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"Why Boggy?" Fabian asks one day, idly watching Adaine's barn owl daemon swoop lazily above them.
Adaine shrugs. "I couldn't say 'Blodeuedd' when I was a child."
"Hell," Kristen says, chewing on a blade of grass. "I can't say it now. " She pokes the sweating possum at her side. "David, roll over. You're like a space heater."
It's the kind of sticky, late summer afternoon that has all the bad kids and their daemons melting into the grass around the Thistlespring tree. Glasses of lemonade sweat on the comically-tiny camping table that Digby set up for their 'study session'. Kaz, Fig's bat daemon, is fully wrapped around one of them, making happy little chirps as the condensation cools his leathery wings.
Adaine yawns and smiles at Boggy as she sits upright. "Where's Saff gotten to?" She comments - casually, but a spike of cold panic shoots through Fabian's chest because he doesn't immediately know. She could be exploring the treetops as a squirrel, or digging through the cool dark earth as a mole. He opens his mouth to call for her and then there she is - a resplendent red macaw on his shoulder.
The others know that Safira and Boggy can stray a little further than other daemons can. Elf daemons are almost always birds and capable of greater distance. But Safira keeps other secrets too, Fabian is reminded, as he watches Saff preen something that looks suspiciously like river clay out from under her talons. He feels the ghost of water on slick fur creep over his skin. So she'd been an otter for the last hour, then, down on the other side of the forest.
"Did you like it?" He murmured to her, once the others were occupied once more with their conversation.
"Did I like what?" She chirps, melodic.
"Swimming. Being an otter."
"I always like swimming." She ruffles her feathers in the imitation of a shrug before going to join a sleepy Boggy in the branches of a further-off tree. Fabian, once again left wondering and wanting, tracks her flashes of red until she's enveloped in leaves, and then he can't see her any more. He wonders if Boggy knows about her. Adaine's never said, but maybe she wouldn't. She's terribly understanding that way.
Hilru - Hillie - gambols up nearby and shoves her head into Gorgug's sleeping form.
"What," he growls, face-down in the grass like he's in a dead man's float.
"Mom wants to know if we want dinner," she says before flopping down, boneless next to him.
"It's too hot to eat."
"She said you'd say that, and that there's some steak strips chilling in the fridge if you do get hungry."
Fabian watches Gorgug sleepily extend an arm and pull Hillie in close, despite the heat. Hillie's long hare limbs practically dissolve as she yawns and joins him in a nap. Nearby, Riz and Nox are lazily flicking through a paperback novel with a flashlight-toting detective on the cover. Kristen and David snore. Everything is peaceful. Everything is quiet.
So why does he feel like he's going to crawl out of his skin?
" You write your name on the face of the world with your heroic deeds. I thought you were just going to be me. A way for me to live forever, but it's better than that. The story's going to get better with each new one."
"Much better."
"Your face there, boy."
He takes his eye patch off. Hands it to you.
I take it, and then drive my sword deep into his heart.
Later, once prom is over and Fabian trudges home, battle-scared and weary and covered in dragon blood, he climbs up to the balcony of Seacaster Manor. His father's body is gone, and he sends a silent thank you to Cathilda for making sure he didn't have to see it again. The blood is still there, staining the tiles. And there are feathers everywhere, shining ruby and sapphire and emerald.
In his pocket, Safira chirps unhappily. He draws her out with a shaking hand.
"What happened?" He asks her, running a finger over her soft mouse body. Safira had settled as a macaw when they were twelve. She was the pride and joy of their father's daemon, a weathered seagull, and even when Hallariel was steaming drunk of a night she always took the time to comment on how lovely and elegant Safira had turned out to be. A pirate's son with a beautiful macaw daemon. That was how it was meant to be.
"I don't know," Safira whispered. "When we - when you drove the sword into him, I just..." She shakes her tiny head, and then suddenly she's a bird again, a songbird, still small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. "Something just broke ."
Fabian stares at her, water collecting in his one good eye. So much loss in one day. He clears his throat.
"Can you be something soft?"
Safira cocks her little bird head at him, and then next thing he knows - the change is so fast, he'd forgotten how seamless it was - she's a chinchilla burrowing into his chest and catching tears in her dense grey fur.
They don't tell anyone. Not even Gorgug and Hillie, who only settled last year. They can't. So Safira stays as a macaw until they're alone, or until she gets bored. She indulges in different forms like they're 10 years old again and shows no signs of slowing down.
They start arguing. That's new, too. It starts one day when Saff yawns on the bed next to him. She starts the yawn as a chameleon and ends it, of all things, as a russet-red spaniel.
"No," he says, blinking at her in shock. "Absolutely not."
She lifts her snout at him. "What's wrong now?"
"A dog?" Fabian scoffs. "Don't get stuck like that, please ."
Safira growls - actually growls at him - and changes again immediately. Now he's staring at a carbon copy of Nox, Riz's basset hound daemon.
Fabian stops short. "I didn't mean it like that," he says, after too long a pause. "I didn't mean-"
"Yes, you did." Safira's new brown eyes bore into him. "What's wrong with being a dog?" She shifts again, and now a little white terrier - almost the spitting image of Rhys, Cathilda's daemon - glares up at him. "You don't really believe that canine daemons are for the servants and lower classes, right?" She says, parroting their mother.
"Of course not," he says weakly. He really doesn't, any more, not after seeing Nox in battle. It's a reflex. Learned behaviour. She knows that. "I just don't think it... suits us."
Safira stays as a dog for the rest of the day. He guesses he probably deserves it, but he's right, too. Nothing seems to suit them any more.
"Fabian, who did this, what happened?"
"Were you ambushed?"
"No."
"You were in a situation where you just couldn't get out, huh?"
"Something like that."
Adaine is leaning over him in the van, voice shrill with concern. "This is personal and I don't like seeing you like this. It scares me, where is your sword, where is your eye patch?" She blinks at him when he doesn't respond to her immediately. "Where is Safira?"
Fabian pats his inside pocket. "Here."
"But..." His friends all watch as Safira, a white mouse again, crawls out of his pocket and onto his shoulder.
"I have pneumonia," he says crossly. "You could be something warmer."
"I'm too tired," she says, in a voice so small he can barely hear it. "I'm just too tired." She curls up against his neck, tiny heartbeat thrumming against his pulse point.
"Fabian," Adaine says slowly. "Saf, did you... unsettle?"
Fabian almost scoffs. James Whitclaw picked up his daemon - in his hands - and tried to eat her. It's fair to say they're a little unsettled by the whole ordeal.
"She's been like this since my father died," Fabian says after a moment. He exhales. " We've been like this. She can't... she won't settle again."
Gorgug squeezes into the spot next to him, folding his lanky legs into his chest. Hillie does the same, her large glassy eyes fixed on Safira.
Fig grips onto Kaz a little tighter. They all do. "You've been hiding this for that long?" She asks. "Why?"
"He's ashamed of me," Safira says.
And that - that's the thing that gets through to him, like a hot knife through butter. He sits bolt upright. Safira almost slips off his shoulder but Fabian catches her and cradles her in his hands, her little white body, her twitching whiskers, her tiny pink paws. "No," he says, and then he's crying again. "No, my dear heart. Not you. Not you."
"I built this place. It's a memorial to Captain Bill Seacaster. It's a beautiful memory. It's my greatest achievement, the best thing I could've ever done. This is how I find my self worth, is curating this place. This is my life's work to build this memorial to the greatest pirate that ever lived."
Safira isn't in the dream, macaw or otherwise. She's not anywhere. Whitclaw ate her, shoved his tentacles through her feathers and devoured her, leaving Fabian half-a-person, severed. Fabian stares at this version of himself, this vacant-eyed construct and realises he doesn't care what shape Safira is. She could be a mouse for the rest of their lives and he wouldn't care, as long as he could feel her heartbeat against his skin every day.
He's drenched with sweat when he wakes. Safira has burrowed into his chest, holding tight with her mouse claws, so tight it almost hurts.
"Saf," he whispers.
"Fabian."
"It's okay if you settle like this," he tells her, running a finger over her soft little head. "I'll protect you. I'll - I'll build a tiny sidecar for the Hangman," he adds, and then wants to vomit all over again as he remembers his faithful steed.
Safira nudges his finger with her nose. "I don't want to be a mouse forever," she says. "I just don't know what we want yet. Or what we need."
"That's okay." He breathes slowly, in and out, waiting for the nausea to go down. He listens to the sounds of his friends sleeping around him. David snores like a truck in Kristen's arms. Fig whistles through her nose in her sleep, just a little. Outside there's a low hoot from Boggy. He drinks it all in, trying to commit each sound to memory.
"None of us are friends with you because you're Bill Seacaster's son. We are friends with you because you’re Fabian."
Safira doesn't turn back into a macaw again. In the morning she sidles up to David and wordlessly shifts into a possum. No-one says anything and they're both grateful. When they fight Whitclaw again she freezes, plays dead while Fabian is stunned. They watch their friends fight and fall and get back up again and can do nothing about it.
When they realise Adaine is gone she becomes an owl, and hoots so mournfully he feels as if his heart might break from the sound.
Fabian walks silently to the clearing before Kei Lumennura. Safira mirrors Nox and hunts nose-first through the forest floor, tail limp and breath heavy.
She flies with Kaz that night, flitting so fast across the moonlight he can barely see her. It feels good to fly again, but it's still not right. It's not them.
Hilru almost boxes her ears when she copies her. They're attacking the pylons and Gorgug's daemon is lost in March hare madness, glassy eyes laser-focused on the goal at hand. Safira jumps into the fray on long, powerful legs and soon they're working together. She stays hare-like when they win, leaping about Fabian's ankles as he cheers with his friends. He feels so light at that moment, chanting spring break with Ragh, so hurt and so happy. He looks at Safira and thinks maybe they're ready.
It doesn't happen until later. Not until the first ray of dawn washes over them. Fabian's been dancing all night with this ember in his chest, feeling at home again in his body, feeling whole - and then it happens. Fabian's world changes, just a little, and he stumbles to a halt. Beside him Safira is a white cat, lithe and cocksure, sat licking her paw as if she had no cares in the world. She looks up at Fabian and he thinks, of course. There you are.
"Don't stop on my account," Safira says. She stands on her four paws, tail flicking behind her. She is graceful as she walks, almost balletic, revealing powerful muscles with every confident stride. Her fur is moonlight-bright, with one black patch over her grey left eye.
Fabian kneels down to pet her. A frisson of energy runs through them both at the contact. Saff rubs her cheek on his hand, a simple declaration: love.
"Are you happy?" He asks.
She jumps into his arms and purrs. They stand there for a long time.