Chapter Text
This, One thought emphatically, is a bad idea.
He had never intended to return to the lab he spent most of his life imprisoned in, not even with Papa dead at his own hands.
(Most of the doctors were dead, the only one he knew had survived was Owens, and that was because the man hadn’t been there at the time of his and his…charge’s escape. He’d not dared to wait once he had Soteria removed from his body.)
But it had been his charge who had worried for the others, his other not-children.
If he was being honest (wasn’t it so rare that he was though?) he knew he couldn’t just… leave them. That they would awake in pain, confused, with none of the adults that had been raising them their entire lives present. They had no idea he was 001, that he ever had powers, until he’d turned it on everyone in the facility.
Owens would return, and what would he do? One knew he wasn’t as callous or cruel as Papa, he never had been, but he’d allowed (and partaken in to a degree) the experiments to make all the others using his DNA. And now he’d be the only one left in charge of them all.
He didn’t trust the man either. Jane, (as she had begun to call herself recently, as another memory of her birth mother returned…and he was fine with it, he was - ) hadn’t either. She couldn’t stop wondering about what would happen to them. He caught glimpses of her mind, some involuntary, some willing on both ends, (neither had ever communicated so fully and openly to another like them until now), and it had very often wandered to them.
Even the bitterness he felt at Two (and Three, Four, and Five) couldn’t destroy the concern.
(It’d been reckless, short sighted, to kill all of the staff and take his not-daughter and go. He knew it, he had already chastised himself. But he would never have let those doctors or soldiers live. Not after all the pain they’d inflicted on all of them, himself included. He had not forgotten his recent “punishment” for what he told E - Jane. It was far from the first time. Even if it had become much less frequent after he’d been weakened. He was often almost forgotten about. But there were times Papa felt the need to remind him of his place.)
So he was here, to see what had happened to them. To see if he needed to…interfere, further.
Beyond that he didn’t know what he would do. He couldn’t take them all with them, he couldn’t take care of them all. He could kill for them, he had and would, but he couldn’t… be what they needed.
(He’d saved the girl connected to him, that was like him, but he wasn’t going to pretend being raised in that lab meant he could raise 14 others like them. He believed in her (he needed her)…less so in himself.)
He was already stretching his mind into the building sensing all of theirs, projecting safe, not a threat, protective.
Now he senses Owens mind and he pushes against it warningly, not shattering it, not yet.
The other man would be wise to remember he could.
The scientist's mind seems… scattered, as if he’s thinking about a lot at once. It seems conflicted.
(He catches glimpses of thoughts, of the children as children and not test subjects. He senses confusion, Owens doesn’t know what to do either.)
When he finally reaches the room the children are all seated in (it is one of the infirmaries, not the Rainbow Room, which something in him is relieved by), he’s not expecting one of them to run up and cling to him.
It’s 010.