#lab assistant reader

Summary: You help Singed with a radical experiment. His fascination with your mind gives way to unsettling attraction. Science and obsession entwine. Pairing: Singed x femReader Word count: ~1,100

You weren’t sure when the line began to blur : between curiosity and complicity, between admiration and something stranger.

At first, it was just a research opportunity. A rare apprenticeship under one of Piltover's most controversial scientific minds, buried far beneath Zaun in a lab that always felt too cold, no matter how many hours you spent there.

Singed didn’t smile much. He didn’t talk unless it served the experiment. His voice was steady, low, and detached yet oddly soothing in its precision.

“Give me the stabilizer,” he said, eyes fixed on the tank in front of him.

You did without hesitation. Your fingers brushed his glove. He didn’t flinch, but he did glance at you just a flicker. Like he was cataloguing the sensation.

The creature inside the tank thrashed, translucent skin rippling with bio-luminescent veins. It had once been a rat. Now it was something else entirely.

“I don’t understand,” you murmured, reading over the notes. “This mutation—its cell division shouldn’t be sustainable.”

He looked up at you, slowly. Not as a scolding mentor. As something else. “Exactly.”

That was the moment something shifted.

You’d expected pride. Or perhaps cold dismissal. Instead, you saw something else in his gaze: a flicker of… admiration? Maybe even something possessive. Like he was proud not just of your observation—but of you.

From then on, he let you closer.

He asked your opinion more often. Gave you the most dangerous tasks. Let you document things he hadn’t trusted to paper in years.

And you said yes every time.

You told yourself it was for the science. For the prestige. For the chance to change the world.

But in the silence of the lab, sometimes you caught him watching you.

Not in the way someone watches a peer. In the way a chemist watches an unstable compound.

Fascinated. Intrigued. Aware it could all blow up with the wrong touch.

“You have an instinct,” he said once, after you'd stopped a reaction from melting straight through the floor. “A certain edge.”

“You sound surprised,” you said quietly, not looking up.

He didn’t answer. But the corner of his mouth twitched—barely noticeable. If you hadn’t known him so well by now, you might have missed it.

Then came the night you stayed too late.

The experiment had gone sideways. The test subject : a hybrid strain had begun deteriorating too fast. You stayed past midnight to run diagnostics, your hands shaking from the cold and lack of sleep.

Singed didn’t tell you to go home. He just watched. Hovered.

“You don’t take care of yourself,” he said after a long silence.

You looked at him. The lab lights buzzed overhead, casting strange shadows. “Neither do you.”

That… made him smile.

Just barely.

You didn’t know what it meant.

Later, when the trial was done and the sample destroyed, you leaned back against the workbench, fingers stained with something you couldn’t quite name.

He stood near, not touching, but close enough to feel the weight of his presence.

“You know,” he said, voice quieter than usual, “this would not be possible without you.”

You turned your head to look at him. “Is that your version of gratitude?”

“It’s a fact,” he said. But there was something else in his tone. Something that made your skin prickle.

He reached out slowly—gloved fingers grazing the side of your neck, like checking your pulse. Scientific. Almost.

But not quite.

And in that silence, you realized something:

You had become part of the experiment.

Not the subject. Not quite the partner either. But something in between. Essential. Observed. Treasured, in a way that made your chest tighten.

And when he said softly, “Stay,” he didn’t mean for the night.

He meant for the work.

For the madness.

For whatever was slowly growing between you that had no name in science.

And you… didn’t say no because you wanted to stay with him.