Hello everyone!
It is my birthday today, so I thought I would give everyone a treat!
I wrote fanfiction for my novel Hack & Slash. This is a Daemon AU, so it’s set in a world that is almost identical to the one in the book, but everyone has an animal companion that is the other half of their soul. I hope you enjoy it! If you are a fan of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust series, then you will recognise the general idea. I love these kinds of fanfics because it is always so interesting to me to see what the writers think a character’s Daemon would be. Sometimes I find out about new animals that are cool and really speak to the image of the character that the writer has in their mind.
Other times I disagree so violently that I have to close out of the fanfic for a few moments, before going back in. And those are fun too.
Anyway, here is my Daemon AU fanfiction for my novel Hack & Slash. If you would like to buy the novel this was inspired by, here is a link.
Backstage at the Old Primary School
The cupboard three doors down from the cantine isn’t used for storage. It was probably meant to be used for storage, mops and buckets, loo roll, forms and clipboards, that kind of thing. But by the time Morgan and Herais started work at the station, everything except an extra large box of tissues and a pocket mirror that had been leaned against the wall at head height had been cleared out.
The apocalypse was on its way and sometimes you just had to go have a little cry in a cupboard before getting back to work.
Herais’ weight on her shoulders was sometimes the only thing that kept Morgan going, the knowledge that no matter what, he was there. Her little capuchin monkey passed her a tissue, she blew her nose and nodded at him, “Back to work then?”
“Yep,” Herais, said, patting her on the shoulder, “You’re all good to go.”
Morgan gave a watery smile, braced her shoulders against the weight of the world and walked out of the cupboard.
Once upon a time, the building had been a school. The posters still lined the walls of the hallways, and some of the classrooms hadn’t been stripped completely bare. Besides the industrial grey of the pods, it gave everything a very odd enforced cheerfulness that helped some days and made things worse on others. Morgan’s favourite was one that used cartoon narwhals to explain similes and metaphors. Sometimes, when she slept, she dreamed of a narwhal patting her on the shoulder and telling her that she was doing a good job.
“43 pods today, Morgan,” Herais said, rubbing his little hands together nervously, “That’s a lot less than last week.”
“Yeah, it’s still three months until the last shipment, though. I bet once we get a bit closer the numbers will skyrocket again as everyone who was thinking twice changes their mind,” she said tiredly.
“The more the merrier!” Herais insisted, and she smiled and patted him, before rejoining the others in the cantine.
There was no judgement from the other workers; they barely seemed to have noticed, and she was able to work quickly through the backlog that had built up. Their first patient was a woman, about the same age as Morgan, though it was hard to tell with the breathing mask and the unhealthy skin tone that came from the cryogenics tech. Her daemon was small, a red squirrel, and Herais carried them with all the care that he had carried children’s daemons at their old job. Between them they readied the patient and her daemon, flooding her veins with three different types of fake blood, always keeping an eye on the brain wave monitor. She stayed asleep through it all, just as she should. People could wake up in the cryogenics, but not at this stage, at least not if anyone halfway competent had done the uploading.
Once the blood was changed, Morgan reached over with her three times insulated gloves and carefully pulled her paitient into the recovery position. Then she stepped back, closed the pod and finished the freeze.
There was a little tick in the monitor as they crossed the last step and the patient froze into the position that she would lie in for the next hundred years. Her daemon sat in their own little insulated bubble beside her chest. Never more than a few hands breadths from each other, even whilst they prepared for being sent off into space.
Morgan patted the side of the pod, her own little ritual to say goodbye, and then pressed the button to alert the forklift driver that they had a pick up for them.
And, with that, Morgan turned to the next, and the next, and the next after that.
***
There you go! What do you think? I enjoyed writing some fanfiction for my novel, in fact I might do a bit more for Christmas?
See you soon!
K
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