#whoever said elias is creepy from the beginning is dead wrong

[jouxlskaard]

I like to think that Elias is boring on purpose. he spends his time and effort when he should be working on boring his employees instead. he's perfected it to an art. every day, he visits each department and tries to find the time to talk about spreadsheets whenever there's the most people in one room at a time. then he tallies up how many of them visibly and/or audibly react with some form of disgust, and compares it with other days. he'd have realised how sad that really is if he hadn't been found out, but at least now he gets to be as deranged as humanly possible. you go, Elias. I love you you stinky rat whore, can't wait for you to show up in the new protocol episode <3

[haberdashing]

i want you to straighten out my tomorrow (4/?)

The last thing Jon remembers is working into the night in the Archives in early 2016. Now he’s in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Scotland, with Martin Blackwood as his only companion. Obviously Jon’s missed something along the way here…

Inspired by beloved of jon, though it can be read separately.

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4

on AO3

“It’s alright, Jon, it- it’s really not as bad as you seem to think-”

Jon closed his eyes as he pressed his hands against his face. “How bad is it, then? How much danger are we in? And we’re just- just sitting around talking, eating breakfast like nothing’s wrong-”

Jon’s voice started to quicken as his speech went on, his breaths quick and shallow. He was panicking, that much was clear, but he also didn’t especially see a reason to stop.

“Well, for one thing, odds are good nothing’s going to happen right this minute, we, we’ve been here for almost two weeks and nothing’s gone after us yet-”

“But something might go after us.” Jon couldn’t bring himself to unbury his head, to go back to looking Martin in the eye just yet. “Like Daisy.”

“Probably not Daisy, honestly. She was a hunter, yeah, but she was on our side. She, er-” Martin let out a strange sound somewhere between a wheeze and a laugh. “She was your friend, I think.”

“She tried to kill me, and now we’re friends?”

“That’s right, yeah. Trust me, it...” Another one of those strange sounds. “It seems odd to me, too. And it took some time.”

If Martin thought it was odd, and he was there, he remembered all of it happening... god, how much deeper did this rabbit hole go?

Jon opened a gap between two of his fingers just wide enough for him to be able to peek out, though he wasn’t sure if Martin noticed as much. “If not Daisy, who?”

“There’s the hunters I mentioned before. They came all the way from America to the Institute to go after you--you specifically, I mean. Actually, come to think of it, both of them come up in statements early enough you might know the names--Trevor Herbert and Julia Montauk ring a bell?”

Jon gave up all pretenses at hiding then, put his hands back down at his side so that he could more effectively stare at Martin in disbelief. “The vampire-hunting tramp and the serial killer’s daughter teamed up in America to become hunters that want to kill me?”

“Oh, you do remember them! That’s about the long and the short of it, yeah. Apparently you stole something from them after they kidnapped you?”

Jon’s mind was swimming again. If this was all a giant puzzle, evidently it had even more pieces than he had initially thought.

“Wait, Trevor Herbert... didn’t he die? I thought you said he died of lung cancer.”

“Oh god, not this again.” Martin muttered under his breath, the sound quiet enough that Jon wasn’t quite sure if he was meant to hear it.

“Again?” Jon repeated.

Martin’s face turned a bright pink. “This came up before once. I thought I’d heard that he’d died, but I must have mistaken, given that the guy’s still around... and, you know, out to kill you.”

Jon sighed, tempted to get in a dig about how Martin couldn’t even manage such basic research but instead only voicing a frustrated, “Great.”

“Though upside is, at least this time you’re not using that mistake as a reason to accuse me of murder.” Martin paused for a moment, and when he spoke up again, his words were softer, his voice subtly shaking. “You’re not accusing me of murder now, right?”

Jon nodded silently. He wasn’t sure how much he could trust Martin right now, whether his ramblings were haphazard lies or just flawed attempts at explaining a complicated truth, but even if he let his paranoia run wild, murder wasn’t on the list of misdeeds he could imagine of Martin at the moment.

“That’s... good. Certainly better than the alternative, anyway.” Martin let out a short bark of a laugh.

“Why did I think you killed someone, anyway?”

“Good question.” Martin laughed again, but there was no humor to the sound this time. “After I found Gertrude’s body, we weren’t sure who killed her, and you got all paranoid thinking someone you worked with was the killer, and that they’d be after you next. Which wasn’t entirely wrong, I guess, since Sasha’d just... gotten replaced.”

“Is that, that Not-Sasha thing the thing that killed Gertrude too, then?”

Martin shook his head, and Jon was struck by the sight of his wild red hair moving to and fro, how his streak of white strands mingled with the rest as it fell around his face. “No, that was... now, this might sound a bit crazy-”

“Because the rest of it hasn’t already.” Jon muttered in a low voice, more for his own benefit than for Martin’s.

Jon wasn’t sure whether Martin could make out what he had said, but he was greeted with a weary stare just the same. “-but I promise it’s true--Elias killed Gertrude.”

“Elias?” Jon furrowed his brow. “Why would he kill Gertrude Robinson?”

“Because she was planning on destroying the Archives, and him in the process. Almost self-defense, in a way, if you want to be generous towards him, which I really don’t.”

“Gertrude was the Head Archivist; why would she want to destroy the Archives?”

“Because they’re evil, Jon!” Martin threw his hands in the air. “Because we work for an evil organization dedicated to an evil fear power, and the Archives are the worst of it--well, besides Elias himself, anyway. On top of killing Gertrude, and then killing Leitner and framing you for it, he’s the one who made the Institute such a mess in the first place.”

Once again, Jon was finding a lot of information being thrown at him in a short period of time. Martin had mentioned Leitner before, but not that the man was dead, a murder Jon apparently was framed for--was that why he’d been “on the run” before, or was that a separate, equally-chaotic brush with the law?

(Also, some small, dark part of Jon that had hardened in place when he was eight years old was a little bitter that he wasn’t the reason Jurgen Leitner was now dead and buried.)

But that wasn’t what first came to mind when Jon opened his mouth to make a rebuttal, though whether he cared more about proving his knowledge or simply clarifying the situation Jon couldn’t say.

“From what I’ve seen, it sounds like the Institute was a mess well before Elias got a hold of it. If anything, Jonah Magnus should get the blame there.”

“Yeah, yeah he should, you’re not wrong! But the point’s moot, because Jonah Magnus is Elias.”

“...what?”

“He’s been, been swapping bodies or whatever for two centuries now, keeping a hold on his precious Institute.” Martin made a series of vague hand gestures to accompany his words, though their exact meaning eluded Jon. “Probably has some master plan involving the place. He was James Wright, too, and whoever was the Head before that, but now he’s Elias Bouchard. The whole Institute exists just to be some creepy monument to the Eye, to suck in power from his fear god.”

Jon’s head was starting to hurt something fierce, and as he realized one of the many implications of this latest tidbit of knowledge, his heart started to pound almost as fiercely as his head.

“...you said I have powers from the Eye, too, because I’m the head archivist. The same ‘fear god’ Elias has, according to you. Does that make me evil, then?”

Jon had hoped that Martin would eke out a quick “No,” maybe add in a bit of comforting reassurance, move on from the question quickly enough.

Instead, Martin hesitated for a long moment, and when he spoke up, it wasn’t to give Jon the simple “no” that he so dearly craved.

“I mean, not exactly, but... it’s complicated. You certainly can do evil things, or, or unnatural ones, with your powers--make people spill their deepest secrets, I think you cut off your finger once and it just grew right back?--but I know you try not to do that sort of thing... most of the time, anyway. You’re not just some amoral monster like Prentiss was when she attacked--I mean, obviously not, or else we’d be having a whole different conversation--but you’re also not... entirely human, thanks to your connection with the Eye. I wouldn’t say you’re evil, but the Eye is, and sometimes it’s hard to tell where you end and it begins.”

“...Christ.”

“Yeah, I know, this has to be a lot to take in, and I’m here to support you however you need me to...”

Jon looked around at his mostly-empty plate, at the dreary weather outside the window, at the safehouse and its thrown-together furniture and the half-done jigsaw puzzle on the far table, and his head swam as he tried to take it all in.

“Does that ‘support’ include you doing the dishes? I think I need a nap.”

Martin looked at Jon quizzically, though he obediently started clearing the table. “Jon, you just woke up.”

“Yes, and I’m going to take a nap now. I think I could use it; my head’s hurting pretty badly right now.” It wasn’t a lie, not exactly, but also Jon just wanted some time to himself, to think things through without Martin’s presence or input.

“Need a paracetamol? We’ve got a few in the bathroom cabinet.”

Jon noticed the way Martin casually, unblinkingly referred to the two of them as “we,” implying that their possessions were one and the same, but he didn’t have the mental energy to parse all the implications behind that single word right that moment.

“Maybe after my nap. We’ll see.”

“Alright then. Just... just come calling if you need anything, alright? I’m not going anywhere.” Martin shot Jon a weak smile as he finished that last sentence, and Jon wondered if there was something he was missing there, some inside joke or connection that was lost to him now.

“Will do.”

The bedroom was still small and awkwardly-decorated and the bed was still far too big for Jon alone, but as he lay there, trying his best to mentally put together the pieces to this convoluted puzzle, Jon was glad that he had some space to decompress on his own, tiny and awkward though that space might be.