been working behind the scenes this entire time, who’s leveraged Martin in a petty game between Avatars in order to push Jon into getting his last mark. Morden asks three ambassadors on B5 “What do you want?”, but it’s only Londo’s answer that he wants to see the glory of the Centauri Republic restored to greatness that damns him into increasingly unforgivable choices. The choice of Delenn and Kosh to keep most people in the dark about the true nature and machinations of the Shadows allows them more time to prepare to fight them, but their silence is complicit in the occupation and enslavement of the Narn people.

Even deeper though, it’s about choices ‘made in the dark’, so to speak. Choices made knowing the cost, knowing there’s no glory in it, that no one will know what you fought for or how long you fought, or how much you gave up to achieve something. S4 has most people thinking Martin’s made a deal with the devil and sided with Peter Lukas even though it’s done to protect the others, to protect Jon, because he feels he has nothing left but sacrifice. One of the tragedies in the Apocalypse is that Jon fought so hard to stay human, to not give in to what he obviously needs to survive even if it’s starving him, and Jonah uses him to doom the world anyway. Vir Cotto cannot stop what his people are doing, cannot change what Londo did and he didn’t stop, but he actively tries to save the lives of a people who justifiably hate him, however few of them he can, knowing if he gets caught he’ll be branded a traitor and killed.  Sheridan’s legacy as the Commander of Babylon 5 is vilified during his lifetime (by a despotic authoritarian regime) and after (by academics reading into history and coming to their own conclusions without compassion for the difficulty involved in the choices made). Delenn’s intervention to correct this is heartbreaking because she was there, she has to listen to people speak about things they know nothing about, and ultimately her speech might not make any difference.

Both shows are about identity. The person you are is not the person you will be forever. Melanie’s working on her anger, and it’s hard, and she slips up, but she’s trying. Martin doesn’t have to give pieces of himself away just to be of value to others, and he’s not lonely¸ and he has friends and he’s in love and he’s finally in a place where he’s allowing himself to be honest about all the good and bad parts of himself. G’Kar’s warmongering and desire for revenge on behalf of his people in S1 has tempered despite everything the Centauri do to him, and his final act is to show mercy to a sworn enemy. 

The world you live in is not static, and it can be changed, and that’s both good and bad.  The Powers in the Magnus Archives can be beaten – not without cost – but there are happy endings possible – you can live and thrive in a corrupted world. For Martin and Melanie, they nearly lost themselves to their respective powers because, in part, it offered things they wanted, things they thought might help them. The noble intentions of Earth in making Babylon 5 as a diplomatic gesture for unity after a brutal interstellar war they were going to lose slides rapidly into xenophobia and isolationism under the application of political propaganda. The Vorlons and the Shadows are set up as a good/evil dichotomy, but it’s revealed that’s oversimplified, that both sides are so trapped in their rigid ideologies that neither of them know who they are or what they want outside of each other, and they have to leave all they have ever known to find out, no matter how frightening that is.

And arguably, in their own way, both shows are about philosophy. You’ve got Martin’s ‘I think our experience of the universe has value, even if it disappears forever’ – your choices may not be fair, you may be trapped in a system you have no control over, and there is compromise and sacrifice and love might save you or it might damn you, but your existence will always have meaning. You’ve got Delenn’s ‘we are star-stuff, the universe made manifest’ – everyone is trying to work out their place, there is no singular right answer but it is your responsibility to stand against actions that are wrong, that infringe upon the freedoms and dignities of others, and you must live with your choices and learn what you can from them because to do so otherwise is to allow them to perpetuate forever.

Also, I think Vir Cotto and Martin Blackwood might get on. Add Guillermo De La Cruz from WWDITS and you’ve got a triumvirate of men who have survived belittlement and humiliations to be the unsung heroes of their franchises, whose initially mild-mannered or timid appearances absolutely hide a rock-hard centre of bravery and competence.

[thehopefulsnowflake]

And again here are more theories and opinions about the magnus archives from my brother

The corruption is one of the "four horsemen"

War and conquest are the military ghosts, and the desolation

Famine and pestilence is the buggy bois

Death is the end, duh

The corruption is colonisation basically

Elias is against having a cat, because they are too powerful, he was very serious about this

Centipedes have a masochistic foot fetish, millipedes have a normal one, don't ask

The woman in Dead Woman Walking is just a Zombie

Is the Woman a victim of the Book of Death from MAG 70

Georgie is a ghosty hunty person

Georgie and Melanie don't seem to be afraid of anything

The Italian mountain troops would have known they were being fucked with

More undead

Reminded him sort of the Meat Men

Also reminded him of the buried on the London underground

The mysterious firing squad intrigued him, did all the men that went up the mountain come back to kill him?

Basira is Drax from gotg

She'll randomly appear and no one will know she's there until she speaks

The chuckle brothers origin story, he means Breekon and Hope

Didn't think the circus had anything to do with the stranger

Breekon and Hope are taxidermy

So they're with the stranger

The Stranger is just everything that doesn't fall under something else

The circus was it's own thing

The cult of the lightless flame is it's own thing

The people's Church of the devine host is it's own thing

The circus is just full of people who you don't know, if you do know them that's sad... He was kinda rambling at this point

Is Sarah Baldwin capable of being bored

Why was she working with Melanie?

Do you just take a liking to ghost people

Did you take them over before of after they were eaten.

The Buried is called The London underground

Is it the Fairchild's? Thinks they're about isolation

Thinks it might be a book

The pit could be an Antlion

Thought that the young woman who was eaten by the pit turned into Gertrude

The young man could be, Gerry, Martin, Salesa, young Jon, Elias.

Thinks The stranger is vanilla in terms of gods and monsters.

The stranger is the least interesting.

Thinks all the Stranger wants to do is just summon a god

For some reason he thinks the Dark should be doing more to stop them, because Rayner wouldn't want that to happen

Martin will rap battle the archive to victory, via poetry from Leitners books

The stranger could just be Lego

He's horny for Rayner, his words not mine

Mr. Sandman brought him a dream

Thinks that the Dark at least can get to their gods dimension but choose not to.

If you make everywhere dark does their god appear?

He asked what would happen if two factions tried to summon their god at the same time what would happen

Thinks that all the Avatars /Entities do the same thing.

Breekon and hope have never killed anyone

Maxwell Rayner is a time travelling shadow demon

Mr sandman is like an angry sandy from Rotg

He made this episode unnecessarily kinky

They're just summoning gods

The stranger is remarkably being left alone

Thinks there is no fighting between factions

If anything they're aided

Is the Fairchild's entity already here

Are they working with the other factions

Says he knows whats going to happen because he "knows how these things go"

The Beholding is already on this side and if another God is summoned then it will be booted

Elias killed Gertrude because she was trying to defeat the Beholding and if it was defeated he would turn into the same thing as below the Library in Alexandria

There were three versions of the unknowing that he thought of

Destroying the concept of identity, the unknowing destroys the concept of personality, individuality, and identity. Turning them into Stranger worshipping entities

The angler fish was the thing in the basement at the Taxidermy shop

Stranger just means it couldn't get any stranger

Or it's deliberate parodies of humans

Breekon and Hope were normal people

Salesa, the chuckle brothers, the meat man, the skin walkers, the taxidermist, the manquien, Not-Sasha, the architects, the circus and to some extent the witches are part of the stranger

Magnus is a stranger that took over Elias

He also thinks Elias is just Magnus who found out how to stick around for a while

But Elias isn't the archive god like he first thought

The twisted detergent is Michael's new entity

Michael is like Loki if he didn't have a brother

The stranger is the big bad

Jon is an idiot, he's a bit slow

His second theory for the unknowing is that It's just going to destroy all knowledge revolving the Elder gods, hence the unknowing, the one he thought the least likely

And third, It somehow increases their powers so that the few people that would recognise them, no longer do. Levelling up in short. Thinks it would work for every entity

Doesn't think The Unknowing would be that big of a shift

The circus and the stranger were different because the Circus dealt with the "Freak show"

Thinks Rayner isn't dead

Dust devils

Dirt zombies

Has only made the connection between the Underground, the pit and the dust storm

Was the kid in the car Michael

Was Michael always the Spiral but just really liked working with Gertrude

Michael is the Spiral, he doesn't worship anything

Elias took Gertrude from him, now he's after revenge

Jon should go chill with everyone at the Archive

Jon should have a sword

While you were busy not having a paranoid breakdown I studied the blade

Michael has a crush on Gertrude

He has a granny kink, he is obsessed with making it all kink related

Michael originally gave his powers away to be with Gertrude

Michael took on this form because he could blend in or brag

He's a monster with a thing for Gertrude

Michael wasn't the same Michael as in the tape

Just trying to trick everyone

Lynne Hammond was lying, goes in line with the church of the lightless flame but it didn't happen

Maybe she heard something similar but it didn't actually happen to her, she was just trying to get some money

He actually feels bad for Tim

Tim should run

John Smith was half telling the truth.

People are in the tunnel's but it's not a government conspiracy

Tim doesn't deserve this

You can tell Basira is used to dealing with idiots

Liked that it cut out when Robin Lennox said let me start again, it's like the archive was trying to make it stop

Thinks the archive doesn't care what is being read to it, someone should read it the Lord of the Ringd

The archive is recording the tape recorders not Elias

Get the dog out

Michael was the crying man, he wanted the dog out

He doesn't want to hurt the dog

"Gertrude why did you leave me? I'll get you one day Elias" based on his Michael granny kink theory

Brian Finlinson was the most coherent in terms of links

Thinks that the spiders were actually there, hiding whenever anyone came around

Lynne is lying, John Smith is half telling the truth, Robin Lennox saw Michael having a breakdown, Brian Finlinson was telling the truth

He didn't remember Peter Lukas ever being mentioned before

Already shipping Peter and Elias

Michael is very sensitive

The Fairchild's and the Lukas' are working together

They don't seem to have an interest in the conflict going on between everyone else

The Fairchild's were in aerospace and Lukas was the ships

Still cthulhu

Even space had a cthulhu vibe

The depth of the ocean or the isolation of space

The Lukas and the archive are working together

There are some of these guys that don't want the entities on this side

Likes the power, doesn't want the full on entities here

The Lukas and the Fairchild's are the cthulhus

They're somewhat working with the archive/the beholding

Is Elias actually a Lukas? Decided yes because he and Peter are married

How much do the Lukas have to do with the Beholding

What sort of arrangement do they have?

Nikola was supposed to be part of the circus but there is a difference between the facimalies and the circus

Thinks that the archive burning down would have no downsides for the Beholding.

They'll summon a god and gazing upon it will kill everyone, everyone dies.

As he was now halfway through the series he explained who he thought was in each of these factions

The beholding, Elias, Martin, Tim, basira, daisy, sims, melanie, sasha, Rosie, Gertrude, leitner. Sasha is caught in a time loop...

The stranger, everyone, has no limits, The maniquein, the taxidermy, the circus, skin walkers, grifters bone, breekon and Hope,  angler fish

The desolation, the cult of the lightless flame, Jims pims aka Jude Perry, Agnes,

People's Church of the divine host, Rayner, Rayner have something to do with the German crypt, Rayner Is also not dead

The diggy boys, the buried, Maggie and Gordon from the dump, dig dude from Dig, whatever was going on with the pit, and the dust storm.

Meat, no recurring. The haans that's it.

Buggy boys, spiders, Jane prentiss

Michael, the twisting deceit, the twisting deceit just is Michael, didn't exist before him

The leitners, the witches are using the books, Gérard, Mike crew,

Cthulhu collective, the lukas', the Fairchild's. Both are just isolation, the Fairchild's are all about being alone, the only time the Lukas have turned up are being alone either in space or at sea

The witches, Mary Keay, puzzle witch, have big crossover with the Leitners, they just have some of leitners books

Trevor is his own entity, is he part of the desease and corruption group

The architects, smirke, smirkes apprentice.

Jared is his own thing. Just found a self help book

It's a giant celestial orgy!

Also Came up with a random spinoff comedy again

Slowly the archive collects strange people

Michael, who is mourning Gertrude... Loudly

They found a worm in the tunnel left over from Prentiss

The worm loves gooseberries

That's Elias, we're not sure what he is

Thats the Admiral, it is a cat.... It runs the place

Rayner is sat in the corner giggling

Leitner started a microbrewery in the basement

Serves bud leitner, you can't get leitner than this

[pensivetense]

A List Of (Mostly TMA) Fic Recs Sorted By Vibe

Not an exhaustive list by any means, just a few favourites that caught my fancy. I shortened many of the summaries for space.

I’m going to pin this here and update it as I go.

Also, I’m pensivetense on ao3

MELANCHOLY VIBES

for when you want to feel comfortably muted

(sad but not utterly bleak endings here)

Hope, Etc. (Dickenson, et al.) by yellow_caballero

Jonathan Sims, six months after the Unknowing, wakes to find himself without a daemon - without humanity, without a soul. It’s a cursed half-life, but existence as a shell without a heart isn’t so bad: between solving the mystery of a persistent illusion cast over his friends and some light pseudo-cannibalism, a life as a monster is better than no life at all. At least, it would be, if it wasn’t for the fucking Owl.

A freaking. Amazing. Daemon au. Ties the lore of Dust with TMA lore very satisfyingly, but is mostly about Jon navigating what it means to be human, or, in the absence of that, a person, and doesn’t require prior knowledge of His Dark Materials. Cannot recommend highly enough.

after one long season of waiting by nuinuijiaojiao

Annabelle is not used to having nice things. or, Annabelle heads to Upton House, muses a little, and gets some well-deserved rest

I love survivalist Annabelle and also the concept of the Web as kind of a horrible Patron, actually.

i love you. I want us both to eat well. by SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse

At the safehouse with Martin, Jon decides it's time to quit statements once and for all. The Eye disagrees. Martin just needs Jon to be okay. It's quite possible that nobody is going to get what they want.

Scottish Safehouse Era, Jon and Martin coping with their respective Entities... really, really good.

the friend by doomcountry

He always greets a new spider when he meets it. It’s instinct, born in childhood, the same way he instinctively counts magpies, or flicks salt over his left shoulder. A little harmless superstition. A bit of politesse.

A great Martin character study with eldritch spider horror included. The imagery regularly haunts me (in a good way).

autumn’s rare gift by bee_bro

Annually, the two meet, renewing the binding ritual where it had all started. The procedure simple: a waltz.

Singlehandedly made me ship Gertrude/Agnes so there’s that. It’s so bittersweet and bee_bro’s writing is, as always, incredibly poetic. (I’d recommend everything they write, actually.)

smile, you’re trending by Goodluckdetective

During an encounter with another Avatar of the Eye, Jon faces his past, Martin takes a turn at playing Kill Bill and Basira has a second look at the monster she’s determined to see. For three people associated with the Eye, they could all use some perspective.

Features an original Eye Avatar character who’s a YouTube personality; she is infuriating and inspired and genuinely frightening and I cannot say enough good things.

Humility by The_Lionheart

have you no idea that you're in deep?/i've dreamt about you nearly every night this week,/how many secrets can you keep?

An OC centric story but don’t let that put you off, it’s amazing. Very heavily focused around Jonah Magnus and the other Avatars as they change through the years. Also, I’d die for the OC.

oh, for one sweet second without the eye series by faedemon

Beholding does not like in the way humans do, but it likes its Archivist all the same.

I’m just so fond of the way this is done stylistically. I have a great weakness for dialogue only/dialogue heavy writing, not to mention all of the wonderful character beats and interplay of humanity/inhumanity for Jon and Melanie.

Rewind by WhyNotFly

It takes eight days of forced confinement for Jon to start hallucinating. [...] It’s Martin, though, that his exhausted brain conjures, because of course it’s Martin. After all this time, of course it’s Martin.

Jon willingly allows himself to be confined rather than hunting for statements, and examines his relationship with Martin.

for a firmament series by supaslim

There is beauty in destruction. There is art in becoming. In which Jon becomes the Archive, and the Archive becomes Jon.

Part two posted this morning and uhhh. Good. Also if you’re here for weird eldritch body horror (I am), this one’s for you.

ONES THAT JUST HURT

for when you want to feel sad

(somewhat bleaker endings here/everyone is NOT okay)

Feste by yellow_caballero

If asked, Martin would say that he became the shadow director of the Magnus Institute by accident. But nobody ever asked, and nobody ever cared, and it was in this way that Martin stopped lying to himself. Or: break free, Martin. All you have to lose are your chains. And your sanity.

Oh, this one totally didn’t go the way I expected it to. A study in isolation. Could go into the category above, as the ending is not bleak, but the tone of the whole is somewhat more depressing than most there.

Ghosts of Love by RavenXavier

Nothing made Martin more grounded in the world than yearning for Jonathan Sims.

Lonely!Martin that really captures a sort of visceral ache. Hurts me and yet I keep rereading.

i do desire (we may be better strangers) by godbewithyouihavedone

For ages, it only knew how to worship, taking human bodies and living off the fear of those who remembered. It never knew love until it became Jonathan Sims. Now it must fight against every instinct to save Martin Blackwood. Archivist Sasha, Not!Jon/Martin, and the worst kind of Fake Dating AU.

Oh, this one just made me sad. The poor not!them, which is something I never thought I’d say.

Apple Of Your Eye by fakeCRfan

In which the Eye is fond of Martin. Perhaps a little too fond for comfort.

Somehow manages to be both sweet and horrifying—the characterisation of the Eye is incredible. ‘The Eye loves Martin’ is a scenario that’s so utterly doomed to failure and yet the writing is packed with so much pathos that I just want them all to be happy. A fantastic use of themes of agency and choice, and the single best use of Beholding as a source of horror I’ve read.

The Last Press by copperbadge

Jon Sims is awake, and has begun preparations for the Rite of the Watcher's Crown. Peter Lukas, who woke him, would be content to rule at his side. Martin is very upset about all of this, and the Lukases aren't thrilled with it either.

I really can’t say anything without spoiling the end and it’s so good. An alternate take on the Watcher’s Crown. Not a pairing that I ever thought would work for me, but this made it work.

watch the blood evaporate by 75hearts

It starts, like so many things in Jon’s life have started, with a nagging itch of curiosity. Jonathan Sims uses his healing abilities throughout s4. Read the tags.

Dear God please read the tags. But this is some high quality pain if it’s for you.

the lighthouse series by low_fi

Peter Lukas is a lighthouse keeper. One evening, he gets a call from a cryptic overseer tasked with monitoring his work.

This is such a vivid and yet subtle story—from the setting to the emotions portrayed, it creeps up on you slowly. The ending was like the gentlest possible gut-punch. The sequel just completed, and yeah, just as wonderful. This one is very much LonelyEyes but I listed it here because it is just exquisitely painful.

SATISFYINGLY HOPEFUL VIBES

for when you want to feel cozy

Clutching Daffodils by Gemi

Martin has always liked the idea of love at first sight. It’s such a romantic idea, the whole thing of it. Seeing someone and instantly feeling that strange, twisting feeling deep inside that every single media likes to obsess over. Of knowing you are in love within the day, petals falling from your mouth and warmth filling your chest as love burrows deep, vines twisting through your lungs. He always liked the idea of it. And then Jonathan Sims starts working at the Magnus Institute.

Somehow manages to be lighter and fluffier than most hanahaki fare, despite the setting. I’ve reread this one a lot.

the least he could do by Prim_the_Amazing

Martin should in fact not pick this man, specifically because of how attracted he is to him. It would be the responsible thing to do. Except he’s already following him. And he’s hungry.

Fluffy vampire au which everyone’s probably already read, but was too good not to mention.

rather interesting by bee_bro

Jonah Magnus realizes that, for some reason, when he comes in contact with weed, Elias Bouchard's consciousness will come into his life banging pots and pans.

Oh boy. So these are all favourite fics but this one is a favourite amongst favourites. The way Jonah is characterised (i.e. incredibly sensitive to scrutiny) is my favourite depiction of him, and the slow-burn between him and Elias is far sweeter than it has any right to be. Also, it’s hilarious.

The Magnus Records series by ErinsWorks

In a world parallel to that of the Archives and the Institute, a supernatural sanctuary stands against a cruel and uncaring world: A world of bureaucracy and tyranny, of murder and carnage, of loneliness and surveillence, of plague and death. But in this world of fear and misery, 14 entities born of the hopes of the world have emerged. And one of them has made their home here, at The Magnus Sanctuary. Perhaps, the employees within may lead happier lives than their counterparts did in the Archives.

This is just so goddamn pure. The author writes a really imaginative, fleshed-out alternate world and alternate Entities with engaging, well-written short statements. All of the character voices are absolutely on point, and it’s overall absurdly hopeful without ever feeling overly saccharine. I love this series so much, you guys, you don’t even know. I want to print it out and paste it on my wall. I love it.

HARD APOCALYPSE

for when you want to feel dark and angsty (and eldritch)

Most of these are shorts/oneshots because it’s just that kind of genre, y’know?

Ashes to Ashes by marrowbones

A conversation at the end of the world.

Oliver Banks is one of those minor characters that I am overly attached to. Love him here.

Employee Benefits by equals_eleven_thirds

The Magnus Institute offered some normal employee benefits: a pension plan, holidays, travel subsidies, free lunch on the last Friday of each month. Rosie makes it work.

This manages to hit that perfect sweet spot of satisfying and hilarious. Rosie gets to torment Elias, as she well deserves.

a rose by any other name by Duck_Life

Part of Jon blooms in Jared Hopworth’s garden.

This one was sad and honestly too gentle to really belong in this category, but I love it.

Eye to Eye by Dribbledscribbles

In which Jonah Magnus attempts a post-apocalyptic pep talk.

Unreliable narrator at its finest, and the implications are suitably horrific.

commensalis by doomcountry

The tower is endlessly, impossibly tall, but Jon’s work is taller.

If you’re here for the eldritch imagery, then this has some of the best.

SOFT APOCALYPSE

for when you want to feel gently triumphant

apocalypse how series by sunshine_states

Humanity adjusts. The Entities have Regrets.

Some nice vignettes set in a kinder apocalypse.

ceylon series by Sciosa

The one in which Jonathan Sims decides that no, actually, he isn't going to let the world just end.

I include this only for the sake on completeness, as everyone has no doubt already read it.

rituals by doomcountry

Martin is the first person to knock on the Archivist's door since it arrived, fully, into its little waiting temple. The Archivist saw him coming from down the hall, but decides to feign interest when the knob turns, and Martin—still a little bit smaller, a little more translucent than before—stands uncertainly just outside the room.

This one’s a little less focused on the world at large and more on JonMartin specifically.

we raise it up by savrenim

Jonathan Sims reads a book and saves the world; although maybe the real salvation is the friends he makes along the way; (although perhaps the world itself and the darkness that exists behind it isn't quite as out to get everyone as it seems).

More ‘soft revolution’ than ‘soft apocalypse’, but has the same vibe. A time travel fix-it. Incomplete but worth it if this is a mood that appeals to you.

Scarred Ground by DictionaryWrites

“You see," Elias said softly, "people always have this idea that only living things can be scarred - and they're right, of course. But a building is a living thing, Martin. And the ground can be scarred, too." "I don't have any scars," Martin said. "Yes, you do," Elias said. "You just need the right light to see them.”

Falls somewhere between ‘Apocalypse’ and ‘Soft Apocalyse’ but I’m putting it here because I feel like it. Also technically a LonelyEyes fic. I found it hard to follow at first but it’s worth sticking with; things will eventually begin to make sense and come together.

LONELYEYES

for when you want to feel lonelyeyes

marrying anguish with one last wish by procrastinatingbookworm

In which Elias isn't Orpheus, and Peter isn't Eurydice, but Elias brings Peter home anyway.

Lives in my head rent free forever. My favourite lonelyeyes fic.

ouroboros by Wildehack

“You know,” Jonah says, a muscle in his calf quivering agreeably where it’s slung over Mordechai’s shoulder, “it’s really quite--fortunate--that I don’t care for you at all.”

Oh, this one hurts in the best possible way. The endless cycle of their relationship, the way it comes full-circle... yeah, good. Actually, no, this one might be my favourite. It’s a tie.

Breaking all the Rules by Thedupshadove

Elias proposes a somewhat...unusual wager.

Soft lonelyeyes? In my recs? It’s more likely than you think. Short, sweet, and... sweet.

Threefold by Sprinkledeath

Peter Lukas breaks three rules.

I’m just a slut for mythology allusions I guess.

Luck Be A Lady Tonight by prodigy

In 2014, Elias Bouchard takes a rare trip outside of his comfort zone. Peter Lukas wastes a bunch of money. You'd be surprised how many things can go wrong for two beings of cosmic power.

I love the sense of the history of them you get while reading this.

love is just a word (the idea seems absurd) by kaneklutz

"Something's wrong. It's stopped hurting" An avatar of the Lonely and an avatar of the Beholding walk into a bar relationship. It was bound to blow up in their faces.

Short, sweet, painful. Excellent exploration of their priorities.

Victor by penguistifical

elias tries something with his powers that he hasn't attempted before

The one where Elias tries to raise the dead. Not incredibly LonelyEyes centric but that’s still the pairing.

Simon Says by penguistifical

“Peter asked me to drop by and have a word with you, and, so, here I am.” Simon chuckles at Elias’s disbelieving stare. “Well, he asked in his own way. He’s not a complicated man, you know. He either comes from your arms looking like a stroked cat that’s been given a dish of cream or looking like he’s been in that toy boat of his out in an unexpected storm. He was far angrier than normal, so I daresay you weren’t cream today.”

I mean personally I’d just go ahead and rec all of penguistifical’s LonelyEyes fics but this is a standout for me.

AROMANTIC AND ASPEC MOODS

for when you want to feel Seen

The Aro Archives series by WhyNotFly

These are all just really really good. From Aro!Peter to two different aro-spec versions of the Scottish Safehouse to a long and beautiful aro hanahaki fic, this series is uniformly wonderful. The two Scottish Safehouse ones (Torn Edges and Murky Water) are my comfort fics.

and now all fear gives way by j_quadrifons

Before he can think it through, he murmurs, "Is that what it feels like? Being in love?" Martin's hand stills in his hair and Jon's stomach drops.

This one just. Wow yeah this is how it be. Another absolute comfort fic of mine.

Sweet As Roses by Prim_the_Amazing

Jon takes Martin by the shoulders, leans up on the tips of his toes, and kisses him.

I’m going to be honest—I didn’t know where to put this one. But it ended up here because the real standout of this fic for me is the portrayal of Sasha, and especially her portrayal as an aro character. So I’m putting it here. Mind the content warnings with this one!

HUMOUR

for when you want to feel delight

The Torment of Sebastian Skinner by Urbenmyth

After the Eye's victory, the statement givers are trapped in their horror stories, living them over and over again. Naturally, this works out better for some then for others.

Premise? Delightful. Execution? Fantastic. I read this one to cheer myself up when I’m sad.

Unlucky by VolxdoSioda

Jon’s dice betray him

Short, sweet DnD au, and the reason I cannot get DM!Elias out of my head now.

Voracious by beetl

A bird hits the window. Jon experiences The Flesh's thrall.

“Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” but make it literal.

The Stupid Endings by Urbenmyth

There are a lot of very deeply thought out and creative AUs on this site. These aren't among them. These ones are how the story could have ended, if Jonny Sims was a dumbass.

These are just uniformly hilarious, I cannot recommend them highly enough.

PODCAST CROSSOVERS

for when you want to make one of those “if I had a nickel for every time...” posts

The Sabbatical by morelikeassassin

Nicholas Waters is in need of an all-knowing eldritch entity beyond the confines of human imagining to help with his latest ritual. He'll have to settle for Jonathan Sims, who happens to have nothing better to do.

Crossover with Archive 81 (s3, specifically). Both fun and bittersweet.

The City And Its Sorrows by cuttooth

“What makes you think your friend is in Eskew?” David asks. He feels he can risk the scrutiny of the city that far. “I read that this is a place people end up when they get lost,” says the man. “This is a place people end up,” David agrees./The Archivist comes to Eskew.

Contemplative piece, and I love the way it presents David’s relationship with Eskew, the way he finds it horrible and hates it and yet belongs to it, is almost proud in the way he shows to to Jon. Great little vignette of two people oppressed by eldritch powers, intersecting.

Hiatus by bibliocratic

My name is Jonathan Sims, and I am in Eskew. (Jon gets lost in a Spiral city. It is not as easy as escaping.)

This one is far more focused on Jon than David, and is honestly more Eskew-weird than Spiral-weird. In the best way. Told in Eskew episode style, and is very good.

Sweet Music by Shella688

Eskew has a music to it, if you know how to listen. The percussion beat of thousands of footsteps, the melody in the squealing of the trains overhead. Today, the music of Eskew comes in the form of nine musicians, playing outside my office. My name is David Ward, and I am in Eskew.

Not TMA, but since a lot of Mechs fans go here—this one’s a Mechs/Eskew crossover. Short and simple, mostly David Ward centric, just a little well-written one shot I had to mention because I enjoyed it but it doesn’t have much traffic. Nice portrayal of the Mechs from an outsider’s perspective, and how genuinely strange and frightening they’d come across (especially if you’re already being haunted by and eldritch city). If you like Eskew-style storytelling, check it out!

NOT TMA

...but good enough that I physically cannot make a recs list without including them. Here!

[lesbialien]

“tim did not hate jon when he died, or in fact, ever hated jon,” an essay by me, featuring about three paragraphs worth of tim meta beforehand, because i’m emo and can’t ever just GET to the point. 

under a cut for length 

Tim Stoker didn’t hate Jonathan Sims when he died. Tim Stoker’s final act was one of hatred, and revenge, and years-old grief; but also love (for his brother, for his friends-because yes, they still are his friends, even the ones who are gone or the ones who are monsters, now-and maybe even for himself, finally), and gratitude, and a sense of triumph, that he was finally able to do something. And Jon helped him do that. 

[notquiteaghost]

shoulder to shoulder

the magnus archives, jonmartin, 1k, post-168, also they’re both autistic

AO3 link in reblogs

After Jon’s explained he is not, no matter how Martin asks, killing Oliver Banks unprovoked, and Martin’s gotten his sulk out his system, and they’re almost out the other side of the Corpse Routes, Jon asks, careful to keep the compulsion out his voice, “You do know why Oliver woke me up and you didn’t, right?”

Martin raises his eyebrows. “Uh, no? You’re the one who knows things.”

Which is what Jon thought, and for a moment he’s caught up in the idea of not knowing something, of having a gap in his knowledge, of— But he shakes it off. This is about Martin’s feelings, not his.

“Well,” He starts, “He… I don’t know how—” The Eye chimes in, ‘helpfully’. He wrinkles his nose, “—I didn’t, until just now, know how true it is that people in comas can hear you, that talking to them helps, but. I wasn’t in a coma. I was… You know the dreams?”

“The ones people have after giving you a statement?”

Jon nods. “I was there. The whole time, I was…” He’s not tried to describe this to anyone before. It’s difficult. There’s an echo, of a ‘statement’ Elias gave, that he pushes away. “They were all connected, all blurred into each other, and I walked through them, over and over.” There’s another echo, of the feeling, the timelessness and the wandering and the watching, seeing— He pushes that away, too. “I didn’t know if I was— asleep, and the dreams were just particularly bad, or if I was dead, and my connection to the Eye was too strong for death to free me entirely, or if it was something else. I couldn’t remember how I got there, I couldn’t remember the Unknowing — In that place, the statements were all I knew. It…”

The Eye, sensing he doesn’t want to relive being trapped in one of its domains, tries to draw his attention to Oliver Bank’s roots, instead. The closest one, if he were to follow it, would lead to—

He rubs at his eyes with the palms of his hands, until the Eye gets the hint.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” Martin says, gently.

Jon shakes his head, takes a deep breath. “No, we do, you need to know.” He takes another breath, then says, as sincere as he can, “I couldn’t hear you, Martin. I couldn’t even remember your name. I only knew you visited me at all when you told me. I, ah, kind of assumed you hadn’t, actually—” 

“What,” Martin exclaims, incredulous. “Why wouldn’t I have visited you!”

“You went out your way to avoid me, once I got back.”

“…Okay, yes, I did do that. But, uh, the first week I sort of… slept in your hospital room. Only stopped after the attack, actually, because Peter— You know.”

A moment of silence to give their hatred of Peter its due.

“Yes,” Jon says. “I do appreciate it, anyway.”

“Even though I stopped months before you woke up?”

“I’m reasonably certain you no longer visiting was a rather key step in everyone’s various plans, so yes, even though you stopped.”

Martin blinks at him. “You think you were trapped that long on purpose?”

“Oliver Banks explicitly told me Annabelle asked him to talk to me. He didn’t know it would wake me, but I’m sure she did. And would you have gone along with Peter, if I’d been around?”

“N—” Martin cuts himself off, furrows his brow. “Maybe? But I would have talked to you about it.”

Jon nods. “Things might have still played out the same, but keeping me out the picture until the Lonely had a decent hold on you made Peter’s plan far more of a sure thing.”

Unsurprisingly, Martin doesn’t look pleased about that. “Mmmm…”

“Anyway, that isn’t my point,” Jon says, and reaches out to take Martin’s hand and lace their fingers together. “I heard Oliver because he made a statement — And a statement about his own moment of… rebirth, no less. He told me I had a choice — I could renounce the eye, and die, or I could embrace it, and… continue.”

Martin huffs, but fondly. “I knew it wasn’t true love’s kiss that woke you, Jon.”

“No,” Jon agrees, “because you didn’t kiss me.”

That makes Martin grin, even as he says, “That is— so cheesy, oh my God!”

“You wanted me to murder the man who robbed you of your chance to try,” Jon points out, trying to suppress his own grin. “You write me poems—”

“That you do not know about!”

“—The substance of which I am entirely clueless of, but still. Poems.”

Martin’s smile is one of the best things Jon has ever seen. “Aren’t you meant to be reassuring me?” 

Right, yes.

“I will not leave you for Oliver Banks, Martin,” Jon says, his tone shifting back to serious, “Because he woke me up unintentionally on the whim of someone else, and you sat at my bedside and read me Terry Prachett’s Feet of Clay, because it’s your favourite Discworld book and you think it’s a crime I’ve never read them.”

Martin’s grip on Jon’s hand tightens, but his tone stays closer to teasing. “Thought you didn’t hear me.”

“The… The Eye is very forthcoming, about you,” Jon admits.

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I try not to think about it. The time for musing on if the entities themselves can feel emotion in any way we would recognise has passed, I think.”

“Yeah.” They’re quiet for a beat, still walking between the dark, twisting things Jon is not thinking about the path of. “Still haven’t read any Discworld, then?”

“No, Martin, I didn’t make time during my final transformation to read fiction novels.”

“Well,” Martin says, as always far better at sidestepping tension before it has a chance to bloom, “I have read them a lot.”

“And now you’re going to explain the plot of the entire series, in great detail?”

“And you’re going to listen attentively, because that’s what love is.”

Jon could spend every moment until all moments cease telling Martin he loves him, and he still wouldn’t have said it enough. God, he loves him.

“I do love to hear you infodump, yes,” he says, and God, Martin’s smile.

“Good,” Martin says, and lifts Jon’s hand up to press a kiss to his knuckles, before his gaze drifts to the middle distance as he organizes his thoughts. “Okay, so, Feet of Clay is one of the Watch books, but it’s not the first Watch book, and also the Watch books aren’t the first books, though you shouldn’t really…”

[that-one-girl-behind-you]

Illicio 7/?

Chapter 6

"Hm. Melanie's worried about you," Helen says. Her eyes are swirling as she runs them over Gerry's hunched form, and her lips curl with distaste. "You don't look good."

Gerry laughs, or he tries to, before it devolves into a wet cough that leaves droplets of ink sprinkled all over the desk. "That tracks. I have never felt so far from good in my life."

"What about when you were a book?"

"When I was a book I didn't have to worry about a man that seems to be actively trying to run face first into any entity he can find," Gerry sighs.

There's people around him, that much Jon knows. He hears them trying to move, trying to dig not even to escape, but just to carve a pocket of air big enough to pull in a mouthful of air before everything closes down again. They don't know and they don't care, that the pressure around them is not always dirt or water. Sometimes it's sadness. Guilt. The Buried has no qualms against using the memories of those you left behind to drag you in further.

He knows the way to Daisy, but only barely. The only hint he has as to her whereabouts is the dull ache of the scar across his throat, and Jon Knows with a feeling of grim satisfaction that the only reason he's able to even feel that much is because made sure to feed beforehand. Still, a single thought plays through his mind on repeat, the only thing that keeps him moving forward anymore.

He doesn't know the way back.

The rib stopped calling to him as soon as the lid slammed shut above his head, and Jon has the bitter thought that he could've skipped the encounter with Hopworth, for all the good it did to him.

Jon's next step sinks up to his ankle, as his thoughts turn dark. Why did he think he could save anyone? When has that ever worked? This was nothing but his arrogance. Another failure at helping what he broke. Gertrude stopped dozens of rituals on her own, but Jon had to bring an entire team into the Unknowing, and make everyone but him pay for his incompetence. Gerry was right, this was a mistake and-

Gerry.

The name has his stomach constricting with guilt, and the Buried clings to it like a ravenous dog; the thick mud he's wading through swallows him up to his thighs in a single motion. Gerry's going to die, or- or worse. Without Jon's voice to feed him he's going to waste away, trapped forever in his own body because Jon made a stupid choice for them both. Gerry- Jon was supposed to make things right for him. Jon was- Gerry has done nothing but be nice and patient to him, and Jon left him alone.

Was this the Eye's plan? To tie him to someone as intrinsically good as Gerry, so that Jon would think it twice before throwing himself into danger again? Gerry's playful, easy kindness has made Jon feel... wanted. He knows he doesn't deserve it; that the warmth in his stomach when he looks up from his reading to find Gerry's face relaxed in his sleep is dangerous.

Jon's affection is poisonous, and one needs only to look at how it's killing Martin to confirm it.

The pressure is up to his waist now, and the memory of Martin's gray eyes only pulls him deeper. The Eye should've chosen a less selfish Archivist, because these two men tried their hardest to keep him safe, and Jon was still ungrateful enough to throw it all away, just to try and earn back a little bit of worth in his own eyes. To be a savior for once, instead of a monster.

Jon closes his eyes, as the heavy pressure of dirt or water or guilt closes up over his head.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Martin looks away from the bright screen, and slides a hand under his glasses to rub at his closed eyes. It's been three hours, but he's finally finished putting this month's payroll in order. He will definitely not need to lie about his capabilities on his next job interview. Or he wouldn't, if he were actually able to just walk away from this mess.

A single, dormant tape recorder rests next to the keyboard, and Martin gives it a sad look. It appeared on his desk yesterday, about five minutes before Gerard started banging against the door and, if he had to guess, at around the last second before Jon stepped inside the coffin, because the entities have that kind of humor.

The button clicks when he presses it, and the tape begins to move as usual, but it lacks the feeling of life the recorders usually have when they turn up around Martin. This may have been one of Jon's tapes, but whatever part of him that was inside it is long gone.

"Statement of Martin Blackwood, regarding... a lost Archivist," Martin sees the fog encroaching the office as he speaks, and he sighs. "What were you thinking, Jon? Actually, scratch that. I think I can guess exactly what you were thinking," Martin feels the pinch of resentment and anger burning in his stomach. The fog around him recedes for a moment. "Some weird combination of 'this was all my fault, and I have to set it right if it kills me', and 'It's not that bad if it kills me, because I'm a monster anyways'. Sometimes I don't know if- are you ever going to stop trying to hurt yourself?"

His eyes burn, and Martin yanks his glasses off his face and all but throws them on the desk to bury his face in his hands. This is ridiculous. Jon is- this is how he is, Martin knew it from the start, when he stopped daydreaming about the smooth voice and hypnotic dark eyes and started noticing the many subtle ways Jon neglected himself, and it drew Martin like a moth to a flame.

The broken ones are the safest, because he can tell himself that they'll love him when he fixes them, all the while being blissfully aware that he can't. The openly relieved, almost adoring look on Jon's face the first time they ran into each other after Jon came back was the most terrifying thing Martin had ever faced. And now here he is, selling himself over to try and protect a man he forgot he can't protect from himself.

"You're coming back, aren't you? You have to. You can't do this to me again Jon, I can't-" Martin doesn't even care that his voice sounds slightly wet. He feels suspiciously like himself, all this emotion is not something he's used to anymore. "End recording."

Martin takes in a deep, strained breath. That's- it's alright. He still has a purpose. Melanie's still here, and Basira. There's people to look after. There's work to do and-

"Are you done with that?" Martin's head whips up, and his hands scramble over the desk to find his glasses and jam them back on his face just in time to see Helen reaching for the tape recorder. The door to Elias' stationary cabinet is no longer obscenely expensive mahogany, but a gaudy yellow material instead.

"What?"

Helen shrugs at an angle that shoulders should never move, and Martin averts his eyes before he can get a headache. "I usually grab them when you leave but you didn't seem like you were going anywhere now."

Martin blinks. "I- that's not- why do you want my tape? Have you been stealing my tapes?"

"Only some of them. The ones that don't go back to Jon immediately. Also it's not stealing if you leave them behind. Finder's keepers."

"Finder- why do you want my tapes?" Martin wishes his face didn't feel so hot. One would think being halfway into the Lonely already would spare him from being embarrassed over this, but there's clearly something still very human in him that's mortified at Helen hearing his sad tea parties with the tapes. This might just be enough to kill it. "What are you doing with them?"

"Not much. You don't take very good care of them, but he can't come into my hallways."

"He- do you mean Peter?"

Helen blinks once, her eyelids moving horizontally. "Can I have it now?"

"I- uhm. That's- that's actually very nice of you," Martin frowns. It's difficult to discern sometimes, if Helen is actually on anyone's side or just enjoys puzzling them. "Thank you?"

"So can I ha-"

"Yes, you can have it." Martin rolls his eyes, and Helen's fingers wrap many times around the tape recorder. "Please don't show them to any-" the yellow door closes, before Martin can finish, and he darts a look around the office.

It would be just his luck if Peter stepped out of the Lonely right now, but there's barely any fog left in the office. Martin sighs. He needs to call it back, or it'll look suspicious.

Martin closes his eyes, and thinks of his mother.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"I'm just really glad you're keeping up with therapy. I know it made you very antsy at first," Georgie smiles behind her coffee cup. Melanie's brain goes blank for a couple seconds. She loves Georgie's smiles, her dark lipstick contrasting starkly with the white of her teeth when her full lips part just the slightest bit.

"It's- I feel better," Melanie says once she's regained her faculties. Then she adds, "but I think my favorite part of going is that I get to be with you," because she's a tiger, not a kitten.

"Are we doing this?" Georgie laughs, and her cheeks darken a little. Melanie doesn't think her heartbeat was this intense during even the worst episodes of the Slaughter.

"I could do this. If you wanted to," Melanie reaches out slowly and rests her hand palm up on the table. It's a hand that has slashed and maimed and killed, but it's trembling somewhat as it waits on the wooden surface.

Georgie's big dark eyes glint with amusement, and the warmth in Melanie's chest is enough that she forgets about everything else for a moment. The Institute, the fears, nothing is as important as the curve of Georgie's smile.

"I'd like to do this. If you're feeling better," and she lays her hand on Melanie's, giving it a little squeeze.

"I do. I feel amazing, I'm cured. It's a miracle," Melanie blurts out, and Georgie laughs animatedly, before leaning over the table to plant a kiss on Melanie's forehead. "Thank you."

The world could end tomorrow, Melanie thinks; all the fears out there can't touch them inside the little restaurant.

"I'm here for you." Georgie nuzzles her nose against Melanie's. "You're... very brave, Melanie."

-------

Melanie's still floating a little by the time Georgie drops her off at the Institute. With all that's happened lately in her life, this feels a little too good to be true. Of course, reality crashes back down on her soon enough.

"How are you holding up?" Melanie pushes open the door to Jon's office, the man's recorded voice reaching her immediately "...oh"

Gerry's asleep on the desk, a hand clenched tight around a playing tape recording, and he looks terrible. The injuries on his face haven't healed at all; listening to the tapes slows the bleeding, but Melanie knows if she were to press stop on the tape, the papery white flesh under Gerry's skin would seep with dark ink again.

Melanie sighs, and walks up to him to see how much longer the recording has left. Jon's talking about worms and fire extinguishers, and the spool is almost empty of tape. She reaches over to the pile of unlistened tapes by the desk, and selects one at random. There's an empty recorder on one of the bookshelves, and she crams the tape inside it and presses play before dropping it next to Gerry. This should last until he wakes up at least.

She doesn't want to think of what they'll do when they run out of tapes.

"At least he's alive," Helen observes, coming out of a door that should've led to the break room. "Or not. Existing, I guess."

"That would be a way of putting it," Melanie purses her lips in a tight line. "I- this is sort of my fault I guess. I shouldn't have taken him with Hopworth."

"He would've known eventually. Like with your bullet," Helen says, shrugging. "He might still come back."

"I don't care-" Melanie starts, then stops and sighs. "I do want him to come back. For them. I still haven't told Georgie because I don't want her to be sad, I think Jon pestering him was the only thing still keeping Martin from whatever stupid plan he's attempting, and it's only been two days but Gerry's already dying." She huffs. It was a lot easier when all she could feel was rage.

"I wouldn't worry about Martin," Helen says simply, and Melanie snorts.

"You're lucky I like your cryptic bullshit." Melanie looks towards the closed door of Jon's office, and the weight on her shoulders intensifies. "I should call Basira."

"Good luck with that"

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Jon doesn't dream like before, in here. Or rather he does, and he's just not used to the way humans dream anymore, all wishful thinking and nonsensical thoughts strung together.

Tim looks down at him and says he forgives him, before pressing down on the detonator. Sometimes he even climbs out of the rubble cackling like a madman and declaring they're all going for drinks because they stopped the apocalypse and they deserve it, and he throws an arm over Jon's shoulders like he used to do before the Archives.

He walks into his office and Sasha -the real one, he knows, even though he cannot remember her face- is sitting at his desk, merrily going through his emails with a smug grin.

Georgie picks up his calls. She tells him about her life, and she says she doesn't like that he's accepted this, but she knows he didn't choose it.

Martin's eyes are green and bright. They're sitting at a coffee shop and Jon's hand is free of scars -burns or worms- where his fingers slot perfectly between Martin's, and they're joking about how Martin ordered tea despite his unreachable tea standards.

Gerry's napping on his sofa because he wants to, not because he doesn't have anywhere else to go, and Jon sits on the floor next to him just to be able to hear him breathe. He's suddenly enveloped in a warm, tight embrace, and all around him it smells like peroxide and lavender. The mix should be jarring but it's not because it means he's safe, and he's home. Wherever that is.

Jon opens his eyes to darkness, and a single, muted click from somewhere on his body.

"I've been... sleeping, I think," he says, because he remembered he's supposed to speak when the tape recorder turns on. "Or I've been dreaming, at least. When I- I'm deeper in, every time I wake up, as if allowing my mind a momentary escape from the reality I find myself in only serves to condemn me even further. I suppose I could stop sleeping, it's not like I need to anymore, but- I don't think I want to."

Jon heaves a sigh that tastes like moist dirt and desperation, before he starts dragging himself forward. If he's awake, he should be moving at least, because the Buried presses on closer the longer he stays still.

"How long have I been here for? It feels like weeks. Months, maybe. By this point I have already accepted I'm not going to find what I came looking for, so why shouldn't I give myself the respite of my dreamscape? It doesn't really matter how much deeper I get dragged in. I don't Know the way back." The dull ache in his throat remains; a bitter reminder of- of what? "...What did I come here for? I- I had a reason, I'm sure. Was it... did I lose something here?"

He can feel the knowledge dancing just at the edge of his mind, and his throat throbs harder the more he thinks about it. The path before him -if there even is something that could be called a "path", here at this pit that feeds on despair- gets rougher. Jon feels rocks and roots dig against his arms, slicing at the skin in places as he moves.

"I don't- I can't remember what I lost," he mumbles to himself. The pain in his throat intensifies, and so does the pressure around his body. He goes to move again, but- but he can't. "I'm- I'm stuck. I can't-" he pulls and pushes,and he hears his bones creak and the dirt around him shift, but the Buried doesn't want to let him go.

If that weren't enough, the pain in his throat keeps growing more and more intense. Did he cut himself on a rock while he slept? It's- no, he... he had it before coming here and- the Buried presses down harder on him, but he Knows this, the scar on his neck, the sound of a gunshot-

"Daisy?" Jon calls out with his last breath, and the Buried crumbles over him. Sharp rocks dig into him, and the weight is too much to breathe. His open mouth fills with dirt so tightly packed around him he can't even lift his eyelids-

"Jon?!"

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"-made the mistake of spending an entire night outside my safehouses. I was almost beaten to death by an angry goth."

"That would be our Gerard."

Gerry pauses the tape again, and rewinds it the past couple seconds before going to rub at his temples. It doesn't help with the throbbing headache -nothing has, and he suspects nothing will unless- until Jon comes back- but it's what one does when one has a headache, and it does make him feel better, somehow.

Did Martin know what was in the tapes he left behind before taking off with the rest? Gerry's heard every recording that mentions him in passing, even the one in which his page gets destroyed. It was... nice, to hear Jon shake off the Beholding's barbed grasp to keep his promise to him. The pained grunts and gasps as the page burned away in the background were decidedly less so.

Click. "-almost beaten to death by an angry goth-". Click.

Logically, Gerry knows it wouldn't have solved anything or helped anyone. But after listening to Jon's little adventure with the spider book, he wishes harder than ever that he'd finished the job.

Leitner had had all the damned books in his possession once. He could've destroyed them, instead of just writing his name on them and stashing them on a shelf. A Guest For Mister Spider had been clearly meant to emulate a children's book, was Leitner too much of an idiot to figure out how that would end up?

Gerry has seen the result, and it's a man who walks into eternal torture because he lives in a constant state of survivor guilt.

"Are you still listening to that one?" Helen's echo-y voice asks by his elbow. Gerry looks down to find she's turned the bottom of an open desk drawer into her door. Gerry can only see about half of her face, but he has no doubt she'd be able to push herself through and unfold to her full size.

"It's just..." Gerry shrugs. He needs to keep playing tapes, and listening to the same ones again and again renders them less effective each time. But he can't bring himself to push the one with Leitner's questioning away. It's something about the circumstances of the two men involved; one with all his knowledge, hiding like a coward for decades, while the other one, so terribly scared, braves the unknown just to learn. Of course the Beholding wanted him. "It's hard to explain."

Click. The low chuckle sends a jolt of something straight to Gerry's stomach. "That would be our Gerard.". Click.

It really is hard to explain. When did this happen?

"Hm. Melanie's worried about you," Helen says. Her eyes are swirling as she runs them over Gerry's hunched form, and her lips curl with distaste. "You don't look good."

Gerry laughs, or he tries to, before it devolves into a wet cough that leaves droplets of ink sprinkled all over the desk. "That tracks. I have never felt so far from good in my life."

"What about when you were a book?"

"When I was a book I didn't have to worry about a man that seems to be actively trying to run face first into any entity he can find," Gerry sighs. "Did he- do you think you could have stopped him?" He asks. The thought has been plaguing him nonstop over the past two days. Jon knew going into the coffin meant death, Gerry made that very clear that day at the flat. Jon is also extremely depressed and lacks a self preservation instinct at the best of times. "I know you were there when he went in."

"If you couldn't do it, what makes you think I would've had better chances?"

And isn't that another fun little link in the blame chain? Gerry had thought making it about Martin would be enough, that Jon's love for the man would outweigh his hatred for himself. Now he's paying for the mistake.

"What did Martin do in there?" Gerry asks instead of responding. Martin had locked the door behind him after coming out, and handed Helen the key before going back to Elias' office. A smart move, Gerry has to admit. The Distortion is the only one inhuman enough to not be lured in by the unchained coffin.

"He placed the tapes around it," Helen's voice resonates even more oddly than usual inside the small drawer. "They've been playing. They rewind on their own." Which is a good sign, all things considered, but Gerry's mind latches on to one detail only.

"He didn't even try," he spits out. He'd also thought, hoped really, that what Martin felt for Jon would be strong enough to call him back. Martin doesn't think the same, clearly, and Gerry can't help but to feel a little bitter about it. "I told Jon he could do better."

"I'm going to leave now," is all Helen says. Nice, not even the monsters want to hear Gerry mope around over a man in love with someone who doesn't deserve him. He goes to close the drawer after Helen's door disappears, and stops when he notices the tapes at the bottom. Were they there before? He doesn't think so.

Whatever, they're the closest within hand's reach, and Gerry can already feel cut at his forehead welling with inky black blood.

Click. "Hello there." Martin's voice coming out of the tape instead of Jon's feels like a slap to the face. "Not doing anything really interesting right now, but you can stay if you want." Gerry clicks the tape off with a huff.

It clicks back on right away.

"Really?" Gerry glares at the tape, because it's the best substitute he has for Jon. In the background, Martin complains about Peter Lukas being exhausting, which Gerry guesses is true but also probably the least remarkable thing to complain about Peter Lukas. "You're trapped in another dimension and you're still going to defend him?"

Gerry clicks the tape off again just to be contrary, right as Martin mentions something going extinct. He can almost picture the stubborn curve to Jon's lips as the button clicks back on.

"Ugh. Fine, fine." Gerry reaches for a tissue to wipe at the ink on his forehead. "I'm going to listen to it, but just this one, or I'm going to bleed all over your office, and I'm not in the mood to clean that up."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Elias knows the value of waiting.

He's learned through trial and error the importance of good timing, and how moving a piece a second too soon can change the entire board so irreversibly that it leaves you no choice but to start over.

Gertrude, for example, had only been the latest failure in a long line of unrealized Archivists, though she was by far the most remarkable out of them all. Elias is ashamed to admit he ruined her for himself; if he'd been more careful about what he pushed her to discover, perhaps she wouldn't have noticed her transformation until it was too late. A pity, but of course it had been her discoveries that sparked the idea of the Watcher's Crown, so not a total loss.

There's not much to do at jail except for waiting and watching anyways. Waiting for meals, for breaks, for Peter, for Basira, for the time to walk out of this gray, boring confinement.

For now, Elias Watches his Archivist.

There are certain places where even the Pupil is blind, but the Buried does not care that you see how trapped you are, and it leaves itself open to being Known.

Jon has just found Daisy, and they cling to each other like twins in the womb, the only thing they know and love in this world of darkness and pressure that has claimed them for itself. Elias is not above being surprised -his current domicile can attest to that-, but he can't deny his stubborn, raggedy Archivist has once again proved more resilient than he expected.

Elias really hopes he makes it out of the coffin, because it would mean he has a real possibility of escaping the Lonely when the time comes. The Forsaken and the Buried have so many things in common.

Also, because it would be a real shame to lose him so close to the end, and he doubts he could find someone else with the sheer luck -or the blessing of the Web- needed to survive these many marks.

He tries calling him one more time, but while the Buried doesn't seem to care that Elias looks inside it, it's not about to give up two victims. Pity. Jon's on his own it seems.

There's a knock at his door, three single, evenly spaced hits Elias recognizes immediately.

"How unexpected," he calls out as he pushes his hair back and straightens his shirt. A wasted effort on his future visitor, but it's the principle of the thing. "Please do come in, Peter."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

In the years since she’s been trapped in the coffin, Daisy has begun to wonder if she actually knows anything about herself. How much of what she considered her personality was actually just the beast boiling just beneath her skin, waiting for the right moment to pounce?

Daisy doesn’t consider herself to be a particularly difficult woman to understand. She’s unpredictable, a creature of emotion; she loves and she hates with the same fierce passion that called the Hunt to her, and her loyalty’s hard to win and harder still to lose, the driving force that calls her back whenever she’s too lost in the sound of her own blood. She’s ran into a few of her kind before, and she knows this is a shared trait between those who serve the Hunt. A bit of a bad joke, really, that all hunters instinctively seek a pack. She mentioned it once to Basira, but she didn’t seem to find it funny -Daisy always did have a weird sense of humor-, and it had made that odd underlying tension in their every interaction even heavier.

She wonders now, which part of her it was that saw Jonathan Sims and disliked him immediately, and she hopes it was the hunter rather than the woman, because she has come to the conclusion that she has never misjudged a person this badly in her life.

“I’m sorry, Daisy.” Jon says again. He apologizes a lot. Daisy thinks she had noticed this before, but she just didn’t care back then. “I thought- I’m sorry I can’t pull us out.”

“It’s not- you still- you found me,” Daisy says. It’s difficult to form thoughts in here, but her words have been coming back slowly ever since Jon’s hand found hers in the dark. Whether it’s whatever remains of his powers, or just Daisy remembering how to be a person again is really anyone’s guess. “We’re together.”

“Yes, we- is that better?” Jon’s left hand tightens in the fabric of her shirt, and his right twitches as it tries to do the same. It’s burned, Daisy remembers suddenly, and she has the briefest flash of rage, the urge to find Jude Perry and kill. The Buried presses harder around her, quelling the sound of her blood. “Daisy?” Jon’s voice pulls her back, something to focus on other than the feeling of dust in her throat.

“I think- y- yes,” she says after a moment, the thought sudden but hard to get out. “Yes. I- it’s much better. Th- Jon, thank you.” She clings to him a bit tighter, when the dirt around them shifts and tries to get between them. The Buried can try all it wants, but Jon is hers now, and it won’t take him from her, the same way it couldn’t take away the memory of Basira’s firm, grounding voice.

“Good, I- that’s good.” Jon’s head rests on her shoulder, and Daisy’s chest tightens impossibly, the feeling completely different to the pressure of the entity around her. Whatever happens now, she’s not alone.

----

Airports are odd places to be at. There's something strange about a space that was designed to be just comfortable enough that you can stand to wait until you're finally allowed to leave it. A tired man with a crying baby in his arms pulls his suitcase out of the luggage belt and turns to leave. Basira feels something in her rear up like a snake in the grass; this man has some kind of information for Jon, and as he walks towards the automated doors he seems to leave behind a trail of fluorescent footsteps, visible only to her but so easy to follow, if she needed to find him.

Her phone rings in her pocket, and Basira shakes her head. The trail goes cold and fades from her mind as she pulls the device out and brings it to her ear.

"It's me. What now?" Basira says into the speaker as soon as the call connects. It's been a while since she's had friends who call only to catch up, and she doubts Melanie's one of those.

Melanie's voice sounds odd through the line. Nervous, somehow.

"I did, some things." Basira sighs. "Melanie did you kill Jon?"

An elderly woman waiting next to her shoots her an alarmed stare, and Basira gives her a little wave and a shake of her head. The woman sighs and seems to relax a little as Melanie speaks some more.

"What do you mean 'not just me'? Melanie did someone kill Jon?"

The woman moves further away to keep waiting for her suitcase.

"I'm- what? Why did you- Melanie I told you to be nicer to him, not help him kill himself." Basira can feel a migraine starting to bloom behind her eyes. "Yes of course Keay's dying he- yes I knew, Elias told- I forgot to tell you okay? I had more important things to do."

She spots her suitcase a few pieces away on the belt and shoves her way to it, yanking it to the floor with a sharp tug and walking off in the gap the other travelers have opened for her.

"I'm on my way. Don't do anything."

[smokeybrand]

King In Benign

I really, really, hate this King In Black event over at Marvel just SO much, man. I’ve written at length about my issues with Knull as a character and giving him an entire event feels like the schlock DC was pulling with The Dark Nights Metal nonsense. I don’t care for The Batman Who laughs either, he and Knull have that same, try-hard, edgelord, “My OC of Judge Death”, energy and i despise that, but at least that sh*t is believable with Batwank. Batman, as a character, has built in superiority. His myth, his strength, is predicated around his ability to defeat anyone with prep time and planning because he’s the goddamn Batman. Seriously, he’s just a rich kid with PTSD and yet, stands alongside a literal goddess and an alien who can punch out reality. There are entire arcs built around his contingency plans to defeat every hero in the world, falling into the wrong hands and how devastating that sh* would be to the world. Batman is the most OP motherf*cker in all of DC so taking that framework, removing all semblance of restraint and morality, warping him into a distorted visage of Joker, and setting him loose on all reality with the power of Doctor Manhattan was never going to end well. His victory was a forgone conclusion because he’s the goddamn Batman. That makes sense to me. That’s lazy writing in my opinion but i can see the framework behind it. that sh*t’s acceptable. That internal logic, works. Knull is not the goddamn Batman. He does not get a pass like that.

Knull has been built up to be this straight up eldritch horror; A Lovecraftian nightmare that predates even the first universe in Marvel continuity. He was the void to the light of the First Firmament. That is something to explore. That is something to be terrified about. That is something mad compelling and make for fertile ground to explore. What does the Marvel brain trust do with it? tie it to the f*cking Symbiotes. Like, bro, what? Now, don’t misunderstand, i love me some Symbiotes. Venom has been a favorite character of mine since i was a wee lil Smokey but let's be honest, they are not a whole ass cosmic threat. They are cool and the way their power set functions as a buff is to whoever bonds with them is dope, but seriously? You expect me to seriously buy into Venom, Carnage, Scream, and Mayhem, are shard of a universal threat? Bro, do better. You can beat a Symbiote if you yell loud enough or drop a match on them. Seriously, weaknesses are weakness but these things recoil at loud sonics and open flame. You can beat them with a bonfire, man. The given genesis of these weaknesses stem from Knull forging the All-Black Necrosword, the first Symbiote, apparently. The weakness to fire stems from the Necrosword’s memory of the crucible flames and the weakness to sonic stems from the pounding of hammer on anvil. Have you ever heard an anvil hit a hammer? It’s not that bad, bro. That means you can probably beat Carnage with a rape whistle. And these are the creatures that Marvel creative wants me to believe are going to siege the multiverse? Word?

It’s such a missed opportunity. If this dude had the ability to manipulate darkness, to actually control the abstract of oblivion, i can see Knull being dope. Also a character redesign because he looks like sh*t but that’s more a personal gripe as a character developer than anything. I give TBWL a ton of sh*t but it’s hard to argue with that aesthetic. Knull looks like a fart. But I'm getting off topic a bit here, my point is this character could have been every bit the beast they want me to believe it to be. An unknowable entity that rivals the abstracts in power? A thing from the murk of the before? A thing that can manipulate the dark, both tangible and philosophical? Just by it’s very nature that sh*t is mad overpowered. Tying him to something as pedestrian as the Klyntar takes all of that away. Showing us that he kept jobbing to the Celestials further weakens his stance on being a proper cosmic threat. Having his greatest weapon, The All-Black, snatched away by Gorr just absolutely discredits anything you want to do with this character. Marvel is doing their best to make this event a thing but I'm just sitting over here thinking how the Beyonders would massacre Knull. How he only took down one Celestial in his entire existence. How a bunch of f*cking Klyntar imprisoned him in a wad of themselves for millennia. Knull is a jobber who gets jobbed constantly. There is no way i can believe he has the power to be doing what he’s doing right now. There are no narrative gymnastics that can make me believe he’s this massive of a threat, not after we’ve seen his origins. There is no way you can sell me on this asshole being Marvel’s version of Judge Death, when he’s been shown to take L after L after L.

Marvel has Knull out here conjuring an army of Grendel dragons, laying siege to the 616, and forcing The Void out of Sentry because, you know, the dark or whatever. That’s dumb in the context of who Knull is but brilliant in the context of who Knull could have been. That “darkness” manipulation works for an overarching menace. Being king of Symbiotes does not. Why the f*ck would Knull be able to manipulate Void? That sh*t ain’t Klyntar, it’s literal the manifestation of mental illness in Rob Reynolds, his “darkness.” Does this mean that all Symbiotes are effectively umbramancy conjurations? If that’s the case, are they all the same thing as the Void? Why the f*ck isn’t everyone who bonds with one, not as powerful as the Void then? You see what i mean? There is a dissonance, an intentional vagueness, for which Knull is actually capable and that makes for lousy writing. That makes for lazy villain. If there is no definition, no parameters, then you can do whatever the f*ck you want, whenever the f*ck you want and that sh*t is bogus. There are no stakes. There is no tension. It’s all just power creep, bullsh*t wank, and ex machina.

Couple that with documented defeats, some embarrassing as hell, and the main baddie of your line wide event is just a goddamn fraud. Knull is a paper tiger being propped up with the worst kind of OC plot armor and i hate it. I hate The King in Black. I hate Knull. I have my grievances with Batwank but at least he was a whole ass character. At least his plot armor made sense in the context of the world. But that’s kind of the point. DC did this better with their version of Judge Death. Dc put in the work. Their character was developed better. His ambition made sense. His power scale never wavered, leveling up in ways that were organic to the plot, as ridiculous as that plot turned out to be. Marvel did not. Knull has none of what TBWL has. The House of “Ideas” shat out Knull and tied a bunch of threads together that should have never been in the same vicinity of narrative development. He’s just an ass-pull cashgrab trying to profit on the surprise popularity with Dark Nights Metal but their attempt lacks the soul. And if you know how much disdain i have for that whole series of events, you know that is heavy accusation levied from me.