#not!tim

(Sorry this took a while to ask, spouse was sick yesterday.)

Ooof. You have to give me the hard one right off! I went through a lot of stuff before I decided on how to do this.

First off: For some reason my brain keeps insisting they'd have Anil voice Not!Tim, I don't know why that makes no sense. But here we are. :P

Secondly: This is going to be so much worse than NotSasha, because that's how I'm feeling right now. :D

1) I'm torn between the idea of Not!Tim being basically fanon Tim--just really ridiculously in-your-face and agent of chaos--or much, much more subdued. Thinking about it seriously, given the way the NotThem seems to work, I'm inclined to lean toward the second. So: Tim is not longer the Archives Fun Guy, but much more of a quiet dude. He's not the Fun Police or anything, but he's not making Princess Bride references or calling Jonah Magnus "Jimmy Magma." Sort of S3 Tim without the anger.

2) Martin is the one who notices Tim is "off." He keeps trying to convince Jon of this, but Jon refuses to believe him, so he winds up doing his own research and trying to find the missing tapes and so on. Jon winds up honing in on Sasha as the potential Gertrude-killer really early on (Sasha wanted the job, after all!!) and they have a straight-up shouting match in his office where he admits to paranoia and so on. Sasha is way more Eye-aligned by nature than Tim ever was, and she doesn't have all the pain of a dead sibling to bubble up, so they wind up teaming up to try to figure out what's going on. By the end of S2, Sasha and Jon are listening to Martin and they go after the NotThem together.

3) This does not make the confrontation at the end of S2 go any better! The NotThem is a difficult creature to figure out how to handle. Sasha and Martin get separated from Jon, wind up in Michael's corridors, Jon winds up finding Leitner and getting framed for his murder, etc. Sasha now has a reason to get revenge and starts investigating the tunnels a lot more, trying to figure out how to destroy the NotThem. She manages to talk Basira into giving her a lot more of the tapes and figures out a bunch of stuff about Elias and Jonah Magnus. Sadly, she does not figure out the body-hopping bit; she just thinks that Jonah Magnus is still in the Panopticon.

4) The plan to deal with Elias during the Unknowing is actually also a plan to have Sasha go and destroy Jonah Magnus' body. Martin distracts Elias long enough for Melanie to get into his office, sure, but Elias swiftly realizes that Sasha is missing and puts everything together. He goes down to the Panopticon and there's a struggle in which Elias/Jonah winds up taking over Sasha's body because she nearly kills Elias. This is way, way less than ideal for him, but he decides to make it work until he can body-hop again. (I figure the body-hopping doesn't trigger any "everyone gets hurts/dies" clause in the Archives contract.)

5) "Sasha" claims that she couldn't find her way down to the Panopticon and encourages Martin to take the deal with Peter Lukas specifically so that they can finally "deal with" Jonah Magnus once and for all. Jonah-as-Sasha is able to take a much firmer hand in the entire ordeal than Jonah-as-Elias was from prison, so that the confrontation in the Panopticon takes place much earlier. The upshot of this is that we get those 10 episodes of Scottish safehouse romance; the downside is that Jon and Martin directly blame themselves for Sasha's death because they encouraged her to go down into the tunnels on her own so there's a lot of angst.

Jon still says "this is for Sasha" while stabbing Jonah, because it's not Sasha anymore.

And the NotTim still gets smote at the merry-go-round Domain because fuck the NotThem anyway.

we’ve decided that “”Tom”” is just Tom Broker, Not!Sasha’s Totally Heterosexual Boyfriend who has had all the fucking charm sapped straight out of him. like it is unreal how unromantic he is. He Tries to be romantic for not!Sasha especially out in public bc he wants to impress her but hes SO BAD at it. Not!Sasha sits across from him and he tries to compliment those dead fish eyes of hers and he gets so flustered and genuinely tongue tied he just wheezes out “good googles you got there”. tries to follow up with “You have arms that can hold.......... Things.” it’s Torment to anyone looking in 

Like don’t get me wrong not!Tim is not like, slobby or disgusting or anything- he cleans up well, even if it’s probably just with one body wash and a 2-in-1 shampoo that doesn’t fit his hair type whatsoever but he uses it just bc it gets the job done, and he dresses “sharply” in that “kinda middle aged taxman’s suit if you slid all the sliders on a business character customization screen to the exact middle” way. but there is No Charm. He couldn’t even talk his way out of a paper bag, much less into police records. he is Perfectly Average in every way

Statement recording by Sasha James. Co-Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. Statement begins