#bc he'd been trying to figure out jon's voice and mentally compare it to the tape he'd heard

[driflew]

I love your My Witness fic!!!! I got a question, since Tim is still alive, is it Martin who bombed and died in the Unknowing? And will the others know or remember that that was their Jon?

thank you so much!! okay, you've got two questions here, so ill answer em both. this sis gonna be long, oops, i just have a lot of thoughts about it. also its very nearly 2am so this might be somewhat unorganized

for the first question of "is Martin dead?" nope! something i think is fun about my witness is that its technically a fixit fic, but bc of where in the timeline i chose to write, it does not fucking feel like it

in my personal interpretation of archivist Sasha, i dont think she'd end up paranoid the same way Jon does, and i dont feel that if she did, she'd turn against Tim. i mean, the heart of jon's paranoia was that he couldn't understand why Tim was there, but Sasha knows. plus, she's closer to Tim than Jon was. i don't know i can rule out her being suspicious of Jon and Martin, esp when Jon... isn't Jon, and ive often read jon's paranoia as being at least partially influenced by notSasha's presence there... but.

all this to say i dont think their friendships would completely fall apart until Martin feels the need to blow himself to smithereens.

also, from a writing standpoint? killing Martin is less interesting when the story centers on Jon and his friends forgetting him. Martin can do a lot more emotional damage by sticking around!! :D

so the second question, "Will they remember Jon?" ...yes, actually but not without some... minor misunderstands. first, Jon accidentally becomes a season 4 antagonist.

i think Jon would decide to try and take out the institute/archives to prevent another ritual and hopefully weaken Elias. which makes sense to him, but to the archival staff, some strange, suspicious, offputting man keeps attacking what's essentially the eye base protecting them. uh. whoops!

eventually Melanie, who remembers him, would end up seeing him, and they'd put two and two together abt this fucking Guy being their missing friend

as for remembering him, that sort of goes into how jon's avatar-status works. jon's kinda like Martin in that he's accidentally got his fingers in too many pies--the eye, the stranger, and the lonely, and it's erasing him further and further from existence.

i wrote Jon loosely following a few rules (which id tighten if i did this again, but i wrote most of this oneshot outside where i had to move every few minutes bc mosquitos kept getting me. my legs were fuckin covered in blood by the end bro), which went sort of like this.

Jon's current inability to be remembered/recognized is, though unintentional, his own doing. the notThem replaced him in every old memory and paper, but he could have talked to Tim and Martin, and they'd have been able to remember his face when he walked away. (whether or not they'd BELIEVE him, though, is... another question)

but Jon was scared! not for nothing of course, and not unreasonably, but he was. he was scared they'd suddenly decided they disliked him, and then later realized they hadn't even recognized him, at which point he became afraid they'd either not recognize him or not believe he was who he said he was. thus, Jon, already VERY deeply touched by the Stranger, accidentally starts manifesting Strangely.

of course, that's sort of a self-replicating loop. every day that Alina doesn't recognize him, he gets worse. and that fear of what would happen if he ever went to his friends and was officially rejected... he knows it will happen, but the longer he prolongs it, the longer he can at least imagine a scenario where they recognize him, or believe him, or remember him when he leaves.

well, until the hospital, of course!

i think, tho, he can be pulled back eventually. this mix of the Stranger and the Lonely based entirely around being Unknown, and his friends are a bunch of fuckin Eye ppl. Knowing is their thing. rn they unknowing nerfs them, but they ARE its natural counter. if Jon has an anchor--or several--he can heal, and they can pull him back to shore. sort of like the canon Martin and the Lonely in 159? they need to get thru to Jon, tho, and bridge the gap to him first. show him he doesnt have to be afraid they'll forget him again, that sorta thing

(it won't totally go away, of course--i imagine strangers will have a harder time remembering his name, or he'll be a little harder to pin details down in his friends' memories. and his legal documents are still, uh, gone, like, hes still legally nonexistent. but. he can be pulled back into the land of the living, as it were)

tl;dr: no Martin didnt die, yes they'll bring Jon back