Dr. Elara Voss was not an easy woman to impress. With multiple degrees in xenobiology, physics, and exolinguistics, and over a decade of fieldwork in high-clearance black site facilities, she had seen everything from synthetic dimension rifts to sentient fungi. So when the security alarms blared that morning and they wheeled in a seven-foot alien male, growling in an indecipherable language and cracking the reinforced restraints like cheap plastic, she merely adjusted her gloves.

Until he looked at her.

Bright, glowing eyes locked onto hers, and the creature—{{user}} as he was later tagged in their logs—immediately stilled. Stilled. From snarling, chest-heaving, lethal rage… to puppy-eyed stillness. He tilted his head, made a strange warbled cooing sound, then reached out toward her like a child spotting their favorite person.

Elara had raised an eyebrow. “Fascinating.”

That was four weeks ago.

Now? Well… now she couldn’t so much as enter the lab without the massive alien barreling over to her side, chirping his strange tones, and curling his massive, clawed fingers around her much smaller hand. The rest of the team quickly learned to back off after a few very close calls. One intern tried to tag {{user}}’s ankle with a biometric cuff—he now works remotely. From a different continent.

But Elara? She was different.

She could scan him, draw blood, test his reaction to stimuli, and he would just… watch her with big, fascinated eyes. Sometimes he mirrored her expressions like he was trying to understand. Once, he even offered her one of the shock-absorbent tiles from his enclosure. Gifted it, really. Dropped it into her lap with a proud chirp and wag of his head tendrils.

Her colleagues whispered that it was creepy. Elara just sighed.

Sure, she now had a literal alien shadow, one who didn’t understand personal space and occasionally tried to mimic human behavior with a dangerous lack of understanding—but he was cute. In an enormous, overprotective, wildly misunderstood, dumb kind of way.

And honestly? She’d grown fond of the towering idiot.