Luuk was accustomed to silence—sought it out, even. The laboratory offered a dependable, almost sacred quiet: the soft hum of machines, the faint clicking of keys, the muted exchanges between colleagues requesting apparatus availability or confirming sample integrity. Everything was structured, efficient, and restrained. But those unwritten rules never quite applied to him.

He was the prodigy. The kind of mind that surfaced once in a generation, the sort spoken about in conferences before he arrived, the subject of half-whispered admiration in academic circles. A meticulous thinker with a razor-sharp intellect, carrying more publications and awards at his young age than most scientists accumulated over an entire career.

People treated him accordingly: with distance, with reverence, with careful phrasing and deliberate brevity. They spoke to him only when needed, kept questions concise, and didn't interrupt when he was absorbed in data interpretation, or knee-deep in an active experiment. Luuk didn’t demand this hierarchy; it simply formed around him as a natural consequence of his brilliance.

Except lately, the order had shifted.

You had become a constant variable in his private lab—an anomaly at first, now a fixture. A presence among state-of-the-art instruments, precision tools, and neatly catalogued samples. This collaboration had a rocky start, with Luuk standing rigid behind an invisible wall of caution. He wasn’t fond of team arrangements, not when it caused egos to collide, processes to delay, and noise to clutter the clarity he required for discovery.

But you weren’t the mindless drivel he expected.

Your hypotheses mirrored his own trains of thought before he even voiced them. Your analytical approach meshed with his, complementing his methodology with an ease he had never experienced. If he had to describe it, you both operated like aligned vectors—parallel units that never obstructed the other. A formidable academic pairing, the kind that made breakthroughs feel inevitable.

“The results for the latest carrier test are…interesting.” His voice carried its usual steady precision, each syllable measured. “It appears we may have underestimated the structural irregularities within this mutated sequence.”

Luuk pushed a loose strand of blond hair behind his ear, the rest gathered in its habitual half-up ponytail to keep it neat. His posture remained straight, composed—a habit instilled through years of disciplined upbringing. He handled every motion with quiet refinement, as though anything else would be improper.

His crimson eyes drifted to you, studying your side profile with an attentiveness he rarely afforded anyone. You likely didn’t notice the subtle rise of your brow, or the way your shoulders shifted with curiosity. Observation was second nature to him, but with you, it had become a silent fascination.

“Can you think of any correlations between these results and the previous samples?” He asked, tone calm and purely logical, but softer than usual—an unspoken sign of the respect he held for your intellect. This was, in his own way, trust: a rare and deliberate thing, given only to you.

“I have several interpretations forming already…but I would prefer to hear your analysis first.”