#to be fair Sasha is more qualified than Jon to be an actual normal archivist but like. that's not saying much.

[mattholicguilt]

so many Sasharchivist aus but all you need to do is watch the IT Crowd

[eldritchteaparty]

Chapters: 14/20 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Characters: Martin Blackwood, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Sasha James, Rosie Zampano, Oliver Banks, Original Elias Bouchard, Peter Lukas, Annabelle Cane, Melanie King, Georgie Barker, Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Basira Hussain Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fix-It, Post-Canon Fix-It, Scars, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, I'll add characters and tags as they come up, Reference to injuries and blood, Character Death In Dream, Nudity (not sexual or graphic), Nightmares, Fighting

Summary: Following the events of MAG 200, Jon and Martin find themselves in a dimension very much like the one they came from--with second chances and more time.

Chapter summary: Martin tells Tim everything that’s happened to him and Jon, and about the fear entities that now inhabit this dimension.

Read above at AO3 or read here below!

Tumblr master post with links to previous chapters is here.

***

“Damn.” Tim stood up and looked down at Jon lying on the bed, where he and Martin had just deposited him. “He is really out of it.”

“Yeah. That—that happens.” Martin decided it was a little cool in the bedroom, and pulled the blanket over Jon. When he looked up again, Tim was staring at him in a very specific way that he decided to ignore. “Thanks for helping me get him back here.”

“Well, you definitely weren’t getting any help from him. So… are we still doing this?”

“Yeah.” Martin took one last look at Jon; at least he still looked peaceful. “Let’s, um—let’s go to the sitting room. Can I get you some tea? Or—”

“No.” Tim shook his head as they made their way back out of the bedroom. “Can I ask—are we doing this now because Jon is knocked out?”

“No,” Martin said immediately, then thought a little more. “Well—mostly no.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means—” Martin tried to think of the best way to say it. “Look, he knows we have to tell you. I just don’t get the feeling he—I think it’s better if I do it.”

“Better for who?”

“I—” Martin sighed. “Look—we can wait until he wakes up, if you want.”

“Nope.” Tim sat on the couch and turned to Martin. “That’s all right.”

Martin grabbed the chair from Jon’s desk and brought it over to face Tim. As he did so, he realized he’d thought through how to tell certain parts of the story quite a lot, but others not nearly as much. One thing he hadn’t really thought about at all was how to start.

“Are you sure you don’t want tea?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Ok—ok. So.” He took a deep breath. “Five years ago—about—we all started working in the archives together. Sasha applied for the head archivist job and she got it; she asked you and Jon to take assistant positions, and I interviewed for the third one and—well, Sasha gave me a chance. Right?”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “Right…”

“And since then—I mean, we’ve done, like—pretty normal archive stuff. And sure, the Institute is a bit off, like—the stuff people want us to store for them and the research and all that, but it’s been fine, right?”

“Um…”

“I mean compared to what’s been happening since—since Jon and I disappeared.”

“Yeah, ok. I’ll give that to you.” Tim continued to look at him expectantly.

“Ok. Ok. Well—it happened a different way, too. Some—somewhere else.”

“Ok.” Tim sat back and crossed his arms over his chest.

“And look—no matter how I tell this—it’s not going to make sense until I really get it all out. So—”

“I’m listening.”

“Right. It’s just that it’s—”

“Martin.”

“Ok. So five years ago, in this—other place, we all started working in the archives. Only—only Sasha wasn’t the head archivist, Jon was.”

Tim shifted his weight on the couch, but didn’t uncross his arms. “You know he applied for the position? I’m not supposed to—no one knows I know that, actually. Not even Jon.”

“Huh.” Martin hadn’t been aware. “I mean—I didn’t know either, but that makes sense.”

“Does it? We all knew Sasha was applying, and she was way more qualified. Nothing against Jon, just—objectively, she was.”

“I mean that it makes sense given—well, ok, we’ll get to that. So you know the people here that started coming in to talk to us—the interviews and the—the statements, the written ones—the thing is, there, that was what we did. It was what we’d always done at the Magnus Institute, in the archives. The written statements, they went back years. Like, two hundred years and then some from before the Institute existed. And we researched them and filed them and we all just—it was normal.”

Tim was listening, which was all Martin could ask.

“So we—we didn’t necessarily believe all of them—though maybe we did more than we said—but then—Jane Prentiss happened.”

Martin told him everything he could remember about it, everything that he could organize into sentences, and Tim’s expression stayed almost the same the entire time. He realized Tim was still trying to decide what to make of it when he got to the part about Sasha being replaced, because even after hearing about what happened to him and Jon with the worms, that was really the first time Tim’s face changed.

“Wait.” Tim finally interrupted him. “This—this happened, or—”

“Yes,” Martin said, “and I know, it doesn’t make sense yet—”

“But—this happened to you? Us? Sasha?”

“Yes.”

“When, though? When you—disappeared, or—”

“No. That happened at the end. Just—”

“Ok. Ok—but Sasha, she—she changed? She became this—”

“No. She—she was replaced. Sasha—” He didn’t like thinking about it now any more than he ever had. “Sasha died. She was gone. And none of us knew.”

“But if none of us knew—”

“Well, that’s not entirely true, Melanie knew, sort of. And then later Jon figured it out, but—well, there’s more. Just—just listen.”

“Does this come back to—to now, though?”

“Yes. In the end, it—it will.”

Martin took another breath and continued; Tim seemed much more invested now than he had been initially, and that unfortunately made it a little harder to tell the story. He eventually got to the part about Tim and what happened to Danny.

“Wait.” As soon as Tim realized where it was going, he leaned forward, uncrossing his arms. “Start over again.”

So Martin started over again, and this time he got all the way through to the end before Tim interrupted him.

“Why Danny? Why would that happen to him?”

Martin shrugged, then regretted it as he realized what a casual gesture it was. “I don’t know. It’s not really clear why—why anyone.”

“But what did he do? Why?”

“Tim, he didn’t do anything. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Why didn’t I stop it, though? Did I say why I didn’t at least stop him from going back? I mean, he came to me.”

“Tim—” Martin stood up from his chair and sat next to Tim on the couch. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have.”

“But if this happened—this happened?”

“Yes. It happened.”

“I would have known something wasn’t right. He came to me. How hard would it have been to—to just stay up with him?”

“Tim, that’s not how they work.”

“They. The—the fears?”

“Yes. And the people and the—things—that serve them.” Martin ran a hand over his face before continuing. “They manipulate you. They—they trap you. Like they trapped all of us at the Institute.”

“So you said. So what—I just let it go? I went to work at the Institute but then just forgot about it?”

“No. Not at all. Actually, after that, you—well, ok.” He told Tim everything he’d learned about the Unknowing, everything that Basira and later Jon had told him about it.

“Good,” Tim said, after Martin told him how it had ended. “At least I knew how to go out, anyway.”

Martin cringed as the memory of cleaning out Tim’s desk after Peter Lukas took over the Institute hit him all over again. Tim might have seen it, or maybe he didn’t, but either way he sat back on the couch again and seemed to collect himself.

“Go on. I still don’t know where this is all going. And you still haven’t said anything about why Elias was doing all this. Why he was trapping everyone into working at the Institute for the—the Eye?”

“Yeah. Right. Well—he wasn’t. Not really.” Martin continued the story, explaining how he had done his best to try to protect everyone after Peter had taken over the Institute, but ultimately hadn’t done anything at all except fall into another trap. He explained how Jon had woken up and his abilities had been stronger, how Jon had done everything he could to keep everyone safe and to prevent any further rituals—but in the end, that too had all been a manipulation. He told Tim how he and Jon had learned that Jonah Magnus had been operating through the successive heads of the Magnus Institute.

“So—Elias, then—”

“We never met him. Not really.”

“Ok—go on. So Jon came after you, and then what?”

“We left. We went as far away as we could get quickly.”

“You and Jon—together?”

Martin had left out some of the more personal details of the story, but Tim had read between the lines. Martin nodded.

“Fair enough. Go on.”

“Well—it wasn’t far enough. Jonah knew where we were—”

“Well, yeah—”

Martin sighed. “—and he used Jon to trigger an apocalypse. It turned out that everything Jon had been doing—all the avatars he’d confronted, all the things he’d done to try to save us, the rituals he’d been trying to stop—they’d all marked him. He’d been marked by every single entity, and Jonah used that to start an apocalypse. He unleashed all the fears.”

“What?”

“Like—the world ended. It was just fear. Everywhere. People were trapped in these domains and they couldn’t leave them and they just lived their fear. And the Eye—watched it all. Through Jonah.”

“What? I’m sorry, I just—”

“Literally the end of the world. I can’t really say it any differently. Like there was one where everything was on fire, and another one that was just a giant carousel but—well, never mind that—and oh god, once we had to jump off the side of a cliff—”

“All right, I’ll just—accept that, I guess?—I did not think that was where this was going—but ok, how did you say Jon started this exactly?”

“He didn’t. Jonah did.”

“Ok but—he used Jon—how?”

“He sent a statement. And Jon read it. He still needed to do that. Obviously we didn’t know it was from him—we thought Basira sent it—”

“Fuck. Really?”

“Yeah, well.”

“And you didn’t stop him?”

“I wasn’t there. Just—for a moment. I told you, they always had this way of—”

“Never mind. But I still don’t get it. You said this all happened. So… why are we here?”

“It didn’t happen here. It happened—I’m getting there.”

He skipped most of the journey through the apocalypse; he picked up again when they got back to London and reunited with Melanie and Georgie. He explained how they had found Jonah, and how Jon had realized he had the option to take over the apocalypse in Jonah’s place.

“And—what?” Tim asked. “End it?”

“No.” Martin shook his head. “He couldn’t do that. We weren’t sure what he could do exactly, but he knew he couldn’t do that. He could maybe—shift things around. Maybe make it not so bad for—for some people. For a while.” He deliberately didn’t explain exactly what that meant, and very deliberately left out the other option Jon had eventually arrived at.

“So—did he?”

“Not—not then. We didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on—that.”

Tim nodded.

Martin decided to skip some other details too. “Well—not long after, Annabelle Cane—”

“The—the spider person?”

“Yeah. She told us about another way. A way that we could end it. By—by letting the fears out.”

“Out? Out where?”

“There was a—a crack. A gap. Um—between dimensions. That place—where all this happened—it turns out it was just one of who knows how many realities.”

“Ok. Why would she tell you that, though? Didn’t they like it there?”

“She said—she said at the time that, eventually, that whole world was doomed. In the end, the—well, Death—the fear of Death—would kill everything, and the entities would remain alone with nothing left to—to feed them. And obviously she didn’t want that.”

“Oh.” Martin could see that the wheels in Tim’s head were starting to turn; he’d have to pick up the pace a little bit more if he wanted to tell it himself.

“So—we voted.”

“You voted.”

“Yeah. And we voted to let them out. To end it.”

“Right. Ok—makes sense, I guess, but—what did that mean? I guess you would get rid of them, but—then where would they go?”

Martin paused a moment. “We—we didn’t know. We talked about it a lot but in the end—we couldn’t know, and we knew the people in that place were suffering. And the other option was Jon taking over. Given that he couldn’t stop it, that didn’t seem like it should be a real option to—to most of us. Well, some of us.”

Tim glanced back in the direction of the bedroom. “I can see that. Ok—so you voted to let them out. Did you?”

Martin considered what he should say; he opted for the short version. “Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

“And what happened? Did the apocalypse end?”

“Jon says it did.”

“What—what does that mean?”

“Jon and I—we—we ended up here.”

“Here? What do you mean?” Tim narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Martin.

“Jon and I ended up here. On the—in front of the Institute. And you found us. Eventually. After a couple of months, I’m guessing.”

Tim didn’t move for about thirty seconds, then his eyes went wide and he jumped up from the couch.

“No. No no no no—”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to the Jon and Martin that were here, then? Where did they—”

“We’re them, too. It’s really hard to—”

“Wait. Did they—the—fears, the entities, whatever you call them—did they come here too?”

“Yes.” Martin looked down at his feet.

“And that’s why all this—no. No. Did you—did you know? Did you know they would end up here?”

“I told you we didn’t.”

“You didn’t know what would happen and you all just decided to send them on out? Like a big goddamn gift to—to—”

“We didn’t know. And—” Martin took a breath. “We didn’t all decide that. Jon—Jon didn’t want to.”

“But he let you. And anyway, it doesn’t count if he only didn’t want to because he got to be some kind of—what, apocalypse god?”

“It wasn’t like that that.”

“All right, what was it like then? Explain.”

“He didn’t really want to do it. It was—he would have—”

“I would have ended it.” Martin on the couch, and Tim in front of it, both turned their head toward the hallway where Jon was now standing.

Tim answered faster than Martin could. “Martin said you couldn’t end it.”

“I couldn’t make it go away. There were other ways to end it.”

“Jon—”

“Don’t protect me, Martin. Not—like that.”

Martin looked at Tim’s face again; he was deep in thought.

“It was your decision, then?” he finally asked Jon.

“Yes.”

“Why did you let them out?”

Martin interrupted. “I told you, we voted, and—”

“Martin,” Jon said gently, and Martin stopped.

Tim waited.

“I tried to keep them there, but I didn’t—I didn’t plan for everything. And in the end, there were—sacrifices I wasn’t willing to make. That I still wouldn’t make.” He met Martin’s eyes, and Tim also turned slowly back to Martin.

“Jesus Christ.”

Martin continued to hold Jon’s eyes, but he could see Tim furiously typing into his phone next to him. For the first time ever, he vaguely wished that he could know what Jon was thinking. It would have almost been worth it.

“Jon—”

“It’s all right.” He was still speaking in the same soft voice. “It really is. It was time. But I am—I am going to have a cigarette.” Jon walked out to the balcony, and a few moments later the faint smell of smoke wafted in through the door. Everything felt like it had slowed down for Martin; Tim seemed able to move at an impossibly fast pace as he answered his phone and started shouting into it.

“Just—just come over here,” he was saying, as Martin began to make sense of his words. “No, you need to hear this from them, there’s no way I can—well if they’re closing the place, it sounds like you have to leave. No, just come straight here. Sasha—no, believe me, none of it matters. None of it. Just leave.”

He hung up his phone and looked blankly at Martin for a moment; he started to say something, but then shook his head and held out a finger toward Martin.

“No. No, there are some things I need to hear from him.” He started out toward the balcony, and Martin stood up.

“Tim—leave him alone. He’s—”

“It’s fine,” Jon called into the flat. “I’ll—I’ll talk to him. It’s ok.”

“Damn right, you’ll talk to me. I need to—” One of them closed the door to the balcony and Martin could only hear Tim’s general intonations; he could barely hear Jon at all. In a moment he gave up trying to listen, and sat down on the couch. He leaned back and closed his eyes, and tried not to have too many thoughts for the moment; he didn’t open them again until he heard an anxious knocking at the front door.

“Come in,” he shouted, and Sasha opened the door just wide enough to poke her head in; once she saw Martin, she walked in and closed it behind her.

“Tim said I should—” She stopped as she focused on Martin’s face over the back of the couch. “Martin, are you all right?”

“No,” he answered.

“Look, I’ve—” she came around to the other side of the couch and set her bag on the coffee table as she sat down. “They’ve closed the entire Institute while they’re investigating the—I just have no idea what to do right now. Tim called, and he’s been sending messages since then, but to be honest I don’t understand any of them. I’m lost.”

“Yeah.” Martin nodded, then dropped his forehead into his hand. “I just told Tim about—everything.”

“I gathered that,” Sasha said. “He seems—upset.”

“Yeah, well, he should be.”

“That’s him outside with Jon?”

“Yeah.”

“Hang on.” Sasha walked to the back door that led to the balcony and opened it. “Tim, I’m—”

“Oh god. Sasha. Oh shit.” Clearly whatever they had been discussing had not calmed Tim down at all. “We are so fucked.”

“Tim, I can see you are upset, but—”

“No. Upset does not even begin to describe what I am right now. I am—I am leaving. I need to leave.” He walked toward the front door.

Sasha started to follow him. “Tim—”

“Let him go,” Jon said.

“Fuck off,” Tim said, then turned to Martin. “You too. Screw both of you. Sasha, just—call. Call later.”

He left, slamming the door behind him.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said, sighing. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but—”

“No,” Jon said, “he’s right to be angry.”

“Do you—think you can tell me whatever you told him?” Sasha asked.

“I can tell you,” Jon said, and then looked to Martin. “Are you all right?”

“No,” he said again. “How are you feeling? You were pretty out of it.”

“I’m—I’m all right, actually.” Jon took a seat next to Martin on the couch, and picked up his hand. “You don’t have to stay here for this. If you—”

“Yes, I do.”

Jon nodded. Sasha went to sit on the chair Martin had brought over earlier, and Martin protested. “No, Sasha—I can sit there—you can—”

“No, stay there.” Sasha smiled weakly. “I’ll be fine here.”

It wasn’t quite like listening to a statement—Martin could have interrupted if he’d wanted to—but Jon’s voice held that same contradictory combination of emotion and detachment it always had when he’d been reading a statement. The end result was that he seemed to explain everything twice as well in half the time that Martin had, and Sasha had remained drawn in and silent until the end.

“Tim should have heard it from you,” Martin mumbled, while Sasha took a moment.

“No,” Jon said. “I think—I think Tim needed to hear it from you, actually.”

Martin started to ask him what he meant, but Sasha broke her silence.

“So—now what?”

“Wait,” Martin said. “Aren’t you mad?”

“I’m—” Sasha considered. She looked tired, maybe in shock, but not angry. “I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, this—sucks—but… I don’t know. What would I have done? I mean—” She laughed awkwardly. “I guess I would have died—”

Martin flinched.

“No—no, I’m sorry. I just meant—I really don’t know how to deal with this—there weren’t any right answers, were there?”

“If there were, I never chose them.” Jon absentmindedly reached for Martin’s hand again, and looked at him briefly when Martin held on to it harder than expected.

“I mean, I know why Tim’s angry,” Sasha continued. “But in the end, you—you really did save all those people.”

“I’m not sure I’d say—”

“But you did,” Sasha said. “Yes, they went through something awful, and I’m sure they were worse for it, but—their lives still had value. They still wanted to live, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Martin said.

“And here—I know it’s already cost a lot—but we still have a chance. Don’t we?”

Neither of them answered her.

“Fine, but—I have to believe we do,” Sasha said. “I mean, Jon—even the—the Eye—it can’t see into other dimensions, right? And the Web probably—probably didn’t really anticipate all of this, right?”

“No,” Jon said. “It doesn’t work like that. At least not for the Eye.”

“So maybe—just maybe—things are different enough here that—I need to think.” Sasha pressed her knuckles to her mouth for a moment. “Jon, I imagine you still have some—influence over this situation?”

Martin looked at him, and Jon nodded. “Some. Yes.”

“How exactly do you plan on using it?”

“I don’t know,” Jon replied. “One way or another, I don’t—I need to make sure they don’t get out again.”

“Understood.” Sasha continued to press her hand to her mouth. “But we have time, right? Some, at least?”

Jon nodded again. “Yes. Of—of course.”

Martin squeezed Jon’s hand again.

“All right. Give me—give me a day or so just to—to really absorb all this. Then we’ll talk it out. Tim—oh, hang on.” She checked her phone, and scrolled down through a few messages that had gone unchecked while she’d been listening to Jon. “He says he’s going to visit Danny.”

“Good,” Jon said.

“Anyway, he’ll come around.” She thought a little bit more. “And I guess we should tell Melanie, and—and Elias.”

Jon stiffened. “Do you really think he—”

“After what he went through today, he—he deserves to know.”

Jon didn’t exactly relax. “Yes, fine. All right.”

“Will you two be all right if I go? Just—like I said, to gather my thoughts?”

For some reason they were both looking at Martin.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll be all right.”

“I’m glad you told us,” Sasha said, standing to grab her bag from the table. “I know that took a lot. And Tim—he really will come around.”

Jon walked with her over to the door and she said something quietly that Martin couldn't hear; then she left, and Martin crumbled into the couch.

***

“Come to bed.”

Martin, who had been doing his best to bury himself between the cushions and the back of the couch ever since Sasha left, turned over to face Jon. “I can sleep out here tonight, if you want.”

Jon knelt to be at eye level with him. “Why would I want that?”

“I don’t know.”

Jon sighed and crossed his legs to sit on the floor. “Martin—what did you think would happen when we told them?”

“I don’t—I mean, of course Tim is mad, but—Ok, I guess I really wasn’t actually thinking about how they would react at all. I just thought it would be better to have it out. That it would feel better.”

“Does it?”

“Obviously not.”

Jon nodded, and reached out to touch Martin’s face. His touch was comforting, which Martin had somehow not been expecting.

“I mean, Tim was bad—but at least it felt—”

“It felt right. That he was angry.”

“Maybe. It’s just that when I was telling it to him, and I was hearing myself say it—I’d really forgotten how bad it was. I mean, I hadn’t forgotten, but—I guess I’m not living it anymore. And that’s not fair. It’s not fair to the other Sasha and the other Tim and everyone else we left behind. I just guess I feel—”

“Guilty.”

“Hm.” Martin closed his eyes, concentrating on the feel of Jon’s hand. “And then Sasha—it’s like she just didn’t get it. I mean, no—I think she got it. She heard all of it and I think she believed it, but she should have been angry? At least—a little.”

“She still might be. They both have a lot to process.”

“Sure, but—she was so optimistic. She just doesn’t know. She never felt—”

“She just said what you’ve said.”

“I know. And when I heard her say it—it made me wonder if that’s how you think about me when I… I mean—we were both there, but you went through so much more than I did. I felt—I felt sorry for her.”

“Martin,” Jon said, “I have never once felt sorry for you. Worried, or—or sad, or—but no, never pity.”

Martin opened his eyes to look at Jon again.

“Are you mad that I told them?”

“No. I told you I understood. It was time.”

Martin sat up, and Jon moved to sit next to him.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“Go to bed,” Jon answered.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Jon touched his leg. “We let Sasha think. She tells Melanie and Georgie and—Elias, and Tim makes up his mind about what he wants to do.”

“And then what?”

“We talk.”

“Jon—” Martin sighed. “I don’t want to push, but—how does this all end up different from before?”

Jon pulled his hand back. “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t.”

They sat a little while longer, until Jon stood up and held a hand out for Martin. “Let’s go to bed.”

“All right.”

“Wait,” Jon said, after Martin got up. “Would you—would you eat something first? I didn’t want to interrupt you earlier. I thought you could use a moment.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You know, Martin—you are a bit of a hypocrite.”

“Yeah, I know.” He put his arm around Jon’s shoulders and kissed his head, and was briefly pulled back in his memories to the day he’d cut his hair for him. That was all he wanted; just that—or, well, a future where some days got to be like that one.

Why was that so much to ask for?

“But I love you.”

“I love you too,” Jon answered.