Author's Note: What do you suppose it would be like, to have a constant companion, all to yourself, all yours? Another being who is your other half, your soul, yourself. I wonder if it would make you more daring when you have a fellow conspirator, more content with an always friend, more cruel with another to justify your cruelness, or more true to yourself with your soul always there to speak from your heart.

Warnings: This is written in a prompt-response format following a list of themed words. Will be posted in a chronological order. A side-project that is wholly exploratory and not plotted much at all.

The Silver Lining
Harry Potter X His Dark Materials

01 Names

When Harry Potter is born, his mother names him for his father, James. James gives him the name Harry, "because of that scruff on his head!" A reason for which Lily swats him, but James is unrepentant and their son is thus named.

It is Lily's daemon Ffionn who names the new child's daemon. It is a puffy little chick of some indeterminate breed and clings tightly to the newborn's ear with its little clawed feet. It is terribly small, small enough to curl up in the hollow of the boy's ear and its feathers are nothing but a dull grey fuzz. The daemon's eyes are sealed shut and it peeps weakly every time Harry shifts beneath its grasp.

"Neelofar," Ffionn says in her light voice. "For the waterlily, for you, Lils. He ought to be named for you, too."

Lily smiles at her little son and trails her fingers over his fuzzy head. Harry merely snuggles deeper into her chest, his arms and legs curled up beneath his body. "So his daemon will carry my name?"

"I like it," James pipes up from his spot curled around his wife. He is slumped rather bonelessly, his long legs dangling off the bed with one arm pinned beneath his wife's body and the other holding onto his son's foot as if he can't quite let him go. James' eyes are closed and he's taking up more of the pile of pillows on the bed than Lily is, but Lily, despite the birthing, is wide awake and awed by the precious bundle in her arms. James' Heortwiella is already asleep, the red deer curled across her human's feet with her forelegs hanging off the edge of the bed.

"So he knows he's yours, too," Ffionn says, propping her forelegs up on the bed so she can press her nose ever-so-lightly to the tiny chick's. It peeps at the contact and the sound is so bird-like that they can't even be sure of the daemon's gender. And they are only unsure because of Lily and Ffionn, and that they are both female and that is awfully rare.

"So he'll know that he is loved," Lily says.

ooo

Harry, nor his daemon, would remember the name given to the little chick and it would be many years before someone bothered to tell him of the name bestowed with so much care upon them.

ooo

Harry doesn't know that it isn't normal until his first day at Primary School.

He is five and Dudley is only thirty-eight days older but that's enough for Dudley Dursley to announce that he's the boss as soon as Aunt Petunia leaves them on the little enclosed playground of the school. Dudley's daemon Petal is a little pug with white and brown fur and she scowls at Harry's daemon, who hasn't moved from his shirt since Petunia rapped on the cupboard door that morning. She's a tiny little brown spider, and while Petal probably only knows that she always hides in Harry's shirt, Harry can feel her eight tiny feet tickling the skin over his chest.

"Don't you ferget, freak boy," Dudley says to him, pointy a pudgy finger at him in a weak imitation of the way Aunt Petunia had waved her finger at Harry just moments ago. Harry isn't impressed by his cousin, though, because Uncle Vernon is at least five of Dudley and a lot more scary to boot. So Harry just gives his cousin a flat look and bounds away from him towards the colorful conglomerate of playground equipment. Its plastic and bright and new and Harry has never been down a slide before and he's dying to try it.

There's a line of three other kids waiting for their turn on the yellow slide, and one of them is already hanging off the railings on either side of the ladder that takes them up to the top. He's a blonde-haired kid with big eyes and he's leaning way backwards in order to talk to the pig-tailed girl behind him. She's scowling at him, and he's grinning, and their daemons are already wrestling with each either in a tangle of fur clad bodies. Harry thinks one of them is a cat.

He sidles up to the third kid, a pudgy boy, but not nearly as pudgy as Dudley. He's watching the other two snipe at each other from a safe distance while still being in line. Harry peers around his shoulder at the two arguing in time to hear the blonde boy call the girl a pansy and the girl to take a swipe at him. She misses because the blonde leans back into the ladder of the slide and suddenly sprints up it. His daemon follows him in the form of some long-bodied thing that looks like a cross between a cat and Dudley's hamster that didn't last the month.

"What's going on?" Harry asked quietly.

The boy in front of him jumps and squeaks, but Harry isn't sure if that was the boy or his daemon who is a hamster that looks remarkably like the one that didn't survive Dudley and Petal. She's peaking out from the boy's collar with a wide-eyed twitching look.

"Oh," the boy says, as if calming from a particularly bad scare. "That's Piers," he says, pointing at the blonde boy who is perched atop the yellow slide and is still taunting the girl, "and Bethany."

The boy looks at him askance. "Do you now Piers?"

Harry shakes his head and smiles, which seems to settle the boy a lot.

"Hullo, I'm Nigel," he says.

"Harry."

"Hi!" Nigel repeats, then glances at the hamster in his shirt. "This is Pika."

Harry blinks at the little hamster as she looks all over his person for his own daemon. Nigel does this too, even going so far as to look all around him on the ground for Harry's missing partner. She finally crawls slowly out of his shirt, one little leg at a time in a snail's pace. Nigel's Pika sees her first and exclaims as the little spider comes into view. She changes for them, into the shape of a little mouse and perches on Harry's shoulder, clinging to the collar of his big t-shirt as if ready to dash back into hiding.

"Hi," she says, very quietly.

Nigel beams and Harry is sure that Pika does too. It's Pika who asks the question. "What's your name?"

Harry and his daemon don't have an answer for them, though. Harry's daemon has never had a name, not like Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and their special son, Dudley. Their daemons have always had names. Harry has never known his daemon to have a name of her own and hadn't thought it was strange, before. Harry hadn't known his own name until he was like three, or four maybe. It wasn't all so long ago really...

But as Nigel and Pika continue to stare at him, Harry finally figures out that it isn't normal. He can tell by the way Nigel and Pika are looking at them. His daemon ought to have a name.

Harry is saved by Dudley and its one of those situations that isn't really any better, but it is a familiar problem. Dudley's grip on his shoulder is hard and the bigger boy is able to push him to the ground without much effort. The suddenness of it causes Harry's daemon to loose her grip and tumble across the sand and Petal strikes quickly, shifting from pug to fat cat and snatching her up in her jaws. She squeals in protest of the handling and Harry cries out, feeling the uncomfortable pressure of the grip Petal has on his daemon.

"No, Petal!" Harry calls as the cat scampers out of his reach, scurrying behind Dudley's feet. "Let her go!"

Harry's daemon writhes, despite the discomfort and Petal tightens her hold, using her claws now too and Harry clenches his teeth against the pain that he feels through their connection. The blonde boy from the slide sidles up next to Dudley, and Harry finds both of the looking down at him in perverse joy. But the discomfort through his bond to his daemon distracts Harry from their taunts.

"Oh, leave him be!" Bethany says, but she doesn't move from her position halfway up the ladder of the slide, as if she's reluctant to give up her position - either as the next in line or for the safety the height gives her.

Finally, Harry's daemon has enough and changes shape, shifting from tiny little mouse into a bear cub and takes a heavy swipe at Petal's house cat face. Petal drops her, more from surprise than pain, and Harry's daemon scrabbles wildly in the sand to return to him, her rotund shape slowing her.

Dudley screams from the hit, a high-pitched wail of a cry that brings the teachers down on them in an instant and Harry is hauled to his feet for a scolding about keeping his clothing clean while his daemon simultaneously gets a scolding from the teacher's daemon about etiquette. His teacher's daemon is a long-legged bird with an equally long neck and beak and she barks out harsh instructions to the sullen bear cub even as Harry weathers the scolding from the woman gripping his shoulder.

Dudley nurses his face and snuggles his daemon, who is a little pug pup once again, both of them sniffling dramatically. Harry nurses the bruised feeling he has in his ribs and the actual bruises that his daemon has from Petal's harsh bite on her.

He keeps silent throughout the entire thing, nodding only to appease the teacher's need for a response. He does not speak again for the rest of the day and his daemon disappears into his hair as a black spider the moment Aunt Petunia shows up at the gates to escort them back home.

Dudley tells the woman everything about his day, his false stories structured to make him look clever and good and wonderful and Harry as anything but. Harry ignores the glower his Aunt gives him when Dudley tells her about the incident on the playground and how Harry's daemon attacked Petal when Harry wanted to take over the slide from all the rest of the schoolyard children and how Dudley tried to stop him and save them all from his freakishness -

Harry is locked away into his cupboard with no dinner as soon as they get home.

ooo

There's a dictionary in his cupboard, a big book with only little black and white pictures that Dudley announced to be boring and so Harry had inherited it. Harry flips through it randomly, letting the large pages flap and turn as gravity would catch them. His daemon stops them by suddenly scampering out of his shirt and into the book, her little mouse body getting lost in the big pages of the book. Harry pulls the pages apart to find her again, and she's perched atop the book in the form of some long-legged mouse that looks almost like a rabbit, but with a longer tail and a lot smaller of a body. She's different from the form she had hiding in his shirt and he takes a moment to study it. She is golden haired, with long round ears, a mouse's face and little front arms but with a rabbit's rear legs and a long tale that sports a tuft of hair at its end.

"A fawn hopping mouse," she tells him. "I saw it on the telly once."

"Don't let Dudley or Petal hear you say that," Harry tells her. "Vernon'll nail a black curtain over the slats." Harry points to the small window in the cupboard door that is guarded by narrow horizontal slats. They let in a little air and less light, but they are enough for them to peer out into the house. From opposite angles he can see into both the living room and through the doorway into the kitchen. He'd hate to have them covered up if Uncle Vernon knew he could see the telly in the living room from his cupboard.

"Of course!" She hops once on the page, her long rear legs flopping against the paper. "Oh, look!" She points to an entry of the dictionary. The book had stopped and opened in the B's. She is pointing to one particular word, and there, sitting between 'bicarbonate of soda' and 'bicentenary' is the word 'bice.'

"I like this one," she says and Harry reads through the definition, happily skipping the parts of the dictionary entry that he didn't fully understand to read the parts that he did.

"Of the color of mal- malachite. Blue. Green. Or of a green hue," he reads.

"I like this one," his daemon says again, with a nod of her little head. And suddenly she's a little bird with a long, needle beak and brightly colored feathers in a kaleidoscope of greens and blues.

She nods again, her long beak emphasizing the motion in an almost hilarious way and she flies up with an audible buzz to flit around his head, her wings going so fast that they are a blur.

"Bice?" he asks. She gives a happy sound that settles between a chirp and a weeeee and continues to buzz around him. "Ok," he says, and shrugs. "I like it too, Bice."

Harry smiles as he watches her circle and call out happy little cheeps and finally, his Daemon has a name of her own.

ooo

"Do you think mum gave you a name, before, like every other kids' mums?"

"Maybe so. I think so. Yes."

...

"What do you think it was?"

"Something beautiful."