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Jonathan Vangelis was a late settler, his daemon flitting from shape to shape well into his first, awful, horridly wrong turn at puberty.
It was a common joke, how fitting that was for him. That girl couldn’t slow down long enough to settle if she tried, his father had once said, a cruel sneer behind his words that the other bar patrons either overlooked or didn’t notice as they laughed along with him.
Jonny had laughed at it, too, at first. In that strained way that one laughs at jokes that might have been funny the first couple times but got old right quick. A laugh which tasted bitter. Adora never really seemed to mind it, he should know, but it began to grate on him more and more as they grew.
As he fell, further and further from what she thought they should be.
In his more resentful moments, he wondered how they could be so opposed in this. She was his daemon. His soul. Should she not be on his side in everything? Just them, a whole in two parts, united against the world?
Of course, it didn’t work like that. She just gave voice to that part of him that railed against his every misdeed. Screamed at him to be better, to do something worthy with his life. To take the trade he had learned sitting, silent and overlooked, by his mother’s side and build himself a life, far away from the desert heat and cracked city streets.
But that was never to be his fate.
With a father like his, how could it?
“That’s unfair,” Adora’s voice cut through his thoughts, harsh as her blazing, golden glare. No matter her form, she always seemed to choose something with golden eyes. “Don’t matter that he’s the worst excuse for a father ever to walk this God-forsaken planet, he ain’t forcing you to do shit.”
His face pulled into a soundless snarl, and he turned away from her.
She’s right, whispered a voice that wasn’t hers in the back of his mind. She’s right, and you know it.
He silenced it brutal efficiency and turned back to the shirt he was mending, determined to pretend, for just a moment, that he had no daemon to speak of.
‘Jonny, please, just think. This isn’t- This is different. This won’t- This will haunt our steps for the rest of our life.’
‘Don’t care.’
‘No, no, you do. You can’t lie to me, I know you do!’
‘Don’t matter.’
‘Jonathan Vangelis for once in your God-damned life would you-’
The shot rang out, and she fell silent.
His world tilted sideways, and something shifted into place with a gentleness that seemed a mockery.
I forgive you, son, he would one day tell people his father had said, as he lay dying on the floor at Jonny’s feet. It was a pretty thought. Made for a good tale. Wasn’t even a complete lie, either. Some embellishing went into, obviously, but the core remained true.
He really, really wished it was a complete fabrication. That, in his last moments, Billy Vangelis could have looked at him with nothing but bitter hatred. Given Jonny proper proof to show Adora, and those parts within himself that still railed against him, that he was right. He was justified.
None of that quiet, gentle, too-little-too-late sorrowful bullshit.
A furious scream tore from his throat as he swung a vicious kick into a nearby garbage can. A sharp pain shot through his leg and he hissed but did not falter. Did not care. Adora grimaced, one of her back legs buckling briefly.
“I never said you weren’t justified,” she said, her voice softer than he had heard it in ages.
“Yeah?” His face pulled into a vicious snarl. “Sure felt like it.”
Her face fell, and a flood of deep regret hit him hard enough to throw him off-balance.
“Fuck.” He fumbled for the nearby wall of an old, abandoned building of crumbling brick. “Cool it, will ya?”
“Sorry.” She reigned herself in, and the torrent lessened to a low hum in the background. He eyed her warily, taking in her form, a pitch-black goat, horns curved gently backwards, her eyes, as ever, blazing gold.
“That’s it, then,” he said. His mouth felt dry, his heart thudding dully in his ears. Slowly he slid down the wall to sit on the pavement, head propped against his knees.
Adora sighed and bowed her head.
“This is us, from now on,” she confirmed, her voice low and serious.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck!” He wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t. His father had earned no right to his tears, no matter the circumstance.
Knowing that did not help in the slightest.
“How screwed up am I?” He raised his face towards the sky, a hysterical mixture of laughter and tears in his voice. Adora said nothing as she sat near him, no words of comfort or rebuke.
He let his head fall back onto his knees and took comfort in that this was a quiet part of town. No one there to hear him. Not a sound in the air save for his own ragged breathing, and the faint, distant click of a cane against the pavement.
Carmilla was an opportunity he couldn’t miss, Jack and his bar an easy sacrifice after everything else. Adora had settled. She had settled, and she was a black goat.
After he was done crying, he had to laugh at that. A high, cruel, bitter sound.
Oh, they would have had a field day with that one.
Couldn’t, now, but that didn’t mean Jonny couldn’t appreciate it himself. A black goat for the Vangelis boy.
How fitting.
“What’d’ya say we lean into it?” he asked, one evening on the Doc’s ship, lounging on his bed, twirling a knife lazily between his fingers. Adora raised her head, one ear flicked up to show that she was listening.
“The aesthetic,” he clarified, face twisting into a habitual sneer. “What’s your take on d’Ville for a surname? I think it’s got quite the ring to it. Jonny d’Ville. Feels right.” He grinned at the ceiling.
She didn’t say anything, and he shrugged, trying for all the world to make it seem like her silence didn’t cut him to his core.
“Don’t matter what you think, I suppose. It’s my name.”
She just laid her head back down without a word.
“Fine!” Jonny spat, drawing himself up and further away from her. “Be like that.”
Even that gained little more than an ear-twitch. But that didn’t matter. She could argue with him all she liked, and she could drown him in her silent disapproval when the arguing did nothing. It didn’t matter. She literally couldn’t leave him. She wasn’t like the Doc’s moonrat, able to scamper about the ship unhindered by any distance limit. She’d come around, in time.
She was his daemon, after all.
Adora did not come around.
Jonny d’Ville died without ever having come to a proper accord with his daemon.
Crushed beneath a falling building, and it didn’t even have the decency to take him out quick. He laid there, in silence and darkness. Unsure if he even would have been able to form words, had he cared to try. Beside him Adora’s form wavered, a mirage fading from the world in time with the numb chill spreading over his broken body.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice sounded fragile and weak, even in his mind. There was an echo there that shouldn’t have been, a distance, unlike the cold shoulder she’d been giving him for-
God, he didn’t even know how long.
Time was hard to keep track of in the depths of space.
‘Don’t matter now,’ he said.
Her only reply was a small, broken cry as she pressed her forehead into his palm. Her form slipped further, her touch too light, a feather where there should have been stone.
Then, in an instant, she winked out, and darkness took him.
Jonny stumbled half-blind through the ship, confusion and horror and the Doc’s words ringing in his ears. She’d tried to convince him to stay in her lab, but she hadn’t put much effort into it, or he’d still be there and-
He couldn’t. He couldn’t look at her right now. So he left, even though he was still half delirious.
“It worked, I can’t believe it worked.”
“I told you. Your heart, I told you wouldn’t die.”
She had, but he’d assumed she meant in that moment. When she replaced the ticking time-bomb he’d called a heart for the first twenty-odd years of his life.
“I couldn’t let you die. I couldn’t lose you.”
He snarled, his fist making sharp, painful contact with the wall. He watched with numb fascination as the skin on his knuckles re-knit itself before his eyes. They’d been pretty words, he’d give her that much.
Much more pressing, at the moment, through the brain-fog and the confused pain, was the fact that Adora had not been there when he woke. She hadn’t been in the room, and yet he felt no pain, not even slight discomfort.
She wasn’t in his room, either.
She wasn’t anywhere.
He’d died. He’d felt her fading beside him.
But he was still here so surely-
If he was still here, she had to be somewhere. She couldn’t be gone, he would know. He would feel it, he would know. He could not exist without her. They were a unit, for all that they had not acted like it for… God, it was probably decades, wasn’t it?
He couldn’t die.
He wouldn’t age.
He could probably ask Carmilla how old he was now but fuck if he was giving her yet another hold over him. Even something so petty and useless as his chronological age.
‘Adora!’ he called, silent and desperate as he stumbled into the small common area of the ship. ‘Where are you?’
No answer came.
‘Adora, please!’ He felt no shame in begging. Not here, not now, not when there was a void at his side where she should be. ‘You can tell me you told me so all you like I don’t care just-’
‘Jonny!’ her voice in his mind was like a rush of cool water on a scorching summer’s day. The adrenaline that had been fuelling his search drained in an instant, sending him crashing to the floor. ‘Open your eyes, I can’t tell where you are.’ He hadn’t even realised he’d closed them.
‘Common area, where the fuck are you?’
The answer came to him in the shape of quick hoof beats over metal flooring and a brief, disorienting glimpse through her eyes as she tore into the room, all but crashing into him with the speed of her approach.
He opened his arms to her, and she pressed in close, her horns pressing uncomfortably into his shoulder but he didn’t care. She was present and real, and he hadn’t held her like this since long before he burned his old life to the ground.
“Adora,” he breathed.
“No,” came the somewhat muffled reply, spoken into his shirt.
He pulled back enough to look at her with blank confusion. “What?”
She held his gaze, with an intensity behind her eyes that had been missing for longer than he could rightly remember.
“Give me a new name.”
“I- what ?”
“Give me a new name,” she repeated.
“Why?”
“You got one.” She sighed and bent her neck to rest her head against his shoulder. “We’ve been holding on to Adora for too long.”
‘I don’t want to be Jonny Vangelis’ daemon anymore.’
Jonny drew a sharp breath through his teeth, his grip on her tightening as he pulled her in closer.
Whatever his reply may have been, however, it died as his hand settled on her chest and found absolute stillness where there should have been a familiar, steady beat. Ice flooded his veins, all other thoughts driven away by this new discovery and the terrible knowledge that he didn’t know, not for sure, if it was a recent development. The steady, unnatural tick of his own mechanical heart seemed almost deafening by comparison.
“You don’t have a heartbeat,” he said, past the lead weight in the back of his throat.
“Oh. I haven’t had one for a while.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?”
She pressed her head a little closer in the closest approximation she could get to a headbutt when they were already so close.
“In my defence, I thought it was just because you didn’t have your original heart anymore.”
“Makes sense, I guess.” He sighed, filing it away as something he could worry about later, preferably never. “You sure you want a new name?”
“Positive,” she said, taking a step back from him but not far enough that he couldn’t easily keep a hand on her. “I can’t be her anymore, Jonny, it’s not healthy.”
“Right, because we’re a paragon of mental health,” Jonny snorted.
“Jonny -”
“Marraco.”
She blinked.
“Your new name’s Marraco, take it or leave it.”
An immediate feeling of relief spread through him like he had loosened the lid on an old jar, something rotten inside it, building up pressure until it could burst. An old tension slid off him as she rested her forehead against his, contentment rising to take its place. In that moment, nothing else mattered. Not Carmilla, not their newly discovered immortality, not the vast, uncountable stretch of time that wound out before them. None of it mattered because here, now, finally, they were Jonny and Marraco.
A whole in two parts, united against the world.