When first listening to mag 111 and 117, did anyone else think that there was gonna be some terrible consequence for burning Gerry's page inside the institute? Specifically in the Archives? Like Gerry's ghost was gonna be bound there or something? Or was that just me? Also, a whole month, Jon?? xD
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Did Jon dream of Gerry's Statment during that time between meeting him and burning his page? Did it not happen because he was "dead"? Did Jon know it really killed him after he stopped dreaming about him? ...hmm...
Hello! I think you said once about a story you had about Danny, Jon and Gerry being ghost hunters (sorry if I misremembered) - I’d love to hear anything else you’re willing to say about it! Your writing is so incredibly amazing, thank you so much for sharing it. I hope you have a great day.
Himbois AU my BELOVED. I have two TMA Buzzfeed unsolved AUs and this one is my favorite of the two. I can’t remember what I’ve shared about this in the past so sorry if this is repetitive:
None of my fanfiction would exist if it were not for this AU because I explained it over text to my beloved moon wife and it made me remember how fun it was to share stories with other people and I started this account
The impetus to this entire thing is Agnes Montague. Jon is trapped in a Web plot, and she is the Web’s natural opposite. The Web carefully lays plans and she destroys them. She meets Jon when he goes to Oxford. Jon had to fight through a horrible craving for cigarettes to even walk into that diner, and the only reason why he did was because he couldn’t afford to buy more cigarettes.
They are inexplicably drawn to one another when they meet. She asks him to walk with her. She asks him if he would rather his path be determined by luck or fate, and he says luck. So she decides to grant him is wish, and rips the webs from his limbs.
It’s a horribly painful process. They’ve been on him since he was eight, after all, and after so long, they’ve become embedded beneath his skin. But he begs her to keep going, even when it gets so painful that he can’t move from it. When she’s done, she tells him that he has his luck, and she does not know if it will be enough to save him. Do not try to find her again.
Both of them think of the other as one of their dearest friends, after, even though they never speak again. Jon thinks of her as the woman who saved him. She thinks of him as the recipient of the one good deed she ever did.
A dog walker finds him burnt and bleeding out in the park and the police get called. Everyone thinks he was subject to a horrific attack by a sadistic freak. Because if Agnes ripping webs out from under his skin, he’s got huge gouges out of his flesh and burns in the shape of hands all over him. He feigns amnesia from the trauma and no one is ever arrested in connection with the crime.
The Web is fucking sweating trying to get him back on fucking track to chain his soul to the eye and end the world but he’s got wildly unmedicated adhd and drama in his soul so he starts a space pirate steampunk folk rock band instead and gets really into leather pants and eyeliner. Keeps forgetting to put in an application to the Magnus institute, re: unmedicated adhd, and it was hard enough to get the application in front of his face to begin with. It’s losing its mind.
Eventually it decides that there’s no way of doing this because Jon with total free will is forgetful and chaotic and it’s just too risky to the operation. But because of what Agnes did, the only way it can get webs back in him is if Jon willingly puts them back on. So it sends Annabelle Cane to intimidate him with simply a fuckton of spiders in an alley. It will make it so very painful while he resists, but if he puts the webs back on? They’ll make him forget it ever happened. And he’ll go on to the place that the Web will get him to anyway, but with far worse pain if he fights.
Cue immediate descent into madness for Jon.
From Georgie’s and his friend’s perspective he gets extremely paranoid, drops out of school, thinks he’s being followed everywhere (he is), and cuts them all out of his life.
From Jon’s perspective, he is desperately trying to escape the Web and unknowingly has kickstarted his own Becoming from his paranoid investigation into the powers. His Nan dies, and the Web sends him flowers to know that it killed her as a punishment for his resistance. He moves into his childhood home and gets more desperate in his search
Then Jessica, his friend from his band, disappears.
The Web arranged for the Circus to take her for parts, then texted Jon from her phone with an address to the warehouse in the woods telling him to come and see what he did to his friend. By the time he gets there, there is already another thing wearing his friend, and yet another speaking with her voice. He’s too late to save her.
While he’s sneaking out of the warehouse he catches a man’s eye. They’ll stopped halfway through the process of slicing off his skin, where it’s partially dissected and hanging off of him. He’s still alive. And there is so much pain and fear in his eyes when Jon locks eyes with him.
Maybe Jon just wanted to know he could save someone.
Whatever the reason, he physically drags this guy out of there, puts him in the back of his Nan’s car, and books it to the nearest hospital. He drops this guy off and fucks off the second people start asking questions like “what the fuck” and “what happened” and “hey, shouldn’t that guy be dead”
The Web watching Jon do what it least expected him to do which is manual labor: ::::o
Jon realizes he has to isolate himself completely. He can’t speak to his friends ever again. He can’t even be in a position to hear news about his friends again. They can’t be used against him if he won’t learn what the Web has done to them. He ices everyone he’s ever loved out and sets out hunting leitner to try and 1) learn more about what is doing this to him and why and 2) see if there’s one that can free him from whatever is hunting him
One day while he’s being generally insane and anguished and whatnot he gains the sudden and inexplicable knowledge that the man he saved is going to be executed along an empty stretch of road by the police, who know he is spooky and cannot allow him to live least other people learn about the existence of spooky things. He does not question how he knows this. He gets in his car and then drives straight to where the knowledge tells him to go and then he hits a police officer with his Nan’s car. He is extremely chaotic and impulsive and it just seemed like the thing to do okay
The man he saved has no memory of a time before the warehouse and has a lot of spooky injuries that cannot heal but inexplicably still allow him to function. Like his hand is barely hanging onto his body by a scrap of flesh and they have to stitch the rest back together but he can still move his fingers and use his hands just fine. He doesn’t get it either.
Anyway section 31 took one look at that bullshit and decided to shoot him in the head somewhere and call it a day and didn’t expect a deranged twink in a 1974 Honda civic to barrel down the road and immediately ram the officer on scene because the evil god that secretly lives in his head told him this was going on and like. He’s not gonna NOT save this guy. He’s done like one good thing in his entire life and that was shove this guy’s massacred body in the back of his grandmas hatchback he’s not gonna let the police UNDO that hard work
Jon doesn’t really know what to do with this guy now that he’s saved him a second time and is sort of freaked out by the Super Prison awaiting him for hitting a police officer with his fucking car so just decides fuck it he can stay in the spare room of his Nan’s house while Jon hunts Leitners.
Jon finds what is, unbeknownst to him, one of the desolation’s leitners on the day that the circus tracks the man to his house. The man lunges for the book, opens it, and the house burns down with Breekon and Hope in it. Jon and the man barely make it out alive. They see Breekon and Hope walk out of the burning house, on fire and wholly unconcerned, and know they have to both run. Now they’re living out of Jon’s Nan’s ancient hatchback and barely scraping by and know that the things chasing them are getting closer by the day
The Web is fine with all this because “Jon has a dark academia style descent into madness and we just sort of skip the Magnus institute and have him become the archivist anyway and get marked by the powers while dicking around with the supernatural” was actually its plan b. This is going great.
They decide the man’s name is Danny because originally he tried out a new name every day and then inexplicably Jon just called him Danny one day absentmindedly without knowing why and Danny had a fucking seizure about it which Danny decided was. Promising. Eventually he built up a tolerance and the seizures stopped so Danny it is then.
Danny is fucking stressed every time Jon goes off on his own. His mobility is limited because he is literally stitched together right now but Jon is somehow serial killer bait?? It is statistically improbable the number of serial killers he meets on his own. He was asking after leitners at a bookstore once and some guy named Mike told him he reminded him of himself, made him feel like he was falling for hours, decided not to kill him, genuinely wished him luck, and fucked off. Like how does that even happen. Jon just goes outside and indiscriminately violent people find him.
Jon insists he’s not going to get serial killed at the next bookstore he goes to, goes to Mary Keay’s bookshop, has a lovely chat with her over tea, asks her if she has a spot of cream, and then tries to climb out the fucking window because oh god oh fuck she’s a serial killer isn’t she
The windows are locked and she’s got a fucking gun so Jon ends up strapped to a table getting serial killed. Danny is going to be so pissed if he gets back and more pissed if he doesn’t
She’s barely started slicing at his skin, has to leave to get the phone, and a kind and beautiful goth rushes in the room and helps Jon escape. They take off together running, both kind of waffle around going to the police, which makes them both realize the other is fucked in the same sort of way. Jon offers to let him crash in their shit motel room for the night so he at least has a safe place to sleep. Well. Relatively safe place.
Fuck it. Fine. Call him Gerry.
Gerry follows this web marked guy back to a shit motel and finds a guy who’s obviously marked by the stranger who sees the blood and immediately starts bitching Jon out for getting serial killed without him and is like “oh you guys are FUCKED fucked”
It is without a doubt the greatest night of his entire life.
Despite how fucked these two are, there’s genuine love between them. They are all they have in the world, and they obviously care about the other despite being impossibly screwed. They treat Gerry kinder than anyone has treated him in a long time. He sort of wants to cry, sitting here with them.
Danny lets him use the green mug (objectively the best mug) because he is a guest and Jon got serial killed when he SAID he wasn’t going to get serial killed and then subjects Gerry to a PowerPoint presentation he’s prepared about What The Fuck Is Up With Jon: Ongoing Theories
Danny: theory 1) he could always do this stuff and no one noticed; theory 2) boy wizard undergoing delayed magic puberty; theory 3) he is possessed theory 4) he is just shaped like a serial killer victim theory 5) it is a pheromone thing; theory 6) he—
Gerry: it’s the third one
Jon: fuck
Gerry is the one who finally tells them everything. They could cry from relief because they’ve been flying blind this whole time. He explains the world, the powers, leitners, his mother, everything.
He’s tried to report his mother to the police to stop her from murdering people and whatnot but she told them that he was her crazy rebellious son and she’s trying so hard with him and he keeps doing these things and he got slapped with making a false report charge and is just. Fucked no matter what. But Jon is like “I could report her for trying to serial kill me? And maybe they’ll find her fucked up skin book?” And Gerry is like “that would be so cool of you for real”
Anyway they get immediately arrested because Mary tells the police that Gerry is her crazy rebellious son and Jon is her crazy rebellious son’s friend and they wrecked her house and are doing this because she wouldn’t buy them concert tickets and Jon’s literally got actively bleeding knife wounds from her and she’s got a little bit of blood on her shoes and they still believe Mary over them.
Jon is like. Sorry I couldn’t do more to stop your serial killer mom. And Gerry is like. No no it’s okay I appreciate you for trying. Sorry we got arrested together. And he’s like no no it’s fine I’ve had worse nights no really sort of, haha, sort of a low bar with being stalked by the spider that tried to eat me in childhood and all.
Anyway the next day the police let them go because Mary, that poor tormented old lady, insisted on not pressing charges despite how terrible the two of them were to her. Jon, who was nearly serial killed by her, feels rather offended.
They’re about to part ways when Gerry tells them to wait. He knows someone who can help put Danny back together. He’s not exactly safe but he’s reliable. You can make a deal with him. Just have to hope the price isn’t too high.
Which is how they end up in Jared Hopworth’s shitty gym bargaining Jon’s ribs for back room magic surgery while Gerry physically restrains Danny from trying to fight the man for wanting Jon’s ribs. Anyway the magic surgery works and Danny doesn’t need to stitch himself together anymore he’s just got a bunch of weird scars. Jared makes multiple pointed comments about how Jon needs more calcium and his bones are weird and spongy. Jon feels rather offended. Gerry has to muscle him out the door before he starts arguing with this fucked up bone man about the quality of his bones.
Jon thinks Danny’s going to fuck off and leave him now that he can live a mostly normal life as a man not actively falling apart and he’s trying to give this farewell speech so Danny doesn’t feel bad about leaving him and it’s just
Danny, doing a handstand: Jon are you kidding me I’m buying you a backpack leash you are never going outside again without me
Jon, choked up: okay
Gerry’s about to go back to his terrible mom because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go when Jon and Danny offer to let him come with them. He’s fucked too. There’s spooky death on his heels. Join the club, literally.
He tries to tell them his mom will be pissed and it’ll be too dangerous for them and Danny is like “I’m sorry I have an entire russian circus after me and Jon is being stalked by the spider that tried to eat him in childhood” and Gerry is like. You know what. Fair.
Gerry has always been damned. He has never been loved in spite of that fact. And the desire to know what that feels like is a physical ache. They’ll probably all die horrible deaths. But maybe they’ll be together as they go.
He gets in the car.
The issue is that while Jon has the physique of a damp kitten, Gerry’s built like a brick shit house and Danny is like 6’4”. And they’re all living in Jon’s Nan’s 1974 Honda civic. It. Is not comfortable.
They think they could scrape together enough money for a shit apartment but the thing is that they are all so unstable and visibly distressed with no job histories whatsoever that not only do they look like drug dealers, they look like drug dealers who do not make that much money. No one will rent to them.
Danny decides to start Ghost Hunt because not only can they claim to be struggling YouTubers instead of drug dealers which he feels is a slightly more appealing demographic to rent to, it’s something they can use to explain why they’re fucking around in abandoned, spooky places. It’s just a cover story. Obviously no one is ever going to watch it.
Jon and Gerry are the faces of Ghost Hunt because they have no illusions about being about to actually hide from the Web and there is no way Mary Keay has learned how to use a computer since Gerry left, but Nikola Orsinov is on Instagram. It’s safest if it’s just the two of them on camera.
The issue with just having the two of them on camera is that they physically cannot take this shit seriously. Are you fucking serious. Gerry has been seeing spooky bullshit since he was in diapers and Jon is being stalked by the spider that tried to eat him in childhood. They physically cannot stand in an empty room pretending to feel a chill when nothing is fucking there. This is. So stupid. Danny’s begging them to take this seriously it’s their entire cover story guys and they just cannot. Danny is on the verge of strangling them both.
This just immediately turns into Gerry and Jon fucking around in haunted houses and goofing off. It’s actually the most fun they’ve had in years. It’s just:
Gerry, reading off the Wikipedia page: it says that horrible fates befall those who mock this ghost
Jon, without hesitation: FUCK YOU
Gerry: *cackling*
Jon: how long is it supposed to take does it say
Gerry: *wheezing* no
Jon: IF YOURE NOT A HACK YOU WILL STRIKE ME DEAD HERE see nothing waste of our time
Most of their videos have like four views and they are very secure in the knowledge that this is a great and unobtrusive cover story and they run a shitty low quality ghost hunting YouTube channel as people who seemingly do not believe in ghosts and who wants to watch THAT and then they fuck off to America to go stop the buried ritual
THE PLAN IS THUS: they are going to walk up to the big hole and toss a leitner for the vast in the big hole
That’s it that’s the plan that’s all they got there is no plan b if the fucked up book thing does not work then the world is fucked they guess
There’s apparently a secret part two of the plan because they get to the fucked up hole town and the buried avatar is there and the second he tries to fuck with them Danny just fucking shoots him
Jon: WHERE DID YOU GET A GUN
Danny: do you remember that grocery store we stopped at
He tried to use a shitty Texas accent for the first part of buying that thing and then rapidly realized that no one cared that he was British and dropped it half way through the purchase process and just walked out with a gun
Anyway they go to the hole and find Gertrude Robinson trying to ritualistically sacrifice an astronaut to the hole and they’re like. Oh. Uh. We’ve got a book we were gonna uh. Just sort of toss. In there. If we could try that first. Danny, Danny don’t get too close just, just frisbee it. Frisbee it.
Anyway it works, town collapses into hole, ritual fails, world is saved, except for this town, which is again in a hole. Who wants to go to red lobster and fake propose to Jon so they get free dessert.
Jan Kilbride does not want to do that. He never wants to see any of them again. Literally no one talk to him. he cannot stop crying that was all so fucked up
Gertrude fucking hates all of them on sight, except for Gerry, who she thinks could do better. She hates Jon in particular. They are all ridiculous people and should not exist.
Anyway they did a great job world saving and are hopping back on a plane to England and are stopped by a fan at the airport. They are shocked they found one of the four people that have ever watched their videos. This is the point where they discover their fanbase has ballooned from four people who probably clicked on their video by accident to several million people while they were distracted by world saving
Some random journalist from buzzfeed stumbled on their YouTube channel and thought they were such a fun and fresh take on ghost hunting videos that they wrote an article which went mega viral while the bois were all too distracted by world saving to delete the videos before too many people watched them
Yeah, the cat? It is out of the fucking bag. They are Known now. It’s too late to delete the videos because they’re too famous. They delete them and ten duplicates will be up within the hour and everyone will be asking questions about why they deleted them. There’s already articles talking about how Jon, an infamous survivor of a violent attack in true crime circles who was reported missing several years ago under highly suspicious circumstances, has resurfaced and is making YouTube videos with an adult goth where they mock ghosts in haunted houses.
Danny’s like. Look. LOOK. We have to fucking lean into this. It’ll be too suspicious if we just delete the videos and go to ground. You are skeptics. You are SKEPTICS. The cover story of YouTubers stops working if you abandon YouTube the second you unlock success. We can USE this
Now Gerry and Jon are globally famous as ghost hunting skeptics on a comedy YouTube channel and are fucking sweating because online theories that they’re secretly monster hunters keep circulating because they are secretly monster hunters and the people they save keep trying to go public about it and keep getting discounted as part of the meme
Gertrude continues to run in the same circle as them and just. Hates all of them.
Gertrude, derogatory: the YouTubers
The boys actually try to save Michael and warn him off from her but they get chased off before they can explain and he thinks they’re just harassing a sweet old lady and then gets ritualistically sacrificed and it’s too late
But then he decides he weirdly likes them because they tried to save him and sets up a door in their apartment, which they discover when Danny randomly walks in there when he’s half asleep and trying to go to the bathroom. They are. Less than pleased.
Michael, oscillating with a million colors: you need not worry. You are hunted but any who try to find your door will instead find themselves walking my paths until their feet bleed with colors that shall make them weep with fear and ecstasy
Gerry: does that include the delivery man
Michael: yes
Gerry: fuck
Anyway they just decide that Michael’s just their fourth roommate who they cannot evict and sort of roll with it. They put up a baby gate in front of his door so Danny will stop trying to wander in there on his way to the bathroom. It’s. Whatever. This might as well happen.
When Mary Keay kills herself they arrest Gerry under suspicion of her murder and they’re like “wait wait we have an alibi” and Daisy Tonner has to watch several hours of uncut video of them fucking around in Scotland trying to find the Loch Ness monster
Jon: I’m Jon sims
Gerry: and I’m Gerry Keay. And this is ghost hunt.
Jon: we’re here on the shores of the Loch Ness, trying to find its fabled monster
Jon, one second later, looking out at the water, cannot swim: well I don’t see it
Gerry, wearing several pounds of leather, realizing they should have workshopped this more: yeah me neither
Jon: well we tried. Okay. Tune in next time for—
Danny, behind the camera: if you two do not find a way to fill at least an hour i will kill both of you
*hard cut to Jon and Gerry sitting on the shore trying to figure out if renting a boat is a hard requirement or if they can get away with just sort of looking at the water from the shore*
Jon: I just realized something
Gerry: what
Jon: we’re ghost hunt. We hunt ghosts. It’s in the name. And the Loch Ness monster isn’t, it isn’t a. A.
Gerry:
Gerry:
Gerry, softly: fuck.
Jon: why did we even come here
Anyway at the time Mary Keay died they had gotten distracted for several hours at a cafe dedicated to highland cows and then decided to pull their own low effort Loch Ness monster hoax with a $20 budget cap to see how easy it is. The answer is very and it is currently on the news, with everyone thinking it was real. Jon and Gerry did not think it would be as successful as it was. Multiple of their rival channels have already released videos about the Loch Ness monster treating it as seriously as possible to ride the hype from the recent sighting and discussing how the recent sighting is some of the best modern evidence of the monster being real and Jon and Gerry are just sitting on this video of them strapping a pool noodle to some driftwood and shoving it out into the loch. Jon fell in at one point and Gerry had to go drag him out it was a whole thing.
Anyway the alibi is airtight and Daisy is unequivocally banned from murdering them in the woods because they’re famous YouTubers and there’s no way people wouldn’t notice they’re missing. She’s convinced there’s something off with them but she has to let them go
Gerry’s shitty mom is a problem again and it ends up with the three of them screaming while Danny whacks at her with an on fire broom and she tries to stab Jon, who she blames for stealing Gerry from her. She keeps calling him a whore and shameless tramp and Jon is like. What are you talking about. We became friends because you tried to serial kill me. You were THERE. Do you. Do you think I seduced him that’s disgusting
They managed to burn her page eventually and it only took multiple fires and a mild stabbing. It’s fine this is fine.
Melanie king hates their fucking guts because they don’t even believe in ghosts and treat the industry like a joke but they’re the most famous ghost hunters by far. It cheapens the profession because there’s people who take this seriously and do good work and instead they’re all lobbed in with these idiots who are cracking jokes while investigating highly corroborated hauntings.
She also hates them because her show is called Ghost Hunt UK and they’re Ghost Hunt (they picked the name because it was stupid and simple and didn’t know someone had something similar. She did NOT appreciate that explanation) and she is treated like the lesser ghost hunt.
Martin has been a huge fan of ghost hunt since its inception. He was two of the four people that watched it originally because he loved them so much he’d watch every episode twice.
He likes them because they just all genuinely seem to love one another and he’s sort of stuck with no family and few friends in a job he’s constantly stressed at and it’s just. They’ve always been sort of an escapist fantasy of his. They were clearly struggling when they started this channel but they still ran off together and did what they loved and the idea of running off with friends was just something very dear to him. He was thrilled when the channel took off.
He’s made Tim watch a few clips of the show and Tim always walked off before a clip of Danny talking behind the camera came up.
On that note Danny the camera man has major cryptid energy to the fanbase because he’s never gone on camera (re: clowns want his skin) and when they started Danny kept telling Gerry and Jon to pretend he wasn’t there but they kept laughing and talking to him and pulling him into bits so he became a very cherished part of the show
Buzzfeed is a minor antagonist in this fic because they keep making these articles like “ten things that make us think the guys from ghost hunt are secretly monster hunters” to play off the meme but every time Jon is like “they’re FUCKING onto us”
When the lonely ritual rolls around Gertrude decides it’s beneath her and texts Gerry to handle it and their solution is to claim that they got an anonymous tip that it was a building undergoing an active haunting and host an episode there. They then start stomping through the halls of Peter Lukas’s fucked up building and loudly commenting on all the building code violations
Ghost Hunt briefly turns into a home makeover show because they find the poor lonely souls who are renting in this terrible building and decide to semi forcibly draft them into guest starring and take them shopping so they can pump their crib. So it’s just
Poor asshole getting unknowingly sacrificed to evil god: I guess the blue rug is fine
Gerry, believes in dedication to an aesthetic: but does it say ‘Janet’
Janet, eyes welling up in tears: no. No it doesn’t say Janet
Jon: then we will find one that does Danny get the car we’re going to the next store
The rest of the episode is Gerry just hauling various accent pieces into the apartments of some of the victims while Jon tries to climb in the fucking vents of this stupid building bitching about how many corners the owners cut and all the fire code violations. The conclusion of the episode is sometimes the real evil spirits haunting us are landlords. It is one of their most popular episodes and ironically the only one where everyone agrees nothing supernatural was going on.
Gertrude texts a link to the video to Peter Lukas with the message “bitch” and then laughs herself sick. It is legitimately devastating to the Lukas family business conglomerate and stock value plummets from the bad press. This is the only thing Gertrude likes about those boys.
The thing is that the head archivist of the Magnus institute is a job and the archivist is an entity and they do not have to be the same thing. When Gertrude dies, Elias appoints Sasha James as the new head archivist of the Magnus institute. But the Eye takes Jon as its Archivist.
Elias doesn’t know where the fuck the archivist is but he knows it’s not Sasha. Don’t get him wrong, she speedran her descent into madness, already Becoming something, but it’s not the archivist. He’s losing his mind where the fuck is the archivist
Meanwhile, Jon, trying to do Ghost Hunt: so you think your bar is haunted
Barkeep: no no we just got a funky air conditioner and the hoax attracts tourists so we keep it going
Gerry: :o
Jon: :o
Barkeep: … why the fuck did I just say that
There’s a subplot where they’re trying to infiltrate a ghost hunting convention because they’re trying to find Sarah Baldwin, responsible for multiple disappearances in the community, and are trying to figure out if maybe they can impersonate someone who has a reason to be at this convention or maybe steal a name tag or something and they’re still debating it outside the convention hall when someone running it spots them and is like “oh my god you’re ghost hunt” they forgot they were the most famous ghost hunters alive
Georgie is at this convention and she’s trying to hunt Jon down like an animal because he fucking disappeared years ago after going off the rails and Jessica going missing and he hasn’t replied to her multiple attempts to reach out and find out what the fuck happened. Melanie helps because 1) gay simp and 2) she hates that fucking guy.
This butterfly effects into a different subplot where Jon Knows that Melanie’s dad is trapped in his nursing home close to being killed by the crawling rot and Jon, Gerry, and Danny end up having to crawl through the window in hazmat gear and carry out like twenty confused and terrified elderly people before setting the fucking building on fire
They haven’t spoken to Gertrude since she set them up to die right around the time they were trying to stop the dark’s ritual (she knew both Jon and Gerry were too far gone in their own becomings and too dangerous to leave alive) and they barely made it out alive so they don’t actually know she’s dead they think she’s just a bitch
They finally collide with the archives crew when Jon’s just trying to go out and buy some fucking juice like a normal person and Danny insists on coming with him because Jon’s going to get serial killed if he goes alone and Jon insists he can go to the store and buy juice without a serial killing befalling him and Danny insists that lived experienced suggests otherwise and Jon insists it will be FINE and then he gets in his car and makes it exactly one block before he Knows that there’s some poor fucking guy trapped in his apartment by Jane Prentiss and he has to pull over. Danny will never let him hear the end of this
He just sort of makes a Molotov cocktail (Gerry taught him how) and sort of tosses it at her and she sort of falls down the stairs and there’s a lot of swearing and stomping and learning that fire extinguishers work way better than Molotov cocktails and when he turns around the poor fuck has opened his door and is gaping at him and Jon was sort of hoping he could dip before being seen. He does not want to end up on Buzzfeed again okay
Martin, thought he was going to die, opens the door to find his celebrity crush of several years personally coming to his rescue: :o :o :o
Jon very apologetically explains to him that no one will believe him and will think it’s just part of the meme so best not go posting anything online and if he agrees not to Jon will give him a ride to a place not haunted by worm ladies and Martin is like “uhhh could you take me to work? I’m an archival assistant at the Magnus institute” and Jon is like “that bitch”
Martin is very confused as to why Jon immediately drives him straight there like he already knows the way and charges right down to the archives and starts shouting at Gertrude to get her ass out here because she is not fucking doing this again not after what happened to Michael. Like. Did he know her personally. Does he not know she’s dead
Jon knows Gertrude is here because the Eye will not fucking shut up about how the Archivist is in the Archivist is in the Archivist is in. Where is the torrid bitch he’ll kill her
Sasha keeps insisting that’s she’s the archivist and demanding to know why he’s here and Jon’s like “no youre not” because the eye is emphatic about that much and it’s not until she tells him that Gertrude is dead that he becomes afraid.
Who is it. Who is the Archivist now?
The Eye practically sings that it’s him.
Jon has a terrible feeling that he has found himself in the same place that Agnes saved him from all those years ago. And he does not know if he has enough luck to leave it again.
He’s uh. He has to go. He’s sorry. He’s so sorry. He’ll—do something. Help them somehow. Fix this somehow. But he has to go right now. He has to, he has to get out of here
An out of breath Elias practically sprints into the room to stop him from leaving. He blocks the door.
Jon tells him to move. Elias is afraid he’s been trying to find Jon for too long to let him leave before a chat. Would Jon prefer Elias’s office or his own?
Jon pulls a fucking gun out of one of the file boxes and points it at him. Gertrude had them stashed all over the place, and it appears Elias missed one.
Jon actually knew that was here because Gertrude once pulled it on him. Woman hated him with a violence beyond compare.
Elias: you don’t even know how to use that
Jon: I’m omniscient. I’ll figure it out
Martin, knows this day has gone so far beyond his wildest self insert fanfic: :o
Elias insists that in a moment, the door behind him will open, and what Jon sees will make him lower the gun and talk to him. Jon insists that’s all the more reason to shoot him now, so he should get out of his way.
Tim comes back from lunch to find Martin’s celebrity crush holding his boss’s boss at gun point and is like ?????????
Jon takes one look at him, says “fuck,” and lowers the gun
Elias very smugly thanks Tim. Tim is like. Celebrity. Gun? Should he. Should he call someone. Police? No? Why would the answer to that question ever be no??
Jon’s looking at him like he’s seen a ghost.
He and his brother always did look similar. Not twins, but close enough. At first glance, Jon almost thought that Danny walked through those doors
He demands to know how long Tim’s been here. Elias says that he hired him several years ago, and he’s very glad he did. It appears that investment will pay off ten times over. Shall they have that chat?
Jon isn’t going to Elias’s office. Elias says he’s more than happy to host it in Jon’s. He cuts Sasha off harshly when she tries to ask what the fuck is going on, and tells Jon to lead the way.
They go into the head archivist’s office, and Jon feels the way he did all those years ago, trapped in an alley with Annabelle Cane feeling like a fly in a web.
Elias tries to launch right into a talk about employment and benefits, and Jon’s like. I’m not fucking staying here. No.
Elias tells him that’s rather shortsighted of him. The archives is staffed with assistants, and they need an archivist. That’s Jon. They’ve already run afoul of one being beyond their comprehension, and poor Mr. Blackwood only escaped with his life because Jon intervened. They won’t survive without him there. And that includes Danny Stoker’s brother.
He’s been working here since his brother—well, not died, exactly, thanks to Jon. Tim loved his brother so desperately. Never recovered from the loss. And his little brother loved him back just as much. Tragic, isn’t it? All these years spent apart, only for Tim to inevitably succumb to the perils of a position as an archival assistant not long after they’re brought back together—
Jon tells him to shut up. Just shut up.
They all sort of thought Danny didn’t have anyone? They spent days looking through missing person reports and never found him. His mark from the stranger made it impossible to Know anything about where he came from. Eventually, Danny told them to stop looking. He had a new life now and wouldn’t leave the two of them for anything. He doesn’t care who he was before this, so it didn’t matter. Jon never even knew his last name was stoker.
Jon leaves. Elias lets him, insisting that he’ll return soon enough. He staggers back to his apartment, where Danny is crawling the walls knowing that Jon has been gone far too long for a juice run and is probably out there being serial killed again. Jon gets back, lets Danny bitch him out, and tells him his name is Stoker. Danny Stoker. He has a brother, who loved him very much, and who saw the stranger take him, and who is trapped in the archives of the Magnus institute. His name is Tim. He is likely going to die, and Jon is the Archivist, which means that maybe he could save him. Maybe he could go back, take his place where the Web set for him, and maybe that would be enough to let Danny’s brother live.
Danny says that if that’s what it comes down to, let Tim die
One of the key conflicts in this is just how fiercely Danny loves Jon and Gerry. He started with Jon, and he’ll end with him. His entire life has been spent desperately trying to save these two people from things that want to eat them while they try to save him in turn. There is no room for anyone else. They’re drowning as it is. And Danny has built his own identity on the foundation of his love for Jon and Gerry, and he is incapable of putting anyone else above them. He does not remember having a brother. And he will not sacrifice Jon to save him.
Danny’s actually furious that Elias is trying to use him as leverage against Jon. He sort of impulsively decides that the only way to stop it is to just cauterize himself from Tim entirely and refuse to talk to him. He doesn’t know who that guy is and doesn’t remember being his brother. There’s no point in telling him Danny’s alive because he’s got no interest in trying to be whoever the fuck this guy remembers. There’s no persuading him otherwise
Cue Jon and Gerry trying to sort of float around the peripheries of the archives refusing to set foot in the building but trying to ease the assistants through their introduction to the spooky world without mentioning the fact that Tim’s dead brother is not dead he’s their roommate and they love him. Meanwhile Danny is trying to hunt Jane Prentiss through the fucking sewers because Jon refuses to leave until she’s no longer an active threat to the archives and he wants Jon away from the fucking Magnus institute. He hears Japan is lovely this time of year let’s move there.
Meanwhile Tim, who walked into this sort of already done with everything because Sasha turned into a paranoid lunatic and he just found out that his boss is evil and they work for evil god and also they can’t leave or they’ll die, has decided that all he wants in this world is to kill the thing that took his brother from him and that these guys are the best chance he has of doing that. Do they need a sound man or something because he’s in on their thing now. He’s in on it. Sorry to force his way in but he’s killing those fucking clowns
Meanwhile Jon is fucking sweating because Tim is loving his brother on main nonstop as if to make Jon specifically agonized with guilt over Danny’s decision to not tell him he’s alive.
There’s a lot more but this is fucking long so I’ll leave it here
I got an ask requesting more from this universe and, so it’s all on one post, I’m continuing it here. So miscellaneous fun facts from the Himbois AU universe:
When the himbois started ghost hunt they did talking heads from an inflatable pink couch like the ones everyone had in the 90s. This was because they were chronically homeless and could only fit inflatable furniture in the car. Danny got it on a whim and when their show took off, they kept the inflatable pink couch as a key feature of it, because they were emotionally attached to it now.
The producers of supernatural have called them up multiple times asking them to guest star as monster hunters who use being YouTube ghost hunters as their cover story to play off the meme and every time they get asked they’re like “hahaha so sweet to ask us but we can’t act sorry thx bye” and sweat even harder
I cannot emphasize enough how the assumption that no one would ever watch this fucking thing was absolutely central to the decision to start ghost hunt. Never in a million years would they have done so had they thought that it would result in them becoming famous.
Danny smacked both Gerry and Jon multiple times when they realized what happened because Danny had been telling them for ages to act like normal goddamn ghost hunters and they kept laughing it off and being like “Danny come on no one is ever going to watch this so what does it matter” if they had acted like normal ghost hunters then no one would have watched their dumb asses but fucking Comedy Central over here just had to go and charm the internet with their irreverent wit. see this this is why they have to listen to Danny this is their fault
Low key tho the fame is in part Danny’s fault because part of the reason why they took off is because of how much they all visibly love each other, Danny included. Most ghost hunting shows just didn’t include the crew and Gerry and Jon just kept dragging Danny into their bits. Their friendship was one of the biggest selling points as a result. Like it was just:
Gerry, reading off the back of the ouija board box: okay so we’re supposed to surround ourself in a salt circle
Jon: why
Gerry: I dunno for protection from the ghosts
Jon: how are the ghosts supposed to move the stupid toy if they’re stuck outside the salt circle
Gerry: the box doesn’t say
Jon: again I question the reliability of equipment purchased from a toys r us
Gerry: I’m just reading the box
Jon: wait Danny’s outside the salt circle are we supposed to just leave him to the ghosts
Gerry: fuck you’re right. That’s fucked we can’t do that
Danny: guys I told you to pretend I wasn’t here
Jon: to the point of your DEATH that’s ridiculous give him his own salt circle Gerry
Gerry: we don’t have enough for two circles
Jon: how do we not have enough salt for two circles was our twelve minutes of preparation not enough to ready us as ghost hunters
Gerry: I got these salt packets from a McDonald’s hardly enough for one circle really. Danny get in the salt circle with us.
Danny: I’m not getting in the salt circle I can’t film you if I’m standing right next to you
Gerry: well I’m not going to summon any ghosts with this thing if it might get you killed by a vengeful spirit
Jon: right are we supposed to just sit here while you are falling victim to saltless murder
Danny: *heavy sigh* I—it doesn’t trap the ghosts outside the circle it keeps them from leaving it. In this scenario I’m leaving you both to the ghosts
Gerry:
Jon:
Gerry: honestly I don’t know enough about ouija boards to say
Jon: we’re sitting in an entire bloody haunted house and we’re supposed to assume that every last ghost has crowded into this circle with us
Gerry: frankly if we’re trapped in with the ghosts it only seems fair that Danny is too
Jon: right right if we’re getting ghost murdered no reason why he shouldn’t be as well
Danny: guys enough I’m not getting in there with you
*hard cut to Danny crammed into the salt circle too, jon and Gerry captured in extreme close up*
Gerry, smug: the gangs all here
Danny: use the bloody thing before there are two more murders in this godforsaken house
*Jon and Gerry try to use it* *nothing happens*
Jon, after a beat: waste of 33 pounds. Do you think we can return it where’s the receipt
And
Gerry, reading off the Wikipedia page: says that people undergo sudden and violent urges while in this room. Jon do you feel anything
Jon: haven’t since 2003
Gerry: cheers. what about you Danny do you feel any violent urges
Danny: literally every day. For the last time you need to pretend that I am not here
From their videos they’re just a group of twenty something skeptics Trying Their Best but the second you look at their history their everything is suspicious. Jon was an infamous case in true crime circles before he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. After he disappeared, there was a new slew of videos about him that went around the true crime circuit for a while because of how bonkers his disappearance was. And now he is a ghost hunter. Like what. What happened. Literally the whole world thought he fucking died why is he a YouTuber.
They are not beating the “actual monster hunter” allegations at all. Like it is fucking bad. There are so many suspicious fucking things about Jon and Gerry that they refuse to answer that just endlessly fuel the conspiracy mill. Like, to show how bad it is:
Jon initially tried to go to the police about Annabelle Cane. He didn’t think they’d be able to protect him from spider magic, to be clear. He was just desperate and willing to the anything. So he lied and told them that he saw the person who mutilated him and this is her description and where he saw her, go get her, and got sort of blown off as hysteria when the person he described was a tiny woman and he claimed to not remember who attacked him when the attack first happened
That being said there is a police report out there that includes Jon saying “she is going to kill me and you do not care enough to stop her” out there that the true crime community shoved in every fucking video after he disappeared
The paranoia, the fact that he thought he was being followed everywhere, his Nan dying and flowers being sent to the funeral claiming responsibility, him cutting out everyone he loved, the house fire—it all made it into the true crime videos and into public knowledge before ghost hunt. Georgie and the rest of his friends actually looked very hard for him after he went missing. They filed multiple police reports and told them everything that was happening to Jon before he went missing. The police never realized it was Section 31 material; they just thought Jon had a breakdown and either disappeared or was kidnapped/murdered by a run of the mill stalker/killer. So all the police reports got released through freedom of information requests, and true crime podcasters and vloggers made him a staple for a while. Then, he pops up alive and doing ghost hunting on YouTube.
Gerry looks like an actual wizard and then his mom goes and dies a mysterious and violent death involving manual skinning and then he gets arrested under suspicion of her murder and then he gets immediately released by having the air tight alibi of *checks notes* setting up a Loch Ness monster hoax at time of murder and then it becomes sort of apparent that he accused his mom of ritualistic serial killing involving skin books on multiple occasions and he and Jon met when his mom tried to serial kill Jon and the police just wouldn’t listen and it’s. It’s a lot of questions no one wants to answer. They stay off the internet for a bit after that.
Moral of the story is that they have such mysterious and strange things in their history that they unequivocally refuse to discuss that everyone’s like “idk maybe they’re involved in supernatural bullshit fr” but it is it is fr
Jon gets into a minor feud involving the true crime YouTubers because people keep begging them to cover true crime stuff too and he got caught on camera saying that he doubts he could ever talk about his own attempted murder with nearly as much unfettered glee as the true crime community and he was of the understanding that making a video to that end was mandatory to run a true crime channel and it does not. Go over. Well.
One of the reasons why Melanie hates them so violently is because the similarity of their names makes her show the most compared to Ghost Hunt out of all the ghost hunting shows and there’s a bunch of fan compilations out there of her show in a haunted attic or whatever being like “I feel it there’s a presence here” or “I think something just pinched me” hard cut to Jon and Gerry standing in the same room like “don’t feel a thing really” and “IF YOU ARE REAL ATTACK ME NOW LETS GO bloody nothing what did I tell you Danny how much longer do we have to do this for.” The general consensus is that Ghost Hunt is the more entertaining and honest of the two shows and Melanie wants them dead
Melanie tries to hunt them for fucking sport because she finds out they may be actual fucking monster hunters when they save her dad from the nursing home and her dad moves in with her and tries to pull up her show and instead finds those nice monster hunting fellows who snuck in his window, got him and the other survivors to safety in the surrounding woods, killed the caretaker with a great deal of arson and screaming and injecting him with cleaning supplies when they got found there anyway, made them burn their clothes and put on new ones, and called the fire department to come pick them up. Delightful young men, seemed very stressed at all moments.
Melanie’s very grateful for saving her dad to be clear but what the fuck do you mean they’ve got concrete knowledge of the supernatural and just never fucking shared it and also their cover was to ruin Melanie’s life specifically
Cannot emphasize enough that buzzfeed is a minor antagonist in this. Jon is convinced that entire news network is a web plot meant to ruin his life personally. There’s this entire Jane Prentiss arc that culminates with Jon on the front lawn of the Magnus institute getting worms ripped out of him and he’s just like “oh dear god we’re going to end up on buzzfeed again aren’t we”
On buzzfeeds end they are not a ensign of the web they just stumbled on these small creators and thought they were such a fun show that they made a post about them completely unaware that they were outing real life monster hunters to the world. they have no idea the ghost hunt boys hate them and have invited them to do the puppy/kitten interview multiple times. It hurts them every time they turn it down but dear fucking god they cannot risk having to directly answer buzzfeed’s questions it’s bad enough as is
Every time buzzfeed publishes an article about how maybe Jon and Gerry from ghost hunt are real life monster hunters haha here’s ten reasons why Danny whacks them multiple times and makes them film another stupid YouTube challenge to try and take the heat off and they’re both losing their minds. Gerry’s a reluctant voodoo boy and Jon’s being stalked by the spider that tried to eat him in childhood and Danny’s forcing them at gunpoint to do unboxing videos. Danny what are they unboxing they live in a car
That being said once their YouTube thing takes off they actually make a very tidy sum because they’re just so ridiculously popular so it does help with the finances. In this world stopping the apocalypse is unknowingly being funded by NordVPN.
When Tim finds out about Danny it’s a whole thing and he is aggressively trying to hire himself as the new ghost hunt sound guy and Danny is like “please please please please please fuck off just fuck off I can’t do this” because the addition of Tim to the mix secretly sort of terrifies him. Like he has spent his entire existence as he remembers it just trying to find a world the three of them can live in and that feels impossible as it is. Danny started with Jon and he’ll fucking end with him too. Gerry and Jon are his world and it’s so hard to find space there for Tim, particularly when Elias is trying to use Tim to hurt Jon. Danny does not fucking want Tim on the team and Tim’s just manifesting like So Glad To Be On The Team Guys
From Tim’s perspective he’s obviously in extreme emotional turmoil about all this but frankly? A world where Danny is alive and *checks notes* a successful YouTuber(?) but seemingly hates Tim is a world Tim will pick every fucking day when the alternative is his brother being dead. Danny could spit in his face every fucking time he saw Tim as long as he was alive to do it. He could never speak to Tim again and Tim would weep every day for joy
That being said like. Cmon. Tim’s not just gonna give up. Fuck no he’s doing the ghost hunting thing.
Tim kept walking off whenever Martin showed him ghost hunt because when he was first explaining it he was very excitedly telling him about how they’ve got Danny The Camera Man who’s never shown but they keep dragging him into their bits while he begged them to pretend he wasn’t there and just. It still hurt to hear that name. Especially in this context. Ghost hunting show is the exact sort of shit Danny would have gone nuts for. It just hurt too much to hear this Other Danny who got to go out and live a life his brother would have loved
After he finds out the truth it sort of haunts him because he could have realized his brother was alive years prior. But that being said the show becomes a huge source of comfort for him when he finds out the truth but when Danny’s still icing him out. He falls asleep listening to it. Sure his brother doesn’t remember him and doesn’t want to but he’s alive and there is hours of content of him laughing and teasing and being so obviously loved.
Danny’s conflict with Tim sort of feeds into an overarching conflict, which is that every single one of the himbois think of the others as their entire world while being insecure about their place with the others
Gerry came in later than Danny and Jon and they both already had their own dynamic going. He initially feels a bit like he’s intruding and not meant to be there and Gertrude initially tries to use this to get a foothold in Gerry until Events happen
Jon meanwhile sort of feels like he’s the most fucked and an active liability to the other two. Like Gerry’s got an utterly shit mom but she’s still human. Danny’s on the run from a circus but they’re not the web. Like, it’s hard to escape the other entities. But it’s seemingly impossible to escape the web. He feels like the other two would have a better chance without him and constantly tries to give them outs he doesn’t want them to take because he has nothing if they leave him.
But, from the other two’s perspective, he was the only one of them that like. Had a life before this. Danny doesn’t remember shit before Jon dragged him out of that warehouse. Gerry’s life sucked and was always doomed. But Jon had friends. He had a band and was in college and was going to have a relatively normal life. So both of the other two sort of worry that they’re the lesser life and he’d rather go back to what he had before them
Danny’s constantly worried because his entire identity is built around Jon and Gerry. He felt like a bag of jumbled puzzle pieces for the longest time and Jon fought to help him make some kind of order of things. Then Gerry got there and made their family complete. But they’re all so unstable that Danny feels like he could lose everything at any moment. He’s trying to desperately to hold onto both of them and the life they’ve built but he’s constantly haunted by the notion that he could lose this life the way he lost whatever life he had before them. That one day the stranger would get him and the version of him that loved Jon and Gerry would just be. Gone again. Like he never existed
Tim is this concrete person who proves that he loved people and had a life before this and he genuinely didn’t want that to be the case because he can’t afford to fight for anything else. He’s barely hanging on as it is.
On the flip side Jon’s constantly preparing for his horrible spidery death and is actively pushing for Danny to build a relationship with Tim so he has someone he can go to if their thing goes to shit. Danny knows he’s doing this and it makes him resist harder.
Jon becomes a meme pretty much every other week. Not an episode goes by without a new meme of Jon sims going viral. He is the internet’s favorite damp little freak.
When they were in their Homeless Poor On The Road days they had a rotating series of bits involving proposing to Jon in restaurants in an attempt to get free food. Sometimes if they were really struggling Gerry and Danny would alternate being the one pretending to be in a committed relationship with Jon and the other snaps and starts to fight them out of secret love for Jon and they all get kicked out before they have to pay the bill. Like they had the most ridiculous fake soap opera drama bullshit going on in an Olive Garden parking lot but they were fucking desperate okay
Jon doesn’t know why he always has to play the guy getting proposed to/fought over. Gerry and Danny insist it’s because he’s not that good an actor and that’s the easiest role. This is bullshit because the man was weirdly born for the stage despite looking and acting like he got lost on his way to the library every moment of his life. Gifted performer and better at it than both of them combined. But the real reason is “out of the three of us you look the most like a bottom” and they cannot tell him that or he’ll drive them all right off a cliff
okay i cannot emphasize on how hard chapter 18-19 of nature has taught her creatures to hate made me cry. jon being an impressionable kid and relearning how to be a person with the help of gerry is so, so fucking sweet, and despite not making it out of the institute, what happened mattered anyway. gerry’s actions and resolve still matter even if they didnt reach their goal. and its like. what the fuck.
what fucked me up even more was gerry seeing this kid younger than him and deciding he can *never* be selfish when it comes to jon. he needs to be someone jon can look up to and rely on. but like. hes also just a kid. its horrible, its horrible all the way around, but when you find love in horror you cling as hard and fast as you can until your nails rip off. gerry is just such a good person, man.
I love so much TMA's theme of "the choices you make, even the unfair ones, are the ones that matter." It's this horrible monkey paw situation. It's not that they're utterly helpless in the face of the horrors--in fact, the horrors sometimes can't touch you unless you make the choice to let them. But they can do truly horrible things to guide your choice. It's like Michael--you have to be the one to open its door, but it doesn't have to play fair to get you to do it.
Gerry and Jon fail, back when they're kids. But they still chose each other in the face of horrible consequences. They still chose to love and sacrifice for someone else. And I think that that will always matter.
It's the one thing that Elias can never take from Jon, and believe me--he's tried. Elias can make the choice as unfair and painful as he wants. But it's still Jon's choice in the end. And Jon chooses Gerry. He chooses to love. And that's not nothing.
As to the second thing, I really think the sheer existence of Jon was a total role reversal for Gerry and really just a sign of how good of a person he is.
(I know there’s a lot of debate as to whether he’s the major character death tagged, I’m using present tense because i had to pick a tense but I will leave the mystery of whether he’s alive or not up to y’all the tenses in this post mean nothing).
Gerry is so fucking angry by the time he meets Jon. He’s at this point in his life where he’s in a horrible, abusive, metaphysically terrifying situation that he just can’t find his way out of. He’s tried asking for help, and people chose not to help him. And that’s important—they chose to do it. It’s not that they couldn’t overcome his mother; they explicitly decided to not help him.
The theme of choices and their importance in TMA is, again, just such a huge motif, and it’s no different here. And, moreover, Gerry knows about the importance of choices—his mother raised him to understand them. It is a huge, looming, unshakeable fact in Gerry’s mind at this point: the choices people make matter, and for some reason, everyone chooses to leave him to unspeakable suffering.
Roles are another important thing in TMA—and Gerry very squarely occupies one as the person reaching out for help. He is never the person in the position to offer it, at least not at this point in his life. He is never truly been confronted with the same decision of helping someone being abused that he has proffered others, again and again and again.
He has been dancing along the edges of that decision, however, and he is absolutely fucking terrified that he will make the same one that everyone makes with him. In his statement, he mentioned his mother’s victims—that she stopped hiding them after he tried to turn her in, and that he always told himself that it was too late, they were already dead, and there was nothing he could do.
He also mentions he was lying to himself.
Now, in truth, there really wasn’t anything he could do to help them. His mom really could and would have overwhelmed him, and by the time he saw them, they would have died even if he got them to a hospital. But he still made the choice not to try, and that’s important, and that is a part of himself that Gerry has never been able to forget no matter how hard he tries.
And then there's Jon.
At the start of their friendship, Gerry is so extremely convinced that Jon and he are occupying the same role. Jon is the kid trapped in this world, who no one helps.
It is not until he finds out that Elias made him an avatar that things change.
It's like this: Gerry and Jon are both two kids in a wildly dangerous situation. Their respective adults have brought them down to the edge of the deepest pool in the world. There's no lifeguard on duty, no safety rails, no life vests, and neither of them have been taught to swim. The ground is slick and people slip often, and if you fall in, you will never be able to climb out again.
Gerry knows, viscerally, that his mother has put him in a situation where he is probably going to drown. But, at the very least, she's warned him not to run--even though she forces him to walk at a hazardously fast pace.
Gerry thought that was Jon. Elias brought him to the edge, told him to keep up, and looked on when he fell in and died painfully. Jon was just the less lucky version of Gerry. Both of them have constantly ran the risk of being eaten, but Jon just happened to be the one that got swallowed. He was suffering the terrible fate that Gerry was fully expecting to befall him.
But then Gerry finds out that Elias made him an avatar on purpose. And that's different from what happened to Gerry. Gerry's mother introduced him to the risk of drowning, but Elias held Jon beneath the waves and waited until he stopped struggling.
Gerry realized, then, that, for the first time, he was the guy that could turn a blind eye. He was every single person who had ever turned their back on him.
And it would have been easy for him to do the same thing.
Because while Gerry had realized that there was a difference between him and Jon, Jon hadn't realized the same thing. Jon was not asking Gerry for help. At the time Gerry decided to save him, Jon wasn't aware that he could be saved. Gerry could have kept on the same way they were going before he knew, and Jon would have never once thought the worse of him.
And besides, the Institute, Elias, and the Eye were all incredibly dangerous. Gerry knew he would risk a horrible, painful fate if he went up against them. He had every single reason to not risk what he did.
He could have turned a blind eye, and the only one who would have paid the price was Jon.
Gerry was a little boy in a terrible situation who found a littler boy in a worse situation, and he decided that he needed to be for Jon everyone he never had. Gerry was a kid, and was trying to force himself to walk in some very adult shoes. Jon was just so incredibly fucked up when they ran that he was completely unaware of how wrong things were, and Gerry ended up shouldering a huge amount of the burden of keeping them on track. The car could have been actively on fire in a hurricane and Jon still would have counted it as better than where he was before; Gerry knew why Jon was like this and loved him more than anything, but at the end of the day, he was still very young and very afraid and spent most of the time wanting to cry. It was unequivocally the best part of his life, and he spent most of it wanting to cry.
It was horrible, and it was unfair, but it mattered. The choices that they made in those moments made Gerry Keay and Jonathan Sims more than any single thing Elias ever did, and it mattered.
in nhthcth do you have the ‘elias kidnapped jon’ reveal already planned? if so how close are we to it? every time you post a new chapter, i come up with a new reveal in my mind, you rly have me writing mental fanfiction for a fanfiction :/
I had all of nhthcth planned for a while before I ever started posting it. There’s been a few things that changed and developed more during the writing process itself, but all of the major plot points and narrative beats were decided and set for over a year before the first chapter went up. I was actually biting my nails during the finale of tma because I walked in like “how badly is this going to invalidate my fanfiction plans.”
Unfortunately, as a rule, I don’t really disclose whether certain plot points are going to exist/when they’re coming, because there’s a lot of people who follow me for nhthcth and I don’t want anyone to get spoilers they don’t want. But so y’all can get a (spoiler free) sense of nhthcth’s general shape and size:
Act II: Conflict Set Up (Circus Conflict Begins-Redacted) — You Are Here/Almost Completed.
Act III: Name/Details Redacted (even the name spoils too much)
Act IV: Whoo Boy There’s A Big Storm Coming Arc
Act V: Climax
Act VI: Finale
As you can see this thing is fucking huge, which is one of the reasons I was really hesitant about posting it. It’s honestly more three separate stories (Jon’s childhood storyline, 2013 storyline, and Redacted) in a trench coat that all feed into each other. Currently, we haven’t even started what one of those stories are and are only partway through the other two. I was a bit worried about committing to that big of a project, but I loved Jon and Gerry’s story arc specifically so much that I decided to try and tackle it anyway, and I’m enormously glad I did.
But I’ll be on this ride for a while, and I’m extremely grateful to the people who have been riding along with me. It’s going to take a while to get to the end, both because there’s just so much story left to go and because I need to take breaks from writing it every now and then to let my brain chew on other stories. We’re definitely going to make it all the way, though. I have no plans on abandoning this no matter how long it takes to finish. This is probably one of my favorite stories I’ve ever come up with and it’s been really great to share in this community of people who like it too.
Thank you for reading and enjoying nhthcth! Have a good rest of your day!
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Hi! I’ve sent you two asks already, sorry for bothering you. I just can’t stop thinking about nhthcth, but I was wondering, does Jon get paid? Was he getting paid as a child?
For some reason I got this idea in my head that if Jon didn’t get paid the contract wouldn’t work. Because like, contracts are usually an agreement that one person does one thing and gets another thing in return. Like the Magnus Institute’s contract is like “you work here and never leave and sell your soul to me and I’ll give you maybe more than minimum wage,” so if Jon didn’t get paid, the Institute wouldn’t be holding up their end of the contract, so Jon wouldn’t need to hold up his end and he could leave.
Although I don’t know how that would work when Jon’s a child, he wouldn’t have a bank account, (does he have one as an adult?) I assume it would just go to his legal guardian’s bank account, which I guess would be Elias, but did Elias ever fully adopt Jon? Like legally? Did Elias have to forge adoption papers and stuff or did he just kidnap a child and hoped he’d get away with it. (I suppose he did get away with it) does Jon even have an ID? How did he go to university when he doesn’t have any school history past third grade?
Anyway, sorry I started rambling, you of course don’t have to answer this (nor do you need my permission not to answer, so I’m not sure why I said that) this is just a funny little question I was thinking about. Also, sorry if you’ve answered this already or there’s something in the fic that would answer it and I didn’t notice. Thank you for the amazing story and answering my other asks.
So, you've actually hit the nail on the head on one of the very important rules for nhthcth as a universe, insofar as like, magic systems (for lack of a better word) goes. That being said, a lot of the specifics of this ask is something that I can't answer due to spoilers (like how he went to university, whether elias ever adopted him, whether he has an ID). Those will receive direct explanations in the course of the fic so I can't answer them here.
But as to like, the magic system itself, it's already been seen/addressed in the fic (in a lot of disparate bits and pieces), so I don't have a problem with a more detailed explanation below the cut.
so, most of this system has been in subtext and broken up amongst a lot of little moments in the fic itself. its there but figuring it out takes a lot of patchwork. I don't currently have a more explicit breakdown of the system in the narrative itself because having like, Jon explain it super explicitly feels a bit too much like those internal monologues of an anime fight scene where the characters are having these really in-depth breakdowns of what they're planning and what's happening while they're throwing each other through walls. I just like more subtle storytelling, personally? A lot of the time, it just becomes so painfully obvious that they're talking to the audience and it feels clunky and unnatural. So I scattered the foundation of this amongst a bunch of little moments throughout.
You're absolutely dead on about contracts needing to be "one person gets one thing and the other person gets the other." That is a hard and fast rule in nhthcth, and it has everything to do with what the Web is.
One of my favorite bits about TMA world building is that the fears as so metaphysical. Which makes for a very fun (again, for lack of a better word) magic system. I hate it when magic systems break their own rules or become too powerful and you can just supercharge on the Power Of Friendship to do basically anything if you Believe Enough. Personally, I think characters get to really shine and show their intelligence when you stick them with very narrow and firm rules and make them work inside that system without breaking it. TMA in particular does an amazing job with that.
The Fears are the platonic ideals of their own identities and they legitimately cannot resist what they are. The episode with the Web's theatre production best encapsulated this: The Web said something along the lines of "If only you could see the strings on me."
In that same episode, Jon almost got trapped in the Web domain watching endless plays, because the Eye could not resist what it is, and what it is is something that spectates pain endlessly. The Web couldn't resist trapping Jon in there, because that's what it is, despite the fact that it would have fucked its own endgame if it trapped the Archivist in its fucked up theatre production until the End claimed them all. They're incredibly powerful beings, but they're still, in a way, trapped by their own nature. Humans can change, adapt, be different, but the Entities can't be anything but what they are.
In nhthcth there's a line that i tend to use again and again to encapsulate this, and it's usually something along the lines of "These things only are what they are."
They're not versatile forces. They're not a flexible tool like most magic systems where you can use this abstract and malleable force to cast the Spell of Fire and the Spell of Healing and the Spell of Ketamine Ape. They can only do what their own existence allows them and they cannot resist their own nature. It's one of the reasons why Jon in nhthcth is so insistent that the Eye can't be used as a force for good--good is completely outside of its existence. If you know anything about Greek philosophy, I think Plato's idea of the forms is pretty analogous to what the Entities are and how they work.
Which is also why Jon's like, "Duh, of course it's the Web that's got us bound and not the Eye. That's what the Web does."
The Eye just isn't about binding and trapping. What Jonah can use it to do is completely limited to stuff that falls under the Eye's umbrella. He could have the most powerful connection to the Eye on the planet (he doesn't), but that doesn't mean he can supercharge on Eye God Juice and blast a hole through the wall with the power of his mind, right? That would make the entire magic system in TMA ridiculous. In the same way, he can't use the Eye to enforce contract terms. That's not what the Eye does.
That's the Web, through and through. So when you're considering the contract, you have to think in terms of what the Web is.
The thing about the Fears is that they're shown to be a little multifaceted in that multiple distinct fears fit beneath the same umbrella with them. Take the Eye. The fear of someone knowing your deepest, darkest secrets fits beneath it, right? And that's very much Jonah's area of expertise. He probably fed on Martin's terror about being discovered for forging his CV for years. He neutralized Daisy by finding out the secrets that hurt her and using them against you. He's the invasive, watching part of the eye that may know your secrets and want to use it against you.
but the Eye is also the fear of someone watching your pain, your suffering, and (for lack of a better term) getting off on it. Enjoying it. It's bleeding out in the street and, when help finally arrives, they just sit down next to you and watch eagerly as you die.
That is so much the Archivists role.
Sometimes, I think of how terrifying the Archivist would be if it wasn't Jon in the role. Don't get me wrong--he has his moments of terrifying power, and he definitely didn't get good reviews on yelp from statement givers. But, fundamentally, he does care.
But imagine you go to the Magnus Institute under the assumption that they may help. You sit there and you tell them the worst fucking thing that ever happened to you. It's like you're experiencing it a second time, in all the horrific detail. You're retraumatized all over again, and then the Statement ends and you're sitting there, tape recorder still running, and you realize the person you went to for help just... enjoyed every second of pain you went through. There's one episode in particular that I think pulled this feeling off so well--the one where the guy in Scotland who found Gertrude's circle opened with something along the lines of "I don't care about any of this. I just want to know if you'll save my son." Like, imagine the horrible, crushing horror of going to someone for help and the moment you realize that were never going to do anything. They just wanted to watch you die too.
It's also one of the reasons that I think that Jon, for all he thrived as the Archivist, kept so much of who he was because of the inaction part specifically. In Season 1, he makes these vague mentions to fights he's getting into with Elias. Elias keeps lecturing him about noninterference, how they're here to research and not interfere, and Jon has these moments were he's like "anyway I don't give a fuck there's fucking leitners out there and if i have my way there will be a hell of a lot less of them." He legitimately says at one point that he's going to get another lecture about Institute mission statements and watching without interference.
Jon made so many bad choices when he was Becoming, but the one he consistently made against Becoming was that, almost against his will, he wanted to save people. That's picking the opposite of what the Eye is, and I think that that's the part of him that he got to keep.
that was more of an aside and not so relevant to the question. i got on a tangent. but it's here now so it stays. i already typed it. Anywho.
Jonah can't do what Jon does. He can't compel answers out of people. He's a panopticon, and the fear he embodies is that someone may be watching you and catch you in the act. It's not the fear of someone forcing the information out of you. But Jon can't do with Jonah does either. He can't just hop through eyes and spy on people. That's not his relationship with the Eye or the part of it he embodies.
They both have a very metaphysical limitation to their own experience with the Eye, because the idea of the Eye itself is just a human classification. Maybe Jon's sky blue and Jonah's dark blue and the Eye's all the blues, but at the end of the day, we just made up the idea of "blue" to explain our own experience with colors. They don't get to wield the full spectrum of "colors" available under the Eye. They can both be attached to the Eye but they're completely limited to what it means to be sky blue versus dark blue.
So it's important to remember that when you consider the contract, because it's just an aspect of the Web. It's not every aspect of the Web.
The Web is the fear of being totally under control of another--think raymond fielding in Hill Top Road, Mr. Spider, forcing people to walk, that kind of thing--but it's not just that. It's also the fear of being manipulated. Of being outmaneuvered. And I think that fits much more metaphysically with what a contract is than being under total and absolute control.
A contract is just an agreement of rules that two parties have to abide by, right? And sometimes the contract is way more favorable to one party than the other, but we also recognize that there's limits to that. You named a very big one--"this for that." For contracts to be enforceable, there has to be this thing we call "consideration." I get this, you get that. If the contract read "I have to give you one million dollars and you don't have to do anything" that'd be a gratuitous promise and it wouldn't be an enforceable contract.
That being said, consideration doesn't have to be balanced. The contract doesn't have to be fair. I don't know a super huge amount of British law (though a lot of American law is derived from it) but in american contract law we have a standard that basically says there has to be a "mere peppercorn" of consideration. We're not going to see if the exchange is fair, just if there is an exchange. there's this huge body of law around what's allowed in contracts and how contracts should be interpreted because we recognize that, at a certain point, something isn't a contract anymore. It breaks the rules of exchange.
And I think that very much goes towards the real fear the Web would be working with when it comes to the contracts. Think of like, law dramas. People like law dramas because the characters show off how clever they are. They're working in some system of rules and then at the eleventh hour they pull out some kind of loophole or interpretation that saves the day, right? The fact that there are limits and rules to what the characters can do is exactly what makes it so exciting when they figure out how to flip them in their favor. You need to have the chance to succeed in the system, however small, or it all just kind of becomes meaningless. There's no point in manipulation or machinations if you instantly lose no matter what.
That's the exact fear the Web would be playing on with the contracts, in my mind. It's being at the mercy of someone who has to follow the same rules as you, but they're grossly skewed in the other person's favor and the other person is better at using them. It's being stuck in a game where both players have to follow the rules but you have no idea what the rules are, and the other player gets to know them and have them severely favor them.
But the entire fear just becomes kind of ridiculous if it's not limited. It kind of becomes like a game of make believe between little kids if you can just write something in the contract without limitation. Like saying "well, my power is at one million percent" "my power is at one BILLION percent" "my power is at FIVE TRILLION percent." Right? Like, if you're playing that game, the rules don't really mean anything. It's all just bullshit. It doesn't invoke the fear of someone manipulating the rules against you. If the contract terms don't enforce obligations against Jonah too, it just sort of leaves the realm of what fear this is, which breaks the rules of the magic system. Being totally at someone's mercy is just a different fear than having someone outmaneuvering you at rules you both are stuck with.
Which means that, for the contract to be what it is, Jonah has to be bound by it in some way. It has to follow some kind of rules that bind him too. It can be very unbalanced and favor him greatly, but it still needs to set some kind of obligation and limit on him or the entire thing becomes ridiculous.
That's why Jonah so aggressively tries to keep Jon from trying to learn the terms of the contract. If Jon knew the way Jonah was bound by the contract, he'd be able to use the rules against him. Jon's playing the same game as Jonah, but he never got to see the rulebook.
We know two ways from canon that you can use to escape the contract: (1) gouge out your own eyes and (2) the archivist dies and the assistants can leave. but we never see the terms of the contract itself, and the fact that option #2 popped up in season 5 when all we knew before that was option #1 means that maybe there are more ways to break the contract and maybe there aren't. Maybe it's just options 1 and 2, or maybe there's other ways to escape we never figured out. Why do options 1 & 2 work? Is it explicitly written out somewhere in the binding instrument? Is it some loophole that not even elias expected? All we know for certain is that ways out of the contract include but may not be limited to options 1 and 2.
So, yes, Jon gets paid. But is that a term of the contract? Was that the consideration that Jonah wrote down in the Web's binding contract, or is there something else? Jon doesn't know, so he can't use it against him.
Maybe Jonah does have to pay Jon under the contract. Or he's only paying Jon to keep up appearances. Like, yeah, maybe the metaphysically binding contract would allow him to chain people here without paying them, but payroll would still have massive questions about why the Institute Head's angry adoptive son has been the Institute's unpaid slave worker for the past decade.
One of Jonah's biggest strategies to keep Jon from escaping is to abide very strictly by what may or may not be the terms of the Web's contract. Jon can't deduce what the rules are if Jonah voluntarily plays by more rules than he has to.
Take Elias's promise to Tim, for example. Jon still doesn't even know how the Web contract is formed. It sure as hell isn't simply the contract that most employees see--there's no clause that says "and by the way you can never ever quit or leave or you will die xoxoxoxo." Are all the terms already written down somewhere he can't find? Could oral promises be binding? He has no idea, because Elias is never going to act in a way that lets him eliminate the possibility. He'll follow the letter of his promise, and maybe that's because he has to or he'll breach the contract, or maybe that's because he's choosing to keep his promise when he doesn't have to. Elias keeps the terms of the contract unclear by following more rules than he has to.
It's one of the reasons why he uses so much doublespeak. Elias says something like "I'll keep my word, and you'll have to do the same." That only tells us things we already knew--Tim would have to be bound by the contract and wouldn't be able to leave. He'll keep his word, but does Elias have to under the contract? If he broke his word, Jon would be able to conclusively tell that oral conditions are non-binding. He'd know that there's some kind of outside binding instrument that has the rules already set out, and Elias can't change them with an oral promise. But if Elias toes the letter of the oral condition no matter what, then it could be because he has to or it could be because he chose to.
There are rules that Elias has to abide by, but Jon is only pretty certain of a few: 1) He has to have Jon's signature before he moves people into his department. He can't give him assistants unless Jon signs off on it first. Jon only got that much because Elias tried so damn hard to get his signature for the transfer. If Elias could break that rule, there's a pretty good chance that he would have, but he didn't so it probably means he can't. It's a place the contract almost definitely binds him too. 2) the contract kills you if you spend too long away from the Institute, but Elias has a way of letting you stay away for longer. If Jon leaves without approval, then he gets sick within a few weeks. But he's made it months away from the Institute just because Elias approved the leave.
So is that because Elias is the one who triggers the contract killing you in the first place? Or does he have a way of stopping a power that will automatically go off.
If the contract reads, "In the case of unapproved absences, the Head of the Institute may file Form B45, the 'Kill My Errant Employees' Form, and the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days," then they'd be able to pretty effectively escape just by finding a way to immobilize Elias permanently--chuck him in the Buried, he'll never die but he also won't be able to file a Kill My Errant Employee Form. But if the contract reads "In the case of unapproved absences, the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days unless the Head of The Institute files Form U95, Approved Leave of Absences," then they need him alive and mobile to file a leave of absence form so Jon won't fucking die the next time he's kidnapped for a month. Or maybe a leave of absence form isn't necessary if Jon's only kept away because of a kidnapping. Maybe the contract reads "In the case of unapproved and voluntary absences" and being involuntarily missing isn't a breach at all. They don't know, because Elias is going to file the fucking leave of absence form whether or not he has to.
If they knew the exact rules and minute details of the contract terms, they could wriggle their way into an exception that makes their conditions more livable. Instead, they're just stuck with a very broad correlation between Elias's action and/or inaction and the contract not killing you when you leave for long periods on approved absences. Maybe they could just chuck him in the Buried and fuck off, but fuck if they know, and that's the sort of risk you really can't take unless you're certain.
A lot of Jon testing boundaries with Elias has been trying to figure out the boundaries of the contract. Remember in the martyrs chapter, where Martin is like "jon why do you have an employee email you're like sixteen???" it's because jon was already an employee, and employees are required to have an official email. He knew it and Elias knew it even if no one else did.
If Elias refused him an official institute email, Jon would know that the contract does not require him to provide all employees with Institute-standard resources as outlined in the employee manual. Maybe sections of the employee manual isn't binding, maybe the entire thing isn't binding. Jon knows breaking the Institute dress code probably isn't a part of the binding contract because of his Epic Fashion Moments (or, if it is, the penalty isn't death like leaving is), but does that apply to all parts of the employee manual? If he doesn't get an official email at the shiny age of sixteen when he's Not Supposed To Be Employed, then he knows another section of the employee manual just doesn't have teeth. But if Elias just gives him what any employee would be entitled to, then it could be because he had to or it could be because he chose to.
It's also the reason why getting people to quit was important to jon--yes, he was trying to get people free of the Institute, but if he pushed someone into quitting, he'd be able to test out some very valuable information about the contract. Can people quit if Elias allows it? Maybe the rule is that the Archives can't quit, but everyone else can if Elias allows it. Maybe everyone can quit if Elias lets them. Maybe no one can quit and they're all fucked. If Elias can let some people quit but never lets them quit, then Jon has no data points to work with when trying to figure out how people escape the contract.
Which is also why elias flipped his shit and burned the HR records the one time Jon managed to get his hands on them. Over the years, there have been people who unknowingly stumbled into one of the rules binding Elias, and he let them quit without protest. There's a very good chance that that's because he had to let them quit. If Jon could find the common denominator between people who quit successfully, then maybe he could figure out how to do the same, which is why Elias has spent so long making sure he gets as little information as possible to work with. Jon can't win the game if he never learns the rules.
It is important to note that Elias breaking the terms of the contract that bind him may not be "and now Jon can finally go home oh my fucking god." The penalties for breach of contract, that we know of, are death. Does Elias face the same penalties if he breaches? Does he face some kind of other penalty? We don't know yet, because Elias is guarding those terms like his fucking life depends on it.
you might have been asked this question before but ive been curious for a while about what would have happened when gertrude was there when jon originally gave his statement? would anything change ?
Honestly she probably would have killed him.
Like, it feels mean to say? It would have been more out of mercy than anything.
If Jon had come to her with only a Leitner, she would have taken care of the Leitner and sent him home. She doesn't normally intervene on behalf of the Statement givers, but they also aren't usually eight, and it isn't unheard of for Gertrude to intervene for the random unlucky souls who cross her path. She intervened on behalf of Jack Barnabas, and she told the monster pig dude how to handle his problem. It's selective when she intervenes, but I think if it's just a little boy scared by a book, she would help.
The thing about Gertrude is that I don’t I think she is or ever has been heartless; I just think she’s brutally practical.
One of the most interesting tidbits about her is that she looked for Eric Delano for months after he went missing, but wasn’t close enough to know that he had quit ages before he actually died. She avenged Sarah’s death by seeking out someone she had never, ever let herself meet before that moment, but she did this right after sacrificing Michael without hesitation. She seemed genuinely fond of Gerry, but she still bound him to a book.
I think that, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be that she wouldn’t want to save Jon. It would just be that she would realize that she couldn’t.
If he had just arrived with a Guest for Mr. Spider, I think Jon would have walked away remembering her fondly as the brusk but ultimately nice old lady who had her assistant make him a cup of tea and taught him how to burn a Leitner. But he didn’t just come because of A Guest for Mr. Spider. He came because of Tommy Bradstaff.
Gertrude’s shown to be more wary of the Web than pretty much any other entity. She got tricked by them way back when she defeated her first ritual, and I don’t think she forgets. I also don’t think she would have thought it was ever a good idea to voluntarily set herself in a competition with the Mother of Puppets. Jon's eight and scared and she'd want to help him, but she also would have immediately recognized that saving him comes with a very high price tag and a very low chance of success.
I do think Gertrude would have at least tried to think of a way to save him. I just think she would have ultimately come to the conclusion that there wasn’t one.
And it’s just practicality, right? That’s the big difference between her and Jon in nhthcth. It doesn’t matter how badly she wishes she could help; she’ll accept when she can’t. But when she can, she usually racks up a very big win. Jon will wildly intervene without even considering his chances. Like, there's a reason why the Eye led him to Danny Stoker that night--it's not conscious the way humans are or the spiders are, but even pavlov's dogs learned association, and the Eye seems to be capable of that kind of low-level consciousness. When Jon finds Eric Delano's statement in canon, it's because he listened to the tapes the Eye didn't want him to hear. That implies the Eye is at least partially able to make connections based on its own impulses and desires.
Jon's its special little boy who has been resolutely fucking starving himself for almost two decades. He went and joined the eldritch version of AA with Daisy in an attempt not to feed the Eye other than when absolutely strictly necessary, and the Eye's never been happy with his starvation diet. But the one sure-fire way to get Jon to forget his sense and start ripping statements out of avatars is to shove some poor schmuck being eaten in his line of sight.
It’s pretty directly stated in nhthcth that danny isn’t the first victim of another entity he’s tried to snatch, even if he’s never gotten as involved with a pair of victims as the stoker brothers. And honestly—he almost didn’t get super involved with them either. Like, when he was trying to duck out after the initial fight at the theatre, long term involvement would have only made it worse for them. Most of the time, the absolute best chances come from "hope that they've forgotten you existed and won't come back for round two. if that fails maybe just hop continents and it will be too inconvenient for them to track you down again. buy guns." There's a pretty high mortality rate with people who hang around him, and he's not exactly expecting these random male model brothers to manage this world long-term.
If Jon’s hadn’t straight up passed out, he would have called Daisy to come pick him up and bitched to her about fucked up clowns being a problem now. He’d feel vaguely mad at himself when nikola skinned both Danny and Tim, because it’d be just another case of him trying to help and just increasing the body count, which is what happens most of the time.
I think Mike described him like someone who kept putting half dead birds in boxes and feeling disappointed when he opened the lid and saw they’d croaked. It's not unheard of for the people he helps to make it, but it's also not exactly often either. And that’s not even really to say he’s any less powerful or capable than gertrude was—honestly, between him and Daisy? They’re sort of a powerhouse duo. Like, people are afraid of hunters. At one point Dekker says that he was going up against something that would require a hunter to kill, and that while he knew a few, he would never actually risk consulting one. Amateur lobotomy it is. And Daisy is the sort of hunter that can kill other hunters. Jon’s this absolute muppet of a human being rolling up to soul-rending horror like “this is Daisy :) she is my best friend :)” and then they turn around and the Avatar of Fucking Them Up is standing there breathing too heavy and blatantly fucking insane. It’s like if kermit the frog kept bringing the fucking terminator to social events.
And Jon isn’t exactly a slouch either. Like, he’s keeping himself as weak as he can, and he’s still strolling into other entities' domains, feeding on them, and just... walking away again. These are people who are extremely used to being the human equivalent of a great white shark, more powerful and deadly than anyone else in any room they're in, but they've got this extremely distressed looking twink curb stomping them when he has reached the absolute breaking point of his Victorian Fatigue. this man keeps coming into their homes and one-shotting them after weakening himself to the point of being on death's door. jon on his own makes other avatars twitchy, but the Jon and Daisy Buddy Cop is honestly kind of one that the other avatars are somewhat actively afraid of.
Like, they'll dunk on Jon (where daisy can't see), because he's jon and he's ridiculous and pathetic at all times, but people are secretly pretty careful to toe the line of shit jon will put up with. Mike will be smarmy with Jon because he knows Jon will let him get away with it, but he also knows that if he fucks around too hard jon will put him through a psychic paper shredder and daisy will bury his corpse in the woods. It's not a secret that Daisy and Jon are strolling around feeding on and blatantly fucking murdering things like them, but none of these self-serving assholes have managed to handle a pretty active threat to their longevity. that's more because they can't than because they won't.
And still, Gertrude is pretty universally regarded as a force of nature, but Jon's still getting told that a seven percent success rate is a bit generous.
Gertrude is Gertrude Robinson, and she's the baddest bitch around, and that has a huge bit to do with her success rate. But it would be a mistake to say that the number of battles she picked didn't have something to do with why she's more successful. Like--Gertrude's going for quantity over sentiment. She'll save the world, but the individual people in it? Those aren't the fights she has ever prioritized, at the end of the day.
Almost all of the statements Jon in canon recorded were from her tenure, and Jon's follow ups usually concluded with "and then they horribly died." Gertrude was casually eating a fucking sandwich in her office and watching while Jane Prentiss decided that she couldn't be saved and went off to cram her forearm in a spooky wasp nest. She didn't help Jane. She didn't explain what was happening. She didn't try to intervene. She ate her sandwich, and she let Jane leave, and I think that at least in part she would have agreed with Jane's assessment. There wasn't any saving her, and that's a judgment that always precludes Gertrude's help.
Gertrude wins as often as she does because she picks her battles carefully. She delivers maximum damage to maximum effect, and she doesn't spin her wheels on things she knows are a waste of resources. She came right on the heels of an archivist who died because he burned through his resources and his luck, and her tenure has been marked by her being smart enough to be cautious.
I think Jon would have given her his statement. I think she would have been nice to him. I think she would have allowed herself to feel sorry for him, and sorry that he was so young, and sorry that it was too late.
I think that she would have considered what the web could have planned for him, and she would have considered how painful a fate was waiting for him if he met the End the Spider probably had planned for him. And I think she would have decided it would be crueler to let him meet it.
Gertrude in nhthcth specifically has always had a weird, twisted mercy when it came to Jon. She never manipulated him, is the thing. Elias made sure that what he did to Jon had long past the point of no return by the time Gertrude ever caught wind of his existence. As far as she was ever concerned, Jon was beyond saving from the day they met, which meant there was no point in trying. She was never going to offer him the mercy of trying to help him.
But she could have played him and she didn't. And I think that's about the most merciful action that Gertrude Robinson would have been capable of.
She knows about Agnes, okay? better than anyone. she's been bodily hauling the world as they know it through a decade of apocalypse attempts. She took one look at Jon and realized that elias had made him to wear the watcher's crown, but also that she couldn't kill him without completely alienating her resources to stop much sooner apocalypses.
But she sort of knew from the day they met that she may have to one day kill him, if only to stop him from wearing the crown. It wasn't set in stone, but it was a very significant possibility.
In chapter 24, Jon reached out to gertrude for absolutely any comfort possible, and she actually could have given it to him. She could have strung him along with false hope, or just given him a shoulder to cry on. Someone other than elias to love.
And she would have done that knowing that she was actively planning how to kill him when the time came. And she's definitely not above that kind of manipulation. Jon's extremely vulnerable when he comes to her, and he already thinks of her as a source of hope. Stringing him along and being his only source of comfort and support would give her an enormous advantage over him that she normally wouldn't ignore. But if he did die by her hands one day, as she knows he probably will, he'd finally go to his end after a very painful life being murdered by the only person that he thought loved him after he lost Gerry. Gertrude sort of uncharacteristically gave up that advantage to spare him from that final betrayal. She'd never sacrifice the world for him, she could have loved him like her own son and she would still kill him without hesitation, and she won't lie to herself about that fact either. It's a weird, twisted act of mercy to have it be turning the cold shoulder to a little boy begging for help, but in her mind, it was the most merciful option open to her.
And I kind of like the idea of Jonathan Sims in nhthcth always demanding the most painful acts of mercy of Gertrude that she's ever contemplated. Because the thing is, if she had been the one to take his Statement that day, she's almost definitely would have decided that Jon couldn't be saved. Not when the thing after him was the Web. And once she decides that, she has two options: let him meet the End waiting outside of those doors, or handle it herself.
And the thing is, her MO is to go for the former. It's not like she's mercy killing everyone who shows up and tells her of the fate worse than death that's most likely to befall them--hell, to take the risk of mercy killing is borderline out of character to her. If it were anyone else, she wouldn't have done it.
But Jon was eight. He was begging her for help that she couldn't give. And the Web has never been merciful. Either it was lying about wanting him for itself and he was going to be killed in the most slow, horrifying way possible, or it wasn't and he wasn't even going to get the mercy of death. Like, if a horrible, tragic fate is inevitable for him, Gertrude has to at least contemplate if there's an option that's more merciful than the rest.
Even giving him a less painful death is dangerous for Gertrude, but I think that's more of a price she'd be willing to contemplate. Like, killing another entity's victim is another way of snatching a meal from them. She had to at least entertain the risk that the Web would have some kind of retribution for it. But she would also entertain the fact that Jon's only sitting in the Archives because the Web let him get that far, that it wanted him to give its Statement to her, and ultimately decide that the risk is one she's willing to shoulder.
I think she would have made sure it didn't hurt. I think she would have made it quick, and made sure he didn't know it was happening. but I don't think she would have ever saved Jon the way he wanted to be saved.
If I’m being extremely generous (and self indulgent) and trying to come up with a world where she would go on a crusade to save him, and probably assuming some kind of off screen character arc that’s completely made her change her entire approach to life, I think she’d bring him to Agnes Montague.
If Jon could ever have a chance way back when he was eight, I think it would have been Agnes. Agnes is the direct opposite of the Web. She's the demigod messiah of the entity of Fucking Up All Your Life Plans. In canon, she's the one that Gertrude went to when she did need to go after the Web. If she had decided to try for him and needed to come up with an option to save him, she'd go to Agnes.
That being said, getting to that decision is just still really unlikely. For all of the above reasons and because of the difficulties Agnes poses. Even if they're in like, lesbian soul love, they've never met in person, and she doesn't really know if Agnes will help. It may attract the Lightless Flame's attention, and Jon may just end up burnt to death instead of filled with spiders. A lot of ways it could go wrong and give Jon a worse fate. It's the sort of Hail Mary play Gertrude never really did.
That line is in the summary because I thought it said everything about what the reader needed to know for Jon in nhthcth. (Also, I just thought it sounded nice.)
Jon in nhthcth is sort of defined by the fact that he has never gotten past who he was in the moment that James Wright locked him in Gertrude's office. It's one of the two cornerstones of everything he became.
The other cornerstone, of course, is Gerry.
Jon has spent his entire life trying to figure out a way that he could have been anything but what he is. It's been a decade and change, but he's never, ever been able to let go of what happened to him. And that feels at least a little off.
Maybe it's the idea that time heals all wounds, maybe it's the idea that Stockholm Syndrome should have kicked in eventually, maybe it's the evil god eating parts of his personality, maybe it's the idea that it's probably exhausting to eternally be struggling against a fate that you met when you were fucking eight. Even if he never becomes okay with what happened to him, he probably should have at least accepted it and moved on to some measure. Like, this has been his reality for almost his entire life. No matter how terrible it was, people usually adapt and acclimate to what happens to him.
One of the core traits of Jon in nhthcth was always supposed to be that Jon just didn't for some reason.
Like, Jon has not even passed the threshold of accepting what happened to him. It's all these years later, and he's desperately replaying what happened and trying to come up with the version that has him going home at the end. Even if you don't accept your current situation, you probably should have stopped trying to figure out what you could have done differently when you were eight, no matter how terrible what happened is.
At the end of the day, even with all he knows, Jon just has never understood why he couldn't have been saved.
He knows there's no Light Side at the end of the day. This isn't some big battle of Good Against Evil--it's just a series of Bad inconveniencing Other Bad because what Other Bad wants is not in the interest of what Bad wants. There's no ancient secret order battling the dark--there's just a lot of people stopping each other from ending the world because they want to be the ones to do it, and also like, Gertrude Robinson and her good-time buddy That One Random Priest. If you're looking for someone to save you in the TMA world, there just isn't really anyone.
And that's part of why Jon goes in after Danny Stoker. It's part of why he keeps undertaking the world's most half-assed rescue attempts. Trying to save Danny when his entire life has indicated that's impossible and probably going to make things worse is a deeply irrational thing to do. He probably should have learned when to walk away by now.
But a part of him is still eight, and a part of him has spent his entire life going over the worst thing that ever happened to him and trying to figure out the way to make it different.
It takes a specific sort of person to keep undertaking herculean efforts in a desperate, wild attempt to save people that he knows are as good as dead. And I think that sort of person once was someone who was as good as dead. He saves Danny Stoker because a part of him is still desperately trying to find the person who could have done the same for him.
In the end, he became the thing he once needed most in the world, which was a chance. I don't think he's realized that fact. And I don't know if he'd find it comforting if he did.
The other thing about that sentence is that it's completely and utterly pointless.
Like. It's been eighteen fucking years. At a certain point, you have to decide it doesn't matter anymore, and clinging to the question of whether someone could have saved you just doesn't help anything. But one of the other core traits of Jon in nhthcth was that he was someone who just simply did not care if what he was doing was practical or had any chances of succeeding.
He's designed to be so stubborn in it that it's almost ridiculous, and more than a little comical but it's honestly borderline sad to me. Here Jon is, making it his life's fucking mission to hold the title of World's Shittiest Employee. He is going to make his hostage situation inconvenient for everyone. He's not doing fucking paperwork; he's only here because elias kidnapped him. He can't get away, but he's going to be the absolute most unmanageable nightmare alive.
It does absolutely nothing to help him.
He doesn't think anyone in the Institute is ever going to help him. He doesn't think he's going to force Elias's hand into letting him go by racking up the most HR complaints in Institute history. It doesn't actually help him in any way to do the vast majority of what he does--it actively hurts him, actually. There's no one in the Institute who wants to help him, because they see him as a nuisance. When he causes Elias too much trouble, Elias punishes him for it. It'd be better from a consequentialist perspective to have settled into some kind of facade of normalcy, but he hasn't. Because playing along, going along with the facade as an Institute employee--he'd have to at least implicitly admit that what happened to him isn't relevant anymore. Sure, Elias kidnapped him and fed him to an ancient, primordial hunger from the dawn of civilization, but by god, he has his monthly staff meeting to get to, and that's too important to make a fuss about the first thing.
It's kind of sad, because while the Institute didn't know the entire picture, nineteen-year old Martin almost immediately said "wow, that blatantly unstable child sure does act like he's being severely abused." Elias had to feed him a story about an entirely different abuser to dodge the world's most needed CPS visit, and Martin still almost turned around and reported Elias literally the same afternoon. Yeah, Elias had a story for the institute to explain jon's Everything, but they really didn't have to buy it.
Like, willful ignorance absolutely played a role in it. Part of it was Elias was their boss and nobody wanted to be the one to accuse him of child abuse. It was easier to accept his lies at face value and not stick their neck out for him. Part of it was just that Jon's never been a very likable victim for them. He wasn't some tearful damsel they could swoop in and save--he smoked too much and was angry and loud about it. And once they made that initial decision to ignore their misgivings, the chances of anyone breaking that pattern got extremely low. No one wants to admit to themselves that they ignored a little kid in an extremely abusive household just because his abuser was their boss and they didn't like the kid all that much. Martin kind of hit Jon like a grenade when he first joined up and actually gave a shit if he was okay.
Of course, this all means that Jon's spent the past decade or so being told by everyone who could see him hurting that his upset at the soul-crushing pain he was in was inconvenient to them and it's rude of him to be so loud about it, could he do that somewhere else, because it really doesn't matter. and he's still there saying "it does matter. it matters to me."
Just--doing pointless things because if he doesn't then they stop mattering and they have to matter somehow defines so much of what he does.
When he was a little boy, Gerry told him that the clothes you wore were meant to be things that make you feel like you, that were who you were or wanted to be, and Jon decided that the parts of him that he loved were made up of other people. It's been fourteen years since he told him that, and out of all the people he's tried to make himself with, Daisy is the only one he still has in his life. He wears the secondhand clothes of people who he lost without anyone else caring to preserve a self that people are actively trying to kill. The fact that he feels more like him when he wears Gerry's coat only matters to the extent that he lets it. He makes pointless interventions on behalf of people he knows he probably can't save, because if he doesn't, then he fact that they needed help to begin with didn't matter. It only mattered whether they could have been saved; needing to be saved doesn't factor in.
I basically wanted him to be the opposite of Basira. Basira was the world's most polite hostage in Season 3. Martin had to actually ask her if she was aware she was in a hostage situation. Her entire thing was that there was no point in getting upset at something you couldn't change--you either got on as best you could or you found a way to change it anyway. That's the exact opposite to nhthcth Jon's approach to life--the Web even pokes fun at him for it in chapter 9. A spider's prey thrashes itself to death trying to get out of its web. Jon's just--flailing like a fly struggling against a web. Gertrude always conserved her resources and energy for where it would matter most, but he exhausts himself on things he knows wouldn't succeed. It doesn't make any practical sense, but there's something viscerally human about it still.
And the last thing that sentence tells you about Jon is that he is someone who has to believe in the lightning strike.
The thing is? Jon knows about pretty much everything this post discussed. No one really knew Gertrude, but if there was someone who did, it was him. He's been hanging around her since he was a little kid. It's been stated that she personally tried to teach him to some degree, though, and we've seen that she's stated to his face that she would not have tried to save him if she had been the one to take his statement. She never really represented a chance at things having gone differently to begin with.
But he still thinks of her specifically when he tries to find the version of himself that isn't this. Because even if she was never really a chance, she was still the biggest chance he had.
Jon was eight. He knew jack all when this started, and he was going up against the most dangerous entity there was. He was never going to come up with a place to go to that wasn't the Magnus Institute, and he was never going to outsmart the Web on his own. Gertrude Robinson was the only one who he ever had a snowball's chance of crossing paths with who wasn't like, actively evil.
There's basically nil chance of her having had some kind of midlife crisis right before he showed up and deciding that this is the one she must save and damn the consequences. There's an even smaller chance of her actually pulling it off and saving him from the Web. But that was the biggest chance he had, and he can't help but cling to it.
Sometimes, you have to beat the odds. Sometimes, lightning strikes.
If you believe in the idea of the multiverse, and that everything that can happen will happen, there is a Jon out there in some far-off universe who walked into the Magnus Institute and met Gertrude Robinson instead of James Wright. There is a Gertrude Robinson who, against all odds, decided that Jon was worth the costs of saving him, who fought tooth and nail to save him and won. It's a fairytale he tells himself, but the idea of someone kind enough to put him in a car so they could drive all about, go on adventures, and find places with rain was also a fairytale he once heard, and it still happened. Gerry was his lightning strike.
And that's really the crux of it. In order for Jon to have loved Gerry the way he did, he had to be someone who would bank everything on odds that were a lot smaller than being struck by lightning. Jon needs to be the type of person who will believe in chances that barely exist, because if he doesn't, he could have never made he decisions he had to make to stay by Gerry's side.
Gerry Keay was not Gertrude Robinson, and he definitely was not anywhere near her caliber when he was the little boy who tried to take Jon and run. They live in a world that tears into your soul, that Marks you in a way that cannot be removed and that never, ever lets you go. It's monsters eating other monsters, and they were both very small and very damned from the get-out. The chances of Jon Sims and Gerry Keay saving each other were always so much smaller than the chances of Gertrude Robinson saving him, and he knew it. If he couldn't believe that there was at least a chance that Gertrude would have saved him, then he couldn't believe that he and Gerry ever had a chance of finding their way home.
We still don't know where Gerry is in 2013, why he isn't there, but we know that Daisy saw him with Jon in 2011, kicking each other under the table for making ill-timed jokes to a monster who wanted to kill them. They first ran in 1999. That's twelve years of betting everything on odds south of a lightning strike. It takes specific kinds of people to do that. It takes people who will take the worst odds possible because they're the only ones they have.
There's no power of love or friendship or hope in that universe, but I think Jon and Gerry wanted to believe that they could love each other to the point of survival. They were looking at a world where, in the whole span of human history, love had not made a lick of difference to the things they faced, and they were asking to be the exception. Wondering if Gertrude Robinson would have saved him... it's hardly the most improbable thing Jon's ever let himself believe.
(Slight spoilers for season 5 of TMA) Wonder where all the animal avatar statments are. Like, there's got to be at least a couple of people who have run into animal avatars? Unless that was only a eyepocalypse thing... im curious now...
"Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it ba- oh. Ah; it seems the cat is now having several mental health crises. Hm. Could- Could we get him some help there?"
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Spoilers for season 5 of the magnus archives, but I quite like the idea that while Basira and Martin were small talking about the Very Bad Choice™ that they were gonna have to make (or something else in order to ignore it for the time being), Jon was just re-evaluating his entire life. Back to the fate v. free will thing he was already struggling with. Plus, if the Web was using him since he was a child, how much of his already dwindling sense of self is actually him, and not the Archivist, or the Archive, or just cobwebs :c
i like the idea of jon needing glasses at the start of the podcast but not at the end due to eye shenanigans, but i don't personally think of it being as simple as "the eye fixed his eyesight laser eye surgery style" because i think it's fun if it's weirder about it.
(under the cut, because this got long and sidetracked as my tma thoughts tend to, and it's been in my drafts too long for me to kid myself that i'll make it succinct <3)
when he first gains the ability to understand other languages, it appears to be somewhat situational to what the eye wants him to understand, in this case applying to the statement but not the invitation. perhaps if he tried in later seasons he could understand both, but the point is it's not instinctive for everything.
later with spoken language, he doesn't seem to realise (at least not in the moment) that it's being translated for him. he only fully seems to register the statement in 102 is french after he reads it, but he is able to see that it's french, so i think it's likely that he still heard chinese but the translation in his mind was natural enough that it didn't register.
so for the glasses headcanon, i think it's fun to apply the same logic. it's not changing his senses at the point of hearing, or in this case seeing, he just Understands what he's looking at. and maybe the fact that he can't technically see it doesn't register until it's pointed out. because, he knows what he's looking at, he can describe it even, but now he can also see that it's blurry and that he shouldn't know all off the details.
depending how bad his eyesight is, i could see this distinction being more or less relevant. if he needed them for reading it might be a lot easier to read things relating to statements. if he's badly shortsighted maybe it would end up letting him "See" things that aren't directly fears related for the sake of him making his way through the world lol.
as for why he'd stop wearing them if it didn't actually fix things, i mean. he was kidnapped 3 times around when he gained the language abilities, among many other incidents. i don't think it would have been a deliberate choice to stop wearing them, and there's enough going on that i don't think he'd get a new pair if things were working fine on some weird level.*
that's mainly for s3 though. with s4 i could be convinced there are cases where the eye actually lets him see, maybe even for the most part, if only for the idea of him waking up able to see better, which i feel could add to him doing way too fine horrors style after a coma. maybe in the same way that he Knows, it's often natural but sometimes takes effort, the mental equivalent of squinting to focus light.
with how it tries to guide him towards and away from certain things, it might not work in scenarios where jon is looking for stuff it doesn't want found, like eric's tape. even if it's mostly letting him see normally at this point, it's less of a permanent upgrade laser eye surgery style and moreso something that's still conditional. on the other hand, perhaps he can see people who have a statement to give very clearly.
by s5. well. i imagine the eye would love for him to see every detail of the world that he helped bring about. i think he can see more than most people can at that point. in the sense of both, literally everything, but perhaps also more detail in actual visuals if he looks for it.
which adds an extra layer of disorientation to upton house and the tunnels if he's getting this level of vision from the eye now as well. i doubt he even gets the base Understanding style of seeing when hidden from it. cut off from the thing that is very much part of you at this point and additionally the thing that lets you actually literally see.
i don't know if i'll ever incorporate this into anything, but it's real in my mind <3 will never be normal about the way the fears affect their avatars.
*under an asterisk because this is less about the actual eyesight part of the concept and was originally in the tags, but my specific headcanon leans towards him losing his glasses during the circus kidnapping.
my reasoning for the circus specifically rather than sometime else in the season:
it's around this time that the language ability developed, so i think it's when he'd get the ability even if he lost the glasses sooner or later.
there was a long time period where they may have just taken them away, even if he didn't lose them in the initial struggle, for ease of getting at his face for moisturising if nothing else.
plays into the way the stranger blocks out the eye in a very literal sense.
could be either a small blessing in the way the lights being out is possibly for the best in nikola's original scene, or on the other hand could add to the stranger's disorientation. maybe both!
i could be convinced that it happened with daisy, i can very much see them getting damaged with daisy and later lost with the circus. i just don't know if losing them at that point would add or detract from the fact that it's already the most powerless jon felt in the whole podcast, it doesn't ring as true thematically as the circus does. i could also see them being lost during the unknowing for the similar reasons as him seeing clearly after the coma, but that renders the s3 portion of the headcanon irrelevant so it's not as much my choice ghfjdk.
(Some spoilers for The Magnus Archives - season 5?)
Hey, so, do the fears choose what their books say/do? Because, if so, do you think the web choose everything about A Guest for Mr. Spider specific to/for Jon? Like, it being a children's book, which he hated at the time; its connections to The Archivist position, with need for more/it never being enough; but also the knocking thing? Like; I think it's got to be a lot easier to fall into deep paranoia if you're already used to seeing common things as negative, no?
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