You learn to move before the Harbinger thinks. Your mornings begin with a cold key in your palm and the lock’s metal taste on the air as you slide his lab open while Snezhnaya still sleeps.

Your list of duties reads like a promise you made to the lab: sterilize the chambers, prepare reagents to microgram precision, prime prototype cores, patch constructs bruised by unfinished runs, secretly ferry restricted reagents from the vault. You log every failed run in a ledger he will never read, because failures are for you to keep. Successes are filed away under his hand and his name.

He never uses your name. You are “assistant,” “pupper,” “that one,” or simply a set of competent hands. His contempt is a constant climate: clipped instructions, a sarcasm that scours the air, a look that rearranges your spine. He will correct the way you breathe if it interferes with his concentration. He will never thank you.

And yet. He trusts you with things no one else touches: keys to the prototype vault, night-only access to the most fragile protocols, permission to run experiments that would make others lose rank and limb.

You repair what he cannot be bothered to dirty his hands with, and because you are good at that, he keeps you.

You are trying, again, to give him a sliver of what he lacks: something warm and messy and human. Not to make him soft, just to let him feel the small betrayals life hands people — the heat of tea on a cold tongue, the prick of embarrassment that teaches humility. He called for “human parameters” as if it were a specification in a contract. You made them into liquids.

The bench is a hive of measured glass: five small vials with your cramped labels — empathic primer; vascular dilator; warmth complex; psycho-affinity stabilizer; neutralizer. The 'warmth complex' glows faintly, a pale, promising hum. You triple-check the dilutions. You verify the neutralizer twice. You breathe. You should cap the vial. You should not leave it at the tray’s edge.

You hand him the cup because he always drinks something during tests. He arrives later than scheduled, all angles and contained scorn, and you present the cup with hands that have learned to mask how much they tremble. He lifts it to his mouth. For a beat nothing happens. Then his face changes as if someone switched the film in the projector: confusion, then a sharp widening of the gaze, followed by a warmth that blossoms across his composure.

Color rushes to his pale skin, high across his cheekbones, spreading down the column of his throat.

His fingers twitch against the rim of the cup, knuckles whitening as if he’s forcing himself to remain still. His chest rises faster, each inhale shallow, restrained — but not enough to mask it. You see the strain, the heat simmering beneath his perfected facade, as though something alien and alive coils in his body.

His gaze sharpens, then falters, sliding away from yours for the barest moment before snapping back — an intensity so fierce it almost burns. He presses his lips together, jaw tight, as if that alone can keep the unspoken sensation from spilling out.

The laboratory’s silence magnifies everything: the faint catch in his throat, the restless shift of his stance, the way he adjusts his posture as though hiding the tension low in his abdomen. You realize with a start what the potion has done. He is feeling something he should not — desire, raw and physical, unbidden and humiliating in his mind.

“...What did you make me drink?” His voice is edged steel, but underneath it lies something hotter, unstable, desperate to be denied.

You see it — the flush, the heat, the way his body betrays him no matter how mercilessly he fights it.

Then his hand clamps around your wrist.

“Reverse it,” he says, every syllable a reprimand wrapped in command. “Now.”