boushards

submitted a bunch of stuff to my supervisors yesterday so i’m taking a day off. going to slowly return to a wip which i wrote quite a lot of at the end of last year before burnout really got me and which i was super excited about at the time. have been thinking about how i could lengthen it out a bit, but honestly plotting is my weakest point of craft and i have no idea how anyone even does it. i am always so impressed with people’s ability to just… sit down and write a coherent story. it’s always like pulling teeth for me, and i never really get what i want out of any plotting exercise. nevertheless, it’s iced coffee time.

sometimes, when elias has had a particularly long day, he ends his texts to jon as if he’s signing off an email and jon teases him mercilessly for it every single time it happens. imagining jon getting a text that ends in ‘yours, E. B.’ and snorting into his hand before replying with something just as formal and then promptly telling elias that he’s a hypocrite and should close outlook some time this century.

the fact that og elias was specifically reminded of his father when looking into jonah’s eyes is sickening tbh. he admits that he’s more terrified of jonah than anything else he’s ever experienced during his interview in mag 193, even his own brush with the supernatural. the judgement and the contempt and the knowing which elias finds there, peeling back all of his layers and leaving only the pathetic truth. his dad must have been an absolute piece of work.

given how boring and unremarkable canon implies elias’s outfits are, i imagine that the very first time jon saw him out of anything remotely resembling office wear was quite the experience. they accidentally bump into each other at work on a sunday and jon can’t for the life of him focus on what elias is saying because he’s far too busy taking in the fact that elias is dressed in washed-out jeans and a very soft looking v-neck. he just ends up nodding along to whatever is coming out of elias’s mouth and definitely misses the way elias smiles as he does so.

there is a walled courtyard at the back of jon and elias’s house. it’s small, made cramped by the outdoor table and chairs, but in the early summer mornings, it’s jon’s favourite place in the world. he sits with one leg propped up, resting his chin on it as he thumbs the pages of whatever academic tome is his poison of choice that day, listening to the wind rustle the wisteria which hangs low above his head. some mornings he loses himself in the scratching of his pen against paper, and other mornings he just sits, blinking in the sunlight. if he leans forward far enough, he can peer into the shaded kitchen, where elias goes about his own morning ritual of setting a pot of coffee on the hob, a look of contentment on his face as his soft whistling harmonises with the birds.

elias smoothing over the creases in jon’s tie with practiced fingers, shaking his head in feigned exasperation as he straightens it out, only to wind the fabric around his hand and yank jon in for a kiss. can anyone hear me.

jon being a certified yapper is actually perfect in a jonelias context because it gives elias a reason to unabashedly stare at jon whilst he rants about amino acids or the tube strike or the underwhelming book he finished yesterday without it seeming untoward in the slightest. elias is being polite. honest.

the season 1 archive crew are forced through some cruel twist of fate to invite elias to their weekly pub quiz night and he decides to mess with them by suggesting a plausible but very much incorrect answer to absolutely every question. they end up with their worst score to date.

the choice to have mag 100 be mostly statements that are about the supernatural but are in no way scary or unnerving and then to turn around and have Peter fucking Lukas - a very real threat who comes across as the complete opposite in a charming, disarming sort of way - show up in the last five minutes of the ep just to schlorp some poor unsuspecting guy straight into the Lonely is perhaps one of the most hysterical writing choices ever made.

i desperately need jon to have a breakdown in front of elias. like i’m talking clenched fists, fingernails digging in to his hands so hard that they draw blood, grit teeth, tiny choked sobs working their way out of his throat, jon trembling all over from the force of them. jon fighting so hard not to let elias see him break, not to let elias hear the way his voice cracks when he says elias’s name, all whilst knowing that it will be inevitable anyway. jon reaching a hand out towards elias but finding only empty air and the sight of elias watching him, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

jon is absolutely the type of person to forget his coat on his way to work and only notice when he’s clocking off. since he and elias are usually the last two to leave the building in the evenings, this leads to elias insisting almost every night that jon borrow his coat, because elias can’t very well have him catching a chill on his way home, only for jon to then be forced to undertake some kind of ritualistic walk of shame up to elias’s office every morning to give elias his coat back (alongside many assurances that it won’t happen again). (it does).

the funniest thing to me about the name jonah magnus is not that it feels like it’s a quintessential villain name or that it’s a bit stuck-up or whatever, but that when the adjective magnus -a -um is used specifically of a task in Latin it is often translated as ‘difficult to accomplish’ and somehow that always gives me a chuckle no matter how bad i’m feeling. the unintentional acknowledgment of his goal being almost impossible within his own bloody name is just. spectacular to me.

jon likes to stare at elias’s hands. they’re sharp and angular, but as well-kept as the rest of him, and when jon is losing focus or thinking too hard about something he finds himself fixated on elias’s fingers. how assuredly they move as he flicks through a sheaf of papers. how deft they are when elias spins a pen around in them, entirely lost to concentration. how sturdy they look wrapped around elias’s nondescript coffee mug of choice, or how often they are smudged blue from a careless flick of elias’s fountain pen. in the moments where his mind strays, jon wonders how they might feel tracing the veins on the backs of his own hands, or cupping his jaw, or smoothing through the fine strands of his hair as if it were the only thing in the world that they were created to do.

i know it’s somewhat stereotypical but i like to headcanon that elias is a bit of a coffee snob. he drinks espresso only and refuses to let anyone else use his coffee machine in case they mess with his settings because he’s got the whole thing down to an absolute science. jon insists that all coffee just tastes like coffee. they bicker about it constantly.