A/N: So. This was started in a Tumblr post by scrollingdown which I responded to with a story idea and have since not actually been able to stop. If you want to learn more about daemons they're from a book series called 'His Dark Materials', and there's a good wiki page about them that I apparently cannot link here, sorry about that.
Tanizah/Tansy is a female American badger and her name means 'persistent'. Esther is a female ringtailed lemur whose name means 'star', and Connolaoth is a male hare whose name means 'pure fire'.
Warnings for this chapter: emotional distress, reference to suicide.
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In Which Tim W. Goes Home
The worst part about waking up after one of his episodes hungry and tired and alone was the alone. Tim had no idea what was wrong with him any more than the doctors' had, but he knew it must be pretty fucking bad to be able to separate him from Tanizah. That should never happen. He should be dead from being so far apart from her. When he wakes up away from her like this he can feel her absence like a bullet hole in the side of his head.
Sometimes he would wake up in his car, and that was marginally better because then he could just break speed limits and the pain would be over within minutes. But more often than not there were times like this, when he'd have to stumble through fields and woods, unsure of what day or month it was and where he was going, his entire brain occupied with getting back to her.
On foot or in his car, when he finally reached his neighbourhood again he could hear her calling to him from down the street. (Except it was less of a call and more of an anguished howl.)
At first she'd been trapped inside their house, forced to wait until he came and opened the door for her. But the third time in as many months that he had come back like this she had actually met him on the road. She'd been wild-eyed and breathing heavily, with loose plaster stuck to her short grey fur. He found out later that she'd clawed and dug her way through the side of their house, inch by inch, until she had gotten free and went to find him. He didn't repair the damage, just stuck a board in front of the hole. After that she always met him out at the road, and while there was no more plaster in her fur her eyes never got less wide and dark with misery.
When he got close enough to her he knelt without even thinking about it. She scrambled from the ground into his arms. Her claws punctured and tore his jacket and sometimes his skin but Tim was so incredibly far beyond giving a single fuck that it didn't even register to him. He felt horrible, and he could feel her feeling his feeling horrible on top of her own fear and grief, which only made him feel worse.
And she never asked him where he had gone. And she never demanded that he never do that to her ever again. (Tim knew she knew that he couldn't promise that, no matter how much literally every part of his conscious brain screamed to.)
Instead she would press her furry face into the side of his neck and urge him to stand. And he would. He'd stagger upright and get the both of them the few dozen more feet to his front door. If he could actually bring himself to unwrap one of his arms from around her in order to reach his keys he'd unlock the door and they'd be able to get inside before sinking to the floor and simply clutching each other. A lot of times he couldn't even do that, though. They'd both just sit there, in front of their house in the dirt, until the bleeding stopped.
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