bakerstreet | The Daemon Meme

The Daemon Meme

THE DAEMON MEME

In the universe of the His Dark Materials trilogy (or the movie The Golden Compass), every person has a creature called a daemon that accompanies them all their lives, and is emotionally and metaphysically a part of them. Daemons are often described as sort of external souls (while the part of the personality in a human's body is the spirit).

Basic Daemon Facts:

- They take the shape of animals
- They can talk, no matter what their shape
- Children's daemons can change form at will; around puberty they 'settle' and become one animal permanently
- Neither the person or the daemon chooses the final settled form, but it always reflects their personality (although not necessarily in obvious or simple ways)
- They are almost always the opposite sex as their human
- If a daemon feels pain, so will their person, and vice versa
- Being physically apart from one's daemon causes horrible emotional and physical pain
- Daemons frequently talk to and touch each other, in ways that reflect or complement their persons' interactions, but daemons talking to humans other than their own is considered strange, and touching humans not their own is extremely taboo; it generally occurs only between long-time lovers. Touching someone else's daemon without permission is a terrible violation.

How it works:

- Just design a daemon for your muse and put as little or as much information as you like about them (shape, name, link to a picture or species wiki if you are so inclined) in a comment, with your muse's name and series in the subject.
- Check out other people's daemons and let your daemons interact too.

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Keel hardly moves when she feels vibrations in her paws - somebody out in the hall, probably checking that Ben was still alive - but she's not expecting something to come in through the flap that wasn't food.

She springs up, unsure about what to do about the animal - the daemon crawling up the inside of the door. The daemon was. Unusual. Nothing like she'd seen before, with the First Order, or here in the Citadel. Keel steps forward, standing over Ben's body protectively. She growls, dropping her head, but doesn't make any move to attack. She's not sure what to do at all, if she should attack or just wait, or what.

That growl gleaned a response, though it was relayed from Sting to Rey to the squad with her and over the comms to Leia, 'we've got one that's still alive.'

Sting was doing his best not to look like a threat, finally contorting himself enough to use a leg-frill to get one of the screws off the panel, just letting it ping to the floor and squeezing in ithrough the narrow gap, still clicking softly, something like echolocation until with a crackle of electronics, the lights dimmed to emergency power level and the door hissed open.

Rey was there, haloed in emergency lighting, staff in hand, and with a strike team behind her, she looked just a little startled when she realized who was in the cell, calling almost immediately for a medic.

Keel lunged with a snarl, snapping at the stranger that appeared in the doorway. All her hackles were up, but she didn't move from her position over Ben. Her entire body was tense, teeth bared. She wasn't going to let anybody take Ben away from her again. He was hers, and only hers, and if they took Ben again, she knew he would die. He wouldn't survive another barrage to his mind.

She lunged for the bug daemon that had let these people in, but it was too far away, and it would have left Ben open to being grabbed.

"Ma'am," one of the other humans said, reaching out to catch the arm of the woman standing in the doorway, weapon in hand. "You should be careful. Who knows what's been done to the prisoner."

Keel's tail was up, all her fur standing on end. She didn't think she could speak, even if she wanted to. All she wanted was for these people to leave Ben alone to rest.

Rey stood her ground, shaking off the hand, keeping her eyes on Keel even as she said: "Let go of me and get the medic. Don't you know who that is?" It was possible that they didn't, the only reason she did was because of Keel.

What she said next was to the Daemon, "You remember me, from Starkiller?" Perhaps reminding the daemon that she'd been the one who'd scarred Kylo's -or was he actually Ben now?- face wasn't the best idea, but it was all that she had, "Snoke is dead and the First Order with him. We're here to return you to the Resistance on General Organa's orders."

"I know who he is, but that daemon..." He looked to Keel. They all knew about Kylo Ren's daemon, who didn't care about the Taboo, who would bite and even kill humans for her master. Still, he gestured to one of the other fighters to get a medic.

Keel barely faltered at the orders, shifting her weight from foot to foot but didn't back off or down. She did recognize the woman. The desert rat who had slashed Ben's face open, nearly killed him herself. How was the Resistance any better? The Resistance wasn't going to help Ben. Ben had killed his own father, and Leia wouldn't just let Ben get away with that. Neither would this girl. No, as soon as Keel stepped away, she'd just kill Ben. Or keep him and torture him.

She snarled louder and this time moved fully in front of Ben instead of straddling him, so she could maneuver better if the woman tried to come into the room to take Ben.

Rey had enough sense to stay where she was at least, knowing better than to move closer, knew better than to make herself an obvious threat, though she also knew better than to do something stupid like put her staff down.

"I understand what you've both been through." She said, "Some of it at least." Coercion hadn't worked on her, thought it might have, if Snoke had started on her as young as he'd started on Ben, so the would-be Sith Lord had resorted to brute force, and Rey's ears were still ringing hollowly from that sort of pressure against her mind.

"While I can't promise much, what I can promise is that no one is going to try and keep you apart." She'd see to that herself if she had to.

"I'm not going to let you take him," she finally managed to say around a snarl. "You people have done enough to him, he needs to rest." He needed to be left alone and to let recover, not dragged all over and tortured even more.

The medics arrived into the hallway as well, the soldiers moving aside to let them through. "Lady Rey," one of them said, peering around Rey and into the room. One look at Ben's state and he said, quietly, "We need to get in there or he won't make it. It might be too late anyways."

"It isn't." She replied to the medic, no small edge of steel in her tone, and she nodded once, though the nod wasn't for Keel or for the medic, but for Sting who had quietly, carefully made his way along the doorframe until he was over Keel's head, dropping to land between her ears, giving a quiet apology before his stinger whipped around to get her in the side of the face, where blood vessels were closer to the surface and would distribute the venom more quickly. It wasn't fatal, far from it, but it was a hefty sedative.

Rey, knowing that it would take a good ten or fifteen seconds to work, was already backing up, herding the group behind her along with, just in case Keel went on the attack in retaliation.

Keel barely registered the voice in her ear before the pain at the side of her head. She threw her head and screamed, then flung herself forward. She could instantly feel her legs getting heavy, but she wasn't going to go down without a fight.

She impacts the little pack of humans and bites as hard as she can, and feels cloth and skin give under her teeth.

But before she can bite again, the heaviness gets worse and she hits the floor. Darkness rushes in and claims her completely. She'd failed Ben. He and she were going to die, because she had failed.

In the aftermath, it's one of the soldiers who is on the ground screaming in pain from deep punctures to the thigh, and a very possibly broken femur. One of the medics stays to patch him up, while the others head into the cell, stepping clear of the now unconscious hyena.

Keel was massive, her fur matted, and her teeth and jaws were now gory with blood. She was also skinny from stress and Ben's lack of proper nutrition.

Rey was the only one who felt comfortable in handling Keel, they had to put her in a crate just to make sure there wouldn't be another attack, despite Rey's assurances that Sting's venom would keep her down for hours, especially with as badly off as Kylo, as Ben was.

They didn't leave her in the crate once they were back in the medical wing on D'Qar, she was allowed to stay at Ben's side, muzzled while he was strapped down, something that was, arguably, for their own protection as much as anyone else's.

Once she'd finished compiling the reports of the attack, Leia, Sunrider on her shoulder where he often was, had gone down to the medical wing herself, utterly unafraid, and while she heeded both the medic and the security personnel's warnings, she still dragged a chair over beside the cot, hesitant just for a moment before reaching over to curl her fingers around Ben's hand.

It was Keel who woke up first, of course. She woke slowly, then all at once, jerking and trying to move. She's heavy with the poison, still, but she can kick her legs and lift her head. Keel looks around and sees Ben first. He... looks better. He's not quite so deathly pale, and his breathing is more even and-- there's something around her face.

Keel starts all over again, tries to open her mouth and fails, then drags a paw over her head and fails to free the muzzle. She yelps unhappily then whines. Ben might not be dead, but she's muzzled. Keel thrashes again, rolls, and this time it's backwards off of the cot. There's a brief moment of weightlessness, and then she hits the floor, hard. She springs back up with a pained snarl, shaking her head and body in another attempt to get off the muzzle.

It takes her a minute to give up, frustrated, before she decides she'd rather be with Ben. As she's putting her paws on the edge of the cot to jump up, though, she finds herself staring at somebody she hadn't seen in a long time, in another shape. Leia. Their mother.

Keel freezes. She's holding Ben's hand, and Sunrider is on her shoulder, and she looks tired.

Leia had winced when her son's Daemon -or what had become of her- moved, and had been about to warn her about the edge of the cot when she was already tumbling from it.

She decided it would be easier to just wait out the realization as to the muzzle being secure, "It's alright." She said quietly when the Hyena's head rose over the edge of the cot again, "Stay with him. He needs you more than he needs me right now." And even though that was the case, she wasn't leaving, either.

Keel hesitates a moment longer, then pulls herself up all the way. She turns in a neat circle then lays down, head on Ben's belly, looking at Leia. She looks... so much older now. Sunrider looks just as implacable as she remembered him being, but it's been so long since she'd last seen either their mother or her daemon.

She can't really open her mouth to speak, so instead she tries to pull the muzzle off again. She's not about to abandon Ben, not after everything. But she has questions. Namely she says, voice stilted and muffled, "Take this off of me." She wasn't about to bite Leia, or Sunrider, she'd been protecting Ben before. But for now, at least, he didn't seem to be in any danger.

She arched a brow at the hyena for a moment, and while she knew everyone would advise against it, she also knew that Sunrider would defend her if necessary. And she didn't think it would be necessary.

Even still she hesitated, just for a moment, before unfastening the muzzle, latches clicking open in three places, careful just to touch the muzzle itself and not the daemon's head, "There's a bandage, too." She said, "I'll leave that there, it's to help with the swelling from the venom."

[Literally the minute after a log out of this account so i can do a tag for another muse you post LOL]

Keel holds perfectly still as Leia reaches for her face. Keel isn't afraid of the Taboo, but it didn't mean that other humans and daemons weren't. But the muzzle comes off easily, and she leans her head back again and shakes as best as she can, the thick fur of her mane whipping around. She takes a second to rub her face with the inside of a paw, then lifts her head again.

"What do you want with Ben," she asks, scooting up closer to him and curling a paw over him protectively. "You killed Snoke, you don't need anything from him, and I won't let anybody hurt him." She wouldn't. And if that bug daemon came near her again and tried to sting her, she would bite him and crush him to bits.

[I'm magic that way!]

Leia wasn't generally concerned with the Taboo when it came to family, but the last time she'd seen Keel the daemon had still been capable of shifting shape, though already tended to favor something smaller than what she was now.

"No one's going to hurt him." She replied, sounding tired more than anything, "And I know he isn't going to be the son I remember, but I hope there's at least something we can do to help him recover some part of himself, repair some of the damage Snoke did."

"He just needs rest," she said a bit hurriedly. "Snoke broke him. He... needs to rest and let his mind heal. He's still there, I know he is." She lets out a whine, involuntarily. Ben remembered everything. He knew the memories Snoke had robbed him of, knew just how deep the roots into his mind went... Even now, Ben was dreaming listlessly about Han, trying to reconcile his own actions with what the truth had been all along, he just hadn't known. "He doesn't need to be poked at. Just let him sleep."

She nodded, "Rest is definitely something we can allow him." And was, aside from had already been done to treat the physical injuries, really the only thing they could do for him that might be of any actual help.

She kept her hand curled around Ben's, and Sunrider dipped his head to tuck the stray end of wine-colored ribbon wound through her hair back into place. It was an old, even ancient, Alderaanian sign of mourning, and one that she'd been wearing for some time, since she'd gotten confirmation of Han's death, not that she'd needed such a thing, she'd felt it.

Keel's gaze was caught by the ribbon, and she looked away. "Snoke... took his memories. Mine, too. He... deprived Ben of love, so he would be easy to manipulate. After he woke up from being dragged off of Starkiller, he started to remember. That broke him, too. And then Snoke found out, and... did this to Ben."

She tucked her nose in to the crook of Ben's neck, breathed in his scent, tried to steady herself.

"I was afraid of that." Or something like that, at any rate. They hadn't known, not for sure, and to find that the reality was very nearly her worst-case scenario didn't help ease her mind in the slightest.

She could only hope that with Snoke well and truly gone, that Ben would at least have some chance at recovery.

"He regrets what he did," Keel says quietly. "It's tearing him up, being unable to come to terms with killing him..." She closes her eyes. "All he wants is his father, but... that's impossible now. I saw his daemon turn to Dust... watched Starkiller implode from the Finalizer..." Han Solo was dead, and she wasn't sure if Ben was ever going to be able to recover from that enough to wake up.

The regret was almost something she'd been hoping for, because it meant that Ben wasn't wholly lost to her and she just nodded, clasping his hand carefully between her own.

"The Republic hasn't yet fully recovered from the destruction of the Hosnian system." She said, quietly, as much for Keel's sake as to cement the facts in her own mind, "And as far as anyone knows, Kylo Ren was destroyed along with Starkiller, and no one knows what happened to Ben Solo. There's been speculation, of course, always speculation, but no one knows. Not for sure." She took a deep breath to steady herself, "We'll figure something out."

"We tried to escape. But Snoke noticed and overwhelmed him until the First Order could come and get him." Keel scoots forward just a little more, nudging Leia's hand with her nose.

She's almost ashamed, to want touch from anybody but Ben. But he can't pet her, can't talk to her, can't scratch his fingers into her thick mane. But Leia... could. If she wanted. "I think he wants to atone for what he did. I know I do."

She hesitated, only briefly, at that nudge, but didn't move her hand away, and when Sunrider shifted a little higher on her shoulder she nodded, running her fingers up over the hyena's muzzle and the top of her head, the touch gentle, careful, not quite sure what the reception would be.

She nodded at the statement, however, "Then that's what we'll allow him, and you, once he's had a chance to recover from his injuries."

Keel leans into the touch and sighs, eyes drifting closed. "Thank you," she says, breathing out. It's tough to relax, but she does manage. "I don't... like this form. Snoke forced me to shift, after we arrived at the Citadel. But I wanted to be something nobody would mess with, that could protect Ben..." She'd been so much happier in the form that was identical to Han's daemon. But this was what she was, now. But a small terrier wasn't threatening, no matter how scrappy and stubborn she was.

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