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late-to-the-magnus-archives · 10 months

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Peach Pit - a Magnus Archives Fic

An AU Somewhere Else - part of the Magnus Monsterverse series.

Spoilers for the whole podcast.

Something is definitely unusual about Jon's experience with the Eye.

Several cheesy sci-fi explanations and eight Jonah Magnuses later, Jon has more questions than ever - but at least it seems like he might have found a new friend.

AO3

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Manuela’s printout made my head spin.

If I let go, if I relaxed the willed mitosis that kept me sane—that retained me as me and not an It to It— her printout would all make sense.

It tried—pushed that temptation before me, promised without words what utter bliss it would be to know everything here and now.

It would be bliss. I know it would. But that was not what I wanted.

Pleasure is not permission, I told It, because whether or not It understood those words, I did.

“Would you mind explaining what this is and how you obtained it?” I said.

She looked quite surprised. “You don’t just know?”

“I could.” They were all listening. I suddenly wondered if this were a test. “I have no intention of ever giving the Eye unfettered access to my mind again, however, and so, I am limited.”

“Amazing,” said Leitner, clapping his hands together and startling me. “Remarkable. I knew you’d be safe to bring here.”

“Hush,” said Gertrude. “You mean that, do you?”

So it was a test. “Yes.”

“Even if your lover passed away again?” she said, and I didn’t care what Leitner claimed—those were the eyes of someone who would absolutely try to kill me.

But I wasn’t what I once was.

I knew fear. I certainly had plenty of my own. Yes, I was scared of Jane, of Sarah, of what they could all do.

But I was a little bit scary myself, now. Of course, I could probably still die—but I wasn’t sure how anymore.

I had to take a moment to answer. “First… are you threatening him?”

Her eyebrows rose. “No.”

“Okay. Well, there’s no reason to assume he’ll die for a very long time.”

“The Lonely does not extend lifespan,” Gertrude said.

“Yes, but he’s healthy, lacks genetic predispositions toward inheritable illnesses, and currently suffers from nothing so much as a lack of sleep.” I froze, mouth open.

Gertrude’s lips quirked. “Only that, eh? I thought you weren’t knowing things.”

“Apparently, when it’s really important, it slips through,” I said primly.

Gertrude snorted. “Still. You avoided my question.”

“No, I’m laying foundation for an answer. I’m not wracked by fear of him dying.” I stopped, swallowed, continued. “Also, I don’t think I can express how badly depressed I was when this… when he was murdered.”

His hand was my anchor.

“And a thousand years engulfed in that didn’t make it worse?”

“No, because the Eye was trying to comfort me,” I said, because it was true. “It’s stupid, though. Meant well, I truly believe, but is stupid—and so all it knew to do was remove me from the hurt.”

“Meant well?” said Gertrude with great disbelief.

“The Eye loves me. Damned if I know why,” I said.

She stared. “They don’t love people.”

“They certainly do. It just doesn’t generally turn out well for the object of that love.”

They all stared at me. Gertrude looked offended. Manuela looked fascinated. Leitner was unreadable behind his stupid green spectacles.

They were being ridiculous. “This shouldn’t be that strange,” I said. “They may not be living things like us, but they certainly have tastes and preferences.”

“I knew it! ” said Manuela, slamming her fist into her thigh.

“Manuela,” Leitner started.

“They have tastes! Opinions! Thoughts!”

“Only in the most basic sense,” I said. “Look, we’ve dropped off the point: I wouldn’t be great if he died, no. But I wouldn’t do what I did then, either. I don’t know how much you know about what happened, but when m… when…” Martin squeezed my hand, and I could keep going. “When he died, we’d been walking for uncountable time through a living hellscape, a nightmare world in which every living thing capable of suffering did, and all their misery was shoved forcefully into my brain.”

Gertrude frowned. “Wait a moment. Are you saying the world ended before you entered your thousand year state?”

“Yes.”

She frowned harder. “Explain.”

“When Martin died, the world already belonged to the Beholding.”

“How?”

“I was tricked by a man named Jonah Magnus,” I said.

Manuela stiffened.

“What?” Oh, no, I wasn’t letting that go. “What?”

“We just found one,” she said.

I stared at her. “One… what?”

“I mean, we know of eight,” she said, glancing between Gertrude and Leitner and me. “But there’s one who’s actually ready to fetch. His world’s ended. His Fear is feeding on him, and he’s not having a good time. So, I mean. What do you mean, he tricked you?”

So I didn’t know what my face did.

I felt pale. I felt… sort of tingly and numb ( vasoconstriction, the narrowing of blood vessels due to emotional stress). I realized I wasn’t breathing only because Martin came around, knelt in front of me, and cupped my face.

“Hey,” he said.

Him. His eyes. Him. I melted into him, against him, clung to him like a rock in a storm.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

I was shaking. “You don’t understand who he is.”

Martin knew I wasn’t talking to him.

“We do,” said Gertrude. “Possibly more than you, since you’ve only encountered one of him.”

“No, you don’t know who he is,” I said, sitting up, glaring over Martin’s shoulder. “You don’t know what he’s capable of!”

“Ending the world, evidently,” said Leitner. “Like you.”

“No, not like me! At least the damage I did, I did with my own damn hands!” I snapped.

“Shhh. Jon. I get it. They will too, in time. Shhh. It’s not that one. It’s not that Jonah.” Martin hesitated. “I mean. They said everyone in your world was dead, so it couldn’t be that Jonah, could it?”

“What happened to him in your timeline, Martin? When you had to kill me.”

Manuela flinched at the words—and that was right. That’s how it should be. She had a human heart, and I really, really liked her.

“You killed him,” Martin whispered. “You stabbed him and took his place.”

My jaw dropped. “Oh,” I said after a long moment.

He watched me. Watching for… I don’t know. Some response.

My face burned. “I didn’t stab him.”

“What did you do, then?” said Leitner, sounding absolutely fascinated.

“I ate him.”

“You what? ” said Gertrude.

“I mean… not literally.” Fuck it. I pressed my face to Martin’s shoulder. I didn’t want to see how anyone was looking at me now.

“How?” whispered Martin.

Him, I could answer. Him, I would answer. “After you died. After I… lost myself completely. After I turned to the Eye, because… everything else was already gone. When it had me, when it… eased me. We went to the Panopticon.”

“We?”

“I... I suppose it was an I, but not really. It was we.”

“Go on,” murmured Martin.

I sighed. “Jonah was fine with it. If that matters.”

“Fine with what?” said Leitner.

“Becoming one with the Eye. That’s what he thought of it as.”

“And… what did you think of it as?” said Leitner. “What did you even do?”

“I don’t know how to explain that,” I mumbled into Martin’s shoulder. “The Eye ate him. I was the Eye. But we didn’t literally eat? His body fell and rotted. I don’t know.”

“That’s absurd,” said Leitner.

“It’s incredible,” said Manuela. “Jon. I need to pick your brain. Please.”

I sighed. “I don’t know anything, Manuela. Not really.”

“But your experiences, your impressions—”

“Manuela,” Leitner began in a chiding tone.

“Please, Jon,” said Manuela. “I’ll pay you.”

I paused. “Shit. We do need money here, don’t we?”

Gertrude laughed. She sounded like she hadn’t expected to. “You were floating for a while, weren’t you?”

My face burned again. “Oh, yes. Freed from the demands of Capitalism. How very blessed I was,” I drawled.

“Please,” said Manuela again.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Leitner said.

Maneula flipped him off. He sighed.

Right. She reminded me of Sasha, and had summarily gone from liked to among my favorite people territory. “If you really think it’ll do any good, yes. I will,” I said. “Ah… about Jonah…”

“Let’s discuss that as part of everything,” she said. “Obviously, we don’t want Jonah here if he’s a danger.”

“He is,” I said.

“Let’s find out together! Nothing’s decided yet, after all. Here.” She dug into her pocket and produced a business card. “We’ve barely even talked about you yet. Listen—I have satellite feeds monitoring everything. Surges of power (which are observable via atmospheric and magnetic disturbance, heat, radiation, and more, believe it or not), increases in psychological events or unexpected deaths… you have no idea.”

“It sounds like a police state,” I said before I could help myself.

She shook her head. “I’m the only one who gets to see all of it—as annoyed as that makes some people —and I don’t have any authority to act on it, nor the power to do so even if I did.”

I stared at her business card; I was still draped on Martin, and I did not give a damn who saw. (Maybe a little. Maybe I did it at them, as well.) “Do I… call you?” All it had was her name and a number.

“Yes! I’ll come get you.”

“Portal travel?”

“Well, I’m based out of the Alps, so yes, you’ll prefer that.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. “So. Tell me what happened. What I did. Cliff’s Notes.”

She looked thrilled. “I’m calling it prisming.”

“Weird nomenclature? You?” said Gertrude, dryly. “Thought I’d never see the day.”

“Prisming,” said Manuela, like tuning back in after a commercial break. “Of course, you understand the concept—when light, passing through glass, slows and bends at different wavelengths, separating into the colors that make up light, which we normally can’t see.”

Martin snorted. “Are we really doing that goofy sci-fi movie trope?”

I pulled back to stare at him. “What are you talking about?”

His smile was so adorable I wanted to wrap it around my heart like a blanket. “We have got to fix your viewing habits. These movies—they’ll be talking about something wild like the loss of Earth’s magnetic field, and then they’ll demonstrate it by roasting a peach pit with hairspray and a lighter.”

I laughed.

I laughed hard. I couldn’t help it. It had been so long since I’d encountered anything so silly. “What! What? You’re joking!”

“Not even a little,” he said, utterly pleased with himself.

“You ought to already know about such things,” said Gertrude warily.

It was another test, but I was still laughing and couldn’t be bothered being intimidated this time. “The Eye knows everything, but doesn’t interact with it. That’s a human response.” I wiped my eyes. My smile faded. “I told you the condition it had me in. Believe me, I spent no time with nonsense like that. I would have missed Martin too much.”

Except… It did care about things now, didn’t It?

It was amused by Brother Love. This was new; I could feel it, feel that this development was relatively recent. How could this be?

I was not going to volunteer the question. Not yet.

“Hm,” Gertrude said. “And do you have the memoirs of all It knew?”

“I honestly don’t know. I feel like I’ve woken from a coma—which I have done, by the way. You’re not… you feel very weird for a while. You are yourself, but not.”

“You were in a coma?” said Manuela. “Tell me about it?”

“We haven’t even finished the current conversation.”

“I don’t think we’ll finish this one for a while,” said Manuela, back on track. “I haven’t figured out how you did it. To be honest, I assumed you’d understand this,” she said, holding up the printout, “and could help explain it to me.”

“Oh.” Disappointed. Embarrassed. “I could try to help?”

Leitner sighed. “Really, Manuela?”

“Well, this is quite new,” she said. “None of the Eye avatars have done anything like this before.”

I blinked at her. “They haven’t?”

“No. It’s one of the reasons I want to investigate your theory about the Eye liking you. That could be what makes this different.”

“But then what are other avatars like?”

“Lenses. Magnification, clarification, seeing through whatever to the truth of things.”

“Peach pits,” Martin mumbled, and set me off again.

“Well,” I finally said. “There may be a way to access all that knowledge, but right now, I don’t know how to do it safely. The Eye is too used to having all of me. It’s a fire hydrant, not a faucet.” I grinned at Martin.

He grinned back and rolled his eyes.

“Right, well,” said Manuela. “What you did is somehow break the hunter—who is effective because they are basically combinations of various avatars—into individual parts. That’s not a little thing.”

“Wait. I did? And they’re what, merged ? Like some sort of Flesh abomination?”

“Not at all. It’s much more homogeneous than that.”

“They’re working together?” Horror erased what amusement I had.

“Or being forced to.”

I stared at her. “Why would someone do that? We’re up against some… mad scientist of the Fears? How is that even possible?”

“We don’t know, but it seems like that, doesn’t it? It’s the reason Jurgen decided to bring people like you here who’d do anything to stop it—it was already happening when we arrived. Otherwise, we’d have to watch the world end again.”

Martin’s eyes were huge. It seemed I wasn’t the only one hearing this for the first time.

“Are you going to tell him everything?” said Leitner, dry.

“Am I going to tell… an avatar of the Eye…” Manuela began with such sarcasm that I think even Tim would’ve been impressed.

“Yes, all right, fair point,” Leitner said, sounding pouty.

He probably wanted to feel important by doling things out. That, or he didn’t trust me. Well, that went both ways. “And why are they called hunters, then?” I said. “Is that the primary Fear they’re made of, or something?”

“No, that was just the name sticking before we could be clever about it,” she said.

That made sense. Humans did that sort of thing—not that I was about to share such an observation. It would make me sound too far outside humanity.

I wasn’t. I was still me. I had to believe that.

“Jurgen, I’m done here,” said Gertrude. “If there’s nothing else for me to do…?”

“You are?” He sounded so surprised.

“Yes. I have come to my conclusion.”

I peered at her over Martin’s shoulder.

“You have?” said Leitner.

“I’ll send you my report, but some of us don’t have the luxury of sitting around in plush chairs all day, staring at stained glass.”

I couldn’t help snorting.

“Everyone is in such a mood today,” said Leitner, and waved his hand at her dismissively. “I want that report.”

Gertrude waved back—with far more disdain than he’d managed—and simply left without another word to us.

“Was that good?” I murmured.

“Hell if I know,” Martin murmured back. “She didn’t come stare at me in any of my meetings.”

“Well, you not knowing alters things,” Manuela said, “but it’s not a dead end. Give me a few days to correlate and collect more data, then let’s talk.”

“All right. I can do that.”

“I think the question, Jon, is whether you can do it again,” said Leitner.

“I don’t know. I’d advise not making any plans around an incident hat could’ve been a fluke,” I said.

“Do you think it was?” Leitner said evenly.

“I don’t know. It could have been some lingering effect of… everything. It’s a risk. Don’t plan around it.”

He huffed. “Fine. But you could save lives.”

“If that’s the case, we’ll figure something out—but I won’t risk anyone in the process,” I said.

And this time, I received the dismissive hand-wave. “If there’s nothing else, Manuela?”

She grinned at me. “A week.”

“A week. I’ll call.”

She stood, gathered her lawn chair, looked around as though to be certain she hadn’t dropped anything, and opened a portal.

I almost saw how she did it—her lenses example, seeing where she wanted to go, and in the process, tunneling a way there.

Was that good? Did it damage something? I had no idea.

She was gone, and it was significantly less comfortable with only Leitner staring at us. “You really are proving to be as interesting as I’d hoped,” he said.

“I… you’re welcome?” I said, uncertain as to the pleasantries in this situation.

“We’ll obviously need to dive into this further, but both Manuela and Gertrude seem to think you are no threat to us—which was my main concern.”

“And you’d have done what, if they thought otherwise?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know. We’d attempt capture and rehabilitation.”

“Like Nikola.”

“Yes. Taking your life would be the absolute last step. We’ve had enough death. All of us.”

I needed to see Nikola for myself before determining whether that truly was the better option. “I don’t intend to die or harm anyone. I just want to live, and I don’t mean mere survival. All of this took my life from me.”

“I understand,” he said, and sounded like he did. “It’s what they all want, and I try to give opportunity for.”

It was awkward now for a different reason. I wished I could just believe him; it would be lovely if he were honest.

And maybe he was, but that would have to be proven over time. “Are we done?”

“Yes. Oh—stop and see Agnes on your way out. She’ll give you a lunch voucher.”

Oh. All right.

We held hands and left.

Agnes was indeed there—her hair cut short, dressed as though it were 35 Celsius in here. She smiled; she eyed me in a way I was coming to recognize as Oh, I killed you in my world, and handed us little coupons for lunch across the street.

We both knew we’d be saving those coupons for later.

I waited until we were outside again before speaking. “How can you stand me?”

“What?” Martin said, startled.

My voice shook. “They all kill me. Even you had to kill me. I drove everyone to it. How can you even—”

He kissed me. Arms around, holding tight so I could not blow apart. “I didn’t want to. You didn’t drive me to it. It was the Web’s plan from start to finish.”

I stared at him.

“She was trying to eacape,” he said. “But to do that, the Eye had to be lured to another world—and that could only happen with you as both bait and bear trap. We both fell for it, Jon. It wasn’t your fault.”

I stared more. “You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.”

“I did. If it was your fault, I’d tell you. But all you did was be yourself, not know what you were doing, and be used. By everyone. I’m not too happy about eight Jonah Magnuses, either.”

“Maybe we can put them all in a room, and they’ll eat each other,” I muttered.

“I’m pretty sure with that many of them together, they would just rule the world.”

“Or wreck it.” I leaned in. “I suppose it might not be like that. Are different versions of people different here?

“Wildly. We saw the Evans earlier, remember? One’s full Lonely; the other went Desolation.”

“Damn,” I said, trying to picture it.

“They get along like siblings—because they just do—but they are very different people.”

I made a face like tasting something awful. “I suppose I’ll at least look at him. Jonah.”

“You don’t have to. He’s not your responsibility.”

“I know him better than anyone here. I do have to, Martin.”

And Jared pulled up. I hadn’t even noticed Martin messaging him. “Right,” Jared said, rising impossibly huge from his vehicle like all the passengers of a clown car in one, and opening the back door for us. He eyed Martin. “This’s what you wanted, eh? No wonder I weren’t your type.” And he laughed wetly.

Martin shrugged. “Always was. Not your fault.”

“Eh,” said Jared. “Killed him anyway, my time. Don’t feel like I owe nothing bad now.”

“How did you…” I said.

“Got these letters, yeah? An’ your picture. Told me where you’d be. Got into the Institute and there you were—but not for long.”

“Jonah Magnus again,” I murmured to Marrin.

“Coincidence.”

I was beginning to wonder. “I need to talk to Jane.”

“Sure? Let’s do lunch at home, first.”

“Do… do I have food?” I said, eyes wide.

Martin laughed. “I do. It’s time you came to my flat, anyway.”

“You gonna get in or not?” Jared said.

We got in.

I kept Martin’s hand between mine. “Thank you for being there.”

He just held me.

We were silent the rest of the ride back. And nothing was stopping us. Nothing was caging us in, or chaining us down. I still felt increasingly trapped, and I had no idea what to do.

The Eye tried to tell me about Jared’s secret love affair with some Corruption avatar, but I didn’t let that get too far.

Its delight unnerved me. It had changed.

And I was beginning to wonder if I was the reason it had.

#tma #tma fic #tma fanfic #ao3 #jonmartin #jmart #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #tma au #tma spoilers #magnus monsterverse

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