43. Bertram
Bertram
“Don’t come over,” Helena said, the second Bertram picked up his ringing phone. “Lovatch is going to attack you—”
“Then we train her not to,” Bertram said. “You can’t keep doing this alone.”
“It’s bad enough she’s acclimated to one Person—I don’t want to make it two!” Helena’s voice broke, and Bertram heard sniffling.
“Have you asked my mom what she thinks?” he asked.
There was a long silence before Helena spoke.
“You know I think your mom is an incredible scientist . . . but you know . . . criticisms of her work—and it’s incredible work!
—are about her interacting with her subjects, so if there’s one thing in the world I might not trust Dr. J about, it’s whether it’s okay for scientist and subject to interact. ”
“Who would you trust about that?” Bertram asked.
Helena’s sniffles grew louder, and were accompanied by little intakes of breath, as if she were fighting back tears again—and losing the fight.
“I know we’re in uncharted territory, Hel,” Bertram said, “but this isn’t the first creature to be deemed potentially non-releasable despite best efforts. Who’re your top magizoology authorities? Individuals or institutions, either way.”
Helena still didn’t respond.
And if Helena wasn’t responding to an open-ended prompt about magizoology, this was an emergency.
Bertram didn’t even bother throwing on a coat as he left his tent and walked over to Helena’s.
“I’m here,” he said, hanging up the phone.
“I’m not coming out,” Helena called.
“Great,” said Bertram, “then I’m coming in.”
“I’m gross and un-showered and smell like substitute catfish—”
“Don’t care.” Bertram started to unzip the tent flap.
“I’m—I’m naked!” Helena squeaked, in her easily identifiable lying voice.
“Seen it before,” he said, but Helena burst out of the tent—fully clothed—before he could actually come inside.
Helena was right—she did smell like substitute catfish, and even if the smell didn’t indicate a lack of shower, her greasy hair and grimy hands were a dead giveaway. There were dark circles under her eyes.
“I told you, I’m disgusting,” Helena said.
Bertram grabbed her and pulled her into his arms.
The second her cheek touched his chest, Helena fell to pieces, sobbing against Bertram. He stroked her gross hair and didn’t even care how gross it was.
Something in Bertram relaxed, just the littlest bit.
Helena was still devastated, and that was still devastating to Bertram. But the fact that he was able to hold her in his arms, to prove that she was still here, to show her that her sadness was not infinite, that it could be contained in the space he provided for her, that he could keep her safe—
Then Helena jumped out of his arms as though electrocuted. Bertram worried he had overstepped by stroking her hair. But then he saw that V-2 had emerged from the tent, hissing and spitting, her hackles raised with pinfeathers standing menacingly on end.
“Lovatch, please, no,” Helena whimpered.
The cub-chick was very much unmoved by this plea.
Bertram held up his hands in surrender and took a few steps back from Helena.
It pained him to do so—all he wanted to do was hold her and make everything okay. But holding her was clearly going to make everything worse if this was the owl-bear’s feeling about Bertram’s feelings.
Bertram waited a moment to see if he needed to retreat further away.
V-2 stayed on high alert, but at least she didn’t make a move to actively attack Bertram.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
“We’re going to figure this out, Helena,” he promised.
“There’s nothing to figure out!” Helena cried. “This is my life now. V-2 has me trapped, and I refuse to acclimate her to you, and fuck this up more than I’ve already fucked it up.”
“Helena,” Bertram said gently, “cut yourself some slack. This isn’t your fault—”
“That’s not what you said before!”
“I was being a dick,” Bertram said. “I was wrong and apologized right away, remember? So, don’t take what I said to heart. You’re keeping a cub-chick alive with no blueprint. You’re doing an incredible job as an owl-bear mom—”
“No! I’m not! I don’t know how to be an owl-bear mom.” Helena sobbed. “I don’t know what I’m doing! Sometimes she screams, and I don’t know why she’s screaming, and I bet an owl-bear mom would know, and I probably wouldn’t even know how to be a human mom because I never even fucking had one!”
Helena crumpled to the ground. She sat in the mud, face buried in her hands as she cried.
Bertram tensed against his impulse to take her in his arms again. No matter how badly he wanted to hold her, to comfort her, interrupting V-2 as she stalked protective circles around Helena would probably make things worse for all three of them.
“You didn’t come to his funeral!” Helena said.
“What?” Bertram asked.
“You didn’t even come to—to my dad’s funeral!” Helena cried so hard she hiccuped as she tried to push the words out. “He wa—was—was all I had. You knew that he was my last family member. And you didn’t—you d-didn’t even—”
Helena gasped for air, a deep, shuddering sound.
“How could you do that to m-m-me, B-Bertram?” Helena sobbed. “How could you do that to him? Whatever you f-felt for m-me, he loved you, B-Bertram, and you didn’t even c-come to—to—to—”
“I didn’t know,” Bertram said, feverishly. “I didn’t hear until after.”
Helena continued crying, but she was clearly doing her best to quiet herself, lips tightly pressed together so she could hear his response.
“I was off the grid, in Madagascar,” Bertram said.
“Th-the P-P-Peacoquerel’s sifaka s-study?”
Bertram nodded. “Mom tried to leave a message on our landline, but a storm had completely cut us off—it wasn’t until I went into town a week later and checked my email that I found out. The funeral had already happened.”
Something in Helena’s face softened, and she closed her eyes.
The genuine relief in her expression took Bertram by surprise. He wouldn’t have expected her to have cared that much about his presence one way or another, especially back then.
“I also . . . I didn’t know that it would matter to you,” Bertram said.
“You didn’t know it would matter to me?!” Helena squeaked out hysterically.
“The way we left things . . . no. I didn’t.”
Helena sobbed again. “You thought because we b-broke up romantically, that erased t-ten years of friendship? Of knowing my dad? Of my d-dad l-loving you?”
Bertram fell silent.
The truth was, when Helena told him that she was giving up magizoology to study human medicine, because it was humans who mattered most of all, he wondered if she had gotten that belief from her human father.
Gerard had never given any indication that he saw Bertram or his family as less than just because they weren’t human. But neither had Helena until that moment, so Bertram wasn’t sure who or what he could trust.
He didn’t know that Helena would have missed having his non-human presence at her human father’s funeral.
The fact that she did broke Bertram’s heart . . .
And healed it a little too.
Because if Helena had wanted him there at her father’s funeral, then she must have believed Gerard would have wanted him there. And that must have meant that Gerard really did care about Bertram, the way Bertram had hoped he did. The way he once believed he did.
And it really, really, really wasn’t intentional that he missed the funeral. Even with his panicked, needling doubts about the sincerity of Gerard’s seeming affection for him, Bertram never would have missed his funeral.
And now that he knew Helena would have wanted him there, the idea that she might have been comforted by his presence if he had been there, and she thought he would’ve withheld that comfort out of spite . . .
“I would’ve been there, Hel,” Bertram said. “I swear I would have. Gerard was always good to me. I loved him.”
And he had. And the idea that Gerard really had loved him, too, half-orc, half-vampire and everything . . . it was painful and beautiful and comforting and devastating all at once.
Helena sniffled. “I didn’t know if maybe you j-just—if you hated me so much that it made you hate him, too, just because he was my dad.”
“No,” Bertram said, fiercely. “No, Helena, never. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.”
“It d-doesn’t matter.” Helena wiped her tears away decisively. “He still would have been dea-dead. He is still dead. Just like your dad. Just like her mom.” Helena jerked her head toward V-2, who was flexing her talons menacingly. “My mom could be dead, too, for all I know.”
“Yes, but . . .” Bertram ran his tongue over his tusk as he tried to think of something to say. “Look, you don’t have your mom, but you have Jennie, and V-2 doesn’t have her mom, but she has you. And I know our dads are gone, but we have each other, right? We can lean on each other.”
“Can’t really lean on someone who can’t get within five feet of me,” Helena said.
“We’re going to change that,” Bertram said.
“It was a joke,” Helena said, quickly. “I know you meant metaphorical leaning—”
“Fuck that; I want you physically leaning on me too,” Bertram said, and he meant every word of it. “Just tell me who we can contact about this, whose advice you would trust.”
Helena shook her head. “No one has worked with owl-bears before; no one knows the answers—”
“Exactly. No one has the perfectly right answers. So, who has been through similar things with otherfolk? You’ve always talked about the benefits of comparing across taxa, Hel.”
For a moment it looked like Helena would speak, but then her head fell forward. She said nothing.
Bertram could think of no clearer sign of a true emergency than Helena not jumping in to discuss the benefits of comparing across taxa. His heart thundered in his chest as he looked at the shell of the woman he had once loved.
Had once loved, he reminded himself, even as every fiber of his being screamed that nothing in the world was more important than making sure Helena was safe and okay.
“I’m compiling a list of every institution and individual involved in rehabilitation and release of otherfolk,” Bertram said.
“You’re going to choose as many as you like, and we’re going to write an email asking whether or not it’s ethical for you to acclimatize V-2 to anyone else, and how best to do it. ”
Helena sniffled. “There’s no one I trust to know!”
“Choose someone and make yourself trust them,” Bertram said. “You’re falling apart, Helena. And I’m not going to stand by and watch it happen.”
Helena buried her face in her arms.
“If you want to protect V-2, you need to be able to take care of her. Sacrificing yourself won’t help either of you. But we can do this, Hel. I’m here for you.”
Helena nodded without raising her head.
“We’ll figure this out,” Bertram promised, “together.”