#blue writes things

> “Um, okay. Recorder’s on? Great. It’s been on this whole time. Wonderful.”

This is technically before the statement starts, but I want to point it out because I still think it’s funny, and also because I like Martin getting to be sarcastic.

> “I want to say something about Caroline was always weird, but that probably isn’t true — hindsight, right? No, to me she just seemed like your average severe female academic type, you know, short gray hair, very disciplined, dressed nicely enough in a don’t-notice-my-clothes way. No patience for people who didn’t take things seriously. I never saw her smiling, except when she was talking to Ben about their research. We got on fine at first, since I knew how much my brother wanted us to. But I started to hate that smile, because every time they made a breakthrough with their stupid theory something new would go wrong …”

So, writing in Magnus Archives statement style turned out to be very fun! I love how the actual statements mix casual speech with involved, weird as hell descriptions no one would ever say out loud, and it gave me liberty to fuck around. A+ do recommend.

Caroline is very much an archetype. Which I think actually sets her up as a character more effectively than Elise and Ben, who we don’t find much out about other than “suspicious” and “devoted” respectively. Scary Professional Woman With Secret Feelings is also … an archetype I am very weak to. Which might come through in the fact that she’s named after GLaDOS,

> He tries to look at nothing in particular, but his attention is drawn persistently towards Martin, and whether that is from some dread force or simple curiosity he doesn’t know.

Jon POV is also fun because when he’s not being drawn into things, he is still skeptical about what a weird life he’s having and thinks things like “some dread force” semi-sarcastically.

> “ … we used to tease him about having a crush on her, mostly because of how red he would turn whenever anyone —”

SORRY MARTIN. In hindsight I don’t know that this interruption is actually necessary — I think the idea was to break up the statement paragraphs and also emphasize how goddamn oblivious Jon is, but I don’t love it.

> “I think he really saw who she was and because of that he trusted her, more than she deserved. It doesn’t matter how clearly you see someone, if you won’t admit to yourself what you’re seeing…”

A thesis statement in the wild! It’s a little clumsy but I still like it. Martin knows Jon well and won’t let himself believe Jon is [unkind/beyond help/too fucking dumb to notice his huge crush]; Jon literally has supernatural seeing powers and yet does Not have a good grip on what Martin’s like or what he’s thinking at any given moment.

> He doesn’t know if she looked like this, or if he himself did, in the early days when he surfaced to Sasha or Martin’s interruptions. He can’t but think that if he had, someone would have made him stop.

Reading Statements Is Bad. I think probably Jon goes into a similar weird trance but doesn’t feel as drained and horrible afterwards.

> He doesn’t make Martin stop.

I love … implied self-recrimination. This is an acknowledgement of his own perceived selfishness even as he keeps doing it. It also leads into the next paragraph, wherein the prose starts to get weirder and more abstract as Jon stops being “a person sitting in a room listening to his coworker read a story” and starts being “the archivist listening to a statement” — it miIiight be too late for him to consciously make the choice to stop this?

> “Ben never would have shouted, of course, but he had this bitter, sulking tone in his voice that he always got if he couldn’t squash things down well enough to pretend he was okay with what was going on.” THIS IS A LINE ABOUT MARTIN THIS IS A LINE ABOUT MARTIN. Listen: I love Martin but he’s anxious and trapped and afraid and selfish and unpleasant to be around sometimes and I never want to write him solely as Soft Chill Dude. He gets to be (justifiably) short with Jon later, but he’s still expressing like .. futility, and giving up on communicating what he wanted to because What Was The Point Anyway, Everything Sucks And I Can’t Do Anything.

> Caroline didn’t sound sympathetic when she said, cold as anything, that he certainly couldn’t help her if he was dead.

I love this secondary character I made up, she’s terrible. She’s a little bit Gertrude, huh. I swear I did not do that on purpose.

> Jon watches Martin, but he doesn’t see him. He sees Elise and Ben and Caroline, standing in the kitchen and beholding something strange and new and fascinating. Caroline standing on the precipice of enlightenment and pressing on, needing to know no matter what sacrifice might be asked of her, not seeing that she might be made to sacrifice other than herself.

This is a little on the nose, literally using the word beholding and then describing a compulsion to keep digging for information. But needing to know is how Jon trips himself up at the end of the fic; he can’t accept a lie, and he doesn’t trust anything he doesn’t know everything about.

> The knowledge is an offering for Beholding, and he beholds it, and it is for him too.

> He is too far gone, here and not here, seeing and not seen.

I ended two paragraphs with this exact same sentence structure! What was I doing! I hate these sentences actually,

> If she doesn’t know what she did already, then me shouting at her wouldn’t help. I hope she knows. I hope she knows it’s her fault that Ben is gone, even if he volunteered. I hope she thinks about it every day, that she should have made him leave whether he wanted to or not. But she’s always been sure of herself. So I doubt it.

I know I said I didn’t know the rest of the story in this statement, but here’s a hint: Caroline sure does think about it!! She is not a happy person.

Returning to parallels, I realize that I added in this third narrator character to describe the action, and obviously she doesn’t match up directly to anyone; there is no one either telling Martin to get out or blaming Jon for letting him stay, except maybe, uh, Jon, who does a lot of telling himself he’s a monster.

But not a lot of letting that actually change his actions. At the end of the fic he concludes that his fear about doing this was right, and that Martin is horrified by him because of his increasing inhumanity; he totally fails to separate the statement reading — which is not good for Martin, and which the Elise-perspective on this would say is not something he should accept, but which was given willingly anyway — from the harm he does *in* freaking out and demanding information, which is a whole other problem, and which takes the dynamic from the statement in a different direction.