An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
behold, the mer!jon au
Elias Bouchard has dedicated his life to two things: first, amassing a fortune via his company’s cutting-edge work in genetic engineering; and second, obtaining definitive proof of the merfolk he knows live under the sea.
Tim, on the other hand, was only trying to catch some dinner when he swam into Elias’ trap. He wound up beached and helpless as a human approached him with a set of blades.
Jon didn’t intend to get wrapped up in any of this. He certainly didn’t intend to get on Elias Bouchard’s bad side; how was he to know the man would take personal offense to someone damaging his stray nets? It was Jon’s job to disentangle and treat the sea life that wound up on their beach every morning, after all. Whatever that sea life might be. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Then again, he would have expected “Elias Bouchard’s bad side” to mean something like cut funding for conservation research, not… this.
ok, heres another au idea: AU where everything’s the same except jon, even since the first ep, has been just. really creepy, like cryptid-levels of creepy
(ramble below, for once not in the tags)
like Tim walks into his office on his first day of being an assistant, ready to greet his boss, and Jon’s sitting alone in his office, the only light coming from the door, his eyes glowing an unnatural green that tim swears isn’t his actual eye color, with hair just long enough to cast an ominous shadow over his features, and Tim just. slowly backs out
it only gets worse as the seasons continue, especially season 2, where hes full-on paranoid and has longer, more unkempt hair that really casts a shadow over his eyes, and a constant expression like hes either gonna kill you at any moment, or hes about to bolt out of the room to avoid getting killed himself, even if his paranoia isnt as bad as his general appearance makes it seem.
He could be perfectly fine during season 1 or post-s5, and he’d still be ominous while doing absolutely everything. Making coffee? staring dead, unblinkingly at the machine until its done. Sleeping? sleeps with his eyes open, even when he was human, or he wakes up instantly and just sits up silently without saying a word looking wide awake as he mentally wakes up.
Even funnier, there’s the possibility that the archive team in s1 don’t notice how creepy and ominous their boss is at all times, but the rest of the institute absolutely does. Even Elias is slightly freaked out.
The team, in season 2, start wondering if Jon is human (even before Jon actually has to worry about that), and ask him, and hes like “what? of course i’m human.” because even though his presence feels like an omen, he still talks the same way as canon, and its not until he wakes up from his coma that he starts talking in omen too.
After s5, it does settle quite a bit, especially if he loses his archivist powers, but hes always been like that, so he goes back to his regular baseline level of ominous and creepy, which Martin has come to adore, as he’s caught a bit of a twisted humour from Jon and Melaine
Hes not creepy 24/7, but if hes not actively engaging with you, there’s a good chance he’s being creepy. (which, now that i think about it, would make the whole him-stalking-tim-and-martin to be so much scarier from their perspective)
(also, imagine Elias being confronted by Jon in MAG 200, and when he faces jon, he just sees this dark figure death-gripping a knife with such a dangerous aura that Elias swears he feels The Eye flinch back from him. And then getting immediately stabbed to death in what i hope to be the most terrifying experience in Elias’ and Jonah’s lives)
