Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jon had one final dream, then. 

It wasn’t a nightmare, as every dream before had been. Jon felt as if the nightmares had encompassed his entire life, as if there was nothing before or after the nightmares. When there was nothing else, when he could barely remember anything different, even nightmares didn’t seem so bad. 

This dream was different. It was nowhere in particular, in no place in time or space. It was just Jon and Deisha, playing with each other as if they were children. 

She fluttered from hand to hand, and Jon jokingly tried to bat her out of the air. She would dodge, light and nimble, and she would wind her way between his fingers. When she settled in his hand he could feel her feather-light heartbeat, and when he held her in his cupped hands he could feel his own. They beat in time. 

Jon found himself smiling, as he hadn’t in a long time. When was the last time they had played like this? Not since Nikola, at least. Maybe not since Georgie’s, when she and the Admiral would chase each other around the room. What about before then? She had always nipped at his fingers, smashed herself into walls, paranoid and neurotic as Jon would clutch her close to his chest. What about before, before, before - barely remembered, foggy with the haze of normalcy. Jon had wanted her to stay stiffly on his shoulder, be calm, stay professional. But she never did. She couldn’t. Too emotional, Jon had always called her.

Here, now, forever, Jon and Deisha laughed together, and his soul sang with hers. He held his hand, and she fluttered to rest on his palm. She cocked her head at him, and Jon raised her to look him in the eyes. 

“Jon,” Deisha said, “you have to make a choice.”

Jon tried to say something, but his words were swallowed by the infinite nothing. 

“Oliver and Ida are speaking to you. Do you hear what they’re saying, Jon? They’re saying we have to make a choice.” Deisha didn’t cock her head or flutter - unnaturally still, calm and severe when she was always so flighty and neurotic. It had always been Jon who was too serious. “If you stay here, you will die.”

Jon said something, but he didn’t have anything to say. 

“There is a great river,” Deisha said, “and we have crossed it. We fly in the land of the dead now, Jon. You have a boat to the other side. You can wake up, and continue walking and talking and feeling the sun. But I cannot go with you. Jon, do you understand? I must stay here.”

“If I wake up without you,” Jon said, the only thing to say, “it won’t be me who wakes up.”

“Yes,” Deisha said patiently, “but it will be close enough. You can stay here with me, or you can return.”

Jon’s hands were shaking. But Deisha stayed still, unswayed by his trembling hands. “I’m not going anywhere without you. I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“You will be taught.” Deisha stared, and stared, and stared. Jon wanted her to chirp or laugh or sing again. Why was she as sad as he always was? “They do not have us, Jon. I have a great secret, one that even they do not know. One that not even you know. Can I tell it to you?”

“Deisha - Deisha, I can’t leave you -”

“I want you to live,” Deisha said. “I want you to live very much, Jon. I love you. Raise me to your ear, and listen to what I say. Then make your choice. No matter what, Jon, I love you.”

Jon raised her to his ear, and he listened carefully as Deisha sang a secret song to him. He had a great realization, and it was only that realization that let him open his hands and hold them out. 

Jon made a terrible choice and lifted his hands, letting Deisha fly far, far away. 

And for the first time in his life, he couldn’t fly with her. 

Great pain struck his heart, burning and stabbing and excruciating, and Jon screamed in pain. He erupted into sobs, falling on his knees, and realized that this pain was not in his body. It was in his heart, a great and supreme pain, and something deep within Jon crumbled and died.

Jon died, and Jon woke up. 

When Jon woke up, he had the distant impression of a bird flying away, before it was gone. 

He groaned, raising a hand to his face and letting it brush over his skin. Still intact, probably. He reached out with his other hand for Deisha, who always slept on his chest, only to find empty air. 

“Jon? Jon, oh my god - nurse! Why isn’t this stupid button -”

“I’m alright,” Jon said. Or tried to say. What came out was probably closer to a garbled mess. He opened his eyes, letting the sight of the very boring septic white hospital room wash over him, focusing instead on Georgie. 

She didn’t look terrible, but she did seem stressed. Admiral - not his real name, obviously, but Georgie told everyone that her sire had named him something so embarrassing she refused to disclose it - hopped on the footrest of the hospital bed, tail bottle-brush straight and swaying slightly in concentration. As Georgie jammed the button for the nurse, he spoke to Jon. If Jon had been any more in his right mind, he would have felt awkward about it. 

“How are you awake?” Admiral demanded. He was a pretty rude, brusque Persian, but he was a good balance to Georgie’s politeness and cheer. “You were dead as a doornail, Jon.”

“I got better?” Jon offered weakly. He swiped out his hand for Deisha, meeting empty air. He looked to his left, then to his right - under his blanket and over it. “Where’s Deisha? Is she under the bed?”

“Oh, good, you have brain damage,” Admiral said tartly. 

“Stop being an asshole and check his temperature or something!” Georgie hissed. 

“What do you want me to do, stick a paw in his mouth?”

“It would do for a start!”

“Where’s Deisha?” Jon asked weakly. “Where’s my daemon?”

The question, Jon thought hysterically, may have never been asked before outside of philosophical thought experiments. Where was your daemon? If Jon closed his eyes and pointed in a random direction, then she would be there. It was as stupid as asking where your own arm was. Proprioception, Jon had read once. In daemon studies they called it suiception. 

The strange and worrying question didn’t even attract Georgie’s attention. She just waved her hand at some area near the nightstand. “He’s somewhere over there. Nurse, come on, I know they put him on his own floor but this is just sloppy!”

But there was nothing there. 

Deisha was gone. 

Jon screamed, and did not stop screaming. 

They recommended he stay in the hospital. 

They said some things to Georgie, things that Jon didn’t pay a lot of attention to. They were giving her a lot of brochures as she accepted them with a stony face. Jon really didn’t care. 

Jonathan Sims. Born February 14th, 1987. Deisha Sims. Red-billed oxpecker. That was what his driver’s license said. That was what this birth certificate said. That was what his medical records said, his secondary school lanyard, his fucking employee ID badge. 

Jonathan Sims. Born February 14th, 1987. Strix Sims. Barn owl. That was what his driver’s license said. That was what his birth certificate said. That was what his fucking medical record and secondary school lanyard and employee ID -

He was distantly aware that he kept on alternating between screaming and sobbing. When he wasn’t, he was frantically asking everyone that came in, from the nurses to the doctors to the orderlies. Where was she? Where had she gone? I don’t know who Strix is, that’s not my daemon, give me Deisha, her name is Deisha, she’s a red-billed oxpecker, I don’t know the owl, give me -

Eventually one of them succeeded in sedating him. When Jon woke up again he was still in the same room - probably nowhere else safe to put him - but it was lit differently, the sun climbing down low over the horizon. Georgie was still there, this time looking truly exhausted. She was awake, typing something on her laptop as Admiral sat on the ground leafing through pamphlets. 

When Jon groaned again, she looked up sharply. “Hi,” Georgie said, weirdly and impossibly soft. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s Deisha?” Jon croaked, feeling tears slowly gather in his eyes. He didn’t bother sitting up this time. There didn’t seem to be much of a point. 

This made Georgie look away, and Admiral took over. He lashed his tail, resting on his haunches. “They said that this is common,” Admiral said crisply. “Some people with near death experiences wake up with brain damage that causes Daemon Rejection Disorder. Of course, nobody’s ever studied DRD in someone whose body died even when they didn’t, so I doubt whatever they want to do is going to help.”

“I’m not crazy,” Jon whispered. This was like when they had sent him to the hospital months ago, when he was having that paranoid breakdown and Deisha was crashing herself into walls. Apparently people took daemon harm seriously or whatever. Even Tim had started feeling pity for him, instead of anger. “I’m not. She’s real.”

“I know, Jon,” Georgie said sympathetically. “I know how you have to feel right now. But we’re here, okay? Strix is here. He’s not going anywhere. Why don’t you touch him? The doctors said it was important for you to reconnect.”

“What the fuck is Strix,” Jon said flatly. 

Georgie and the Admiral glanced at each other, holding a silent conversation that Jon was not privy to. 

As usual, it was Admiral who broke the bad news. “They want to put you in the mental ward,” he said flatly. “Putting you in the mental ward would be a mean thing to do to the mental ward, frankly -”

“Stop being an asshole!”

“ - but they’re desperate enough to get rid of you that they were willing to just send you home. Of course, you’re homeless. And if they discharge a homeless, crazy dude out on the street, they’re going to get mega sued.”

Of course he’s homeless. They said that he had been asleep for six months. Jon would have felt dizzy with it, if it wasn’t a drop in the bucket compared to his other loss. “I can go stay in the Institute,” Jon offered weakly. It was the only thing that made sense, which probably said a bit about how stupid his life was. 

“You can’t live in your workplace, Jon,” Georgie laughed, somehow brittle. “I know you keep trying, but -”

“We’re worried you’re going to hurt yourself,” Admiral said bluntly. “DRD ends in people trying to choke or kill their daemons, sometimes.” Georgie winced in disgust. “The doctors thought the only solution was to involuntarily commit you to an institution immediately.”

Fuck. Jon paled. “I can’t -”

“Or they said that, if I promised to look after you, I can take you home,” Georgie said, faux-cheerfully. She clapped her hands on her thighs, giving him a prim and fake smile. “Congrats! We’re roommates again!”

Jon stared at her. He wanted to feel something about this. He knew Georgie didn’t want to get involved in his problems again. He knew that she wanted out of this supernatural shite. He hadn’t even told her what Elias said - that he was turning into something inhuman. How could she know? He couldn’t put her in danger like that. He could hurt her. 

But he just couldn’t care. Nothing was real. Everything was a pale, strange shade of what it used to be. The three dimensional had flattened and become two, and Jon had lost both of his eyes. 

“I want Deisha,” Jon whispered. “Where’s Deisha?”

Georgie’s face creased in an emotion that could have been sadness, could have been resignation, could have been anything but fear. Admiral jumped up on the bed lightly, squashed face inscrutable as always but tone soft. 

“This is a shit situation, Jon,” Admiral said. “But I remember what it was like, okay? Georgie barely said a word to me for a year. And I barely said anything to her.”

“It’s why you’re such a dick,” Georgie said reflexively, but she was smiling again.

“I meant what I said about not wanting to get involved in you flushing your life down the toilet,” Admiral continued. “But we don’t want you dead or institutionalized or hur - hurting Strix.”  Admiral took a second, seemingly overwhelmed by the sheer prospect, before turning back to Jon. “We don’t think this is your fault. And we’re willing to put our feelings aside to make sure you’re safe, okay?”

That was when the Admiral nuzzled his face against Jon’s, without Jon’s consent , and Jon screamed. 

The nightmares were back. 

Or maybe they had never left. Jon didn’t remember falling asleep, or dreaming. The nightmares stretched on into each other, bleeding through and staining the boundaries, until even his waking life was another paving stone in that path. 

It was the tube again. Karolina was back, sitting sedately on a hard plastic seat facing him. Jon sat directly across from her, unable to move or speak. Or maybe just unwilling: somehow, no matter how bad the nightmare was, he never really found it necessary to intervene. He always knew how real it was. 

Karolina’s badger daemon sat in her lap, trembling slightly as the woman sat stone-faced. Petite, with unbrushed chin-length blonde hair cut in a sloppy bob, she didn’t react as the tube crumpled and creased and groaned around her. 

It was the same dream as ever. Almost relaxing, for lack of screaming and crying. Jon had to fight the urge to make small talk. But there was something different about it this time. It was the badger daemon, whose name Jon couldn’t remember now. He seemed a little more translucent, his movements a little more stiff and robotic. No longer shuddering with fear, but rather the tremor of ungreased gears. 

“That’s weird,” Karolina said, startling Jon greatly. After the first few times she never spoke to him, having realized that he couldn’t speak back. “It doesn’t normally have a daemon.”

Jon looked to his left. Perched on the back of the hard plastic seat next to him, a tall and imposing owl daemon sat serenely. It was a barn owl, with an ashy white face and ruffled light brown feathers. It was tall, elegant and smooth, and its two marble eyes shone a brilliant and otherworldly green. 

It stirred no emotions in Jon, other than vague familiarity. He wanted to reach out a hand and stroke it, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Was there supposed to be someone else there? No, of course not - right?

“I missed my last train,” the owl said. It didn’t look at Jon, just tilting its head at an impossible angle as its eyes fixated on Karolina. She blinked sleepily back. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Didn’t you look different?” Karolina asked, but Jon was not paying attention anymore. He was staring at the owl instead, desperately struggling to remember where he had seen those terrible eyes before. Where he had felt them pierce him, and crack him open.

It wasn’t until the owl looked back at him, head tilted in amused familiarity, that Jon realized that the eyes were his own, and he screamed himself awake. 

Only two days later, after an uncomfortable MRI and a team of doctors who were eager to see him go, Jon slumped on Georgie’s couch staring at the wall. 

He wasn’t thinking of much at all. Half of his mind was taken up with a strange hunger, a sucking at his soul. The other half of his mind was static, unwilling to entertain a single thought out of defensive protection. Every thought he had turned back to Deisha. To Tim and Daisy, who were apparently also dead. Jon had lost everything in a day. Best not to think about much. 

Or think about how Martin and Pell hadn’t visited. Maybe they had only liked Deisha. She had always been the nicest to them, anyway. 

“ - and he still hasn’t touched Strix?”

“Doesn’t even acknowledge his existence. I’ve never seen him even look at him.”

“Hm.”

“This isn’t brain damage.” Honey’s voice, as light and clear as Basira’s. “You know that.”

“We are staying out of your supernatural trauma parade,” Georgie said firmly. “What are you even doing bringing those statements here? Does he look like he’s in a condition to work?”

Out of the corner of Jon’s eye, he could see Basira shrug. Both she and Georgie, along with their daemons, were huddled in the doorframe connecting the kitchen to the living room. They were turned towards each other, but Honey and Admiral had no such pretense and were staring unabashedly at Jon. Daemons very rarely followed the rules of social politeness - but then, they weren’t meant to. They had their own rules of etiquette. 

Such as not fucking touching people.

They had added another symptom. That was the fucking thing of it. They had added another symptom to his chart. ‘Terrified by other daemons’. That was what they said. It wasn’t as if Georgie hadn’t noticed or felt it, or as if Admiral wasn’t aware what he had done. 

They just didn’t think anything of it . 

Just like Admiral hadn’t thought anything of speaking directly to Jon. Just as nobody was even trying to speak to ‘Strix’ or act as if he was even really there. As if he existed anywhere else than in a creepy dream that wasn’t even real anyway and he was not going to call poor Ms. Gorka again and bother her about something as stupid as a fucking demon owl -

“I thought work might help him get his mind off things,” Basira said, semi-defensively. “Always calms him down when he’s in a snit.”

“We’re testing out a hypothesis, anyway,” Honey said. 

“Just don’t upset him,” Georgie said, not mollified at all but giving up the argument in the face of Basira and Honey’s implacable surety. “And keep Honey out of his sight, the doctors said it’ll set him off.”

“Hm,” Basira said, but she stepped forward into the living room anyway. Georgie and Admiral moved back into the kitchen, throwing together a sandwich for herself. She might get Jon a bowl of cereal - she realized yesterday that Jon wouldn’t eat if she didn’t put something in front of him. 

When Basira stepped in front of him, Jon was disappointed to realize that he wasn’t happy to see her. Deisha always fluttered when someone returned to the Archives, or when they saw a friend after a long time. But she wasn’t there to be happy, and so he didn’t feel happy. 

Sure enough, Honey crawled back inside her hijab, poking her antenna slightly out of the folds of the scarf. Jon didn’t actually know Honey’s name - Basira didn’t divulge her daemon’s name except to close family for religious purposes, so everyone just called her Honey as a nickname. Diminutive for honeybee. Basira didn’t seem like a social person, but daemons always surprised. She and Deisha had never really -

“Jon. You with me?”

Jon really didn’t feel like replying to her, so he didn’t. Honey waved her antenna consideringly as Basira threw a manila folder on the coffee table in front of him. A few pages scattered on the table. Jon didn’t have to look to know what they were. 

“Thought you might be hungry,” Basira said crisply. “Maybe the ‘food’ will fix whatever’s going on with your brain.”

“But we don’t really think anything’s wrong with your brain,” Honey said. Even she talked directly to him. “We think this might be an Avatar thing. We’ve been doing plenty of research since Georgie called, but I’m not sure we have anything conclusive yet. The Entities seem to prefer targeting people’s daemons.”

“It’s where they’re most vulnerable,” Basira muttered. 

“It’s also the highest density of Dust anywhere,” Honey replied, echoing what was probably a familiar argument. Any day in the Archives, Jon could always hear Basira and Honey go rounds and rounds of debate and brainstorming over endless books. They spoke to each other more often than they spoke to anyone else. Gran would have called them a little self-absorbed. “We think the Unknowing might have targeted your mind, confused you about Strix.”

“Remember the statement about the man who thought his girlfriend’s daemon was his?” 

“I still think that was Spiral - anyway. We’re looking into it.” Honey paused a beat, antenna waving. “Get back to work as soon as possible. We need you.”

“I hope you feel better soon,” Basira said, almost gently. “Strix has to miss you.”

That was it. Jon laughed, harsh and bitter, and everyone else started. 

“Strix misses me, huh?” Jon drawled, well aware his voice was harsh, bitter, and empty. “Why don’t you ask him? Go ahead, Honey, ask him how he feels.”

“There’s no need to be difficult, Jon,” Honey said primly. 

“ Where is he then, Basira?” Jon said, and he found that he was yelling. “Go ahead, point to him!”

Basira gestured vaguely to a corner, as if that meant anything . “Look, Jon, I’m sympathetic, but -”

“He’s not real!” Jon yelled. “What’s Strix like, Basira? Does he laugh or ruffle his feathers? Does he like flying with Pell? Does Angelus slap him with his tail when he gets mad? Does he peck at Sejong when he rages at her -”

Jon’s throat closed up, and he couldn’t continue. Basira’s expression crumpled, just a little bit, and Honey retreated back into her hijab. “We all miss them,” Basira said, voice tightly controlled. “You’re not the only one grieving, Jon. But don’t take it out on Strix.”

She left soon after that, Georgie following her out the door to have another conversation out of earshot, and Jon could think of nothing else to do but pick up the statement left on the table. There was a tape recorder next to it, so he waited for Deisha to peck the play button -

Jon pressed play. 

“Statement of -”

He read through the statement, meandering his way through fear and trauma. In a way, it felt almost good. Better than it had ever felt. Jon had thought that he would never experience these emotions again, fear and trauma and pain and agony, but they were swelling within him now as he channeled the heart and soul of someone far distant. It was a little addicting: finally feeling something, anything at all. Even if it hurt. It was better than nothing. 

“Finally.”

An owl perched on the tape recorder, blinking slowly at Jon. 

Jon bit down on another scream. 

The owl - the Owl, he wasn’t fucking calling it fucking Strix - was the same owl from the dream. His eyes were no longer identical to Jon’s - nothing about him was Jon’s - but there was something hauntingly familiar in him anyway, a cousin just met or a long-faded photograph of a relative never known. 

Jon jerked back on the couch, pressing himself against the back cushion. Something about the Owl was so wrong. It was terrible, and disgusting, and vile and slimy and evil and everything bad in the world. He had never seen a more awful thing. Jon had the incredible sense that it hated him, every inch and ounce and heartbeat.

“Don’t be melodramatic.” The Owl preened its feathers a little, bored. “How can I hate you? I’m you. Go back to the Statement. You want to. You need it.”

Jon went back to the Statement, staring the Owl straight in the awful little eyes the whole time. When he finally reached the end, he found himself saying,

“Supplemental. I have found an Owl in Georgie’s living room. I suspect it has ruined my life.”

“You’re very paranoid, aren’t you?” the Owl said, cocking its head. “No surprise there. You never let anyone in, because you always expect them to leave. They always do, of course, so maybe it’s not so paranoid after all. Even Martin and Pell ditched you.”

Jon’s throat was dry. “If they’re working for Peter Lukas, they know what they’re -”

“Doing? Might as well let that one play out.” The Owl ruffled its feathers, shrugging off the topic. “Ask your questions, Jon.”

“Who are you?” Jon asked intently, leaning forward in his seat. He tried to call the Compulsion, but it wouldn’t come.

“You. And you can hardly compulse yourself, Jon.”

“Why is everyone saying that you’re my daemon?”

The Owl blinked at him. “Humans are loathe to witness the truth. They will invent any plausible excuse so they can continue living in comfort. A man walking around without a daemon - it would be nothing more than a corpse puppeteering itself. So they invent a self for you. They approximate me. Just as you are.” The Owl blinked again. Jon couldn’t read its body language at all . “I’m not your daemon. Only humans have daemons.”

Jon’s mouth was dry. His heart thumped in his chest. Did it? Did it? “Where’s Deisha?”

“Only humans have daemons, Jon.”

Oh. Jon felt his hands shaking, and carefully stilled them. Grief wouldn’t help. No amount of sobs or screams could fix this. Could fix what he had done to himself. “I ripped out my own heart,” Jon whispered. 

“Yes. But it was worth it, wasn’t it?” The Owl preened itself again. “You know, now. You know what you’ve always wanted to know. You’re powerful, when you’ve always been so powerless. This is what you wanted, Jon. You chose this. This is not a deal you can renege upon.” The Owl tilted its head at an angle unnatural to man. “Like it or don’t. If you’re taking my advice, I would advise to make this process as smooth as possible.”

“ You stole her !” Jon screamed, and dived for the Owl’s throat, intending to wring the life out of it. 

That was how Georgie found him: screaming, lunging at the monster that called itself the daemon of a monster, intent on choking it to death in his bare hands. 

But there was nothing real to throttle or kill, other than himself. And Jon refused to die - he had proven that well enough, when he chose his own pathetic life over Deisha. So Jon just screamed instead, until Georgie pulled him back into his increasingly familiar bed and let him cry himself out. 

Jon liked to make theories.

He spent most of his life with absolutely no control over what was happening to him, so a common coping mechanism for him was to try and rationalize or intellectualize everything. When his grandmother was dying he spent hours reading everything he could on heart failure; when Mr. Spider knocked on his door all he had read were books on spiders. He had taped pieces of paper over every image in his little Eyewitness book, but he had read them. 

Eyewitness. Ha, ha. 

For several weeks Jon’s brain was so foggy and sluggish that he couldn’t bring himself to think about anything, much less a hypothesis. But the thoughts crept back in eventually, soggy and desolate and intrusive. He spun himself in circles, unable to get off the couch, unable to do anything but stare at a wall or a television. 

But that wasn’t productive. And productivity usually made Jon feel better...or at least it let him ignore that he was feeling worse...so better get back to it. 

So Jon looked eventually dragged himself into reading a few useless scientific articles on DRD, even more useless books on daemon spirituality and the mysticism of human-daemon contact, and several recovery sites. Jon eventually decided that the 1970s connection of human-daemon contact with sex and profound love was ridiculous, and all it meant was that it flooded your body with endorphins that were either extremely pleasurable or extremely upsetting. One of the most common causes of PTSD, apparently, so that was fun. There were a lot of workbooks on trauma that Georgie kept emailing him, which he deleted from his email inbox. 

Having conducted his useless background research, Jon began conducting useless experiments.

Jon cajoled Georgie into acting as a participant, who was almost relieved to see Jon playacting his usual Baby’s First Science Experiment routine. He placed two tape recorders in front of her, ignoring the way Admiral batted at both suspiciously. 

“This recording is from my first conversation with the damned Owl,” Jon said severely. Georgie nodded. He pressed play, letting the cassette play a little to show that it was a real Statement, before fast-forwarding to his supplemental with Strix. The one where he admitted to it . “Summarize this conversation for me.”

Georgie listened carefully before frowning. “You yell at him a lot about how he ruined your life...he tries to get you to take more statements, which explains quite a bit...he says you have to deal with reality, and you attack him.”

“So, same story as usual,” Admiral said. He crouched a little, as if he was about to jump into Jon’s lap, but when Jon violently flinched back he retreated back into Georgie’s. “He’s an ass, you’re an ass back, violence. Are all of your conversations like this?”

“We don’t have conversations,” Jon said frostily. 

“Yeah, I can see why.” Georgie buried her hand in Admiral’s fur. “Look, there’s therapists who specialize in repairing human and daemon relationships, maybe you should -”

Good christ. “I’m playing the next one. This is from almost a year ago, when - it was with my real daemon.”

Jon played it. Basira had filched it from the office for him, just a random statement from one of the many periods in his life where he was losing his marbles. Jon recognized this one - there had been a really dramatic screaming match with Deisha in the supplemental. She had been tearing out her own feathers, and Jon had…

Their relationship had improved after Elias framed him for murder. They didn’t hate each other. They had gotten closer. They loved each other. Deisha had always loved him, all of the - arguments and self-harm and fights had just been growing pains, that’s all. 

But when he fast forwarded to the screaming match, all he heard was…

“They all hate you,” the motherfucking Owl was saying. “You probably deserve it, too. Look at the way Sasha treats you. She hates you, you just know it. There’s something wrong about her.”

“Why do you hate Sasha so much?” Jon said, frustrated. But he hadn’t said this .  “She’s my employee. You’re just trying to drive me away from them -”

“Oh, as if you're not responsible for your own actions. I’m not the one going through their trash -”

“It was your idea!”

Jon paused the cassette, ashamed. He didn’t have to ask Georgie what she heard. They had heard the same thing. 

“They didn’t even let me keep her voice,” Jon whispered. Somehow, that was the worst thing of all. “Not even a memory of her…”

Georgie didn’t say anything. Jon didn’t have much left to say. 

After Jon’s fit of homicidality - and after his ‘psychosis and delusions’, as the doctor carefully noted in his follow-up appointments - Georgie rarely let him out of her sight. Georgie and Admiral had a very long range for reasons that neither of them had divulged for a very long time, which had always inspired witch rumors in the other students and abject interest from Jon. As an unfortunate side result, Jon was constantly treated to Admiral eyeing him or, horrifically, sitting on his shoes or chest. 

Test: failed. Result: world wrong, Jon right. 

Look, he wasn’t a scientist. 

His next test subject was Basira, regarding the phenomenon of the relentless...whatever was happening when Admiral threaded between his legs. Even Honey, when Jon had seemingly gotten over his ‘daemon terror’, had started resting on his hand when Basira was trying particularly hard to prove a point. 

Surely Basira could explain things. She was a rationalist and intellectual, just like Jon. 

“You’re insane,” Basira said. 

“Just go with the experiment,” Georgie said, chewing on a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. “It’s the only thing I’ve found that gets him actually talking.”

“Don’t indulge me,” Jon bit out, scribbling in his notebook. He paused, pen halting. “Or do, if it makes you help me.” He pointed at Basira with his pen accusingly. “Where is the Owl? Point to him.”

Basira vaguely waved to a spot beside Jon on the couch. 

“ Specifically , please.”

“If you say so.” Honey drifted off Jon’s hand and buzzed around a spot on the couch before returning to Jon’s hand. Closest he would ever get. “That good enough for you?”

“Not nearly,” Jon said, somewhat aggressively. “Can you ask Strix a question that only we would know the answer to? Anything will work.”

“Sure.” Honey shifted a little in his hand. “Strix, what age did you two settle?”

Silence loomed. 

“Well?” Jon prompted. “What did he say?”

“The answer?”

“What’s the answer?”

“The age that you two settled,” Basira said, aggrieved. “Honestly, Jon.”

 Jesus christ . Jon had settled at twelve - premature to almost all of his peers, especially his male ones. The school counselor called it trauma. Jon called it evil spiders. He held up his hand until Honey was at eye level. “Who are you sitting on, Honey?”

“You,” Basira said, in her most unimpressed deadpan. Daisy once said that if you knew her well enough you could read almost every emotion from her endless slightly different deadpans. “Is this, like, confusing?”

“Would you say that Honey, Basira Hussain’s daemon, is sitting on Jonathan Sims, the human? Would you also say that this is causing you any discomfort, extreme emotion, or that it violates a social taboo?”

Basira stared at him blankly. “Yes. No, no, and...no.”

Jon groaned. 

Test: failed. Result: inscrutable.

Everything was inscrutable, now. Jon had always been painfully socially awkward, but now it was worse than ever. Interacting with people was painful, strange, and stilted. He preferred not having conversations at all, staying silent and reserved even when Georgie and Basira tried to converse with him.

How could they? He could only hold half a conversation. Jon had always found it difficult to puzzle out both strands of a conversation when he had two ways to communicate; handling both halves with only one half was borderline impossible. 

Jon once read a number that 55% of conversations were in daemon language. Nobody knew how true that was but Jon. He couldn’t display happiness or sadness, couldn’t add subtext to his words to insinuate anything. He sounded stilted and blank to himself, as if he was having a conversation just between two humans with facial paralysis and a monotone. When Jon cringed away from the touch of other daemons, it was almost impossible. 

Eventually, he gave up. He grew used to making eye contact with Admiral, rolling their eyes when Georgie was talking. Honey crawling up his arm suddenly became a show of inquisitive support. When Georgie crumpled under stress - some of which Jon knew had to be because of him - his shows of comfort seemed token and insincere until he held Admiral to his chest.

The worst part was that it didn’t even feel strange. At no point did Jon feel the need to walk to the London Crisis Center and fill out the form for non-consensual daemon touching. It felt no different from the brush of Georgie’s hand, or Basira grabbing his arm. It made Jon feel disgusting, that he was touching Admiral and Honey without their knowledge, but...they did know. It should have been intimate, but it just made him feel more alone. 

Jon gave up, in every way. It helped. 

“Why is this happening?” Jon asked the Owl, during yet another increasingly unsatisfying feeding session. No, that made him sound like a tiger in a zoo. Meal. Afternoon snack. Trauma party. “All of my experiments failed. Nobody’s giving me a straight answer. I have to go along with this, or - or I’m alone. I’m all alone. Why are you doing this to me?”

But the Owl just laughed at him. He appeared on the tape recorder every time Jon read a Statement. If Jon had his way he’d never see it again, but he needed the Statements more than he hated the Owl, so he dealt with it. He hated the hunger more than he hated the Owl. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise: Jon had always cared about himself more than Deisha.

“I know you enjoy the illusion of control more than actual control, but this is ridiculous even for you,” the Owl said. Jon threw a magazine at him, which he dodged easily. Why did it always sound just like Elias? “Don’t pretend that you have no choice. You have an alternative. You simply dislike the alternative. If you’re cozying up with other people's souls, then don’t put it all on me. I don’t control what you do.”

Jon’s hands were shaking with anger. Or maybe hunger. He was always hungry, these days. “You’re lying. All you do is lie.”

“I’ve never lied to you. I’m the only part of yourself that doesn’t.” The Owl clacked its beak. “You’ll be happier if you go back to work. This trickle of food isn’t satisfying either of us.”

It wasn’t until long after the Owl disappeared that Jon realized he didn’t answer his question. 

But, as always, the Owl was right. Jon had to go back to work. He was annoying Georgie, anyway. 

When they asked, he pretended it was because Basira was pushing him into helping her stop the Dark’s ritual. Jon knew that she was sneaking off to the prison to visit Elias and his monstrous little cuckoo bird, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Admitting it was because he desperately needed more food seemed like a bad idea.

But maybe some part of Jon had been eager to get back to work, aching for the normality and familiarity. So much as Jon was eager for anything, anyway. He didn’t really feel happiness anymore. 

Still, Jon could feel some faint stirring in his chest. Daisy and Tim were - but Melanie was still there, wasn’t she? And there was Basira. Martin wasn’t around, but that was alright. He’d show up for Jon, right? Sasha would - but there was always Basira and Melanie, and now they could finally work together. It wasn’t enough to make him feel optimistic, and it didn’t make the gnawing hunger go away, but at least it was something. It was enough to get him to fix his hair, dress himself in the jeans, flannel, and ratty jacket Georgie had saved from his flat, and to get him out the door. It had to be enough. Basira would already be in the library, looking up rituals, and Melanie would be goofing off in the bullpen as always.

But when Jon opened the door to the Archives, he saw someone who wasn’t Melanie.

She looked like Melanie. If Melanie had let herself go a bit. Her always uncontrolled long red hair was now a matted shag, practically unwashed and unbrushed. She wasn’t wearing her flannel and jean shorts, instead exchanging the flannel for a sports bra and...that was a lot of ripped fishnet...but it still looked like Melanie. Maybe her identical twin? 

Jon’s reflexive thought was that she was a Not!Them, but he Knew that she wasn’t. Not!Sasha hadn’t had a daemon, something that nobody had realized was strange and that had sent Melanie screaming from the Archives. This red-haired woman had a daemon.

It just wasn’t Melanie’s daemon.

“Who are you?” Jon asked, halting in the doorway. 

The woman spinned around, from where she had been - kicking the walls? What? Her daemon spun around with her, slobbering at the teeth, eyes wide and red. It was a little Tasmanian devil, with a white stripe and a smooth black coat, that would have been cute if it wasn’t snarling and slobbering. 

“I guess they weren’t kidding when they said you had brain damage,” the woman said snidely. She even sounded like Melanie. She kicked the wall again, her big combat boot absorbing the blow. There didn’t seem any particular reason for her to kick the wall. She didn’t even seem to enjoy doing it. She just did it, as if she didn’t know how to stop. “Fine job, ditching us for six months and coming back an idiot.”

“I don’t understand,” Jon said plainly. “Why do you look like Melanie?”

“I am fucking Melanie, you fucking idiot,” Melanie snarled. “Melanie and Angelus? Hello? God, get out of here if you’re going to be useless.”

That gave Jon a start. The woman’s daemon had the same name as Melanie’s. Latin, as was fairly traditional for white Britons - and, in Martin’s case, those adopted from white Britons (“I’m Pellio, but call me Pell.”. “That’s fun! Don’t mind Jon, he’s just -”). 

Strix. That alone should have tipped everyone off. The fucking Latin word for owl. Deisha was named after his great-great-grandmother, it had been passed down in his family for as long as anyone could remember. It was Jamacian, it was his Gran’s Gran, it was his . 

“But Angelus is a beaver,” Jon said, even as he knew that it was useless. They’d never believe him. Nobody believed him anymore. “He’s a North American beaver. He’s not -”

Angelus snarled at him - Angelus had always been sulky, had been viciously angry since Elias touched him, but Jon had never seen him this rabid. Melanie, with a sharp mind and grounded practicality, tended to keep him in check. But these two just seemed to feed on each other, making each other angrier and angrier until they burst with it. Jon, who was slowly entering the Archives while keeping a healthy distance from Melanie, couldn’t help but step back, afraid for a ridiculous second that Angelus might attack him. Melanie didn’t seem afraid or surprised - she just scowled down at him. Whatever he had said, Melanie had heard something in it. 

“Just shut up, you fucking bitch,” Melanie said, before kicking Angelus . 

Jon couldn’t help it - he screamed, more out of shock than fear. Angelus rolled over easily, no worse for wear, but he bared his teeth at an impatient Melanie. Jon felt disgusted, more and more convinced that this couldn’t possibly be Melanie.

More and more worried that she was. 

Basira popped her head out of the library, and quickly sized up the growing snarling match between Melanie and Angelus. She didn’t look shocked or disgusted by the blatant display of Melanie trying to kick Angelus again as he wove between her feet. Or by Angelus’ personality and form change. She just seemed exhausted but tolerant.

“Can you four keep it down?” She asked. She must have finally noted something in Jon’s pure shock. “Melanie, I told you about Jon and daemons right now.”

“As if he’s a delicate little flower?” Melanie snarled. She gave the wall another good kick while glaring furiously at Jon, as if she was envionsing his head under her heel. “He’s an Avatar, he can deal. What about us , huh? Where’s the fucking sympathy for us?” Angelus snarled something. “Yeah, we all know it’s not fucking brain damage. It’s some side-effect of his new creepy compulsion powers.”

“Be that as it may,” Basira said curtly, “we don’t need the fighting. Jon, get over here, there’s some Statements I need you to get through.”

“Basira,” Jon said planatively, fully aware it would do no good, feeling the need to tell her anyway. Just in case. Just in case. “Melanie’s daemon is a beaver. It’s not a Tasmanian devil. Why is it a Tasmanian devil?”

Honey poked out from under Basira’s hijab. “Add that to the symptom list, Basira.”

Basira sighed, pulling out a notebook and marking something down. “There is absolutely nothing cohesive about his symptoms. None of our theories are holding water.”

“There’s no reason why the Eye would reduce understanding of the world,” Honey muttered. “There’s still the Stranger theory -”

“He’s had no problems recognizing us.”

“I had problems recognizing Melanie,” Jon said helpfully. “Considering one half of her is completely different .”

“Maybe the Dark?” Honey suggested, ignoring Jon completely. “It could be their way of trying to put the Archivist out of commission before their ritual.”

“If that’s their goal, then it’s working,” Basira said grimly, making a note in her notebook. “He’s completely useless like this -”

There was a knock on the Archive door. 

Melanie whirled around, instantly incensed into extreme rage. “No fucking visitors to the Archives! Society has progressed beyond the fucking need -”

But the doors were opening anyway, and Jon was forced to confront that there was a figure  in the doorway. Familiar-unfamiliar, with a small ant on his shoulder, lugging a giant coffin behind them. 

“Evening, all,” one man said, stepping into the Archives and forcing Jon to back away further into the bullpen.

 Melanie snarled at his intrusion into her space, but she stood in front of him anyway, brandishing a knife that - where had she pulled that knife from, she was wearing mostly fishnets. Angelus was snarling louder, teeth exposed and breath heaving. 

The other man wheeled in the giant coffin, which was wrapped up in chains and groaning. Jon took another step back, but Basira was suddenly striding forward. Something about it was familiar to her, but what -

“Have a special delivery,” the man said. “Take it. It’s weighing me down.”

“The coffin from Daisy’s statement,” Jon breathed. The man - Breekon, it was fucking Breekon, cockney accent and all - side eyed Jon from under his cap. The ant sat on his shoulder perfectly still, like a little figurine. “That’s it. Breekon and Hope.”

“Where’s Daisy?” Honey asked, but she already knew. 

Breekon didn’t grin in satisfaction, didn’t brag or boast. He didn’t make any expression at all - face as blank as a doll’s, daemon as still as a toy. “She deserved it,” Breekon said. “After what she did to Hope. Killed him. Couldn’t kill her - but I suppose this is better. Take it. We don’t want it anymore.”

Angelus barked sharply, a rabid and vicious noise, and dived for Breekon, but Melanie caught him in midair. Honey was swirling in tight circles over Basira’s head. Jon had no way of feeling that agitation and fear. He just felt viscously cold, an Arctic wind gusting through his chest. A thousand gusts of knives cut him open inside, and Jon found himself overcome with a cold and distant anger. 

“ What are you doing here ?”

The Compulsion grabbed Breekon around the neck, and he barely grunted before answering. The ant daemon moved for the first time, biting Breekon’s face to get him to stop talking, but it didn’t work. It never really did. “Revenge. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I thought it was for revenge. But it won’t bring him back. Thought it might hurt you. I just wanted to hurt you. But maybe there was no point. You’re hurt enough, aren’t you?”

“Get out,” Jon hissed. He was distantly aware that his eyes were hot, almost burning, as if something was shining through them. His hair, loosely bound in its ponytail, brushed against the back of his neck. “Get out!”

“I won’t,” Breekon said. “I won’t until you hurt.”

An awful static rung through Jon’s ears, heavy and cloying. The others heard it too, the daemons screeching or buzzing. Melanie moved to shield Angelus, and Basira nabbed Honey out of the air to clutch in her hands. 

In fact, the only daemon unaffected was the Owl. Perched on the doorframe, he straightened and beat his great wings, like a demented avenging angel. 

In that moment, Jon knew. But he had always known, really. 

“Your daemon isn’t real,” Jon said, just as the Owl dived and took a bite out of the ant. 

Breekon screamed, the ant fuzzing with a strange and alien static, before he shook the Owl off. The Owl just laughed, swooping back to land on Jon’s shoulder, as Breekon stumbled from the room and ran off desperately, his ant daemon clenched in his cupped palm. 

Jon thought for a second that he might feel - sick. They said that Ted Bundy’s daemon ate the daemons of its victims. But he didn’t. For the first time in a long time he felt whole, with the familiar weight of a bird on his shoulder and talons pressing into his jacket. 

When he turned to look at Basira and Melanie they were both staring at him. At the Owl. Melanie was clutching Angelus tight to her chest, who was quiet for the first time today. Basira was staring at Jon blankly. Not judgmentally, or disgusted. Just staring. 

“The daemon wasn’t real,” Jon found himself saying. Maybe they’d believe him. Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe it no longer mattered. “It was a ghost. Breekon was a Stranger, he wasn’t alive. It wasn’t a real daemon.”

“That’s weird,” the Owl said, burping slightly, “it sure tasted like one.”

Jon lashed out an elbow, driving it as forcefully into the gut of the Owl as he could, and the Owl lightly took the hit as it fluttered off his shoulder. Jon rounded on it, head buzzing, stomach full, reaching out to finally fucking strangle it -

A burning pain pierced Jon’s leg, and he screamed. His legs buckled, crashing onto the floor, and he saw that Angelus was biting Jon’s calf fiercely. The jeans were ripped, but - but there was no blood. 

“Thanks for being fucking useful for once,” Melanie grumbled, but she pushed forward to tug Angelus off Jon. Jon screamed again as the teeth slid out of his ankle, but he watched the wound in terror as it closed up before his eyes. Melanie didn’t look impressed. “Typical. Cannibalism all over this fucking workplace.”

“Maybe we’re servants of the Flesh,” Basira joked grimly. Honey was crawling over her forehead. “Melanie, please stop Jon from hurting himself anymore, it’s demented.” She stepped forward towards the coffin and brushed her fingers over its lid as Melanie snarled something about how she wasn’t a babysitter. Jon took the opportunity to skitter further away from Angelus, and when he looked around he saw that the Owl was gone. “Daisy…”

Jon tried not to feel full. 

“Go fish.”

Jon squinted listlessly down at his hand, drawing another card. “Have any...twos?”

“You’ve already asked that, mate,” Georgie said sympathetically. Admiral yawned. 

“Uh.” Jon stared down at his cards, the numbers swimming. “I seem to have forgotten the rules of Go Fish.”

“You know what,” Admiral said, as Georgie lay down her cards. “Let’s watch TV.”

It, of course, the same TV that they always watched. They used to do this all the time in college: get smashing drunk, pull up the game show channel that played nothing but reruns of 70s and 80s game shows at 2am, and drunkenly heckle Jeopardy and Supermarket Sweep. Both Jon and Georgie felt very strongly about judging other people, and also useless trivia. In retrospect maybe Jon’s fate had been decided for him at the beginning.

They also used to enjoy making fun of shitty ghost hunting shows, but Jon had the feeling that Georgie now held some loyalty to shitty ghost hunters. 

“I’m, like, not getting involved, you know?” 

Jon grunted, stroking Admiral’s fur as he sat on his chest and rumbled. 

“But we’ve been really good friends for so long, and she’s just so important to me, I can’t help but care. I always knew that she had some stuff going on, but this is just beyond the pale. I told her that I’ll be here when she decides to accept help, and that’s all I can do. I just need to keep telling myself that, you know?”

On screen, Mike skipped right over the Rolos. Idiot. 

“Men are clowns,” Admiral hissed. Jon scratched his ears in silent agreement. 

“I just don’t know how everyone in my life ended up being driven insane by the eldritch fear entities that control our lives! Like, it’s a little statistically unlikely!”

“You were driven insane by the eldritch fear entities that control our lives,” Jon said flatly. 

Georgie paused, toenail polish halting in midair. She glanced back up at Jon from where she was sitting on the ratty rug painting her nails, eyebrows rising in surprise, as Admiral rumbled like a massage chair on Jon’s chest. When Jon stopped scratching him he hissed, so Jon didn’t dare stop. “I wouldn’t say insane,” Georgie protested. “More like forced to witness the many-dimensional unoriginality that exists as the simultaneous truth and untruth of the universe; and partake unto yourself the depths of apathy of an uncaring god.”

“You’re insane,” Admiral said flatly. 

Jon nodded mutely in agreement. 

“You two are always ganging up on me,” Georgie said crossly. She flapped her hand, blowing on her nails to let the matte black cool. “Come here and help me do my other hand.”

“But Admiral’s comfy…”

“Then take him with you, you have hands.”

That was how Jon ended up sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of Georgie, letting Supermarket Sweep drone on in the background. The host yammered, his cockatiel daemon chattered, and the fresh faced 70s youths ran backwards and forwards in turtlenecked excitement pulling carts to and fro in jagged lines. One man’s okapi daemon skittered over the waxed linoleum and toppled over a store display of toilet paper, sending the studio audience laughing. 

Something stirred in Jon’s mind, and he found himself speaking softly as the Admiral twisted into pretzels in Jon’s lap and Georgie absentmindedly watched the telly. Or maybe she was watching Jon, instead: Admiral’s claws kneading into his jeans, her eyes catching on his unkempt hair. 

“S.M. is an American woman with bilateral destruction to her amygdala. She’s known as the woman with no fear. Her brain displays no signs of fear when walking through a haunted attraction, or watching horror movie clips. She displays only interest and curiosity at danger, and has a friendly, unimpaired, coquettish personality. With very little negative affect, and a high quantity of positive affect, she is open and friendly. In a world where nothing is dangerous, maybe it makes sense.” Jon blew carefully on Georgie’s nails. “The woman with no fear has experienced a pronounced number of traumatic events during her lifetime, partly due to difficulty recognizing and removing herself from dangerous situations.”

“That’s the most you’ve spoken in weeks and it’s a vague post?” Georgie asked, unimpressed. 

“Was that a spooky thing or have you been doing a lot of Wikipedia binges on brain disorders?” Admiral asked, apparently interested. 

“Spooky thing.” Jon screwed shut the nail polish, letting Georgie inspect her new matte black nails. “You work hard to compensate for what you know you don’t have, Georgie. You’re so good at it. You’re so good at protecting yourself. You care so much, and you want to help so much, but you’re always so aware of how dangerous life is.” He faltered a little, hands drifting back towards scratching at Admiral. He saw Georgie’s eyes go half-lidded and comforted by the attention. “How do I do it? I lost something. I don’t know how to navigate without it. I feel like this raw and weeping wound.”

“I don’t see anything missing in you, Jon,” Georgie said gently, and she carefully reached out to place a hand on Jon’s knee. The dual contact - with both Admiral and Georgie - was almost overwhelming, like a tight embrace, and Jon almost felt warm. “I don’t feel anything missing when you have him on your lap. I know things are different for you now, but maybe we can view this as a fresh start.”

“ Nothing is weird about me and Admiral right now,” Jon said flatly, scratching the cat behind the ears. 

“Only if you don’t get the spot behind the - yes, right there, thank you.” Admiral eyed Georgie balefully. “At least one of us is good for something.”

“I will dump you in my bath.”

“Insane woman. Threatening her own daemon. Madwoman.”

“Shoe’s on the other foot, Georgie,” Jon said flatly. 

“Oh, shut up. Just because you’ve been going all Yellow Wallpaper doesn’t mean that it’s contagious.” Georgie shook her bottle of nail polish, smiling mischievously at Jon. “If you promise not to muck up his fur I’ll do yours too.”

At a certain point in your insane, nonsensical, surreal life, you simply had to say fuck it. Jon extended Georgie his hand, and he let himself focus on the twin sensations of the Admiral’s fuzzy heat on his lap and Georgie’s slim fingers on his. 

A fresh start. It sounded nice. But Jon had the sense that they were living in the twilight now - that there was a great and calamitous end coming, and that none of them would be prepared for it. No matter how deeply they expected it to happen. 

But maybe that was tomorrow’s problem. Jon wanted to see if Jasmine and Jim won that new vacuum cleaner. 

Jon stared down at the coffin. 

They had limply discussed moving it to Artifact Storage. Artifact Storage didn’t want it - and they were afraid that they wouldn’t get it back, anyway. None of them wanted to keep it in the Archives, because it seemed to drive Melanie crazier and Honey wouldn’t stop crawling over it. They had eventually settled for sticking it in one of the small empty supply rooms in the basement, shuffled off into a corner so nobody had to look at it. 

Jon could relate. Basira and Honey left soon after on some errand they refused to tell Jon about. Melanie and Angelus, bored of kicking in walls, had started disappearing too. Jon didn’t want to know where they went. He was alone in the Archives most of the time. Jon spent almost all of his day reading statements, pretending that he wasn’t hungry.

They hadn’t figured out how to open it. When Jon saw the Owl again he asked, but his most helpful suggestion was to read a statement about a flooded home. 

The man had survived through giving his grandfather’s knife to his eagle daemon, sending it out of the window in vain hopes that it would escape. It did - pedestrians a week later found an eagle daemon pulling a limp human through a torrential downpour, knife clenched in its beak. 

This wasn’t really helpful to Jon. For obvious reasons. 

He tried to avoid going home too often, to keep Georgie safe, but somehow she had gotten Melanie to force him home before nightfall each day. She had heard about him trying to throttle ‘Strix’ again. He kept out of her way and slept most of the time, half-heartedly passing the majority of his paycheck to him when he got it. She said it was too much, but - well, he did owe some back rent. 

Besides, it was almost nice. When Jon could stay awake, and when Georgie wasn’t busy podcasting her day away, it was nice to just exist in the same space as someone else for a while. Jon was beginning to realize that, when he was left alone in the Archives at work, with nobody for company - not even himself - he kind of lost the plot a bit. 

It made it hard to focus, anyway. Jon wasn’t doing much of anything, which he would have felt somewhat guilty about if he was still pretending that this was a real job. He just sat and stared at the wall most of the time, or read Statements. He did almost nothing else, but come in here and sit on the coffin. 

“I’m back again,” Jon said. He needed something to talk to. Everybody had noticed how he constantly kept talking to himself (‘Go talk to Strix instead!’) but it was just too bizarre to keep an internal monologue instead of the natural internal dialogue. They didn’t understand. “Sorry I keep coming back. I guess I’m lonely.”

Jon sat down on its rim, tracing a finger over the warped wood.  “It’s so hypocritical. Melanie and her daemon bite each other and everyone’s calling me a nutcase for saying that the imaginary owl’s imaginary? Double standard.” Jon huffed slightly. “I can’t decide if I would rather they leave me alone or if I would rather them care. We’re a basement of nutcases, but everyone knows I should be in an institution.  Admiral hovers, Honey runs off somewhere just to avoid me, Angelus attacks me…but at least it’s attention, right?” 

Pathetically, Jon imagined that the coffin was saying something back. He nodded. “You’re right. Deisha always needed a lot of attention. If nobody but me talked to her for a few days, she’d grow sad...I always told her that it wasn’t our fault we were surrounded by idiots.” Jon dug his finger into the warped wood, almost painfully. “Nobody likes it when I say her name out loud. No, you’re right. That’s the advantage of being alone, isn’t it?”

Of course, the minute he said that, the doorknob to the closet rattled. Jon jumped, a solid foot in the air - why hadn’t Deisha warned - right - before the door creaked open, and Jon was left screwing his eyes shut against an influx of light. 

It wasn’t until the spots in his vision cleared that he was able to see Martin and Pell standing in the doorway, looking shocked. 

Excitement burst in Jon’s chest. He jumped up, unable to fight the grin. “Martin! Pell! It’s you! I - I promise I’m in the closet for a good reason, but who cares, you’re here!”

“Shit,” Martin said. 

Martin didn’t look great. Well, no, he looked good. He was wearing an actual suit, and not even an ugly one. His hair was cut shorter, a sharp burst of jet black hair. He had lost some weight, but it just made him seem a little gaunt and unhealthy. Jon reflexively glanced at his chest to try and see Pell perched there, or the top of his head, but for just a second he couldn’t find her. 

His vision cleared further, and he saw that Pell had rested on the open door. Distant from Martin. Pell never got off Martin, except when she was anxious…

“Pell,” Jon said, watching her softly beat her wings, and maybe the way everybody was treating him really had driven so insane that he thought nothing of talking directly to Pell like this, “what’s wrong?”

“Okay, this was an accident. I really didn’t think anyone - okay, never mind.” Martin awkwardly stepped backwards, grabbing the doorknob and cuing Pell to fly out of the room. “I have something to do - somewhere else, see you later, Jon -”

“Martin, please !” Jon cried, and Martin stopped short. 

Had Jon ever said please to him? Had Jon ever pleaded with him? Had Jon ever asked for anything from Martin and Pell? He must have. Jon always wanted Martin around, ever since he woke up from his death. He couldn’t help but shake the feeling: that if only Martin was here, he could help him feel better. He could feel safe. 

“I really can’t stay,” Martin said. He didn’t meet Jon’s eyes, staring at the coffin instead of Jon. It was impossible to tell if Pell was looking at him. “I have...paperwork -”

“Deisha is gone !” Jon yelled, and Martin reflexively shushed him. It made Martin step forward and close the door, if only to avoid causing a scene - but if that was what it took to make Martin stay, then Jon would scream down the Institute. “Deisha’s gone, and everyone’s saying she never existed, and you’re gone, and - Martin, I’m so tired. I can’t rest.”

On some level, Jon had expected Martin to know. He had imagined it, so many times: Martin blinking in surprise, pushing his glasses up on his nose. What do you mean, Deisha’s gone? What owl? I’ll help you, Jon. I’ll help. 

“Who’s Deisha?” Martin asked. 

Jon couldn’t help it - he crumpled, landing heavily back on the coffin. He couldn’t even feel disappointed. He rested an elbow on his knee, kneading his forehead, wishing he had the energy to resent that not even Martin could help him. 

“The Beholding stole my daemon,” Jon said dully. 

Martin’s mouth creased tightly, his expression unreadable. Pell fluttered behind him, equally inscrutable. He looked at his watch, clearly frustrated, before sighing and nodding at Pell. She pushed off the wall and flew down to Jon, softly landing on his hand   “I can’t talk to you. I’m going to go stand outside this door and play Flappy Bird on my phone. Pell and I are practicing stretching our range, so she is staying in here. You have five minutes.”

Then he left, closing the door firmly shut behind him, and Jon was left sitting on the rim of a coffin staring at the butterfly on his hand. 

Pell had always betrayed Martin, in every way, and this was no different. She was a little cold, rarely speaking to others or acting social with other daemons. When she made jokes, they were frequently mean. Light proclivity for arson. Don’t ask how a butterfly can commit arson, Jon wished he didn’t know. Martin would laugh something about stereotypical insect daemons and offer Jon some tea, and nobody would be any the wiser. She mostly hid inside Martin’s jumper or perched on the back of Martin’s head, giving him a goofy little headband look. Tim had called him a five year old girl. 

Her sense of humor had always been a little cutting, but - well, it had always made Jon laugh. Jon and Pell got along. Martin and Deisha got along. Even Deisha and Pell frequently teamed up to terrorize Sejong or - or whoever Sasha’s daemon had been.The only parts of them that couldn’t get along, it seemed, was Jon and Martin. 

Jon explained everything as quickly and thoroughly as possible to Pell, who silently flapped her wings in close attention. Holding Pell felt no different than holding Martin’s hand, but - well, it was still weird. It wasn’t as if Jon and Martin held hands. Ha ha. They wouldn’t. But wouldn’t it be nice? What if they did hold hands? Would Martin do that?

When he finished explaining the brain damage/infernal monster situation, the Deisha situation, the Owl situation, the coffin situation, and his idea for the coffin situation, Pell sat there in silence for a few wingbeats. Jon was practically vibrating with anticipation.

Finally, Pell said, “Well, you still have a talent for getting yourself in stupid situations.”

“As if you aren’t working for bloody Peter Lukas!” Jon snapped. “Do you believe me or not?”

Pell beat her wings again thoughtfully. She wasn’t a small insect - literally, Martin said she was called a Large Blue Butterfly - and Jon could feel her wings brush against his palms. “I don’t think you’re lying. And I don’t think you’re crazy. Crazier than usual. Weirder things have happened to us. I’m surprised that nobody else believes you, honestly.”

It was the first time Jon had heard it. Ever since he woke up, this was the first time Jon had heard it. He sagged in relief, and fought the urge to clutch her. “You believe me. So long as you believe me, I can - I can handle the rest, Pell.”

There was a loud squeak from beyond the door, but everybody tactfully ignored it. “I do admit it’s strange, though,” Pell said thoughtfully. “Strix definitely exists. I feel that very strongly. I’ve never even heard the name Deisha before. I feel as if I know what he’s like. I’m very sure that he’s a barn owl. But...I can’t imagine him in my mind. When I try, he doesn’t look anything like you at all. Thinking of you two next to each other...there’s nothing natural about it.”

“You’re sitting on my hand,” Jon asked gently. “Is there anything weird about that?”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to do it,” Pell said mildly. “We used to imagine it all the time, what that would feel like. Then Martin would get really embarrassed and told me that it was inappropriate, and then I would bring up all of his teacher crushes, and then he would -”

“That’s a bit too honest, Pell.”

“Yeah, sorry. I always am.” Pell pushed off his hand, and fluttered up until she rested on Jon’s forehead. Her wings brushed his forehead, gentle and soft. “Your idea about the coffin’s stupid. You’re going to die.”

“At least I told you about my plan,” Jon said, almost crossing his eyes trying to look at her. “You still won’t tell me about what you’re doing with Peter Lukas.”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“No. I trust you.” Jon faltered. “I’ve never said that to anyone, you know.”

Pell was silent for a long moment, two. 

“Well,” Pell said finally, “you know daemons. We’re always more honest to each other than humans are.”

Before Jon could begin to ask, Martin opened the door. He steadfastly refused to look at Jon, face beet-red, and gestured sharply for Pell to return. She flapped once more on Jon’s head, and then pushed off to go spiral closer to Martin. Not quite touching, but always in orbit. 

“Don’t talk to us again,” Martin said, and closed the door with a sharp click. 

And Jon sat in that dark little supply closet, sitting on an empty coffin, knowing that his heart no longer beat. But he could feel it anyway: the rapid thump-thump-thump of excitement, the tingling in his fingers, the slow and steady rise in his chest. 

But there was something even stranger than that in his chest now. Jon had been torn asunder, ripped in two and leaving jagged edges. The feeling hadn’t gone away, and he knew it would never go away. But, for just a second, as Pell’s wings brushed his forehead, he felt as if there was something else in his heart. A different shape, a different color, singing a different song, but an unmistakable light. As if he wasn’t alone. 

It felt like another flavor of the love he held for Deisha. Just to the right, and straight on to morning. Burning, glowing, rising, singing. 

Was it love?

For Martin ?

It was impossible. When they had torn Deisha from him, when Jon had carelessly cast her aside, he knew that he could never feel this again. This song was hers, and without her he couldn’t sing. This happiness, excitement, joy - it had all been hers, and without it he could feel nothing. The Dust that composed her - it had been all of the love that Jon could feel, and without it there was none. Deisha was gone, and it was gone. 

Then why did he still feel it? Why did Jon know, deep in his heart, this subtle and stupid truth that churned the blood through his veins? That Jon had fallen in love with Martin - at some point, unrecognized and unseen, known only now that it was far too late to do anything about it?

If everything in Jon that loved was ripped away, then why did he still feel it ?

Jon stood up, and stared down at the coffin. An anchor. That was what the statement suggested. Jon didn’t have a daemon. But if they needed a part of your body, something that was integral, then...well, it was battered, but Jon still had a body, didn’t he? He could spare some parts of it. 

He’d already chopped off half of it. He wouldn’t notice any more. 

It was only once Jon saw Jared and Helen that he realized. 

Jared’s piranha was not real. Helen’s...well, Helen’s door was real, so far as Helen was real, but Jon highly doubted it was her real daemon no matter how many times she insisted it was. In those dark tunnels, even Angelus flickered. 

The owl had said it, and Jon had refused to listen. Only humans had daemons. Avatars, monsters, and the dead did not. 

The piranha was not real. The Tasmanian devil was not real. The ant was not real. 

Cheap facsimiles, paper cut-outs that served as nothing more than a discount imitation of the real thing. Of course Angelus was a Tasmanian devil. It wasn’t Angelus. 

If he had gone where Deisha had gone...maybe it was for the best, that Melanie didn’t realize. She still talked to him as if he was Angelus, and she was barely functional in a way that Jon was not. The illusion, at least, kept her comfortable. Possibly even kept her compliant. 

Jon did not know what “Angelus” was whispering in Melanie’s ear. He suspected it was nothing good. He wondered morbidly if it was really Melanie who bit him when Angelus did, but he suspected not. 

Maybe, if Jon was the Avatar of anything else, he would believe that the owl was his too. He would let him settle on his shoulder, believe the strategic truths he whispered in his ear, let him preen his hair as Jon stroked his soft feathers. Even if it wasn’t real, Jon could at least have the comfort of a self again. The comfort of being Jonathan Sims.

But the Eye had never abided comfortable untruths. It thrust the ugly reality at Jon, and forced him to confront it. So long as Jon was eating Statements - so long as the Owl could pierce into Jon’s heart - it hardly cared that Jon was dying inside. 

When Jon ripped open the chains to the coffin he wasn’t thinking of very much. Mostly that he was afraid that this would hurt Georgie. She had been putting a lot of well-intentioned work into keeping him alive lately, he didn’t want to fail her. He hadn’t gotten around to redoing his will yet, although seeing as he was a bit homeless and penniless that might not be important. He’d do his best to return, even if only so she wouldn’t look at him with those sad eyes in her nightmares. So he could continue painting her nails. 

And if he didn’t...well, she’d get her couch back. 

Jon retreated into the dark. 

“It hurts, Jon. 

“I know he’s there. I can feel the pain. It means he’s still here. He’s so far away. Every second is painful. I feel like our bond is being stretched to its furthest point, and if I move so much as a centimeter it’ll snap. 

“I can move. I can’t move closer, but I can move further away. But Cŵn can’t move. If I move just a little left, our connection will snap. I can’t move right. So I stay here. I could move. But I can’t. Do you understand, Jon? 

“But we’ve been talking. We never really used to - to talk. I never realized that. He always said all of these things to me, always pushing me and telling me that what I was doing was good, was right. It wasn’t right. I was hurting people. But he always said it was okay, and they deserved it, and - and he had to be right, right? He’s me. If I wanted it, Cŵn wanted it. I must have wanted to hurt those people. I did want it…

“Maybe I did, Jon. Maybe at first. I don’t remember when Cŵn changed. I think I only know when we stopped talking. He stopped touching me as much. I never held him anymore. I was lonely, but I never admitted it.

“Was he as lonely as I was? Was he all alone, just like me? Or did he really hate me as much as he said he did? Did he really think I was an evil bitch who liked to hurt people and wanted to keep hurting people? I don’t think he was wrong. Was it him, who said those things to me?

“We’ve been talking more. I don’t think that beast was him - or, if it was, it was only a part of him. He’s so much more than that. I feel like I know him, for the first time. I like him. Isn’t that weird? I like him…

“Can we talk about something else, Jon?”

Cŵn was a doberman. Apparently. 

Apparently he had always been a doberman. It hadn’t surprised Basira. She embraced Daisy tightly and desperately, and Honey had stuck firmly to Cŵn’s nose and refused to leave. It hadn’t surprised Melanie either, who was actually happy for ten minutes before she had to leave to go stick her knives in more trees. Daisy didn’t seem surprised, but it had always been hard to tell with her. 

It really didn’t surprise anybody other than Jon, who had always been under the impression that he was a wolf. 

It had always been one of the worst parts about Daisy. People with large, dangerous, aggressive daemons always walked around like they owned the place. Daisy had always been soft-spoken and calm - it had always been Cŵn who snarled and howled and never spoke except in low, hoarse threats. It didn’t matter that Daisy was a 150cm petite blonde when her wolf could tackle anybody’s daemon and clamp his jaws around their throat.

That was what he had done to Deisha. He had held her between his teeth. It had hurt less when Daisy slit his throat. 

But now Cŵn was just a doberman - still large, and he could probably still take the vast majority of daemons in a fight, but hardly a snarling, rabid wolf that rarely spoke. He still didn’t speak very much, not even to Honey. Daisy, weak and emaciated, had to lean on him to walk anywhere. They seemed to talk, but it wasn’t verbal. 

In fact, the only person he seemed to talk to was Jon. 

By now, Jon was used to the bizarre way other daemons were treating him - he hadn’t had the opportunity to ask Pell to elaborate on her bizarre parting remark, no matter how much it drove him crazy - but Cŵn’s behavior was almost too strange for even the others to understand. Even Basira and Honey squinted and whispered and grimaced, giving all three of them strange looks. At first Jon hoped desperately that someone had finally picked up on the fact that it was weird for the evil monster wolf to even touch him at all, but they mostly just seemed disturbed that they were being affectionate. To Jon, whose most dominant memory of Cŵn was the monster holding him between his teeth , it was uncomfortable at best and unsettling at worst. 

At first. Jon got used to it, after a bit. Jon was beginning to learn an all-encompassing truth, a truth so terrifying and paralyzing and disgusting that it left him raw and aching. It was the worst truth he had ever learned, and somehow the most important. 

That people had to be touched, or else they would be driven insane. 

And Cŵn would not stop touching Jon . 

When Daisy wasn’t leaning on him to walk, he was pressed against Jon’s legs. Daisy freaked out when Basira tried to wrestle her into the shower, so Jon was left sitting in the bathroom facing the door, terrified for his life, with a giant doberman on his lap shivering and shaking. Jon couldn’t do anything but rotely pet him, kneading his fingers into his tight muscles as deeply as he could, pretending that he didn’t need the grounding too. 

Georgie immediately showed up at the Archives to grab him, and probably yell at him for a very long time about suicidal behavior again, but when Cŵn refused to get off Jon’s lap she gave up in frustration and stormed back out. Daisy, sitting in a chair at the next desk over with a vacant expression, barely seemed to notice. 

“I’m fine,” was all Daisy would say, when Basira grilled her. “It’s fine.”

“You’ve missed quite a bit,” Melanie said faux-brightly as she clapped her hands. Angelus hissed at Cŵn, sprawled unmoving in Jon’s lap from where they both sat on the floor pressed up against Martin’s old desk. Cŵn didn’t respond, either to play or fight, just blinking sleepily. “Basira’s been doing her Gertrude Robinson impression, Martin’s been doing his fucking traitor impression, Jon was doing his corpse impression and is now doing his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest routine, and I’m stabbing squirrels to death in the park.” She brightened. “Do you want to help me? Cŵn can fetch them. Like in Duck Hunt.”

But Daisy barely seemed to respond, eyes half-lidded and expression distant in a way that suggested that she was focusing on Cŵn. Jon wondered if they were having a mental conversation. He experimentally scratched at his ruff, on the right side, and he watched Daisy subtly arch her neck. 

He felt, abruptly, like both prey and predator. 

“Daisy,” Basira said urgently. She was sitting in a chair next to Daisy, Honey circling around Daisy’s head desperately trying to get her attention. “Are you sure you don’t want a hospital? You were...if you were awake in there…”

“It’s fine.” Daisy’s voice had always been hoarse and throaty, but no matter how many empty water bottles they scattered around her she always seemed parched. “I’ll...get over it. We have bigger problems.”

Basira watched her for a minute, then two, large brown eyes sharply focused. Finally, she nodded, and stood up from the chair. “Right. Well, there’s a lot to talk about. I have a timeline in the library.”

“Sure.” Daisy slowly rose from her chair, Basira quickly lending a hand to help her, and Jon saw her clap the side of her right thigh in an extremely familiar motion. She always used it to call Cŵn back to her. “C’mon.”

Finally , Cŵn jumped off Jon’s lap. He stood next to Jon, tail wagging, until Jon carefully stood up too. He didn’t move. Jon stared at him. Daisy flatly stared at the both of them, eyes dull and unfocused, until Jon sighed and let Cŵn herd him into the library. 

Basira pursed her lips, but didn’t question it. Doubtlessly taking it completely for granted that Cŵn was all over him, and writing up conspiracy theories as to why Jon and Daisy were suddenly buddies. As usual. 

After three hours lying on the floor of the library playing daemon and hanging out with Cŵn as Daisy and Basira talked, unable to even care enough to pay attention, Jon was finally able to escape back into his office. 

He sat at his desk, staring at the grimy tape recorder in front of him. It was the only proof he had that it had been real - that any of it had been real. The dirt was dry, crumbling and devoid of weeds or rocks or life. It was just dirt, and even as Jon tried to wipe off the tape recorder with a tissue it never seemed to come off. No matter how hard he scrubbed it was still in the corners, pressed into the cracks between buttons, and he furiously ejected the grimy cassette so he could scratch away at the caked-on dirt with one dirty fingernail, just making the whole thing dirtier -

Cŵn gently closed his jaws over Jon’s wrist, and Jon screamed. 

It felt, in that second, exactly as it had felt all those months ago. Like his wings were beating, little heart working furiously, body shaking with tension and fear, but all he could feel were those terrible teeth pressing into his soft body. Drool pooled on his feathers and seeped into his tail. It was so hot -

“Jon. You’re in your office. You’re sitting in a chair. You’re not there.”

Jon snapped back to himself, filling his own body again, only to find Daisy sitting on the couch pushed against the far wall of his office several meters away. She sagged on the couch, like she was weighed down with lead, but her watery and cloudy blue eyes pierced Jon even as Cŵn carefully released Jon’s wrist. She had taken a shower but something about her still seemed filthy. Jon, whose own hair was still matted from his own shower, could relate. 

“Daisy,” Jon breathed. He wanted to say something after that - he wanted to ask her something, to explain anything, to ask if they were allowed to talk about what she had discussed down there - but he couldn’t think of anything to say. “Daisy…”

“You seem different.”

Even Cŵn’s voice was different. Still deep and brassy, but less tinged with copper. He stared up at Jon, dark eyes fixated immovably on him, and Jon couldn’t help but dig his hands into his ruff again. Neither of them made eye contact with Daisy. 

“I feel different,” Jon confessed. “Everything about me is different, and - and I’m so confused.” 

“Seven months is a long time,” Cŵn said, but Jon just looked at him, unimpressed. They both knew what Jon meant. “Jon, I feel strange. I feel as if something was starved out of me. Like I was filled up with something toxic, and that coffin drained it out.” He cut himself off for a second, before hesitantly restarting, “I feel different.”

“You seem different.”

They stared at each other, and Cŵn’s ear twitched back to Daisy. 

“She’s not going to say it,” Cŵn said, “but she’s wondering why you’re letting me touch you when I bit down on you.”

“Shut up, fucker,” Daisy snarled, and Jon startled. She must have seen his jump, subduing immediately for favor of leaning back on the sofa and scowling heavily at Cŵn. 

Cŵn snarled back, just as heavily, somehow identically. “Because you’re so innocent.”

“ You were the one who thought -”

“It wasn’t me -”

“Yes it was!” Daisy screamed, hoarse and low and strangled. As if she wanted to yell louder, to let it rip out of her, but this was all she could manage. “It was always you, and me! We talked about this!”

“You used to be a wolf,” Jon cut in, almost randomly. He was too tired to feel embarrassed or awkward about cutting in between a human-daemon argument. He had the feeling they were all way past this. “You weren’t a doberman. When we met. You were a wolf.”

Although Daisy still only either looked at Cŵn or a point on the wall, Cŵn stared fixedly at Jon. “The others said that the Beholding drove you insane and now that you live off trauma you keep babbling weird shit about daemons.”

“If you don’t believe me you can just say so,” Jon said, exhausted. 

But Cŵn just stared at him, head cradled between Jon’s hands, and Daisy’s hands clenched on the battered couch cushion as she stared at the wall. “No. I know. I just don’t like knowing.”

Jon smiled thinly. “Welcome to the club.” He hesitated a beat, heart thumping heavily in his chest. What was this? What was rising in his chest? “Do you know my daemon?”

“Daemon?” Cŵn barked quietly, jerking his head to the side. “Right. Strix…”

Hesitance. Uncertainty. Daisy didn’t even glance away. Hope clutched at Jon’s throat. “He’s not real. Like you weren’t a wolf. The Owl’s the Beholding, and I’m not his.”

Cŵn stared up at him, eyes glimmering faintly with soft pulses of yellow. 

“If you say so,” Cŵn said, “I believe you.”

Something crashed and shuddered in Jon’s chest. It felt almost like breaking. He found himself slipping off his chair, knees hitting the ground hard, and clutching tightly at Cŵn. His fur was velvety, tough and strong ripcord muscle bulging underneath, and he panted heavily in Jon’s ear. 

This bright, shuddering feeling in his chest burned his throat, scalding the numbness and fog away.  It was just to the left of how he felt in that closet with Martin: not as if a hole had been filled, but as if he had turned around to find another source of light. 

Someone believed him. Someone was in his arms, letting him hold them. 

Jon buried his face in Cŵn’s fur, and he didn’t look up when he heard footsteps approach them. Very gently, as if terrified that the touch was unwelcome, Jon felt the faint brush of fingers against his hair. 

He tilted his head so he could see - Daisy, face almost entirely turned away from him. Almost - he could see that, hilariously, her face was beet red. She was sitting against Cŵn, her back leaned against his side, and her right hand was gently brushing Jon’s hair. 

“I guess we’re in this together,” Jon said. 

Cŵn grunted. “Whatever this is.”

“You both talk too much,” Daisy said. 

“I have a theory.”

The Owl preened its feathers. Jon had been slowly developing a better sense for his body language. He seemed a little amused. “I’ll hear your evidence.”

Georgie was a normal person and very creeped out by Daisy, and was even more creeped out by how Jon, Daisy, and Cŵn were best friends now. She acquiesced to Jon’s petition for a 7pm curfew so he and Daisy could listen to the Archers together, but she still got Melanie to push him out the door sharply at seven. Jon had the feeling that the women in his life - so, everyone in his life - had begun feeling a little overly comfortable pushing him around. 

Sometimes he told Daisy that Georgie wanted him back early. Sometimes he told Georgie that Daisy was holding him up with a movie. 

What he did then, in those long and still hours where he paced the streets, was his own business.

His own, and the Owl’s. 

“I’m the only person - being who is experiencing reality authentically.” Jon slumped against the brick wall of the alley, heaving heavy breaths. He felt wonderfully full, almost bloated - a rich meal where he had been subsisting on crackers. “Everyone else is deluded either by their status as humans, or as a self-protective measure from refusing to witness the horror of their existence as Avatars.”

He could feel guilty tomorrow. He could feel shame, horror, embarrassment, and guilt tomorrow. Right now, just for right now , he could feel good. 

What did it matter, anyway? What did it matter. This wasn’t cannibalism. Sure, it was evil and awful and wrong and hurtful, but it wasn’t as if a human was -

“ - doing it to other humans,” The Owl said, clattering its beak. “You’re a monster. Monsters eat people, it’s what they do. It’s not as if you can help it. You can either suffer and self-flagellate and moan and eat anyway, or you can at least not live miserably.”

“You’ve already convinced me,” Jon whispered. “You already made me do it, you can shut up now.”

“You know I don’t make you do anything.” The Owl preened as Jon huffed, disgusted. Liar. It was either this or starve. He was forcing Jon to do this. There was no choice. “Don’t lie to yourself, it’s unbecoming for us. Go back to your theory.”

The alley stunk to high heaven. It was behind a kebab shop. There had been someone in the kebab shop who - well, never mind. Guilt later. The large steel dumpsters were in front of Jon, and the Owl was perched on the rim of the dumpster. It was an ignoble position for such a majestic, regal, and utter bastard of an animal. 

What would Martin think. The thought made Jon want to die. What would Martin think of this. It would hurt him so much. He had always believed the best in Jon, even when he didn’t deserve it. Only when he didn’t deserve it. 

Guilt later. Guilt later. 

“When a human chooses to become an Avatar, their daemon is replaced with a simulacrum constructed by an Entity. The daemon’s form is often metaphoric of the Entity’s nature - wolf for the Hunt, owl for the Beholding, and so forth. This daemon acts as the voice in the ear of the Avatar. It magnifies their worst nature, it encourages the Avatar to murder and destroy, and it alienates the Avatar from any goodness or humanity in their spirit.” Jon’s throat closed up, and he leaned his head back against the puckered brick. “Simply put, the Entity rips out the person’s soul, and replaces it with an internal drive to feed the Power.”

He sat there, breathing harshly, his nerve on end as the Owl blinked slowly at Jon.

“Well,” he said finally, “how would Melanie say it? ‘He a little confused, but he got the spirit?’ ”

“I am so fucking tired of you.”

“No, really. It’s not bad for someone working with a vague impression and half the facts.” The Owl ruffled its feathers. “Of course, pretty pathetic for an Avatar of the Knowledge Entity, but you were never quite qualified for your job.”

Jon groaned in frustration, clenching his hands in his hair. “I don’t understand! It doesn’t make any sense ! Georgie clearly still thinks of me as a human, but when we’re having movie night she acts as if I’m being distant if I’m not cuddling Admiral! Martin treated me normally but Pell called me a daemon! I think Daisy literally thinks I am a daemon !”

“Not consciously,” the Owl admitted, “but subconsciously she absolutely does. It’s hilarious.”

“She won’t make eye contact with me! She thinks it’s rude!” Jon pulled at his hair, groaning. “It’s only people who actually - actually like me.” 

“If Martin likes you.”

Jon conceded the point. “They know I’m not human anymore. They know it consciously, and they know it - they know it in their hearts. Do they know I’m empty inside? Do they know that the taboo doesn’t apply to me, that it means nothing for me to touch them? Is that why they let me do it?” Jon lowered his voice, forcing his ragged breathing to calm down. “The human mind can’t conceive of a person like me. Someone who’s this empty. Maybe they’re just - slotting me into something they understand. If they hate me, human. If they care, daemon. Just a happy little lie.”

The Owl didn’t confirm or deny. It just stared at Jon, head tilted, strange and foreign. Finally, it said, “You remember your Year 3 biology class.”

“Daemons are made of Dust, which is generated from consciousness and sapience,” Jon said dully. “Also photosynthesis.”

“Angelica really did hate you, by the way. That wasn’t your imagination.” The Owl tilted its head, further and further, unsettling and strange. “Emotions, imagination, and creativity all generate Dust.”

“For the daemonification of an omniscient fear entity, you have a talent for stating the obvious.”

“What do you think negative emotion generates?” The Owl said, green eyes in perfect mirror to Jon’s glimmering in the dim yellow street lamps. “Where do you think the power and energy generated from the worst impulses of humanity goes?”

Jon’s mind blanked out, fuzzing into static, before the answer hit him like a truck. Two years ago he would have said that Dust was Dust, that it was neither good nor evil, positive or negative, but two years ago he hadn’t believed in Evil either. Two years ago he hadn’t known that there were primordial Eldritch forces that hated him . 

“They’re Dust,” Jon whispered. “The Entities are Dust.”

“You were always the last in class to get the point,” the Owl said wryly. It straightened, head cranking back to its original position. “But that’s not what you wanted to know. You wanted to know what happened to Cŵn. He was subsumed by the Powers for years, but he’s returned to his original self. Still attached to the Power, still poisoned by their evil Dust, but he’s undeniably real. What’s your theory about that, Jon?”

Jon bowed his head, finding his hands shaking. In fear - in hope - “Should someone alienate themselves from their Power, and try to starve it out, their daemon can resume its original form and live again.”

“Good effort,” the Owl praised sarcastically. “That’s your running hypothesis. That’s your hope. That maybe, if you starve me to death, then Deisha will come back.” Jon shook and trembled. “Are you doing a good job of that, Jon?” 

Jon didn’t answer. 

“Thought so. You don’t care about her enough for that. You chose yourself over her once, and you will every time. I’m not so bad, you know. Once you get used to me. What was it Gran said, once?”

“You can get used to anything,” Jon whispered. “No matter how awful.”

“Most intelligent thing that old bat ever said. Literally.” The Owl straightened, beating its large wings in the still night air. “I’ll always be here for answers, Jon. If you’re ever courageous enough to seek them out. We’ll talk -”

“Stay,” Jon burst out, surprising himself. “Stay. Please. Just for a while. Let me -”

The Owl stopped short, wings beating, before hopping off the dumpster and swooping down to land on Jon’s shoulder. “You’re not meant to be alone,” he said, “are you?”

Why had he done it?

Well, the Owl had left him no choice. Except that wasn’t true. The Owl was dripping poison in his ear, wheedling and pressuring and encouraging, driving Jon mad with its constant encouragement and dry commentary. That was true. Jon was hungry. That was also true. Jon cared more about filling his own stomach than getting Deisha back. Maybe that was true too.

Maybe the only truth of the matter was that when Jon paced the dim London streets, threading his way carefully between the crowds of people, his jealousy and rage was so white-hot it burned his throat. 

When Jon was a child he used to take the bus down to the park by himself to play. He would sit under a tree and crack open his book, and skim it as he spent most of his attention people-watching everyone else at the park. He felt the same horrible emotion every time, and yet he kept coming back. He watched the families playing: the Mums setting out picnic baskets on the rickety wooden picnic tables, the Dads playing footy with their sons. The other kids playing with their friends. He would feel the same thing, every time: why don’t I have this? What did I do so wrong that I didn’t deserve this? 

The crowd wasn’t something he noticed, normally. He only paid as much attention as to make sure that he wasn’t running into anybody. Navigating a crowded London sidewalk could be hell, no matter how incredibly wide they made the sidewalks. In the last fifty years daemons had started generally settling smaller and smaller as people moved from the spacious suburbs into more and more crowded cities - Jon had read a study on it once - and gradually sidewalks had started narrowing to make room for cars. It didn’t change the fact that something that Jon once took for granted was now stabbing him in the heart with every step. 

He saw daemons on shoulders, in bags, in tanks, pacing next to their humans, and thought - why don’t I have this? What did I do so wrong that I don’t deserve this?

Except he knew. This was no Sims Luck, this was just him and his choices. But he just got so angry and bitter and resentful ...he just felt so monstrous…

This would break Martin’s heart. But Martin wasn’t here, and Martin didn’t want anything to do with him. First intelligent thing that man had ever done. 

Jon wanted to be a monster. Just a little. Just once. 

Blame Strix. 

Jon threaded his way through the crowd, descending the steps into the Underground and filing silently into the tube, with a daemon on his shoulder. His claws gently clenched into his jacket, his wings sometimes brushing against Jon’s cheek. Walking with the new weight was strange, leaving Jon hyper-cognizant of his gait and his new ‘personal bubble’. 

Tim had used to complain about how impossible it was to live in London with an oversized daemon. He would have lived someplace with far less people - “But you know the publishing market in England, it’s London or bust!”. He had always taken up so much space. Sometimes Jon thought that Tim’s personality was so big because his daemon was so big, not vice versa - everybody was paying attention to him anyway, so why not make it count? 

Sejong and Deisha had never quite gotten along, no matter how friendly Tim and Jon were in the beginning. At first it was a funny joke about how opposites attracted. After a while, in the twilight years of Tim’s life, he used to get snide about it. She’s an oxpecker and he’s an ox, Tim would sneer, of course we hate each other. 

I don’t hate you, Jon used to say. 

Deisha would poke at Sejong’s eyes. Daemons always betrayed. 

Now, today, Jon sat in a hard plastic seat on the tube, with a daemon on his shoulder like everyone else. In another special compartment, Tim had once sat with his arm around Sejong and browsed his phone with the other oversized daemons. Nobody paid attention to anybody around them. Nobody except Jon, who was giddy with the thrill of finally, finally, having something that everybody else had. 

“Your orphan complex is awe-inspiring. They should do a study on you.”

Do not punch him in public. Do not punch him in public. 

But when he climbed up the flight of stairs to Georgie’s flat, picking through the keys on his keychain, he jerked his shoulder and made the Owl flap off. He chuckled lightly, already understanding why. 

“Greedy, aren’t you?”

Jon opened Georgie’s door and stepped through, alone.

Georgie was sitting at her kitchen table, editing her raw sound, and she didn’t look up from her work even as Admiral bounded over. Jon swept him up into his arms, bending his head down and letting Admiral nuzzle his face. If he nuzzled a little back, that was nobody’s business but his own. 

“Do you really have to stay out so late just to hang out with that woman? She gives me the creeps.”

“We trauma bonded,” Jon said, exhausted, for the fifth time. 

“She tried to kill you!”

“She’s not special.”

Admiral huffed, batting at Jon’s face. Jon grimaced, subtly trying to spit out the fur the cat left in his mouth. “Everything about her just reeks of someone who wasn’t hugged enough as a child.”

With an overly touchy and attention-seeking daemon and a reserved and aloof human, they had used to say that about Jon too. They had been right, but it was still a stereotype. “Bring it up with her therapist.”

Georgie’s hands halted over her keyboard. She closed her laptop, turning around to face Jon. He had given up and laid down on the floor, letting Admiral walk over his chest and make biscuits in his jumper. Jon couldn’t help but notice that Georgie had started avoiding eye contact with him too. More evidence for his bizarre hypothesis. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Georgie said haltingly. “About you, and - some of the stuff we’ve been talking about.”

Jon hummed, stroking Admiral’s fur.

“You’ve gotten - better. It’s really nice to see, Jon. You're actually improving and getting yourself out of that slump, you know.”

“Yeah,” Admiral said, “we figured you’d just kind of give up and be a sadsack forever.”

“Don’t be a dick!” 

But Admiral just gave her an unimpressed glance. “You’re such a hypocrite. You play it up all polite and nice, just so you can let me say the mean stuff. Then you get to scold me or yell at me and pretend that it wasn’t you who said it. You’re always having your cake and eating it too.”

“Never thought I’d hear you call her out on it,” Jon murmured to Admiral, who flicked his ear in acknowledgement.

“Whatever,” Georgie said, looking sharply away from both of them. “Point is, you’re trying for once.”

“But we’re well aware you wouldn’t even have been able to try if you didn’t have a safe place to stay away from that horrid workplace,” Admiral said. “And if you didn’t have at least us to talk to. So this is Georgie finally admitting that giving someone space might not be enough.”

Jon had a sense of where this was going. “There’s someone you’re finally ready to help.”

“It’s what a good friend would do,” Georgie said.

“We’re kind of in love with her,” Admiral said.

“You’re the best suited to help us with this,” Georgie said. 

“You’re really the only one who can,” Admiral said. 

And, really, when put like that - there was never any question at all. 

“What do you need?” Jon said. 

And when Admiral rubbed his face on Jon’s, and Georgie got off her chair and hugged him, he had a hard time feeling like a monster at all.

Jon, as it turned out, was necessary because he was the only person who could both grab a Tasmanian devil daemon and not get his arm ripped off. Or, rather, it wouldn’t really matter if his arm got ripped off, because arms grew back. If you were Jon. Arms grew back if you were a plastic shell of a person and also Jon. 

Daisy probably could have helped, what with her fuck-off doberman daemon, but the prospect of attacking another person’s daemon freaked out Daisy and made Cŵn start snarling and drooling to the point where Jon had to cuddle with him a bit to get him to calm down. Melanie had begun making sarcastic comments about when Jon and Daisy were going to tie the knot, which made Cŵn and Angelus get into spitting fights. Jon, as the only one here without fangs, politely abstained from the fight over his honor. 

He was not going to think too hard about all of Daisy’s defenses of his honor. He was not. It had already taken a ridiculous amount of bargaining to get her to let him do this in the first place. 

It was something Georgie had broached with Basira first. Apparently they were texting buddies, which Georgie didn’t even pretend was for anything but Jon updates ( Georgie: here’s a pic of jon and adm cuddling, so cute! <3. Basira: What is this). Basira had deigned to return from her mysterious wild goose chases hefting a pack of sketchy medical supplies and a furtive expression, and Georgie began dropping by the Archives more frequently with the excuse of getting takeout for Melanie.

Melanie appeared confused and suspicious of the attention, but with Georgie she almost seemed human. It was only Angelus, for once calm and resting under the desk as Georgie and Melanie sat on top and split pad thai, that reminded Jon that Melanie wasn’t Melanie. Any more than Jon was Jon. 

The plan was put in motion one night a week after Georgie asked for his help. Daisy excused herself to go take a walk, Georgie dropped by with a bright smile and a big carton of Melanie’s favorite soup with a tranquilizer dumped in it, and Basira sanitized a scalpel in the gender neutral bathroom sink. Jon holed himself up in his office, eating and eating and eating, as the Owl laughed and laughed and laughed.

He was going to hold Angelus down. He was going to pin him down and not let him move. The thought made Jon sick. It was as bad as what Elias had done to her. It was disgusting, and made Jon’s gut curdle with shame.

But...was it? Jon didn’t feel disgusted when Angelus bit him, or when he was forced to grab him and peel him off his calf. Maybe it was time for him to accept what Daisy and Cŵn and Georgie and Admiral already knew. What even Basira and Honey and Melanie and Angelus seemed to know.

The taboo was for humans. It didn’t feel wrong - and Jon still knew right from wrong, he did, and when he did wrong he knew what he was doing - and maybe it even felt right. Normal. Like aloe vera on a burn, soothing and cool and calm. 

The Owl laughed at him when he said it. He didn’t deny it, but he heckled Jon over how it meant that he was empty inside after all. But Jon couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the Owl didn’t like his relationship with Admiral and Cŵn. He tried to steer him away, neg him. 

Which was as good as proof that it was healthy, and good, and right.

They waited thirty minutes after Melanie finished the soup, and when Jon heard a knock on his office door he scrambled upwards and ducked out of his office. He saw exactly what he expected: A large tarp spread out on the ground, Melanie carefully laid on the center with her matted red hair sticking to her chin. They had left Angelus where he was curled up on the table, Admiral struggling to move him without shoving him off the table and potentially waking him up. 

“I hope you put a strong sedative in that soup,” Jon said mildly. Without thinking too hard about it, he scooped up Angelus and sat on the ground close to Melanie, feeling his little chest rise and fall. Asleep like this, he was almost cute. “If she wakes up in the middle of this…”

“Melanie wouldn’t hurt me,” Georgie said stubbornly. She moved closer to Melanie and, after a second’s hesitation, sat on her knees and put Melanie’s head on her thighs. 

Basira snapped on rubber gloves and knelt by Melanie too, scalpel at the ready. Honey was buzzing over Melanie’s body. “She said that she got shot in the leg, right?” Basira carefully used another scalpel to cut through Melanie’s fishnets, pulling them away from her leg to give her access. 

“I can kind of feel a disruption in her Dust,” Honey said thoughtfully. Jon was impressed: only an insect daemon like Honey could have sensed that. “It’s concentrated...around here.”

She buzzed over a spot on Melanie’s upper thigh, and Basira carefully put her thumb on it and kneaded the skin. Basira’s brow furrowed. “I don’t feel anything…”

“It was a ghost bullet…”

“How are we supposed to cut out a ghost bullet?”

“Jon said it would work!”

“Like Jon’s always right?”

“Is this not going to work?” Georgie asked, fighting hard to keep a tremor from her voice. Admiral tried to jump up on Jon’s lap to curl up with Angelus, but Jon shook his head. Very much not safe. “Basira’s right. How can you cut out a ghost bullet?”

The Owl’s words from earlier cut in through Jon’s mind. Melanie had always said that ghosts were the imprints of dead daemons, the last vestiges of Dust taking their old forms. According to stupid ghost lore, sometimes these vestigal daemons could possess items. Usually creepy dolls or houses. Sometimes they possessed living daemons, driving them mad. Like in that Exorcist movie Jon hated. 

Melanie hadn’t shared many details about the India ghost. Just that there was a haunted rifle and it had shot her. Had it been human shaped? Sometimes ghosts possessed skeletons and made human-shaped ghosts, which was incredibly creepy and the subject of more than one shitty and pulpy horror movie.

Jon looked down at Angelus, sleeping in his lap. Ghost bullet…

When Jon spoke, it was calm and even, almost distant to his ears. “It’s in Angelus.”

Everybody looked at him, the humans blanching and the daemons freezing. 

“That’s fucked up,” Honey said bluntly. 

Georgie’s lip wobbled. “Melanie…”

Jon couldn’t believe he was doing this. “Give me the scalpel.”

Nobody in Jon’s life had ever trusted him with a knife, and Basira wasn’t about to start. She wavered, glancing between him and the scalpel. “Jon, I don’t think…”

“Are there any other daemons here with opposable thumbs?” Jon asked crisply. “Or do you want to cut it out of him?”

Basira silently passed Jon the scalpel. She didn’t see anything strange about Jon’s comment. At this point, neither did he. 

He couldn’t let his hands shake. He couldn’t let his fear get the better of him. Jon had spent thirty two years ruled by fear, and he refused to let it pollute one more second. He carefully laid Angelus out on the tarp, letting Georgie and Basira move Melanie further away, and laid Angelus on his side. He let his fingers trace over the daemon’s flesh. Only an insect daemon…

Jon opened his eyes, letting them shine a bright and piercing green. Georgie hissed between her teeth and Honey buzzed in agitation, but Jon ignored them. There. It was right there, on his left flank. 

“Admiral, Honey, get up on the desk,” Jon said. How was his voice so calm? Was that really Jon speaking? “Basira, hold down her legs. Georgie, cushion her head and hold down her shoulders. I’m not wearing a belt -”

But Basira was already stripping off the outer layer of her scarf, carefully stuffing it between Melanie’s teeth, and when everyone was in position Jon forced himself to breathe a useless breath in and out.

Well, Jon thought as he pierced his coworker’s daemon with a scalpel and dug out a ghost bullet, my life’s gotten stupid.

Jon was not a surgeon. It was not a clean cut. He was distantly aware of Melanie screaming, of Angelus howling, but all of Jon’s focus was on making another incision in the writhing and hollering daemon. Another cut there, dig it out - he didn’t have gloves , but it’s not like either of them could get an infection - dig it out, dig it out, there !, take it out -

The bullet clattered on the ground. He was distantly aware of Melanie screeching, attacking Basira and shoving away Georgie, but not touching him. Only Angelus attacked him, lashing out as Jon kept him tightly clenched to his chest.

Angelus bit into his arm and tore out a lump of flesh. Angelus bit and bit and didn’t let go. Jon didn’t fight him. He let Angelus bite, and rend, and tear. Jon was distantly aware that blood was fucking everywhere, ragged strips of skin hanging from his arm,  that his flesh was falling on the ground in sick clumps. It hurt, but other things had hurt worse. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon murmured, uncertain the rabid daemon could even hear him. “I know it hurts. The emptiness was easier than the feeling. Let it hurt, Angelus. I know it hurts so much. I know it hurts to live. Please come back.”

Angelus boiled, and bubbled. Melanie screamed, and Angelus tore, and Jon found himself curling up tighter around the daemon. He felt oddly as if he was protecting him, even as he tore him apart. 

“You’re okay,” Jon whispered. “Come back to Melanie. Come back. She needs you. You’re okay. Come back. She needs you. Don’t leave her all alone.”

If Jon Looked, with Eyes that were not his own, he could see it. He expected to see the rot and poison leave his system. But instead it was Angelus who glowed with a soft yellow light, who began dissolving into Dust. It looked just like when Gran died and her bat dissolved into nothing.

But as Angelus dissolved, the Tasmanian devil’s blood-stained teeth dissipating into the cold air, something different was left in Jon’s arms. 

It was just a beaver after all.

The beaver, of course, did not stop biting him either, but Jon did not let him go until Melanie’s screams faltered into hoarse, screaming sobs. When Melanie crumpled on the ground, hugging herself and screaming, Jon carefully leaned forward and held out Angelus. Melanie reached out, not touching him, and let Jon deposit him in her arms.

For the first time in months Melanie clutched at Angelus and cried, and Jon felt that odd feeling again: the breaking and swelling in his chest, like something thin and fragile cracking and allowing a new life to burst through.

It was impossible for the feeling to be hope. Deisha had been his hope, and she had taken it with her when she left.

But Jon didn’t know what else to call it. 

Georgie’s flat was getting a little crowded. 

Jon tried to demure and move back into the Archives, hopeful that he was no longer a flight risk, but at this point Georgie seemed to be keeping him around because she ‘liked’ his ‘company’ and thought living in your evil workplace sounded ‘terrible’. Sounded fake to Jon, but whatever. 

What it did mean was that Jon got his awkward asexual front row seat into the blossoming of a beautiful love story between his ex-girlfriend and his homicidal coworker who had torn out huge chunks of Jon’s arm down to the bone. 

They had left the Archives looking, objectively, a little like a murder scene. They tried to clean up as best as they could, even consulting Artifact Storage on the best place on premises to dispose of human flesh, but Jon was pretty sure he saw one of the cleaners crying in the basement. He had been fairly sure that they had stopped going down into the Archives, actually, but apparently the smell of rotting flesh had been bothering Peter Lukas. Or maybe Martin, who had apparently started flexing his rarely seen talents of absolutely psychologically destroying people through passive aggression and administrative hell. 

The objective slaughter zone and Jon’s blood-drenched clothing meant that Jon’s limp offers to stay at work were rebuffed. Jon was forced to admit that Georgie was probably right. No matter how awkward it was hearing Melanie’s unmuffled sobs. 

She lay in the bedroom that she and Georgie now shared and sobbed. She tried to make a sandwich and broke down crying in the middle of it, at which point Jon gently made the sandwich for her and fetched a blanket. She sobbed herself awake at night, and often had difficulties rising from bed. 

She stayed at home from work for as long as possible, but once she started throwing up in the bathroom she was forced to return. There, she sobbed in document storage. Jon sometimes heard her throwing things or kicking walls again, which was at least familiar, but otherwise she rarely spoke to anybody but Georgie and sulked in corners. 

When Melanie lurked alone in corners she kept Angelus clutched tight to her chest, who now only limply and half-heartedly tried to bite her. He still chewed up everything else - they had once gone through so many chairs - but it was now only rarely turned on her. The contrast between Melanie’s desolation and Angelus’ lingering anger was confusing to Jon, but Georgie showed him a lot of articles on PTSD that claimed it was common. 

And when Melanie wasn’t clutching Angelus, Jon was.

At night in Georgie’s flat, Melanie and Georgie sat on a few cushions on the rug and leaned against a coffee table, talking in low voices, as Jon lay on the couch. Both Admiral and Angelus fought for real estate on his scrawny chest, often pressing cautiously up against each other. And Jon. A lot of crawling over Jon.

“When are those two going to get it together,” Admiral whispered to the both of them. The telly was blaring some random reality show in the background, but nobody was paying any attention. “It’s been a whole week. Come on, there’s only one bed and everything.”

“Romance doesn’t solve our severe emotional trauma,” Angelus said flatly. He had always been very adversarial, and Jon was realizing that he and Admiral bickered nonstop yet agreed on everything. “Give it two weeks, Melanie has to stop crying long enough to make out with her.”

“There’s only one bed , Angel! This is just like all of Melanie’s fanfictions.”

“Melanie writes fanfiction?” Jon asked, morbidly fascinated and barely cognizant of what fanfiction was. So this is what daemons talked about when the humans weren’t around. Jon always found conversation easiest when all parties were there to convey both intent and language, but his primary school teachers had thought he was autistic anyway. But sometimes, when people were close enough, when there was no need for body language or for words to convey what you needed to say, a strange and obscure world opened up for Jon. 

“Fall Out Boy bandom,” Angelus said smugly. “Georgie put together a Spotify playlist for her vampire AU.”

“What’s an ay-you?”

“Jon, you ignorant child,” Admiral said, flicking his tail in Jon’s face and making him sputter. “Back on topic. I’m doing the best I can, but Georgie’s always thinking of me as the horny one who makes bad decisions anyway. I wheedled her about Jon for weeks before she asked him out.”

“You did ?” Jon gasped. In retrospect, Deisha had always been effusive in her praise over Admiral and Georgie. “Wait, you liked me?”

“Not particularly, but you were hot.”

“Why is Jon so hot,” Angelus asked Admiral. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Our theory is that it’s God’s apology for the orphan thing.”

“ Admiral -”

“Not that Melanie isn’t much hotter than Jon,” Admiral said quickly. “Fucking smoking, that girl. Her hair! Wow! And her rack’s to die for. What’s her cup size?”

“34DDD,” Angelus said smugly. “I’ll convince her it’s a good idea to send you bikini pics if you want.”

“Hell yeah. Back-alley surgery’s a weird start to a relationship, but I think we can probably spin this as romantic.”

“Not going to lie, I was pissed and Melanie’s still kind of traumatized over it. But you all probably did me a favor, so I guess it was the best of a bad situation.” Angelus shrugged uncomfortably. That kind of rational, intellectual decision was much more characteristic of Melanie than Angelus, but Jon supposed that they had been talking more often. Maybe rediscovering each other.  “We’re even warming up to Jon. When we mutually severely maimed each other I decided he wasn’t a pussy after all, so we’re friends now.”

“ That should be a fanfic trope.”

“Agreed.”

On the rug, Melanie and Georgie were talking about make-up. Jon felt as if he had jumped ship to the more interesting half of social interaction. 

Before all of this, Jon had always figured that conversations, jokes, plots, were solely between human and daemon joint pairs. When daemons huddled together, it was to cuddle or groom or annoy each other. But there were entire social dynamics, entire conversations - conversations that their humans were only subconsciously cognizant of. What was it CS Lewis had said? ‘If humans and daemons shared one mind then ingenuity, creativity, and philosophy would be strangled in its cradle’?

Jon saw, even now, how they provided comfort to each other. How Jon now provided comfort  in a way he never had before. Jon had always been the least comforting person in any room, awkward with feelings and accidentally hurtful and cutting with his words. But the act of physical affection, of holding Angelus close to his chest as Melanie sobbed - that, even Jon was capable of. 

It provoked a strange feeling in Jon. A soft, warm light. A sympathy and empathy he had never known, having spent his life in self-absorption and self-isolation. All he needed was Deisha, Jon had repeated to himself over and over again. Like every lonely child did, with nothing but a daemon for company. 

In the midst of this ultimate loneliness, in the pits of this profound spiritual desolation, Jon abruptly found that child sad and painfully lonely. He never connected; he never allowed another mind to penetrate his closed and cold world. It was a little pathetic. 

Not that Jon wasn’t pathetic now. But at least he was able to help someone else, someone besides himself. 

No matter how tough and butch Angelus had always been, when Melanie was in the middle of a crying fit sometimes she would let Jon pick him up and cuddle him. Late at night, when Melanie sobbed in the living room of Georgie’s flat, Georgie hugged her tightly and Jon cradled Angelus close to his chest. It was like a group hug, but weird. But not. 

Some part of him had hoped that this meant that, because he and Angelus were friends (?), he and Melanie would be friends too. She had stopped being mean to him, and no longer kicked or pushed him around. She, actually, stopped touching him at all. She still talked to him normally, and when she did it was either still telling him to go away or aggressively friendly, but Jon noticed that she had stopped making eye contact with him too. But Angelus was still -

Who was he kidding. They were friends, but Melanie had converted to the weird side of people in his life. At least she wasn’t as bad as Daisy. 

The next week Basira, champion of logic and reason and facts over feelings, caught him sitting on the floor of the Archive with Cŵn flopped across his legs and cradling Angelus to his chest. Daisy and Melanie were eating lunch together and talking mildly and absently about their childhood traumas. Melanie, as reported by the unrepentant gossip Angelus, had an emotionally abusive mother, and Cŵn sadly admitted that they had been raised on a Welsh farm. Sheep had been involved. Jon gleaned this information as the three of them partook in the number one daemon hobby of gossiping and shittalking.

They had been in the middle of chatting about how many divorces Peter Lukas and Elias had when Basira stopped short in front of them. They all quickly shut up as she stood there and squinted at the scene. Honey drifted out of her scarf and drifted over to touch down on Cŵn’s nose as a quick hello before retreating to Basira. 

Basira and Jon stared at each other critically. Basira looked strongly as if she was almost getting it, but was not quite there. Quite frankly, it was nice to see someone who was making eye contact with him again. 

“Do you mind?” Jon said. “This was a private conversation.” 

“Sorry,” Basira said awkwardly. She turned away, straightening her skirt. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

They all watched her go, Honey drifting slightly behind before following her. 

“That woman can be so rude,” Angelus said finally, beating his flat tail lightly against Jon’s arm. Jon bounced him a little in his arms, as if he was a cute puppy. He ignored the giant teeth. “Look at her glarefest.”

“She’s just blunt,” Cŵn said tiredly. “It’s not like her to butt in on private conversations, though.”

“Yeah, her and Honey are mad private. We thought they hated us for, like, three months.”

“They do that on purpose. Says it keeps people on their toes.”

“What’s the situation between you guys, anyway?” Jon asked Cŵn. “Its been all…”

“Sexual tensioney?” Angelus said helpfully, and Jon was forced to hold him above his head as Cŵn nipped at him. 

Jon didn’t know what it said about him that his only male company these days were daemons, and half of their conversations were ‘girltalk’. Any way you cut it, it was pretty pathetic. Although, to be fair, Jon wasn’t really sure what ‘girltalk’ was. Most of the women in his life just talked about their trauma, other people’s trauma, and the malevolent sentient forces of trauma. Maybe that was ‘girltalk’?

“It’s complicated and Daisy doesn’t like talking about it,” Cŵn said primly.

“Daisy doesn’t like talking about anything.”

“True.” Cŵn paused a beat. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they are so in love with each other it’s stupid.”

“Oh my god,” Jon groaned. Did Deisha talk to everyone about his love life? What love life! 

He had a sudden, vivid, and terrible mental image of Deisha gossiping to everybody around her about Jon’s obvious crush on Martin. Had she known? What would she say now, about how Jon had been thinking about Martin obsessively, in the soft dawn light every morning and in the purple twilight. When he thought about him, his breath caught and his heart sunk and he felt like he was going to die all over again, every second. 

Loving Martin was how it felt to die. 

If Deisha was here, what would she say? ‘Love isn’t supposed to be a bad feeling, Jon, it’s good!’. She’d say that love made her want to sing. Deisha always sang when Jon did the dishes, when he loaded the washing machine, when he tied his shoes. Even when he was in a bad mood, even when he snapped at her to shut up. Maybe especially then.

Jon had thought of Martin far too much, for far too long a time. Deisha had to have known. In that endless and confused month that Jon had spent in the custody of Nikola, the plastic doll with a marionette daemon, he had thought of Martin far too often. He wanted a comforting hand, wanted the soft embrace of a mother, but he couldn’t begin to imagine it. He had tried thinking of Georgie’s hand on his cheek, but somehow the sensation had turned into Martin’s tea, his endless fountain of care and concern. If Martin had been there, Jon had thought wildly, then things would be okay. If Martin was here, he’d get Deisha out of the little box they kept bolted to the floor and take them far away from here. 

But Martin hadn’t saved Deisha from Nikola, from Elias, from Jon. No one could. Jon couldn’t save Martin now. He knew that he didn’t need saving. Jon trusted Martin. 

Maybe Deisha sang when she loved Jon. Jon wished he knew how to sing back. If he could, he’d sing to Martin. 

No matter how soft and warm the weight of the daemons were, Jon felt that yawning emptiness inside him. It was like a black hole, sucking everything in. Jon was hungry. He needed something to fill the emptiness. He needed to consume that Dust born of pain and fear, the fruit and nectar that fed into the Powers, needed to stuff it inside of himself until it filled that cavern. If Jon hurts then everyone must hurt. Rome must crumble, because Jon was crumbling. 

Jon was hungry. He was always, always hungry. 

When Jon crouched over his cramped, cluttered desk, cramming communion wavers in his mouth, unsatisfied and starving, the Owl loomed over his shoulder. 

“You made too many sacrifices to die now, Jon.”

Jon walked down London streets, the wind tangling his hair, as the Owl’s talons bit into his shoulder. 

“It’s either eat or die. What, either you mildly inconvenience someone or you bite it? How is that even a choice?”

Basira said it was like addiction. Look at Daisy, she was doing it. Granted, she was fucking dying, but she was doing it. Daisy said that she wanted to get better. Cŵn said that they were suicidal. All daemons did was gossip. 

Jon hid in the Archive library, clutching his recorder tight to his chest, as if the instrument of his destruction could save him.

“You know she’s full of it. Come on, Jon. You deserve it. You’ve had the hardest life possible. Nobody’s ever loved you, or given you a kind word. How are you obligated to do the same to them?”

Jon patched over the hole in his soul with paper, trying to fill the gaping maw with touch and affection and intimacy, and it helped but it wasn’t her . 

Jon lay awake at night, staring at Georgie’s ceiling, aching.

“You’ve been powerless your entire life, Jon. You’ve lived the past three years never knowing why all of those terrible things were happening to you. Your entire life has been shrouded in ignorance and spite. You sacrificed it all for power and knowledge. It’s the most valuable thing in the world, and you know it. And you’d throw it away ?”

He was right. He was always right . And Jon hated it . 

“You’re doing really well, Jon,” Daisy said. “We’re proud of you.”

For someone so obsessed with knowledge and truth, Jon had become awfully good at lying. 

Yes. Yes, right, my complaint. Sorry, I got distracted.

It was - right, the day after my yoga class, so Wednesday. At the Common Bond coffee shop, the one on Waxley Lane? It’s where I apply for jobs. You know, get there when it opens, get a bottomless black coffee and sit in the back drudging my way through site listings. Right, the unemployment thing is relevant, but - 

Well, it’s none of your business. I’m not going to tell you about all of that. I already had to - shit happened, I got depressed, I can’t keep a job, all of that awful shit I hate telling people. I don’t want to tell you. But I just did. Isn’t that funny? Shit like this just spills out, I guess. You ever feel like an overflowing cup, just always spilling over with your own shit and pain and hurt? Yeah, I thought you’d say that. You seem the type. 

I noticed him immediately. It was hard not to. I was sitting in the back patio for people with oversized daemons. You know, with Prakaash and everything. He’s a krishnasaar - how would you say it, Blackbuck? I put it on the form. Say hello, Prakaash ( Whatever ). Sorry. He’s been moody lately. Don’t blame him, really.

So it was weird that the man was there, because his owl daemon wasn’t very big at all. He just sat on the man’s shoulder as the man sipped his coffee. It’s pretty fucking rude to take up space in oversize areas that someone who is actually oversized might need, but he was hardly taking up our parking spots, so...whatever. 

But I mostly started noticing him when I saw how he wouldn’t stop staring at me. 

It was that damn owl daemon. The man didn’t look at me at all - he sat and stared at that wall for twenty fucking minutes, I counted - but his owl daemon with those awful green eyes just stared at me. At first I tried to be nice, like maybe he’s autistic or something, but after a while of the thing not even blinking I just knew that he was a creep. 

I would have gotten up and left and sat in a different area, but there’s hardly a lot of oversized seating available. I wanted to complain to an employee, but...he wasn’t doing anything, I didn’t want to be rude...so I stayed. I almost got up and left, but...I stayed. I wish to god I had gotten up and left, but I stayed. I don’t know why. I told myself that it was because Prakaash could have just stomped the hell out of him if he tried anything - I’ve never had to worry about self-defense in my life, my friends say it’s very Libra - but I don’t think that was it. I think it was because the owl didn’t want me to. 

After twenty minutes of this, the man moved. I had been watching him out of the corner of my eye, I was so keyed up. And he walked over to me. I tried to pretend I didn’t see him. But when I looked away, pretending that I was fixing my earring, he sat down next to me. His owl flapped his wings a little as he sat down, keeping his balance. That stuck in my mind. It was kind of awkward. 

I can tell you exactly what he said. I’m not sure why. The internet page I checked out said that traumatic experiences can be ‘snapshot’ in your mind or something. Was this traumatic? Am I just being dramatic? Can you tell me if I’m being dramatic or not? Please? No, sorry, that’s unfair, never mind ( It’s not unfair, get this guy fucking fired ). Sorry about him ( Stop acting as if you’re inconveniencing this guy. Doesn’t your dumb workplace have an HR? ). What do you mean you don’t have an HR?

Sorry. Back on it. 

“Hello,” the guy said. He spoke directly to Prakaash. It was really weird, but I guess just as weird as the rest of him. “I’m the Archivist of the Magnus Institute.” He didn’t introduce himself, and neither did his daemon. I remember thinking that was weird. “Sorry if I’m being forward. Have you heard of us?”

Prakaash was really, really uncomfortable. I was too. I said that we were just on our way out, so...

The owl nipped a little on the guy’s ear. “You’re forgetting.”

“Right,” the guy said. He finally started looking at me, as his owl flapped on his shoulder. It was a barn owl, big and tawny brown with really creepy green eyes. Really creepy. “Sorry. I just wanted to talk to you. You should go talk to the Magnus Institute. Write down what happened to you. We’re very interested.”

I said yeah, sure, of course, right on that. You know. Oh, you’re a guy, so maybe not. I got up from my chair, grabbing my laptop, but Prakaash didn’t move. He just sat where he was, staring at the owl. The owl stared back. I tried thinking at him, getting him to move, but it was like he didn’t hear me. He and the owl just seemed to be in their own world. I remember thinking that it was like he was hypnotized, but then scolding myself for stereotyping. Out of all the things. 

“Prakaash,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“This definitely makes you a bad person,” the owl said, “but you were a bad person anyway.”

“Or you can just tell me it right here. I don’t mind.” The guy leaned forward. I realized for the first time that his eyes were green. Just as green as his owl’s. “What happened to you underground, Priyanka?”

I told him. I didn’t really want to. I’m not going to tell you now. But I told him. 

It felt awful. Like it was being ripped out of me. It was like I was back there, like I was experiencing all of it over again. But if it wasn’t for - if it wasn’t for what the owl was doing, I would have thought that I was just going crazy telling this creep my life story, right? I was doing it, and it wasn’t like he was holding a gun to my head, so there must have been a reason. I think I would have felt terrible, I think I still would have had those nightmares, but I think I could have pretended that it was...normal. 

But the owl.

It flapped off the guy’s shoulder and landed on Prakaash. We weren’t exactly friends getting coffee and catching up, so it was massively uncomfortable, but it was the least weird thing about everything. I barely noticed. But then -

Then the owl -

Sorry. Hold on. Prakaash, can you - ( No ) - okay, fine. Fine. You’re not the only one having a hard time, you dick ( Whatever ). 

The owl started eating Prakaash.

At first I thought it was just pecking him. Mean, but - but normal . But then I saw him ripping off bits of fur. And skin. There was blood. He was eating him. Like a vulture on a carcass. He was eating me.

 Prakaash could have taken the owl in a second. He could have smashed him to bits. But he didn’t. He just sat there, like he was tranquilized. Like I just sat there, talking and talking. The man didn’t do anything. He just stared at me, just as weird and strange as when the owl made eye contact with me, drawing everything I never wanted to say out from my throat that would not stop talking. 

It was seven at night. The coffee shop was plenty full. The seating area was plenty full. But as that owl sat there and ate Prakaash, nobody noticed. Nobody looked up from their computers or phones or friends. Nobody helped. I keep on having nightmares where - nobody helped. 

Then it was over. 

The guy got up. The owl fluttered back up to his shoulder. Prakaash was fine, as if nothing had ever happened. They didn’t even say anything to me. 

“Are you satisfied?” The Archivist asked. 

The owl just laughed. “Are you ?” 

Then they left. Out the gate. I didn’t see them again. And then I had a lot of nightmares and my mental health’s been - anyway, anyway, anyway. 

I don’t think telling you would help. But I want this guy to experience some fucking consequences for his actions. I can’t give a police report, nobody will believe me, but you guys specialize in strange, right? You’ll believe me, right ? Can you at least fire him?

I can’t stop thinking about the feeling of a beak digging into me. Part of my brain wants to say - this is cannibalism. Someone just tried to cannibalize my daemon. Take part of my soul, my heart, and my spirit, and - eat it. 

But I know that wasn’t it at all. Whoever the Archivist of the Magnus Institute and his owl daemon are, they aren’t human at all. 

Sorry to put this on you, Mr. Blackwood. You seem nice. Just bring this up with somebody , please. Let somebody know. I haven’t bothered you telling you all of this, have I?

They put Jon in a chair. 

Jon had received a lot of interventions in his life, which was not a complimentary sentence. He knew how this went. They started off all calm and concerned, then they moved into how they felt about his actions, and how inconvenient and mean he was being to all of them, before they got around to how Jon was a terrible person and how he had to jump through a dozen flaming hoops until they would consider talking to him again. 

This was not like that. 

“Do you understand why this is the wrong thing to do.”

They put Jon in a chair and formed a semi-circle around him. Basira was standing at the front, elected spokesperson for her calm and decisive manner. Honey was perched on her arm, watching Jon warily. Melanie was to the left of her, completely unwilling to hide, visibly doing her best to reign her anger in. Angelus was anxiously gnawing on some wood from a destroyed chair. Daisy was sitting on a desk, hunched over, kneading her forehead. Cŵn was sitting under the desk, head on his paws, watching Jon with a fixed and steady gaze. 

Jon hunched in his own chair, fingers latticed around the back of his neck and staring at the floor. He didn’t look at any of them. He just looked at the floor. 

“Yes,” Jon whispered.

“You understand that this is fucking twisted, right?” Melanie demanded. Her voice was hoarse and strained, as if she was repressing her own freak-out. “ Eating him?”

“Angelus ate me,” Jon said dully. “I’m not special.”

Melanie sputtered guiltily. “He’s a beaver, he gnaws - look, I’m not excusing his behavior, but don’t turn this around on us. You said you were getting better. We thought you were getting better, like I did. But you’ve just been getting worse. You’ve been preying on people, Jon. You lied to us.”

Jon did not deny it. It was objectively correct. 

“What are we going to do about this?” Basira said. Problem oriented, task focused. She wasn’t caught up in shaming or guilting him. She just wanted to fix the problem, and the problem was Jon. “We can’t count on you to make the right decision right now. What are we supposed to do about you?”

Gran used to say that all the time. Funny. “It wasn’t my decision.”

“Fuck all of that, he lied to us!” Melanie burst out. “He’s been sitting around acting all innocent and fluffy when he’s been fucking eating other daemons! I know how hard this is, I get it, but he’s not even trying! I got better, Daisy got better, but Jon’s just wallowing like always!”

“It’s not my decision,” Jon whispered. 

“Focus, Melanie. This isn’t about our feelings. We have to make sure that Jon can’t hurt anyone else.”

“You keep saying that! You aren’t smarter because you pretend that you aren’t biased, Basira!”

“What do you mean by that, Jon?” Daisy asked, sounding impossibly exhausted, and Jon looked up at her. She was looking at him, even in the eyes. By the way the daemons shied away right now, he must seem pretty damn human. ‘Human’. “How is it not your choice?”

“The owl is making me,” Jon whispered, and everyone froze. 

They continued looking at him, but Honey fluttered down on Angelus and whispered in his ear. Cŵn’s ear twitched in Angelus’ direction, who thumped his tail. Great. 

“Do you mean Strix?” Basira asked. Daisy was biting her lip. “Strix made you do this?”

“Look, Jon, I get it,” Melanie said. She looked almost earnest, almost pleading. “Angelus told me - he said so much shitty stuff, okay? And Cŵn lied to Daisy for years. But it’s a choice. You can choose if you want to listen to them or not. And if you make the right choice, or - get back-alley surgery, I guess - then they’ll go back to normal.”

Melanie hadn’t realized that Angelus once looked different. She wasn’t as self-aware as Daisy was. She had never been as strongly affected, for as long, and she hadn’t quite teased out why she had fallen to the Slaughter in the first place. Angelus was the same as ever, to her. Just less cruel. 

“Melanie’s right,” Basira said, completely incorrectly. “You know this isn’t like Strix. He isn’t...insane. Like this. He’s just corrupted, and you have to choose not to feed into that addiction.”

Jon couldn’t help it. He barked a sharp, bitter laugh, that made Angelus lurch forward before falling back. “What’s Strix like, Basira?” 

“Not this again,” Basira muttered. 

“I know he’s not acting the same,” Melanie said heatedly, “but it’s him , and you have to accept that the awful and monstrous demon was you all along!”

“Melanie…” Angelus whispered hesitantly. 

Melanie rounded on him. “What? Are you denying it? Are you pretending you didn’t do that shit to me too?”

“I’m not,” he said, pressing up against her leg, “but Jon really believes that…”

“How is it our fault he’s delusional?”

“He’s not my daemon!” Jon yelled, clenching the fabric of his jeans so hard it felt like he was going to rip his fingernails off. “He’s not, he’s a fake!”

“We thought that you had moved on from this,” Basira said sharply. “You didn’t say that you still thought this.”

“Check mark down for lying and delusional,” Honey muttered. 

Cŵn barked loudly, the sound echoing through the empty Archives, and everyone shut up. He wriggled his way out from under the desk, stepping forward to stand next to Jon. Daisy watched him, eyes wide. 

“We think he’s telling the truth,” Cŵn said evenly. “There’s no reason for the Eye to make him delusional about his own daemon. I used to take a different shape too -”

“You felt like you took a different shape,” Angelus said urgently. 

“Same thing, Angelus! It’s the same thing! And if Jon realizes that his oxpecker is hidden inside a barn owl, then maybe he’s less delusional about what’s happening to him than we were.”

No. He had thought that Cŵn understood. That Cŵn believed him, that Daisy believed him. But he hadn’t. He had just assumed that what was happening to Jon had been what happened to him, same as Angelus and Melanie. This was nothing but a relentless game of telephone: Honey trying to explain to Angelus and Cŵn their experiences, Angelus insisting that what he had experienced was everyone’s reality, Cŵn saying the same. 

It was relentless. It was ridiculous. How could three people’s souls be in complete concert, and still miscommunicate? How can you hold someone else’s heart and still have them hurt you? 

How could they not ?

“She’s dead,” Jon moaned, and he was no longer speaking to any of them. He folded in on himself instead, hugging his chest, overcome with a terrible and grotesque pain. “No one understands, nobody sees me anymore, she’s dead!”

“What’s wrong with him?” Daisy asked urgently. She sounded foggy and far away. 

“He did this a lot right after he woke up.” Basira, distant and strange. “It’s been a while...stress, maybe?”

“Maybe he’s just gotten better at hiding it,” Melanie said. “Just like he was hiding eating people. How is he making this all about him?”

But Jon wasn’t paying attention. It didn’t matter. It felt like his world was melting around him again. Something in him yawned endlessly, deep and empty and soul-sucking. 

“It’s that fucking owl,” Jon said, maybe. His chest felt constricted, like he couldn’t breathe. “The fucking owl keeps making me. I want to kill it, I’m going to kill it -”

“Jon, please -”

“Give me her, give me her, please -”

Warm, small hands clasped around his wrists, tugging gently, and it was only then that Jon was cognizant that he was pulling at his hair. He heard Daisy’s voice, strained and worried. “Jon, take a deep breath. I know Dahlia’s real -”

“It’s Deisha!” Jon screamed, trying to pull away. “You used to know that!”

“Cŵn, make sure that Jon’s not going to hurt Strix -”

“ Stop touching me! ”

The hands released him, instantly. Jon hunched over until his forehead was on his knees, spending every moment of attention and energy on trying not to hyperventilate. He wasn’t very successful. He wanted to sob and cry. He wanted to break things, break Strix, break anyone until they admitted what only Jon knew. 

But nobody could know what an Avatar of Knowledge and Observation could know. Nobody knew the truth, except for him: that in this beautiful world where humanity knew the shape of each other’s souls, nobody could understand each other at all. 

Nobody in this world could understand how he felt. He was alone even among the other monsters. Nobody was willing to see reality for what it was except him; nobody had heard Strix drip poison into his ear but him. Everybody else lived inside these delusional little bubbles, where their daemons weren’t replaced by evil puppets of Dust and nobody they cared about would ever disappear. That life was forever and would never cease. 

How could they? The knowledge drove you mad. Jon had ravaged his own life, and Sasha had died unnoticed while he turned his head and obsessed over his own pain. Tim had been spinning in his suicidal spiral for months and Jon was too busy whining about how bad his own life was to care. Gran had died while he was taking exams . Mum and Dad were the lucky ones, got out early before Jon could ruin their lives too -

Nobody human could live life as Jon did: always aware that at any given moment, it could all be taken away. No wonder he ripped out his own heart. All Deisha had ever did was give him pain. 

As always, eventually, Jon calmed down. He rubbed at his eyes, sniffling - when had he started crying? - and rubbed the gunk out so he could open them.

The first thing he saw was that the Archives were abandoned. Humans and daemons both were gone, leaving closed laptops and shut doors behind them.

The second thing he saw was Martin.

He had drawn up a chair to sit across from Jon. He looked exhausted, in that bone-deep and persistent way that one carried around like a weight. Pell was slowly beating her wings as she perched on the far end of the table next to him, surprising Jon deeply. Had their range always been that long? It was almost as long as Georgie’s. 

Martin was kneading his forehead, elbows propped on his knees and dangling his large glasses over the floor. His suit was crumpled, and there were heavy bags under his eyes. 

It took a second before he recognized that Jon was looking at him. He looked up from his palm at Jon, finally, and Jon saw that his normally dark eyes had lightened into a kind of foggy grey. It didn’t look very good on him. 

So this was what it was like to look at Martin, in love, Jon marvelled. Like you had spent a long, hard migration flying hard over continents, and he was the soft bough where you could rest. Steady, implacable, and tired. 

“Are you done?” Martin asked. 

Jon nodded mutely, sniffling. 

“You going to start smashing your daemon against a wall?” Pell asked, doing a fantastic impression of disinterest. “Because everyone was really worried about that for some reason when they went and tracked us down.”

Jon shook his head. 

“Basira caught us up. Do you need some water or anything?”

Jon shook his head again. 

“You’re fully aware that this comes off like you were caught sticking your hand in the cookie jar and you started doing that toddler thing where you bang your head against a wall,” Pell said. 

Jon was fully aware.

“I really don’t want to be here talking to you,” Martin said, shoulders slumped and eyebags twitching exhaustion. “It’s bad for my development, I’m not in the state to be anybody’s shoulder to cry on for once in my life, and I haven’t felt a human emotion in like two weeks. I had a woman sitting in front of me bawling because you did something to her nobody should ever do. But I’m here anyway. So you have to talk to me, Jon. Nobody knows what’s upsetting you.”

His throat was dry and hoarse, and Jon had to clear it a few times before he spoke. For Martin, he would. “I’ve been telling them. It’s Deisha.”

“I don’t understand, Jon,” Martin said patiently - not an entreaty, not a protest, just a simple statement of fact. “I have no frame of reference for what is happening to you. You have to tell me if you want my help.”

“What if I tell you and you don’t believe me?” Jon whispered.

“I believe that you’re hurting,” Martin said frankly. “I believe that you’ve been falling apart for two years, and that something happened that shattered you. You told me about Deisha and I accepted that it was what was happening to you, even if it made no sense to me. I know it’s scary, but you have to trust me enough to try.”

Who had Jon ever trusted? Who, besides Martin?

“The love of my life has died,” Jon said. It wasn’t right, but it was the closest he could describe. “Everything positive and good within me has withered. It is a weight so heavy that I cannot breathe. And I’m not allowed to talk about it, or acknowledge it, because when I do everybody with the love of their lives right next to them either pretends that they know how I’m feeling or they call me a liar.”

They stared at each other. 

“My Mum died a few months ago,” Martin said. 

“What was that like?” Jon asked, curious. His Gran had once called him lucky: he would never remember losing a mother. 

Martin stared at him, blinking slowly, as if he struggled to recall. Finally, he said, “It was like I had nothing left.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” Martin said. “See, the love of my life had died too.”

They stared at each other. 

“Are you allowed to say that?” Jon said awkwardly, waving a hand. “What with the - Lonely thing or something?”

Martin shrugged. “What’s lonelier than unreciprocated feelings?”

Hm. 

Not quite true, if a monster with no soul was truly capable of feeling the same depths of emotion as thoughtful and kind Martin, but Jon had the feeling that this wasn’t the right time. 

It could wait, all of it. If Martin decided that it wasn’t worth it to love a monster, that the bird known as Jonathan Sims had died, then that was his decision. Jon would accept it, either way. 

“We’ve completely forgotten how to have a normal human conversation and I don’t think you ever knew how,” Pell said. 

And maybe that was it - that casual dig that Pell always off-handedly made and that Martin always shushed her for. The assumption that Jon, cut in half with his greatest point of contact other people’s daemons, is failing at human interaction as usual. Something snapped in place in Jon’s head, and he realized something very important for the first time. “You’re looking at me in the eyes.”

“Great, this was fun, I’ll put this in my progress report for Peter on the ‘list of things that make me feel bad’.” Martin stood up, slapping his thighs and pushing his chair back. “I’ll probably have to write a three page essay on why falling in love with you was a mistake so I can make up for you telling me about your feelings, but I’ll deal with that. He keeps on making me employee of the month and then running off to go watch Love Live anyway, it doesn’t matter. Have fun with your life.”

“Have fun with your evil plots,” Jon said politely. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

“Always fun hanging out with you, Jon.”

Martin left, almost aggressively, and Pell was forced to follow him. But she took a second to linger on his nose too, wings beating slowly and thoughtfully. For a brief, fantastical second, Jon imagined that her wings beat in time with his heart. 

But that was, of course, stupid: Jon’s heart didn’t beat. 

“Forgive him,” Pell whispered. “He’s haunted by ghosts. I’ve always tried to tell him that a pain shared is a pain halved, but he’s stopped listening to me. He’s trying to tear me out.”

“Tearing out your own heart isn’t so bad,” Jon whispered back. “It hurts less. After a while.” Pell beat his wings softly on Jon’s nose, the edges tickling his nostrils. “He’s betraying you. Putting himself above you. Choosing his pain over your life. Don’t you hate him?”

“Martin always smiled and hid away the pain. I always screamed it. He’s hated me his entire life, every second of his life, for that. It’s nothing new.” Pell paused again, thoughtful and quiet. She always had been. “You understand. When you hate yourself - when the daemon and the human hates each other - it’s a self-perpetuating loop of agony and rage. I used to describe it in my poetry as a…tornado with wind like a thousand knives, cutting and raging in anger. But if you dive into the tornado, and stand in its eye, all you really see is a still and quiet pain.”

“So he’s just causing you pain,” Jon said, depressed. 

Pell fluttered across his eyes, a light recrimination. “God gave you and I wings for a reason, Jon. It’s so we can enter that tornado, and fly upwards. When you rise high enough, and you stare at that beautiful blue sky, all you can see and feel is love. Humans can’t see it, so we feel it for them. The pain is inevitable, but the love is always stronger. It’s like the sun. Can’t you feel it, Jon?”

“Yes,” he said, in complete and magnificent wonder, “I can.”

“Great. I’ve forgotten what the sun feels like. There’s no goddamn windows at our stupid fucking desk.”

“Pell!” Martin snapped, from where he had stopped at the door. “Shut up about feelings! Let’s go, we have embezzling to do!”

“Bye, Jon,” Pell whispered, and Jon watched Pell and her human flutter away back into the awful storm. 

When Jon tried to leave the Archives, he found that Martin had locked it behind him. Definitely at the request of the girls. So he lay on the couch in his office instead, not even mustering the energy to pull up another stale and disgusting Statement. He stared at the ceiling, and partook in his new and exciting hobby of completely zoning the fuck out. It was his favored tactic for dealing with the hunger. 

Sooner than he expected - or maybe he had been zoning out for a while - his office door opened to reveal Daisy and Cŵn stepping in. They seemed unsurprised to see him on the couch, unresponsive, and Daisy went to go sit down in his chair and rifle through his Statements. She was looking for information on the Hunt, Jon knew, and as much on rituals as they could find. Basira was panicking. Cŵn flopped down at her feet, and by the way he stared at her Jon guessed that they were talking. This was not as interesting as the ceiling, so he continued staring.

Jon drifted pleasantly, thinking and feeling nothing, unable to move even if he wanted to, until he heard his desk chair roll and saw Daisy standing over him. She enjoyed standing over people lying down. She liked to feel tall. 

“Can you sit up, please?” 

If he didn’t do it Cŵn would find a way, and that would be unpleasant. He sat up, trying to remember if Daisy had ever seen him like this. It had died down after the first month, but Cŵn always seemed to know when he should lie down on Jon’s chest and nose at him, so maybe she knew more than he expected. She usually did. 

Daisy sat on the little coffee table in front of the desk, sweeping aside the takeout boxes and loose statements. She was looking at him again, just slightly not making eye contact by staring fixedly at his forehead.

Slowly, and with great deliberation, she said, “I’m sorry for trying to restrain you. It wasn’t appropriate, or right. I was worried about Strix, but that’s not an excuse. I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do,” Jon said dully, “but you won’t believe me.”

“Jon…”

“We’ve been defending you against everyone else for hours,” Cŵn said, with his characteristic lack of patience, “so don’t give us shit right now.”

“Let me guess,” Jon said, not even upset about it. “Twenty four hour watch again?”

“You are getting off light , Jon,” Cŵn said. “It’s not a punishment. If someone had done this for us when we were deep in it, I think we’d have a few less murders on our conscience.”

“It’s to protect others,” Daisy said, “but it’s to protect you too. We care about you, Jon. We don’t want you to hurt yourself. I ended up hurting you so you wouldn’t hurt yourself and - and it was a shit situation that I feel a little responsible for. ” She looked down, picking at her cuticles in a rare display of anxiety from Daisy. “You should have told me when you relapsed.”

“Of course I couldn’t,” Jon said. “Then you would have stopped me.”

In this one thing, in this trial, Jon and Daisy sat in complete understanding. Cŵn leaped up on the couch in a silent show of forgiveness, and let Jon gently tangle his hands in his fur. It was a small, strange miracle to him: that Jon had allowed the Owl to rip other daemons apart, and Cŵn still let him touch him. 

It was no surprise. Daisy had done worse to others. Jon had the sense that he and Daisy’s relationship was founded on the powerful, extraordinarily intimate groundwork of being completely terrible people in the exact same way. 

They cohabitated his office in complete silence for the last few hours of the day, Daisy utilizing her very long range with Cŵn so she could stay on the other side of the office from Cŵn and Jon. Jon had the sense that Daisy knew consciously that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and had probably done the most rational thing, but subconsciously she likely felt as if she had assaulted him terribly. Left feeling guilty and ashamed without any real understanding why, Daisy had to be torn and upset. 

For some reason, this sent another coil of shame shooting through Jon’s gut. His actions hurt others. His problems were hurting everyone around him. People who cared, for some godforsaken reason.

At five, Melanie knocked on the office door, and Jon silently gave Cŵn a final scratch before sitting up and packing away his things. They walked together out of the Archives in silence, walking next to each other as they emerged into the street in complete awkwardness. 

As they waited for a poor soul with an ibex demon to walk past, Jon decided to broach the topic first. “I shouldn’t keep staying with her.”

Melanie didn’t even glance at him, but Angelus poked his head out of his backpack. If they were out and walking around he preferred not to slowly waddle around next to her. It was adorable. 

“She already gave you her statement,” Melanie said, red curls flying away in the wind and hiding her face. “I doubt she’s had two traumatic supernatural experiences.”

“I don’t count?” Jon joked weakly. It didn’t seem to land. 

They walked in silence a little longer. It seemed as if Melanie was thinking very carefully about something, judging by the way that Angelus’ ears twitched her direction. They stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for the crossing sign to light up. 

Finally, she said, “I already told her. She...didn’t seem surprised. She said that Jon never quits as quickly as he says he does.” That sounded about right. Jon didn’t understand how someone could know Jon as well as Georgie did and still voluntarily hang out with him. Granted, she was a little under duress. “Are you going to attack her?”

“No!” Jon burst out - not out of anger, but fear. “No, I’d rather die. I’d rather starve to death, Melanie. I wouldn’t - I can’t. Not to her.”

“So it’s just to people you don’t care about, huh?” Melanie jabbed the crosswalk button. “What about Strix? Would you be unable to stop him if he tried to hurt Admiral?”

“Are you calling me psychotic?”

“I think we’re way beyond classifying your spooky evil shit as a mental disorder,” Melanie said wryly, and Jon conceded her point. 

“No,” he admitted, “the - Strix has never done anything that I didn’t let him do.”

The crosswalk turned green, and Melanie and Jon walked across the street. 

The crowds were thick, just after rush hour. Angelus watched the crowd around them with a keen eye, occasionally cuing Melanie to move aside for someone coming up behind her. Jon settled for sticking close to her. Melanie was never safe, or reliable, but Jon found odd comfort in her predictability. 

“Daisy said that our situations aren’t the same.” Melanie drifted to the side to let a woman pushing a baby carriage past. The baby had a little baby rabbit on its lap, fisting its little hands in its fur. Insufferably adorable. “That we’d be bonkers and sociopathic too if we thought our daemon had died.”

“As usual, your talent for putting things in the kindest possible way shines through.”

Melanie reached out to shove him on the shoulder, but she retracted her hand last minute. It was oddly comforting. Jon thought that she had gone back to hating him. “I feel bad for you too,” Melanie said, “but just because Angelus was never so bad that he was cannibalizing. And I was never so bad that I wanted him dead, even if I wanted him to hurt as much as I did.” 

“It’s not cannibalism if you aren’t the same species,” Jon said dully. He had said it to himself often enough that it had lost its shine. 

Melanie finally looked at him, large green eyes squinting suspiciously. “Is that what Strix is telling you? To convince you to do it? That’s fucked.” She paused, before adding awkwardly, “Angelus used to say that we should stab -”

“Are you trying to bond with me?” Jon asked incredulously. 

“I would rather immolate than be friends with you.”

“Glad to know you care.”

Angelus poked his head out of the backpack again. “She’s jealous that you and Daisy have monster solidarity and she wants in on it, but she’s convinced that there’s no way we could ever get along despite being identical people.”

Jon squinted at Angelus. “Since when are you the feelings one?”

“Since when do you actually interact with anybody but yourself?”

Jon conceded the point. Maybe that explained why he and Angelus actually got along so well - there was something about the stripping of artifice that made similar people get along instead of hating each other for the crime of having their worst traits. 

Something else occurred to Jon. “Wait, are you jealous that Angelus and I are friends and that you and I aren’t?”

That time Melanie took off her backpack and took a swing at him, and he was forced to dodge her melee based attacks all the way to the Tube station.

Less than two frustrating weeks of constant supervision and constant starvation later, Basira went to Norway. Not on a vacation or anything. It was for murder. 

Jon strongly felt as if he should go along. Little things like stopping an evil cult ritual felt like something that someone who had evil superpowers and couldn’t die should take care of. Unfortunately, Jon was the only one who shared this opinion. 

“Look,” Basira had said, “I’d feel a lot better if I had your spooky mojo there.”

“Even if you are, as a person, kind of useless,” Honey contributed from her unusually friendly and open position on Basira’s arm. 

“Thanks,” Jon said.

“But you’re like, hella unstable, and I don’t trust you in any kind of dangerous situation whatsoever. Or most situations, to be honest.”

“Thanks,” Jon said. 

“Cŵn had to stop you from smashing Strix against a desk literally yesterday,” Basira said. “I don’t have time to babysit you to make sure you don’t toss your daemon overboard. I need to check back with my contact for more information, and then I’m heading out.” Basira’s hard look softened a little. “And try to hang on there, okay? I’ll be back soon.”

“Either that or we’ll die,” Honey said helpfully. 

Apparently Basira’s contact hadn’t been very happy that Jon wasn’t going, but Basira wouldn’t budge. Jon didn’t know whether or not to interpret this as his friends (friends?) not even trusting him to go outside by himself, or if it was a heartwarming show of concern for his safety. Or the safety of his douchebag useless daemon. 

His assasination attempts would work one of these days. Jon was biding his time. 

Fortunately/unfortunately, without any live Statements Jon only ever saw the Owl while he was reading his increasingly unsatisfying paper Statements. Definitely unfortunately, Daisy now refused to leave his office while he was recording - something he had started insisting upon once the Owl had begun haunting him. So far as Jon could tell others could see him when he appeared to Jon, but he didn’t particularly feel like stretching everybody’s conceptualizations of reality. 

There was another reason, of course. But Jon couldn’t understand or place the shame, so he ignored it. It was like hunger that way.

He had begun resorting to when Daisy left for bathroom breaks or to talk to Melanie, any time he could squeeze out. More than one Statement had been recorded in the washroom. His life was growing more ignoble by the second. 

Unfortunately, the day after Basira left for Norway, Daisy spent the entire day moping on the couch in his office and refusing to move. Cŵn and Jon talked loudly about her romantic life, which made her throw a shoe at them, but otherwise Jon couldn’t get a fucking second alone. It was driving him crazy. He needed to eat , but he couldn’t eat with Daisy here , but he needed to eat -

He could say he was going to the loo. Daisy didn’t escort him there. He could say he was going to the loo, and go upstairs to the ground floor, where an HR woman sat in her office grasping tightly onto a brush with the corruption as a child - the ones when they were children were always the best ones, every time -

Jon grabbed a Statement and a tape recorder. Fuck this. He didn’t listen to that shit the Owl whispered in his ear. And it was the Owl, it was him - the thoughts weren’t in his own voice, he could feel the hot breath of the Owl in his ear, he knew what thoughts were his and what weren’t - didn’t he? Didn’t he?

“Statement of Henry Garfunkel,” Jon said angrily, as Daisy raised her head. “Recorded by who cares on a date I can’t remember. Statement fucking begins.”

It took only seconds for the Owl to settle in on the tape recorder, same as always. But it was the first time that Daisy and Cŵn had been in the room when it happened, and Jon carefully watched their reactions out of the corner of his eye. Daisy didn’t really react, but Cŵn’s ears perked up and he raised his head to stare fixedly at the Owl. 

When Jon finished up the Statement - unsatisfying, unsatisfying, stale, prechewed, like a mother bird regurgitating her food to her children, they expected him to live off this - Cŵn jumped off the couch and trotted over, carefully raising his paws to rest on the edge of the desk and sniff at the Owl in greeting. 

The Owl turned its head away, a pointed snub. Cŵn woofed in frustration. 

“Daisy, Cŵn, I’d like to introduce you two to the bane of my life, this fucking owl,” Jon said dryly, propping his cheek on his chin. When Daisy rose from the couch, eyebrows raised, Jon waved a hand. “Yes, this is the first time you’ve met him, just trust me on this.”

“Charmed,” the Owl said frostily. So he had no interest in Jon’s friends. Did he have interest in anybody else? “This is twelve days without a proper meal, Jon. We’re starving.”

“He’s beautiful,” Daisy breathed, and Jon started in his chair. He hadn’t noticed her walking up. But she was bent over slightly, hands on her knees. “He looks just like you, Jon.”

“Hard to believe you’re a monster,” Cŵn said gruffly. He bared his teeth at the Owl, who just turned away dismissively. “You’re nothing like I remember you.”

“I don’t remember him as very much at all,” Daisy said thoughtfully. She tilted her head at the Owl, making wide-eyed direct eye contact. Great. Nice to know who she thought of as the human in this relationship. “It’s weird to see you two interacting. Most of the time I just forget he’s there…”

“Wonder why,” Jon snarked. 

“Goodness,” the Owl said, “are all of your captors this dim?”

Cŵn snapped his teeth at the Owl as Daisy rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, Jon,” she said, “he sure acts like you.”

“My daemon is kind ,” Jon snapped. “She’s emotional and anxious and neurotic and sweet and funny and loving! She’s nothing like this - like this -”

“What makes you think I don’t love you, Jon?” The Owl said, startling Jon into silence. It bobbed its head slightly, almost curiously. “Every daemon loves their human.”

“You’re not my fucking daemon,” Jon hissed harshly, startling Cŵn down from the desk. Daisy stepped forward, hand already raised cautiously, and Cŵn carefully moved to push up against Jon’s chair. “You’re an evil, demonic fake, and I will wring you out of me if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Your tenth level best friend was right. You should see a shrink.” The Owl ruffled its feathers, ignoring Daisy and Cŵn entirely to stare up at Jon. “You really aren’t going to Norway with Basira.”

“Yes?” Jon asked, too confused to remember to be hostile. “Since when do you give a shit about anything I do?”

But the Owl just clacked his beak consideringly, shaking his facial feathers. “Well,” it said finally, “to be frank, I’m not attached to one outcome or another. Let’s watch this play out.”

“You are so fucking predictable ,” Jon snarled, and reached forward to grab him and break his little neck. 

That was when Cŵn pushed Jon’s chair, making Jon sprawl out into the ground, and by the time that he dragged himself back up the Owl had disappeared into nothing. 

And Jon was left unsatisfied: unsatisfied with how Cŵn jumped into his lap, licking his face, wanting Deisha instead. Unsatisfied that the Owl wasn’t dead, hadn’t dissolved into nothing so Deisha could return to him - and no matter what Daisy said, that thing was not Deisha in a different form. Unsatisfied even with his sleep, plagued always by nightmares and horror. 

Hungry, unsatisfied, with a meal that was little more than a smell of something delicious on the wind. 

Like a child, Jon thought wryly. Hungry, tired, wanting his daemon to cuddle. The base instincts of man, the first emotions a baby ever showed. 

Maybe nothing else was important. Maybe that’s why Jon was always hungry, always exhausted, always lonely. Maybe there was nothing else worth needing, and once those base instincts were ripped away then that was the death of humanity.

Well. There was one other thing Jon needed. But he was a little busy. 

To make his bad day worse, Jon got stabbed on the way home. 

With a knife.

By some idiot asshole in a suspicious cloak. 

As Jon stared down at the idiot cultist - Ervin Jackovski and a slightly flayed Edvard, and long history of his allegiance to the Darkness, and his recent encounter with some insistent spiders - he decided not to tell anybody about this. Despite the stab wound, he felt wonderfully full for the first time in far too long, and seeing as this was the most morally innocent Statement he had stolen in a while he didn’t feel like getting harassed about it. Georgie would give him a hard time about the rip in his shirt, but he could pretend that Strix had clawed through it. It wasn’t as if there was any blood, or a wound. 

Just a scar. Long, thin, and narrow. 

It probably didn’t mean anything. 

Probably. 

With Basira gone, Jon’s strict supervision relaxed somewhat. Not necessarily because Basira was forcing the others to do it, but more because Daisy and Melanie were much less conscientious than she was. Jon had the impression that Basira saw herself as holding this group together by her teeth. 

As a result, after a few Statements where Jon and the Owl had silently agreed to be on their absolute best behavior towards each other, Jon was given a freer range around the Archives. Not in the rest of the Institute or outside the building - but in abandoned, empty libraries, and in soft and quiet breakrooms, there was nobody for Jon to hurt but himself. 

It was morally objectionable to do anything that the Owl agreed with, but compromises were necessary in life. Their conversations even got somewhat civil. 

Their main point of contention was the fact that they were both slowly starving to death, and that Jon refused to do anything about it. If Jon thought about it from the Owl’s - if it was Deisha here, then she would also be frustrated at him. But she wasn’t here, and Jon was hopeful that if he went down then he’d take the Owl with him, so there was a bright side to it. 

It wasn’t as if Jon didn’t try. Sometimes. Just sometimes, when he knew Daisy was there to stop him. But sometimes he just needed it so much -

Jon was prowling the library today, and had been for the past three days. He was deep in the stacks, much further than almost anybody but Jon and Basira ever went. This far into the library, surrounded by wire racks holding an endless row of cardboard boxes stretching back decades, Jon could almost feel a pressure on his chest. It was like he was being squeezed, consumed by what loves him. 

He meant to do research. It was why he went down, so he could find anything about the Beholding’s ritual. But instead he would find himself pulling out a box and picking a Statement at random, consuming it ravenously yet absently before he reached for the next one. 

Sometimes the Owl would flap into the stacks and come back with a stack of paper in his claws. After this many Statements in a row, he tended to just hang around. Jon couldn’t work up the energy or the time to complain about his presence. It had started to become oddly comforting. Better the evil was seen than invisible. 

And when Jon sat alone in these dim stacks, nobody around and nobody within shouting distance, completely abandoned and isolated and alone...something terrible was better than nothing, sometimes. Anything was better than nothing. 

Humans weren’t meant to live like this. It was probably a good thing that Jon wasn’t human.

“Another cult one. Would have been nice to read before I joined a cult, but useless.” Jon tossed it aside, grabbing the next Statement out of midair. “Is this Flesh? It smells fleshy.”

“You’re getting a good sense for them.” The Owl fluttered in midair before landing on an empty rack, tilting his head at Jon as he flipped open the manila envelope and randomly put his hand on the floor next to him. There was a recorder there. Obviously. “You aren’t even checking to see if they record normally.”

“Don’t be daft. I can tell the difference between painted styrofoam and food.” Jon clicked the recorder on, not even waiting for Deisha anymore, as he scanned the page. As he thought. “And it’s not as if you’d give me a bogus one.”

The Owl tilted his head in amusement. “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

“The Beholding does not suffer untruths,” Jon said dismissively, clearing his throat to read out the Statement, before he found himself faltering. He looked up. “You are the Beholding, aren’t you?”

The Owl clicked its beak, almost in laughter. “Are you?”

“Of course not. I’m its...conduit. It feeds through me.”  Jon faltered. “Right?”

“As usual, you’re half right. I applaud you for your consistency, Jon.” At Jon’s unimpressed stare, the Owl laughed. “Oh, please. You know that about yourself. It’s not good or bad, it just is. It makes you easy to manipulate. You’re remarkably easy to influence, Jon. Wind up your key and watch you go.”

“Nobody’s here this time,” Join pointed out dully. “I can kill you if I want.” But then Jon paused, taking a second to actually work through the Owl’s words. Jon had the impression that he had to tell the truth, or at least tell it slant - but he insulted and prodded so often that Jon was rarely calm enough to think about what he said. “I don’t think you’re just the Beholding. You’re...more than that. More sentient. There’s another part of you…”

“True,” the Owl admitted easily. “I suppose I’m as much of the Beholding as you are.”

“You’re its conduit?”

“If you were nothing more than its conduit, then what’s the point of keeping you you ?” The Owl was almost being patient, even as Jon pulled a face. He wasn’t ‘himself’, he was ripped in half. “Humans have a mistaken concept of self. Just because their daemons toddle along unintelligently beside them, they assume that there is a real ‘them’. That the self does not change, and is immutable.” The Owl ruffled its feathers. “It’s nonsensical, of course. People are nothing more than a meaningless amalgamation of experiences, people, genetics, form, environment, and connections. There is nothing unchangeable or inherent about you - not even your daemons. As you’ve learned by now.”

“You’re venturing into theoretical philosophy territory,” Jon said flatly. “That’s hardly in theme with your ‘objective truth’.”

“But it’s in theme with you, isn’t it? Frankly, your society deify daemons far too much. What do you keep calling it, your ‘soul’?” The Owl clacked its beak in annoyance. “Nonsense. Dust is produced by humans during acts of creation. The process of pregnancy and the act of birth produces an intensely high quantity of Dust, which is innately shaped by the newborn into an animal form. Scientists theorize that the animal form is evolutionary, intended to protect against predators. You exist symbiotically, your daemon’s personality evolving to compensate for the human’s and vice versa. Georgie doesn’t have to be rude; Admiral does it for her. Honey doesn’t have to feel emotions, Basira does it for her. Martin doesn’t have to ever show rage against a world that has never loved him  - he just funnels all of that anger into Pell. Souls. Good lord.” The Owl chittered a little, flexing its wings. “I blame religion. Ruined all of you.”

Jon stared at him. 

“You’re me,” Jon said. “Even if you weren’t at first. You’re me.”

The Owl’s pure, shining green eyes stared at him, head tilted, as if trying to make sense of him. He didn’t need to. He was just pretending. The Owl understood him, in every way there was to be understood. 

He just didn’t love him.

“Yes,” the Owl finally said. “I am you. I am the Beholding. I am myself. Do you see now?”

“I’m the Archivist,” Jon breathed. “I’m the Beholding. I’m Jonathan Sims.”

The Owl laughed. “Not me?”

“No,” Jon said, “never you.”

They stopped talking after that, Jon returning to his Statements, to his endless and ravenous hunger. Never full, never satiated, nothing ever enough.

Did the Owl feel this? He never seemed desperate, starving, in pain. Just impatient. What part of himself was the Owl? 

Humans and daemons were one. A person was two. Jon plus Deisha were themselves. Who was Jon plus the Owl? Did he want to find out? 

The Beholding was part of Jonathan Sims. Maybe as much as Deisha had been. Beholding plus Jon made the Archivist? Jon plus the Archivist equals Beholding? Jon minus Beholding equals Deisha? Who was Jon, independent of all of this - Jon, before he took this ridiculous and awful job? It made Jon’s head hurt. 

Who was Jon, before Mr. Spider - Jon, before a small part of himself had died and never recovered? That was before Deisha had even settled. She had turned into the largest animal possible for her, teeth gripping at his shirt, trying to hold him back, stopping him from walking through that door. But she couldn’t hold him back. 

Out of desperation, she had antagonized the bully. Clever, smart, and quick, Deisha had dared the bully to come fight Jon, and him stealing the book had snapped Jon out of it. No, not when he stole it - when he started reading from it, when the curse was passed onto another. Deisha had saved his life, back then. 

She had never been quite right after that. Jon, with the malleability of children, had moved on quickly and basically forgotten about it. Even if he had spent a solid month reading about nothing but spiders. And the month after that reading about aliens and ghosts, supernatural phenomena, out of body experiences. Drove Gran crazy. But Jon had always wanted to know. He had always been convinced that reading out his picture books to Deisha would make her calm down from her bouts of neuroses. It never really did. 

Deisha had started upsetting herself more often, turning into bigger animals and throwing little tantrums. She had started breaking things. Jon read a book ten years later about it. Common trauma response in children. They feel the pain in their hearts even as their minds couldn’t process it. Jon had the sense that the Owl would say that Jon’s brain wasn’t developed enough to rationally process trauma or death, so his confused and terrified feelings were sublimated into Deisha.

 Jon, who always stuffed himself with information and knowledge to give him some measure of control because he couldn’t control what happened to them. Deisha, overcome by fear and trauma, because she couldn’t control what happened to them and it terrified her. 

The Beholding was part of Jonathan Sims…

Jon finished reading the Statement, mindlessly tossing the cassette on the ground. Unimportant. He just had to find something here that was important, something that would help. But every statement that the Owl brought, or every one that caught Jon’s eye, was useless for anything but stale and gummy food.

The Beholding was part of Jonathan Sims…

“Jon? What are you looking for? There’s no Statements back there.”

“Just exploring,” Jon said vaguely. He peered into every box, finding a lot of ancient junk and a strange amount of personal items. One box was entirely full of moth-eaten scarves, with a label in faded Sharpie reading ‘MICHAEL’S - DO NOT TOUCH!’. Another box, covered in cobwebs (“Er, will you...” “Good christ, Jon”), held several notebooks full of strangely scientific observations of another subject. Many were empty. 

The Owl, who had been fluttering from rack to rack and watching Jon carefully with his glowing pure green eyes this whole time, dropped down to perch in front of a battered box. “No, go ahead, have fun toddling around exploring while we’re starving to death. Take your time.”

There was nothing in this area. Nothing important, or interesting, or meaningful. Bogus statements, detritus, trash, memorabilia of people either long dead or long forgotten. Jon was convinced that looking through this area was a waste of time. 

The cardboard box behind the Owl was battered and creased. 

Jon stepped forward, and he calmly picked up the Owl and tossed it aside. He caught himself in midair, elongating and stretching itself angrily, as Jon pulled out the box. There was only one cassette in it, battered and dusty. 

“You’re going to regret looking at that,” the Owl said. He didn’t sound angry, but he never really showed any emotion other than contempt. “The information on that cassette is too terrible to know. It’ll ruin everything in your life. I’m trying to protect you, Jon.”

“Deisha protected me,” Jon said. “You - I’m going to fuck you over.”

It was there, in those dusty and dim stacks, that Jon sat down and listened to the final cassette. To the conversation between Gertrude and a lonely puffin. 

Dedico compared it to a flower pressing. If you made a page out of the skin of the victim, you could keep their soul within the book. In the final moment that a human brain flatlined, when the daemon dissolved into nothing, you could capture the Dust inside the page of the book. A permanent imprint, dried and preserved, forming a beautiful flower forever in bloom. 

Jon was familiar. Ami had explained the process. She had admitted that it hurt, very much. Always. She missed Gerry, with every atom of her existence. She was glad he wasn’t there. Ami had been so kind and gentle, so intelligent, that Jon couldn’t bear to burn her. 

He was regretting that now. Dedico was calm, coherent, and almost normal. But Jon’s heart panged with sympathetic loss and devastation. How terrible, to live so far apart from your human. Like crying out into an empty void, never answered. Without a hand to hold you to their chest or a careful match of their heartbeat to yours. 

“Stop bullshitting us,” Belua snapped. Jon startled - Belua only ever spoke in the recordings when Gertrude was alone, and according to people who knew her in life he had never spoken, period. Just a cute little octopus in a little wheeled tank that Gertrude always dragged after her. After a certain point in the recordings - Jon guessed when Gertrude realized a very evil thing was listening in - he had stopped speaking there, too. Jon had only heard his voice a few times, barely recognizable. “How did you do it?”

“You’ve always been so interesting, Belua,” Dedico said, almost amused. “You know that’s the first time I’ve seen your blue rings? It’s not intimidating. You don’t make it so long with an anaconda for a partner if you’re afraid of dangerous animals.”

“A predictable answer,” Belua said, “from a bird with a disappearing habitat.”

“Bell,” Gertrude said, and Belua quieted. “Dedico. We’ve let you give your Statement, and let you speak. Tell us how you did it.”

“Well, normally I’d show you,” Dedico said, with a faint note of wry amusement in his voice, “but it seems as if this book froze me at a more dignified time in my life. It’s quite easy, Gertrude. Anyone can do it. Eric had some kitchen shears in a locked cabinet. Keep the sharp things away from the baby, you know.” Eric laughed lowly. “Not that those two were ever afraid. Little Ami likes to play with Cul, letting him wind around her so she could nibble at his tail. I always yelled at Cul, said it was too dangerous, but he just said I was being a bore…”

“What did Eric do with the kitchen shears, Dedico.”

“Sorry. I’ve never been good at focusing. You know that.” A faint pause, nothing but the sound of the tape running. “Anybody can quit, Gertrude. You just have to permanently maim your daemon.”

Silence. 

“Well,” Belua said wryly, “that would be a little difficult for us.”

“Yes, the irony is magnificent.” Dedico chittered a little. “Eric sheared off a wing. Hurt quite a bit. Felt good afterwards, though. Our solution was bird specific, but for many mammals l I suspect blinding would be most effective. But it has to be permanent. And it has to mean something - if the limb’s vestigial, then it doesn’t work. If you’re talking a dog, blinding won’t work. You get the idea.”

Another long period of silence. 

“Thank you, Dedico,” Gertrude said finally. “I’ll reunite you with Eric now. Your information was valuable.”

“If useless for us,” Belua said. “Oh, well. Never thought we’d get off that easy.”

“Happy to help, guys,” Dedico said, before pausing a beat. “Belua. Can you tell Ami…tell her that she’ll return to God, alright? In Heaven, daemon and human become one, and become close to God. I’ll be reunited with Eric, and one day they will be reunited with us. Tell her that she shouldn’t be afraid of it.” He paused again. “I’ll speak for Eric. Tell Gerry that we love him very, very, very, very much. That’s it.”

“Understood,” Gertrude said, and the tape clicked to an end.

Jon came sharply back to himself, slamming back to his body. For those fifteen minutes Jon had been there, feeling the exquisite and incredible pain of a daemon abandoned, forgetting where and when he was. He was sitting cross legged on the floor of a dark, dim procession of library stacks, surrounded by nothing but dirt and dust, and accompanied by nobody else but an Owl with shining green eyes that pierced the night. 

Jon couldn’t help it: he laughed, sharp and insane, and could not stop laughing. He laughed and laughed and laughed, hysterical with the insanity and the irony.

He dropped off the cassette at the Archives, sticking around only long enough to sit in a circle with everybody else and listen to the tape. The damned Owl hadn’t left either, too amused by the Greek tragedy unfolding. Jon sat in a hard-backed wooden chair, with the Owl on his shoulder, distantly aware of the tape running as he focused on the people around him. 

He saw it in everybody, when Dedico told them the truth. Daisy’s arms tightened around Cŵn from where they were both sitting on the floor. Honey buzzed sharply and loudly, flying into Basira’s palm, and Basira closed her hands tight around her. Angelus, held against Melanie’s chest, simply stilled. Melanie’s expression didn’t change. 

The tape ran out, and everyone sat there in silence. Of course, there was another tape - Jon’s conversation with the Owl, and Jon’s breakdown afterwards - but he kept that in his pocket. Some things were only for the Beholding’s ears. 

Everybody glanced around at each other. Maybe they were waiting for the others to speak first: to have someone say firmly and bravely that there was no way they were doing that. To say that there was no other choice. It was a terrible decision, and it would be a terrible thing to have to make it for yourself. 

So, of course, the damn Owl felt the need to cheerfully speak up. “If you all hold concerns regarding the tape’s authenticity, I can personally verify. So who’s first in line? Basira, you want to make the logical decision and tear a wing off Honey?”

Basira immediately held her cupped hand closer to her heart, glaring at the Owl. “Don’t be ridiculous. There has to be another way.”

“After searching so hard to find an out, there’s no reason not to take this one,” the Owl said. Jon, and maybe only Jon, recognized that it was teasing - or needling. “It’s all pros and one con, in my book. You get to reduce harm, free yourself of your inevitable descent into monsterhood, and cripple the Eye at its figurative kneecaps. That’s quite a bargain for one little rip and tear.”

Basira’s hand was cupped over her heart, now, letting Honey dive into her shirt and rest over her heat. “One little rip and tear is cutting out my own eyes. This isn’t equivalent and you know it.”

“Are you sure? It’s nothing in comparison to you slowly starving me to death.” The Owl’s voice was truly poison now, and Jon was startled to hear it. Cŵn’s eyes widened. “Rules for thee but not for me, hm?”

“Jon, if you don’t shut that thing up I’ll do it for you,” Angelus said. Melanie clutched him tighter to her chest as he tried to wriggle free.

“Trust me, I would love to.” Jon propped his elbow on his knee, rubbing his forehead tiredly. Jesus, what he wouldn’t give for a restful sleep. What he wouldn’t sacrifice for a dreamless night. “It’s all hypothetical in my situation, anyway. You heard Gertrude and Dedico. I couldn’t quit even if I wanted to - and I do want to.”

“Why not?” Daisy asked quietly. Her hands dug into Cŵn’s fur, and Jon knew that she wouldn’t do it. There was no reason for her to. “You hate Strix.”

But Jon just shook his head. “That’s why. It has to be a sacrifice .” Jon flicked the Owl on the ear, making him shake his head irritably. “Killing this thing would be a party. Gertrude couldn’t maim Bel is any way that he couldn’t grow back. Once you’ve come as far as I have, there’s no true going back.” Jon shakily exhaled in and out, useless but comforting. “I have to break the news to someone else. You all...let me know what you decide. If you...want to...and you can’t do it yourself...I’ll help. Sorry. Um...I’ll be back. Obviously.”

When Jon left the Archives, he silently shut the door behind him. He expected the Owl to stay, to disappear into the strange and foreign world where even Jon could not see, but instead he rocked with Jon’s movement and stayed clamped onto his shoulder. Wildly and irrationally, Jon wondered if he was going to have to buy one of those jackets with reinforced shoulders for those with birds of prey daemons. His shirts were rapidly filling with holes. If it wasn’t for the fact that his flesh was demonic Play-Dough: With Real Blood!, it would probably be quite painful. 

“I don’t want to have this conversation with you looking over my shoulder,” Jon said. “ Literally .”

The Owl clicked its beak in amusement. “You don’t like my MST3K commentary?”

Jon half-heartedly tried to punch the bird in the face, barely even trying anymore. The Owl didn’t even fly off, just twisting its head unnaturally to dodge. “Hearing you make nerdy jokes is like a fast food social media account tweeting memes.”

“What are you going to tell Pellio?” The Owl asked, as Jon lethargically stepped into the elevator and jammed the button for the top floor. In a flat deadpan, it said, “ ‘Have Martin rip off your wing and run away with me, Pellio. Let’s elope into the sunset. We can live our cottage core honeymoon in a lighthouse and I can finally write that bestselling history nonfiction novel about the Salem witch trials.’ ”

“They were very fascinating and - and no. Of course not. I’m stuck here, with you.” The lift dinged and the doors slid open on the first story. There was a group of employees with their lunches in their hands waiting in front of the lift. They all stared at him. None of them got in. Jon jammed the ‘close door’ button, and the lift started rising again. “But I want him to get out. I know Martin. I don’t want him to - to wait around for me, to make sure I’m alright. He needs to save himself. It’s either maim Pell or lose him forever. It’s not even a choice.”

“You never think anything’s a choice,” the Owl said amusedly, as the lift rose and rose and rose in a faint whirring of gears. In the space of a turn of a gear Jon understood exactly how a lift operated, and found the information useless. “You’d much prefer it if you were dragged from one situation to another, and nothing you did was ever your fault. You had no choice but to gaslight those victims, you were just protecting yourself from that big mean scary eye. You had no choice but to stalk Tim and Martin, you were just protecting yourself from that big, mean, scary Barbie doll. You had no choice but to stupidly maim yourself and get kidnapped, to saunter vaguely downwards into hell, to let Tim kill himself. You had number one and two to look out for. Until you decided that only number one was important after all.”

“I can make you stop talking,” Jon said quietly, and he only realized it as he said it. He only realized it was true when the Owl abruptly shut up, ruffling its feathers. 

The lift doors dinged open onto the third story, expunging Jon into the reception area towards Elias’ office, and directly in the line of sight of Martin, the very picture of the tired assistant. 

He didn’t seem surprised to see Jon. Pell was far away from him again, resting on a Dolly Parton calendar on the back wall of his little area. Martin just looked tired, pausing from where he was rattling away on a cheap keyboard. His desk was occupied by stacks of paper, important looks forms held together with manila folders and crooked staples. Not bad for the secondary school dropout. 

Unfortunately, and as usual, the Owl was right. As Jon burst from the library into the Archives, as he stalked his way up to the highest storey of the Institute, he was filling his head with romantic speeches. Let’s run away, let’s finally be together, let’s leave this awful place and our awful lives. Leave your mother behind, I’ll leave my grandmother; let’s both leave our isolated childhoods at the door. This pain, this fear, this trauma - none of it is real, none of it is important. We do not have to carry it with us. Freedom is possible, for you and me. Please. Please. Please.

All we need is each other. All you need is me and Pell; all I need is you and Pell and...

There, the fantasy fell apart. When Jon felt the Owl’s claws dig into his shoulder, everything crumbled. Jon would kill the Owl a hundred times, but it would never change a thing. 

Like Macbeth, almost. Crying ‘Out, damned spot!’ as he plucked away his daemon’s feathers. Jon had never liked Macbeth. He blamed it for the stereotypes of bird daemons - between Macbeth, Hannibal, and the mythological Witches, other teenagers would tease Jon about when Deisha was going to pluck out their eyes. Typical non-mammalian prejudice. Jon once read a study that -

“Jon,” Martin said, exhausted to the bone, “you really can’t be here.”

“ - that people without mammalian daemons were less likely to be hired against equally qualified applicants with mammalian daemons, and were less represented in political or sales positions,” Jon said suddenly. “Martin, hello! How are you! I’m doing fine, thanks for asking!”

“You really showed them,” the Owl said dryly. “Growing up to become a cannibal, really fight those stereotypes.”

“When did you become so awkward ,” Pell groused, fluttering away from the wall to linger on the arm of the couch close to Jon. Very far away from Martin - how far had their range -

“Since I fell in love with you,” Jon said, before he could think better of it, before he could think of the million reasons not to say it. 

Pell froze. Martin made an unholy sound.

But this wasn’t about Martin. Jon couldn’t say this to Martin - who was so polite he was inscrutable, who was so cold that it could only mask a lifetime of bitterness. Martin, who fretted and gave and took care of everyone. Who had brief, explosive moments of complete honesty roughly once every six months before bottling it all back up again. Shoving every bad or mean little thought into Pell, and then hating Pell for it. 

Some things were between daemon and daemon. Jon’s last vestige of humanity, the only human emotion he had left - who else could he give it to?

He held out his cupped hands, and Pell fluttered up to rest in their center. She didn’t say anything, but vibrated with intense confusion. 

“You don’t understand,” Jon rushed out. He was afraid that if he stopped, or halted, or slowed down, he would lose all courage. Jon had so little courage. “I never understood any of it. The way I wanted you close to me, or the way I missed you when you were gone. For me, for people like me - it’s so hard to understand , the weird and desperate ways I wanted you here. But you were gone, and - and I just wanted, and wanted, and wanted.”

“Jon, what -”

“I thought I couldn’t ,” Jon burst out. “It was Deisha that wanted, and loved, and hoped. All of the good in us was within her. But you kept on making me feel this way, and I couldn’t stop , and it hurt so much…”

“Did something happen?” Somewhere along the way, Martin had stood up, and was standing on the other end of his desk. Confused, lost - faced with an emotion he no longer understood. Just like Jon, in the end. “Jon, what’s -”

“You can leave!” Jon said, and both Martin and Pell froze. For the first time he turned to look at Martin, desperately wishing to hold Pell close to his heart the way Basira could hold Honey. “There’s a way to do it, I just found it - I can show you the tape if you want - it’s awful, but it’s possible . You know how to do difficult things, Martin, I know you can do it. All you have to do is -”

“Maim Pell,” the Owl said, and Jon startled so severely that his hand jerked. Pell flew out of his hands, escaping back to rest on Martin’s head. The sight was so familiar, Martin looking like Martin again, that Jon wanted to die all over again. “Probably tear off a wing.”

“What,” Martin said slowly, “the fuck .”

“I can’t come with you,” Jon said. 

“He has no daemon he loves enough to hurt,” the Owl said. 

“But you can ,” Jon said. “If you just leave me behind, you can be free of this place.”

“And you’d be free of us,” the Owl said. “Which is a bonus, I think.”

“Free of Peter Lukas,” Jon drove in. “Free of this pain. You can leave , go do - whatever it is you always wanted to do -”

“Beekeeping,” the Owl said helpfully. 

“Beekeeping!”

“Jon, Strix,” Martin said, “ please be quiet.”

Jon and the Owl quieted. Martin sagged against his desk, rubbing his forehead, obviously thinking desperately. He opened his mouth a few times, before closing it. Pell flapped insistently against Martin’s head - always a sign that the two were silently talking. 

Abruptly, Jon was slightly aware that he had potentially broken that news in a very confusing and inappropriate way. To be fair, he had never dramatically confessed love for anyone before - Georgie had said it first, and it had been easy to say it back to her. He had definitely never confessed love to anybody in context of telling them to mutilate themselves, and then maybe go keep bees. Had he handled that badly? 

Shit. You only got to tell someone that you loved them and that they should mutilate themselves once, and Jon had blown it. 

“You have not been sleeping enough,” the Owl whispered to him. Jon pinched him. 

Finally, after an agonizingly long silence that left Jon’s mind spinning in horrendous anxiety, Martin spoke. “You have chosen,” Martin said slowly and carefully, as if he was choosing his words precisely, “the worst possible time to do this.”

“In my defense,” Jon said, “there is really no good time.”

“You have no idea what -” Martin cut himself off abruptly, almost strangled. When he spoke again, Jon realized that his voice was strangled because he was close to tears. “I was wrong. I thought the worst thing would be you never feeling that way back. I was wrong, Pell. It’s even worse if...if I can’t…”

Ah. So Jon had made things worse. Again. What a fantastically useless talent. 

Martin stood there in silence, too choked with emotion to say anything. Jon had never seen Martin this overcome by anything. He never broke, never faltered. It was disturbing and distressing to see now. Had Jon did this? Jon had been breaking down for the past two years, and maybe hearing that tape had snapped him - 

“What is wrong with you!” Pell burst out, and Jon jerked back. 

“Great,” the Owl said, giving off the perfect impression of rolling his eyes. “Here’s Pell’s little temper tantrums again -”

“No! You are such a self-sacrificial little - do you have any idea what you’re proposing? What you want us to do? This isn’t a victory , Jon, this is the worst case scenario!”

“It’s not that bad,” Jon cried desperately. “You get used to it, after a while. It’s - I’m not saying it’s not a sacrifice, but you can live with it -”

“That’s easy for you to say, Jon! You already sacrificed your daemon! How would you know what it feels to tear yourself apart!”

Jon reeled back. It would have hurt less if Martin had punched him. The Owl laughed, a horrible cackling sound, obscene and ringing. Truly animalistic, yet human in its cruelty. 

“Pell!” Martin sweeped Pell off his head angrily. “That’s just too -”

“No! You’re thinking it, aren’t you? Say what you’re fucking thinking, you arse!” But Pell’s voice was choked too - in just as much pain as Martin. As Jon. “Jon can’t stop indulging that stupid little matyr complex because he just doesn’t get that his actions affect other people ! Wow, just like someone I can name!”

“Oh, fuck you -”

“Jon rips himself apart for fun! All he does is tear himself in smaller and smaller pieces, because he just can’t fucking bear to hurt this badly. At least if you hurt yourself, you have someone to blame. If you blame yourself, it’s easier than just acknowledging that life sucks . You two are pretty good company, you know that?” 

“I hate you,” Martin hissed, close to tears. The Owl laughed harder, and Jon’s heart broke a little bit more. “I’ve always fucking hated you and you’re a resentful little shit about it.”

“There you have it, Jon. There’s your answer. Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.” Pell kept flapping in the air, not moving closer to Jon or Martin - in the strangest act of all, completely alone. “Someone who hates himself this much can’t spare any love for anyone else.”

“I’m going to fix this,” Martin whispered furiously. He wasn’t paying any attention to Jon at all. Superfluous. “I’m going to fix this for them, and not even you are going to get in my way.”

“Them? Last time I checked, half of them likes it this way.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon said, and both halves of Martin froze. They had forgotten he was here. “I’m sorry for making things worse. I’m going to - I’ll go. Sorry. Thanks. I do love you. Sorry for...saying that, I guess.”

Jon turned on his heel and climbed down the stairs. The Owl fluttered off his shoulder, drifting slowly down to the bottom of the stairwell, and perched on a railing until Jon reached him and he hopped back on his shoulder. 

He didn’t disappear. Jon didn’t expect him to. 

Jon exited through a back exit, unwilling to encounter colleagues who gave him stranger looks when he had a daemon than when he didn’t. There was something cruel and off putting about the Owl, which was mildly validating to Jon. 

He didn’t want to think about the picture they made together. The strangely tall and unnaturally thin scarecrow that loomed and lurched. The imposing barn owl, perched on his shoulder, stretching out his wings like an avenging predator. Maybe when they were apart neither of them strictly looked like monsters - but together, there was no mistaking it. 

He always used that exit when he wanted to smoke. Melanie would join him, and they would stand there in awkward silence as both of their daemons politely ignored each other. So it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when he found her there now, sitting on the filthy concrete leaning against a chain link face. She had a particular expression on her face, one that Jon knew very well: someone who was so overwhelmed with something too terrible to name, that they couldn’t bear to think about anything at all. 

It was only Angelus who acknowledged him. He was sitting in Melanie’s lap, as she robotically stroked his fur. 

“Jon. You aren’t going off to do anything rash, are you?”

He forgot about the house arrest. “Are you going to stop me?”

Angelus quieted as Strix cocked his head curiously. “Nah. We got other problems.” He paused for a long time, still and silent. Melanie seemed a little checked out, just petting and petting. Finally, after so long that Jon was about to walk off, he said. “We’re doing it.”

Jon stared at him. 

“He convinced me,” Melanie said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had just finished a very long crying jag. Judging by her red eyes, she had. “I kept on saying no, no, no - but he’s kind of smarter than me these days, you know?”

“You’re the one who has to do it,” Angelus said quietly, “but I’m the one who has to live with it. Respect that. I know how I want to live the rest of my life. I know the kind of life I want us to live. And this...this isn’t it. We want to be a kind of person who - and we can’t be that person here.”

“It’s hard to be a good person in the Magnus Institute,” the Owl said, amused. “Isn’t it?”

“I can do it for you,” Jon said. “I’m not very squeamish these days.”

“Sorry,” Angelus said, “but I’ve kind of had enough of you maiming me for a lifetime.”

Jon shrugged. It was fair. It would only work if Melanie did it, anyway. “I’ll see you at home, Melanie. Sleep on it, okay?”

“We will,” Angelus said. 

“Stay safe, Jon,” Melanie said, “okay?”

Jon and the Owl glanced at each other. Fat chance of that. 

But Jon promised anyway, and he left Melanie and Angelus alone in the dirty and smoky alley behind the Magnus Institute. But it was hard to feel as if he was leaving them behind. They’d be leaving him alone in that basement soon enough. 

He was happy for them. He really, really was. 

“Liar,” the Owl hooted, and Jon didn’t correct him. 

Jon didn’t remember making the decision. He only remembered having made it. 

He wandered through the London streets in a haze, barely cognizant of where he was going or why he was walking. He found himself wandering down into the tube, slumping in a seat and staring listlessly ahead. There were four meals in this car alone, but Jon had better things to do than eat tonight. 

Meals? Lord, you’ve grown morbid. 

You’re starting to sound a little like me, Jon noticed. Jon heard the Owl in his head frequently, its poison dripping slowly through his ear, but never when it was visible. And it never felt like this: the telepathic speech that Jon had only ever experienced with Deisha. The Owl had begun to infect everything, it seemed. Do you remember when I used to just sit on busses all day? Just ride around and around as I read?

The movement was comforting. Yes, you’ve always been mildly autistic. What of it?

It was that , Jon remembered, as the tube rattled and shook on. People gripped poles tiredly, daemons folded themselves under the elevated seats. A fish sloshed in its tank balanced on a woman’s lap. But it was also...the feeling of existing in an in-between space. Busses and subways are neither here nor there, aren’t they? They let me slide into the book, or in my own daydreams. We always lived in our own head. 

There was nothing out of it that interested you two. 

Jon silently stroked the Owl’s head with one finger.

Did he make the decision then? As he yearned for that in-between place, neither here nor there, neither real or fake?

Monster or human? Alive or dead? Deisha or Strix?

Jon got off the tube at the next stop. He saw a hardware store in front of him. 

He went inside and bought a switchblade. The cashier gave him a very dubious look, but the Owl just craned its head to an unsettling angle and he rang them up. 

Loved or unloved?

So what’s the rationalization here, this time ? The Owl asked, as Jon waited at a bus stop. You have a few favorites. What about the old ‘I’m doing this to protect everyone else, they’ll be safer if I’m gone.’ That work?

Cars barrelled past. The girl next to Jon played on her phone. Candy Crush. Martin took care to disabuse me of those notions. 

Martin made it clear he would be upset if anything happened to you , the Owl pointed out, flapping its great wings as the bus approached and creaked to a halt. You’re going to hurt his little feelings like this?

I think all I do is cause Martin pain . Jon clambered into the bus, carefully dodging daemons as he retreated to the back. The Owl, mindful of the person behind them, hopped into Jon’s lap instead. He had never sat there before. I don’t think he’s going to be happy with me. But I think I’ll survive this. 

And if you don’t?

Jon shrugged. 

So we’re going with door number two. ‘I’m secretly not suicidal, I just don’t care if I die’. Is that any better? It’s barely even a rationalization. Jon opened his mouth, but the Owl cut him off. Or are you going to give me number three? ‘I have a theory’? You’ve hurt a lot of people under the guise of your theories, Jon. 

“I never said I didn’t,” Jon whispered. “And testing a hypothesis is better than making choices based on instinct or impulsivity.”

Rationalizing your emotional reactions with post-hoc logical reasoning , the Owl said, bored. 

What are you, my therapist? Jon thought hard about that. ...my anti-therapist. My nega therapist. Evil therapist, who makes you feel worse. 

That’s just a regular therapist. 

Jon conceded the point.

Eventually Jon pressed the stop button and expunged himself from the bus. He walked for about ten minutes, letting the Owl jump off his shoulder and coast easily ahead of him. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and bare, softening slowly into twilight. There was just the lightest brush of wind, enough to keep the Owl aloft, and Jon watched him in silent wonder. 

There was a strange grace about him, soft and silent yet incredibly sure. Jon saw that in predators: every movement they made was purposeful, elegant and aware. Cats, especially. Hyper-aware of their body and the way they occupied space in every dimension. Predators were lazy and cowardly animals, never picking fights they couldn’t win. Hunting took energy that predators couldn’t afford to waste, and they were more likely to run from a fight than defend themselves. It was prey animals who huddled, stayed, and fought. 

Birds...birds waited. They waited, watched, and struck. 

Oxpeckers were largely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa, as Jon’s ancestors a very, very long time ago had been. One of Jon’s infinite magazines/articles/manuscripts/books, somewhere along the line, had informed him that the popular idea of daemons settling where their human’s ancestors came from was mostly false. Daemon forms were largely informed by native animals to the region where one spent their formative years, daemons of family members or caretakers early in life, whether they lived in urban or rural areas, personal awareness of the animal, and a thousand other reasons. Jon had seen more than enough crackpot documentaries about a wild-eyed man who promised fantasies of a computing machine so advanced that it could predict what daemon a child would settle as. 

It was nonsense, of course. There were a thousand million factors that influenced a final form. One could no more predict it than predict the weather. 

Jon had been baffled himself. All of his ‘So Your Daemon Settled As…’ encyclopedias cheerfully informed him that they were gregarious, friendly animals, who settled on large mammals and helpfully ate bugs and parasites off them. Jon had never once done something for anyone else, ever, besides trying to die for them. 

Of course, knowledge had evolved since then. It was now understood that oxpeckers were vampiric - opening wounds and enhancing existing ones to drink the animal’s blood. That, of course, made much more sense for Jon. 

Jon had never been to the graveyard before. By the time he was healthy and sane enough to go outside, nobody was willing to talk about Tim any longer. Jon would like to believe that everybody was silently grieving, and yet unwilling to admit it to each other so they could seem strong, but somehow he just had the feeling that everyone was too busy feeling sorry for themselves to worry about someone who wasn’t around to annoy them any longer.

It had festered. Basira and Martin didn’t completely shut down for no reason. Melanie was so traumatized she tipped over the edge of the Slaughter. And you…

There was a sign-in and directory building, but Jon ignored it. He picked his way through the aisles of graves, tedious and generic looking. Tim’s parents had apparently been Anglican, so he had been buried. He had no idea what they had told them. Suicide by clown? Gas leak?

Nothing would have helped. Tim had never mentioned them, not once. For likely the same reasons that Sasha never mentioned them, that Martin had never mentioned them, that Jon had hardly divulged his little baby orphan status. He half regretted telling Georgie - she seemed to find it so sad that it veered into comedic, an attitude that Jon himself had somehow adopted. 

Cross, cross, cross. A little reliquary attached to the top of each one representing the daemon. Stone, stone, stone. 

Jon found his feet halting before he realized he was there. He started at the headstone, eyes almost glossing over the simple text. It didn’t seem to make any sense: like looking up a name in a directory, like finding his name and email on the Institute website. A name in English, some Korean characters that Jon understood to be his Korean name, Sejong’s name in English and Korean, and a birthdate. No beloved son, or...whatever. What had Tim been? Mean coworker? Ex-friend? Sad, lonely, angry, hateful, kind, generous, happy, infinitely loving?

He had loved so much it killed him. Put that on a rock. 

Jon, of course, did not make the decision there. He made the decision before he sought to justify it to himself; before he bought the knife; before he left the Institute. 

When had he made this choice? He didn’t even remember making it. All he remembered was pain, and fear. 

Jon silently withdrew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. It didn’t feel quite like paper. More like vellum, the kind Jon would brush his fingers against in ancient archival collections as he chose his career path. Words carved in blood.

He should burn it. His lighter was on his inside jacket pocket. It was the right thing to do. 

Jon very rarely did the right thing, these days. 

He read from the page carefully, finding his voice falling into the dramatic rise and fall of a Statement, before the Dust rose up from the page as if they were carried by a gust of wind. They swirled and glowed, until they finally coalesced into a little sand cat perched in front of a gravestone. 

She didn’t look very pleased with Jon. The disgruntled expression was, unfortunately, adorable. Jon hadn’t known Amicus for very long, but she was a sweet and gentle soul. Jon liked to imagine that Gerry must have hated it: his tough and goth aesthetic ruined by the sweet little sandy brown cat riding on his shoulder. Jon would have liked to tease him about it. 

He never would, of course. That was what death meant.

“You said that you’d burn me,” Amicus accused. “You promised .”

“I will,” Jon said quickly. He held up his lighter, flicking off the cap and striking his hand against the wheel to show the flame. “I will. I just - I just…”

Jon trailed off. He had no rationalization. What, in case he needed Amicus again? That hadn’t been it. Jon only hurt to extend his own life. Why…

“I don’t know you very well, Archivist,” Ami said, “but you seemed to miss my point about how this existence sucks way worse than death. You’re kind, but there’s no room for kindness in lives like ours. That’s what Gerry always said.” She flicked her ears. “I always disagreed, but one of us had to have hope that...hey.” Ami tilted her head at him, ears flickering further. “You used to look different.”

The Owl swooped down and landed on the gravestone, laughing. Ami glanced backwards, unamused, before turning her attention back to Jon. 

Jon, who wanted to cry. “Yeah,” Jon croaked. “I did - I did look different. I’m...like you. I lost my human. It’s...you were right. It hurts. I’m sorry I didn’t burn you before. I didn’t understand how much it hurts.”

“It’s alright,” Amicus said...amicably. “It’s kind of nice, actually. Hearing that someone else understands. Nobody ever understood me and Gerry, not really. Nobody ever really loved us but each other. That’s what makes it so hard. They’re gone, but you still love them, you know? There’s just no one around to love you back. So all those feelings...they’re just a call into this canyon, and you never hear the echo.”

“I would have understood you,” Jon said, and he knew deep in his chest that it would have been true. “I would have loved you. I’ve only known you for a short while, but I love you too, Ami. You’re...a lot of people love you, who only knew you for a little while.” He paused, almost hesitant. “I have a message for you from your sire.”

He told Ami the message. She sat there silently, tail lashing, listening to Jon recite Dedico’s words. His eidetic memory came in handy for once: he could recite the words exactly, just as he said it. 

The graveyard fell into silence after Jon said it. The Owl still seemed amused, but Ami was silent. Finally, she said, “I didn’t know Cul and I did that. Thanks, Jon. I guess there’s a bright side to being trapped in this dumb book. Heh. Gerry used to hate it, me always going on about the bright side of life…” She tilted her head in a smile, just a little. “I forgive you for being scared. But if you don’t burn me now, I’ll bite you. This is how I want to go out.”

“Tell Gerry that I asked for his number,” Jon said, and Amicus burst into peals of laughter as Jon caught the page on his lighter’s flame. 

She was still laughing as she burned away. Jon held up the page and let the ashes blow away, scattered in the wind. No need for a burial, he supposed. 

Jon wanted silence. Just one moment of silence, a few seconds to imagine how he and Gerry’s life could have intersected. He liked to imagine that it could have been a little silly, a little stupid. A missed opportunity. A regret. He and Amicus could have made fun of him together.

They would have been friends. She had forgiven him. 

“Congratulations. You finally found the right answer.” The Owl scraped its talon over the swoop of the ‘S’, ruining everything . “It only took you thirty two years.”

“It’s not about my choices,” Jon said calmly. He felt it, now, that strange calmness. He always felt it, right before he did something stupid. God’s warning sign. Gran used to say that God had to work very hard to keep him alive. “Or my justifications, or my rationalizations. I’m just afraid. It’s all just fear.”

“Almost every choice you’ve made, you’ve made from fear,” the Owl agreed. It beat its wings, a heavy flap that cracked the still graveyard air. “What choice have you made now, Jon?”

Jon withdrew the knife from his jacket pocket. The bomber jacket had been Tim’s. The knife was Jon’s. 

“We are in private,” the Owl agreed. Not even afraid. “There’s nobody around to stop you. I’m much smaller than you are, and considerably lacking in opposable thumbs. There’s not much I can do to stop you.”

Jon stood there, gripping the handle of his knife so hard his knuckles turned white, and found that he was shaking. 

“Except we’ve been in private many times, Jon,” the Owl continued. “You’ve tried, yes. You’ve tried where others were around to stop you. You’ve hurt me, punched me, but never in a way that could have seriously harmed me. You yelled and bit and spit, but you’ve passed a thousand opportunities by to kill me.” His eyes glowed a fluorescent, toxic green. “Because you still believe she’s within me.”

Jon’s hand shook. 

“Cŵn starved himself back into Daisy. The Buried sucked the toxins out of him, and he shed his skin back into a particularly slobbery dog.” The Owl tilted its head at Jon, faintly curious. “You removed the poisoned bullet from Angelus, and the beaver emerged from the devil’s shell. Surely the same can happen to you. So you wait, and bide your time, and hate me.”

“You didn’t want me to starve myself,” Jon whispered. “You wanted to maintain your pathetic and disgusting form.” 

“I was trying to keep us alive. You were the one trying to starve us to death. You didn’t do a very good job, frankly.  B- for effort. D- on execution.” The Owl clicked its beak in something halfway approximating a laugh. “You didn’t make it one month without food, much less six. There was no convenient bullet for you, no easy answer. Your slide into insanity was the work of one sick fuck pulling your strings for years upon years, Jon. You never had a chance.”

Sick fuck...Elias? Jon knew that Elias was constantly manipulating his entire fucking life, but something about the way...no, he was trying to distract him again. Jon wouldn’t fall for it this time. He wouldn’t. 

He always fucking fell for it .

“So we ended up here. You, alone. Nobody willing or able to save you. No end to this horror show in sight, and no reprieve for its Frankenstein. The curtains won’t fall on this tragedy. You will live the rest of your life as the Archivist, puppeteered to commit greater and greater atrocities, for the sake of extending your miserable life. Pluck out as many of my feathers as you like, Jon. The stain will never leave. But even then, despite that , you grip onto life as hard as you can. If you had really wanted to die in that coffin, you wouldn’t have done the impossible and emerged victorious. You possess a remarkable tenacity, a stubbornness that keeps you dragging yourself by your fingernails through each day.”

It was, of course, slightly ironic: that the same iron-willed desire to stay alive was the same flaw that kept Jon apart from his daemon. He could never starve the Owl out.

 He would do anything for Deisha but die. 

“What choice will you make now, Jon?” the Owl asked. “How will you save both yourself and her?”

There was, of course, only one way. 

A heavy presence bore down upon the both of them. Almost tangible, this physical weight and fear. A butterfly struggling on a pin, the sense that everyone in a room was staring at you and finding you wanting. Observed, eternally, and never quite measuring up. Observed and perceived, in all of its horrifying reality. 

A static began to build in Jon’s ears. There was no knife in Jon’s hands: only a tape recorder. 

Jon’s eyes burst with heat, and he knew that they were sparking a sharp and violent green in perfect tandem with the Owl’s own. His long and curly hair, unkept and unmanaged and restrained only by a loose ponytail, snapped free of its tie. It rose, buoyed by the static electricity that jumped off every centimeter of Jon’s skin.

The power burned within him. It was a desolation, consuming everything within Jon; and it was a vast and incredible emptiness. Infesting him, reducing him into a hollow doll. Crushing him tightly, illuminating a great and terrible pit of tar that swallowed him whole. 

It was every pain Jon had ever felt, and everything within Jon that just wanted to hurt something . 

Steal, as had been stolen from him. Violate, as he had been violated. Consume, as he had been consumed. 

Jon filled himself with a great and terrible hate, and it burst open.

“Statement of Strix Sims,” Jon intoned, the words crackling with power. “Regarding how I gained the power to save my daemon. Statement taken live from subject .”

Jon ripped, and ripped, and ripped. 

He ripped golden, bright white Dust from the Owl. He ate it, cramming it into his mouth, pulling more and more. 

Martin’s rejection, the cassette.

No, no, further!

A knife in the dark, a friendship repaired, an intervention. 

No, further, further!

A consumption. A friendship, formed. Love, a connection, an understanding. A monster and a daemon carving each other open, dripping bloody Dust onto the floor. 

Further! Further! 

A friend extending her hand in a third chance, an awakening and a terror, a terrible and demonic bargain struck in the pits of nightmares!

It was before this! There had to have been a moment , a moment where everything had gone wrong! Something that could be fixed !

Tim’s death, the Unknowing - kidnapped, a door reforming - Basira and Daisy trapped - a handshake - a man beat to death with a lead pipe - a friend replaced - a friend consumed - worms, worms, worms - 

Hadn’t it been the worms? Hadn’t that been the source of his first scar? Hadn’t that been when Jon realized that there was no protecting himself, no keeping himself safe? He had always known the world was full of terrors and hatred, but he had always thought he could keep himself safe -

When had Jon understood that the world was full of terrible things?

Jon opened the door -

Mr. Spider -

The first mark, the first scar. That was it. Where everything had gone wrong. If only he hadn’t picked up that book, opened that door. 

It hadn’t been a choice! It had been an accident, the worst kind of innocent mistake! He had been a child, he couldn’t have known! He hadn’t done anything wrong , it wasn’t his fault , he hadn’t chosen -

When had Jon first understood grief?

In that moment, as Jon ripped through page after page of a life lived in fear, the Owl struck. He leaped off the gravestone, talons outstretched and wings splayed, and dove with unerring aim straight for Jon’s heart.

Strix buried his talons and beak into Jon’s chest, piercing leather and flannel and shirt and skin and fat and muscle, spurting hot blood, and sheared sinew and valves in two as he ripped out his heart. 

Statement of -

“Boss? Where do you want these files?”

Jon jumped in his seat.

It was a seat. A computer was in front of him, a website flickering faintly. He had been sitting down. Cheap rolling chair - the kind that had belonged to each desk in the Archives before they had started lugging down the old wooden chairs for their new members. And for Angelus to chew on. Where was -

Jon’s hand drifted to his chest, placing it over his dead heart. There was no wound, no hole or heart half-dangling by frayed strings. His shirt was dry, unmarred by blood, and he was unhurt.

“Earth to Boss?”

Jon turned to the voice. 

Tim was standing next to him, eyebrow arched. Jon realized that he was sitting at - Martin’s desk? That cheesy Bible quote placard, right, Martin’s. Tim was holding a manila folder out to him, one hand propped on his hip. He was wearing a t-shirt - “Disco’s Not Dead!” - and khaki shorts. Not the bomber jacket Jon was wearing now, with flannel layered underneath, and a grimy t-shirt under that. 

The bomber jacket, flannel, and jeans that Jon had found in the bottom of a box in document storage. He told himself that it was the only clothing around that fit him, even if it was baggy, but - but Jon had missed Tim’s cologne. The outfit made him feel a little braver. He had never told anybody where he found it. They all knew. 

“Nice outfit,” Tim said. Jon double checked, and saw that he was still wearing the bomber jacket. “You the understudy for Jensen Ackles now or what?”

“You had files?” Jon asked weakly. 

“Sure do.” Tim passed him the files, and Jon started rifling through the folder. “Seriously, what are you doing at Martin’s desk all zoned out like that? Didn’t get enough sleep again? Not to go all Martin on you, but six cups of coffee does not six hours of sleep make.”

“You mother henned me far before Martin ever did,” Jon said, distracted. 

“He’s right,” Sejong said. As usual, he was lying down with his feet tucked under him across from Tim’s own desk. There used to be an extra desk - across from Tim, next to Martin - but they had taken it out to make more room for Sejong. After Melanie joined, they had to awkwardly rearrange everything. “Sasha finds it insufferable.”

“Oh, she does not,” Tim said, swatting Sejong lightly on the horn. “Sasha finds me charming.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Charming!”

The manilla folder was filled with Statements. At the top of every Statement, in the little box containing the name, date, ID number, etc, Jon saw only the same thing.

Statement of Strix Sims. Statement of Strix Sims. Statement of Strix Sims. 

“The votes are in,” a voice said, amused, “it’s a tie.”

Jon instinctively looked to the desk, where Deisha tended to bounce around. But the voice came from behind him, and he slowly turned around to see the Owl balanced on a bird daemon perch. Jon looked around the Archives and saw three of the perches scattered around - one in the breakroom, another by the desks, another by the filing cabinets. He would bet that there was another one, well-used, in his office. It was all very homey. 

“You heard Strix!” Tim clapped his hands triumphantly, as Jon slowly closed the manila folder and placed it on Martin’s desk. “Sasha is totally ambivalent about my person. Speaking of which, she tell you when she and Martin are getting back with that takeaway?”

“I can’t remember,” Jon said dryly. He glanced back at Strix, who just eyed Jon amusedly. “Did you just tear out my heart?”

“You did it first,” Strix said. “Fair’s fair.”

“Is that your revenge? This fake memory, you instead of her?” Jon asked. He couldn’t find it within himself to be outraged or sad or horrified. Just resigned. “Not even in a memory? You won’t even give me a memory?”

“You have her voice on the cassettes,” Strix said. “What else do you think a memory is?”

“Say, what are you looking at?” Tim leaned over, shoulder brushing Jon’s, and Jon instinctively leaned away as his shoulder tingled. Inappropriate and rude, seriously - “Hah! The great and powerful Jonathan and Strix Sims, on Facebook during work hours !” Tim gasped, faux-scandalized. “Wait until I tell the Sun!”

Facebook? Since when was Jon on Facebook during work?

But when Jon took a closer look at the page, he realized that it was familiar after all. He had been on this page before - twice, every year. Eventually it was only once a year. People tended to remember them together, and the three year gap between their deaths blended together after so long. 

“It’s a memorial page,” Jon explained. As calmly and nonchalant as if he was explaining the follow-up research for the newest Statement to the rest of the team. “For my parents, you know. My mother died in a car accident when I was a baby, and my father of a brain tumor.” He checked the date, and found what he expected. “It’s the anniversary of my father’s death. See, everyone’s making all of those wall posts…” Jon scrolled through then, rolling his eyes. “She’s with the angels now, glory be to god, he was a great father and great brother...the usual. Same things every year, you know.”

When he glanced over at Tim he looked struck. Sejong had halted completely, staring at Jon with wide eyes as his tail flicked. 

“Did I not tell you?” Jon asked, confused. “My grandmother raised me. She’s dead too. Passed...ah, three months before I took this job. A little before you knew me? That’s why I was...rather difficult.”

Tim opened his mouth, then closed it. Jon waited patiently. This is why he didn’t tell people. 

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Sejong said, as calm and sure as he had been back then. Or, rather, as calm and sure as he had pretended to be. “That’s...very difficult.”

“Christ, mate,” Tim said. “That’s...a lot.”

“I got over it,” Jon said politely. 

“It’s why we’re attractive,” Strix said, preening. “God’s apology.”

That startled Tim into a laugh, and he was still laughing somewhat hysterically when Sasha and Martin walked in. They were both carrying plastic bags laden with food as Sasha was talking at length about something and Martin nodded at polite intervals. Knowing Sasha - assuming he did - she was expounding at length about the Byzantine Empire as Martin frantically tried to pretend he understood anything she was saying. 

Pell was perched on the back of Martin’s head, as usual. Sasha had an insect daemon lanyard, and Jon straightened. He watched it avidly, drinking in the lanyard - it was patterned after the trans pride flag - and the battered little off-white case. 

The lanyard had been a gift from Tim. Sasha had been very embarrassed about it, and hadn’t worn it for two months. Martin, using his powers of psychological warfare for good, had spangled his desk in pride merch until Sasha finally showed up to work one day with it on. She had been beaming, and Tim had obnoxiously yelled pride slogans until Jon had emerged from his office to tell them to shut up. That made Tim call him a homophobe and threaten to call the nonexistent HR, and Jon’s complete inability to recognize when someone was joking made him panic and blurt out his biromanticism. Tim had called that day a victory for the queers until -

Until they had all forgotten. 

“What are you doing at Martin’s desk, Jon?” Sasha asked. Jon watched her avidly too, fascinated. She looked the same as ever, but...there was something different about her. “Snooping?”

“Hypocrite,” Sejong snorted. Tim lightly kicked him in the side. 

Martin, poking his head out from behind her, just looked mournful. “Jon, if you want the Hastings report then I can just send it to you, please?”

“Sorry, Martin,” Jon said, distracted. He pointedly ignored the way Sasha and Tim exaggeratedly pretended to faint in shock that Jon had apologized for something. “I was just looking something up on Facebook.”

“... my Faceb -”

“He’s looking for your nudes,” Strix said helpfully. Without looking, Jon picked up Martin’s Bible quote placard and threw it at him. It thumped against the wall, clattering onto the floor. 

“I’ve never seen a person so adversarial with themself,” Sasha admired. She dumped the takeout on her desk - cluttered, with way too many laptops - and began distributing the takeout. Jon didn’t receive one. “For such a decisive person you sure have a real conflict in your internal dialogue. Freud says that means you didn’t get enough parental affection as a child.”

As if Jon couldn’t see him, Tim was making frantic slashing noises across his throat. Sasha popped open her lanyard and held out her hand, letting a small insect jump onto her hand and then onto the desk. 

Jon peered at it with interest. A little praying mantis, with big forearms and an intelligent look in its eyes. It fit Sasha perfectly. It was her, in every way, and when Jon saw the two of them together he wondered how he could have ever mistaken her for the Not!Sasha. It was no surprise that Jon had felt such a persistent wrongness for so long - a Sasha without a daemon was an articulated plastic doll. She had been nothing more than a plastic doll.

“Oh, dear,” the praying mantis said. “Sash, I think you stepped in it again.”

“What? What did I say this time!”

“I’m sure your parents loved you very much, Jon,” Martin said loyally, yet eagerly. Jon knew Pell well enough to tell that she was rolling her eyes. “Is the naan in the bag, Sasha?”

Tim groaned. Sejong huffed.

“I assume so, yes,” Jon told Martin. He tried to grab some of the naan himself, but his hand went straight through the foil. Of course. “They died when I was a toddler. That’s what I was looking up. Sorry about that.”

Everybody froze awkwardly. The praying mantis coughed a little. 

“Why is it such a surprise?” Strix asked. Pell fluttered up from Martin’s head to balance on Strix’s head, and the owl patiently le thim. “Do we act like somebody who was loved as a child? Please.”

Martin barked a surprised laugh, and Sasha nodded. As if this explained everything about Jon. 

But the praying mantis scurred across the table to look up at Strix, rubbing its arms together. “No need to be self-deprecating. Sorry, Strix. It was an insensitive thing for us to say.”

“It’s alright,” Jon said faintly, although Strix should have been the one to respond. “It was so long ago, I’m not even really sad over it. I didn’t even know them.”

“Do you still love them?”

Jon was silent. 

The praying mantis was looking at Jon now, and he let himself look it in the eyes. It was small, fitting perfectly on a leaf or perched on the top of Sasha’s desktop monitor. It - what was its gender? - seemed warm and caring where Sasha could be callous and brusque. But they both cared, really. The mantis was just better about showing it. 

“So long as you love someone,” the mantis said, “you’ll always feel sad that they’re gone. Won’t you?”

“I didn’t love you,” Jon said. “We were just coworkers. There was no reason to - to be sad , I didn’t even notice you were gone -”

“Did you miss me?” Sasha asked. She stood behind her table calmly, big brown eyes soft and warm. “You didn’t even know I was gone, and for all that time you missed me. That’s a form of love to me.”

“What about Tim?” Jon cried incredulously. “We hated each other by the end! He blamed me for everything, and I was too self-obsessed to even apologize for how I treated him! We were going through the same pain, we had lost the same person, and it’s like we were in two different worlds!”

“Don’t you have regrets?” Tim asked. He was leaning against the desk, Sejong watching Jon with dark and half-lidded eyes. “Love can breed the strongest hate. Things could have been different, and now they never will be. You failed me and I failed you. What’s sadder than that?”

“I ruin every relationship I have!” Jon yelled. He stood up from his chair roughly, limbs shaking. The computer and stupid website mocked him. “Martin loved me, and I made him hate me! Martin’s alive, he’s right there , I just can’t reach him!”

“But that’s kind of worse, isn’t it?” Martin smiled faintly at him, as kind and soft as ever, and Pell beat her wings against Strix’s feathers. “It’s far lonelier to have someone just beyond your reach than it is to have never had them at all. It’s so close, and so far away. Your love hasn’t gone away. Loving someone when they aren’t by you - it breaks hearts, you know?”

“It’s okay to feel sad that we’re gone,” Sasha said. “It’s okay to still love us anyway.”

Something in Jon snapped - but maybe it had snapped a long time ago. 

“So what?” Jon screamed. “It doesn’t matter! Love was something I never got ! I lost everything ! I never had anything at all!” Jon’s chest was heaving, everything within him exploding in pain and rage. “I came from nothing, I lived thirty two years with nothing, and I will die with nothing !”

Jon cut himself off, chest wracking with shuddering breaths. He could breathe, here. His blood still coursed, his lungs still heaved, and his heart still broke. 

There was a great rustling of feathers and wings, and Strix swooped down to land on the monitor. It flickered and froze, the Facebook page fuzzing into static. 

“This never happened,” Strix said. “You looked at this Facebook page alone, in your office. It was lunchtime, and you heard them all laughing and talking. You felt alone. You wanted to join them. But you didn’t. You chose to scroll through endless meaningless well-wishes instead. You always wondered - if you had shown them, if you had tried to make them understand...would they? Could you laugh here too, with them?”

“This was the last time I was happy,” Jon whispered. His hands were clenched into fists, and he could feel the ghost of a tape recorder in his hands. “After this...after I lost them…”

“You weren’t happy back then,” Strix said patiently. “But when you lost them, you lost all opportunity for that happiness.”

“Give her back,” Jon whispered. 

“No opportunity for your happy family, no chance for Gran to ever tell us that she was proud of us. No happy marriage and beautiful children for you and Georgie or you and Martin. No chance to cradle Muñi or sit against Sejong. No humanity. You lost all hope.”

It was an overwhelming tide, a powerful crash that toppled him and made him crumple. It tugged at his ankles, trying to drag him down into its undertow. 

Sasha, the ghost of a memory, was still standing behind her desk, smiling at him. She was so beautiful, with a big mane of curly hair and a reserved smile. Tim was still leaning against the desk, tall and strong and proud. Martin, hovering in the back, reserved and self-hating and so secretly miserable. Gone, gone, gone.

Jon. Deisha. Gone.

Give her back…

It didn’t make sense. How could Jon feel this love, even now? How could he still love so much that he grieved every day, that he was fading away into someone cruel and foreign, that every second was painful? Deisha was every part of him that loved. If Jon couldn’t love, then how could he grieve?

“Sasha,” Jon croaked. “Tim. Have you heard of a myth, from a long time ago?”

They both looked at him curiously. Muñi - that had been her name, it had always been her name - cocked her head at him. “I know plenty. Which one?”

“It’s...from the great Witch clans of the North,” Jon said. His voice was hoarse and raw. He wanted to cry and scream. He wanted to sob, and sob, and sob. He wanted to hold her close to his chest, their heartbeats in time. “They speak of an underworld called the world of the dead. The living...and those in-between life and death...can visit, for a time. But there is a great river. Humans may cross it, but they must leave their daemons behind. A psychopomp can ferry you from one side to another, but the living must make the journey alone. The dead carry their daemons with them, but the living cannot.”

Tim and Sasha stared at him, these shades from the land of the dead. 

“Tim...Sasha…you’re beyond that river, aren’t you?” Jon couldn’t repress the tears, now. He found that he did not want to. It felt like the least he could do. “You’re on the other side of the river. I’ve stood on its banks, and felt its cold water. The land of the living was on the other side. I wanted to live so desperately. So I left her behind...is she with you? Tim? Sasha? Is she together with you? It was so cold there. Are you cold?”

A heavy weight settled on Jon’s shoulder. It was Strix, heavy and cold. He was so cold. 

Jon carefully lifted him up, and placed him on the desk. Instead, he reached out a hand, and let Muñi crawl onto it. He walked through the shade of Tim - no, he walked through nothing. When he turned his head he saw that Sasha and Martin were gone too. 

But Sejong was still there. Jon sat down, leaning up against him, and carefully deposited Muñi on Sejong’s nose. They had rested like that, once upon a time. 

Sejong was warm, and smelled of something crisp and just a little burnt. Jon knew, instinctively, it was the smell of Dust. It was a smell no human had ever known. 

It was something Jon could have never had, when they were all alive. It was only here, in this forever past and eternal now, in the land of the dead, that Jon could have this. The warm sensation of Sejong’s fur, the tickle of Muñi’s arms against his palm. 

If nothing bad had ever happened - if Jon had never felt this terrible and eternal pain, if he had not chosen to return to the land of the living - then Jon would have lived and died having never felt this way. 

“Jon,” Sejong whispered, a hot breath in his ear. “What secret did Deisha tell you?”

And, in that second, the memory slammed Jon in the chest, and the Statement ended. 

“Hm. Are you dead? You can tell me if you’re dead.”

Jon felt a shoe prodding at his ribcage. He felt hard, cold ground beneath him. Wind on his face, an ache in his muscles. 

Jon opened his eyes, and saw the tilted figure of a familiar-unfamiliar man. He was short, with skin much darker than Jon’s and a head shaved smooth with a strong jaw. He seemed mildly interested into whether or not Jon was living or dead. 

“Still living,” Jon said, into a mouthful of grass. “Yet again.”

“You’re improbable,” Oliver Banks said. He was wearing a nice black pea coat buttoned up to his chin with a thick black scarf, and black jeans. “Might as well sit up, unless you feel like dying.”

“Are you my psychopomp?”

“I’ve stolen the identity of a ferryman once or twice, if that’s what you’re asking.” But it wasn’t, and Oliver understood. He just smiled slightly at Jon - as if smiling was very difficult for him, and yet he chose to do it anyway. 

Jon righted himself, and saw that he was lying exactly where he had fallen. He also saw that Oliver was sitting disrespectfully on Tim’s gravestone. Even more disrespectfully, he was carefully holding an asleep Strix against his chest. 

It did not feel wrong or perverse. It felt like Oliver was hugging Jon, tight and carefully. When Jon saw that Oliver did not have a daemon, he was not surprised. 

Jon saw a cassette player, just within reach of his hand. He stared at it, and listened to its soft whirr. 

“Do you want him back?” Oliver asked. “You weren’t very successful in tearing him apart. I think you have to wait a bit to do that more effectively.”

Jon didn’t say anything, or move. Oliver continued holding Strix. 

“How did you know I was here?” Jon asked weakly. He coughed, clearing his throat. It felt as if he had been screaming. Probably because he had. “Was it...what did you call them, the tendrils?” But he understood the answer the second he asked. “I don’t have any, do I.”

Oliver just hummed, carefully adjusting Strix’s limp wing. “Have you heard of the story of Pandora’s Box?” Jon shot him a flat, unimpressed look. “Yeah, I know. You’ve probably melodramatically compared yourself to her, right? The too-inquisitive, too-foolish woman who opens the box of every evil in the world, and sends it all rushing out. She opens the door, etc, etc. Roll credits, everything terrible that happens happens, we all run away screaming, the end.”

“You’re missing half of it,” Jon pointed out. “At the bottom of the box was hope.”

“What did Deisha tell you, Archivist?”

Jon stared at Oliver for a long moment, two. He listened for his heartbeat, and found nothing. He listened for his breaths, and felt nothing. 

Of course, the established truth is this:

Deisha was half of Jon. She was his joy, his excitement, his love. She was his anxiety, fears, and neuroses. She was the part of him that lived in trauma, and she was the hope for a better future he always had. Jon had been the part of them that always wanted to die, and she had been the part that clung stubbornly to life. 

Of course, the evidence was this:

Jon connected with humans as if he was a human, and daemons as if he was a daemon. He held, touched, and cradled each daemon as if he was one himself. Other daemons, the ones that saw through to the heart of him, treated him as if he was one. Those that looked beyond the human and saw Jon to his heart always saw the same thing. 

Of course, the evidence was this:

Jon has fallen in love. Jon has felt anxiety, fear, and neuroticism. Jon has indulged in his trauma responses, and Jon still stubbornly clung to live. 

Jon had opened Pandora’s box, and hope had stayed behind. 

Of course, the truth was this: 

“She never left,” Jon said, “did she.”

Oliver smiled happily at him, relieved to see him understand. “Eric and Dedico are a bit Christian, but they were telling the truth. When humans and daemons die, they’re formed into one. Just because you returned from death, Jon, doesn’t mean that you were cleaved in two. It just means that two became one.”

The idea was too strange to even consider. “My soul...went...inside of me?”

“I know. It’s fucked up.”

“That’s insane,” Jon said dizzily. “What, like - where is it, then? Is it next to my kidney?”

Oliver waved a hand vaguely. “I think it’s, like, all over the place? It saturates you?”

“Souls don’t go there,” Jon said. His pastor had to be crying . “That’s just - that’s demented.”

“It’s freakish! But trust me, you get used to it.” Oliver sombered a little, his smile turning sad. “I haven’t seen Ida since the satellite killed me. But it’s not as if I’ve stopped being depressed, so...she’s in there somewhere. It’s a comfort, isn’t it?”

It was. 

Jon wasn’t alone. 

It was…

Oliver politely gave Jon a few minutes to compose himself.

“Why?” Jon asked blankly, when he finally stopped crying. “Why did...any of this...I haven’t understood anything . Nothing makes sense anymore.”

“Wasn’t that what got you into this mess?” Oliver asked curiously. “Always needing to know? Maybe you should just go home, Archivist. Take your daemon with you, and forget what you’ve learned in this awful place.”

Jon stared at Oliver blankly. Too much was buzzing in his mind, too many phantom pains were tearing at his chest. He had spent so long feeling so empty, and now…

“I deserve to know,” Jon said. He always had. 

“Right. The spiders said you would say that, actually.” Oliver coughed awkwardly, shifting Strix in his arms. A wing dangled, and he carefully readjusted it. “So, you’re aware you’re a corpse.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Bad luck, mate,” Oliver said, completely insincerely. “But as a corpse, you produce no Dust. You’re meat, calcium, and a few leftover electrical impulses. That’s what an Avatar is: nothing, really, at all.” He said the phrase emotionlessly, as if it no longer bothered or hurt him. It hurt Jon, tore at an old wound, but...hurt was better than numbness, every time. “You’ve been wondering why Melanie and Daisy had infected Daemons and not dead ones, right? They never died. A little while longer and they would have gotten there, but you saved them.  Mengele was a monster, but he proved it - people cannot live for longer than about a week severed, and they cannot live without making Dust. So what do you do if you’re a fully fledged, powerful Avatar, who died and cannot make Dust? ”

“You steal it,” Jon said. “Trauma - trauma creates Dust. So you traumatize and...force others to tell stories, which creates Dust too...and you consume their Dust to perpetuate your own existence!”

“Right! We’ve soul vampires, basically. Which you should be familiar with. Oxpecker and all.” Oliver laughed nervously, as if he had made a joke. “I think Strix tried to explain it, as spitefully as he could. You know how the Entities are made, right?”

Jon nodded dumbly. “Fear, trauma, and negative emotion generates...Evil Dust. Which coalesces in another dimension to become the Entities.”

“We need a better word. Nega-Dust? Dark Dust?”

“Great to be the pioneer of a field.”

“Nice to meet someone as cheerful as I am.” Oliver stroked one finger down Strix’s fur, almost careful, almost fond. “It’s another world, really. A dead world, where only death lives. There’s holes between worlds - ripped, cut, you name it - where the Dark Dust seeps into ours. Some people...attract that Dark Dust. You’ve met them. People who are just fountains of negative emotion, evil deeds, fear and trauma, right?” Oliver shrugged. “Or maybe just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. With all that Dark Dust swirling around them, it has to go somewhere . So it goes…”

“Into your daemon,” Jon breathed. “It corrupts the daemon into an extension of the Entity itself. But if that’s true, then the human helps generate the Dust -”

“And it becomes a feedback loop,” Oliver said, satisfied. “Dust begets Dust. Trauma begets trauma. Fear begets fear. And, when you finally die, the Dark Dust is all that’s left of you. Just every awful little part of you, left behind in an empty shell. You’ve seen them - they’re empty, hollow things.” Jude’s enraged ox, Mike’s bluebird...Nikola’s marionette...there was no real daemon underneath, no humanity. Just a self-perpetuating cycle of evil. If Jon saw them again, he knew that he would recognize that they were parodies of souls.“But even that daemon has to be fed. Humans and daemons feed each other, but corpses generate no Dust. So the Avatar has to steal Dust from others because they don’t make it themselves, and the daemon has to steal Dust from living daemons, and so on, and so forth. You get it?”

“Do you have one?” Jon asked blankly. “I don’t see a...death daemon anywhere.”

“End only destroys. It does not create.” Oliver couldn’t manage a smile that time, only clutching Strix a little tighter. Jon wondered how much lonelier it had to be, to not even have Strix. “But...you know, six months of nightmares makes a lot of Dust. And it had to go somewhere. So…” Oliver held Strix up. “Tah-dah.”

“I made him,” Jon said blankly. “He was telling the truth. The Dust from the Beholding, the Dust generated by himself as a sentient being...the Dust from me …”

“He hates you,” Oliver said, “doesn’t he?”

Jon stayed silent. 

“You generate your own evil Dust, you know. Your self-hatred. Your cruelty. Your endless fountains of fear and trauma. Your grief is so strong it stinks . And it goes into him. And he gives it back to you. And, just like humans and daemons, it becomes this...cycle. And you’re linked. Even if you weren’t at first, you’ve grown to become each other. Isn’t that kind of beautiful, in its own way?” Oliver shrugged. “I don’t blame you for hating him. If I ever met that...shitty little voice in my head, that grows stronger and stronger with every shitty thing that happens to me, I’d hate it. There’s a monster inside of all of us, and if I ever met it...I’d try to stab it too, you know?”

Jon stared at Strix.

Daisy hadn’t been lying: he really did look just like Jon. Imposing and alien, just a little off-kilter. Severe and sharp, gaunt and pinched. But he was striking and beautiful, words people had always used to describe Jon. 

Just Jon.

“I’m sorry you’re sad,” Oliver said awkwardly. “Uh, I feel like a psychopomp should have more to say on that, but - but it’s sad. And I’m sorry you’re sad. But I’d say that Deisha made her choice, okay? You should respect it. If I could - if I could tell Ida anything , it’s that I’m not going to waste this life she gave me. It’s a cursed, terrible half-life, but - she wanted me to have it. So I’m going to live it. Okay? Did that make sense?” Oliver faltered. “I’m not very good at comforting people. I normally just show up and tell them that they’re going to die and then leave...I guess I’m kind of doing the opposite with you, and it’s a nice change of pace, but I don’t really know what -”

“Oliver,” Jon said quietly. “Can you give me him, please?”

And when Jon held out his arms, Oliver silently straightened and walked over to deposit Strix in his outstretched arms. Jon was still sitting on his knees, his jeans still scratching the cold and unyielding soil, but he barely felt it.

All he could see was the daemon in front of him. Eyes closed in sleep, body limp and relaxed where it was normally so tense. Pure white facial feathers, his other feathers tawny and smooth. He was a little fluffy, a little prim. Just like Jon.

He was just Jon. Everything Jon had always hated. Everything that Deisha had always loved, no matter what, no matter who Jon had grown up to be and what kind of terrible choices he had to make. 

Jon clutched Strix tightly to his chest, in that cold and abandoned graveyard, and almost imagined that his still and dead heart could beat again.

For the very first time, Strix and Jon and Deisha beat in time together, in a terrible and monstrous cacophony, and Jon felt whole.