Chapter Text
Tony was used to the odd looks he got when people first saw Sephara. The American people, he'd learned, expected billionaire playboys to have billionaire playboy daemons--a lion, perhaps, or if he was going with his avian nature, a peacock.
Nick Fury was the first person he'd met in a long time who'd looked at Sephara with anything other than disappointed shock. "She's a--"
"Red-billed chough," Fury finished for him.
Tony blinked, his lips still forming the words. "Brownie points to the super spy," he murmured.
"I've been researching you for a while, Mr Stark; you won't surprise me with a thing as defining as your daemon."
Fury's own daemon was a grizzled pit bull; her brindle coat had more scars than Fury himself, and Tony was pretty sure she could kill him if she looked at him just right. "What's Seph got to do with your super secret boy band? Do our deamons need to match for me to qualify with the team?"
"You don't qualify, but she has nothing to do with that," Fury said flatly.
Tony couldn't help a sharp spike of hurt. On his shoulder, Seph ruffled her coal-black feathers. "Why not?"
"Read the file," Fury said, turning to leave. His daemon fixed them with a last hard stare, then followed at his heels.
Sephara flitted from his shoulder to the beige file on the desk and tugged it open with her crimson beak. "Apparently," she said, "we're volatile, narcissistic and self obsessed." She said
"Well we can't argue with that, can we?"
It wasn't Clint that made the different call. It was Alesa who snatched the arrow from his bow string, snapping it between her talons and telling him, on no uncertain terms, that they were going to bring the Black Widow in--and not in a body bag.
The first words Natasha ever said to him were in reference to Alesa. "A bit predictable, isn't she, Hawkeye?"
"Technically," he'd told her over their raised and loaded guns, "she's a jackal buzzard."
He'd been creeped out at the time, goose flesh crawling all over his arms and down his spine, because he was staring at her gun barrel (aimed directly at Alesa, and wasn't that a cruel way to kill) and he couldn't see her daemon. He'd heard all kinds of rumours about the Widow program, but never that they Severed girls. He'd only seen it once before, in a child prostitution ring that wanted to make the kids docile and quiet, but the woman he was facing seemed so normal. Surely, she must have a daemon.
He'd pushed the issue aside in order to bring her in, and it wasn't until hours later, in a S.H.I.E.L.D. jet on the way back to the Triskelion, that he looked across and saw Temero for the first time. The tiny lizard crept from the long cuff of her sleeve and made his slow way across her left hand, his scales darkening from pale tan until he was almost black.
He expected such a small, vulnerable daemon to be a liability in the field, but he quickly learned otherwise. Temero would curl up into the hollow of her collarbone, barely five centimetres in diameter when he tucked his tail around his head. Natasha's uniform was re-enforced there, hard enough to protect him from anything up to a direct bullet wound, and he was near enough that he could whisper to her. It wasn't long before Clint began to wish he could have a similar arrangement for Alesa.
After one particularly grueling mission that ended with a drug baron's fox daemon taking Alesa by the wing and dragging her away from him while he choked and screamed and vomited, Natasha and Temero sat up with them all night, Temero speaking comfortingly to Alesa while Nat pressed a cool flannel to the back of his neck.
"In the Widow program," she said softly, "they assessed us as soon as our daemons settled."
Clint stilled, swallowing hard; she'd never spoken of the program before.
"There was a girl called Anja," she continued. "She was deadly; had the highest marks on any test the threw at us. And she was ruthless; she would have been the perfect Widow. Her daemon settled when she was fourteen. I can't remember his name, but I remember he settled as a sun bear. The next day, they disposed of Anja. A large, recognisable daemon was useless to them...I was lucky, with Temero."
The chameleon nodded sagely and crawled up onto her shoulder, turning his skin the same vivid orange as her hair.
Clint summoned a laugh, gathering Alesa carefully into his arms. "You say lucky, I say unbearably cunning."
"Easy, cowboy, I just saved your life," she retorted.
"We'll walk it off."
The punching bag was about the only place Steve felt anywhere near normal. Most of his time, when he wasn't asleep, or researching the seventy years he'd missed, was spent working out his frustration on a bag full of sand.
At first, Nyasia had paced the gym restlessly, her claws clicking on the wooden floor. Then, she'd grown angry and tried to drag him away from the bag, clenching her teeth in his jacket and tugging until he shouted that he didn't want her help, (didn't want the memories, the guilt, the grief) didn't need it. Finally, she'd taken to lying down as far from him as their bond would allow, her tail curled around her paws.
That arrangement had worked for weeks before Director Fury walked in on their new life. Steve had just sent a bag flying across the room, a split down one side, his shoulders heaving with exertion. The Director's feet were silent on the gym floor, but Nyasia had scented him as soon as he'd walked through the door. "Steve," she said quietly, slinking to his side.
"I've never seen a dhole daemon before," the Director greeted.
Steve stiffened, his ears burning. Nya's form had been a common topic of discussion when he'd first had the serum; because surely, surely, Captain America should have a bald eagle daemon? "I've never thought much about it," he lied. He and Bucky had spent endless hours researching their daemons, what they meant.
"Well, Captain Rogers, I have. Dholes are loyal, aren't they? And brave. Exactly what I need in a soldier."
"What's the mission?" He asked, exchanging a glance with Nya. Differences in opinion aside, they were a team--and being soldiers was what they did. This, finally, was familiarity in a strange world.
"Same as it always is," Fury shrugged, extending a beige file. "Trying to save the world."
Jane Foster looked between the god she was coming to love and the giant daemon at his side. Thor's Hillevi was a mountain goat, only she was almost six feet tall and her wickedly curved horns were shining, solid gold. Her dark eyes were old with wisdom and her giant hooves left dents upon the floor, yet she was unimaginably gentle with Jane's tiny Brangaine. The Rhesus monkey had taken to sitting atop one of Hillevi's golden horns to groom her snowy coat, ultimately falling asleep on the divine deamon's head.
It was Hillevi that convinced Jane Thor really was the god of thunder, and not the mad homeless person Darcy had presumed him. When she'd first hit him with the van and taken him to hospital, she'd assumed his daemon was too small to be seen--a songbird, or an insect, perhaps, safely curled in his clothes. It hadn't been until the next day, when they'd taken Thor back to her lab, that the giant daemon had wandered through the door and hurried to his side, butting him affectionately with her nose.
"How is it that you can be so far away from each other?" Jane demanded, mindful of Bran sat only a few inches from her arm.
Thor frowned. "It is natural for my people. It was the Asgardians who first taught humans how to see their daemons, and, once we'd showed the first, it became second nature, so interwoven that humans forgot they'd ever not seen their daemons. But they never learned how to be apart from them, as we do."
"So you're saying, in Asgard, people just wander around--alone?" the astrophysicist shuddered at the thought. Being away from Bran--it was simply unnatural.
"Most chose to keep their felagi close, but yes, they often wander freely. Often, my father's Munin will carry messages to my mother." Thor said patiently.
"Felagi?"
"Our word for them," he explained. "It means much the same. Anyway, it would be impossible for me to fight with Hillevi tied to my side."
"Why? She looks pretty badass, I wouldn't want to mess with those horns," Jane said warily.
It was Hillevi who answered, shifting slowly forwards. "He did not say I do not fight, simply that we do not fight together. I've never quite mastered the art of flight, my dear," she laughed.
Natasha had seen the footage of the Hulk raging through Harlem, noted the giant boar daemon at his side with its rolling, mad eyes and foaming mouth. The dainty, almost-white pig with her small, slender feet and bright, intelligent eyes, was therefore a shock that almost rattled her cover.
She finally asked him about it on the quinjet. (Anything to pass the time on a ten hour flight.)
"It's a bigger surprise to me, trust me," Banner said with a wry smile, scratching his Maisha behind her ears. She was small enough to fit comfortably in his lap, and, when she spoke to him, her voice was soft and melodious. "I guess the...Other Guy has another daemon. Or maybe we both just turn into our worst selves."
Maisha rolled her eyes upwards. "Speak for yourself," she reprimanded him. "I happen to look very fetching with dark hair."
Natasha shook her head in amazement. "I don't know whether the two of you are quite what Fury's expecting."
"You said you don't need the Other Guy," Banner said quickly.
"We don't," she reassured him. "I've just never met two more docile people in my life."
Maisha twitched her snout. "Careful," she said. "You won't like us when we're angry."
"That's my line," Banner muttered.