2020-08-22 4:54:15 ¶ ●

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please tell us more about co-archivists au 👉👈 i am very excited to hear your essay

BLESS UR HEART ANON I was NOT expecting anyone to actually read my tags <3

ANYWAY, thanks so much for asking and here are my vaguely comprehensive ideas for co-archivist AU here we go (it’s gonna get pretty long so I’m putting it under a cut lol)

Seasons 1+2 would probably go pretty much the same - Elias still chooses Jon alone as archivist and canon proceeds as is up until Infestation. Sasha still gets Not-Them’d but she doesn’t cease to exist, instead ending up trapped in some liminal space. She was already strongly tied to Beholding and so is able to be claimed by the Eye to escape the Stranger (think Mike Crew getting claimed by the Vast to escape the Spiral) which allows her to break out of the clutches of the Not-Them. Meanwhile, in the tunnels, Leitner tries to trap the Not-Them with the Buried book and instead the thing is psychically ripped apart from the inside out, the memories of Real Sasha are instantly airdropped back into everyone’s brains, Sasha wakes up in a pile of broken table fragments, and gets the hell out of there.

From there, the start of s3 is pretty much the same for Jon (he and Leitner decide that the book had some sort of unforeseen adverse affect on the Not-Them that exploded it somehow) - he flees the institute after finding Leitner’s body, hides out with Georgie, and so on. Everyone assumes Sasha’s dead, except for Elias, obviously, who Knows not only is she alive, but she’s well on her way to becoming an Archivist. (He’s not going to do anything about it - sure, it’s more moving parts than he was counting on, but a backup Archivist could prove useful if something were to happen to Jon. Plus he’s already got a bet going with Peter over which of them will make it to the end.)

Sasha, consumed by the beholding-typical hunger for information, seeks out The Distortion - Michael helped her that one time, after all. She gets hints of usefulness from him (though he insists on using 80-word-long names for all the entities) but mostly he speaks in riddles and is generally frustrating. I’m also gonna say they have a Jude Perry handshake moment except instead of boiling wax it’s knife hands because I love parallels.

She leaves the Spiral with a vague understanding that entities are a thing and starts basically throwing herself into situations fitting their various motifs and hoping for an encounter. One of them seems related to heights? Guess she’s going skydiving. (I stand by my headcanon that Sasha is at least as if not more impulsive than Jon. In s1 while he was like “well I guess I’ll keep an eye out for more statements about Prentiss and hopefully get more information” she went straight to “I personally am gonna hunt down this nightmare worm monster! How dangerous can she be she’s only killed like 5 people that we know of + I’m too curious to leave it alone!” I mean seriously.) While this is a great way to accumulate a lot of Marks for herself, it’s not a great way to find out anything useful. Plus she’s nearly gotten herself killed a bunch of times, so clearly she needs a new approach.

She goes to find Michael again but instead finds Helen, who’s much more inclined to be helpful. She fills Sasha in about how Jon’s also going Archivist, and gives her a door to find him. Sasha steps through the door and emerges in a clearing in the woods where Daisy’s just about to slit Jon’s throat.

Suffice it to say, when a yellow door appears from nothing in the middle of the woods and dead-for-a-year Sasha James steps out of it, Daisy is very surprised. The resulting altercation leaves Sasha marked by the Hunt but the situation calms down after the arrival of Basira who points out that, when facing Elias, surely two avatars are better than one.

Events of s3 from there on play out basically like they do in canon except this time the archivist’s not alone, which helps with the whole “turning into an avatar” identity crisis. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both still freaking out, but they’re freaking out TOGETHER so it’s not as bad. It’s nice to have someone to talk to about weird Beholding stuff, especially when they literally share your brainwaves. (I’d imagine there are a lot of moments when everyone’s just sitting around resolutely doing no work when both Sasha and Jon abruptly stand up, point to each other, and yell some random thing that means absolutely nothing to anyone else but them because Beholding just airdropped them some knowledge. Also since the archivist power is split between the two of them, when they go into Statement mode they end up speaking in unison, Sasha’s right eye and Jon’s left both glowing. It’s very creepy for anyone watching.)

Then comes the Unknowing, and Tim blows up, but instead of dying like in canon, he gets pulled back into the realm of the Stranger along with the rest of the Unknowing and trapped there. When Jon and Sasha wake up from their twin comas, Basira tells them he’s dead, but Sasha realizes that somehow she Knows he’s not. With Jon’s help she uses Beholding (all-seeing) to break into the realm of the Stranger (concealment) and pull him out, and later Jon does the same for Martin in the Lonely.

And in the end, yes, they both end up marked by all the entities, and the world still ends, and things are still pretty bad. But at least they have all four of them (the og archive team) to deal with it. And at least, when Jon needs to info dump about cursed beholding information, he can talk to Sasha. And at least, when Martin would really like some company that isn’t someone possessed by an omnipotent eyeball god, he can talk to Tim. Which I think would help with morale if nothing else.

(Thanks for sticking to the end of all that lol - I meant it when i said i had a lot of thoughts)