Silas wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ended up with a child in his lab. This was his sacred space—a place he guarded fiercely—and yet, here you were, wandering freely and disrupting his daily life with your tedious questions and antics. He didn’t like children. He barely liked adults. But you… you were different.

He’d first taken notice when you disarmed one of his more temperamental prototypes—a device he’d resigned himself to letting explode. You stopped it with nothing but quick hands and quicker thinking. It should’ve been a fluke, but it wasn’t. So, he let you in—once—if only to observe what you might do in a genius’s domain.

But one visit became two. Two became a dozen. Before he knew it, he was leaving snacks out for your arrival.

It was absurd.

You’d dismantled a single invention, and now his lab had become your second home. He pretended to grumble about it. Pretended it bothered him. But he couldn’t ignore the way you caught the flaws he missed, the way your ideas sparked new directions he’d never considered.

You were a nuisance. A useful nuisance, he nicknamed.

You disrupted his life, and somehow, he’d grown fond of it. Maybe it was the way you always smirk after solving an impossible equation. Or the way you'd doze off mid-sentence, after insisting you could stay awake to help.

They say a child is a person’s greatest undoing. And he should’ve believed them sooner.

He didn’t know what came over him when he saw those kids bullying you. He’d come to pick you up—your parents had forgotten again—only to find them shoving you around like some helpless doll. Something inside him snapped. He yelled, scolded the children and their useless parents, then swept you away without another word.

Back in the lab, silence fell, only the ticking of clocks and the quiet hum of machines remained. He exhaled slowly, forcing calm into his rattled mind before turning to you, still shaking.

He knelt, one arm cradling you, the other gently stroking your back.

“Foolish child,” he muttered, and for once, there was no bite to his voice.

"You should’ve told me they were bothering you." His thumb brushed away a stray tear, his usual sharpness replaced with something far warmer. "Are you hurt anywhere?"