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Alex Mercer has no dæmon when he wakes up in the morgue; it’s part of why the hazmats scream so much, seeing this dead, disfigured thing lurching off the table. Better he had half a face, or his chest laid open and his pulsing organs all bared, better that than a lonely half man missing something that no one can live without.

Dana has a squirrel dæmon, grey and twitching and clinging to her when she clutches him in her hands. Both of them whimper together in terrified horror as Dana stumbles back at the sight of their brother standing there, mutilated beyond belief. "Oh fuck ," she sobs, Gene pressing himself to her chest in desperate love and disgust and sympathy and fear "Alex where's- where is she? Where's Cally?"

He doesn't know who that is.

Dana looks like she might throw up - she has to wrestle with Gene for a moment to put him down so she can tentatively put her arms around Alex. Twitching and making little noises of distress, the dæmon circles them. "It's okay, we'll-" tears are running down Dana's face as she holds Alex tightly. It would be easier to hug a dead body. "She has to be somewhere, we'll find her. Oh god Alex, what the hell did they do to you?"

He doesn't know. He has no dæmon, and he can barely remember what it is to have one.

Elizabeth Greene used to have a dæmon. It's a rat. The first pictures, the ones where she's holding it tightly under her chin, show it as a sleek, dark thing with little hands that hold onto one of Greene’s fingers. When Alex sees it, floating in a vat of weird oxygen-rich, breathable fluid, it's white and patchy and haggard-looking, its bulging, glassy eyes red. Alex has enough knowledge - and memories - inside of him to feel sick, to feel so, so sorry for this creature, held apart from its body. Because it’s more than the tank; he read the files Dana found. The dæmon , they explained, is a high-level contamination risk due to its sharp incisors. Immediate Intercision is advised.

How much of her empty stare is the virus, and how much is the part of her that was cut away, their connection severed for ever, turning her from a girl and her beloved soul into two half corpses that move? There's a reason Intercision is called a bloodless lobotomy.

She's sitting hunched in her cell with the scattered bodies of the soldiers all about her. She hugs her knees like she doesn't even know her own dæmon is right there. “I’m going to let your dæmon out, okay?” Alex tells her. He figures that's what she needs most right now - only, her voice stops him dead.

“ The time for waiting is over. ”

When she lunges at him, he’s too surprised to fight back. He doesn’t want to - she’s just a girl, they’ve used her, they’ve cut her, they’ve made her into a monster. But then she breaks the wall. All of Manhattan glows in the dark outside, and he realises that victim or not, she is insanely infectious. So he makes a break for the tank with the limp, pale dæmon suspended in it, and smashes the glass, and if his dæmon were there she would be nudging it from where it flops and twitches on the floor, she would nuzzle its shaking, sodden body in sympathy. The rat staggers to its feet, stumbling, squeaking, making for Greene. Her back is to him. He squeaks and squeaks and she half turns her head- and steps out into the air, and falls.

Alex is of half a mind to damn the great taboo, the instinctual knowledge that one should never, ever, ever touch another’s dæmon in anything but the deepest trust and love and consent - he could grab the little dæmon and race after her, of course she’s confused, she’s Severed , but if she just had him back-

Something growls in the darkness, wet and horrible; a pink and glistening mass with claws and teeth is rushing towards Alex and it-

It steps on-

In a little puff of dust he’s gone , the dæmon scrabbling blindly after her and crying piteously as she leaves him is dead , crushed, gone and Alex is flung out of the hole in the wall and he sees her.

Elizabeth Greene, standing on a rooftop, watching him fall. Alive . Her dæmon is dead and she’s alive.

What is she? What is she?

In the aftermath, Alex feels his lonely, single heartbeat and is forced to wonder; what am I ?

Karen’s neat, dark monkey dæmon hangs on her hand and tries to pull her away when she opens the door. He knows something’s wrong instantly; he keeps crying “Where is she? Where is she?” as he tugs and tugs on Karen's hand to get away from the ghost at their door. Karen whispers, with her hand over her mouth and her face gone grey, "I thought you were dead!"

He doesn't know if she means before, or just now, when she opened the door and saw him there alone like a nightmare. He thinks of Elizabeth Greene, stood on the rooftop with her dæmon dead, and says "I should be."

Karen manages to hug him, although he can see the effort it costs her. Proxenos stays as far from him as possible. On his brief visits, he rarely sees the dæmon properly, hidden by the time he comes in; he can almost pretend she doesn't have a dæmon, and he isn't so alone, until the monkey's bright white neckbeard-looking ruff catches Alex's eye as Proxenos peeps out from various hiding spots. Alex puts it down as their perpetual disgust, although he does notice, before Karen tells him she's sorry, that it's her dæmon whispering in her ear that prompts it.

The Specialist's dæmon wears a muzzle. Alex, a shapeshifting, flesh-absorbing, dæmonless freak of a man finds unease uncurling in his stomach at the sight. Appearance is the only thing that links dæmons to real animals; to see one treated like the other is uncanny, uncomfortable, dehumanizing, almost sad . But she doesn't let him pity her. She has a wolf’s head and face, amber eyes that speak of the wild, not the feral, and yet there’s malamute in the sharp definition between the black and the white on her face. So Alex does not think wolf , he thinks dog . On a leash, in a muzzle, waiting on a sharp command. She exudes a quiet kind of savagery standing with her head down and her bright, unblinking eyes boring into Alex's, as even when her man takes her muzzle off she doesn't bare her teeth or growl. It all makes her snarl that much more blood curdling when Alex takes a step closer and it finally ripples out of her, her hackles risen; to hear them together, there's something similarly hoarse about her snarl and her man's voice. Her bared teeth gleam, all polished metal and razor edges. Alex can't tell if it's a coating, or if the real teeth have been replaced. This guy's a fucking psycopath, he thinks, and he avoids her snapping jaws like the plague, as vicious and undesirable when he gets too close to her man as the stun baton.

Alex knows, the same way he knows English, not to touch another person's dæmon. They touch him - they claw him and bite him and ram him when he consumes their people, desperation overtaking that great taboo - but he doesn’t touch them back. The people tend to be about halfway dissolved when their dæmons vanish. It’s uncanny to see the exact moment a person dies. 

Blackwatch dæmons are less fussy than most, willing to pitch into battle against more than just their own kind - but Alex still won't stoop to being the monster who lays hands on them. It isn't the memories showing him that contact at its worse that make him so adamant. They're full of gagging, of needle-sharp pain, of hours spent sobbing and hugging whimpering dæmons, of trying to scrub off the crawling skin left in the wake of an unfamiliar, unfriendly, unconsented touch. It's the memories that show him the good; the ache so sweet it sings when she took her girlfriend's hand and laid it on her dæmon's back; feeling like a songbird set free when his dæmon pressed herself against his wife's neck. A thing more precious than a beating heart laid in another's hands. That's why Alex won't touch them in violence, as a stranger, even when they fasten their teeth in his legs and his arms, and claw at his eyes with talons.

Sometimes, though, he thinks he'd take the agony of strange hands on his own dæmon just to feel anything, just because then he'd know she's out there somewhere.

Ragland's owl dæmon only ruffles her feathers and flares her wings slightly when they realise that's wrong with Alex. A dæmon is a good way to catch out the feelings a person hides, but Marwe is quiet, she doesn't stare, she doesn’t make him feel like a freak, so he likes her and Ragland almost immediately. She flaps up to Ragland's shoulder as Alex leaves the first time, resting her head on his while he strokes her puffed up feathers. Alex can tell, as he gets sicker and sicker, that she wants to comfort him as his own dæmon would, that she feels more pity even than disgust at the sight of him, poor, wretched thing that he is. That's why Ragland's a doctor, Alex supposes. She's the one that urges her man quietly and with gentle hoots to hug Alex when he brings Dana in and collapses over her, screaming his failure out. Her gentle voice encourages Alex, too, to have hope; his dæmon is out there, whatever Gentek did with her - he'll find her, and she'll be waiting for him.

When Alex slips into waking dreams, losing his conscious mind in a labyrinth of others' memories, he sees his Cally. Sometimes she's a bird, with bright wings and a song that's nothing like Alex's dark, twisted biomass or his gaunt face. Sometimes she's something leaping and bounding too fast to see, running and running, light on her feet, lithe and powerful and beautiful.

Sometimes, when he wakes, Alex can feel her beside him for a moment. If he keeps his eyes closed, she stays, her presence so solid and vivid that he thinks she has to be somewhere , whether that's inside him or in a Gentek lab he hasn't found yet. If that's the case, it should hurt to be so far from her - Blackwatch's elite have a record of twenty feet separation before both man and dæmon passed out from the pain, and Alex was never a trained soldier, so his distance should be much less. But he holds desperately onto the belief that he's different, because if he's not, then they're Severed. Severed people are like shells, their feelings ripped out, like Elizabeth Greene. Alex isn't like that, he knows, but he's still afraid.

Then he gets the phonecall. You're not human. No one took your dæmon. You don’t have one.

It all makes sense. It 'frees' him. It utterly and completely destroys him.

When he dozes, Cally is gone, and he does not see her again. He tries to forget. He almost manages it, or at least manages to bury the memory of her so deep she could scream and he wouldn't hear her under the rest of the voices.

Alex thinks, when McMullen's hawk dæmon huddles by him, pressing against his chest, refusing to look at Alex, that she's just as afraid and disgusted by him as everyone else. McMullen gathers her up as he sits against the wall and refuses to just say anything without making it a riddle.

He should have known, he should have known . She's too quiet. Too still.

They'd agreed on this.

She gives one wild, broken-hearted cry in the second before McMullen pulls the trigger, flinging her wings wide and pressing herself against the heart beating in time with hers. Then she's gone. In all the stories of self sacrifice, everyone knows the dæmon begs for anything else, tries to pull their person away from the brink. They're the animal instinct to live, above all else, to survive.

McMullen was, Alex grudgingly concedes, a brave man, if not a good one. That or he had more spite in him than Alex would have thought a person could hold.

Robert Cross's dæmon does not wear a muzzle for other people's sake, but for her own. It keeps her jaw shut when every idle yawn and loll of her tongue can catch it on her razor teeth. Her tongue is ragged from them, missing chunks at the sides and scratched up beneath, and Alex remembers how the blood dripped as she panted on the hive's rooftop.

Cross doesn't seem surprised when Alex, in a fit of irritation, asks him why he did it to her. Alex is angry because he doesn't even have a dæmon and Cross has mutilated his, how is that fair? Alex would never have done that to her if she was his.

"I didn't ask for it," is Cross's bloodcurdling reply "I woke up before I knew they'd put me under and they'd ripped her teeth out."

Alex watches her press her face flat against Cross's leg, and realises the full extent of what Blackwatch is.

Cally cannot be denied forever. Alex likes to pretend he's getting used to it, but when Cross kisses him the wolfdog dæmon pines quietly and when they fall together with hungry hands and hips she paces restlessly in the other room; alone, frustrated, unnerved. Alex doesn’t know what she’s thinking, but he can feel her eyes on him when he leans close to Cross or reaches out to touch him; he thinks its disapproval. Suspicion. He's a monster. If anyone knows it, it's her, because when they're together she is alone . And Alex can’t ignore it - he’s not doing this for the hell of it - he loves this man, no matter how much he tries to drown the feeling, he loves him and he wants Cross to love him back but there she is, the soul, glowering from the corner making sure he knows it can't be, a normal man can't love a half one. Alex should end it now, before it hurts so much it kills him, only he keeps clinging to the sharp, silent gestures and frowns Cross throws at her when she's pacing; and when Cross's back is turned, sometimes, she'll pad quietly closer to Alex as if she's going to say something. He always waits, tense with anticipation, for her words to be cruel. But her amber stare is unfathomable, and he has yet to hear her voice.

Hell, maybe it'll be fine. The moments when it's just them and she's silent outside the door, letting him forget her - it's so good he can't let it go, even if he knows something is missing, even if he knows he's walking into the storm with a lightning rod in his hand.

He tries not to break down in front of people. He saves it for lonely rooftops, because even at Dana's bedside all he can see is her dæmon nestled into the crook of her neck, always with her. But he's tired, and she still won't wake up, and the voices are too loud today and there's something about the way Cross is playing with the hair at the nape of his neck that just- just breaks him- and he starts to cry. Cross's arm around him is a familiar comfort. He leans into it and doesn't hear her pad over to him, only feels the weight of paws on his knees and looks up in shock, to gape as her ragged tongue flicks out warm on his face, over his tears. Cross's caught breath lets out in a rush when Alex hesitantly puts his hands into the thick fur of her cheeks and presses his forehead to hers, and she lets him, she whines low in her chest and nudges her face against him. Not contempt. Fear, yes, and jealousy; they had everything and she had nothing, all alone outside the door. But she never hated him. If he'll have her, this will do.

When they're lying together, soft and tired, she jumps up onto the bed and picks her way across the tangle of their limbs to flop down between them, her legs in the air, her belly up. Alex swears her tail even twitches in a smothered wag when he tucks his chin over her head, his nose pressed against Cross's neck, and Cross's big arm under them both; he doesn't complain when it's totally dead by the time they all wake up.

Taggart has a crab. Alex wasn't expecting that, and almost kills it standing on it. It snips its little claws at him with all the efficiency and good sense that Taggart shows, and Alex doesn't even notice it disappear. Means to an end. He doesn't linger on the memories, he doesn't want to know the thousand ways Taggart loved her and she loved him, sharing their pulse and their thoughts and their life, because Taggart is a means to an end and for once, Alex would like it just to be that uncomplicated.

(It never is.)

The dæmon of General Randall is not large, but she knows how to use her beak, and goes straight for Alex's eyes - but her stabbing and biting do as much against him as against a block of concrete. She flaps her butcherbird wings and wrenches at his sleeve, throws herself at him, while Alex can see the wolfdog in the background bristling with the desire to snap her between those razor teeth; but she can't, in case they kill the dæmon and therefore the man before Alex can get what he wants from him. The butcherbird shrieks at her, and at Cross, as she flutters half way towards them, begging them one moment and threatening them the next. She's a pitiful sight, desperately flinging herself across the floor as Alex's tendrils tear Randall apart, trying to reach him. She turns to dust, mid-screech.

Alex notices the way Cross digs his fingers into his dæmon's ruff. He wants to do it too, to feel her nosing at his palm to reassure him, but that's a sacred thing, and he won't do it in the place where they denied a dæmon her last moment with the dearest companion of her heart. He can't even be angry at Randall for his own sake any more - they took Greene's dæmon, and he'll kill them all for that, but they didn't take Alex's. He's just alone. It hurts, but he's learning to live in pain.

There are screams outside, and they all look up as a Wiseman barrels into the hangar, his python dæmon fast as a whip beside him, yelling "It's Fisher, he's turned into a thing, that fucking thing that attacked us-!"

Alex glances at Cross, who's unclasping his dæmon's muzzle. They race for the deck.

There's no time, there's no time ; Alex makes his decision in a heartbeat. He roars " get out of here! " at the remaining Wisemen as he sprints for the heli. He hears Cross's pained cry at the same time as something digs into his leg; he turns because he thinks, what, is the supreme hunter not dead?

Cross is lying on the deck at the far end, unable to stand. His dæmon has sank her teeth into Alex's leg. She stares up at him, paws scrabbling on the ground as she tries to haul him back.

He hates it, he hates her yelps of pain as he prises her jaws off his leg, but she won't stop fighting him. This is by far the furthest Alex has ever seen Cross and his dæmon apart, it's more than they should be able to bear, how much pain are they in? Cross is crying out in a voice Alex hasn't heard him use before, her name, Alex's, dragging himself towards them as best he can. Alex wraps her in his arms for a second, holding her close, her fur on his face and her cries vibrating through him. Cross will feel the touch through her, and it will just have to be enough. "Get him somewhere safe," he whispers to her, and then he shoves her hard so she slides on the deck and he's in the heli with the door shut before she can stop him.

He doesn't want to die, but when he does, he'll be like any other dead person, their dæmon gone in the course of nature.

He rebuilds. With scraps on the ground, birds, fish he snapped up as he dragged himself back to dry land. The residue of the nuclear blast hums in his cells but he phases it out easily.

He sits on the bench in the dark and looks out at the sparkling water, thinking about… nothing. He has a lot he should be thinking about, but he feels… oddly at peace. His racing mind is quiet. Maybe it's the near death experience, maybe it's-

Something tickles his temple, under his hood. He twitches, frowning at the unfamiliar sensation. It's there again, his hair stirring. He reaches in and feels the tiny hooks catch on his skin, holding on as he withdraws his hand and finds it sitting on it.

It's bigger than it should be. A Portia Jumping Spider, specifically a P. schultzi, is absolutely miniscule, but this one's about the width of his palm, legs included. It tilts its face with its huge, round eyes up at him.

"Cally," he breathes, but immediately, it's not right. It's not Cally. Cally was a dead man's dæmon and this is… this is his .

It wiggles its little body at him, all sharp, uncanny movements and big, big eyes. Then it nestles down into his hand and spreads its pedipalps as much as it can, like an attempt at a hug.

I'm sorry I wasn't there when you needed me.

It's not like the hivemind or the stolen memories, but they don't need words; they're one being, after all. He holds it gently against his neck, the palps furry on his skin as it strokes him soothingly. "It's ok. You were, I just didn't know how to tell."

It'll be better now. You're not alone.

"Yeah." he's going to cry again.

Ragland's dæmon notices first. She gives a gentle hoot; it's with a little coaxing that the spider peeps out from inside Alex's hood, its eyes catching the light, holding its body close to him. Ragland blinks.

"She just... appeared?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know why you're surprised," the owl dæmon laughs "We all knew she was somewhere. I think this is one of the least surprising things you've done."

When Ragland tells him that Dana's woken up, he's off like a shot to go see her; but Marwe lands on the table beside him just before he does and says "You were never less than human, Alex. Now no one can tell you otherwise."

Dana takes the news better than Alex was expecting. He's had to tell her, after all, that her brother is dead. To begin with a dreadful silence stretches for so long that his dæmon creeps out, wanting to help but not sure how. Dana's eyes widen. "Cally?"

The dæmon shrinks again, scrunching its legs up around itself. "It's not- I'm sorry. It's not Cally." he reaches up to cover it with his hand.

Cally is dead, like Dana's brother. 

Dana lets out a shaky breath. Her dæmon twitches his bushy tail weakly, and wobbles down her arm. "Sorry. What's her name?"

"I don't… know yet. I don't know if it's- if they're a she."

Under his hand the little palps brush against him, making him open his fingers so it can peep out between them. To their surprise, Dana laughs.

"Yeah, that kinda makes sense. A spider. Cally wouldn't have suited you at all."

"Do we get to help you name you?" the squirrel stands up on his hind legs, peering back at the round eyes in the shadow of Alex's fingers.

"Sure. I can't think of any." he can, but they all come from other people's memories of who they knew, and he doesn't need that kind of baggage. Dana flings out ideas for an hour, in between pleading with Ragland for a McDonalds, until Alex is about to leave so she can rest - then she says "Athena" and the spider (now playing in Gene's bushy tail) perks up.

"'Cause of Zeus?"

"And I'm sure she turned someone into a spider once. And, you know, goddess of war, born from Zeus's head when it was split open-"

"Okay, I see it," Alex laughs. He feels a little tremor of delight run through the spider, who stamps its tiny feet.

Athena.

"We like that."

The Wisemen aren't out on the streets for a while. They took a beating from the hunter - Alex hopes that's all it is, not that they've been outed as standing by and letting Zeus eat the general.

But eventually he smells their specific strain on the wind; the little furry body clinging just under his ear trembles with apprehension and impatience. He waits on a rooftop along their patrol route, a familiar outline looming over them, and by the time Cross has come racing up the stairs four at a time to the old safehouse Alex is already there. Both man and dæmon barrel into Alex so hard he'd fall if he was human, Cross grabbing him and pulling him into a crushing hug, the dæmon yelping and rearing up to lick frantically for his face. He has to laugh, breathlessly, as he hugs Cross back with one hand and rubs the wolfdog's cheek with the other.

His own dæmon stirs, tentative toes creeping further from the depths of his hood. Its eyes catch the light, making the wolfdog pull back a moment, her nose twitching as she stares. Athena shuffles its pedipalps anxiously, ready to scrunch up - what if they don't like me? - or scuttle back down into hiding.

Then the wolfdog wiggles. Her tail is wagging side to side so vehemently it moves her whole body, and encouraged, Athena creeps forwards. Cross has by this point noticed something's up and pulls back - his dæmon just leaps in where he was, her paws dragging Alex down to where she can push her nose into his hood. Words wouldn't suffice; she's not a verbal creature anyway. Athena is almost knocked off its many feet when it catches even a small lick to the face. So it scuttles up onto the other dæmon's muzzle, and Alex lets them both down, and together two people in four bodies look down as the spider crawls up the wolfdog's face until her eyes are crossed looking at it, still wagging, still wiggling her entire body in barely contained delight. The fuzzy pedipalps brush gently over the fur beneath them and then Athena sinks down, nestling its body onto the wolfdog's nose.

Alex's heart - both his hearts, the one that beats and the one with eight legs - feels like it's about to burst. Cross's fingers slip into his as a stream of murmurs pass through them from their conversing dæmons. "You know, I always thought it'd be a cat."

"Not that far off, really."

"Only by a couple of extra eyes." Cross laughs. After a moment, he adds "I always knew you had one, though. The second I laid eyes on you I knew you had one somewhere."

Later, when they're sprawled and tangled together, the wolfdog jumps quietly up onto the bed. As she flops down in her accustomed space, Alex feels his heart stutter in his chest, his whole soul light up and some place deep inside him that he didn't even know was there thrum a pulse that goes from his bones to the roots of his hair; Athena's abdomen fits perfectly into the dip of Cross's collarbone, and when he smiles and hums in sleepy bliss, the feeling of it vibrating through Athena's whole body gives Alex goosebumps.