If There's a God Who Can Save Me

by lizandletdie

For the first time on FF.N, the Victorian Sci-Fi Rumbelle Romance Novel where Gold is a mad scientist searching for the secret to time travel and Belle is his brilliant lab assistant. Now with more slow burn romance and family angst.

1. Prologue

nd if there's a god who can save me/I'd ask that he open the skies and do it now/but he's just a chemical/I'm not a snake/I'm just falling apart again

– Ludo, "Overdone"

Prologue

It hadn't come as a surprise to the village when the clever little boy with the coward father had grown into an equally clever young man. The townspeople had long avoided the child, leaving him to be raised by his aunts. Gossip held he was a bastard, sired on gods-only-know whom, and deposited by an indifferent father on indulgent spinsters. The boy himself had no idea who his mother might be, he remembered only a father, and even then not very well. The father had been absent from the village for longer than most could remember, leaving the townspeople no real idea of where the child belonged in the village hierarchy, so the boy occupied a strange place outside the life of the village. He soon learned to avoid the society of others, for his presence made them uncomfortable, but as long as he remained an outsider he was well enough liked.

When the young man who had been the little boy vanished, gossip was once again ready to fill in the details. His father had returned, it was said, or else some other wealthy patron had found the child and persisted in having him educated to the highest standards of the realm (perhaps his father had ingratiated himself on someone in a position to have his son educated, perhaps he had been a soldier killed saving his commanding officer, or perhaps the mother had been someone of some standing and her family had finally taken an interest in the boy). The boy himself must have known, but neither he nor his aunts ever shed any light on the matter, but the fact is that the boy went away to university. The aunts faded and eventually quietly passed and the boy was forgotten as his father once was.

Many, many years later, when a man named Gold moved into the largest house in the village, bringing with him a small son of his own, the villagers can be forgiven for not recognizing the clever boy in the brilliant man he had become.