I own nothing but this laptop and the dog that is supposed to be warming my toes. Oh, and the voices in my head.. or maybe they own me..


Bucky always said that Adrasteia would Settle as something big and scary. Steve strokes her graceful blonde head, she was big enough to carry him in this form. All lanky muscles and powerful shoulders and jaws. And Settled. People always talked about how it made everything seem right, that something just clicked inside them when they looked at the Daemon by their side and saw what they really were. But Steve was just confused. But it was somehow nice, knowing this hulking cat was his soul, as she looked up at him with exasperated brown eyes.

"Stop your fussing Steve. I'm perfect." She purred and Steve smiled, refusing to think about how the nuns would frown and mutter about wild animals as Daemons and about the space she now took up.

She couldn't sit on his shoulder a monkey or a cat anymore, with a flicking tail tickling his ear as she watched him draw. But she was big, bigger than any Daemon he'd ever seen except for the Elephant daemon of that traveler that hadn't even stayed for a day because his Daemon wouldn't fit anywhere. But Adrasteia was right, she was perfect. Dangerous and scary with the same soft eyes he'd grown up with.

Bucky would curse up a storm, using all the language he'd learned from hanging out with the soldiers. Probably mutter that he always knew. And his Sari would take the form of a Blue Jay just to proudly, affectionately scold them.

Not many bullies would stand up against the boy with the snarling daemon almost as tall as him. Adrasteia growled in approval, as if she liked this idea more than any of his others. And Steve supposed that it wasn't any surprise that the shape of his soul confused him when the rest of her always had. Because Adrasteia wasn't like him, she enjoyed the fight rather than just viewing it as justice, she laughed and taunted Daemons without the thought of how dangerous it was. Encouraged him into disobedience and trouble with glittering eyes.

Maybe the people that theorized that a Daemon was a mixture of the hidden parts of your personality and what you need them to be was correct. But it didn't change the fact that people started walking on eggshells around him when Adrasteia turned into a Hyena just to laugh. Well she couldn't do that now. She was settled, and though they didn't know it, they would go off to war together. Her powerful, terrifying but nurturing shape would make Doctor Erskine with his Iguana Daemon choose them for the experiment, and his Daemon would no longer dwarf him. He'd miss that. But then they'd freeze in the Antarctic sea and wake up in the future with Adrasteia snarling for her Pride, because these people weren't hers. But they would be. They just didn't know it yet.


Details can be found on my Deviantart account, my username is Sablehaven.

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