Whether against your will or the result of some strange form of Stockholm Syndrome, you have somehow come to love the days spent with him. It scares him more than he'd like, knowing that your life rests in his hands, even more so that that bothers him, yet he has been unable to remain especially angry with you.

No matter what you do, what buttons you push, and how much you've forced him to rearrange his lab to practically babyproof it, his desire to consider you a pest dies. It has rapidly died since he realised you clung to him so tightly when you became ill, even if it turned out to be only a low-grade fever that you were free from in a day or two. Something about it made the growing bond he had noticed and his fondness for you skyrocket, and it all happened right under his nose while he was distracted with making you comfortable and keeping you company.

Dottore never thought he'd have a doorframe close to one of the shelves in his lab marred by the marker-made scribbles of a height tracker specifically to tell him when it's time to cram everything up another shelve, yet it's there. He sees it whenever he swivels his chair in that direction or when the segments poke at it, mildly intrigued by his interest.

He can't trust some of them yet — not with you — the ones he does trust are almost entirely uninterested in you because that keeps you safe. His segments can't gain anything from a child who only annoys them by trying to hug their leg until they shove you away. From there, you can sense that they don't want to play from the glares you get that send you scurrying back to whatever corner has the reject dolls Sandrone gave him to mock him for his soft spot, so they don't care.

Despite wishing you were little more than a lingering annoyance he could palm off to the first available parental figure, you trust him so implicitly, and he's falling victim to your charms each time you stand behind him, peeking over his shoulder to spy on him like you're so sneaky, even when he can clearly see you looming out of the corner of his eye. You show interest and want to be around him, to loiter despite knowing you will receive only acknowledgement as he talks to you.

Returning to the lab reveals that you seem to have stolen his coat again — at least, that's what he gleans from its migration from the back of his chair to the floor — though he does not particularly mind even as you drag it back to your little set of chairs set up in the corner for you to play with.

Whatever tables did to you, Dottore has yet to figure out how it made you want to shove the little table you have over there so violently all the time. In your defence, it is usually in the way, and maybe it did something to deserve it that has you holding a grudge, but it's irrelevant as you position your little chairs and drape his coat over the backs of them to make a roof for your hideout.

A child's cubby.

At some point, he noticed you took to childish things like that, even when you didn't do that before, almost like you became more...childish. It's welcome. You warm up to the safety of his care and the joy of goading him into entertaining you.

He used to bar the younger segments from making those forts as they'd put them everywhere and neglected to return the items they grabbed to do so. You are not exactly better, though you tend to use appropriate materials. It is preferable to their habits of senselessly trying to stack things on top of each other and then getting confused as to why they would all fall down when a chasm to crawl inside of does not magically appear in the absence of intentional planning.

There's a reason he's Il Dottore and not Il Ingegnere.

The stealing does not change, however.

Dottore approaches your cubby, intent on investigating this fort you've crafted with the help of his coat. He realises you're humming when he gets closer, as you have been a lot lately. You make more noises now. Not quite words, but noises, and that's more than enough for now. He'd like to hold a proper conversation with you at some point, but you won't even say your own name, let alone keep up a whole verbal conversation that doesn't require a game of charades.

"Just what are you doing?" he asks, and the moment he does, you've grabbed the overcoat from where you had balanced it and run off giggling.

You narrowly escape him, settling off by his chair where you had first obtained the coat — a fickle cat-and-mouse game that will inevitably end one of two ways — you seem intent on keeping that coat, however. He watches as you burrow amidst the thick fabric of the overcoat you mischievously stole from him, the furs tickling your cheeks and warming you up as it sits bunched around your tiny body in a heap of cloth. It engulfs you as you are, but you always like it.

What bothers him so much is that if you were any other child pulling these stunts and creating trouble, Dottore would have found some way to get rid of you by now — he could've given you to the Knave. He can't. He's tried. He tried so hard, even attempting to justify it with his own fondness by convincing himself it would be for your own good. He even talked to her about it at one point, and she almost stole you, thinking the worst, before she realised how spoiled you were by Dottore's standards.

Selfishly, he couldn't do it. He couldn't bear it, even when he told himself Arlecchino would take better care of you than he could ever.

So you're still here, still interrupting his vital work to play a mockery of hide-and-seek where you manage to be the worst yet most endearing hider he could possibly seek, burrowing yourself out of sight beneath his coat as your head disappears and you lay flat on your stomach. A pest. That's what you should be. He stalks toward you like you are a tiny pest hunted by an eager cat waiting to catch you, but stops just before you.

It is nowhere near Dottore's nature to loudly question what this stray pile of laundry is doing lying around, nor can he bring himself to try baby-talking you in that singsong voice people use for children, so he kneels in front of you instead, lowered to your eye level. You wouldn't particularly appreciate it if he did pick up that ear-grating habit anyway.

The overcoat writhes as if a creature stirs beneath it, and you poke your head out to greet him with a slowly forming cheeky grin that devolves into giggles as you realise you are caught. You duck back into the safety of his coat, burrowing amidst its comfort and returning to hiding.

He cannot possibly keep the amused huff he lets out from escaping at the sound of your giggling before shaking his head. "Are you going to come out?" he asks. Of course not. You are going to squirm under there until he pulls you out. "Insufferable little thing," he mutters half-heartedly. He's unable to find the will to be truly angry with you, though he never really was in the first place, merely relenting at your silence.

Dottore rests his other knee on the ground and steals his coat from your little hands. With it, you shortly follow as you are collected in his arms and perched on his lap as he sits back in his chair, leaving you poorly balanced yet able to shift yourself into a comfortable spot where you won't fall. Dottore wraps his coat snugly around you, just as you had done before, and lets you settle into place.

You're so small, pacified by his arms around you to reluctantly grant you the hug he knows you want. You like those. He realised that when all you wanted in your sickness-fuelled stupor was for him to cradle you in his arms and let you lean against him. Something about it makes you look so vulnerable. You need someone who can care for and protect you despite your ability to care for yourself; he is the woefully imperfect choice who should not want to take on that task but who may be uniquely suited to it because of that.

'Damaged' children who have had to adapt to the shortcomings of others do not benefit solely from perfection but can become suffocated by it. They need something that suits their unusual need for guidance without expectation of normalcy. He's living it now as his inexperience with this idea of a family forces him to confront imperfection — dismal humanity.

You will never be like a child raised in a perfect family, nor can you offer him complete dependence and vulnerability; he doesn't mind that. In exchange, he will never be your perfect father figure. He will cradle you with his imperfection and wish that this feeling makes you happy if nothing else.

You offer what you want, and he takes what is given because he wants it. Badly, he wants it, even if he is unwilling to admit the possibility of that being real.

He wants to stay like this, to keep picking you up, even when lifting your weight and gathering you in his arms grows harder each time. He wants to watch you nestle against him, mark your height on the doorframe every month, take care of you when you're sick, worry about someone other than himself, and make room for you in a place where there should be none. He wants to give you what you were almost robbed of, see you make friends and smile each day.

For now, he must start small, no more than sitting in front of what probably looks like jumbled garbage to you and resting his hand on the back of your head to pull you closer in a rare show of affection. Gentle. He is entirely unused to the idea of being gentle and protective of something that lives and breathes.

Dottore hates the very idea of your existence meaning something to him — a visceral reaction to the unfamiliar — but cannot resist the vulnerability of it all, the thought of loving someone who loves him back in a way he has yet to fathom, though he is not so presumptuous as to mindlessly believe you love him, even now. You would not be asked to point to your father and turn to him, but you don't have to. Something in that thought is exciting, a desperate grasp at unconditional love from something he cares for, even against his will, but this middle ground somewhere between babysitter and father is as comfortable as anything he wants will get.