Author's Note: To those about to read this I warn you that this is a kind of spin-off meandering drabble with a vague plot of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus", while it might be readable without having read that first and fairly understandable, there will be a lot of gaps in explanations. Also, because of this NOT CANON.

"I once had a daemon,"

She was eleven, teetering on the edge of adolescence to the very beginnings of maturity, and she was sitting on a bench in King's Cross Station speaking to a man who had her eyes and her face but hair like ravens' feathers, a man who claimed to be Death.

"Does death have a soul?"

He offered her a small, strained, smile, and in it was thousands of years of suffering.

"No, he doesn't, but Harry Potter did, once." Death paused then, pale fingers tapping against the stone of the bench, and he added, "It was the greatest gift I had ever received, and I would not even realize it until the very end."

"He was like your daemon, your…"

"Lenin," Lily filled in for him.

"Yes, your Lenin." Death responded softly, tasting the name, "He was like your Lenin. Independent, stubborn, willful, and so very clever, much cleverer than I ever was. But of course, it was a he rather than a she… That was the first glaring sign that he was never mine to begin with. We'd have the worst fights sometimes, he never understood or even liked Ron or Hermione, and they always… doubted because of him. Even them, my greatest friends… Everyone thought I had an inner dark side, that I was some sort of a sexual deviant, or at the very least had an inner cynic."

He gave a small laugh, a harsh dry thing, one that didn't suit him, "Of course, they were wrong, he was the most human element of me. And… And of you."

"What do you mean?"

"He isn't yours, Lily," he reached across for her hands, held them in his, and stared deep into her eyes, "You've always known deep down, you've kept track of the inconsistencies, the differences… He's never been yours."

She wasn't entirely sure which of them had come to full consciousness first, whether it was him or her, of course he always claimed it was him but to Lily it'd seemed like they'd become, well, themselves, more or less around the same time.

It was a sharp jagged sort of thing, sentience, and not altogether that pleasant. Of course, there had been hints of it before, but just hints, just observations piled up together. It wasn't until they were around three that it hit with the full weight of a logging truck.

And compared to Dudder's and Buddy's slow progression the differences were very clear.

Of course, with Lenin's deep and utter contempt for Dudders and Buddy, for the fat little boy with his fat fuzzy little daemon that tried so hard to look so very intimidating, Lenin was all too glad that there appeared to be nothing in common between them.

(Lenin, frankly, would be pleased to be entirely inhuman if it meant that there was no way in hell for them to share any genetics with Dudders or any of the other Dursleys. Lily was never quite sure how she felt about that.)

Lily, on the other hand, was slightly more apprehensive about all of it. And at first, when they'd been in the house, it'd been ignorable. After all, the sample size was small, just her and Lenin, Dudders and Buddy, Vernon and his mule of a soul Sheila, and Petunia and the thin narrow eyed ferret Rowan, plus Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia barely counted being adults and their daemons long since settled, so really it was just her and Dudley. But then school started and… Well, it hadn't been so easy to push to the side.

"They never talk, did you notice? Well, not them, their daemons. They chatter on, stutter, but the daemons… They don't talk."

Lily observed this from the back corner of the classroom, looking at the heads of all the children as they talked loudly with one another, sharing this and that, and barely seeming to have anything in common with Lily and Lenin at all.

"I imagine they have nothing to say," Lenin commented with a shrug, or what amounted to a shrug in the form of a raven, shedding black feathers on her desk in his usual chronic irritation.

Children annoyed Lenin.

No, strike that, everything annoyed Lenin, but he found children particularly irksome.

"And they're… They're soft, always rabbits, puppies, kittens…"

That wasn't entirely true, there seemed to be some correlation between the intelligence and maturity of the child and the form of their daemon. The smarter ones, or the ones who seemed more with it, their daemons tended to cycle through more forms. They weren't just mammals for comfort but frogs, birds, fish, nothing too impressive but certainly nothing as unimaginative as Buddy's preferred forms of large dog, small dog, and fluffy bunny.

Adults, of course, didn't count. Their daemons were static, fixed, they had a certain presence to them that came with having spent years as themselves, and thus hard to compare to the evanescent forms of a child's soul.

Lenin glanced up, eyes black drops of ink in his skull, as he took in the chattering children, Dudley towards the front of the class sneering back as he caught Lenin's glance even while Buddy shuffled almost unnoticeably in his golden lab form, uncomfortably. If ravens could smile, could have cutting jagged smiles without happiness, then she imagined Lenin's beak would be curved into one now.

"Yes, it's all very mundane isn't it?" He turned his attention back to her, shifting as he did so into the form of a black cat, his eyes a green to match her own as he stretched and pawed at her papers, "Of course, this is why you should be so grateful you have me for a daemon rather than them. Can you imagine how dull it must be, being attached to that?"

"You wouldn't envy them either, you would hate to be Dudder's daemon, to be Buddy."

The cat licked at its paw in indifference, rather like how Lily might examine her nails, and then said in his usual drawling dry tone, "Yes, that said, this is all a bit hypothetical. I am not their daemon nor could I ever be, similarly they are not my humans nor could they hope to be. We are two sides of a coin, Lily, you can't have one without the other."

She did imagine though, and she was grateful, because with the long hours in the cupboard it was hard to imagine anyone but Lenin beside her. Lenin who would take the form of a wolf with stained teeth and yellow eyes, filling the cupboard to the brim, and baring his teeth at Petunia's entrance every morning as if he was merely biding his time before he went in for the kill.

Still, they were different, and Dudders capitalized on that from the very beginning.

They were pushed to the back of every classroom with ease, the adults never said much, but the children certainly whispered. There were unconscious tells that daemons gave, in some ways it was much easier, much more accurate, to read a daemon than it was to read a face. Lily and Lenin made them nervous, even the adults, that more than Dudley calling her a crazy freak and pushing her or chasing her around with sticks, was the real clincher.

She'd understood for a very long time though that there was something fundamentally wrong with reality. It all looked very convincing, at a glance, but if you really thought about it and watched you would catch all the little inconsistencies thrown about.

Sometimes they were quite glaring like teleporting to the roof, turning her teacher's hair blue, things breaking around her, but they also could be subtle and consistent. Lenin's independent thought, his contradicting thoughts, his own range of emotions and feelings, his self-control, his wishes, his desires, and even his strange abilities…

But the more she thought about it, she wondered if it was truly her, and if it wasn't them, everyone else, instead.

The fact of the matter was that everyone she'd ever met, the Dursleys in particular, were just a little flat by comparison, a tad bit unconvincing. Oh, they played the role with consistency, blathered on about her stupid drunk parents when appropriate, assigned her drudgery, threw her in the cupboard, but there was no purpose behind it, no rational reason that she could possibly come up with for their utter contempt.

They and their souls were a dream dreamt by no one.

Of course, Lenin had never agreed with this, since the first time she'd told him her theory about the glitches in the universe, and the unerringly false nature of the world they lived in.

"Lily, I've had to suffer through Dudley Dursley learning to talk, but believe me when I say that has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard you say."

They were in the cupboard, (they were always in the cupboard) he was an anaconda, all green, silver, and gold, winding his way about her feet with a strangely lazy sort of impatience. As if he had all the time in the world to wait but would rather not.

She was curled in on herself, chin on her thin knees, staring at the dark wall littered with the few crayon drawings she had managed to sneak inside as if she could peer through them entirely and into the great cogs that made up reality.

They were younger then, only just beginning.

"And how are you so certain that everything is real, Lenin?"

"Because down that path lies madness and irrelevance. It doesn't matter if it is real or if it is not, and because of that it might as well be real. It's a pointless question."

"But it changes, Lenin, even you have to admit it's not consistent."

He looked at her through hooded nonplussed eyes, painted an eerie and reptilian gold even in the dark, "They are consistently mediocre, we are consistently extraordinary, what is there to question?"

"Don't you find it odd, how the world seems to bend itself around us?"

He curls himself around her, wrapping himself around her legs then her torso, his head moving so that his head is pressed against her ear, "No, because tell me, Lily, who else would it possibly bend for?"

And that's what she would always think, that Lenin was her inner realist, that which bent to the pragmatic laws of reality, or at least respected them in some capacity. And it had seemed natural to her, he was her equal and opposite after all, all that which made her herself…

Why shouldn't they disagree from time to time?

She wasn't born Lily and he wasn't born Lenin.

She'd been born Eleanor Lily Potter, mostly referred to as girl by the Dursleys, and Lenin, well, Lily actually had no idea what the hell he was supposed to be named growing up. The Dursleys rarely referred to her own name, there was no way in hell they were going to go about speaking to her daemon of all things.

People, as a general rule, were uncomfortable talking directly to someone's daemon. It was considered not only intrusive but also instinctively uncomfortable. Instead there was this unwritten but universally understood rule that daemons spoke to other daemons and humans spoke to other humans.

Like most of these unwritten rules Lily had absolutely no idea they had existed until she'd gone out and broken all of them.

Because you could tell a lot about a man by the color of his daemon. And Lily felt that ignoring them, shifting her eyes and focusing on the human instead, was a very strange thing to do when their soul was sitting right there for the observing.

That, and Lenin had always demanded nothing less than everyone's full attention, and in the very beginning she'd found it hard to understand that any other daemon would want it differently.

(Sometimes, she wondered if Lenin was really her daemon at all, and if instead wasn't a person himself who just happened to be her daemon.)

At any rate, Lenin had always been a little put out by their lack of solid, respectable, names.

"Eleanor isn't so bad, I suppose," Cat again, irritated, eyes narrowed as he sat on the branch of a tree in the back yard with narrowed eyes that shifted from blue to green to back again, apparently undecided on a preferred color, "There are certainly worse names, but it's also such an ordinary one, Ellie Potter… It hardly suits us."

"And you don't seem to have one at all," Lily pointed out as she kneeled there grabbing at weeds with gritted teeth, knowing all too well that Aunt Petunia was watching from the kitchen to be sure Lily didn't slack off while Dudley sat inside watching Saturday morning cartoons.

"No, it seems I'm beneath names entirely," he agreed with a sniff of contempt as his eyes burned through the glass of Aunt Petunia's window.

"Well, do you have any ideas?" Lily asked, and watched as he blinked, bristled, and shifted out of his cat's form into a blue bird, a strange and unusually optimistic form for him (he seemed to have this obsession with dark or else terrifying things and only on especially rare occasions took the form of anything anyone else would remotely call pleasant).

"Something rarer than Ellie, something memorable, extraordinary, something that fits…" He trailed off, eyeing her critically with a cocked head, "How about Persephone, for the Greek goddess of Spring and queen of the underworld?"

"Good god no," Lily said, shuddering slightly, because while she might not have gotten along with her peers she was all too aware that going by a name like Persephone was going to get her nowhere fast.

That and she couldn't take it seriously.

"Why don't we try you first, since you seem to be getting nowhere with mine?" Lily said, hoping to divert him before he got too insulted, but it was apparently a bit late for that.

"I was going to suggest Hades or Pluto for my own, since we were running with a theme, but it seems you've entirely…"

"I can't call you Hades," Lily scoffed and momentarily forgot about her weeding, "Have you ever heard of a daemon called Hades? Because I haven't, and if I did then I'd never be able to take them seriously."

"Then what can you take seriously, Ellie?" And there he was spitting out Ellie like it practically burned, like that was the grossest insult anyone could ever offer them, when, really, she had never minded it too much.

Because most of the time the Dursleys didn't even really use it.

She paused, thinking, and felt herself thinking through all of the names rattling around in her brain, "Oh, I don't know, uh, what about Napoleon?"

"Napoleon?"

Lily nodded and shrugged as she began to pull out a truly stubborn weed, "Sure, you're Napoleon and I'm that other guy… Wellington."

"Wellington and Napoleon, really, that's what you come up with? Why on earth do you think those names are any more respectable?"

Lily stared down at her red hands in distaste, already hurting despite having half of the yard left to do, "I don't know… It fits."

Lenin took this moment to change back into a hissing cat, hair bristling as he glared down at her with his tail raised, "It fits? Tell me, how does it possibly fit?"

"It fits you," she paused, and felt that her words were somehow weighted even as she said them, "This place… This is your Elba, isn't it? You're stuck here, with me, longing for glory and revolution on this island in the suburbs."

She paused then, somehow picturing him not as a daemon, but a man in his own right with his own python daemon curled over his shoulders, staring out the windows at the darkened English countryside as his own bitter hatred and determination stared back at him.

"No, that's not quite right, you haven't done it yet… You're still waiting for the revolution, egging it on, willing for it to happen… You're Lenin."

"And if I'm this… Lenin, then who are you supposed to be? Trotsky?"

She stared up at him for a moment, and somehow felt the answer at the tip of her tongue, in spite of it having not been anywhere near there before that moment, "No, of course not, I'm Lily."

And they had their dreams then, of great and terrible things, and somehow they'd managed to convince themselves that it was as easy as that.

It wasn't.

Author's Note: Well, this has been rattling around in my head for a while and I thought, why not? So there's a vague underlying plot to all of this but if/when I continue it it's probably going to meander a bit to get there (i.e. probably at least one more pre-Hogwarts chapter with maybe some parallel look into Death's own past) . With that said, this obviously isn't a priority so... yes, don't expect rapid updates. Especially since I really need to get back to updating the regularly scheduled fanfiction that I have going rather than all of this brain dump stuff I've been doing recently.

But anyways, I will give credit where credit is due and mention that Dudley's daemon name Buddy comes from some other HPxHis Dark Materials fic I read that I cannot remember the name of. And I thought it was brilliant, and couldn't come up with a more fitting one on my own, so Buddy remains.

Thanks for reading, reviews are very much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own His Dark Materials or Harry Potter