Chapter Text
People give Steven odd looks sometimes, for the bird carrier.
To be fair, they give him odd looks a lot, for all kinds of reasons. He isn't too fussed about it. Well, he tries not to be too fussed about it. Anyway, it isn't so strange. People with insect daemons have cute little carriers all the time, to keep them from getting squished in a door or whatever -- why shouldn't he have one for a bird?
"You're not having me on, are you?" asks his soon-to-be boss when he's interviewing for the museum job. Her daemon, a big sort of owl with funny tufts on its head, lands on the ground next to the carrier and squints in through the clear plastic side. "Haven't got a lizard hiding under the collar, or a beetle in your hair or some such, and this is a prank where you'll let a pet bird loose in the museum?"
"I would never!" exclaims Steven. He's not sure what he's more offended by: the idea that Zillah is a pet, or the idea that he'd risk getting bird doings over all the beautiful Egyptian artifacts. Or even the plastic replicas in the gift shop. "She's nocturnal, is all. I'm letting her rest."
"I'm nocturnal," says the owl daemon, glaring directly up at Steven. Or probably he's not glaring, probably that's just how owl eyes are shaped, but Steven feels awfully glared-at. "It doesn't affect my work."
"Well, this won't affect mine, either." Steven taps on the cage. "Zil, come on, wake up, say hello."
Zillah shakes her black-tipped tan feathers, stands up on her long legs, and unlatches the carrier from the inside. "Hello," she says, nodding a bit in greeting. Most daemons would touch noses here, but with birds the pecking can come off as aggressive, especially when your beak is as long again as your head. "I promise, I won't hold Steven back."
"See, there you go!" says Steven brightly. "Also -- she's not a domestic bird. She's a Senegal thick-knee."
Donna is standing now, leaning over her desk and craning her neck to look at the two bird-daemons. "I can see why," she mutters, eyes lingering on the knobby bulges of Zillah's legs.
Right, Steven keeps forgetting not to use the silly name. "Also known as a stone-curlew--"
"Don't care," says his future boss. "When can you start?"
***
Okay, so the bit about stone-curlews being nocturnal is an excuse. It works well enough, gets people off Steven's back, but it's not, strictly speaking, true.
If anyone ever visited him at night, they would see Steven staying up as late as he can, playing wake-up tapes and drinking coffee and fiddling with puzzles, until he finally gives up and chains his ankle to the bed -- and Zillah quietly dozing through it all.
(If anyone visited at night, he'd have to explain the ankle chain and the perpetually-sleepy daemon. So if you think about it, it's a good thing all round that his prospects are shot, really.)
Steven suspects it's all his fault. The more he fights to keep unnaturally-long hours, the more his other half has to sleep to make up for it.
That's not supposed to be how daemons work -- but Steven's relationship with Zillah has never really been how it's supposed to be, has it? They don't have deep, heartfelt conversations that explore their innermost thoughts. They don't bounce ideas off each other in frantic synergy, or catch each other's eyes and fall into sync without saying a word. He doesn't feel terribly connected to her at all.
One morning -- and this is a secret Steven plans on taking to his grave -- he was in such a rush, about to be late for the third day in a row, he made it all the way out the building before he heard the frantic beating of wings against the windowpane above, and realized he didn't have the carrier with him.
That is absolutely not normal. It's not totally unheard-of to have a range that far -- not like he left Zillah at the top of a skyscraper, or anything -- but people need training for it, don't they?
(Or they need to be a witch. And, well, Steven has a Y chromosome, so that's out.)
On the carrier-forgetting day, he ended up actually holding Zillah in his arms for the whole bus ride. Just to have the tactile proof she was still there, you know?
And it was hard, but it was also sort of nice, because people made more of an effort not to bump into him. Even at peak London rush hour, you just don't touch another person's daemon, any more than you make a grab for his unmentionables.
In the plaza in front of the museum, figuring he was in trouble for being late already so he might as well, Steven stopped short and looked down at his sleepy tan-feathered cargo. "Sorry if this is a stupid question," he said, "but are you, you know -- my daemon?"
Zillah stirred, and peered up at him with one shockingly-yellow eye. She didn't seem hurt or traumatized or anything, the way you'd think a daemon would be, if some stranger went and carried them bare-handed for an hour. So that was something, anyway.
"Of course I am," she said. (He hasn't asked her since. She looked so tired.) "Who else would I be?"
***
And then he wakes up in a sunny pastoral field, somewhere very far from London if the mountains are any indication, with a broken jaw and a shouty voice yelling at him to "surrender the body!" to "Marc".
"What do you mean?" he stammers, turning around and around. Nobody in sight. No carrier, which makes his heart stop for a second, until Zillah swoops out of the sky and lands next to him. She must've been right behind him as he fell from...wherever.
Also, she's awake and alert and seems incredibly composed, which, well, that makes one of them.
"Hey, what's going on?" asks Steven. "Do you know? Where are we?"
The curlew makes eye contact, and starts. "Steven?"
"Ohhhh," cuts in the angry voice of, apparently, Steven's new full-blown psychosis. "The idiot's in control."
"Leave him alone!" snaps Zillah, addressing someone over Steven's shoulder. Where, as established a few seconds ago, there is nobody in sight. "You're not helping."
"You can hear it?" asks Steven, totally gobsmacked. Which is stupid, right? She's his daemon. If they're going to start hallucinating, of course they'll do it together.
"You can hear him?" says Zillah right back. She opens her beak to say something else, then abruptly replaces it with "Run!" and takes off. Not flying, though. She's following her own advice and running, close to the ground, half-hidden by the tall grass.
Steven wavers on his feet, then starts jogging nervously after her.
"Listen to her, idiot!" puts in the angry voice. "Run!"
Steven does. Not because he's inclined to start trusting the help of disembodied voices, so much as because the shooting has started.
***
One second he's standing with a scarab clenched in his frozen hand and five burly men piling onto him -- the wolf and crocodile daemons can't fly, but a hawk launched itself after Zillah, and Steven doesn't know whose range is longer --
The next second he's standing with a scarab clenched in his bloody hand, and five bodies lying in a circle around him, and no daemons to be seen.
"Go north!" calls Zillah's voice from above him.
"I don't know which way is north!" yells Steven in reply, and takes off down the street that has the fewest angry-looking people advancing toward him.
He didn't know it was possible to do a high-speed chase in a cupcake truck, but apparently this is a day for all kinds of new things. At some point Zillah isn't inside, then she is. At some point he's frantically mashing cupcakes into a man's face while Zillah writhes in the grip of a monkey daemon, then he's not. At some point Zillah's long beak with the jet-black tip isn't stained red, and then --
And then he sits bolt upright, in his pajamas, in bed.
In his apartment. With the chain on his ankle and the tape on the door, and the stone-curlew in her basket next to the bed, fast asleep.
No blood on anybody at all!
He doesn't wake up Zillah to ask her about it. If she doesn't remember any of the wild adventure, he'll feel stupid. And if she does, what of it? They're the same person, deep down, aren't they? Just like they'd have the same hallucinations, there's no reason for them not to have the same dreams.
Instead Steven gets dressed-up for his date, bundles Zillah gently into the carrier, and tapes a single rose on top. Maybe he'll get lucky, and it won't get too smashed-up on the bus ride over to be romantic.
***
Steven does not get lucky.
He gets an angry broken date, and a secret compartment, and a mystery phone, and he's about two sentences into a phone call with a mystery woman -- who is upset and exasperated and keeps calling him "Marc" -- when Zillah flies in his face, knocks it out of his hand, and ends the call.
"What did you do that for?" yelps Steven.
"Steven," says the curlew, one three-clawed foot resting on the now-blank phone screen. She's awake and alert, like she was in the dream. "You need to stop."
"Why?" demands Steven. "Who was she, Zil? What do you know about it?"
"I know you're going to get hurt if you keep looking."
"Hurt by who?" Steven scoops her up with both hands. "Who are you talking about?"
She doesn't resist, doesn't even flinch -- although Steven has the sudden feeling that if he had reached for the phone instead, her beak would be red again. Her head is cocked, one yellow eye fixed on his. "You don't want to know! Trust me."
He...doesn't.
He just -- doesn't.
When the building starts rattling and the lights start going, Steven drops the daemon and runs.
***
"Tripped on something," he stammers from the elevator floor, as a woman with a hamster daemon in her purse walks in. "Can't be bothered to keep this building clean, can they."
"Always the same, isn't it," agrees the woman with a nervous laugh. She turns away from him, but the hamster curls its body around to openly stare.
Oh. Right.
"Almost sat on my daemon," adds Steven weakly. He hopes he can just leave the rest up to her to her imagination, working out what kind of daemon would ride around in a person's back pocket.
From the way she flees the elevator with a stream of increasingly-high-pitched excuses, she didn't imagine anything good.
***
In the crowd, during the not-a-dream, Steven hadn't matched all the daemons to people. If they're riding on your shoulder or held in your arms, it's easy enough, but the small animals crowded on the ground? Or perched on ledges? Hard to tell which is which. Doesn't much matter, really.
When Harrow steps out of his nightmares and into the museum, it's a different story, everyone is helpfully spaced out. Steven's eyes dart around, looking for Harrow's other half.
He would've expected a snake, right? One of the kinds that swallows bird-eggs whole. Creepy, child-murdering bastard. Or maybe a jackal -- a wild, stalking killer of the desert. That sounds about right.
...well, at first, he doesn't see any daemon at all.
Zillah lets herself out of the carrier and flutters up to his shoulder. In spite of everything, in spite of the creepy soft-voiced man with no visible daemon and a crowd of followers, it makes Steven feel better that at least one person in here has his back. (Even if that person is, technically, him.)
Another bird-daemon coasts down from somewhere at the corner of his vision.
"You're not meant to perch on the statues," says Steven -- automatically, like this is a normal tour group, not a bunch of menacing cultists --
The bird lands on Harrow's shoulder.
It's a stone-curlew.
The wings are a different pattern than Zillah's, she must be a different species, but the resemblance is clear.
"What's this?" stammers Steven. "Why is she -- Zil? What does this mean?"
"It means you shouldn't listen to him," says Zillah darkly.
"It means," says Harrow softly, "that I am familiar with the voice in your head."
As he keeps talking, somewhere in the back of Steven's mind, a puzzle piece clicks into place -- about the hallucination (?) he keeps getting of a terrifying bird-skull-priest-monster, and how the size and shape of the bone compares to the skull of a stone-curlew.
***
Zillah doesn't go back in her carrier for the whole day. She perches on high shelves and the tops of cabinets, keeping a three-sixty view of everyone who comes into the gift shop.
Steven doesn't interrogate her while the public is there, because "so, does the bird-skull-ghost go around specifically harassing people whose daemons fit his aesthetic?" is not the kind of thing you ask in front of people when you want to seem less loony.
And he doesn't interrogate her after-hours, because there's a supernatural jackal monster crashing around the museum.
Steven runs like hell until he gets barricaded in the bathroom, which is where his reflection in the mirror starts talking to him.
The mirror bloke doesn't have a daemon. Steven thinks that must prove he's a(nother) hallucination, and/or some kind of devil, then remembers the Harrow thing and looks stupidly at the ceiling for a bird daemon, then realizes, duh, there's no reflection of a daemon because his daemon isn't there.
He threw the carrier, to distract the monster. He has a moment of panic at the memory, because Zillah is always in there. Then he has a different kind of panic, because she wasn't in there, but did he consciously remember that when he threw it?
"Where's Zil?" he croaks, cutting off whatever the mirror-man was saying about fighting and control. "Oh my god, did I leave Zil out there? I'm a monster, I'm a monster--" He starts slapping himself in the face -- whether to wake up from this nightmare or punish himself for being a horrible excuse for a human, he isn't sure.
"She's fine!" says mirror-man, with such total confidence that Steven manages to stop hitting himself. "She's behind it, up near the ceiling. The only monster here is that thing, you understand me? And it can't fly, so it won't go after her, not when it has ground-level prey to chase."
"Meaning me," stutters Steven. "Ground-level prey, easy prey. That's me."
"You don't have to be," says mirror-man. "Steven. Look at me. Give me control, and I can save us. All of us."
The last thing Steven remembers is really, really hoping that he's right.
***
"What you're about to see is about to melt your brain --"
Shouldn't have said that. Shouldn't have set himself up, all he did was jinx himself. There's no visible monster on-camera, the footage didn't even catch things getting visibly smashed-up by an unseen presence, there's just Steven flailing and running across the screen. Like some kind of lunatic.
"Is that you?" asks the guard. His daemon, a dog that looks like it might be half-fox, glances away from the screen to look at the carrier on Steven's hip. "Where's your--"
A bird-shaped blur zips across the screen -- far enough behind Steven that it's weird, but not crazy-weird. She's too fast for the camera to pick up the distinctive black-and-white patterns that show up when she opens her wings, but it's clearly Zillah.
"Blimey, mate," says the guard, now turning his own eyes to the carrier before looking back at the screens. "Didn't know Zendaya could move that fast."
"Her name's Zillah," says Steven, voice so small that he's not sure the guard even notices.
A few minutes later, on-camera Steven walks back into the frame.
Except it's not Steven. It's his evil twin, it's the mirror man, it's something possessing him -- he doesn't know what the hell it is, he only knows that's not his face staring up at the camera, hard and cold, eyes boring into the lens.
Zillah lands effortlessly on mirror-man's shoulder, and tilts her head to match his gaze. Her eyes are huge and round and more-alert than they've been in...well, as long as Steven can remember. The footage is black-and-white, but he would swear he can see the yellow.
She and the mirror-man have exactly the same stare.
"That's not me," says Steven, heart in his throat, and chokes on the rest of the sentence: ...And that's not my daemon.
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