have come to the conclusion that one of my major criteria for a real god tier ship is if one of the characters has to at some point go “how do I live with the ethical implications of loving this person who has committed multiple murders”
[ID: Three digital drawings for the TMA fic Teeth on a String. The first drawing has two panels. In the first panel, Gerry examines a sparse bookshelf with a neutral expression and a magazine in his hand. In the second panel, Jon is staring at him while sitting down and leaning on the shoulder of Elias, who is mostly out of frame.
The second drawing has two panels. In the first panel, Jon sits on the floor of a hospital room, playing with a curtain hanging from the window. He is wearing all white hospital clothes. In the second panel, Gerry stands in the doorway of the room, watching him with a frown on his face.
The third drawing is of Tim and Sasha in a crowded fantasy marketplace. Sasha looks around with an amazed expression, adjusting her glasses. Tim looks around with a wary expression and holds onto Sasha’s arm. In the background are various colorful stalls and fantasy creatures walking through and manning the stalls. In the sky there are hanging lanterns and various ribbons, bells, and chimes.
Gerry is white with pale skin and black hair in a ponytail. Blond roots are starting to show. He has various piercings and is shown in both images wearing all black and dark grey. Jon is South Asian and dark-skinned with black and gray wavy hair, wearing a collared shirt and green sweater in the first picture. Elias is white with pale skin and blond hair, and he wears a grey suit. Sasha is black with dark skin and coily brown hair pushed back with a headband. She wears big circle lens glasses, a white collared shirt, and purple mini skirt. Tim is East Asian and pale, with cropped black hair. He wears a yellow collared shirt with a palm tree pattern, and grey shorts. End ID.]
Excited to share my first pieces for the fic Teeth on a String by@suttttton! It’s pretty heavy, so make sure to read all of the content warnings, but if you’re craving a good amount of whump go check it out if you haven’t already! More art is to come when the rest of the fic is posted :D Many thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this Big Bang!
Months and months ago I wrote some tender, poetic, body horror for the jonelias zine and today I finally got to post it! Check it out!
I haven’t been able to write for a long while cuz I’ve been….debilitatingly anxious about comments and feedback so if you like this piece (or any piece I’ve ever written) I would really really appreciate hearing so. No pressure but. It would mean a whole heck of a lot
Rated M for off-screen kink negotiation, sexual situations, arousal at the memory of past trauma, rape roleplay, and safe word being called during a scene. But it’s all followed by some very soft aftercare!!
Pairing: Jon/elias
Happy Jonelias week! This sort of fits in with the Tuesday prompt of “Entity Swap AU” but it’s just a pretend entity swap for the sake of the kink~ enjoy! *** The door to Elias’s room is closed. Jon had closed it himself. That’s how this needs to begin, that’s how this always begins. Jon had asked for this. Jon wantsthis.
It begins like this: a shaky breath to try and soothe the jelly in his knees, a subtle twisting of his hips against the confusing mix of fear and arousal, trembling fingers coming together in spite of themselves to clench into a pale fist. He’s sweating, too hot and too cold and they haven’t even begun yet. He can’t fall apart before it’s even begun.
After all, it begins like this: with a whimper of fear so soft it might as well be silent, and Jon’s knuckles against the wood of the door looming before him.
It begins with knock knock.
The door swings open, quick and fluid, and Jon knows Elias has been waiting there for him. Jon asked for him to be there and he is; framed in the doorway like a manor lord with his blood red robe and his black silk slippers. He is ever so slightly taller than Jon and he is gazing down at him dark and hungry and Jon is sinking into the floor. Jon feels like he barely comes up to Elias’s knees beneath that gaze. Just a child again. Helpless.
“Hello there, little fly,” Elias says, the tip of his tongue flicking wet along his bottom lip. Jon is paralyzed watching the tips of his teeth flicker in and out of sight as he speaks, catching yellow in the lamplight. “Won’t you come in?”
Jon doesn’t respond, can’t dig the words out from beneath the frostbitten panic in his throat, but he takes the hand Elias offers and allows himself to be led into the bedroom. So familiar, and yet, in this moment, Jon can see nothing but monsters pooling in the shadowed corners. In the dim light, his skin glitters with sweat.
“What have you brought for me, little fly?” Elias cups Jon’s cheeks with his hands. “I see no present. What a rude guest you are, to bring no present.”
The shaking spreads uncontrollably, spasming out from his stomach into his limbs until Elias grabs his wrists tight to hold him steady. Jon cannot speak, cannot defend himself. His brain twists inward, trying in vain to remember if he had heard the door click shut behind him. Trying to gauge if he could make a break for it. But Elias is staring at him with twin adder eyes, and he cannot turn away.
“There there, no need to be frightened. I’m not upset. I see now that you brought me a very good present indeed.” Elias releases Jon’s wrists and they hang there, in space, as unmoving as a chunk of lifeless marble. His skin is jaundiced in the light, the stark peaks of his knuckles casting strange shadows, and for a moment Jon wonders whose hands they could be. Surely they do not belong to him.
Elias begins to untie the belt of his robe. He moves slowly, so slowly that it is almost a cruelty. Forcing Jon to accept the betrayal of his legs and stomach. He isn’t even trying to escape. Leisurely, deliberately, Elias winds the soft restraint around and around Jon’s helplessly obedient wrists, binding him tightly all the way to the elbow.
“There,” Elias says again, smoothing a proprietary finger across Jon’s cheek. “Don’t you look pretty in my web.”
All Jon wants to do is close his eyes, let even a tiny part of himself escape from the all consuming terror that has built up around him like snowdrifts, but he cannot even do that. He is locked into Elias’s greedy eye contact as he’s pulled in closer. He is cornered. He is craning his neck to stare up into the glittering yellow light reflecting off Elias’s teeth. He is just a child. Too young to die.
Something indescribable cracks its way out of Jon’s throat as he feels the slow glide of Elias’s tongue up the side of his throat. Not a scream, not a whimper, not a moan, just the noise of an animal who is beyond the point of trying. He will be eaten. There is nothing he can do. When Elias bites rough into his collarbone, Jon’s hips buck just once. He’s hard against Elias’s thigh, he can feel it, and sickness roils through his gut. He wanted this. He read the book, didn’t he. He knocked on the door.
“What a delicious present,” Elias whispers hot against Jon’s skin, his tongue slipping into the folds of his ear in between each word. “But I want more.”
“Red,” Jon barely breathes, his voice struggling through the choking panic and the thick glut of tears rising in his throat. “Red red red red red red red.”
As if a spell has been released, Jon’s trembling legs give out from under him and Elias barely manages to catch him in time to help ease them both down to the ground. Jon sobs in a breath, still babbling out red even as Elias shushes and soothes him, unwinding the binding from around his hands.
As soon as Jon’s hands are free he collapses forward into Elias’s embrace, burying his face in Elias’s shoulder and shaking against him as he cries. Elias doesn’t try to move him, doesn’t even complain about the snot and spit that Jon is certainly getting on his nice velvet robe, he just rocks them gently back and forth and tangles his fingers in Jon’s hair. “You’re safe,” Elias murmurs into the side of Jon’s head. “You’re safe, I’ve got you.”
Jon grasps uselessly at the back of Elias’s robe, clinging to the soft fabric with the grip of a dying man. The tears just keep coming, keep shaking out of him again and again, rising up from parts of him so deep he didn’t even realize they were there, resolving into incomprehensible sobs and half-formed words lost in the smooth edge of Elias’s skin. As he finally calms, he can feel Elias kissing him, gentle presses of his lips all up and down the curve of Jon’s skull. Jon sniffles in a bit of calm and focuses on the gentle rhythm of it, trying to match it with his stuttering breath.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, when he can finally manage the words.
“Whatever for?” Elias hums, more vibration than words.
“I asked for this,” Jon’s eyes are already closed but he wishes he could close them more. He wishes he could stop existing. “I was the one who wanted to try this and I didn’t even last a full minute. I’m pathetic.”
“Not the adjective I’d choose for the man who came face to face with a fear when he was only a child and devoted the rest of his life to hunting them down. You could’ve run away.”
“Ididrun away,” Jon says. “I left that boy to die.”
“So that you could survive. And make your way to me.” Elias squeezes Jon tight to his chest. “I’m very grateful to that boy for giving us the chance to meet.”
Jon chokes out a deeply inappropriate chuckle. “What a horrible thing to say.”
“You’re in my arms right now,” Elias says, pulling Jon in until their foreheads press tight together. “How horrible can the world be?”
[image id: a painting in bright, holographic colors of Jon and Elias, wearing dark suits, dancing on a leaded glass ceiling, the city below them. Elias is facing the viewer, his eyes flashing red, his right hand held back with a flourish; Jon has his back to the viewer, holding Elias’s other hands, one toe pointed in the middle of a stride and his long hair is flowing loose)
Art by @cocoabats, just a snippet of the full piece included in [pleasured exhalation], a jonelias charity fanzine
Details coming soon; follow our blog to be notified as soon as preorders are live.
“I believe the general consensus around the Institute is that I’m quite boring,” Elias says mildly. He must immediately see in Jon’s expression that it is, in fact, the general consensus – at least from what he’s gathered from the Researchers team – because his lips curl up ever so slightly, eyes crinkling in the process. “I’m neither surprised nor offended,” he adds, like he’s being kind to Jon. “I’m their boss and quite an old man.”
At this, Jon actually rolls his eyes. “Right,” he says sarcastically. “No way to connect with the youth in your grand old age of – what, fourty-five? Fifty?”
Elias’ smile deepens. “You flatter me, Jon.”
He actually sounds amused, and Jon cannot resist. “Fifty-five?”
“At my age, we don’t count the years anymore,” Elias retorts, eyes bright.
Jon takes it exactly for what it is: a challenge. Elias won’t tell him – but he’s assuming Jon will find out anyway. It’s a ridiculously easy challenge; in this day and age, your birth date is hardly a difficult information to find. But it thrills him all the same. And even if somehow Elias had made it harder to gather, well, Jon’s a researcher. He could ask Sasha and he knows he won’t.
“They’re wrong, anyway,” he says, impulsively.
Elias raises his eyebrows. “About what?”
“You’re not boring,” Jon says. “Nobody else in this Institute knows as much as you do about… everything.”
It was incredibly rare, Jon had found, to catch Elias by surprise. He’d only managed once or twice before, and even then he wasn’t certain Elias hadn’t pretended to be surprised more than anything. Right then, though, something crosses Elias’ eyes, sharp and fleeting, that roots Jon to his chair.
“…Thank you, Jon,” Elias says, a bit too late. His voice has significantly softened, and something too warm creeps up Jon’s collar. “You most definitely are a very interesting man yourself.”
Hello friends!!! After NINE LONG MONTHS that have felt like A MILLION YEARS the amazing @smallhorizons and I have completed writing a WHAT BELONGS TO THE SEA sexy sexy side story. It is set during chapter 20, right after Jon accepts his position as Head Archivist from Elias, and functions as canon compliant even if it isn’t technically part of the main story. If you haven’t read the original, you might still enjoy this if you like wormsy jonelias, and if you like the dynamic of this piece, maybe give the main selkie Jon story a shot!!!
The pen has a surprising weight to it when Jon takes it and signs the contract. A similar weight settles over his shoulders. A shiver goes up his spine and settles like butterfly wings beating at the inside of his ribs. This job is his. The Archives, all the knowledge in them, those are his. A deeper sort of greed settles into his chest, and he smiles at Elias with a bright, manic energy. The kiss Elias presses to his hand feels like a blessing.
Folks if I could turn your attention to the windows, you’ll see the native Elias fucker in its natural habitat. Observe the complex rituals it engages in to brainstorm new fic ideas. These creatures will sometimes scroll for miles and miles to find proper sustenance and bring it back home to the nest.
