AN: 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."
Uses the same daemons (sort of) as in the Everything universe, but is a separate and unconnected tale. And Spence has been aged up so he's the same age as Aaron and Emily, for convenience.
Edited March 2019. Massive thanks to Desdaemona for betaing this piece!
.
.
The Midnight Others
"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."
Neil Gaiman, Fables and Reflections
.
Spencer
.
1.
When Spencer and Aureilo were ten, their father took them away. They were lonely after that. It was a quiet kind of loneliness. Seeping. Curiously suffocating. It changed with the seasons. In winter, it was a cold house with two rooms heated: the office where Spencer wasn't allowed and the bedroom where he chose to remain. In spring, it was walking alone when before she'd have walked with him. Aureilo was there, but Aureilo was also silent; a mute, lonely hare following a mute, lonely boy.
Summer was the ticking of an oscillating fan in the quiet of their home, a sleepy apartment in the middle of DC. William had paid a lot for it, he told them, as to ensure that the walls were thick enough that all sounds were kept out. Keeping the sounds of the city out seemed to be of great importance to him. Spencer wondered what was so bad about noise that it had to be pushed away, especially since the thick walls also kept the world out. Spencer missed the world. He missed his mom. And time went on. Fall was a year from then. They turned eleven.
She never replied to their letters.
.
2.
They were alone, their feet cemented to the floor with the certainty that there was a sheer drop on either side of them, and it was utterly, catastrophically dark. So dark that, when Spencer held his hand out in front of his face, he couldn't even see the white-pink blur of his fingers outlined in the gloom. He tried to speak and found he couldn't.
He looked for Aureilo, but Aureilo was gone.
He screamed and woke, shivering in a sweat-soaked bed with the window open and his curtains flicking angrily against the wall. Whap whap whap they went and every beat of them sent a snap of light down onto his tangled feet. Aureilo watched him from the foot of the bed, sometimes illuminated, sometimes in shadow, the line of moonlight lashed right across his twitching nose.
"Just a nightmare," the hare whispered, trying to wiggle closer. Spencer looked to the door. He'd never had a nightmare alone before.
"Just a nightmare," he repeated glumly, because the door wasn't going to open.
Their mom wasn't there.
.
3.
People wondered where Spencer's mom was. William never told, and Spencer didn't know.
Here is a good place to talk about Diana Reid.
Diana Reid was as bright as her son, a professor of English Literature as lost in the mysteries of the word as Spencer promised to be. Her son was a gift to her, the one bright spot in a world that was darkening steadily day by day as her life began to glitch ever so slightly out of line with those around her.
Diana was sick, getting sicker. It was her who unwillingly planted the seeds of her husband leaving her with nothing but a packed bag and her son at his side. Her dæmon was a scruffy cheetah with a vacant stare. Her dæmon often grew ill before she did. Sometimes, she struggled to tell the difference between human and dæmon. Sometimes, she wondered if there really was any.
"He's a hare," Sonnet said dreamily one day when they were sicker than they were well, and Diana had wondered at the time if she was the dæmon or the human and if she'd bleed Dust or blood if cut: "Our son is."
"The handsome hare," she murmured before going to find William to ask, "William, did you know our children are hares?"
He looked at her strangely, glancing to the window where, outside, their children played. Children, plural, Diana thought: was not Aureilo just as much his own creature as Spencer? But William hated her telling him that, so she kept that thought to herself (but she very much considered herself a mother of two).
"Have you taken your medication today?" he said instead of anything sensible.
She hadn't.
"I guess that makes me just as much of a feline as Sonnet," she thought out loud.
"Perhaps that makes me the human," replied Sonnet.
One of them, or both, had pointed out: it was terrible, perhaps, that their sons were hares because cats were ever so deadly to them.
While they were talking, click click click went the sharp-edged nib of her antique fountain pen against her palm, click click click. Her eyes were on her children, William's too. Around the garden they ran, two boys in the shape of hares, laughing. She welcomed their laughter. A mother hadn't failed her children while they laughed still.
"God, dammit, Diana!" William yelled, his coyote-dæmon barking with shock. Sonnet paid no attention. She looked down. Drip drip drip went what had been inside her as it pooled down and out to make a mess on the carpet. In some light red, in some gold.
Two weeks later, William took Spencer and left. What followed was the rest of this story. Much like Margery Kemp, what followed was her struggle to recover from the ghostly aftermath of her first child. She doubted she ever would. A mother never forgets, and a mother never stops looking.
.
4.
They walked themselves to school every morning. William began work early and finished late. Spencer quickly became accustomed to being on his own. It wasn't so different from before except now he didn't have to check to make sure his mom was eating, and he didn't have the promise of a story once the chore of sustenance was over. He woke to his alarm, dressed, ate breakfast with his father — usually silently, although sometimes the radio would chatter quietly at them as they ate — and then they would leave at the same time: William in his car and Spencer on foot. They walked the same way every day. This, at least, was soothing. There was a rhythm to monotony that pleased them, sometimes.
It was the lonely monotony of evenings they hated. Alone until after dinner. Listening to the hum of the microwave as their father came home later and heated leftovers. Forced conversation in the hour before Spencer and Aureilo took themselves to bed and William vanished into his office. Absolutely nothing like the evenings they'd spent with Diana, reading and learning and—
Shaking his head and with it the taunting memories, Spencer trudged on.
The way they walked they took for a reason. Halfway there — exactly eighteen and a half minutes into their walk — they passed a second-hand bookstore. There was no room for books in their new lives, they'd been told, at least none that didn't come with a library barcode and a date of return. Their bedroom was small, the only bookshelf used solely for those books school required, and there was no room for frivolities on the stern shelves lining their father's office. All of their books had remained behind in the house they'd been taken away from. Left with their mom and her scruffy cheetah-dæmon and everything they'd been before now. But they always stopped outside despite this firm ruling. They never went in. Like Eve with the fruit, they needed a push towards that forbidden temptation.
The push came in the form of a woman with nicotine stained fingers and a wide cherry-red smile that was a little sticky at the edges. She had worked at that bookstore for seventeen years and, today, looked outside to see a familiar sight looking in. The boy standing there, so close to the glass that his nose almost tapped the panes, was the quiet kind of unloved, she thought. Pinched and small and with clothes that didn't quite match his changeable eyes or savagely shorn hair. She'd thought, the first time she'd seen this boy and his reticent dæmon, that he was the kind of boy who would grow up to be quietly attractive; now, noting his narrow fingers curled around the strap of an expensive backpack and the lingering waifish-ness of him, she adjusted that assumption. He was going to grow up devastatingly handsome and with no idea of the power of that nervous smile and that dream-lost expression that was guaranteed to make him seem mysterious instead of lonely to any girl that paid attention long enough to notice him.
"You always stop here but never come in," she said to them, leaning from the door with the little bell above her head dinging sumptuously. Frozen, Spencer and Aureilo stared at her, the waft of air-conditioning from within the store pushing out the scent of paper and glue and dust. "Figure a boy like you, so excited about books, you ain't got any money to buy them, do you?"
Shy with strangers, neither of them answered her, Aureilo also avoiding eye-contact with the curious-eyed toad-dæmon on her shoulder.
"Well then," she finished, propping that door open and vanishing within, "if you decide you'd like to speak, little bunny-boy, come in. You can pick something out to keep, no charge."
Eventually, he'd take her up on that offer. She'd remark after he was gone about the strange boy with his rabbity-dæmon and his thick glasses and too-big backpack, and how odd it had been that she'd given him his pick of the stock and the only thing he'd wanted was a battered replication of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules.
.
5.
He punctuated each week with a letter like a period on the nothingness that had happened. Each one began and ended the same way: Dear Mom, we miss you. Love, Spencer & Aureilo.
Dutifully they were written, folded, tucked away in their hopeful envelopes with the postage affixed, and added to the mail pile on their father's desk. And, each week, they were dutifully swept away by William to be posted along with his own correspondence.
Diana never replied.
"Maybe this week, huh?" William said one week, noticing Spencer's letter stacked precariously in place as usual. His coyote-dæmon sniffed at it, bat-ears swivelling around to listen to Spencer's quiet I guess so from behind them. Aureilo shivered and said nothing. They suspected that their mother had lost them.
Every time they moved, which was often, William would reassure them that their mother's letters — if there were any — would find them, despite the address change. Spencer wasn't so sure. Despite this, he kept writing them. He had to.
Who else did he have to talk to?
He talked to Aureilo a lot. They moved beyond being silent since it was crushing, the noiselessness. They felt like they were drowning in it. Instead, they took to huddling together, a boy and his unsettled-dæmon — although, with the amount of time Aureilo spent as a hare, they may as well be settled — curled together under a house made of a blanket, eyes closed and reading to each other from the books they kept within their minds. All the stories that Diana had once read to them, before the day they'd packed their bags and left her behind.
They knew it was strange, that Aureilo was more like Spencer's friend than an innate part of his being, but they had to talk to each other; there was no one else.
Not the kids at school. They were a constantly shifting influx and outflux of changing faces and names as Spencer drifted from school to school, aimless and lost. The teachers barely had time to be surprised about his intelligence before there was another school, another new class, another I'm New! name-tag with his name scratched on it in blue ballpoint.
Not the teachers. They changed as often as the kids did. Usually only hanging around long enough to mention to William that Spencer really shouldn't be with the children in his year level, they couldn't challenge him adequately and he was bored and restless.
"No," William always replied, "He's going to be normal — he needs kids his age, not college textbooks and more distractions from life."
There was no talking to his father. William didn't want to know. "We'll settle down soon," he said, but they didn't.
"You'll understand why one day," he added after that, but Spencer doubted they ever would.
And the biggest lie of all: "You'll make friends soon."
Spencer did. Once. Just once.
His name was Ethan. He liked jazz music, miniature ponies, sour green apples, and he liked Spencer. They were friends within two days, best friends within a month, and, three months later, they were reluctant pen-pals as Spencer was, once again, moved on. But, this time, he had an inkling why.
"There's a woman asking for you in the office," Ethan had told him, finding him sitting in the library at lunch. "I heard them when I was getting a band-aid for this." This was a bug-bite that Ethan was proud of, his rat-dæmon on his hand pointing smugly to the wound; Spencer only had ears for the mysterious woman.
But, before he could ask further, they were summoned away. Their father came to get them.
They never did find out who the woman was, and they never saw Ethan again.