#web!martin fanfic :(

[gammija]

ok since the Magnus Protocol is confirmed AU from tma, and jonny and alex have purposely not said that their voices are not reappearing in TMAGP, consider:

evil AU jon and martin. mostly because I just know jonny and alex would have such a good time acting that out. And also because i want to see a completely unhinged jon and a web!martin used to their full potential damnit

[victoriadallonfan]

Ward Fic Idea: A Chicken Tender Christmas!

Kenzie realizes that with her portal tech, she can now deliver toys to all the children in Gimel! With the Chicken Tenders help - and being targeted by the naughty Fallen children who want these presents for themselves - she is off to deliver tinker gadgets to every house by the end of Christmas!

[elysiumsblesseddead]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Annabelle Cane Characters: Martin Blackwood, Annabelle Cane Additional Tags: The Web Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Web Avatar Martin Blackwood, Child Martin Blackwood, Spiders, Friendship, Autistic Martin Blackwood, Not Canon Compliant, Autistic Annabelle Cane, Annabelle Cane and Martin Blackwood are siblings, Child Annabelle Cane, Canon is my toybox, And all the toys are spiders, Pretty crappy toybox Summary:

"You're my brother now."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Annabelle and Martin. They're siblings :]

[ollieofthebeholder]

to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 110: April 2018

Martin was usually up before Jon in the mornings. He’d been assuming that it was the Archives themselves waking him up, or maybe just an internal clock telling him he had to get things ready before his people came in, but they’d spent the night at his—their—flat, and here he was, up before the dawn and presiding over the stove as he made breakfast for his boyfriend. Nothing fancy, just a simple, basic spread, but since he wasn’t in the Archives, he needed something else to do with his hands while he cataloged, and he wasn’t the type to linger in the shower.

It was one part reassurance, one part prediction, like walking the rows of shelves and looking for files out of place. Martin knew every dream by now, knew the shape of the fear, knew the course each one took, knew the exact likelihood of his being spotted in them, knew what the door to the room of each dream looked like and where in the room he was likely to find the next one. But they didn’t always appear in the same order, and he used this early morning time to himself to sort out what dreams he’d seen when and what that meant.

It didn’t have to mean anything, and he knew that, but if Gerry’s flashbacks could telegraph what was likely on its way—what was likely to be the death of them, Martin had realized after the last one—why couldn’t Martin’s be leading him to a truth? The Eye wasn’t one for predicting the future, but it could See the present, which was infinitely harder, if you asked him. Easy to make guesses at what might be coming, harder to see what was right under your nose. All he had to do was put the pieces together…right?

The dreams were only of the live statements. At first it had only been the live statements Martin himself had been present for, but now every tape of a live statement he’d listened to had a corresponding door. Well, almost. He’d listened to three live statements Gertrude had recorded, and only one had made it into his dreams—the woman who’d been present when Gertrude disrupted the Flesh’s ritual, apparently. He didn’t dream about the man who’d encountered the ancient Archivist beneath the streets of Alexandria, nor, thankfully, did he dream about Mary Keay. Melanie had also never turned up, but the reason for that wasn’t hard to figure out; he hadn’t started having the dreams until he’d been kidnapped by Breekon and Hope—until he’d begun taking Jon’s place—and both of them had been employed by the Institute by then. The crew of the Archives were exempt from the nightly voyeurism, presumably because the Ceaseless Watcher could see them any time it wanted.

The other two…well, he was fairly certain the reason that he never saw them was because they were no longer in a fit state to dream.

He’d learned the rules of the dreamscape, too. He would find himself standing in front of a closed door. If it was a familiar door, it was almost always the one that led to a cemetery full of fog and empty graves, and all he had to do was touch the knob for it to swing open with a dread creak. If it was unfamiliar, though, he knew to reach for the ring of keys clipped to his belt to find the one that matched the lock. Each lock, each door, each key was—somehow—completely unique, and it was easy to match. There were doors he Knew led to Melanie’s fears, or Basira’s, or Tim’s, or even Jon’s, but there was no key to match on the ring and they remained resolutely shut. On those occasions when he had listened to a tape someone else had recorded and was confronted with a new door, he would be approached by the spectral form of whomever had taken the statement, who would place the key into his hand. They always seemed to be sleepwalking, like they weren’t truly there, and faded away immediately after completing their errand. Whatever the case, once he unlocked the door, while the key remained on his belt, the door stayed unlocked.

Usually.

Martin hummed under his breath as he traced his path in his mind. He’d started with Naomi Hearne as usual—she hadn’t seen him tonight, which was a pity in the waking world but a boon in the Eye’s realm—and then gone through all the other Lonely statements in rapid succession; obviously the Beholding just wanted to get them out of the way. He’d long suspected that the reason Naomi was always first was precisely because she and Martin had known each other through Evan, so it was less likely to be particularly fulfilling, especially if it was a night where she could see him; the nature of the Lonely was such that knowing another person was present took a lot of the fear out of it, and he was pretty sure the only reason the door was still there was that it had to be.

Once the Lonely rooms were over, he’d stepped into a hospital morgue and watched as a corpse rose to address a young woman. This, too, was always largely unsatisfying to the Ceaseless Watcher. Georgie’s lack of ability to feel fear meant that anything he got out of the dream was residual, and on the nights she noticed he was there, she just glared at him. The door on the other side of that one had led to a slowly collapsing train on the London Underground, and despite Karolina Gorka’s apparent lack of fear, she’d been concerned enough to make a statement of her own volition, so it was a little better. Martin wondered, in the daylight hours, how he didn’t have a worse time himself in there, considering there had never been any denying it was the Buried, but he supposed it was because these weren’t really about him. He was only there to observe; the Fears, or the memories of them at least, couldn’t touch him. He wasn’t a god, but he was probably the closest thing there was to it in the dreams.

Things had escalated from there, as they usually did, and Martin laid them out methodically in his mind like a tarot spread. Last night’s path had been largely grouped by which Fear had touched the victim, with an added increase in how much terror they still inspired. The office building had actually been occupied—it wasn’t always, the Hunters kept to odd hours and were half a world away anyway—and the door at the other side of it had been the pale, unvarnished oak with the silver padlock that led to Daisy’s months in the Buried.

Except…except last night, when he had touched the door, it hadn’t budged.

Martin turned the bacon over carefully. He’d been…unconcerned really. Emotions didn’t really factor into the dreams for him. He’d simply reached for the keys on his belt. But when he’d gone through every single key on the ring, looking for the one he Knew matched the padlock, it was simply gone. That was…unusual. Something wasn’t right about it.

There’d been another door right next to it, as there usually was when he encountered a door he wasn’t allowed to access, and he had gone through and lost himself in witnessing Gerry’s spectral form tremble and flicker as the Book burned, which meant Gerry had been asleep, which meant there was probably a flashback to discuss. Martin wondered if it would overlap with wherever his own dreams had been leading him. Gerry’s dream had been one of the last ones; the only one after that had been Web-related, so either there was that to look forward to or that was just the one that drew out the most terror. The guy on the tape had still sounded pretty terrified while Melanie tried to calm him down, but that could easily have also been due to Melanie’s expression.

In his dreams, he’d quickly put the matter of Daisy’s door out of his mind and focused on drinking in the terror of the next room, especially Gerry’s—the Eye got a lot of satisfaction from feeding off another avatar—but in the grey light of pre-dawn, he kept coming back to it again and again. Worry gnawed at him. Could something have happened to her? He didn’t think her falling back into the Hunt would block her door up like that, and he’d learned, first from his round-the-world trip and later from taking Trevor and Julia’s statement, that if whoever’s statement he was wandering through wasn’t asleep at the same time he was, the room would just be vacant, not locked. This had to be something more serious.

But reversible, he reminded himself. The doors being present meant there was a way for him to get to the other side of them…not that he wanted to, really, but they were there. He didn’t know if it was in case they ever distanced themselves from the Beholding or if it was in case everybody else was asleep and the Beholding was willing to settle for crumbs.

Was that it? Martin paused, chasing a nascent thought. The Archives crew were exempt from nightly viewings of their traumas, by virtue of being allied to the Eye, and he suspected it went with anyone who was in some way bound to the Eye. Had Daisy—

The sound of footsteps behind him broke his train of thought, and he turned around with a warm smile. “Morning, Jon. Sleep okay?”

“Hmm? Fine, fine.” Jon seemed…grumpy was the only word Martin could come up with. Despite his claims, he didn’t seem like he’d actually had a good night’s sleep. His hair was a bit disheveled, as though he hadn’t bothered running a brush or comb through it, which was probable—he and Melanie had had a few go-rounds about him not taking proper care of hair as long and thick as his was, and if Martin didn’t brush and style it for him, he often just pulled it back into an absent, messy ponytail or topknot screwed in place with a rubber band, a few of which Martin had had to cut out of his hair in the end—and he hadn’t shaved. There was something off about his clothing, and he was stood in the doorway, arms folded over his chest.

He also, Martin couldn’t help but notice, hadn’t asked about his sleep.

“Oh. Good.” He had to fight to keep his smile in place. “Breakfast is almost done. Could you grab the plates, please?”

Wordlessly, Jon came into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and yanked down two plates. Martin eyed him, but decided not to ask about it yet. Jon was obviously thinking over something that was upsetting him, but if Martin asked too early, he’d clam up. Better to either let him decide for himself that he wanted to bring it up or wait until he burned off some of his agitation. Meanwhile, he focused on not burning the bacon.

He served up the food, fetched the silverware, and made tea, then set a mug in front of Jon and sat down. They didn’t often have time for a leisurely meal in the morning, just something quick thrown together in the break room or something Melanie or Tim brought in with them, and even when they spent a night at the flat, Martin’s anxiousness to get back usually meant they didn’t linger. But he’d needed to think, and besides, he wanted to spend time with his boyfriend doing something normal every once in a while. Like eating bacon and eggs and fried bread.

“I think the bread might be starting to go,” he mused, prodding at one of the pieces with his fork. “Not moldy, but a bit stale. Still, nothing a bit of butter can’t cure, right?”

Jon grunted. He was shoving his eggs halfheartedly around his plate without seeming very interested in eating them. He hadn’t made eye contact with Martin since waking up, either, and it wasn’t the comfortable kind of loose attention he usually paid when he was sleepy or overstimulated and just couldn’t have too deep a connection with individual people. It was like he was deliberately not looking at Martin. He was also sitting on the opposite side of the table instead of next to Martin, he’d only got the plates, not the silverware, and—that was what was off about his appearance. He was wearing a crisp, stiff olive green cardigan, which wasn’t unusual in and of itself—Jon was fond of earth tones—but it was a machine knit, commercially produced cardigan rather than one Martin had made (and Jon had mostly appropriated). He hadn’t worn one of those since Jane Prentiss had attacked the Institute.

Martin told himself he was reading too much into it, just being paranoid. Jon could wear whatever he wanted, obviously. He probably had just grabbed the first thing he found, not worrying about whether it was one Martin had made or not, and really, it didn’t matter if he did. They were past the stage where Martin got a weird, fluttery feeling he couldn’t explain when Jon wrapped himself in one of his jumpers without thinking about it. They’d spent the night curled up together, for God’s sake, he knew Jon loved him.

That didn’t mean Jon wasn’t mad at him for something, though.

Part of him—most of him—wanted to avoid the topic, let Jon bring it up in his own time. Apart from his earlier assessment that Jon would be less likely to tell him what was wrong if he asked too early, he wasn’t going to ask are you mad at me like a child. His mum had been like that, refused to actually say when she was upset with him—which, honestly, was most of the time—and would play the passive-aggressive game until he cracked and begged forgiveness for unspecified crimes. Asking what he’d done had never ended well.

The tiny, rational, adult part of him pointed out that, as he had just been telling himself, Jon, unlike his mother, actually loved him. Putting Liliana Blackwood’s motives on Jon without provocation was just cruel, to both of them. And they were trying to communicate. Maybe Jon was trying to conceal his irritation, but surely he’d realize that Martin was only calling him out on it because he cared.

Right?

“Jon?” he ventured, laying down his fork. “Is something wrong?”

“Is something wrong?” Jon repeated, and oh, boy, Martin knew that tone of voice. He cast an involuntary glance towards the hallway, and it was only when the Knowledge that all of the closets in the flat had knobs on the inside and none of them locked popped into his head that he realized what he was doing in his panic.

He started to swallow the surge of irritation, but that rational adult part of him whispered, No, actually, that’s justified, go for it.

“Yeah, Jon. I’m not a mind reader,” Martin snapped. He paused, then added, “Okay, I am, kind of, but I’m trying very hard not to do that to any of you, and especially not you. It’s really easy to see that you’re upset, but I don’t know why, and if it’s something I can help with, I’d like to know.”

“And if it’s not something you can help with?” Jon said, a bit acidly.

“Then I’d still like to know. Even if I can’t fix it, I’d like to at least know what’s bothering you.”

“Bothering me,” Jon repeated.

That did not serve to make Martin any less irritated. “Are you going to tell me, or are you just going to treat me like I’m the stupidest being on the planet?”

As ways to diffuse the situation, that was probably one of the worst things Martin could have said. As a means of getting Jon to look at him, it was highly effective, even if the shock in his eyes quickly gave way to a look Martin hadn’t seen leveled at him since that stupid dog slipped past him his very first day in the Archives.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Martin,” he said, his voice cold and brittle with sarcasm. “Of course you’re not the stupidest being on the planet. Far from it. That would be the rest of us, wouldn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” Martin demanded, both bewildered and angry now. “When have I ever said any of you were stupid?”

“You don’t have to say it. It’s obvious in everything you do. Or don’t do, as the case may be. Your knowledge surpasses ours and we all know it.” Jon pushed away from the table, leaving his breakfast—and, Martin couldn’t help but notice with a twist of pain, his tea—untouched. “I’m off to work. If you think there’s anything there I can be of use for.”

“Jon—” Martin began, then changed his mind. He’d fucked it up, as—no, not as usual, he told himself firmly. Yes, he’d suspected that Jon would be upset if he tried to ask what was going on before he was ready to share, but he hadn’t known. He’d made a judgment call and been wrong, that was all. It happened to the best of them. At least it was something fairly low stakes. “Fine. Let’s just go.”

It didn’t feel low stakes, though. This was their first real fight since becoming a couple…if you could call it a fight…and deep down, Martin was both miserable and terrified over it. Few of his relationships had ended well, and all of them had fallen apart at the first serious disagreement. While those had mostly been over things like sex and Martin’s loyalty to his siblings—things Jon was, in theory anyway, completely on board with—he didn’t need the Beholding to know that Jon was it for him, that he would never love another man in his life. He’d been afraid for a while of losing Jon to an Entity or an avatar. He’d never considered the possibility of losing him to a breakup. He was probably catastrophizing a bit, but the fear was real and he didn’t know how to handle it.

Especially when they rode the entire way to the Institute in silence.

He wasn’t surprised when they arrived before Melanie and Sasha, Tim and Gerry having taken a turn spending the night. He also wasn’t surprised when Tim took one look at him and came over to give him a hug.

“Rough night?” he asked sympathetically.

“Rough morning,” Martin mumbled, hugging him back. He was still a little angry at Jon, but he was more scared than anything, and a Tim hug was doing him a world of good. “You?”

“Not pleasant.” Tim let go and glanced over at Gerry.

Gerry set down his mug and came over to hug Martin as well. As usual, he was colder than an ordinary human being, but at least he wasn’t burn-your-skin cold. “We can talk about it when everyone’s together. I, uh, had another flashback last night.”

“Figured. You were in one of my dreams last night.” Tim gave a fake dramatic gasp, putting his hand to his chest, and Martin narrowed his eyes at him. It was only partially in jest. “Not like that. Just…statement dream. If you’re not sleeping, the shack is empty.”

“Wait, you dream about that?” Tim asked, sounding startled. “I thought you just dreamed about the statements.”

“Gerry gave a statement,” Martin reminded him, letting go of his brother. “A couple days before Jon and Melanie left for Sheffield, remember?”

“Yeah, but not to you. And besides, you don’t dream about the rest of us, do you?” Tim frowned. “At least I don’t…I haven’t had any nightmares about…Danny since I made my statement.”

Martin shook his head. “You’re all bound to the Eye, I can’t see your dreams. The, the doors or whatever are there, but I can’t get through them. Gerry isn’t.” A sudden thought struck him. “By the way, where’s Daisy?”

“Right here.” Daisy’s voice floated from the direction the shelves. Martin turned to see her looking…remarkably better than she had in a while, actually. At least like she’d got a good night’s sleep. Her hair was slightly damp, like she’d just got out of the shower, and she was holding a cup of something hot and steaming. She saluted him with it, a dry smile playing about her lips. “Morning.”

“Morning.” Martin did manage to smile back at her. He was honestly relieved to see her. “Sleep okay?”

Daisy shrugged. She looked faintly pleased with herself. “Eventually, yeah.”

Before Martin could inquire about it further, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him and turned to see Sasha coming towards them, her usual cup of coffee in one hand and her laptop bag slung over her shoulder. Most of them didn’t bother dressing professionally these days, and usually Sasha was no exception, but today she was wearing a pant suit, pumps, and makeup. With her hair in a loose braid slung over one shoulder, it crossed Martin’s mind that she was dressed exactly the way she’d done on their first day in the Archives.

Daisy raised an eyebrow at her. “Job interview, Miss James?”

“No, just reminding myself I’m a grown woman with a job. Morning, all,” Sasha added, slinging her bag off her shoulder and setting it on her chair.

“Morning. Where’s Melanie?” Martin looked over Sasha’s shoulder, but there was no sign of his sister, which was unusual; she was normally in the lead, or glued to Sasha’s side.

“Outside. Jon passed us on the way in heading out to the courtyard, and we got about halfway across the floor before she decided to turn around and follow him so he didn’t have something happen to him.” Sasha set her coffee on her desk and began unpacking her laptop. “I’m guessing he had a rough night, too. He looked unsettled.”

“We’re…fighting. I think,” Martin added uncertainly. “He’s pissed at me, anyway.”

Tim raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why, what did you do?”

“I don’t know, that’s the thing. I asked him about what was bothering him and—he didn’t really answer? He was kind of passive-aggressive about it, actually. Something about me treating everyone like you’re stupid?”

Tim’s eyebrows, impossibly, rose higher. “Jon said that?”

“You mean like how he was treating you when he first got the job down here?” Sasha asked. “Like you were stupid. Not like you thought everyone else was stupid.”

“He never thought I was stupid. Just incompetent,” Martin muttered. He rubbed his forehead. “I—have I been acting that way? I don’t mean to, and if I’d known…”

“No?” Sasha sounded incredulous. “Unless you’re complaining about us behind our backs on the tapes when you think we can’t hear them. You know, like Jon did about you those first few months.”

Martin felt the beginning of a headache forming between his eyes. “Sasha, I’m really not in the mood for any more guessing games today. Are you trying to make me angry at Jon back, or are you trying to subtly call him out as a hypocrite?” He froze as the words he’d just said, and the tone he’d said them in, replayed in his head. “Christ. Is that how I always talk to you guys?”

“No, you’re usually a lot more soft-spoken and polite about it when Sasha or Jon are being cagey like they won’t say what’s on their minds if you don’t compel them, and the rest of us don’t do that to you,” Tim said bluntly. “You really need to quit that shit out, Sash, it’s not fair and it’s not funny. We’re supposed to be communicating, remember? If you don’t want to talk about something, just say that.”

Sasha froze, then looked up at Martin with an expression of genuine contriteness. “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t actually realize I was doing that. I guess I was trying to get you angry back at Jon—maybe so you’d force him to tell you what’s on his mind, I don’t know. But I wasn’t…I don’t think I was doing it on purpose.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I had a nightmare last night that I haven’t had in years and I guess it upset me more than I thought.”

“About the funfair?” Daisy asked, startling Martin.

Sasha whipped her head around to stare at Daisy, eyes wide with shock. “The—? How’d you know about that?”

“We indoctrinated Daisy into the family proper last night,” Tim said dryly. “She got to witness her first flashback.”

“Maybe that’s why Jon’s so upset. He’s the only one that hasn’t, then.” Sasha rubbed her chest. “But that—that didn’t actually…happen, did it?”

“Must have. I don’t flash back to imaginary events,” Gerry said quietly. “I get it. Easy to convince yourself something like that wasn’t real, especially when you’re a bit older…if you don’t know this sort of thing is real, it’s harder to believe it. And Martin did say you’d been Marked by the Web before Prentiss attacked. I didn’t think that spider biting you in the boiler room was enough to do that if your encounter with the Distortion wasn’t.”

Martin’s stomach lurched. He honestly hadn’t thought about that since the night he’d Looked at everyone, and since Sasha had never asked to make a statement, he’d continued to not think about it. That she didn’t even remember being Marked had never occurred to him, even though he and Melanie had both forgotten their first Marks…

“It wasn’t…that bad, as some of these things go,” Sasha said, a bit uncertainly. “I mean, anyone would have been scared of almost falling off the top of a funfair wheel in the dark.”

“Yeah, but the ringmaster climbing after you with too many limbs, not exactly normal,” Gerry said. “And you were ten.”

“Near enough eleven,” Tim and Daisy said in unison. Despite himself, Martin smiled.

Sasha laughed, but it sounded a bit forced. “I guess I should give you a statement about that later, Martin. Are you up for it today?”

“Yeah, sure. If you are.” Martin rubbed the back of his neck. “And only if you’re sure you really want to.”

“I do. You deserve to know about it, and at least this way it’s my choice.” Sasha sucked in a sharp breath. “I mean, not that you’ve ever forced one of us to tell you anything we weren’t ready for. That’s not what I’m saying at all! I just mean that I’d rather you hear the details from me rather than accidentally. Besides, you probably haven’t had a good live statement in a while, you’ve got to be hungry, and it’s better to have…farm-raised than wild-caught, I guess. Want to do it now, before Jon gets back in?”

“No. I want to do it later, after you’ve had a chance to tell Jon what we’re doing,” Martin said pointedly. “Last thing I want is for him to think I’m sneaking around keeping secrets from him. Or that I’m, I don’t know, making you tell me.”

“You’ve never done that,” Sasha said. “And I could see how hard it was for you not to ask Tim about his Stranger Mark all the way back at the beginning. You’re a good man, Martin Blackwood, and don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.”

Martin smiled weakly. He’d been really worried about Tim’s Mark. Now that he knew the truth about Danny, of course, he could understand why he’d seen the intense indigo glow that looked like the Stranger had physically reached into his chest cavity and ripped his heart out—because, metaphorically speaking, it had. Still worrying and upsetting, but at least not in a something in you has been replaced kind of way.

“Have you ever thought about tracking down the people he flashes back to?” Daisy asked. “Getting their statements?”

Gerry shook his head. “I don’t ever know who I’m flashing back as—to me, it’s always just, well, me. Tim can usually guess when it’s not me—”

“Pretty sure your mum wouldn’t have let you wear pinafores and bows,” Tim interjected.

“—but if it’s not one of you lot, or someone he knows, that’s about all he gets,” Gerry completed. “Even when it is someone he knows…”

Tim nodded. “Honestly, if Sasha hadn’t introduced herself to…uh…Mister Seymour at the funfair, I might not have clued in that it was her. I guess we could maybe start recording them and giving them to Martin so he can Know who it’s about and go find them, but—”

“Can we not?” Martin begged. “I really don’t want to start getting into that habit. The only reason I’m taking Sasha’s is because it’ll keep her from dreaming about it again, but I can’t guarantee that with the other people who give live statements.” He turned to Daisy as a thought he’d had earlier came back to him. “Speaking of, I—”

A door banged hard from the other side of the Archives, cutting him off. “MARTIN!”

Melanie’s voice, equal parts angry and panicked, sent all other thoughts flying out of Martin’s head. She’d been outside—outside with Jon, who was upset and angry and liable to do something stupid. Nothing had attacked them in the Archives in ages, and he Knew that was to do with Basira and Peter Lukas somehow but couldn’t see the shape of it yet, but that might not extend to outside the building, and if they’d left the grounds anything could have happened, and all he could think of was that Jon had been kidnapped, or worse…

He started towards the door leading to the courtyard and halted, drawing in a sharp breath of relief, as Melanie burst into the open part of the Archives, dragging a both startled and annoyed-looking Jon after her. She thrust him into the center of the group and stabbed a finger at him. “Look at him!”

Bewildered, Martin did. He looked both startled and irritated, although the irritation was clearly winning out as he adjusted his cardigan with a jerk. His hair had started falling out of the half-knot he’d pulled it back into, and while from the shoulders down he looked crisply professional, from the neck up he looked like he had just rolled out of bed. And into the path of a backfiring Hoover.

“I don’t know—” he began, not even sure where he was going to end that sentence.

“No, Martin, Look at him,” Melanie said again, and this time he could hear the capital L on Look that had nothing to do with it being at the beginning of the sentence. “We were talking, and I was telling him to stop stressing so much because it’s giving him more grey hairs than before and ran my hand through it to show him and—” She held up her hand, which had a couple strands tangled around it.

They weren’t hair. Jon’s hair was glossy, and even the grey strands were darker than those. It also wasn’t sticky.

Martin stood frozen, staring at the strands of web Melanie had apparently brushed out of Jon’s hair. Several things—Jon’s attitude towards certain things, seemingly innocuous conversations, Tim’s comment about how Sasha and Jon tended to act—suddenly slotted themselves into a picture that made horrific sense. The Eye buzzed excitedly in the back of Martin’s mind, and he had a hard job pushing it away.

Slowly, he turned to look at Jon, who also seemed stunned and frozen as he stared at Melanie’s hand. The expression could have been feigned—and Martin hated that he was thinking like that about his boyfriend—but somehow, it didn’t seem that way. And when he turned to look up at Martin, the horror in his eyes was not something that could be faked.

“Jon?” Martin said, as quietly as he could. It took almost all of his strength to keep the Eye out of his voice as he asked the next question. “May I?”

“Yes,” Jon whispered. His lips barely moved.

Martin…blinked.

The glasses didn’t do much to stop him from Seeing things these days; it was almost entirely by force of will that he didn’t walk around viewing the evidence of the Fourteen on everything he encountered. Without his glasses on, he couldn’t stop it, another reason he was thankful he woke up before Jon and could avoid seeing him before he could get them on, but he didn’t need to take them off to See things clearly. All he did was relax his hold a little, and the Beholding eagerly rushed in to take what it could.

Jon’s Marks nearly stole the air from his lungs. The bright green glow of his eyes and lips had faded a bit, or maybe it just seemed that way, as had the pus-colored glow that still clung to the worm scars dotting his face and neck. There was a bright red slash at his shoulder, splintering into bright blue forks of lightning that seemed to reach his lungs, where it tangled with the brownish-tan that had settled there, and a red-orange line across his throat. There was a flash of yellow in his abdomen where the Distortion had stabbed him, just on the edge of where Martin was looking.

All of that he had expected.

Martin had gone to a Mechanisms concert with Melanie once, just after Gerry had left London with Gertrude for the last time. He remembered the lead singer, Jonny D’Ville, and his delighted, feral grin as he’d sung into the microphone; more particularly, he remembered the makeup on his face, like cracks mazing and emanating from his eyes and spreading across his face. The Web Mark spreading across Jon’s face made that look like a drag queen’s eyeliner. It sparked out from his eyes in long, jagged lines, up into his hairline, into his ears, into his mouth. One particularly long spar traveled in a meandering, unbroken, but still direct line from his eye to his heart—the only part of the Mark that had been there the last time Martin had Looked at Jon, almost two years ago now.

God, how had it gotten so bad so fast?

Slowly, Martin raised a trembling hand and touched Jon’s face, tracing the scars only he could see. Jon wasn’t an Avatar of the Web. Far from it. But it had been slowly taking him over, poisoning his sight, his hearing, his words, even his heart. And Martin hadn’t noticed.

“Jon,” he whispered, penitent and hurting. “I’m so sorry. I should have noticed.”

Jon made a noise he’d only made once or twice before—a tiny whimper of pain, like he’d done when Martin had first Looked at him. The static died abruptly as he threw himself at Martin and jolted him back to the present, throwing his arms around his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Jon gasped out, clinging to him tightly. “I’m so sorry, I—I didn’t know, I didn’t—I-I shouldn’t have let it get this bad, I—”

“Jon, no, it’s—” Martin stopped himself as he pulled Jon into his arms and held him just as tightly. He couldn’t say it’s not your fault. It…kind of was his fault. At least partly. He took a deep breath and tried again. “I shouldn’t have let it get this bad, either. I was too focused on that…compulsion thing you were doing, and I didn’t realize that was the Web either. I never thought about…the paranoia.”

“It’s not just you. I, I talked Tim into letting me go into the Buried, I—” Jon took a deep breath and buried his face in Martin’s chest. “I’m sorry. I’ll, I’ll make it up to you. Somehow.”

Martin pressed a kiss to the top of Jon’s head. A too-familiar smell hit him, and he wrinkled his nose. “Did you start smoking again?”

“Last week,” Jon admitted, his voice muffled by Martin’s jumper.

“Those things will kill you, you know,” Martin scolded automatically.

To his mild surprise, Jon actually laughed—a bit brokenly, but genuinely. He pulled back and looked up at Martin with genuine warmth and affection in his slightly wet eyes. “I know. I’ll stop. I promise.” He wiped his cheeks and turned to Melanie. “Thank you. For…noticing.”

Melanie shrugged, a bit awkwardly. “You noticed the Slaughter bullet. One good turn deserves another. Thank you for not breaking my wrist when I went to mess with your hair. Speaking of, want to borrow my brush? You look like a horse’s ass.”

That got a round of chuckles, albeit weak ones, from the rest of the Archives crew. Martin looked around at all of them seriously. “I—I’m sorry about that. Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine, Martin,” Sasha assured him. She looked a bit uncomfortable as well. “I, ah, I won’t ask you to Look and see how bad mine’s got, but I can guess. Anyway, I do really want to give you my statement about Mister Seymour’s Wondrous Entertainment Ballyhoo.”

“Mister what?” Melanie sputtered.

Martin closed his eyes briefly. “Was it seriously called that? Jesus. Let it never be said the Mother of Puppets and her ilk are subtle.”

“Huh?” Sasha blinked, then suddenly smacked herself in the forehead. “Seriously? How did I not get that?”

Daisy actually laughed. Martin didn’t think he’d ever heard her laugh before. Jon looked a bit bewildered. “What’s going on?”

“Gerry had a flashback last night,” Tim explained. “It was how Sasha got Marked by the Web. Sasha’s going to give Martin a statement about it so he can get some energy back, especially after what he just did, and also so she doesn’t have to dream about it again.”

Martin took a deep breath and turned to Daisy. “While we’re, uh, getting things out in the open—I, uh, I couldn’t get into your dreams last night.”

“What?” Melanie frowned.

“I don’t remember how much I’ve told you about the dreams.” Martin, reluctantly, let go of Jon and leaned against the edge of the nearest desk; Jon, unprompted, seated himself on the desktop and leaned against his side, which felt a lot like forgiveness to him. “It’s like I’m walking through a series of rooms, and there are…doors. I’ve got a ring of keys on my belt, but the doors are all unlocked. And if I come across a new one, there’s usually a matching key on my belt to unlock it. There are a few I walk past that I Know are, um, yours, but there’s no key on my belt for them, so I can’t witness those. I know all the doors by sight.” He turned to look at Daisy. “Last night, I came up to yours—well, one of them, anyway, the one that leads—led—to the Buried—but it was shut, and the key wasn’t on my ring anymore. I, uh, I got a little worried. Usually if whoever’s dream I’m in isn’t asleep, I just don’t see them, but…this was different. I couldn’t get into it anymore, and…I don’t know, I thought something might have happened to you.”

Daisy shrugged. “I joined the Institute.”

Tim coughed. “Sorry, what?”

“Remembered Basira saying something once, about how she hadn’t dreamed about anything since Elias recruited her,” Daisy said. “And I remembered the first night Martin turned up to watch me watching Masters climb into that coffin, and the first night he turned up without Jon. Couple nights ago I couldn’t sleep and listened to the tape we all made right before the Unknowing…” Something flickered across her face briefly, and she swallowed hard, then rallied and continued. “Anyway, Melanie said something about maybe making a statement about something so she’d stop dreaming about it and…I dunno. Wondered if it would work. So last night after Gerry passed out and you fell asleep on top of him, I nipped upstairs and broke into Bouchard’s old office. Forced the lock. Found where he was keeping the employment forms and just…filled one out.” She shrugged again, seemingly unconcerned, but there was a glint of pride in her eye. “Seemed to work just fine.”

Martin stared at her for a long moment. Worry for what she’d done to herself warred with pleasure that she’d found a solution, and there was a tiny bit of malicious satisfaction at having stolen a servitor of another Fear that he attributed exclusively to the Beholding and ruthlessly told to get fucked.

He smiled. “Well. Welcome to the family, then.”

[bananonbinary]

do u ever see a depiction of one of your blorbos that just makes you like "this is super compelling and a fantastic concept and i will follow along enjoying it as a concept but nonetheless you are 100% wrong in your interpretation and if you ever asked my honest opinion on canon we would have no choice but to fight to the death over it"

[professional-writher]

being a strange little freak of a homosexual is so hard because I have to actively choose between reading Jekyll and Hyde or TMA fanfic and that decision is really difficult you guys :(

[late-to-the-magnus-archives]

Fed - a Magnus Archives fanfic

So. This was just what it was, now. Hardly the first time in my life I’d faced challenges, gray morality, and a strange situation in which I wasn’t precisely trapped, but all my other options were worse than the one I was considering.

It was heavy. Too heavy.

“Take a moment,” said Spider Martin. “Looks like you need it.”

I eyed him. “Reading my thoughts?”

“No, your face. It’s quite expressive. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s clearly a lot?”

I hated his blue eyes.

That wasn’t his fault. Something about him just made me remember how I had watched him die.

(Then is your Martin really your Martin?)

Yes. Shut up. I couldn’t… That was not a box we were opening this afternoon.

Spoilers for the whole show. This is post-MAG 200.

Part four of the Magnus Monsterverse AU.

AO3

--------

The fog took me, and as if I’d spent a thousand years there instead of my own metamorphosis, I immediately succumbed.

It wasn’t even conscious: just a completion, a sense of self and no other, an aching, longing magnificence that hurt like pure joy, flooding through me. I think I cried out. I might have come. I definitely wept.

This place… oh. Oh. I ate it up. It ate it up. We ate it up, together. There was such strange joy in me. It was such a wondrously terrible new thing. It drank it in, and I drank it in, and I may have cried out again, because this time, he answered.

“I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.” And Martin pulled me in, shocking in his there-ness, his solidity, his presence, the very miracle of his existence.

He was the only thing that was real, and We loved it that way.

I clung to him and cried. I could not get close enough. I never could, not ever; it would never be enough, and I embraced that, painted my body, rolled my eyes back in my head to bask in its glorious void.

He breathed deeply, slowly, and his heart beat strong. “It was you,” he said. “While I was in the waves, it was you, missing you, thinking of you, grieving you… that’s what did it. That’s what powered everything.”

And suddenly, I saw.

Saw him in strange, wild waves, surfacing to stare at a gray sky that matched his eyes.

Saw that he rarely surfaced. He spent most of his time under, in the broad, booming silence, the current pulling him along, far from everyone and everything. The isolation under pressure; the magnificence of loneliness in a world with other living things—

He rejoiced in his pain, felt he deserved it—but it didn’t last.

“They died,” he whispered, and tears kissed his cheeks, so I kissed them off.

He felt them dying; felt the people—so far away their absence made him ache—winking out like lights.

Martin breathed in the water (and I did with him) and mourned and lost.

And when it happened, and all were gone, his god fed on him.

Because of me.

“It was you,” he whispered. “Missing you was… it became everything. I missed you so much that I…”

He lost himself.

I could look up at him, now, and saw him like burning mist, saw his perfect eyes with limbal rings I could tumble into and drown.

“When they found me…” He swallowed. “When Tim leaned through the door of fire that Maneula somehow got him to make and found me, I didn’t know his name. I knew his face, but it just made me cry.”

I understood that. I knew I’d cry when I met him, too. I was sure he still hadn’t forgiven me.

“When they came, I fought them. I thought that if they took me away from here, I’d lose missing you. That’s bonkers, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said.

He touched my lips. His eyes were wide. “What?”

“No,” I repeated.

He looked stunned. “You’re in my silence. You can’t speak.”

Oh. I felt what he meant; he had this weird, Lonely power, this silence he could enforce, but, I—ah. “Yes, I can.” I knew how to talk.

Martin still stared. He looked spooked. “We… we should go back.”

I’d scared him. That would not do, so I kissed him instead.

He made a sound and responded, clutching me, his blazing eyes sliding shut. Color washed his cheeks, and as it did, we became real.

The fog vanished as if eaten by summer sun. We stood together in our apartment block, in the central courtyard, under blue spring sky, in sight of all the windows.

We both breathed hard, shudders trembling through us like aftershocks.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

“I kissed you,” I said, still dazed. “Was I not supposed to?”

“You… you became the Lonely,” said Martin. “You were the Lonely. You… I don’t understand.”

Eh?

What?

Eh?

“I what?”

“Hey, kiddos,” said Mike, coming out from the same building I lived in. “We’re heading out to get a bite. Want to come?”

We had no time for this. We had to deal with what just happened. We—

Oh. Behind him came a rogue’s gallery.

That was Michael Shelley. Right behind him came Helen Richardson, scowling.

There was Arthur Nolan—an angry, angry man, made worse because there were two of him in a row. They had not bothered to be anything but identical.

Sarah Baldwin came out beside Jane Prentiss, both of them chattering away about something called Brother Love I’d never heard of.

(The Eye dropped three seasons’ worth of this bizarre forbidden-love-among-the-cloisters “reality” show into my head. Thanks. You shouldn’t have.)

(Drama! It happily tremored at me.)

I stared at the lot of them, frozen. So many of them had tried to kill me, or been part of my torment. My actions had led to their deaths, as well—and some of them, I’d never even seen in the light of day.

I made a small noise. I don’t know what it was. Some panicked thing.

“I've got you,” said Martin. “It's okay. They’re not going to hurt you.”

I couldn’t believe that.

They greeted Martin with smiles, though no touches, no personal space invasions (and I could appreciate that). Me, however… no one seemed to know what to do with. They eyed me. Jane stared. Michael tilted his head. Helen rolled her eyes.

“We going, or what?” snapped Nolan One with all the grace of a bulldozer. “I’m fuckin’ hungry,” said Nolan Two.

“I think we should initiate our new friend and make him join,” said Mike Crew.

Sarah Baldwin laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. “He looks like a scared rabbit.”

“He’s fine,” said Martin.

Was this happening? This was happening. “You’re going?” I said to Martin.

He looked grim. “We should.”

He was trying not to be lonely. Trying so hard.

I would never get in the way of that. “I’ll go, sure,” I said, staring at Jane (whose skin boasted numerous scars, even more than my own, but no sign of worms just yet). “I, uh. I’m Jon. Hi.” So graceful. My face burned.

Jane grinned, stretching her scars. "Hi."

Helen laughed. As she did, her face shifted; she was still Helen, still herself, but she’d changed, like distortion through glass. “Hi, Jon. I’m Helen.”

Michael tilted his head further. Too far. Smiling in an utterly banal manner. "Archivist."

“I… yes. It’s weird to see you both at the same time.”

They just looked at me.

(It was thrilled. If I could have shrunk small enough to hide in Martin’s pocket, I would have, and It loved my misery.)

“Oh, I like this one,” said Michael. “You’re much less human than before.”

“Ah. Well,” I said. “That’s true, I suppose.”

“Still a prick,” said Helen.

“Hey,” I protested.

“From what I recall,” said Martin, “you were the one so obsessed with him that you wanted to keep him in your corridors until everybody else he ever knew died so you could have him all to yourself.”

And everyone turned to stare at her.

Helen’s dark cheeks blushed darker. “Well. Desperate times, and all that.”

Michael cracked up.

Crew followed, and Sarah, and soon everyone was laughing, even the Nolans—and it wasn’t a bad laugh, it really was not, but I felt no better.

“We’ve all come a long way,” said Jane.

“Archivist,” said Michael. “Come to us. Join us. Let us see your skill.”

“My what?”

“We’re, uh. We… can you guys go ahead? We’ll meet you at the curb.”

“Ooh,” said Nolan One, low. “Somebody hasn’t been told about the birds and the bees yet.”

“Be nice,” said Sarah, and swatted his arm.

Nolan Two bared his teeth at her.

“Sure,” said Crew, and gestured to them all. They all walked on, continuing their conversations or lack thereof.

Michael winked at me over his shoulder, then loudly said to Helen, “So what did that feel like, all trapped inside you?”

“Kill me now,” I muttered, covering my face.

Martin kissed my forehead. He’d lost just a shade of the color he’d had, but seemed to be holding steady. “So. Here’s how this works. We go and meet at a pre-set point in the city. Then we, uh. He gives us a list of people.”

I looked up slowly. “To what end?”

He just looked back.

“To what? To… to feed on?”

“It’s that, or we feed the Fears through ourselves—and something about us, about what we were at the ends of our worlds means that if we let them feed on us, we supercharge them. We could end it here all over again. So we don’t do that. Instead, we… Annabelle calls it ‘hummingbirds.’”

Flitting from person to person, sipping the nectar of fear. “So it’s all even less stable than Leitner said. This is horrible.”

“It’s not that bad. The people we see don’t even realize it’s happening, usually—we keep it light. Besides, we don’t do it to nice people.”

My look was dry.

“I mean it, Jon. People who hurt animals. That sort of thing.”

“A lot of those in London, are there?”

“You’d be surprised. There’s less fear in this world in general; it’s less spread out, so it’s potent. We only need a little.”

“This is insane. You know that, right? You must see it. This is lunacy.”

“It’s surviving. Which is a choice.”

Oh, how I hated that, but I understood. I knew. I got it. We could all do the world a favor and die, but none of us truly wanted to. Or at least… knew we should not want that. How did one judge the worth of a life? The risk of that life doing wrong? At what point could I or anyone say, you’re too dangerous to live because of what you might do?

“You’re right,” I whispered.

“It's going to be okay. I promise. Come on and join us today.” His smile was small, but real. “Keeps you from going crazy.”

And I knew that was true for him.

And I knew it was true for them.

And I knew it was not true for me.

Something weird was happening here. Or I was delusional.

Or maybe It was lying to me, wanting me so hungry I would make a mistake.

(I knew, though: It could not lie.)

“I’ll join you,” I said, softly. “But I swear, if I see actual innocent people being… being…”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I trust the people we’re working with.”

“Web.” I clenched my jaw. (Were my teeth made of eyes, too? Calcified, maybe?)

“I don’t expect you to be there right away,” he said, and kissed my forehead again. “I don’t expect you to adjust to all this quickly. But I hope you can at least trust me.”

I stared. “That is a hell of a thing to leverage, Martin.”

“It’s that important. I wouldn’t just say that, you know.”

I did know. “You’re really serious about this.”

“I need you so much.” It was a whisper. “I’ll do anything I have to do in order to keep you from… burning out, or getting devoured by your stupid Eye, or falling afoul of the hunters.”

“Hunters?” I said.

“Later.”

We were growing quite a pile of things to talk about later. “All right. All right. I’ll come with you. Show me, Martin. I trust you.”

So help me, he regained some of his color as we walked out of the courtyard to join the others, who’d waited by the curb.

#

I had never been good with groups of people.

The theater group in which I met Georgie (and through her, gained at least some social skills) had helped a little.

The Magnus Institute Library employees, of whom I was merely one of many, also helped—I could tag along without pressure, camouflaged by their gregariousness.

The Archives… that group was considerably less comfortable because I felt like it was all on me.

It wasn’t. I know that now, but my promotion went straight to my head, and not in a confident way. I’d felt immediately underqualified and out of place, and wondered daily why the hell I’d accepted the position.

I knew now. I could not have refused. I didn’t know that, then. I’m not sure that understanding would have helped, either.

Still, the social aspect of things had only meant stress. To this day, I did not recall going to Martin’s birthday party and rambling about emulsions while eating rum and raisin ice cream. The Eye did not give me that memory back. I knew it happened only because Tim and Martin and Sasha had never stopped teasing me over it. Very funny, really.

(Tim. Sasha. Oh, gods…)

(Right, Archive, focus, you’re all right, they’re here now—)

(Jon. Dear lord. Focus, Jon.)

So I was obviously in a good head space for something like this.

“So you’re really Jon,” said Jane Prentiss, and something that wasn’t a tongue moved in her mouth as she spoke.

I choked a little. “Y… yeah. Hi.”

“Huh. I killed you in my world,” she said.

“I’m hearing that a lot today,” I muttered.

She smiled, and dear gods, her teeth were squirming. “I’m glad they found you. I wanted to apologize.”

“To… wh… why?”

“Well, it wasn’t really you I was mad at. It was your Eye.”

“Oh.”

Her grin made it more awkward, not less; she stepped closer. “You smell delicious, by the way.”

“Martin,” I said in a tiny, pitiful voice.

“Jane, come on, be nice,” said Martin, pulling me closer.

She laughed and backed away.

“Did everybody here kill me?” I whispered.

“Not all of them, but, uh. Possibly most?”

Fuck.

We walked past the park and into the city. It was clean; the vehicles genuinely were all electric. I saw no one who seemed down on their luck, either, which was bizarre.

What kind of idealized place was this? And what, exactly, was the hidden underside?

They were all talking, and because I have terrible timing, I decided this was the moment to whisper to Martin, “What did you mean by, ‘don’t you try to take my choices and blame yourself for them?’”

He stiffened. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”

“All right. I can wait.”

“Liar.”

I laughed. “I am not lying.”

“You can’t wait to find out,” he teased.

Gods, I wanted to kiss him. “I may have learned a little patience in a thousand years.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he challenged.

I grinned, but before I could respond, he spoke.

No. Another him spoke.

“Right,” said his voice, but it wasn’t him, and I turned slowly to find the other Martin waiting for us all on the corner.

The moment I saw him in the light of day, I knew: this Martin was Web.

Completely Web, all the way through; his smile was perfect, and his stance, and the way he shifted his weight and barely met other people’s eyes and laughed easily.

It was completely fake, and I could see it, and I felt like my skin was going to crawl right off my bones. Or whatever I had under there. Eye-bones.

He seemed to know, and he stopped to stare at me. For one moment, when I met his eyes, they were dead. Flat. Dull. There in place to hide the spiders behind them, utterly without anything resembling emotion or true life.

Then he was just Martin (so similar to my Martin, or… no. What Martin had been before everything), and smiling at everybody. “I’ve got all kinds of assignments for you today,” he said, handing out Post-It notes.

“Sure, but did you account for our latest acquisition?” said Nolan One.

Sarah Baldwin barked a laugh, and Jane elbowed her.

“I did!” said Spider Martin happily. “Jon? It’s okay if I call you Jon, right? You’re starting out with me today.” He approached me.

Don’t reach for the Eye, I told myself. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

On my bright green Post-It was Martin’s flowing script with two addresses and the instructions, 1:30pm Martin B.; 3:00pm Mike C. “What?” I said.

“Why?” said my Martin.

“Because we’ve all got split shifts, and it seems like a good idea to help Jon get along with everybody?” said Spider Martin. “His second will be with Mike.”

“Not fair,” said my Martin, but without anguish.

Spider Martin shrugged. “It’s the best one for this afternoon. Trust me on this.”

Everyone seemed to accept this with ease. Great. They were all drinking the arachnidian Kool-Aid.

“Can I get him next time?” said Michael.

Spider Martin beamed. “Yes! Jane after that.”

“Yipee!” said Michael.

“What is happening right now?” I said.

“I think you’re popular?” said my Martin.

I did not feel popular.

“Shall we?” said Spider Martin.

“I don’t even know what we’re doing. I don’t understand. I don’t—”

My Martin cupped my cheek, turned me to him, and kissed me. Lingering. Slow. A delicate tasting of lips and tongue, a gentle whisper of love and attention, a promise. “You’ll be fine,” he murmured.

“I don’t have a box for any of this,” I murmured back. “And I think my label maker is broken.”

Martin laughed. “Your label maker of doom?”

“Something like that.”

He nuzzled me. “See you in a little bit.”

And he pulled away, paired up with Sarah Baldwin. (Stranger—and if she did anything to him, I would…)

(Would what? Would what? I didn’t know. Something terrible. Something…)

“I don’t bite,” said Spider Martin.

I looked at him.

Martin’s smile. Martin’s face. Martin’s body. No—Martin’s skin. I could feel he was crawling on the inside.

I turned away. Whatever happened to him was done. He wasn’t mine, never had been. I still wanted to react. Violently. As if to his murder.

“I’m not dead, you know,” he said.

“Yes, you are,” I whispered.

“No more than Annabelle. I know—or I’m pretty sure, anyway—that you’ll struggle with this, but I chose this path. I did. I’m happy with it, too.”

“You ended your world.”

“Pot, kettle?”

I swallowed. “Knowing I did wrong hardly exonerates you.”

“We didn’t really get to know you in my world,” said Spider Martin. “You caught up with Darren and took the book back right at Mister Spider’s front door.”

Darren. That’s what the bully’s name was. “Did I?”

“Yeah. You died pretty quickly. Your mind snapped before they could get much fear out of you, so there wasn’t a point to dragging it out.”

I turned to stare at him.

“There you are!” he said cheerily. “Your eyes were brown originally, weren’t they?”

“They were. And yours should be green.”

He beamed. “Naw.”

“Naw?”

“Blue tends to be trusted more easily. It’s racially offensive, and largely due to media influence, but there you go.”

I stared harder.

“Would you rather me pretend to be something I’m not?” he asked, putting genuine curiosity into it.

“No,” I said quietly. “I… it’s a nightmare. This. Is all.”

“Because you think it’s losing someone.”

“It is.”

“No. The Stranger—that’s losing someone. A weird ingestion and rebirth like the Distortion—that’s losing someone. This?” He gestures at himself. “This isn’t losing someone any more than you were lost.”

I wasn’t sure I hadn't been lost.

He smiled so easily. “Come on. Let me show you how this works. You’ll think better when fed,” he said, as harmless and bright as a children’s mascot.

I was already fed. Somehow. But I didn’t want to try to get into it. “Lead the way, I suppose.” Everyone else had already paired off and left. “Do you always assign partners?”

“And areas, yes. We wouldn’t want to cause harm, and the buddy system helps prevent that.”

I snorted.

“It’s true! Your Beholding might lack the ability to consider consequences, but surely you don’t think we do.”

“What, the Web has a stance against overfishing?”

“Yes! Exactly so. We didn’t even mean to end the world when we did. We’re significantly more careful now to avoid it ever happening again.”

“How did it happen, then?”

(The Eye offered to show me. I refused.)

“Get to know me a little bit better, and I’ll tell you.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get to know him better, but I also didn’t feel like I had a choice.

In silence, he led me north, past old buildings I sort of knew, past silent cars I’d never imagined, past lovely boutiques and pubs with a distinct lack of loud music or voices coming from them.

I’d never seen a London like this. I had no idea how to feel about it.

Neither did It, and the drive to know why this was so grew in me with anticipatory joy like a child looking forward to their birthday.

I couldn’t blame It. This was absolutely unexpected. The differences in history must have been significant.

“How did your world end, anyway?” said Spider Martin. “You hardly have to tell me, of course, but I rather thought you’d prefer we hear your understanding over Manuela’s.”

I really needed to meet this woman. “And how the hell would she even know anything?”

“Same way she found you.” We turned a corner, and finally there was sound—a busker, just beginning to tune his violin. “She calculates things. Honestly, if she weren’t so firmly entrenched in the Eye, she'd have made a lovely sister.”

I stopped walking. “She’s Eye?”

“That she is. It was her desire to see more and know every world that had her prepared and able to escape when the time came.”

I couldn’t imagine Manuela Dominguez as Eye. “Then she didn’t build a Dark Sun. She didn’t hole up at Ny-Ålesund. She didn’t try to summon Mister Pitch.”

“Not her. Some of her alternates, yes, but they’re secondaries. She’s Prime.”

“Prime?”

“The first one of her kind rescued. In her case, the actual rescuer, too.” Martin produced paper money from his pocket.

It wasn’t a design I’d ever seen. “May I?”

“Of course.” He handed it over.

It was a ten-pound banknote. Julius Caesar glowered on the front of it, stern and uncompromising. The bill itself was cornflower blue; intricate guilloche in a gradient from orange to purple subtly deepened the design, and it bore such phrases as The Bank of Holy England and Toward the Greatest Empire.

Damn. I really needed to get hold of some history books.

(The Eye offered to show me how this banknote existed. How it had been designed. What the phrases meant. Why a long-dead Roman emperor decorated the front. No, I told It, firm and tamping down my need. Let me find out on my own.)

This delighted It. The joy of discovery through me was apparently worth the wait.

“What did money look like where you came from?” said Spider Martin.

“Do you actually care?” I drawled.

“Inasmuch as I’m trying to establish a decent working relationship with you, yes, I absolutely do.”

“Then surely you know telling me things is more valuable than asking.”

“What do you think I've been doing?” said Spider Martin. “We are here to pay that man over there to play ‘The Outlandish Knight,’ which he associates with a past girlfriend, with whom he associates the feeling of being trapped and controlled, and playing it makes him afraid he’ll never get free. Thus, shall I be fed. And you, my dear Archivist, merely need to watch him—because he’ll feel very, very watched, and thus shall you be fed.”

I frowned. “And he deserves this, does he?”

“In revenge against that girlfriend, he poisoned her cat.”

“He what?” Well, now I was furious.

Which (calm down, Jon) was probably on purpose. It was calculated.

“He did,” said Spider Martin. “What happened to him wasn’t nice, but he isn’t very nice, either.”

“Did the cat… die?”

“No, fortunately, though it did go blind.”

I clenched my jaw. Anger against this random man tempted. (Easy, Jon. Easy.) “If you’re lying to me, we’re going to have a problem.”

Spider Martin looked at me. ���Jon, I’m not stupid enough to lie to you. You could just see it. If I lie, it’ll undo any attempts to build trust between us. All right?”

That… made sense. “All right. Why do you want to work with me, then?”

“Because we all need to work together. All of us. We’re unique in all the world, and we have a challenging existence. We need each other to keep each other balanced and prevent the world from ending again.”

Damn, but it was all logical. “Why did you call me Archivist a moment ago?”

“Because that’s what you are—and I suspected it would be easier to think of eating a bit of this man’s fear with that reminder.”

This honesty was refreshing. Maybe a little too refreshing. It was all calculated, every bit of it.

But then, it was calculated because it would be effective, and I couldn’t fault him for trying to be effective. Web was just… so disturbing about it, which was the entire point. “Will this mark him?”

“No. We’re getting a taste, caring for ourselves, but not doing enough harm to mark anyone. Most of them don’t even remember it happened after; they just shrug it off.”

I exhaled shakily.

So. This was just what it was, now. Hardly the first time in my life I’d faced challenges, gray morality, and a strange situation in which I wasn’t precisely trapped, but all my other options were worse than the one I was considering.

It was heavy. Too heavy.

“Take a moment,” said Spider Martin. “Looks like you need it.”

I eyed him. “Reading my thoughts?”

“No, your face. It’s quite expressive. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s clearly a lot?”

I hated his blue eyes.

That wasn’t his fault. Something about him just made me remember how I had watched him die.

(Then is your Martin really your Martin?)

Yes. Shut up. I couldn’t… That was not a box we were opening this afternoon. No.

Maybe not ever.

“If you’re really not ready, it’s okay,” said Spider Martin. “Last thing I want to do is upset you.”

“Sure. Because I’m so dangerous compared to the lot of you.”

“You are, actually.” Spider Martin shrugged.

I rolled my eyes. “No, I’m really not. I can hardly damage anyone the way I could at the end of my world, and I was nothing but a punching bag before that.”

He tilted his head. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s not what we—oh, pardon.” He took out his phone.

“Not what you what?”

Spider Martin’s eyes went wide. “Shit,” he said. “Keep up!” And he turned and ran.

Spider Martin could move. That was not at all how my Martin ran, not at all his body language or motion or mobility, and the smooth, loping speed of it was freakishly comforting compared to the mask of the one I loved.

I ran after him.

#

Fun fact: being made of eyes and/or light beams made me better at running than I would have guessed.

I mean. I wasn’t good at it. But I also didn’t run out of breath, or stumble, both of which would have been the case before.

I kept up with Spider Martin, who I swear was running with the use of six extra invisible legs, and that was no small thing.

“What is it?” I called at his back.

“Get ready for a fight!” he said.

“A fight? A fight with wh-”

I saw.

Hunters, Martin had said.

Nolan Two on the ground with smoke pouring out of his chest instead of blood.

Nolan One behind a car flipped onto its side, unable to stick his head around it at all because of—

What was—

What WAS that, that was—

I couldn’t understand what I saw. Purple, green, wisps of things like tentacles, not solid, and yet they were, punching holes into that car, not just reaching around it but building Nolan’s fear, and—

We turned the corner at the same time as Mike Crew and Helen Richardson, and everyone acted at once.

Coordinated? No. They’d just done this before.

Helen distorted into a tall and mutated and terrible thing and dropped straight into the sidewalk—and at the same time, a yellow door opened beneath Nolan Two, and he fell out of sight.

(I couldn’t see the attacker. I needed to see it.)

Mike bared his teeth—a horrifying look, actual anger, which he had not shown with me the day he threw me into the sky—and gestured.

Lightning struck.

Struck… what?

(I couldn’t see it! I needed to see it!)

Mike couldn’t see it, either; he struck where those tendrils were coming from, the central invisible knot of them, but evidently did not hit it, because now, it threw tendril-attacks at him. He moved, guessing as much (he could not see them, I knew he could not), staying out of the way of whatever it was punching holes where he’d been.

Spider Martin picked up another car and threw it.

That one connected; the car hit something, but was not enough to stop it, and more tendrils shot out toward Mike and Spider Martin.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. My eyes burned, my head throbbed—I couldn’t see it, I had to see it, I needed to see—

Michael grabbed me and pulled me into a yellow door in a wall just as one of those purple-green tendrils slammed into the sidewalk where I’d been, cracking it, penetrating below the concrete.

The Corridors. So familiar. I knew this well.

“No!” I cried, throwing myself at the door.

“Easy, Archivist,” said Michael, right up behind me, long hands draping over my shoulders to pull me back. “You aren’t ready to deal with them.”

“No! I need to see it! I need to see it!”

“Archivist,” Michael thrummed at me. “You’ll make your Martin cry.”

Martin?

Martin.

I stopped, gripping the door handle. “I… I need to… see it?”

“You will be hurt. Maybe killed. That would be terrible.”

He did not sound like it would be terrible.

I shook. “I couldn’t see it. Michael. Please. I have to see it. I have to try.”

He sighed. “Silly Archivist. As you wish.” He reached past me, all around me, and opened the door.

We were on a nearby roof, and I could look down and see.

I looked.

Looked.

(Use me, It beckoned.)

And I did.

My vision opened as it had not since I arrived here, and I saw.

Connected it was all connected

Powers like the Fears but different

All through this world every living thing everyone was marked or

Not marked something like marked already connected

Connected it was all

The thing

There

A person but not

It was three persons in one

Three of them together standing there strange dark bodysuit a gas mask

No hands

No hands only those tendrils sprouting from their arms, tendrils which now seemed so solid

Each of them moving independently (three person in there, three minds to work them) trying actively to kill us all

To kill the Nolans the Mike the Helen the

I saw, and as I did, I broke the attacker apart.

I didn't even mean to. I just saw it for what it truly was, and made reality real.

One second, it was invisible, impossible to harm, its tendrils unseen by the others. The next it stood there, a person in a weird suit—and it shuddered, and then it was three. They exploded apart, splitting the uniform and popping the gas mask like a hatched egg in rapid-time.

And now, the others could see them. Could see three naked people on the sidewalk, gasping, shuddering, heads down, vomiting.

Nolan, Mike, and Helen surged in without hesitation, all at once.

I looked away, swaying, gasping.

Michael kept me from falling off the roof. He looked amazed. “What did you do?”

Fed.

I was so fed.

I felt rich with it, blissful, drugged. Absolutely relaxed and warm and tingling to the edges of every inch of my form.

Sirens. Coming.

“Time to go!” said Michael, pulling me back through his yellow door.

The Corridors did their thing, and I felt it, and floated in it, and spun and flew and was.

Michael cried out.

So did I. We became colors and swirling paint, flowing out of the drain against gravity in beauty and madness and bliss. And then—

#

I woke up.

I was back in my little bed in my gray apartment. My hair was wet; I smelled of soap. My heart pounded. (Benign essential blepharospasm, perhaps?)

Martin was next to me, asleep. I stared at my boring popcorn ceiling.

Had that… happened?

Next to me, on the nightstand, was a bright green Post-It note with handwriting I didn’t know. It said, Jon. We need to talk.—JL

Leitner.

Sure. Sure, we could talk. Fuck if I knew about what, though because I had no idea what had occurred.

It was four twenty-two in the morning. Martin slept. Leitner could wait.

I watched Martin, trying to understand (had I slept? If so, it was the first time in a thousand years), trying to parse what I’d seen and what I’d done.

The Eye did not help me because It could not. It didn’t know, either, and that frightened me more than anything else I’d seen.

------

NOTES

He's like a shammy; he's like a towel; he's like a sponge! A regular towel doesn't work wet, but Jon works wet or dry. Holds 12 times his weight in trauma!

[marlasomething]

(my) Mag a Week: Last Guest For Mr. Spider

Hello there!

I am participating in the "a mag a day" idea by @a-mag-a-day which is BRILLIANT and I decided to do "statement a week", rolling dice with the characters and fears that were ftw that week in the episodes I have listened. This week I am publishing late...I have a hell of a week, sorry.

For today I rolled Archivist!Jane Prentiss (HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!) and The Hunt (Eps. 52-57).

As usual, please do forgive my quick tipper and non-native speaker mistakes, Marla

Allons-y!

CW: bullying, possesive behaviour, children's death, childhood trauma, mentions of paranoia

Also on AO3!

Statement of Jonathan Sims, regarding the reappearance of his school bully almost a decade after his alleged death.

Recorded by Jane Prentiss, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

 I want to make something clear: I do not believe in the so-called supernatural. Never have, never will. Still, whatever happened to me last week is rather… odd and I do believe in the archival and research purposes of your institution, thereof my presence in here.

 Someone had, somehow, achieved human cloning in a… worrying manner.

Yes, yes, I know how it sounds, but it is the only logical explanation (though I do not doubt you will be making your own outrageous assumptions the moment I leave this place).

It all began last Friday, when I was leaving work…I am a journalist for The Hill Top Journal, the one managed by Raymond Fielding? You might have heard about it, even if your interests focus mostly around fake information, I am almost confident you also rely from time to time in factual truths.

And there is no one better at giving them than us. I am not being arrogant; this is just an empiric fact, sort to speak.

Anyways, this is all beside the point I was trying to make: last Friday, I was leaving work and I had an er… meeting with one of my closest friends, whose name I won’t reveal unless forced to, since I respect their intimacy, when I was pushed to the ground by a figure that barely reached my hip level. And, though I am completely aware of my quite small frame (both in width and height), a person that small shouldn’t have been able to throw me out of balance so easily.

I looked up, ready to grab the person’s arm and, in case of them being a minor; find their parents for an extremely serious talk.

As I did it, I froze. In front of me, with a cruel sardonic smile I thought I was never going to see again: Mike George, my personal bully when I was growing up while living with my grandmother. It had been over fifteen years since I last saw him, but there was no mistaking him; stocky in a soft way but with the clear promise of becoming rather extremely muscular the moment he decided to ill-mannerly obsessed over sports and going to the gym in an almost pathological manner (and he had been bound to, given his social circles), skin so pale his veins and arteries could be clearly seen palpitating violently every other second, short dark hair and a nose covered in freckles despite the rest of his skin being porcelain-like in that respect. There was no mistake possible to be made: he was him , only that he had not aged a day since the last time I saw him. The time I was certain I had caused his death...

…I guess that, before carrying on with the present moment, I shall explain myself, even if just in general terms.

 When I was very young, my parents passed away and I moved in with my grandmother. I wasn’t an easy, nor a nice, child, but that doesn’t excuse the attitude most of my new classmates showed me. From the stupid fact that I am not white to the jealously it made them feel when I knew the answer before most of them…they took every single breath coming from my lungs as a personal affront, especially Michael George.

He was all the clichés a male-presenting bully of the nineties could be and, just as his role required of him, there was nothing that annoyed him more than his so smart attacks having no effect on me. That is why he started following me after a couple of months where I made sure I only cried in front of my grandmother, who deduced it was because of my parents and just joined silently on my alleged mourning.

Back then I…right now it sounds ridiculous to say it out loud but…I used to have an imaginary friend, based on the character of a rather disturbing supposedly children’s book called A Guest from Mister Spider. She was a spider, I called her Mother because, well, I am not afraid to admit I had certain issues I am still working through and that I went to speak to her every day because, even using my imagination, I ought to be accurate and precise, so I only went where a spider the size of two sumo fighters put together (and a similar, if not more violent, attitude towards people she didn’t like) to the abandon building she liked to hid herself.

One day, Michael George discovered this safe space of mine and…well, started laughing at the fact that I was speaking to a completely empty two-story house in the middle of a street full of people. At this, I did something I didn’t know I had in me to do, though it was more out of the pure instinct than it was well-thought self-defence (I was already targeted every single moment I was at school, imagine if they had known that my best friend was an imaginary spider!).

I won’t lie: the moment I pushed him, adrenaline through my veins, the pray that I had always been finally becoming the predator…but it wasn’t me, I didn’t feel comfortable fitting those shoes and regretted what I had done almost immediately.

It was too late, though. From inside the building came a noise that, to me, sounded too much as someone’s bones being chewed by powerful jaws. However, since my adrenaline was over the rooftop and I was still partly afraid of Michael’s violence, I simply decided to conclude that his neck had been broken and the echo had just distorted the original sound.

Obviously, as I wasn’t a murderer (Good lord!), I started yelling for the help of an adult.

They clearly saw the corpse inside, though I didn’t find it in me to also look to see the lifeless body of my former stalker, and they were going to take me in for questioning when the body disappeared.

Just like that.

It was as if it had never happened.

I never spoke to Mother again, and nobody, not even some of those insane crazy theorists (that, of course, I have to push away from time to time), had claimed of having seen him.

Until now.

 Until I was lying on the street, the boy standing over me with an honest expression of being enjoying himself as much as possible. I tried to mutter his name, but just stuttered, He mocked how I had finally been left out of words to speak, he mocked that I was still a scrawny four-eye badly dressed weirdo (his words, not mine) and said something incredibly mean I didn’t thought he had the intellectual capacity for. “You have too much grey hair in there for such an still innocent person”.

I was perplexed: how could this clone say things like that with such a believable speck? Once again, he being a clone is the only logical explanation came with something completely out of the reach of what the original Michael George had been capable of.

He seemed to notice how much it was costing me to process the whole scene, so he started laughing and told me that “Actually, I have you to thank for. See? The eight-legged bitch you threw me to? She tried to whisper into my ear. To play with her food, I guess. I was going to have none of it and, somehow, I was able to absorb whatever bad energy you had used with me before and…with that extra force, I ripped the spider into small bits.

So, yep: thanks again, Jonny dear”. As he finished talking, I was not only scared, but also straight-up mad. Who on Earth had decided it was fun to toy with someone’s trauma this twisted way?

And, what was even more frustrating, why did anyone decide that, of all humankind, Michael George had to be the one brought back to life? Angry as I was, I rose from the floor and pushed him against the wall and, with my usual luck, a police officer saw me.

Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t precisely critic of my attitude.

“I completely understand some kids need a special hand, Mister, but, please, do it in a more private place. He will learn the lesson either way” as he left, the clone began speaking again.

“I have to respect this attitude. And don’t worry, Sims, you will not be seeing me unless I get superbored. After all, I had been like a lot of years going from orphanage to orphanage all around the World in countries where they speak a proper language” he meant English, the ignorant twat. “Just…keep those angry issues under a thin leash. If you were my actual equal, it would be so much more fun to murder you”.

 I haven’t heard of Michael George anymore since then, though I started to look up in my free time about him and his probable aliases with the help of my previously mentioned friend, who also happened to be a former policeperson (that didn’t end well for anyone involved, but none of your incumbency), and found a rather rich amount of information that I attach to this statement. I hope that you are able to do something useful with it, though I am not completely confident about it.

Especially, after speaking to that assistant of yours; Martin. I don’t like to speak ill of people I barely know but…useless ass. That’s it.

The thing is, that I cannot simply walk into my boss’ office and told him someone had cloned my childhood bully and study my past in an almost predatory way to create the most traumatic, vivid experience possible.

So it’s in your hands…I guess.

  Statement ends.

Well, Mister Sims didn’t lie when he said he had conducted a rather thorough investigation on this…immortal boy? I don’t even know anymore. Not until what happened with Amherst.

Anyway, the only critic I have for Mister Sims is that, next time, he should try and cover better his friend’s identity. Miss Daisy Tonner, as he had even left a printed chat between the information were her number, name and face are perfectly visible. That and, please, Jonahtan, take a little bit more of care of your personal hygiene and laundry.

There where you sat, now it is filled with cobwebs and spiders.

End recording.

  SUPPLEMENTAL: I am tired, so very tired. I have always believed in the supernatural and I thought that, maybe, accepting a job here was the right option. Plus, a way to actually put to well use my degree and instead of feeling useful I am here…talking to one of the worms that survived from John’s…I mean, Amherst’s attack, the poor thing trapped in a crystal jar while Tim is…acting cold? But he had always been cold, so I don’t see why I see that as a problem. Sasha grows increasingly paranoid questioning even me and my position as Head Archivist…AND I THOUGHT I FINALLY MEET A FRIEND THAT I COULD TRUST AND FEEL COMFORTABLE AROUND.

And then, there is the question of Martin. Sweet, tender Martin, that doesn’t value himself enough and seems to have develop a crush on that asshole of Sims…I know he doesn’t like women that way but, if only he gave me the chance…

Wait, what is that worm? Do you really think you could help with…?

Oh, shit.

End recording.

[esamastation]

Some Magnus Archives fanfic ideas....

1, The Archivist was never a Beholding adjacent position - there's nothing about the Eye that demands it's servants to record their knowledge. Instead, the Archivist was an ancient, general purpose collector of fears, always meant to gather and immortalise them in stories. Jonah Magnus (like many avatars of many different Powers before him) just hijacked the concept for his own uses and now everyone assumes it's how things are supposed to be.

1.2, All Leitners are written by Archivists. After consuming enough stories about specific Fears, an Archivist has to get them out, expelling all the gathered fear and coagulating it into single point - traditionally, in books. Aka, unbeknownst to him, Jon's recordings work a little like Leitners.

1.3, Simon Fairchild is the only one old enough to remember a time when an Archivist had no special connecting to the Beholding.

1.4, A time travelling Jon resorts to drastic measures to make sure he can't be used for the Watcher's Crown again, and permanently mutes himself - and gains for his troubles an obsessive compulsion to write eldritch books.

2, Post ep. 200 Jon and Martin end up somewhere else - back in time, alternate reality, in another fandom, whatever. Jon is still the Archivist and he still has the urge to archive, to listen and to record. But knowing what they do now, both are of the opinion that using tape recorders is a Big No. Aka, Jon ends up using vinyl records instead (and thus courting the Spiral instead of the Web??)

3, Jon asks a very important question I really wished he had: why does Gerry, with all the experience and knowledge he has, get eye tattoos on all his joints? Do they do something? What do they do?? Which then leads Jon down a very different sort of path of Being Marked By Horrors. Aka, Jon starts getting magical tattoos to balance and counteract the various Dread Influences on his life. Aka, Tattooed Jon Being A Distraction To Everyone and Also Mucking Up Elias' Plans By Having A Closed Eye Tattooed On His Forehead Maybe???

3.2 Better yet, this becomes a Trend in the Archives and everyone outside the Archives comes to the conclusion that the place is ran by some sort of delinquent gang of tattooed hooligans. Tattooed Martin for the soul, anyone?

4, Jonah/Elias Sees everything there is to see and figures it all out long before Jon and Martin make it back to London. Total extinction of human race looms not in unfathomable distance but less than hundred years in the future, and it turns out that in absence of human free will, the Fears grow... quite boring and repetitive, really. Jonah wanted Immortality to See It All, and this... isn't it. So, time for a retry. Aka, Jonah time travel.

4.2, Jon, Martin and Jonah all end up back in time after episode 200, and immediately Jon and Martin scramble to stop Jonah - not realising that he's already changed his mind about the Watcher's Crown, and is, in his own way, on their side.

5, Mr. Spider's door is flung open and the Archivist stumbles out, right in front of traumatised little Jon Sims. Aka, Eldritch Eye Monster tries to raise his own younger self to make better decisions than he did and probably only makes things worse.

6. All the above.

[knowthevoidisscreamingmad]

For some reason in magnus fanfics I:

Actively seak out full eye avatar jon ( only when he agnsts about it not when he embraces it)

Really enjoy eye avatar jon with multiple eyes

Sometimes like web avatar martin if done well ( preferably agnsty martin )especially when it links to Jon's spider trauma ( WOW I JUST LOVE PAIN)

But I cannot read lonley avatar martin. Even if he's repressing it ESPECIALLY if he embraces it . He just feels so sad . Somehow more sad than if he was straight up murdering people as a full on web avatar .something about lonley martin just upsets me .And not in the way well written angst does just differently. Pre season 4 I didn't really ship JonMartin I just kinda knew some people did and vaugley saw where it was coming from but Peter Lucas and the mutual pineing just got me .This also hooked me on JonMartin ready for season 5

Anyway If anyone has any good fics with reluctant eye avatar jon forcibly taking statements and/ or becoming more outwardy monsterous( multiple eyes or maybe moth jon) and martin comforting him please drop them in the comments.( I NEED THE ANGST)

[original-art-stories]

The Magnus Archives Fic list lying on my computer>

The horror and everything else. Mostly Jon centric probably...

Anatomy of a Mask - A new archival assistant is hired. Her name is Mary Sue. Starts as a comedy and absolutely does not end that way.

Plus One - Jon attends a series of parties for which a plus one is mandatory.

Decree Nisi - Elias and Peter divorce (again), and the judge is tired of their bullshit.

Reflection - Jon is haunted by himself, and refuses to take any of his advice.

Rosemary and Thyme - fantasy AU featuring romance, quests, and fairy politics.

What Belongs to the Sea - Selkie AU, mind the tags on this one.

Bell, Book, and Candle - “By the Ride or Die Pact of 2009, Jonathan Sims can call upon Georgie Barker at any time for aid with no strings attached. Despite their rocky history, their childhood friendship, and Jon’s barely recovered alcoholism, this pact is sacred and must be upheld.”

Things Could Always Be Worse - Jon swaps place with an alternate-universe version of himself, who is heroic, chivalrous, and wears plaid. It’s terrible. Inspired by the parodic “straight TMA” blog.

👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨 👁‍🗨

Sex Repulsion and Asexuality Save the World (Though That's Not What Jon Claims): canon divergent from MAG 160, in which Jon is so sex repulsed that a changed word in the Hazel Rutter statement saved the world. Crack is treated seriously.

Refusing to Give Up Tomorrow: safehouse hurt/comfort ft. MAG 160 divergence

The Eyespot Chronicles: Trilogy of works. AU where instead of going Somewhere Else, Jon and Martin stay in the OG universe. However, Jon is a moth.

Déjà Vu: Time-travel fix-it where Sasha, Tim, Jon, and Martin all wake up on the day of the day of season 1, episode 1, with memories spanning from that day to the moment they died.

terror management theory: AU where Mr. Spider kills Jon, and now Jon can't permanently die. Despite this, the fic is rather light-hearted (or at least crack)

Other Kingdoms: A season 3 fix-it, in which Martin uses a Leitner to wake Jon up. Do note that there are references to sex happening (Jon's demisexual in this), but it's rated T so nothing is shown.

When No One Looks: Dark Avatar!Jon AU set during the latter half of season 1

Chamomile: In which post season 4, the NotTea becomes a pet.

If The Archivist Had Been Meant to Fly...: Wingfic in which Jon saves Martin from Simon Fairchild

Molt: This is my favorite take on Web!Martin. This is also a darkfic, to the point that the author was made so sad by chapter 1 that they wrote chapter 2 as a fix-it to chapter 1. Also, as a warning that I would've appreciated but isn't in the tags or summary: there's a scene alluding to corrective rape, but this doesn't actually happen.

Drawn Out of the Unknown: Canon divergent s3 fic, official summary is "While investigating a possible location for the Circus's base, Martin and Tim find something unexpected.

The fic series that contributed to me listening to TMA was this Good Omens crossover by Bibliocratic. Really enjoyed it and finally between this fic and seeing TMA all over my tumblr dashboard (plus having a project to work on with my hands) I finally listened, so I'm thankful for that.

The other series I really love is>

The Magnus Institute vs the 21st Century: a series of emails and IMs which is just utterly hilarious. It's the Magnus Institute going through GDPR compliance processes and it's just fabulous.

And then one I'm still sort of following even though I don't read much TMA fic right now is

 dustsceawung by callmearcturus. It's a Moth!Jon fic with Martin as someone who moved to a town in a different fairy court (in a fae AU). Not complete and hasn't updated in a while but I really like the tone.

The world is too much with us is one of the many many many time-travel fix-it fics (I think that's a genre all it's own in the TMA fanfic community at this point). Spoiler to be on the safe side, it follows Jon after he's dropped back in 2014 by the Spiral, and relives what amounts to the next four seasons of TMA, using the experiences he had the first time 'round to try and avoid the apocalypse--and keep everyone alive in the process. Oh, and he's got the added bonus of already being an Avatar of the Eye. Very much angsty with a happy ending. This one's completed, so feel free to binge.

Martin x Jon 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/41149674As everything ends, as the tower crumbles around them, Jon and Martin hold each other in a firm embrace. What they see of the world shatters, and Jon breaks with it. He awakened, alone, confused, and something was terribly wrong with him.

Tim drags Jon to a party in celebration of his promotion with one goal in mind: getting  Jon drunk off his arse.

Martin is moving to a different position within the Institute and celebrates as well.

through the clouds like a moonbeam: Jon gets wings during the apocalypse. Martin likes them; Jon doesn't.

I’ll bear the waiting now: AU where Jon is the new head archivist with two assistants, but there's a disembodied voice that only Jon can hear. Do note that there is something that looks a lot like suicide but there's a happy ending. (Alternate summary that spoils the fic: Martin is a "ghost" and also Jon's "late" boyfriend. )

true kinda love: Season 3 Co-Archivist!Jonmartin

hiding: Season 3 jonmartin kissing to hide from the Circus

The Garden of forking Paths - Jon and Martin search for each other through universes.

“What about him then?” Georgie asks.

“Who?”

“Him,” she says again like it is obvious who she means, holding up the sketchbook revealing a spread that has several loose sketches of Martin. It surprises Jon it took Georgie so long to find Martin in the book considering he had at least one-third of its entirety dedicated to him.

To graduate from art school, Jon needs to paint a nude portrait, but none of his friends are too keen on modeling for him. As a last resort, he asks a handsome barista.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/46426702When Martin needs a fake boyfriend to bring to his family reunion, Jonathan Sims is the last person he would have expected to volunteer.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51906919Tomorrow, Martin begins his new job as a lighthouse keeper. He knows (hopes) he'll enjoy it. What he doesn't know (yet) is that a very, very curious selkie lives near and is intrigued enough by him to come visit.

https://archive.transformativeworks.org/works/30210444/chapters/81277828 The last fic I read (time travel)

This list has become a behemoth, comprising various lists created by others. I've saved it, but now I need to free up space. This is the process I'm undertaking for every list I've saved.

[helpmeimblorboing]

So, I was thinking - it seems unfair that I just keep all info on my projects to myself up until release day, right ?

But also I can’t exactly start posting about all of them. That would be chaos

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna make a poll - where y’all can vote on which project I talk about first, or most

If there are any specific topics from my projects you would like to see info on, my inbox is open - plus, you can comment it below this post

And for those who don’t know, these are my projects -

1) Crimson Redux - a fully original story about a world where supernatural forces, dictated by the influences of three godlike (and mostly unknown) entities - Alexithymia, Dysthymia and Dysphoria. Follow James Barker, the son of a serial killer, as he tries his best to navigate his way through this world, dealing with love, loss and action as he does

2) Lion’s Mane (WIP title) - This is just a retelling of the story of Alexander the Great and his lover Hephaestion

3) Take My Heart - A modern AU, and supremely angsty Patrochilles fanfic where Achilles is the heir to a massive corporation dissatisfied with his life, and Patroclus is the indie musical artist whose videos he comes across one day

This is actually an excerpt from it

4) Tearing Tides - The story of Anaklusmos, an ancient prince of Sparta, blessed with immortality by the Gods, following him through the years as he meets with ancient historical figures and fellow demigods alike, until he makes his way to modern day. Technically a PJO fanfic

5) Avatar Crew - An AU of The Magnus Archives where Slaughter Avatar Melanie King, Spiral Avatar Michael Distortion, Desolation Avatar Tim Stoker, Eye Avatar Jonathan Sims, and Web Avatar Annabelle Cane all get together to form the one big Avatar family, each member helping the others to feed, with occasional intercessions from a similarly symbiotic Hunt Avatar Daisy Tonner and Flesh Avatar Jared Hopworth.

At least, right up until Jon has a change of heart and leaves the Crew for less bloodstained pastures, rooming with Lonely Avatar Martin Blackwood

6) Sunlit Prince (WIP title) - A VERY barebones project, but basically a retelling of the Iliad and the stories preceding it from the perspective of Hector of Troy

7) Vine-wrapped Gold (WIP title) - equally barebones project, but basically a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh

8) Silver-sheen Traitor (WIP title) - perhaps the most barebones out of them all, but a slightly modernized (and very gay) retelling of the Bible from Judas’ perspective

Now, I can’t in good faith offer to post about the last three projects (mostly because I’m still trying to figure out what to do with them, and if I should even try) so please don’t comment about them

[bright-and-burning]

thank you k @mecachrome i LOVE to yap and i love to see other ppl yapping!!! f1 tag game time!!!

Who is your favorite driver?: lando's grip on my brain should be studied in a lab tbh

Do you have other favorite drivers?: i am fond of many many drivers... oscar obviously is #2 to me. just the tiniest bit below lando, sorry oscar <3 and then there's a medium sized gap to anyone else but i am extremely fond of the williams guys. and i am studying alpine and aston martin like bugs. and i have a lot of blorbo-in-laws that i feel very fond of...

Who is your least favorite driver?: it depends on the day whether i even dislike anyone or not. today i feel neutral and up about everyone!! sometimes i distinctly do Not feel neutral... (usually during races)

Do you pull for drivers or do you like teams as well?: i am very driver oriented but obviously my like . internal ideas about drivers are heavily influenced by who their teammate is/what team they're on. and since i've been into f1 the driver lineups have. not changed. so in my head the teams n the driver pairings are pretty immutable (obviously that will Change djfldsakjfa)

If you like teams, what team do you pull for?: i am so deeply attached to the orange bitches 😔 i just watched the season 6 mclaren dts episode and when claire williams went “the likelihood of a team being able to turn around their performance to any kind of significant degree during a season? i can’t tell you how difficult it is. it’s pretty much unheard of” i just smiled SOOOO evil. sooooo evil. i believe in andrea stella's hot nerd vibes bless that man

How long have you been into F1?: since uhhhh approximately one week after qatar 2023. made this account right around cota 2023

What got you into F1?: twitter algorithm put some tweets about the shitshow that was qatar on my timeline (literally one of them was just. a little of names and like . blank threw up. blank was hospitalized. blank couldnt get off the ground.) and i was like:

(why is that picture SOOO large) and also i had been admiring the f1 web weaves for a while bc i would look at the 'web weave' tag and half of them would be f1 and i was like wow. these guys have a collective shit ton of daddy issues. fascinating... tbf!!! i have always been sports brain lol. just never quite rpf sports brained? so the stars aligned for this fr (recommended tweets, f1 web weaves, and me being unemployed, geographically isolated from all my friends, and severely depressed)

Do you enjoy Fanfic/RPF?: yes . i am constantly cooking . everyone here is soooo smart and cool and the writing is genuinely so incredible. and 8104 specifically has just like. a really dope bunch of ppl ive become friends with that i am constantly like. wow i cant believe these ppl want to talk to me!!! (k you are included in that <3)

How do you view new fans?: by looking in the mirror... djfladsj jk. i am a new fan! i am not a ""dts fan"" (have literally watched two episodes Ever and one of them was today) but none of it matters and i don't really find those kind of lines to be helpful. i have disagreed with ""dts fans"" and i have disagreed w ppl who started watching before i was born and i'd do it all again (this probably says more abt how opinionated i am than anything else)

If you could take over as team principal for any team, who would it be and why?: personally i am delusionally confident enough to believe i could run that bitch like the MARINES. at the very least i would not be running my mouth like toto lol. vibes wise idk if i could do it at Any Team (like. imagine mercedes being run by a punchy american woman. LMFAO. imagine FERRARI) (i'd say mclaren for papaya reasons but a) andrea stella i could never replace you and b) i think i would set zak brown's fuckin sports car on fire day 1.) but based on location only alpine!!

Are your friends and family into F1 as well?: uhhhh no. my dad went to exactly one motorsports event when he was like my age maybe a year or two younger and saw a really horrific deadly crash so that ended any family interest. my friends are mega sports ppl but they're into like. american popular sports. and running. i do have a tifosi coworker and a couple friends from high school who are into it but that's it

Are you open to talking to other fans/making friends?: yes!!!!! i am so horrifically extroverted i love to chat i love to make friends!!! i am in so many ppl's dms on the Daily just sayin shit to the point where im like maybe i should cool it. lol.

tagginggggg @monacotrophywife @freeuselandonorris @liamlawsonlesbian andddd @red-flagging if you want !!!! this was fun n i love hearing how ppl got into f1 bc i feel like i might've taken an odd route

[flo-nelja]

mind control

I get this one often, because people love me <3 also while it changes the two first are always the same.

Xavier/Magneto (X-men)

I have read fics with consensual mind control for them that were extremely formative. I also read fics with noncon mind control, though in general they were gen. The last one has happened in canon a few times, though it was often more complicated than that. It's never easy. But damn it works so well for well and there are so many possibilities

2. John/Scorpius (Farscape)

Nothing beat the horror of John realizing how the mental chip was influencing him, slowly, then too fast. And it was hot too.

3. Doctor/Master (Doctor Who)

With a Shalka image, because with the Master living in a robot body and unable to leave the TARDIS, there's at least an element of this, but there is potential in both directions and it would be so creepy and this show already has so many mind control plots. I think it might work.

4. Eden/Mohinder (Heroes)

I used to ship this really hard when I started watching Heroes, and the mind control was canon, and it had unrealized potential. So I spent quite a bit of time looking for fics. ^^

5. Christabel/Geraldine (Coleridge)

Discovered this ship in a Locked Tomb related accident, and damn, the canon mind control and creepy homoeroticism was everything.

6. Horatio/Lin (Horatio Lyle)

The fact that Horatio has trauma about Tseiqin mind control makes the possibility of this - for plot reasons of for sexy reasons - even more delightful.

7. Jon/Martin (The Magnus Archives)

The universe is good for this, and I've read so many good fics for this, from canon-typical use of compulsion to Web!Martin AU...

8. Sistah Spooky/Mindf**k (Empowered)

In canon Hannah is too much of a good person to brainwash anything but herself (and it's creepy enough), but she did some invasive-things-you-can-safeword-from in Theresa's mind anyway, and there would be so many possibilities, if the writer had not evilly made them fail to resurrect Hannah.

9. Knives/Legato (Trigun)

It happened once and of course the power dynamics totally go in the opposite direction, but still, it has fanfic potential.

10. The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair/Stephen Black (Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell)

Yes, still here for the creepiest aspects of fairy magic!

[i-know-honey]

I’m very very glad everyone enjoys Way Laboratories so very much because between the kink-overtoned spy shit and platonic sugar babying I have been completely unable to resist including a whole lot of references to real life government agencies and the early Cold War and generally keeping the whole “ethics of government contracts” stuff towards the top of the page. and the only thing I can really say to explain this incredibly bizarre theme for a fanfic is that I have complex feelings about the positioning of good and evil in the James Bond franchise and I’m a young American leftist who fucking loves NASA and the history of the space program and therefore spends a fuck ton of time thinking about the ethical implications of the impossible-to-disentangle web of American space technology with the privately held military industrial complex. It’s kind of impossible in some ways to think about & engage with the history of nasa without also being forced to contend with the history of Lockheed Martin and its neighbors and I have no good or clean answers on how to reconcile all of that so I guess I just made it a surface theme in a silly fanfic instead and everyone can come for the platonic sugar baby reader insert and stay for the examination of the ethics of the legacy of the early American space program

[milkteamoon]

2022 fanfic review ✨

2023 is the year we are bringing BACK fic rec lists, so I wanted to put together a list of fics that I really enjoyed this year. Thank you all who made 2022 just a bit more bearable! (Note: ratings vary for these, please read the tags!)

▷ Antigonish by softlyblue - (complete, 10/10) Martin inherits a haunted house and hires ghost-seeing Jon to deal with something that wants to kill him. I love the slowburn in this fic so very much and highly recommend it.

▷ Beholding the GDPR by shinyopals - (oneshot) The Magnus Institute updates its privacy policies. This fic is so very funny and has a really neat formatting too!

▷ There Are Ghosts in This Story by whynotfly - (complete, 3/3) Something is very wrong with the Institute, but only Martin and Jon can see it. Honestly made me lie on the ground and contemplate existence after finishing it.

▷ Snare by prim_the_amazing - (oneshot) What if the Web claimed Jon long before the Eye? I really love the scenario this fic posits, as well as the characterization of my favorite girl Annabelle.

▷ Terror Management Theory by prismatical - (oneshot) Jon can’t die; this causes more inconveniences than one might think. This fic has such a fun premise and really is a wonderful and emotional ride!

▷ Mister Fahrenheit by masokissme - (oneshot) Jon deals with a fever after his encounter with Jude Perry, and Elias...sorta helps. I really loved the characterization of both Elias and Jon in this fic and think the author really captured the hilarity of their dynamic.

▷ How Not To Perform Customer Service Interactions by vienna_salvatori - (oneshot) The Magnus Institute from outsiders’ perspectives. This fic was hilarious and really captures the inherent humor of being just some guy in a world filled with eldritch horrors.

▷ Of Your Dreams by saintbleeding - (oneshot) Martin dreams of Jon while he’s in a coma. I love love love the horror of this fic; it truly left me feeling haunted long after I finished it.

▷ For a Firmament by supaslim - (series, 2 fics) Jon and his relationship to his own humanity. This is a very lovely s4 canon-divergence that has one of the best understandings of Jon’s character that I’ve read thus far.

▷ From the Highways to the Hills by blackwood - (oneshot) Georgie, Jon, and what they mean together. This fic looks at Jon and Georgie’s relationship through college, and I think the characterization of Georgie is particularly of note in its ability to stay true to her negative traits and still make her sympathetic.

▷ Jared Hopworth, Chiropractor by breekon - (oneshot) Jared’s side hustle, it’s all in the title. This fic is honestly just very funny and I love speculating as to what the avatars do in their off time.

▷ What Survives of Us by wildehack - (complete, 3/3) Jon wakes up after the Unknowing - after the end of the world. I don’t usually read post-canon but this one really got me and I think it truly feels like it could be canon.

▷ A Deeply Annoying Child by ajkal2 - (oneshot) A kid, a Leitner, and the consequences that follow. This is a really lovely look at Jon and Tim’s s3 relationship through a bit of a different lens.

▷ Won My Bride at a Poker Game by prim_the_amazing - (complete, 8/8) Martin saves a moth from a spider and deals with the unintended consequences. This fic is a very sweet slowburn that deals with fairy Jon and all of magic’s many intricacies.

▷ From Cradle to Cremation by did - (oneshot) Oliver Banks vs. making small talk with attractive people. I love fics focused on side characters, and Oliver’s internal monologue in this definitely worth the read.