A/N: why? Because it's fanfiction and I can. If you've never read His Dark Materials or watched the film The Golden Compass, here's the gist of it. Everybody has a dæmon (pronounced 'demon') which is the physical manifestation of their soul. The dæmon is almost always the opposite sex of their person, have the same amount of intelligence as their person, can talk, and can't go far from their person without them both feeling horrible pain. Childrens' dæmons can shapeshift into whatever form they want until they 'settle' into one form during puberty, and their permanent form is said to reflect that person's true personality. It is the greatest taboo to touch another person's dæmon, the only exceptions being the closest of lovers, as it is quite literally touching that person's soul and can cause them physical and emotional pain. This will be a collection of one-shots, each one about a character and their dæmons and why their dæmons have the forms they do. Hope you enjoy.

**WARNING: there will be mentions of abuse in this fic, physical and otherwise, so if that bothers anyone, don't read further.

Connor was used to people being put off by the sight of Akela. Not many people had great blinking wolf dæmons unless they were seriously messed up in the head, twisted in some way. It was an old prejudice, one that died hard, that people that had wolf dæmons were off, lacking in the moral and emotional areas. Usually it was the truth, but most forgot that a person with a wolf dæmon might've also experienced a deep trauma or abuse as a child. And for Connor, it was a mix of both.

When he was younger, his uncle had liked to 'play' when they were alone, and he wasn't ever allowed to tell Mum or Da about it, either. Riley Norton's dæmon had been a serpent, a great python, and she would wind her coils tight around Akela's neck and chest, applying enough pressure to choke them both into compliance without leaving any lasting marks. Pakshara, as was the python's name, would slowly tighten her coils until they were both gasping, dizzy from lack of air, Akela too terrified to try and change shape. Uncle Riley would hiss dark things in his ear, warnings of what would happen if Connor ever dared to utter a word all whilst Pakshara slowly constricted all resistance out of Akela, not loosening until both boy and dæmon gasped out breathless promises of silence.

And silent they were. Connor went days, sometimes weeks without speaking, and Akela wouldn't change forms for months at a time, and she never took the form of something small or cuddly, like other small children's dæmons did. Whilst his classmates' dæmons tried out the forms of rabbits and birds and mice and dogs, Akela was always something predatory, something bigger and scarier. She was always a wildcat, a puma, a jaguar, a coyote, a wolf, a bear, a wolverine…but never a serpent in any form. She wouldn't speak to other children's dæmons either, just show her teeth and growl at them if they came too close. She promised herself, promised him, promised them, that they would never be helpless again, that she would always protect him just as he would protect her. But even so, Riley was still a grown man, and he was only a child.

The first time Riley ever hit him was when he was six, almost a year after they had started 'playing' their secret game. Connor had panicked and tried to get away, biting the man's hand; Riley backhanded him across the face so hard it knocked out one of his baby teeth. When his parents asked about the mark on his jaw, he said he'd fallen off the climbing frame and caught one of the bars with his face. After that, Riley was always careful to hit him where the bruises wouldn't show or restrain himself just enough to not leave a mark. Occasionally, when Connor tried to fight again, he'd end up going home with a split lip and bloody nose, claiming that he'd gotten in a scuffle with some older boys at school.

People liked to make fun of the way he wore his gloves and scarf all the time, and the many layers of clothing, but they didn't understand. He'd started wearing three shirts and two jackets because if there was enough fabric between him and Riley's fist, then the bruises didn't last as long. If he had a scarf on, then the pinning hand on the back of his neck didn't feel like it was about to crush his vertabrae to splinters. If he wore his gloves, then nobody would see the scars on his wrists where he'd pulled against the handcuffs attached to the man's bedframe or the ugly burns on his palms where Riley had forcibly held his hands on the bars of a grill after he'd called the man a maladjusted, neurotic paedophilic bastard; he had a good vocabulary for a six-year-old. Not his smartest move, that one, but the brief flash of fierce joy he felt at the look on Riley's face was worth the fiery pain of hot metal searing his flesh.

His parents were baffled, his classmates and teachers even more so, and soon he was avoided like a leper in school. Uncle Riley said that neither he nor Akela were ever going to amount to anything, that they were both worthless and didn't deserve to have friends, and the words became quite firmly ingrained in Connor Temple's mind. Even when he was an adult, sometimes he would still hear the echo of Riley Norton's voice hissing how pathetically useless he was.

It took eight years before anybody puzzled it all out. Riley Norton was arrested and sent to prison, but the damage had been done. By then, Connor was thirteen years old and Akela had settled into her meanest form, that of a lean, harsh Arctic wolf with thick black fur and dark gold eyes, nearly as tall as him and heavier, too. His mum had broken down after discovering the truth, and his father had never treated him the same after that, never hugged him or told Connor that he loved him, always distant, always reserved; John Temple's own dæmon, a beagle, had shied away from the great wolf Akela had become, as had his wife's, a wee brown sparrow. People thought it meant he was broken, but he saw it another way. Akela was a wolf, therefore, in a way, so was he—a lone wolf that'd been forced out of his pack and forced to defend for himself because he was the only one he could truly count on. But people still looked at him and Akela like there was something wrong with them.

Of course, it did come in handy sometimes, Akela's settled form. Like when his parents finally gave up and sent him to live with his gran. He was the new kid, and like secondary school law dictates, bullies hone in on the new kid, testing boundaries, deciding which category he fell into: victim, cronie, or ignored. For him, it was the lacrosse team. They were the sort who were born with a silver spoon stuck up their arse and therefore thought they were better than everyone who wasn't, who weren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer but would still go to some top-level school because the dean owed their daddy a favour. They'd sought him out his first day during lunch hour. He'd sat by himself, surrounded by this bubble of isolation that took the form of a no-man's land of empty chairs. Four of the lacrosse players had come right over, their dæmons also settled: a hawk, a mongoose, a crow, and a badger. They'd tried the usual scare tactics, which he stubbornly ignored, until the biggest one had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck to drag him out of his chair. Akela, who'd been lying under the table beside his feet, was out in an instant, snarling thunderously loud and pinning the boy's mongoose dæmon under one huge paw, white fangs bared directly in the squirming weasel's face. That day, Connor fell into a new category entirely: avoided. Nobody wanted to mess with 'the crazy geek with the wolf dæmon.'

It wasn't until he went to Uni that he finally managed to make two friends. Tom and Duncan were just as weird as he was, at least in terms of geekdom, conspiracy theories, and the like. And they were the first people who didn't see Akela and think he was some sociopath. They thought the lean wolf was "dead sick" and Nissal, Duncan's pudgy hedgehog, and Vitrial, Tom's red squirrel, would often sit proudly beside Akela, puffing out their chests when the dæmons of passerbys stared as if to say, look at us, we're friends with a badass. But he'd yet to meet another person with a dæmon as wild and predatory as Akela; the closest thing they'd seen was a copper with a large, bristling mastiff dæmon at his heels at a frat party that got a little out of hand at semester's end.

Until he met Professor Nick Cutter and Stephen Hart.