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."
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Aaron Hotchner had once sat on the sidelines at his cousin's birthday party because he couldn't decide whether he wanted to play party games with one group of excited children or tag with another. Instead, he'd moodily slouched against the wall of his uncle's house while his daemon snuffled around his legs in the form a badger, huffing at anyone who came too close.
Grandmamma wandered over to him clicking her tongue at his flushed face and running a cool hand over his forehead, wiping a lock of wayward hair back from dark eyes. "You're not very good at knowing what you want," she commented with a sharp gleam in her eyes, and Aaron had shrugged.
He never really outgrew that.
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"Your daemon still hasn't settled." The school psychologist eyed him over narrow glasses, a slight look of distaste around her mouth.
Aaron fought the urge to kick her under the table as she carefully avoided looking at Halaimon. Hal was flickering at a rapid pace through a startling variety of animals, each displaying Aaron's irate mood. Her daemon, a barred owl, clucked his beak a few times and rustled heavy feathers in obvious disapproval.
At seventeen, Hal should have settled years ago. But Aaron rarely did what was expected of him; why would his daemon would be any different?
"It says here your brother's daemon settled two years ago, and he's younger than you." There was that desire to kick her again as she rattled off the bane of his life.
Why can't you be more like your brother? Why are you so serious, why are you so cold? You're a disappointment, Aaron.
"I'm not my brother," he muttered to the glossy surface of her desk. Hal shifted into a crow and made a harsh noise of agreement.
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Aaron had left home as soon as he was able, and never looked back.
Which was why Sean on his doorstep in the middle of the night when he had finals the next day was a surprise, and not a welcome one.
"Why are you here?" Aaron had asked, moving aside with a raised eyebrow to let his brother in, his daemon gambolling playfully around his ankles.
"What? Can't I visit my big brother without there being some dark reason?" Sean said with a snort, stopping dead at the sight of Hal sprawled near Aaron's bed. "Woah, she settled big."
Aaron looked from Sean's slim, cheerful daemon to his own watching the proceedings with cold eyes, and shrugged. "She's some sort of shepherd dog. They get big."
Sean knew him better than to believe that he didn't know exactly what his daemon was, but he also knew better than to pry.
"Can I stay here for a while?" he said later night after a few beers and Aaron warily agreed, even as Hal bared long fangs at the otter in a silent command for them to keep their distance.
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"What's your daemon?" asked the FBI recruiter on the first day of Aaron's training, his pen poised over the intake paperwork.
Aaron thought of the work he'd soon be doing, dangerous and thrilling and for the first time something he wanted more than anything.
"She's a wolf," he told the man quietly and Hal rumbled in agreement.
Halaimon - grey wolf, the form said in clear print for everyone to see.
"What does it matter what they call me anyway?" Hal asked later that night. Aaron didn't answer.
When the other trainees introduced themselves to him, he told them to call him Hotch. There was a lot of power in names, even if Hal didn't see it. Aaron had a dog daemon and everyone compared him to his brother.
Hotch had a wolf daemon and no one questioned him.
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He wasn't sure what to make of the new team member Gideon had insisted on, all gangly limbs and wide eyes; his ridiculous hair flopping into his eyes and guaranteeing the kid would never be able to get off a clear shot - assuming he ever qualified for a weapon anyway.
"I dunno, Hotch," Morgan said out of the corner of his mouth, watching Gideon talking to the kid in his office. "He looks like he's going to get himself killed in the field." His daemon, a boxer dog with a powerful, muscular body, leaned against his leg and rumbled deep in her throat with unspoken agreement.
Hotch let one hand fall onto Hal's rough head, an easy feat considering his daemon's height, and made a non-committal noise.
"Give him a chance," he suggested. "He might surprise us all."
Gideon emerged from his office with his hawk daemon perched on his shoulder and a wide grin on his face, the cocky one that Hotch always hated. "I'd like to introduce you all to Dr. Spencer Reid," he announced, shoving the man forward even as he tried to hang back.
"Where's his daemon?" Hal said in a voice low enough that only Hotch could hear. There was no animal perched on the man's cardigan or hanging out of a pocket, the ground around his feet clear. Hotch frowned, and made a mental note to ask him if he had an insect daemon and a proper safety case for the creature to travel in.
In the end, that turned out to be the least mysterious thing about Spencer Reid.
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It was their first case with the new kid, and Hotch felt a small tinge of apprehension at letting the strange and somewhat off-putting Dr. Reid out into the field. It was a feeling that wasn't changed in any way when a Volvo that looked like it had seen more years than Hotch pulled up next to him at the airfield and the Doctor himself stepped out.
"Agent Hotchner," Dr. Reid greeted him nervously, nodding his head as he got out the car. "Halaimon," he added, repeating the gesture towards the large daemon at Hotch's side.
Hotch froze in shock. It was an unspoken rule that people didn't talk to other people's daemons unless given express permission. For his newest colleague have done so in such a casual manner was startling, to say the least.
A flash of brown by the younger man's feet drew his attention away from the social misstep as a creature darted out of the car and bounded off to vanish into the shrubbery at the side of the carpark before Hotch could even get a clear view. "What was that?" he said, forgetting his irritation, Hal twitching with surprise.
Dr. Reid shrugged indifferently, leaning into his car to get his go-bag and nudging the door shut with his hip. "Aureilo. He'll be back before we board. Have you got the case notes?"
He was right. Hotch had barely settled into his chair on the jet when the creature reappeared, bouncing easily up the steps and eyeing the cabin with her head tilted to one side.
Hotch noted that she was small. Then he noted how pretty she was. He felt surprise for neither of these things.
"She's a rabbit," Morgan commented, lowering the casefile and grinning at the lanky creature. "Suits you, Pretty Boy."
Reid gave Morgan a strange look at the nickname, even as his daemon shook her fur out angrily and stood upright on her hind-legs. "I am most certainly not," the daemon hissed in what was unmistakably a masculine voice. "I'm very clearly a European Hare, and most assuredly not a she."
Reid kept calmly reading through his file as everyone looked from him to his daemon, his eyes never leaving the page.
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Reid didn't talk very often but Aureilo did, when he bothered to be present anyway. Anytime he wasn't, Reid would wander around with an oddly vacant gaze as though half his mind was somewhere else.
He was still brilliant though, even more so when he had his daemon to compliment his reservations, and at some point they stopped caring that there was no guarantee whether a question aimed at Reid would be answered by him or by his daemon.
Hotch wasn't sure when he'd started to respect the man in his own right, but it may have been around the point that Reid had shot a man in the forehead to save both their lives without Hotch ever having to say a word.
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Hotch leapt out of the car with his heart hammering in his throat, his daemon two steps behind as they raced to the house. Hal charged ahead, tasting the air. He was only half aware of the rest of the team spreading out, Morgan and Prentiss racing for the barn with their daemons beside them.
"This way," Hal barked, turning on a dime and bounding towards the cornfield. Hotch followed her, his hand on his weapon and adrenaline charging through his veins.
He'd sent Reid and JJ out here. If something had happened to them, it's his fault.
He caught up to his daemon staring down at the trodden stalks and earth with wide, worried eyes. "Someone was dragged," Gideon said softly, his hawk wheeling high above, keen eyes searching for their missing colleagues.
"Spencer," breathed Hal, nostrils flaring over a dark splatter of blood on the ground, and her voice light with an emotion he'd never heard her express before. "That bastard has taken Spencer and Aureilo."
She was scared.
So was he.
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They're spread out around Hankel's house, desperately searching for anything that could possibly lead them to their missing friend, when Hal snuffed the air and gave a wild, startling bark. Their guns were out in seconds, but it asn't fear that slammed into Hotch like a freight train when his daemon trotted over to the door and nuzzled the creature that limped in.
"Aureilo," he said, relief crashing through him. If the hare was here, Reid was too. The nightmare was over.
The daemon staggered further into the room, soft fur mattered with foamy sweat and leaving a damp trail of blood from damaged paws. "I tried to chase the car," he slurred, slumping onto his side and laying horribly, terribly still, the only sign of life in the laboured rise and fall of his sides.
Hotch couldn't think for the crushing dread that followed those words, head whirling with the implications. That bastard took Reid and not his daemon. He'd severed them. He'd killed them.
They'd die. Deaddeaddead, chanted a jeering voice in his head, the bitter first-hand knowledge of what happened to a person separated from his daemon the subject of many tragic cases previously. No one else in the room moved, humans and daemons all frozen in the grief of the moment, everyone expecting the hare to vanish into a shower of gold dust at any second.
They hadn't said goodbye.
Hal whined deeply and curled her huge body protectively around the fragile form, nosing it gently, tongue caressing the bloodied paws.
She raised her head and bared white fangs at the inhabitants of the room. "They're not dead yet!" she snarled, turning her muzzle toward Hotch. "You can still find him! Move!"
They do.
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He was standing next to the body of the bastard that had taken him and looking at them with an expression that belonged on a much older man, as though he wasn't quite sure where he was or what was happening anymore.
Hotch wanted nothing more than to grab him and shake that vacancy out of his expression; to stop him from looking so much like someone severed from reality.
Aureilo lay immobile in Hotch's car, curled up deeply asleep in the backseat, still destroyed from his desperate attempts to get to Reid before the unsub took him. And Hotch didn't dare pick the light body up and carry him out here to this nightmarish place, even if the end result was placing him in Reid's arms.
Reid staggered towards him, shaking and pale. "I knew you'd understand," he gasped, collapsing against his chest. Hotch drew his arms around him and squeezed tightly, letting out a breath he hadn't been aware of holding.
He was alive. He was talking. God knew how, but he was okay.
Hal squeezed in beside them and pushed her heavy head against Reid's leg, whining uncharacteristically, needy in her demand for attention. Reid hesitated for a moment, eyes flickering up to Hotch almost as though to ask for permission, before dropping a trembling hand down to run gently down the canine's fur.
Hotch shivered but didn't say anything.
Somehow, nothing about Spencer Reid surprised him anymore.