all right. recent discourse and also mine own brain sparked a terrible thought . sorry in advance (except… no .. im not ..) … if steven was born of Marc’s need to Get Away from his mother… what do you think caused Jake to appear as a second alter in Marc’s life ? is there a canon answer im unaware of atm ?? it’s hurting my whole soul to think about.. . although i have one (awful) teensy theory… maybe it was when Marc was going to …off himself.. at the base of Khonshu’s statue That Night and even just the thought of ending his own life could maybe be grounds for Jake’s existence? because.. i mean, Jake protects them, right ? even from themselves..

i was just hurting my own feelings enough that i absolutely had to come hurt yours abt it . cough. anyways here’s a spare hankie love if you need one . i’d lend you mine but it’s soaked bc im fucking sobbing over this . also im quitting my job to become your full time pre-published fic reader btw jsyk.

I truly believe that Jake would be born from Marc witnessing or experiencing something incredibly violent.

And violent could be a lot of things. The common theory is obviously Wendy's violence, and I've written about that before and still consider it a strong possibility. It would show how essential all three of them were for survival, and really reiterate the individual part they each played in it. Big fan of the whole idea of "we're all here because we were all needed."

What would really be interesting though, and this one has been absolutely doing an entire whirlwind in my brain lately, is that period of Marc being a soldier, a mercenary, and leading up to, as you said, his suicide attempt and pact with Khonshu. There's an entire world of possibilities there to explore. We could talk about his dishonorable discharge, and how that could've clouded his image of the military being an escape for him and his toxic relationship with authority. Or his PTSD, and how it's still not entirely sure at what point in his life it started to develop because all of it was violent. Marc has an entire relationship with violence in exchange for something else, whether that be money, or purpose, or the greater good, or even just as an ending. Jake could've come from any part of that.

Where he's at now, he wants to escape his own violence so completely that he was willing to die for it. He's willing to let Harrow live over it. But Jake doesn't, he won't, he can't. It would be so satisfying to see Marc come to terms with that through him, to discovering Jake and realizing what exactly he came from, and to finally understand what he needed to do to survive and to forgive himself for it.