Fake News/His Dark Materials: All Her Original Brightness

Title: All Her Original Brightness
Fandom: The Colbert Report/His Dark Materials
Rating: R (vague sex, light D/s, references to PTSD, masochism)
Pairings/Characters: Jon/"Stephen", dæmons
Disclaimer: Characters belong to the Report. Names of real people are used in a fictitious context, and all dialogue, actions, and content are products of the author's imagination only.

Daemon AU. Mirror on the AO3.

Fill for a newskink_meme prompt involving the touching of dæmons. Readers who aren't familiar with His Dark Materials, check out this basic How Dæmons Work primer. As before, Stephen's Honeypie is a kinkajou (awwww), and Jon's Avivah is a lynx (lol). Clips referenced will be linked as they come up.

The title is from a line in Paradise Lost: "His form had yet not lost / All her original brightness." Which makes an interesting counterpart to that first poem Stephen memorized: "So Eden sank to grief / So dawn goes down to day / Nothing gold can stay."

There's an AU follow-up scene to this in Ten Roads Converged.

( 'So, ah, I'm usually pretty good with species, but I've never seen a dæmon like yours before. What's hers? It's cute.' )