It's my turn with the time travel trope! Except, I have no clue how to explain how the time travel happened, and this will likely remain a one-shot, but still, I wanted to write one!
It takes place after episode 200, Jon and Martin somehow appear back in season one while Martin is living in the Archives.
~
Tim was an early bird, so, like most mornings, he was the first into the archives. He greeted Rosie as he passed her desk and traveled down the stairs to the basement, walking through the narrow hallway and into the door at the very end.
He was humming as he walked in but stopped silent, dead in his tracks, when he saw the heap of what seemed to be two people huddled together on the carpet.
One layed, completely limp, in the lap of the other, who was leaning over the first with his arms wrapped around him.
The first figure blinked open his eyes, slowly waking up, seeming dazed and groaning in pain. Tim recognized him instantly.
"M- Martin?" He sputtered in complete shock. His hair was duller, with a few white streaks running through it, and he seemed smaller, somehow, than the Martin Tim knew, but it was still unmistakably him.
Martin's head whipped around to look at Tim. Yep, it was definitely Martin. Like his hair, his eyes were a slightly duller blue, and his glasses were slightly cracked, and he had tear stains running down his cheeks.
"Tim?" Martin all but shouted, sounding just as surprised. "What are - I mean - how are you even -?" He turned his gazed down at the man in his arms and gasped.
The man was still unconscious, with a large blood stain on the chest of his shirt and, seemingly, more blood on his hands.
Tim almost recognized him as well - his hair, though longer and more gray; his face, though covered in small circular scars, along with what seemed to be a burn scar on one cheek; and he was covered head to toe in eyes - but, he looked shockingly similar to Jon.
Martin was now crying and whispering something that sounded desperate and pleading, something along the lines of "Please wake up" - though, Tim couldn't quite make out what he was saying - over and over as he cupped the man's face in his hand, that was also stained with blood. Martin seemed to notice the stain on the man's shirt and quickly un-buttoned it to see the wound.
To both his and Tim's surprise, there was no wound. Then, the man's eyes fluttered open.
"Jon," Martin breathed, voice filled with relief, as he brought his hand back up to the man's face. "You're alive!"
"Y-yes," the man - Jon - 's voice was hoarse, "and you're here, too." He, too, began to cry, reaching his own hand up to hold Martin's face.
Martin leaned down and pulled Jon into a hug, and they sobbed in one another's arms.
Martin pulled back, "I - I thought -"
"Yeah," Jon cut him off, then a sad smile spread across his face, and his voice broke a little, "but we're okay."
"Yeah," Martin said, smiling down at him as well. He pulled Jon into a kiss, and they sat, smiling fondly at one another for quite a while.
Then, Jon's smile faded, and he asked, "Where - where are we?"
Martin looked up and gazed at the room. "The Archives?" He said, a bit surprised. Then he locked eyes with Tim, once again.
"Oh!" Martin stammered as if he'd forgotten he was there, "Tim, right! You're - You're here? You're alive!"
Tim stared down at the two of them, at Martin's smiling face and Jon look of complete confusion, and eventually managed to push the words, "Who are you?" from his mouth.
"Tim, it's us, Martin a- and Jon," Martin said, still smiling.
"No," Tim was shaking now, "No. Nope. You are not. You are not Jon, and you are not Martin. Who are you?"
Martin's smile dropped.
"Tim, it's alright, i-it's us," Jon said, beginning to sit up more, but remaining in Martin's lap.
"Jon doesn't look like that," Tim said hesitantly.
"I know it's been a while, but it is us."
"No, I saw the real Jon yesterday. So, who are you?" Tim demanded again.
"What? No. We haven't seen you in at least a year. I mean - not since the unknowing, and we thought you were dead!"
Tim began to laugh nervously and took a few steps back.
"Alright," he said, his voice beginning to shake, "I don't know what this is - or who you are - but you need to get out, or I'm going to call the police."
"Wha- I mean, are they even going to come?" Martin asked nervously.
"Is everything back to normal?" Jon's voice was filled with hope and anxiety.
"'Back to normal'? " Tim repeated, clearly confused.
"Yes. Did the world turn back?"
"'Back'?" Tim repeated again.
"Yes," Jon seemed to be growing impatient. "Is it fixed? The fears - are they gone?"
"I don't know what you're on about, but you need to leave," Tim, by this point, had almost made it to the door.
Just then, Jon - another Jon, one who seemed much more put together and didn't have any scars across his face - walked in the room, staring intently at something on his phone. He stopped when he nearly ran into Tim, then looked to the Jon and Martin sitting on the floor.
"Martin? What's going on? And who is that?" He asked, refering to the Jon in Martin's arms. Then, his eyes grew wide as he looked at the blood on each of them and the eyes covering the other Jon.
Martin looked to his Jon, "Jon, what's going on?"
Jon just stared in confusion at all the people in front of him, then seemed to gather his thoughts.
"Just, hold on a second," grumbled, then closed his eyes (well, the two on his face - the rest that covered him remained open) and static began to buzz throughout the room.
"Right," Jon said, opening the two eyes on his face and turning to Martin, "It's April twenty-second... 2016."
"What?" Martin sputtered, then laughed nervously, "No, this all started - or, the world ended, or whatever - eighteenth of October in 2018, Jon!"
"I know, Martin," Jon's voice now seemed to be getting a bit frustrated, "we must've traveled with the fears and gotten pulled into some weird time travel nonsense." Jon brought his hand up and rubbed his eyes, wincing a bit.
Martin wrapped an arm around him. "Are you alright?" He asked softly.
"Fine," Jon grumbled. He brought his hand down, but his eyes remained shut. "Goodness, I've got a splitting headache."
Martin hummed in concern.
"Sorry -" Tim interrupted ,"- The world ended?"
Jon sighed.
"Yes," he said flatly, "And we'll explain everything. Just give me a moment."
Jon once again shut his eyes, presumably to Know something again, but the static was interrupted by another person entering the room.
Dressed in his PJs, gripping a small bag and a bundle of clothes in his hands, and rubbing sleep from his eyes, another Martin was walking from the direction of document storage.
This Martin was brighter. His hair had no white, and his eyes were a deep blue. He, even though he'd just woken up, seemed significantly less tired than the Martin on the floor.
He froze about two feet away from the others in the room. His mouth hung slightly open as he looked from a standing Jon to a much more disheveled Jon, who was also sitting in the lap of a man who looked a lot like himself.
He looked a moment longer between the four people in front of him before snapping his mouth shut and muttering a disbelieving "Right, yeah... sure" and walking out of the room.
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Flesh avatar!Martin fic
TW: severe body image issues, self hatred, negative self talk, body dysmorphia, body horror (ish), unhealthy one sided relationships
Jon wasn’t eating.
The level of Martin’s romantic obsession had never crossed the line of tracking someone’s eating habits, but it didn’t take a genius to see that whatever he was eating, it wasn’t enough. His own apple and snack bar combination had lasted him throughout secondary school, a certainty that he sincerely hoped wouldn’t change any time soon. But Jon needed it more than him.
Behind his desk, he felt small. He didn’t have to be aware of the flesh that hung off his limbs in jiggling masses, so he opted for something better. Something smaller. Jon was substantially smaller than him - a fact that he found overwhelming at first. He switched between the constant burning of awe of a lithe and sharp frame and the need to put his excess to use.
The line of sight from his desk to Jon’s office was cruelly clear. A hulking great wooden door between them, one that was the stumbling subject of many of his own poems. A foggy allegory of distance. It was a momentous occasion of sunshine when that door peeled open. Each time, Martin drank his fill of Jonathan Sims, but recently, it had left his mouth uncomfortably dry.
Today was one of those occasions. A forest green sweater vest hung off what only just passed off as a body. Lines cut beneath his deep brown eyes, distracting rather than highlighting. Cheekbones that once lifted a haughty expression only shadowed a much heavier one. Maybe this was just the rose tint that surrounded Jon, romanticising a time of crisis where Martin could justify stepping in. Or maybe Jon was actually not doing well. His body followed this line of thinking, footsteps treading heavily after Jon’s rabbit-footed paces, into the kitchen.
“Hi, Jon.”
Fat kids could only ever want to be one of three things when they grew up. Either utilise their size as a sign of comedy, strength or as softness. Anything else was unforgivable. Martin chose softness. He let that seep into his words, melting his body into the patches in the floor, so he would not trip.
“Martin.”
He lapped up the slight incline of his neck, a nod that contained a dizzying array of possibilities. Jon was clutching at a chipped mug as if it were his only anchor to the mortal world. Martin was inclined to believe that.
“I was wondering…”
The cupboard doors bristled against the hinges in the silence that followed. Jon did not expect further conversation. Neither did Martin.
“Yes?”
“I brought too much food.”
“Right.”
Now, Martin. Prove your value as a pile of meat.
“Would you like some?”
An apple. A peace offering. An organic bridge of sorts, nutrients shared from a body that doesn’t need it to a body that does. Almost parasitic. And Jon looked at it as such. With the disgust of someone offering to attach to him, to leach off of his energy and time.
“It’s just a fruit. It won’t kill you.”
Jon’s eyes sunk further into the past. Into whatever warren he had been dragged into, taking from him his edges and sanding down into the bare necessities. Martin only had one card left to play.
“I…please just take it, Jon?”
Sincerity.
Emotions are rarely seen in the fat kid. Emotions are frowned upon. They increase your size, your ability to be noticed, so reassuring or stoic or half-laughing are your only choices. This is a wildcard. Not even Jonathan Sims could predict his response. Unpredictable was something Martin could get used to being.
“...Sure, Martin.”
Jon gave Martin a wide berth while crossing the kitchen. As if he had grown suddenly and was unsure of his new dimensions. Martin felt no contortion of his size, standing, watching Jon walk away, biting the apple in his hand. There was no door to the kitchen, of any material, let alone wood. Nothing especially poetic about eating an apple in an office. Just a faint sense of hunger and a new willingness to do something about it.
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ok so hear me out.
this has been rattling around in my brain for a good couple of days, i had two all-day art exams so i was just sat silently alone with my own brainrot for ten hours and honestly it paid off
so this is my idea for the magnus scrotocol protocol and what it could be about, but honestly if it ends up being way off i might actually write it - because of all the alternate universe shit it could easily be canon Somewhere Else. also i know alex and jonny said that it’s inspired by the video game control, but i know absolutely nothing about that game so please take this with a grain of salt, it probably won’t be canon but a guy can dream!!
so, it takes place on another earth, parallel to the main tma universe, where things are pretty much the same as real life. and while it’s obviously not a world without fear, the entities don’t exist there. well, until they do.
so when jon and martin do That One Thing and the fears are let out into the multiverse, the sheer energy they cause as they enter the outskirts of this world sends technology CRAZY. and everything, at exactly the same moment on every electronic device in the world, is just chaos, a mangled mixture of nonsensical noises and static (and maybe you hear a little “statement remains” here and there, not sure what the mechanics of that would be in terms of jon’s official status, but hey it would be fun and it would make “Oh…Hello” make sense). and everywhere around the world, people are just… watching. listening. frozen with the most complete and all-consuming feeling of terror they have ever experienced. and of course it ends, and no one wants to admit that it was real, but after around twenty minutes of society just grinding to a halt, everyone feeling the same thing at the same time EVERYWHERE, it’s a terrifying global phenomenon. the world is afraid.
and so The Experts (whoever would be assigned to deal with whatever this is) start doing their research, and they manage to “decode” it (which makes the ARG and stuff like MAG - Error even more meta and fun) and it’s straight up just mag 200.
and they say that it’s clear it was recorded via tape, and they don’t know how it made its way onto electronic devices like this because it’s A TAPE, it shouldn’t give off any kind of signal you would be able to broadcast, and nothing should be able to be broadcast on that scale in the first place. but that’s not the worst thing. the worst thing is that one of the voices in this mysterious message is that of uk prime minister elias bouchard.
and no, i don’t mean jonah magnus, i mean the ORIGINAL Elias Bouchard. i mean it makes sense - he was a white man born into a rich and privileged family, and despite his uselessness, no one batted an eyelid when he became head of the institute. so yeah, it doesn’t seem too out there to think that in an alternate universe, he became the tory prime minister. (hence “there will be some returning voices” - i think it would be so fun to finally hear ben play the real elias, and such a different role and experience despite being in a similar position of power in the context of the story)
so the series begins in a meeting of all the Important Brits who need to deal with this issue, maybe with our civil servant protagonist(s?) in the background serving tea or something like that. we hear basira say her “good luck” before the tape clicks off, and we’re finally introduced to the people she ended up unknowingly saying it to.
and i haven’t actually figured out plot details, it’s just my idea for the basic premise, and i do think it’s unlikely because of the rest of the plot. like, in my opinion it wouldn’t be that interesting having the characters try to figure out where the tape comes from, and what the events of mag 200 mean and how it happened and why it happened… because we already know that, and alex and jonny specifically said they weren’t going to spend time pretending like we didn’t know information that we already know from magnus. but at the same time, they said they want to “play around with the lore”, so a post-apocalypse show set in the original tma universe definitely seems off the cards and this is the most interesting Somewhere-Else-civil-servants idea i could think of.
but yeah, just my idea! again not sure what would happen in the rest of the series, but it would be really cool as a starting point. and maybe you could even have jon and martin existing as like,,, ghosts in the machine, communicating through technology and helping the main characters navigate a world with the fears in it. which would definitely explain the actual canonicity behind “Oh… Hello” and this idea of mag 200 being broadcast to the masses as the fears come through.
please do reblog or send me an ask and tell me what you think and your own ideas, i personally would lose my shit if something like this were to happen and i think it sounds really cool.
also im gonna tag @jonnywaistcoat because i would love to see what he thinks of this idea and any crumbs of either confirmation or denial he might give us (but also if he does see it i will lose my mind and probably spontaneously combust so there’s that)
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