AN: Have a weird little one-shot because idk. Not set in the Everything I Never Knew universe, although for those of you familiar, it uses the same daemons. No pairings.
For those who are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials universe, this is basically all you need to know (taken from the wiki)
"A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders."
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When JJ was a teenager, one of her friends had commented that she could tell what a person was like in bed just by looking at them. JJ didn't believe that anyone could be that observant.
Besides, it wasn't that interesting to think about. It was three years after Rosaline and JJ was more concerned with seeing other things in people. Things like their interests, their loves, the secret things that they held close to themselves and only looked at when no one was watching them.
Their fears and the things that would break them. The last two were particularly important, because if she worked out how to see those, she could save them.
Kailo said she was being silly. He'd dance around her head, a flickering yellow jewel, and his incandescent wings made patterns of shadows on the roof above her head as he told her that she couldn't save everyone and that she'd burn herself out if she tried.
She didn't answer, but she curled into a ball on her bed that was a twin for the empty one up the hall and thought that if she ever loved someone as much as she'd loved her sister and burning would keep them safe, she'd light the match herself and revel in the flames.
Later, she found herself thinking back to that friend and that comment and apologising because as it turned out, she'd been somewhat right.
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She made a family accidentally. She hadn't meant to, hadn't wanted to, but they'd slipped into her defences until she'd woken up one morning and realized with a faint whisper of fear that she couldn't bear to miss them.
Spence was the first to sneak past her defences. He was annoying, until he wasn't, and ridiculously over-the-top awkward until she realized that that was a shield for his vulnerabilities.
His hare was mouthy and never shut up and she thought that was weird, until one day she saw a man look straight past him as though he wasn't there, and Reid didn't even seem to care.
He wanted to be overlooked, his bearing said. He stood like he didn't want to be noticed, every pore oozing with I'm unimportant, don't pay any attention to me. If it wasn't for Aureilo, she'd have believed it.
Aureilo was the part of him that refused to be ignored, and he was impossible to lose.
He was the first she tried to profile as well. She knew his loves, he wore them on his sleeves. If he loved something he loved it passionately, and audibly, and there wasn't one of them who didn't get their ears talked off about his newest passion or hobby, all complex, all beyond them.
People he loved in a gentler way, frightened of their rejection, but it was still visible. He loved Morgan with the giddy awe of the youngest brother, and Elle with a wary caution. JJ knew he loved her because he smiled when he walked into the room and he was always the first to ask her how she was feeling, even if he knew the answer and even if his day was worse than hers.
He loved Gideon and they'll never speak of that because it's too raw for words, and she thought he might love Hotch but after Gideon he'd never admit it.
He lost all caution with loving Emily and that ended with him on her couch for ten weeks, resisting being seduced by the promise of oblivion.
She thought of what he'd be like in bed and quickly decided she didn't want to know, because someone with as much potential for love as he had would come apart too easily.
She tried to work out his fears, and at first she thought maybe it was dying, because every time a victim died his thoughts would turn inward. He'd look at his daemon and speak to no one.
It quickly became apparent that it wasn't dying that scared him. It was living.
He was the first to take off his vest, the first to throw himself in the firing line, and she realized one day that he intended to be the first to be lost. She might love them now, but he'd loved them first, and he wasn't going to watch one of them be hurt when he could bleed for them.
It was terrifying and horrifying and Kailo gasped with the pain of the thought of burying him.
So they dragged him out of his grave over and over again because that was their job, and he determinedly continued pacing around the edges of it with an expression that hungered to know what it felt like within.
She knew that one day they'd bury him and his intellect and his hare, because Spencer Reid was nothing if not placidly determined to get his own way, but for now she held the idea of him close and gave him as many reasons as she could to stay.
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Elle was the first person JJ had failed since she was eleven and her sister had cut herself open to let all her pain out in a torrent of red and gold on the bathroom floor.
Elle with her ferret daemon that complimented every part of her; both keenly vicious, both wildly cunning, and both with the tenacious ability to wriggle their way out of any danger.
When she was fierce, Arlo was as well; and when she was thoughtful he'd curl around her neck and breathe with her heartbeat. He didn't stay out of the firing line in the field; when Elle pulled her weapon, Arlo was at her heels dancing with barely restrained glee and facing down daemons five times his size.
She had a hair-trigger temper in the field, and when JJ allowed herself the sly thought of what she'd be like in bed, she imagined she'd have a hair-trigger in there too. She caught Elle watching Reid once as the tall profiler tried to explain something complicated to a blank face Morgan, and there was a pensive kind of hunger around her lips and around her eyes that JJ drew back from.
She drew back and she let Elle burn because she'd made a choice between Reid and Elle, and Reid won. She failed them both because she only chose one. When she'd looked at a hare and a ferret, she'd known which would leave unscathed.
Because Elle was a fire-cracker with an uncertain fuse that Randall Garner had lit and left to burn, and JJ didn't want Spence anywhere near her when that line finally ran out.
And when it did, it took a man with it and left behind new lines on Hotch's face and a gun and badge on his desk.
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Gideon was next, and JJ had never been able to profile him. She wasn't about to start now when she could see the shadows beginning to eat away at his edges. His hawk was no help; Houlihan was nothing but sleek feathers and a blank gaze and he gave her nothing to work with.
She hoped he found what he was looking for when he left, but she doubted he even knew what it was.
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She was there when he killed Foyet.
She took Jack and Arelys away, out of that room and that nightmare, but she never forgot what Hotch looked like when he was covered in a man's blood and hungry for more. She never forgot what he was capable of when pressed, or how she suspected he'd do the same for any of them if given the chance.
Halaimon was big and she was intimidating, and she wasn't everything that people expected her to be. JJ had never noticed, never thought to see, but Reid did and one day he'd pointed out that Hal was only half a wolf in the kind of voice you'd use to discuss the weather.
She considered that she'd missed that so it was very likely she'd missed so much more about the man.
Like how after Haley, he flirted with the idea of death, with one foot in the door and one foot out, looking back at Jack as though he was the only thing tethering him there. Jack was the thing that Hotch held close and secret. After Henry was born, JJ understood this a lot better. It was frightening to have something you loved so much in such a fragile creature as a child.
Even more frightening when you knew intimately how many different ways you were capable of failing that child.
Aaron had a daemon trapped between two worlds, but he stayed late every night and only reluctantly went home. Sometimes she'd go past his office and he'd have his head in his hands, and Jack's photo flat on the desk, and she wondered how long he could deal with the weight of the failures he heaped on himself.
She wondered when he'd stop dealing with them.
Hal didn't let people close and Hotch didn't know how, and JJ knew this would eventually be the end of both of them.
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She almost shot Emily once.
Spence was missing (her fault) and the snarls of dogs still echoed in her head, and she'd spun around with her weapon in her hands and almost put a bullet between Emily Prentiss's perfectly groomed eyebrows.
Emily hadn't flinched. Neither had her daemon, both watching her with identical, catlike gazes.
That never really changed. Emily rarely balked at anything, and in the entire time JJ knew her she was only sometimes rattled.
She killed Emily once.
She'd stood by her hospital bed and looked down on the woman who'd become her friend (sister) and told her that she had to die; all while Kailo and Sergio huddled together on the floor and whispered promises to each other that their humans knew they might not be able to follow up on.
Out of all of them, she knew Emily the best and feared her the least, because while Spence craved death and Hotch flirted with it, Emily had taken Death by the hand and shown him the door.
"Come back to us," Kailo had begged as they sent Emily away to die, just for a little while.
"Always," promised Sergio, and they did.
Then JJ had gone out to tell her family that Emily, their Emily, had died under a cold knife and uncaring eyes, and she wasn't surprised that lying came so easily to her because butterflies were known for undergoing metamorphosis.
When before she'd been loyal, now she was a liar, and she wasn't overly surprised with how easy it had been.
"I didn't get to say goodbye," Reid said brokenly, and she almost laughed at him then and brought it all crashing down, because he was supposed to be the smartest there so didn't he know that that wasn't at all how it worked?
She'd never gotten to say goodbye either, to any of them.
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Eris made jokes and pulled pranks because Rossi wouldn't, or couldn't.
He had to be firm and professional, especially at first when he was filling Gideon's shoes and feeling the pinch around his toes. The only time he smiled was when his eagle owl finally managed to hit someone with a carefully aimed pen, or the time she'd switched the salt and the sugar. It was childish. It was mundane. It was wonderful.
JJ couldn't remember a time without him.
He came when they were falling apart, their weird little family, with Reid hiding his arm under layers of unseasonably warm clothes, and Emily facing Hotch's scrutiny, and Gideon chasing his own ghosts.
He pulled them back together.
She didn't want to think of him having fears, because he became their foundation, him and Hotch, and a building is only as strong as its base. And there was nothing vulnerable about the man or his owl with the wingspan as wide as their arms, and she let herself think him unshakable.
It worked for a while.
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Garcia had a magpie and JJ knew there was probably levels to it she was ignoring, but she liked to think that it was as simple a reason as 'just because'.
She decorated the little corner of her universe with trinkets and baubles and hid herself away from the horrors of their work, and JJ knew she would always be able to find her in there with her magpie daemon and her troll doll collection, eternally optimistic.
When everyone else around her seemed to be coloured increasingly with shades of grey, Garcia was a comforting reminder that for some people, things could still be simple and good.
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Morgan was handsome and his daemon boxer was too; JJ had seem them both work a dancefloor as easily as they did a profile. Kailo would flutter down to scold Naemaria in his whispering voice, and they'd both laugh. They were sleek and charming and when they'd both turn that charm onto her and smile disarmingly, she knew the temptation.
But she'd also seen him take home dozens of women and none of them stayed, and she knew that Morgan looked at his future and saw Gideon 2.0 – forever chasing his tail and looking for something that stayed resolutely hidden.
She knew his fears because, before Will and before Henry, they were hers too.
She knew his worse fears more intimately because they were still hers, and she knew that he dreamt of gravestones and Taps and their colleagues growing cold and still just as much as she did.
After Emily, he never trusted her the same.
JJ didn't really blame him.
After Rosaline, she'd never trusted herself either.