AN: Written for the prompt: Harry Potter, any, only witches and wizards have daemons
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Tuney couldn't see him. Mum and Da couldn't see him either. Jem had always been by Lily's side, turning into birds and butterflies since she was small to make her smile.
Mum thought Jem was an imaginary friend. "So what is Jemmolia today?" she would ask over breakfast. Lily would squint at Jem as he flickered through forms before settling on something.
"A rabbit," she'd say. "A duck."
Tuney called her a liar and said Jem didn't exist, but Lily could touch Jem and Jem couldn't touch anyone else because everyone else didn't have someone like Jem to know he could be touched. Sometimes Lily thought that was why Tuney got so annoyed sometimes. She didn't have a Jem to hug and whisper secrets to or play great make believe games with. Jem could fly and play the part of an invading bear and the poor fox kit and be a war horse. Tuney was just jealous.
Then Lily met Severus and Sev had a Jem too, only his Jem was a she and she was called Namovie. Namovie wasn't anything like Jem really, she liked to stay in Sev's pocket and take small, venomous forms like spiders and scorpions. It was Severus that told them that there were a lot of people who had companions like Jem in their life. A whole world full of them that people didn't know about.
"But why can't anyone see them, Sev?" Lily asked, waving a hand. In the foot of space between them, Jem lured Namovie outside into the bright summer sunlight and the prickly warm grass. She was a snake today, bright red and scary looking with pink eyes and a tiny forked tongue that flicked in the air as Jem darted around her, a sparrow today. "If there's so many why haven't I seen them?"
"It's because we're special," Sev said. "We're magic and they're just muggles. Magicless. They're not real enough to have a daemon."
Daemon was what he called Jem and Namovie ages ago. Lily wrinkled her nose. Tuney and Mum and Da felt real enough to her. "Maybe they just have their daemons on the inside rather than their outsides," she reasoned.
Sev gave her a pitying look. "Muggles don't have daemons. Only a wizard has a daemon."
To Sev that made most ordinary people less than human, Lily thought sometimes. If there were people out there that all had their own Jems at their side, people without daemons had to be pretty scary. It would be like someone missing a limb because that's what Jem felt like most of the time. He was part of her.
She didn't know how to tell Severus that he was wrong about muggles though. They weren't much different than Lily or Sev even if they didn't have a Jem to keep them company.
Between them, Namovie shifted into a small dun colored bird to flutter-hop with Jem. It was the most relaxed Lily had ever seen her, and that was more important than Sev's strangeness about people who didn't have daemons.
"Do you think I'll get to meet more people like me?" Lily asked.
Above them, Sev made leaves and seeds swirl around like Lily could only ever do by accident, which no one ever believed she could do in the first place. "You will," he said confidently. "One day we'll both be where we belong."
Lily didn't know where she belonged but any place where people could see Jem was a place she wanted to see someday.
