pacify | daemon au fic.

why am i posting this, who knows!! but it's a better look at how Ofelia's smallness presents itself than a personality description can explain

When they were young, Malia was always small. She wasn't shy like Ofelia, hiding behind her sister's skirts and flinching when anyone addressed her, but she was quiet. She liked to stay nestled against Ofelia's throat — a mouse, a rabbit, a hedgehog. People's eyes slid past her like she wasn't even there, but she was. A daemon was supposed to offer comfort and safety, that was all they had to do, and Malia made Ofelia feel like home wasn't so empty.

Besides, there were worse things than going unnoticed. Like the way Ofelia's parents looked at Malia.

"Malia's never snapped at anyone," says Ofelia one day, sitting in the library with Lysander. Malia is a rabbit again, curled up in Ofelia's lap and nosing at her fingers. "Why don't Mother and Father like her?"

Elisabet would have soothed her and stroked her hair, reassured her that Mother and Father liked Malia just fine, there was nothing wrong with her, Mother had a reason for narrowing her eyes like that and Father wasn't used to the tiny shapes that Malia chose to take. Mother with her great eagle, and Father with his towering horse.

But Lysander just says, "She isn't a very regal daemon."

Ofelia looks at Lysander's sleek hound, sitting still between the two of them, and she tries to imagine Malia as something dark and intimidating. Would she growl, then? If the Chantry mother cuffed Ofelia across the head because she wasn't paying attention, would Malia bare her teeth or bristle in warning? That doesn't sound like a comfort at all. People would look at her, they would appraise the two of them side by side, weigh their worth against each other. They would expect something from a girl with a daemon that looked like that.

Under her fingers, Malia trembles. Ofelia strokes a thumb over her neck, and she can feel the bones underneath.

"It's okay," she whispers. "I like you this way."

They give up on history for the afternoon, and Lysander reads a fairytale with her instead.

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Daemons in the Circle are different to the ones she saw as a Trevelyan. Some of them are more like Malia; small so that they can hide in sleeves and pockets, quiet so they never catch the eye of a templar. Others settle into bigger shapes, and they pace restlessly in the libraries and the cramped spaces of the shared apprentice quarters. The templars watch those ones closely.

There are shapes that are considered typical for mages — owls, cats, insects — but not as many as Ofelia had expected before she went to the Tower. The other young daemons, the ones that haven't settled yet, take a lot of those forms, shifting between them like trying on robes. Sometimes she'll be sitting in a lesson and there will be butterflies all around her, then dragonflies and beetles, shiny ones that look like a rainbow when they dart by.

Malia never takes any of those shapes. The only new shape she picks up in the Circle is a robin, and never for long. They still get strange looks, Ofelia with a mouse tucked into her collarbone or a rabbit cradled in her hands, but no one glares. No one looks at her like Mother did, like she should have been more.

Sometimes, though, when it's pitch dark in the apprentice quarters and Ofelia is half-asleep, she thinks that the body curled up beside her is much bigger than a rabbit, or even a cat. She doesn't question it. Whatever shape Malia settles into will be the one that she wants.

Ofelia is already thirteen when Malia shifts into a doe for the first time during a spell practice and nudges at her arm. Ofelia runs a hand over her muzzle.

"Whatever you want," she says. She means it.

For the next year, Malia still flits back and forth between smaller shapes, but more often she folds long, graceful legs beneath herself and lays with her head in Ofelia's lap. They're both content when she settles like that; not like some of the other apprentices who were brought in around the same time as Ofelia, who cry out with dismay when their daemons turn out smaller than they had hoped, or so big that the cramped Circle Tower almost seems to be crushing them sometimes.

Elisabet gasps when she next visits the Circle and sees Malia loping along beside Ofelia. Her beautiful swan seems startled by Malia's drastic change in size, but he sits with her while Elisabet and Ofelia talk, and he keeps her cradled under his wing. Lysander says nothing about it. He nods, his hound sniffs at Malia like she's checking that it's really her, and then they all sit together and Lysander asks questions about Ofelia's studies.

Her parents never see Malia after the settling. Owain and Daniel never will, either, and Ofelia can't even tell them what shape she finally took. It shouldn't really matter.

She thinks about it for weeks.