The nurse tried to stop him from entering.
"He is dirty, wounded and he…", she trailed off and lowered her voice, "…stinks."
She tried to calm the baby for three nights now. It cried all the time and then it fell asleep out of exhaustion and when it woke up it cried again. Her eyes hurt and burned and she just wanted to finally be able to sleep one night without interruption. She felt incredibly sorry for the little fellow crying until his throat was sore, but she had tried everything, everything she had learned in her thirty years of being a nurse and nothing, nothing worked. If he was ill? No, the doctor said he was a strong healthy child, where his mother was? Someone said he had none. Where had she gone? A father could just disappear into nothing, but a mother? He was a newborn, how… well, honestly, she didn't want to know how or why or what. She didn't know anymore.
And now this ravage warrior entered and entered and didn't care about what she was saying, he was just like "I want to see him.". And he lifted him out of his little bed and the small one sobbed, almost choked on his own drool and stared at him and - stopped crying. She couldn't even scream at him what the hell he thought he did, but then she was so… shocked, she couldn't say a word.
"Na²? How are you, my tiny friend?"
The baby just sniffed and seemed to be astonished himself that he wasn't crying anymore.
"I've heard you've been crying a lot, du kleiner Floh³, why was that, hmm?", he wiggled the baby in a slow slight movement, making it look like it was dancing in the air.
The small boy made as babbling noise, a wet quiet "guh" and placed a tiny pudgy sweaty baby hand on his nose. Gilbert laughed and the baby hand began fumbling around on his cheeks.
"Na? Do you remember me?", he took the small hand into his bigger scratched and rough one and caressed it lightly. The huge blue eyes just stared into his red-purplish ones as if the little boy was trying to remember something. Gilbert settled down with the baby on his lap onto a chair in the corner humming a song quietly and buried his nose and mouth in the downy hair placing sometimes a small kiss onto the boy's skull.
The nurse exited the room slowly. The two didn't even seem to have recognized her. There were too many secrets and things in there, she didn't understand and also the love of a few centuries…
² 'na', a german expression, similar to "Well then?"
³ 'du kleiner Floh', kind of a term of endearment, a little comical (I thought it would fit Big Bro Prussia to say something like this.), translated literally it means 'you little flea'.
I want to mention a german actor as an inspiration for this: Matthias Brandt (btw son of former Chancellor Willy Brandt). He plays an inspector in a series called "Polizeiruf 110". I haven't seen many of his actings (and I am no fan of criminal series…), but he persuaded me immediately and especially his relation to a toddler in the episode "Kinderparadies" was so cute and he depicted emotions so real – god, I could have died due to the cuteness. Here a trailer of this episode, if you're in the mood for shitty german TV trailers of weirdly good criminal films with weirdly charismatic actors. Wohoo.
Link doesn't work, type in "Polizeiruf 110 Kinderparadies – Trailer" in on Youtube. Sorry.