33. Bertram
Bertram
After leaving the lab to cool off, Bertram thought long and hard about the exact details of Helena’s devious plan.
Helena was the one who had brought up the possibility of the owl-bear imprinting.
If she was planning on making it seem like she had “accidentally” gotten the owl-bear to imprint on her, one could argue it would’ve been smarter for her not to raise the issue at all.
But Helena must have known that Bertram would have thought of the imprinting possibility if she hadn’t, so one of them would have brought it up eventually.
And Helena would have known that Bertram would have known that Helena would have known about imprinting, and therefore it would have been suspicious for Helena not to bring it up.
Which meant that the fact that Helena brought up owl-bears possibly imprinting did not clear her of wrongdoing. That could have been her laying the groundwork to pull her scheme off without Bertram being suspicious.
The same was true for the fact that she suggested Bertram be the one in the owl-bear suit, even insisting that it be him when he pushed back against it.
Because of course the more she insisted that she wanted Bertram to be imprinted on, the less suspicious it would be when Helena was the one who was imprinted on after all.
She could spend all her time preparing Bertram to be the primary owl-bear caretaker, insisting he take on that role, commissioning a suit for him, so that he would never guess that she had snuck off to open up the incubator, carefully put a single crack in the egg, and lock eyes with the weirdly precocial-altricial developing cub-chick to start the imprinting bond pre-hatching.
Bertram frowned.
Ever since the tumultuous, heartbreaking end of their friendship, Bertram could not trust Helena to be honest or forthcoming, or even a good Person, really.
He couldn’t trust that she wasn’t lying simply because he believed in her honesty.
However.
No side of Helena he had seen—neither kind nor cruel—had ever been anything less than clever. Helena, if anything, was strategic to a fault.
She was extremely logical, and her plans were always both meticulous and streamlined.
Bertram imagined how Helena’s highly academic mind would approach his own interrogation of her actions, the way she would parse out the facts and possibilities before coming to a conclusion.
If Helena planned to make a baby owl-bear imprint on her, would she bring attention to the subject in a complicated bait and switch where she put Bertram front and center and constantly argued with him as a distraction?
Or would she have simply taken the primary caregiver role?
If it was very important for her to have the owl-bear imprint on her in her human form, Helena still could have proposed the costume plan, gotten into costume, and then managed to show her real face to the baby owl-bear during hatching.
All it would take was her lifting up the mask slightly to lock eyes, and Bertram would have been none the wiser . . .
The latter seemed like a much cleaner, strategic plan and therefore much more Helena.
Besides, even in his most hurt, furious state of mind, it was hard for Bertram to truly believe that Helena would risk hurting the baby owl-bear by damaging the egg.
Yes, Helena had stabbed him in the back, and the heart, and pretty much anywhere else on his body capable of carrying metaphorical emotional pain.
But she had spent the last month pacing back and forth, day and night, worrying about the egg, panicking about the health of the baby inside.
When they went to candle the egg, she had told him not to drop it so many times her voice eventually became a constant droning soundtrack to his movement.
The most hateful, conspiracy-prone part of Bertram could say that Helena only wanted the egg to be safe so that the cub-chick would hatch and further Helena’s scientific success.
But even the least generous parts of Bertram’s psyche knew that wasn’t true.
Thinking about the cold, hard facts, there were two simple, logical conclusions to the sequence of events that had occurred:
1. Helena did not engineer the owl-bear imprinting on her
2. Helena was probably genuinely distraught that her actual plan had gone awry and was now most likely panicking over how best to raise this baby owl-bear
Which also led him to a third simple, logical conclusion about the sequence of events that had occurred:
3. Bertram was an asshole.
Items one and two would require quite a bit more brainstorming when it came to how to rectify the baby owl-bear imprinting on a humanoid form. Helena would undoubtedly be very helpful in course-correcting. His mother as well, for that matter.
Item three, Bertram having been an asshole, was something he would have to course-correct on his own.
And there was something more troubling too.
If Bertram were to give Helena the benefit of the doubt and assume she truly, genuinely didn’t know that the owl-bear had imprinted on her . . .
Then she had stepped between Bertram and V-2’s sharp claws not knowing that she was safe from them.
Bertram imagined how easily those claws could have pierced Helena’s delicate (mostly) human skin, and something twisted in his stomach. He felt ill at the thought of how close she came to being seriously injured.
And she did that on purpose?
For him?
Helena would put herself in harm’s way—risk her life even—for him?
It didn’t make sense.
Bertram sighed. His tongue darted out and ran over the top of his protruding tusk.
He wondered what Helena saw when she looked at that tusk.
He had assumed the answer was a disgusting reminder of his monstrous nature, a reminder that he was someone less worthy of care and consideration than humans were.
But would she have stepped in between those claws and Bertram if she didn’t think him worthy of care?
Was that not putting Bertram’s life above her own, even?
Bertram shook his head. No, even if Helena hadn’t been consciously aware of the imprinting bond, she must have instinctively known that she was safe from V-2.
She must have.
She must have.
Because if she hadn’t . . .
The implications of that were too staggering for Bertram to even ponder. And he didn’t dare try. Because if he let himself believe once again that Helena really did care for him, and if he was wrong . . .
Bertram didn’t fall asleep until long past midnight, and when he did sleep, it was fitful.
Even so, he was awake bright and early, long before Helena emerged from the lab.
Awake, and cooking. When Helena did emerge from the lab, looking disheveled and worse for wear, the owl-bear was clinging tightly to her shirt with all twelve talons.
“Despite what you think, I don’t want this owl-bear with me,” Helena said at once, before Bertram could even speak.
Bertram tried to tell Helena that he knew, but Helena barreled on, talking at a hundred miles per hour.
“I tried to leave her in the nest last night with the fake owl-bear mama but she ripped it open and threw the stuffing everywhere and screamed and screamed so I removed the fake owl-bear and she stopped screaming but then she screamed again when I tried to leave so I just ended up sleeping in the nest with her and she tried to sleep underneath me all night but I was scared of crushing her but I got her to settle next to me at least but when I woke up this morning she absolutely will not let go of my shirt but I swear I tried to keep my distance—”
“I know,” Bertram said, when Helena took enough of a breath for him to interrupt.
Helena looked shocked. “You do?”
“I was shitty to you yesterday,” Bertram said. “Everything went wrong so quickly, and I was panicked, and I took it out on you without thinking things through. You were right; it doesn’t make any sense for you to have done this on purpose.”
“I really, really didn’t,” Helena said. “So. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” Bertram said. “Sorry for being a dick.”
“It’s okay. There was a lot—a lot going on, a lot of feelings. I—I get it. It was a disappointing day for all of us.” Helena grimaced as V-2 purred against her chest. “Well. I guess it wasn’t disappointing for her. But she doesn’t know any better.”
Bertram smiled.
There was a moment of silence.
“Bertram,” Helena said, quietly. There was a brief pause, then she took a deep breath and continued: “What did I do to you?”
“What do you mean?” Bertram asked.
“I know I hurt you, back—back when I left for med school,” Helena said.
“But . . . what you said yesterday . . . that I could have sabotaged our research project? On purpose? If you really think that sounds like something I could do, that I would hurt an animal . . . that I would hurt anyone . . . I knew you were upset with me, but I thought you knew me better than that.”
I thought I did too, Bertram wanted to say. But he stayed silent.
In the heat of his panic yesterday, he had been unable to stop the words from bursting forth, unable to suppress years of frustration and hurt.
But without the engine of his panic, without the certainty that Helena had deliberately ruined their study and put the owl-bear in jeopardy, the words were no longer there.
“Do you—do you want to talk about it?” Helena asked. “What happened back then? We never really talked about it. Maybe it’s time.”
Bertram considered this.
On the one hand, there was a chance that re-opening that old wound could allow it to heal properly this time, to really cleanse the pain and anguish that still plagued him now and again.
Or, if he reopened that wound, he might bleed out.
“No,” Bertram said, finally. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Helena nodded. “That’s okay. But if we aren’t going to talk about it, can we start over, maybe? Clean slate?”
Bertram hesitated, and Helena jumped in.