#anyway it’s time for another tma break which is painful because the mystery is so intriguing but i can’t handle the horror

[mita-vittua-olivia]

i told my brother (11) that i listen to tma and that it’s a horror podcast etc. he likes to come into my room in the mornings and today i couldn’t sleep so i was awake when he came in (which usually never happens) and he was so surprised, but then quickly came to the conclusion that it’s because of “that horror podcast”

like yes you’re right but

[mimosaeyes]

“You could talk,” Jon says slowly. “Doesn’t matter what about, just as long as it’s distracting. That would... that would help, I think.”

Set during episode 39, when Martin and Jon are hiding from Jane Prentiss. 2.1k, pre-relationship.

For TMA hurt/comfort week organised by @themagnuswriters, prompt: “treating/distracting from injuries”

Content warnings: canon-typical worm imagery, blood, Martin’s Prentiss anxiety

Beta-ed by @emberidzae

Also available on AO3 here

Martin has triple-checked that the door is locked. He knows he has; he remembers jiggling the knob and scuffing his shoe on the seal over the crack at the bottom. Yet he keeps throwing nervous looks at the square of dirty glass through which he’d peered into the corridor. From where he’s sitting on the floor, knees hugged to his chest, he can’t tell where Jane Prentiss currently is, or what she’s doing. Not unless she were to press her wan face up against the window, the holes in her skin indistinguishable from her eye sockets, and raise one infested fist to knock.

He shudders and makes himself take a deep breath, subconsciously tightening his grip around the corkscrew. It’s still slick with Jon’s blood. His fingers slip a little, a sensation that makes his stomach turn. He takes another deep breath and glances to his right, where Jon is propped up against the wall with his injured leg stretched out in front of him. To Martin’s surprise, Jon’s attention is focused not on the door or his wound, but on him.

“What are you thinking about?” Jon asks — quietly, but the sound still startles Martin after a couple minutes of tense waiting. In the silence after Jon had paused the tape recorder, Martin has been left listening to his own, anxious thoughts. They’ve been running along the same well-worn tracks as during those thirteen days he spent trapped in his apartment: where is she, what do I do, is anyone coming, how long since I checked the door, where is she?

What do I do?

“I guess…” Martin hesitates, having a brief mental debate about how much is appropriate to say to your boss who’s just confided in you that he’s only dismissive because he’s afraid; helplessly so. “I felt safe, here. I didn’t think she could get in.” He pauses, glancing at the door. “Guess I was wrong.”

Jon surprises him for the umpteenth time today by saying, “I’m sorry.” He sounds genuinely sympathetic, and even leans forward as if to pat Martin’s arm, although he stops halfway, looking awkward. 

As he slumps back against the wall, he winces, hissing slightly.

Furrowing his brow, Martin scoots closer to him. “Does your leg hurt?” 

“I’m fine,” Jon says, literally lying through his teeth. A muscle in his jaw jumps as he clenches it. He sighs. “Nothing to be done anyway, while we’re stuck here.”

He’s right, to an extent; they don’t have any medical supplies or even water to wash out whatever secretions a worm might leave behind. Martin shudders at the thought while eyeing the small pool of blood that has trickled out of Jon’s wound. “We can at least put pressure on it,” he decides at last. 

After casting about the room for a moment and seeing only boxes and papers, he starts to remove his own jumper.

Jon blinks. “What are you doing?” 

“I don’t have any other cloth,” Martin explains, lowering his arms again.

“I’m hardly going to bleed out from this,” Jon scoffs, his voice returning to its usual prickly tones. “There’s no need to be so dramatic.”

A few weeks ago, Martin would have backed down at once, stung by Jon’s standoffishness and jumping straight to the conclusion that Jon wouldn’t trust him to perform even such basic first aid on him. In light of today’s revelations, though, he merely narrows his eyes. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what,” Jon says flatly, looking askance. Martin takes that as a good indication that he’s hit the nail on the head with his inference.

“Pretending you’re not scared, so you won’t have to deal with how crazy this whole situation is. Well, you’re not fooling me.”

He maintains a firm, steady tone but holds his breath once he’s done speaking, silently worrying he has crossed a line. Several beats pass before Jon mumbles something in response.

“What?”

“I said you can use my vest,” Jon repeats, over-enunciating. He sounds arch again, though rather more cowed than before. Deftly, he unbuttons his vest with one hand while waving the other vaguely in Martin’s direction. “That’s one of your favourite jumpers; don’t ruin it on my account.”

The motion of him shrugging out of the vest does something fascinating to his collarbones, the lines of which are visible through his white button-up. It takes Martin a moment to process Jon’s words and ask, “Wait, how do you know I like this jumper?”

“Well, you wear it on special occasions, like your birthday,” Jon says as Martin begins to fold the vest. “You didn’t make Tim any tea for two days after that time he spilled some pasta sauce on the sleeve. And before you lived here, you sometimes left a hoodie or cardigan at your desk overnight, but never this jumper…” He trails off. “I’ve said too much, haven’t I?”

“It’s alright,” Martin tells him, while a pleasant, dizzy feeling starts up in a corner of his mind. He had no idea Jon noticed anything about him at all, aside from his supposedly incompetent work. “We do investigate mysteries.”

Such as the mystery of why Martin is about to use a vest made of what feels like rather expensive fabric to staunch the bleeding, when his own, comfy but ratty jumper is on hand. He clears his throat, glancing at Jon’s leg. “May I?”

At Jon’s nod, he pushes his trousers up to mid-calf. Then he stops and just stares at the ragged wound for a moment. He’s never thought of himself as being particularly squeamish, but he gets a little lightheaded anyway at how far the worm had tunnelled before Sasha managed to extract it.

This is what he’d pictured in the initial days of waiting out Prentiss, when he was still weighing the possibility of making a break for it. The mental image had effectively deterred any attempts. Since he’s started living in the Archives, he’s also woken up several times gasping from nightmares about the parasites burrowing into his exposed flesh. He always gropes for his corkscrew and the fire extinguisher he keeps next to his cot, clutching them to him while staring blearily out into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by the lamp he leaves on.

He shakes himself. There’s no point thinking about that now. His fears have come to pass after all, and Jon needs his help. Martin places the fabric over the injury and presses down. Immediately, Jon gives a quiet hiss.

“Too much?” Martin asks, easing up a little.

Jon’s already shaking his head. “No, it’s okay. Thank you.”

They both fall silent for a while. Martin’s thoughts inevitably wander back to whatever’s going on outside. Whether Tim and Sasha are alright, whether help is coming. Too soon, he lifts the vest to check on the bleeding. It has slowed a little, but there’s still a sluggish ooze from the wound. He resumes the pressure, then looks up to find Jon watching him again.

“Why are you being nice to me?” Jon asks.

“Um.” Martin shifts into a marginally more comfortable position while he tries to find a polite way of phrasing Because of basic human decency…? “Why wouldn’t I?”

He means it rhetorically, but Jon actually starts to answer. “Well, I haven’t exactly been lovely to you. Yet here you are, offering to sacrifice your favourite jumper and — and staying here with me, when you could run for it and escape a situation you’ve probably been dreading for the past couple of months.”

I wouldn’t just leave you, Martin thinks at once, with a resolve that surprises himself a little. The time he’s spent living in the Archives has been stressful, sure, but it’s also brought him closer to each of his co-workers. (Regularly dousing one another and the premises with fire extinguishers will do that.) He wouldn’t abandon any of them.

That seems too heavy to say to Jon, though. Especially since, if it needs saying, maybe that means Jon hasn’t felt the same sense of solidarity. So Martin deflects instead. “Should we be talking at all? It might give away where we are.”

“You checked the door. We’re fine.” Jon attempts a reassuring smile but breaks off and flinches, his leg twitching briefly under Martin’s hands.

“What’s wrong?”

Jon pulls a face. “There’s a weird… pulsating feeling. Like it’s still crawling about in there.”

A horrible thought occurs to Martin. “Sasha did get all of it, didn’t she?”

“I’m sure she did,” Jon says. “I’m just being paranoid. In any case, I... don’t exactly relish the prospect of digging around with the corkscrew some more.”

“Hmm.” Martin bites his lip. “Then I don’t really know what else I can do.”

His thoughts stray back to the door, to the taste of canned peaches, too sweet in the back of his throat. He hates all this waiting. He needs to be doing something.

Jon tilts his head at him as if puzzling something out. “You could talk,” he says slowly. “Doesn’t matter what about, just as long as it’s distracting. That would... that would help, I think.”

Martin perks up at this — though of course, his brain chooses this moment to forget just about everything he has ever heard of, read about, or thought. “Ah…” he flounders. “I, I watched a documentary last week. It was about sharks.”

Breath hitching slightly in pain, Jon settles himself against the wall. “Tell me about sharks,” he says, with a wry and strangely indulgent smile.

So Martin does. “Um. Okay. D-did you know,” he says, starting with his favourite fact, “sharks that lay eggs do it in leathery pouches called mermaid purses? I’m not making that up, they’re really called that...” Then he goes on to explain how scientists determine the age of a shark by counting the growth rings formed on its vertebra, much like the rings in the cross-sections of trees. (At this point, his spiel is interrupted as Jon mumbles, “That’s... dendrochronology, right?” Only he stumbles over the syllables, so Martin repeats the word correctly, and somehow it turns into a weird competition of who can say it five times fast. Martin wins, but all of his blood is where it should be, so he’s hardly gloating about the victory.) Finally, he moves on to trivia about specific species, like the epaulette shark, which can walk on land, or the bonnethead shark, which for some reason enjoys eating seagrass.

Martin saves the best for last. “But my favourite,” he says, fully chatty by now, “has got to be the cookie-cutter shark.”

“A great name,” Jon remarks. “Why do you like them?”

“Well, first of all, they’re tiny. They kind of look like large fishes, really. And they glow! They have the strongest known bioluminescence of any shark. They migrate every day — but not from place to place. Up and down, actually. They’re, uh.” At this point, probably extremely belatedly, Martin realises he has been going on about sharks for quite some time. His mother, for example, would have stopped him ages ago. “They’re pretty cool,” he finishes rather lamely.

Instead of berating him or yawning pointedly, Jon actually still looks interested. “You haven’t explained why they’re called cookie-cutter sharks,” he notes. There’s a gentle quality to his voice that Martin has never heard before. It makes him genuinely believe that Jon wants him to continue talking. After all, this is the man who rambled about emulsifiers during Martin’s birthday celebration, pausing only to tell him he was about to put his elbow (and thereby his jumper) in a bit of melted ice-cream on the table. It had been embarrassing for Martin, who may or may not have been fawning slightly and absently letting his vanilla-honeycomb dribble out of the cone — but perhaps Jon was actually trying to be considerate.

Still, Martin hesitates before diving into his explanation. “It’s a little gory,” he hedges.

“If we die today,” Jon deadpans, “for me, it’ll be out of curiosity.”

It takes Martin a moment to realise he’s joking. Then he laughs, startled and faintly delighted. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he says. He pauses for dramatic effect. “Their signature feeding habit is to gouge round holes in their prey. Like… like a cookie cutter with dough.”

Jon groans, though not out of pain, and starts laughing. “Well, that’s certainly topical.”

“Not the best distraction, in retrospect,” Martin says apologetically.

“No, it’s alright. Touch of humour. I enjoyed it.”

More than enough time has passed by now, surely. Martin checks under the cloth again. “You’ve stopped bleeding,” he reports.

“That’s good,” Jon says softly. “Wouldn’t want the sharks to get me.”

It’s only then that Martin realises he’s entirely forgotten to fret about Jane Prentiss. For quite a while, too. Huh, he thinks, mentally replaying the way Jon had asked him for a distraction. That would help, I think.  

Help who?

[my TMA fic on AO3]

[my post-canon JonMartin + cat fluff AU]

[lamiralami]

TMA Retro 1: Angler Fish

So I was wistfully scrolling through the calendar to April for the third time in five days when the math added up: if I were to listen to an episode The Magnus Archives a day, it would just about carry me through to season five (give or take a couple weeks depending on when the premiere date lands). A retrospective relistening, giving myself the time to pay attention to all the details I missed on my initial devouring. And an excellent way to fill the long and lonely days until Jonny Sims rises from his crypt to kill us all. Anyway! I’ll be doing a post-per-episode-per-day, tagged tma retro - all and sundry are welcome to participate!

Let’s get down to it with MAG 1: Angler Fish

well actually, rewind a bit. let’s listen to some trailers 

starting out strong with some spooky chanting, a dire warning, and Jon being a huge bitch about Gertrude. also this guy Jacob had the right of it. you should have tried listening to his warnings about Beholding instead of complaining about some messy files Jon my boy! 

“I swear, if he’s brought another dog in here, I am going to peel him.” out of that jumper? 😏

I just really like picturing the Day Martin Brought a Dog Down to the Archives. do you think it was a little dog and he managed, through increasingly wacky hijinks, to keep Jon from finding out for most of the day (with the help of Sasha and Tim, after letting them in on the scheme of course)? or was it a big dog that ran around knocking over shelves and boxes, sending statements flying while the Archives staff gave (ineffectual) chase, except for Jon who climbed on top of his desk because he’s afraid of big dogs and tried to obfuscate this by shouting prodigiously?   

seriously, is there fic of this? there ought to be so much fic of this.

right off the bat, Jon is such a disdainful prick and it’s delightful. in the first few minutes he manages to imply that most of the other employees of the Institute are too lazy to do archival work, rips into Gertrude and her lack of a filing system, and basically calls Martin an idiot. 

this totally plays into why Elias chose him as Archivist. he needed someone to go around collecting marks from the powers, and here he has a man who’s demeanour invites everyone he comes in contact with to punch him in the face. it fits so well it feels like a trap. (it is probably a trap, can’t wait for this to bite you in the ass Elias) 

definitely getting the impression that the Archives are seen as, shall we say, the redheaded stepchild of the Institute - “an impeccably organised library and an absolute mess of an Archive.” which becomes, just, so hilarious when you think about what’s to come from the rest of the Institute’s perspective. worm attacks, murder investigations, discovering corpses of former employees and mysterious bonus corpses. everyone else at the Institute fucking hates the basement weirdos and their constant disruptions. 

and then Jon mutters about “making excuses” and my heart breaks for him (not the first time, not the last). he’s hopelessly unqualified for this job, and he must have felt such pressure to get the Archives into good order. hence him grabbing a couple researchers (and Martin) to pad out the investigation work so how fucked the Archives are doesn’t come to the attention of the “ivory tower academics” in the rest of the Institute, and being so angry at and judgemental of Gertrude and the state she left the place in. he wants to be a good Head Archivist, and he doesn’t know how, so he has to bluster and cover everything with pompousness and disdain and blame and scepticism, trying to come off as a Real Boss. Jon tries so hard. it’s at the core of who he is. 💔

love the sound of “Old Fishmarket Close.” that name has spooky mood lighting.

it is fun to imagine how this looked to the angler fish. they’re chilling, waiting for a snack, got a skin ready to go, when this guy tumbleweeds himself down the street to crash land on their literal doorstep. eldritch fear equivalent to uber eats. 

oh ho ho, the statement giver refers to the figure as “the stranger” several times! dammit Jonny you beautiful bastard!

there’s also some puppet imagery, with the figure swaying and dangling, and being folded and pulled back “like a string had gone taut.”

also wonder if there’s a link or warning here about the smoking? smokers were the angler fish’s prey, and Jon’s smoking and web lighter have been brought up a few times but never fully dug into, yet. hmm. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much Jon’s voice is dripping with contempt any time he’s not reading a statement. he is such a little punk! I love him!

Jon sounds like it’s physically paining him to say “LOL,” the septuagenarian vibes are emanating from this man

Sasha establishes herself early as a competent and technically adept assistant, therefore marking herself for death. RIP, we stan forever