fic recs?

[kindkit]

Now that I'm caught up through S4 of The Magnus Archives, I'm cautiously looking forward to reading some fic and would be grateful for recs.

I'll happily read about any canon character, and also OCs within the universe. Backstory, futurefic, previously unrecorded statements, historical fic, the Entities in their own domains, AUs of the "what if X in canon happened differently?" type. Just about anything. I'm not particularly interested in shippy het, pure porn of any variety, or noncon/dubcon unless the pairing is Elias/Jon, Elias/Martin, or Peter Lukas/Martin (because sex can be a very lonely thing and Peter Lukas is a creep).

As for Jon/Martin, I love that they actually got together and I want them to be happy forever and ever, world without end, amen, and yet I find I don't really want to read domestic-bliss fics for them. Stories about the Scottish honeymoon are very welcome, but I'd like them to feature Jon and Martin as they canonically are, two people who have real emotional issues and painful histories even without the monsters, and who managed to fall in love without ever having a proper conversation. Peter Lukas wasn't wrong when he said they hardly know each other. I want to know how they get to know each other, how they get to the point of relative ease and intimacy they've reached by that last episode.

Having given this rather exacting list of requirements: if there's a very good fic that has one of my DNW's, please rec it anyway, just give me a heads-up about the content.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Peter Lukas wasn't wrong when he said they hardly know each other.

Tangential to the fic recs topic -- what interests me is that I think Peter Lukas is right in some ways and extremely wrong in others.

He asks "How much time have you spent together when not working, or bickering, or fleeing from the latest thing that wants to kill you?" -- but two years working/bickering/fleeing is going to give you a pretty good sense of who someone is, probably more so than if you'd seen them on their "best behaviour". They've seen each other terrified, vulnerable, defensive and also mean. Martin's seen Jon being an utter prick to him personally, and is devoid of illusions about it ("Oh, is that supposed to be, what, a revelation?").

On the other hand, of course, there's a huge range of stuff they've never discussed, and they've never really got to know each other in a potential-relationship way; they've gone straight from zero to I WOULD LITERALLY DIE FOR YOU without a single date in between.

So "simultaneously too settled and not quite intimate enough" feel about the Scottish scenes that made them not 100% work for you is what actually rings true for me, because they're in a WEIRD place, relationship-wise, and to me it works for that. There's a shared humour we've seen bits of before (e.g. Martin teasing Jon for thinking he was a ghost, or Jon snarking to him about notSasha's boyfriend being "very Kensington"), and it makes sense that they're leaning into that (and working out how to use it to flirt, to be playful with each other) while they work things out in this new context.

I really love this comment on how even in the shitshow that is their 154 conversation, you get the glimpses of how their relationship could work, the ways they could be really good for each other:

https://dathen.tumblr.com/post/187823813234/dathen-the-tragic-dark-romance-of-the-run-away

[rydra_wong]

(Also I keep meaning to rifle through my bookmarks and provide fic recs, but things keep happening.)

[kindkit]

Well, when/if you get the chance I'd love some recs. But I found that after a first initial desire to Read All the Fic, I've reverted to trying to sort out my own thoughts, so I'm not as much in a tearing hurry to read fic as I was.