October 2020

OOOH, YES, VERY GOOD

This got really long so it’s going under a cut, sorry lmao

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tired-fandom-ndn:

OKAY OKAY THIS IS GOOD. There’s two directions we can go with this.

#1 is that they are purposely hiding their marriage, probably because Jon wants to; he’s a younger guy married to his boss, he was given a position he didn’t earn, etc etc, he doesn’t want their relationship to be tainted by how other people see it or think that Elias is playing favorites even though he totally is. So even though Elias brags about his amazing husband constantly, he never mentions Jon’s name, out of respect for Jon’s wishes. This would involve so much drama!!

• The assistants (mostly Tim) trying to set Jon up on dates!
• Martin flirting with Jon because he thinks he’s single!
• Elias and Jon sharing longing looks during work because they just want to be affectionate!
• The Institute gossip mill going wild because of the way Elias pressed his hand to Jon’s lower back and leaned in so close during the last sponsorship gala!
• Clandestine hook-ups in the supplies closet!
• Someone seeing them kiss and assuming that Elias is cheating on his husband!
• Jon’s turmoil from hiding his relationship from the people he loves and cares about and trusts!

Now, if #1 is a soap opera though, then #2 would be a romantic workplace comedy. #2 is that they are, in fact, very open about their relationship but their coworkers and friends are just too fucking oblivious to put the pieces together.

• Jon carries his ring with him everywhere but hates wearing it on his finger because of sensory issues and instead, it hangs on a chain underneath his shirt so no one realizes it’s there and matches the one Elias wears.
• Elias just loves pet names so much that, even though he corners his employees specifically just to brag about his amazing husband, he never once mentions Jon’s actual name. It’s all “my darling” and “my beloved” and “my dear” and a whole bunch of other cheesy bullshit. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, he just wants everyone to know how much he loves Jon.
• They always go to work and leave work together but because they both have such important positions and they’re so dedicated to their jobs, they’re always the first people to arrive and the last to leave. No one knows that they do so at the same time.
• They are very affectionate at work, but that affection is wildly misinterpreted by other people. Jon’s way of showing love is basically by nagging and worrying and being snippy and sarcastic, so they all just think he’s being a dick to his boss who is just oh so patient with his incredibly difficult employee. On the other hand, Elias is TOUCHY. He’s always putting his hands on Jon, leaning in close, invading his personal space, and everyone thinks that he’s sexually harassing the poor archivist who is too scared and embarrassed to say anything. HR gets like 7 reports about his behavior on a daily basis.
• They kiss at work, but only quick pecks because anything else is inappropriate unless it’s in a closet or one of the quieter parts of Artifact Storage. This leads to fun shenanigans where they somehow only kiss when no one is looking and when people who do see, it happens so fast that they’re convinced they were imagining it.
• They always go to Institute events together but because they were both invited as important members of the Institute, no one realizes that they’re there together.
• Jon is 100% convinced that everyone knows about their relationship. Elias knows about the confusion but thinks it’s hysterical.
• Rosie knows. Rosie always knows.

OKAY BUT WHILE I WAS WRITING THIS I REALIZED IT COULD BE A MILLION TIMES FUNNIER WITH LONELY EYES + JON??? BECAUSE IF EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT PETER THEN THAT WOULD JUST TAKE THE MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND SHENANIGANS TO A WHOLE DIFFERENT LEVEL. POOR ELIAS HAS BEEN ABANDONED BY HIS HUSBAND WHO’S AT SEA SO OFTEN, BUT THAT’S NO EXCUSE FOR HIM TO HAVE A PASSIONATE AFFAIR WITH ANOTHER MAN. JON, YOU HOME WRECKING WHORE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING.

I am just absolutely delighted by this, if you couldn’t tell.

@jaygarrick256

The Institute absolutely has an HR. It is doing its absolute best to present itself as a legitimate and respectable organization dedicated to the pursuit of supernatural and paranormal discovery, and part of being a legitimate and respectable organization is taking care of its employees. Hence the HR.

Now. Does HR actually help anyone at all? No, absolutely not. Is it designed specifically to further isolate its employees from each other and other people? Yes, that’s pretty much its whole purpose. Does it amp up the employees’ paranoia levels and their fear of being watched and recorded beyond anything they could’ve ever imagined? Of course, it’s the Institute for god’s sake! But it’s still an HR and it still looks very good on paper.

Jon is on his third day of no sleep when he finds himself in Elias’s office, shouting “Why won’t you just tell me,” for what must be the hundredth time, even though he knows it’s useless, despair and exhaustion a bitter tinge at the back of his throat.

Elias looks at him for a long moment, sighs, and starts tugging his tie loose.

“Uh,” Jon says, blinking. “What are you doing?” 

“You’re overwrought,” Elias says, totally calm, laying the tie out on the desk and continuing on to his cufflinks. “And you haven’t slept. It happens.” 

“Uh,” Jon says with some urgency as Elias drops the cufflinks in a desk drawer and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “Uh, I–I–I’m not, uh, I don’t–” 

“Obviously,” Elias says smoothly. “That’s not what this is about, Jon. Get your shirt off, please.” 

Jon blinks, and abruptly knows what is about to happen. Elias is going to bend him over the desk and beat him savagely until Jon’s brain goes quiet, unable to hold much more than simple physical sensation. Then Elias is going to tie Jon to the radiator with his own jumper and do some paperwork while Jon finishes shuddering and weeping with pain, caught and helpless under the gaze of their patron, like a moth pinned to a card. He doesn’t intend to touch Jon at all, but he is confident that in forty minutes Jon will be steadied, calm, perfectly capable of a good night’s sleep. Useful again. 

By this point Elias is stripped to his undershirt, and neatly folds his shirt over the edge of his chair. He slides off his belt, thumbing the buckle consideringly. “Well?” he says, perfectly polite. 

Jon swallows hard, and fumbles at his jumper, heart beating so fast he’s almost dizzy already. 

Elias gives him an approving smile. 

Prompt me for more things? :) 

The intimacy of being watched so fully by someone who loves you with everything they have, of every part of you being Seen by your lover and your soulmate and your god… … . . Love that shit. They’re so good.

14. Anything they both dread? 

Elias is working on some correspondence when he feels it: a little pulse of fear at the back of his throat, where he keeps his awareness of Jon. He sets his pen down and settles back in his chair. 

He s very familiar with the gradients of Jon’s fear by now; has learned to relish the subtle nuances between his horror, his terror, his agitation and his panic. He loves Jon’s fear. 

He opens the nearest pair to Jon’s current location: on the cover of a mystery novel, lying on the cot in Document Storage. He looks at Jon. 

Jon is sitting up in the cot, knees folded against his chest, and he is trembling. He looks terrible, gaunt and despairing. Elias savors it, the sight of his hollow-eyed Archivist shaking with hunger: Jon is very close to his breaking point. When he does break–when the limits of his body drive him to take what he needs from the people he cares about–he’ll be ready. 

Jon laughs hollowly, and looks directly at the book, meeting Elias’s gaze. Elias thrills a little: Jon doesn’t always know when he’s watching, but he’s getting better at being able to tell. 

“I thought I’d be pleased to spite you at least,” Jon says hoarsely, and then flinches a little, like speaking aloud cost him something. “I thought–but it turns out knowing I’m doing the right thing doesn’t make it any easier.” 

Back in the prison, Elias frowns. 

With another pained laugh, Jon shifts on the cot, and Elias sees the chain looped around his wrist, binding him not to the cot but to the exposed pipe just behind it, running down the wall. The chain glimmers with little threads of spiderspilk where it catches the light. 

Elias feels, for the first time in at least a year, a throb of something approaching real dread himself.

“That’s right,” Jon says, and he’s shivering again. “Dug it up in Artifact Storage. It’ll bind even me. Stop me from–” For an instant his teeth are chattering too hard to speak– “From hurting anyone else. From doing what it wants from me. What you want from me.” Jon scrubs both hands over his face with a light clink of chain, and then continues, low and desperate: “I’m not as strong as Daisy, you see. I can’t–make myself give it up. Couldn’t even take out my eyes, could I? Not now. But I can–I can still die, I think. I’m. Going to die. I think.” 

Elias closes his eyes abruptly, and opens the nearest pair to Basira: a photograph of Daisy on the lockscreen on her phone. She’s wearing a key on the chain around her throat, and it’s gleaming with web. 

This is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that he missed this: they must have been planning this for a while, must have learned some of Gertrude’s tricks. 

He has to call Peter. He closes his eyes, tries to open Elias Bouchard’s eyes, back in the prison, but–

“Elias,” Jon whispers, and fear is a solid knot at the back of his throat, and Elias can’t help but look at him again. Jon has the book in his hands now, his eyes gleaming bright with fever, his lips chapped, his voice low and confessional. “Elias, you–told me I wouldn’t become a thing like–the corpse in Alexandria. I’m–Elias–am I going to die? Or am I going to–” he breaks off, unable to finish, but he keeps looking at Elias, his eyes dark and searching. “Helen told me that Beholding hasn’t changed me,” he says after a while. “Because I keep giving it what it wants. What happens when that changes?” 

Elias doesn’t want to find out. 

Elias doesn’t want to lose this chance, lose Jon, the way he lost Gertrude and so many others before her. He can’t. 

He wants to tell Jon that he won’t allow it, but unfortunately he doesn’t quite have the means, not yet. Instead he reaches up a hand to his own throat and strokes at it lightly, until the dread starts to ebb away a little, dissolved not by any real reassurance but by the idea of reassurance itself. Jon gives a little shuddering sigh, the knot of his fear unraveled a little, and closes his eyes. 

So does Elias, opening them again in his body. 

He finds that he’s trembling, very finely, in every limb. He forces himself still, and calls for Denise the guard, pleasant and calm. 

It is past time, he thinks, to change the game. Before Jon does something they’ll both regret.

Elias, the cheesy bastard, started calling Jon his angel after the eye incident and Jon indulged him for a while.

Then Elias fucked up and used that pet name in front of Simon and now it’s banned in their relationship forever.

Jon’s “halo” isn’t actually a physical thing that Elias can touch, but when he opens the rest of his physical eyes, Elias absolutely kisses his eyes. He tried to be kinky once and kissed an eyeball directly and Jon made him sleep on the couch for at least a week, so now he’s careful to only kiss the corners of the eyes or the eyelids.

I totally agree with you about Elias still being in there it makes total sense.

But can you imagine how much Elias being in there and Jon being able to hear him would wreck Jonah’s plans?  Elias has probably been watching for years, maybe decades, and suddenly has a phone line directly to someone besides Jonah for the first time ever? Jon is going be told all sorts of things Jonah really doesn’t want his soulmate to know.

(Its even worse for Jonah if Elias notices Jon first, which is likely because he has less to distract him. Elias doing the mental equivalent of sneaking around to make sure Jon has the absolute most possible information.)

So, in canon my headcanon for that is that Georgie and Jon have very different ideas as to how their relationship ended. Georgie went into the breakup still caring a great deal about Jon but seeing that they just weren’t good as a couple but would have liked to remain friends with him. Jon however came out of the relationship blaming himself, as is usual for him.

In a Jonelias soulmate au where Elias finds him that early, I can see Elias using Jon’s own lack of self-esteem to separate Jon from any friends he had left. Well of course he shouldn’t try and get in contact with anyone, they all hated him anyway, they only let him hang around because they felt bad for him.

But Elias is here of course, and Jon is learning so much at the Institute, and when he shares his findings with Elias and Elias smiles proudly at him, well that means Jon is doing something right. Right?    

Also, I wonder if Jon in the soulmate AU where Elias found him in Uni, would end up with Jon having a Archiving degree, with Elias manipulations causing Jon to switch degrees.

He goes to every show that he can fit into his schedule and he always dresses ridiculously nice for them. He tries to order top-shelf scotch at seedy bars and from makeshift basement bars, then spends the whole show doing that awkward old white person supportive cheer. You know the one? Where he just stands at the edges of the crowd, bouncing a tiny bit in place and clapping politely? It gets him a lot of side-eyes.

He also likes to politely cheer for people when mosh pits start and offers his sympathies to the people who have to bow out of them.

And as soon as Jon is off the stage, Elias is pressing him against a wall or the bar or a shaky table that’s sticky with something and shoving his tongue down Jon’s throat and his hands down those ridiculously tight jeans. He actually loves how no one judges them for those open displays of affection, a very far cry from the Looks™ they get just for holding hands or giving each other pecks at Institute events or any other high society bullshit they have to attend.

tired-fandom-ndn:

He goes to every show that he can fit into his schedule and he always dresses ridiculously nice for them. He tries to order top-shelf scotch at seedy bars and from makeshift basement bars, then spends the whole show doing that awkward old white person supportive cheer. You know the one? Where he just stands at the edges of the crowd, bouncing a tiny bit in place and clapping politely? It gets him a lot of side-eyes.

He also likes to politely cheer for people when mosh pits start and offers his sympathies to the people who have to bow out of them.

And as soon as Jon is off the stage, Elias is pressing him against a wall or the bar or a shaky table that’s sticky with something and shoving his tongue down Jon’s throat and his hands down those ridiculously tight jeans. He actually loves how no one judges them for those open displays of affection, a very far cry from the Looks™ they get just for holding hands or giving each other pecks at Institute events or any other high society bullshit they have to attend.

I maybe wrote a fic about this??? Maybe???

Couldn’t help myself!