#that and garfield! elias jokes

[charmophron]

my dumbest fandom legacy is still naming the peter lukas/elias bouchard ship lonelyeyes. another white mans useless contribution to society

[ieattaperecorders]

TMA Fanfic: The Fate of Four Novelty Mugs

Contrary to popular belief, there are things in charity shops other than sinister books. Tim Stoker, for example, finds some tacky mugs that he buys as a joke for himself and his coworkers. Tim works in a place of fear, of tunnels and lies and terrible, terrible secrets. But this isn't the story of where Tim works. This is the story of the mugs.

Read it on Ao3

Not long after he was transferred to the archives, Tim was browsing a charity shop when he came across a display of terrible, tacky coffee mugs.

He was delighted. He spent some time looking through them, snickering at the weirder ones and appreciating them greatly, if only ironically. It occurred to him that the little kitchenette in the break room at work didn’t have much when it came to dishes. There were a couple of grubby plates and one large, gray mug with a chip in its rim. But everyone knew that mug had been Gertrude Robinson’s and no one was willing to touch it. Tim and Sasha had joked about it being haunted by the old woman’s ghost. But they didn’t use it either, so the joke was on them, he supposed.

Why not, he thought, picking out a mug for himself and for each of his coworkers, all of them exceptionally awful. His said “Over 65 and Still Sexy!” in pink bubble letters. Martin’s was oddly shaped with a black and white pattern like that of a Jersey cow and an awful three-dimensional udder sticking out of the side. Sasha’s had a picture of Garfield the cat scowling under the words “Don’t Talk To Me Before I’ve Had My Coffee.” Jon’s was red and green striped, with “I Believe In Santa Claus!” scribbled merrily over the image of a smiling, cartoon Saint Nick.

He brought them to work wrapped in newspaper and presented them to their new owners. Sasha laughed loudly when she saw hers. Martin thanked him with a level of sincere gratitude that Tim thought was a little much for a 75p gag gift. Jon looked at his skeptically and thanked him without even trying to sound sincere, which was exactly what Tim had expected.

Gifts given without much thought, kept in a quiet little room in a building full of secrets. This is what happened to each of them.

Tim’s was lost during the Prentiss attack. It slipped from his hand when Sasha tackled him to safety and was broken against the wall. No one noticed it at the time, and Tim had other things on his mind afterwards. It was swept up along with thousands of dead worms.

Not-Sasha drank from Sasha’s mug at every opportunity, taking its tea with milk and sugar exactly the way Sasha hadn’t. Some time after Not-Sasha vanished and Tim came to understand what it was, he found the mug left forgotten on the counter. There was a tea bag inside it, dried up and stuck to the side. He smashed it on the floor and walked away without cleaning up.

Martin had always liked his. He’d liked all of them, really. It made him happy, knowing everyone had these silly little things Tim had picked out for them. It made things more homey, made the archive staff feel like more of a team, or something like that. Even after the cabinet started to fill with other cups and dishes that people brought from home, he used his a lot. He became more careful with it after the Unknowing. It reminded him of Tim, and keeping it from being lost or broken felt important in a way that Martin couldn’t put into words.

In time he agreed to work with Peter Lukas, who eyed that particular mug disapprovingly whenever he saw it on Martin’s desk. Eventually, Martin sighed, washed it thoroughly, and donated it to the same charity shop Tim had bought it from. He replaced it with a plain, blue thing purchased from an impersonal big box store. Peter approved.

Jon had always hated his, as Tim had known he would. Save for when Martin brought tea in it, Jon’s mug mostly sat unused in the back of the cabinet, pointedly ignored. He spotted it there a week or so after returning from the hospital, after the coma. Seeing it put a mournful smile on his face. Tim used to do things like that, he thought, back when things were simpler. Buy everyone stupid little joke gifts, or give the woman at the deli counter names like “Count Dracula” and “Grumpy Cat” when he went on a lunch run so that all the sandwiches came back labeled that way. Jon realized he even missed the way that Tim would imitate the tone he used while reading statements when he thought Jon wasn’t listening. The Unknowing had ended Tim forever, but he’d stopped laughing a while before then.

The second Jon touched the mug he knew its previous owner had died from falling down the stairs in his home. He knew exactly how long it had taken the man to die, and that the nephew who’d boxed up and given away most of his things had never really cared about him. Jon used it anyway, kept it around as a little piece of something that was gone now. He felt silly, not because it was an absurd-looking thing or because it seemed out of place on his desk. (Though it did, certainly -- sitting there being defiantly ridiculous in a room filled with horror and grief.) He felt silly because he was trying to connect to a man who had died hating him by using a gift that he had never really appreciated.

It was eventually scooped up by a police officer that had been sent to clean up after the final attack on the archives. It was placed, along with everything else in Jon’s office, in one of several large cardboard boxes that were sealed with packing tape. Due to an understanding he had with the chief of police, the boxes were taken to a storage locker owned by Elias Bouchard, where they would sit and wait for the end of absolutely everything.

People plan, events fall into place as the world draws closer to terrible change. In the background, a silly unimportant thing is lost. And few if any really notice.

[montpahrnah]

okay so i'm reading one of your wolfstar fics (bless you and bless my lucky stars for finding your fic) and i just REALLY need to know who your dreamcast for the marauders would be. ben barnes, for me, is sirius. as for the rest, i still don't know.

hi anon!!! this is such an amazing question and maybe a difficult one to answer in a way that isn’t totally weird because this entire generation is such a nebulous amalgamation of things for me rather than specific people that i worry i’m gonna give you a very indistinct picture. it’s one of those times i wish i could let other people in my head through a pinhole crack or something because i know exactly what they look and feel like in my own brain, even if each permutation is different, i SWEAR it makes sense, but explaining it is probably going to look strange and incoherent, which is maybe not far off from anything else i do, so.

i’ve seen a handful of people say luke pasqualino works for sirius, which i like; sometimes i can see it for him and sometimes i can’t… but i love this in particular, it is v much The Vibe for me, definitely as much as any individual person i’ve ever seen. also look @ pavement-era stephen malkmus (the one in the front of both). for me it’s more in the vein of attitude/aura/look rather than exact likeness, like, sexy but uncertain/weird about it (weird about everything tbh), irreverent, magnetic. slanted and enchanted is in my top five sirius albums, just literally everything about it from start to finish–i always think of him when i listen to it. post- and even pre-azkaban, during the first war, i see him with a very season in hell vibe (he’d have loved rimbaud), or like, the breathless hallucinatory quality of an ashbery poem or basically anything vonnegut (“everything about life is a joke. don’t you know that?”). the weirdo pseudo-ritualistic sexiness of laughing stock is v sirius to me; also kinda george emerson, maybe slightly, in terms of having enormous and holy and overwhelming feelings he maybe does not examine very closely–he just lets himself feel.

remus is someone i 300% cannot see as a super conventionally attractive guy, or even one who knows how to live in his own body sometimes (i also see sirius that way to a very slight extent at times during the first war, but more so post-azkaban); like there’s this disconnect between his mind and his body and how he inhabits both that makes him dearly interesting to write. SO, not to be a bitch but remus is not andrew garfield or luke newberry and i’ll never ever buy it even a little lol!!! i love this ryan mcginley photo that gen reblogged a while ago, which is as screamingly close to remus for me as anything i’ve ever seen or likely ever will. often i see him with a dash of 70s tom verlaine too (def more in the vibe/look than exact likeness), including television’s music, and also as some kind of physical embodiment of this ymg song; think of a man kind of cobbled together by the years like a sort of patchwork thrift-store connoisseur (maybe not those pants w/ that jacket but you get me).

also! not in terms of appearance at all but both sirius and remus fit the general vibe of these gifs ft. elias ronnenfelt (the one on the right) lol

i feel kind of weird about doing this because it’s so eye-rollingly predictable of me but james is moses archuleta. like, he is james potter to me, he is as close to the image of james i have in my head as a single living person can probably ever get. strangely though i can’t think of a dh song that screams JAMES POTTER? they’re more sirius and remus and sirius-and-remus to me… he looks like he’s probably into king crimson and stayed up all night reading the electric kool-aid acid test in fifth year. thinks he’s lennon; is definitely more mccartney. every time i look at ezra koenig’s twitter i think of james.

peter is admittedly the one i’ve thought about the least, which is unfair maybe but predictable… not to keep yelling about pavement, but mark ibold sorta fits, as does thomas turgoose, though i don’t think they’re perfect (ibold comes closer for me, but again, not any one person etc). looks like the kind of guy who loved but wildly misinterpreted taxi driver.

AND, because i can’t leave out lily:  think viv albertine (complete with this, probably has slits lyrics tattooed somewhere on her body) or christina billotte.

i’m sorry for how long this got–i probably ought to make specific tags for this, haha. THANK YOU for asking me; i’d love to hear from you, anyone, everyone–tell me about your vision of these guys!! if there’s anything i’m about, it’s obsessing over this weird doomed fictional friend group