#this is definitely too rough ajd chunky but uuuhhh here you go?

[cicadahaze]

TMA au where Jon wakes up with amnesia. He doesn’t know who he is besides that his name is Jon Sims. He knows some people came to visit him, but their names and vague discriptions alone aren’t enough to track them down. He does his best to create a life for himself, practically start over besides what he can puzzle out from his possessions in his miraculously still his apartment. When he asks the landlord, the landlord says that some weirdo has been coming and paying his rent every month. No idea who the man is, had quite the odd feel to him, though.

Jon tries his best to find a new job. He manages to get something low-wage, as he has only vague ideas of his credentials. He manages to get access to his bank account- lucky guess. Very lucky guess, he supposes.

He likes talking to people, in his customer service job. His coworkers always seem tired and annoyed by the customers, and he understands why, but they seem to have a weird affinity for him. He’s good at getting them talking, at getting to the heart of the issue and getting the truth. He’s good at seeing when something else is bothering them, whether it be stress, or drugs, or… well, they like to tell him about it, and the stories are always strange. Unsettling. But after they spill their mind to him, he always has a new energy. It’s easier to get through the day with something intriguing on your mind.

Jon knows he is not being watched, just as he knows that the man in aisle four is not trying to recover from alcohol addiction. He has not seen that woman with the short cut hair and the strangely smooth skin grinning at him, he has not seen mannequins turn their heads ever so slightly, and he has not seen the woman-who-is-no-longer-a-detective out of the corner of his eye all to often as he goes through his day.

Jon does not sleep well. When he dreams, he dreams of the strange stories the customers tell him on occasion. He dreams of a woman being dragged further beneath the arm by a corpse holding her ankle. He dreams of a man who wanders through an endless warehouse. He dreams of stories he has not been told. He dreams of a woman falling into a grave for her by a church that does not exist. He dreams of a ruined hospital and the spirit inside that years to devour the ghost hunters within. He dreams of a woman being pushed into a coffin and he’s not able to look away.

Jon stops asking customers about anything besides business. Jon stops sleeping. Jon starts feeling a soul-deep hunger. Jon sleeps. Jon tips a story out of a poor old man and feels whole for the first time in weeks.

The Magnus Institute. Jon doesn’t remember where he’s heard of it before- maybe from a tormented customer, maybe in gossip from co-workers. But he knows that it’s where he should go. It’s where people are supposed go to tell their unbelievable stories, where the people who talked to him should have gone. So he does. When he approaches, he’s at once beckoned and repelled. Something heavy fills his lungs and tells him that he’s not welcome as he climbs the steps, but when he opens the doors, it’s impossible to turn back.

The researchers look at him strangely when he asks after the archives and the statement-takers, but they answer promptly, and he continues before he can ask anything else. He descends the steps, and something in him revels at the echoes of the stairs under his feet. Working in a place like this seems so much better than his customer service job, even if the pay is likely somehow worse. A strange place of the supernatural seems like much more natural a habitat for a medical mystery of a man, practically a John Doe, found in a blown up wax museum.

It takes a moment to find someone. The place seems quiet, hollow, like the frame of a puzzle without the center pieces. When he finally does find an archivist, the man looks shocked. The man’s eyes roam Jon’s face, and Jon does not want to know he’s seen this man before, passing through the store too often and slowing down ever so slightly by his station.

“Hello,” he says politely. “I’m here to make a statement?”

The please-familiar man drops the tape recorder he was holding.