#the way I gasped when I saw him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fellpyrean · 1 year

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Claps hands alright we’re doing this! So I started listening to magnus archives a few months ago and it really did things to my writing ideas, so now I’m gonna round some up and post ‘em.

I forget where/when I first saw a moth!jon but u know. He’s cute. So here is some moth!jon AU! Corruption Jon :Dc and archivist Sasha! ~1800 words.

Since he is a corruption avatar in this, there is (as expected) some possibly gross bug imagery, but not a lot of holes. And no worms! :D

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The flat is quiet.

Quieter than Sasha expected, and much neater too than she expected when they connected this one to "Filth." The lights are off and there's a faint dusty, sweet scent in the air as she cracks open the door, torch slicing through the dark.

It catches on motes of dust. She thinks she hears movement, a susurrus of rustling like fabric faint in the depths of the place but little else. She pushes the door further, feels it catch on the ragged old rug on the floor and watches moths flutter up, batter against her torch in little puffs of dust before they flutter away.

Part of her worries as she steps inside, as she closes the door behind herself - leaving just a crack in case she needs to get out fast.

This is too quiet for something of the powers. The flat should be more of a wreck, more… more miserably bloodstained, more disgusting and unnerving, but it looks, honestly, just a bit messy, a bit moth-eaten. The couch sags a bit wrong, but hell, she can't pretend she's never had one like it. There are shelves of books, their edges chewed and pages no doubt holey, there's even a mug left forgotten on the kitchen counter. It's all dim; lit only by what spills around heavy curtain edges and her own torch as she steps further in and - and hears that rustling again from the end of the hallway and heads straight for it.

More moths flutter up at her steps, and she is wary, she is. But the things just… flutter uselessly at her hands, their wings shedding dust and their fat abdomens plump and full, but hardly a threat before they fly - further inside.

Towards that faint rustling noise, towards the door at the end of the dim-lit hall that is just open enough to allow the frantic moths to flit inside. Writhing and wriggling at the crack between door and jamb just a moment before they vanish inside, but the movement… it makes Sasha swallow.

Something about the way the bulbous little things squirm before they pop through sets her stomach on edge. Too many of them; more than she thought, all struggling to squeeze into that door.

The crack writhes by the time she reaches it.

She can swear she hears them whine and click and screech in tiny voices above the din of their frantically fluttering wings.

She uses her torch to push the door open. Fast, loosing a cloud of moths from the stuffed crack that fall and flutter and scatter into the dim room before her.

The rustling has not gone quiet. Neither has the soft, whining song of flapping wings and voices she cannot place as she raises her torch high, fumbling for her pepper spray in her other hand. More of a comfort to herself than any real belief it would accomplish anything against something abnormal, but the room doesn’t… change. Nothing leaps out of the dim shadows, nothing comes ravening towards her with a horrid, dripping maw.

It’s a bedroom. The bed is really as far as the light peeking around the curtains lights, in thin, dusty stripes across worn rugs and a small pile of abandoned clothes.

“A-Ah.”

Sasha whips her torch towards the voice, and stills.

There is… there is something like a man there. Tucked in the corner, with all the moths frantically fluttering, scuttling towards it. She watches, stomach queasy, as the moths drill between the heavy folds of the blanket? The wrap? It has folded around itself. It reaches a hand out to a particularly fat straggler and cradles it in its palms like a treasure, bringing it up slowly, carefully, and opens thin, paled lips and lets the thing crawl straight into its mouth as Sasha gags.

It is almost worse then when it looks up.

Long, straggling hair that was probably rather nice once. Now it is loose and lank, black shot with grey and dust that hangs over… over his shoulders, over the thing he has cocooned himself within. His eyes are dark. Too dark.

There are no whites, she realizes, and cannot help but feel her fingers twinge around the pepper spray.

But he isn’t attacking. He is just looking at her, head cocked like a curious animal as the moths burrow back into the shelter he offers.

She can work with this. She sucks in a breath, wills her stomach to settle as she tells it it could really be so, so much worse, and points the torch further towards the floor. Good manners. Going out on a limb that he’s probably not too fond of bright light.

“Hello,” she says. The strange man stares at her. Hard enough she swears she can feel the tracks his eyes leave on her skin, but she only makes herself stand taller. He seems to like that. He laughs. Not maliciously.

It’s soft. Like cotton, like it’s been a long while since he’s used his voice, and the rasp sticks to it as he speaks and Sasha tries not to linger on where exactly that moth went.

“Hello, Archivist. Doing house calls?”

He’s smiling. And that’s what gets her.

His voice is soft and smooth like old silk and his smile stiff like he’s unused to using it, but something about him feels familiar. It’s there, just at the corner of her mind, and she knows she’s frowning deeply as she casts a line and tries to hook just why she feels like she knows this strange man, but then he laughs again and stands.

He rustles as he does. That… that thing wrapped around him doesn’t move the way it should, not like cloth, but she can’t immediately place that, either. Not until he walks a little closer and her torch light catches on it and it… shimmers.

Like moth wings. And Sasha sucks in a breath.

She can see it now. The patterns in the dusty brown, the oranges that circle white to make massive, partly hidden eyespots. The thick, dark veins supporting the overall structure, and she can’t help herself from blurting out, “Can you fly with those?”

The man shudders, that smile hung unmoving on his face as he brings a hand to his mouth and coughs against the static.

“Not well,” he answers into his hand, his too-dark eyes sparkling. He lets his hand drop back into the too-layered folds of his wings and shuffles a little closer; his wingtips drag across the floor, like a blanket wrapped around a child too small for it, and she can see now where his long, untied hair turns into something shorter. A ruff of fur at the back of his neck, across the back of his shoulders.

(Can see the moths wriggling down into the fur, settling there, an army of tiny, coal-black eyes staring out at her, glinting green when her torch light catches them.)

And then he stands still, that faint smile on his face, his dark eyes half-lidded in an expression she cannot place, and waits as that soft, soft distant song hums in the room.

Sasha exhales. This is more than she dared hope for. He’s talking. He’s non-aggressive.

“I,” she begins, wetting her tongue before plunging back into her words. “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions. About the ‘Filth.’ About you.”

He watches, and she feels emboldened.

(Her phone begins to ring as she steps closer to him, and she ignores it. It’s Elias. She knows.)

“We don’t have answers. And if you could tell me, tell us what you know? About… about what’s happening.”

Her phone stops ringing. It starts again. The man smiles wider and reaches out. Sasha can see that his hands are… strange. Plated like chitin, and the desire to grab his hand and investigate each delicately plated joint wars deeply with the uneasy reminder that there are probably moths crawling beneath, of statements that were far, far more explicit about what ‘Filth’ did to a person than this man showed.

His hand waves in front of her face for a moment and she starts, coming back to herself, as her phone angrily rings again.

“Your phone?” the man asks, and Sasha doesn’t hesitate for a moment to shut the thing off.

(Elias. All three calls. If he doesn’t want her here, then she’s not leaving.)

“Well Archivist,” and she knows she is not missing the strange bitterness that clings to that word this time, knows there is something she is missing about him, “If you have that many questions, we should probably get a little more comfortable. I have a feeling that once I let you start, you’ll keep me well after dusk.”

And isn’t it bizarre? As he brushes past Sasha - both carefully and clearly telegraphing his movements so she only feels the barest touch of his wings as he heads back out into the hallway - she realizes she doesn’t feel afraid of this one. A little disgusted if she thinks about him too hard, yes, but there’s been no threat. No… no menace, no winding, evasive non-answers, just. Incredibly human remarks. It almost circles right back around from comforting to even worse than something as alien as the thing with the door. Michael.

But as the rustling moves away from her down the hallway, she can’t help but flash her torch around the bedroom. One last bit of nosiness.

An old, worn bed, rather like the couch. Shelves with books so moth-eaten they’ve gone to pieces. An open closet, filled with over-large sweaters and… She blinks. And oddly proper button ups, slacks.

And then… and then she turns her torch in one last semi-circle and catches upon a strange shine beneath the lumpy pillows.

Like polaroids.

The itch that there’s something she should know only grows when she spots them; growing from a thing at the edge of her thoughts to an all consuming need that drives her in fast steps across the dusty rug before she even catches herself. She fishes the pictures out with deft fingers and - and she thinks her heart stops in her chest.

She knows the people in the picture.

That long, dark hair shot with grey is distinctive - even set on a much more vibrant, lively face, and above a painfully crisp button up. He’s wearing glasses in the picture, and. A name tag.

She can’t read the name, but she’d recognize that emblem anywhere. Not that she needs to.

Because beside the stuffy librarian like man, his eyes green instead of black, stands… Tim. Tim, his shirt as loud as ever, his smile boisterous, and an arm slung affectionately around the man who couldn’t possibly be any more his opposite. And the same horrible name tag pinned to a pineapple-strewn lapel.

The man worked at the Magnus Institute.

He worked with Tim.

She knows his name now.

Jonathan Sims.

#tma #tma fanfic #moth jon #crowswritings #hides chatter in the tags #my tentative ideas for this were that it's actually a time travel AU #as well as (gasp) jon/tim #bc like i mean who is to say the time travel is actually time travel?#you may as well have been shoved thru the crack to another world entirely where the time flows differently #and in this world jon and tim were originally a lot closer #jon sims #sasha james #i remembered i needed to tag them anyway so just picture tim doing his best to flirt with this oblivious stick in the mud #and catching feelings along the way but the guy is just Oblivious #and then one day he vanishes bc future/alt world jon comes along and p much instantly gets eaten by another Fear #(i imagine corruption as the antithesis to the lonely thanks to my partner so he did feed himself to it in desperation tbh)#when he woke up in a world and more or less panicked not wanting the same thing to happen as before and was so so desperate not to be Alone #jazzhands #he didn't consider that this world was actually different in some ways and legit just thought it was time travel #so when he saw the pictures of him and tim he was deeply confused and panicked and guilty #ok final jazzhands #this is a short drabble #the full idea would be much more than a short drabble and i am not strong enough to do a 50k jon/tim AU #love to spin it around in my head tho

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