happy new year everyone! and, honestly, what a year 2025 has been for me.
i’ve had a rollercoaster of a year. highs, lows, and everything in between. but the most impactful thing to happen to me this year was that in february i decided to start listening to a podcast.
i’d been seeing tma content on my dash for months and all the amazing fanart had me intrigued, but i was a certified horror hater at the time, and to be honest the prospect of starting it was a daunting one. i can actually remember the exact date on which i listened to the first episode. i remember sitting down at my desk with the intention of getting some work done and telling myself that if it’s too scary then i can always just turn it off and listen to something else. i think i must have ended up listening to five episodes that day alone. it got its claws into me like nothing has done since adolescence, and pretty soon it had taken over my every waking moment.
tma also rekindled my love of writing. i hadn’t written a fanfiction in about three years before i started listening, and though i work on personal fiction projects on and off, i hadn’t felt emotionally connected to my writing in years. i have clinical depression, and oftentimes it steals the joy from the things that i love, but for the first time in a very long time, writing has been fun again. it’s a hug when i’m sad, a soothing balm when i’m stressed, and one of the only things which can make me forget everything else going on around me. during the most stressful moments of this year, listening to tma was an escape, and writing my silly little fanfictions probably saved my life.
somehow, i even managed to find the courage to post my works to ao3, and quite honestly the response, though it might seem small to some, has genuinely blown me away.
if you are one of those people who has read, bookmarked, kudosed, or commented on one of my fics since i started posting in june, then, from the bottom of my heart and with as much sincerity as i can muster, thank you. you don’t know how much it means to me, to be able to have even a tiny positive impact on someone else’s day when my own life often feels like it is falling apart around me.
and so, on to 2026. this year, i’ll be submitting my phd thesis, continuing to nurture that which brings me joy, and, of course, writing a metric shit ton of fanfiction. i have so many exciting projects planned for this year, and i hope that they’ll bring just as much happiness to everyone who reads them as i know i will get from writing them.
boushards:
something something jon and elias wearing each other’s clothes to work after they start seeing each other but they both dress in such similar outfits all the time that it takes virtually everyone in the institute a few months to realise that they don’t just buy clothes from the same brands or anything.
yeah no i’m still thinking about this actually. they start off just wearing each other’s ties or jumpers; items which could easily be mistaken as the two of them buying their clothes from the same workwear brands. over time, probably once they’ve been together for a while and rumours are starting to sprout like weeds throughout the cafeteria, it becomes more obvious in small and subtle ways.
elias seems to no longer wear tailor-made clothing, judging by the ill fit of some of his outfits these days.
jon takes a very strong liking to a particular jacket which has a dry cleaning tag on one of the inner seams made out to an e. bouchard.
elias’s taste in socks suddenly gets a whole lot more colourful.
jon accidentally packs his stuff into elias’s work satchel one morning and doesn’t notice his error until lunchtime.
elias wears a set of novelty cuff links one day, and the next day jon has the exact same pair on.
jon blows his nose with elias’s monogrammed handkerchief. he sometimes smells faintly of elias’s preferred cologne.
elias wears a shirt of jon’s with a very recognisable ink stain on one of the cuffs which jon hasn’t gotten around to cleaning yet. he’s not one for rolling up his shirt sleeves, so the whole archival team notice it when elias comes down to the archives early one morning and very politely asks jon for his office keys, which seem to have somehow magically appeared in one of jon’s trouser pockets.
it’s got to feed the eye somehow.
aaaaand tech issues. this laptop is only two years old and if something happens to it i literally don’t know what i’ll do.
okay it seems fine after a forced restart. cannot deal with this today, if it happens again i am just going to give up.
leons-tits:
Something that will always get me about MAG 92 is the fact that Jon gets dragged back to the archives visibly worse for wear. His clothes are ripped, he’s covered in dirt, his hair is tousled and knotted, he reeks of ozone, damp earth, and blood. He is clutching a horrifically burnt hand and his neck wound is still open and sluggishly dripping blood onto the collar of (Georgie’s) shirt. All of this, and only one single person bothers to ask if he’s ok, bothers to ask what happened. (“Goodness Jon, whatever happened to your hand? And your neck-”)
Then that very same person goes on to confess to two murders in front of you and all your co-workers. Not even Martin asks if Jon is ok. And then every single one of Jon’s assistants leave him bleeding, weak, and vulnerable in the hands of a literal murderer. Despite this, Jon can’t help but trust Elias, to need him, to ask him the most vulnerable questions because Elias is the only one to actively praise him. The only one to tell him he’s doing well, to make sure he’s ok, to care for him.
