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To be honest, hearing Melanie and Jon chat towards the end of season 2 and more or less "sympathizin
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HOWEVER, oh my /god/ we need a role swap. I’m crying a little bit just imagining Jon being - really a whole lot healthier, probably, without the magnus Institute, for a longer time at least. Also: Martin is still very very gay for him, he just fell in love with his voice and smartness ages ago, it’s literally his favourite podcast. Georgie&Jon’s break-up went more okay. Melanie /is/ still in contact with Georgie too, which helps. …
Oh hell no, Melanie wouldn’t have handled it better than Jon - it’d just be different. I think the paranoia is mostly down to the Beholding versus the Stranger with not!Sasha working there in the Archives and the Beholding knows something’s wrong but the Stranger is too powerful for it to see through so it just results in this horrible paranoia. (I know we usually ship Melanie and Sasha and normally I’m all for that but I c a n n o t do it in this AU, so maybe Melanie wanted to ask her out but didn’t because boss? OOOF still bad but less bad.) So Melanie’s paranoid but, I think, generally more willing than Jon to trust her co-workers, so she’d probably figure out Elias faster but she’d also be telling the Stranger absolutely everything she was doing at all times.
Jon, meanwhile, is working on this YouTube series, he does it mostly alone but Georgie helps and hooks him up with technical people, it’s not a live action thing like Ghost Hunt UK but more an eerie atmospheric storytelling thing like Seriously Strange. (He hates doing shitty Top Ten videos but they get clicks, and he has rent to pay, and frankly the most successful one he’s ever done is Top Ten Most Absurd Statements from the 1999 Magnus Institute Leak, and he feels okay about that.) And then he’s doing a bit on Cambridge Military Hospital, he’s had it on the list for years but they’re going to tear it down, and he desperately needs a second person to help him out with the video but Georgie has a hard line about trespassing after an Incident when they were at uni so she hooks him up with Sarah Baldwin.
And then Jon goes in to give a statement about it, because look, that was unacceptable, and Melanie accuses him of being a dilettante and Jon accuses Melanie of selling out to the ivory tower of academia, and also Martin makes him a cup of tea and apologizes profusely for Melanie, she’s been under a lot of stress, I’ve always been a big fan of the show, d’you think you might ever talk about… And Jon is just barely civil and Martin is, as usual, very, very, very gay. Tim makes fun of him mercilessly and decides to get caught up on the back catalog of Jon’s show ASAP so he has more material (and is Very Mad to discover that this guy has learned things about Robert Smirke he never knew, who puts original research in YOUTUBE VIDEOS, literally the least accessible format on the planet, Martin your taste in men is TERRIBLE. I know I’ve said this before when you wouldn’t go out with me but this is a NEW LOW.)
By season three when Melanie’s exhausted from the revelations about Sasha and Jurgen Leitner, when she’s crashing at Georgie’s because she really doesn’t have any other friends close enough to crash with, and Jon’s just come back from India with a limp and a permanent scowl on his face, Jon and Martin have established a kind of low-key YouTube comment flirtation (egged on by user 888annabelle888 who is apparently just subscribed to encourage Martin to talk to Jon) and Tim is a simmering ball of barely-repressed rage, but after Elias’s confession and the whole revelation about Leitner/Gertrude/hey you really are working for an eldritch fear entity, the three of them sit down with cups of tea and Martin admits he doesn’t have any qualifications and Jon tells them about Mr. Spider and Tim tells them about Danny and they start plotting to murder Elias together. (It still doesn’t work, because Elias, but it’s a whole lot more…wholesome than it was before. And if Tim still can’t quite trust that Jon and Martin are actually Jon and Martin, well, they’re helping him for the time being, that’s going to have to be enough.)
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HOWEVER, oh my /god/ we need a role swap. I’m crying a little bit just imagining Jon being - really a whole lot healthier, probably, without the magnus Institute, for a longer time at least. Also: Martin is still very very gay for him, he just fell in love with his voice and smartness ages ago, it’s literally his favourite podcast. Georgie&Jon’s break-up went more okay. Melanie /is/ still in contact with Georgie too, which helps. …
Oh hell no, Melanie wouldn’t have handled it better than Jon - it’d just be different. I think the paranoia is mostly down to the Beholding versus the Stranger with not!Sasha working there in the Archives and the Beholding knows something’s wrong but the Stranger is too powerful for it to see through so it just results in this horrible paranoia. (I know we usually ship Melanie and Sasha and normally I’m all for that but I c a n n o t do it in this AU, so maybe Melanie wanted to ask her out but didn’t because boss? OOOF still bad but less bad.) So Melanie’s paranoid but, I think, generally more willing than Jon to trust her co-workers, so she’d probably figure out Elias faster but she’d also be telling the Stranger absolutely everything she was doing at all times.
Jon, meanwhile, is working on this YouTube series, he does it mostly alone but Georgie helps and hooks him up with technical people, it’s not a live action thing like Ghost Hunt UK but more an eerie atmospheric storytelling thing like Seriously Strange. (He hates doing shitty Top Ten videos but they get clicks, and he has rent to pay, and frankly the most successful one he’s ever done is Top Ten Most Absurd Statements from the 1999 Magnus Institute Leak, and he feels okay about that.) And then he’s doing a bit on Cambridge Military Hospital, he’s had it on the list for years but they’re going to tear it down, and he desperately needs a second person to help him out with the video but Georgie has a hard line about trespassing after an Incident when they were at uni so she hooks him up with Sarah Baldwin.
And then Jon goes in to give a statement about it, because look, that was unacceptable, and Melanie accuses him of being a dilettante and Jon accuses Melanie of selling out to the ivory tower of academia, and also Martin makes him a cup of tea and apologizes profusely for Melanie, she’s been under a lot of stress, I’ve always been a big fan of the show, d’you think you might ever talk about… And Jon is just barely civil and Martin is, as usual, very, very, very gay. Tim makes fun of him mercilessly and decides to get caught up on the back catalog of Jon’s show ASAP so he has more material (and is Very Mad to discover that this guy has learned things about Robert Smirke he never knew, who puts original research in YOUTUBE VIDEOS, literally the least accessible format on the planet, Martin your taste in men is TERRIBLE. I know I’ve said this before when you wouldn’t go out with me but this is a NEW LOW.)
By season three when Melanie’s exhausted from the revelations about Sasha and Jurgen Leitner, when she’s crashing at Georgie’s because she really doesn’t have any other friends close enough to crash with, and Jon’s just come back from India with a limp and a permanent scowl on his face, Jon and Martin have established a kind of low-key YouTube comment flirtation (egged on by user 888annabelle888 who is apparently just subscribed to encourage Martin to talk to Jon) and Tim is a simmering ball of barely-repressed rage, but after Elias’s confession and the whole revelation about Leitner/Gertrude/hey you really are working for an eldritch fear entity, the three of them sit down with cups of tea and Martin admits he doesn’t have any qualifications and Jon tells them about Mr. Spider and Tim tells them about Danny and they start plotting to murder Elias together. (It still doesn’t work, because Elias, but it’s a whole lot more…wholesome than it was before. And if Tim still can’t quite trust that Jon and Martin are actually Jon and Martin, well, they’re helping him for the time being, that’s going to have to be enough.)
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