To the Well-Organized Mind

Chapter Twenty-Eight

[Hale/Asis/Fen]

I do not consider Tavelin to be a fool. She may, in fact, be the most intelligent person I have met and ever will meet. She can combine substances I can't pronounce the names to and successfully create something that strengthens your immune system. She has a table of letters and numbers memorized, the contents of which I don't know anything about besides a few familiar terms like "oxygen" and "gold." She knows the proper protection and when to wash her hands to avoid the risk of infection of something so tiny it is invisible (and possibly doesn't even exist).

And yet, she has grown up so sheltered that she doesn't rightly give respect to threats that would, without any hesitation, kill you if given a chance. She is no fool, but she is very foolish. And it is this very foolishness that leaves me living in fear.

She's like a klutz, oblivious and due to stumble over something again. I just wait in dread for the day that she waltzes into the wilds or tries to join a feral gang because she lacks the common sense of the danger it poses.

-from Hale's musings

***

[Hale]

She kept thwarting his assumptions at every turn. First he had thought all he needed in life was to survive and be next to her, and that would be enough. But then he realized he needed to get her away from the laboratory in order for them both to be happy. From there, he believed all it would take was reaching the amazing Paradise for them to find their "happy ending." But she had proven that thought wrong again. Now here he was, finally sharing a house with Tavelin, and they were together, safe, at peace...and still, he wasn't her number one.

Perhaps it was his own fault for having such assumptions at all. But optimism was just a version of assumptions, wasn't it? And it was his optimism that kept him going at the worst times.

Now, as he woke up to another morning where her side of the bed was disheveled and already cool from whatever godforsaken hour she had gotten up (no doubt to begin working on more important matters than spend a second more with him than she had to), he couldn't keep pretending that changing their surroundings or predicament would change her.

He sat up and listened for a moment, but no, the house was quiet. She was long gone. With an exhale, he flopped back down onto his flat pillow.

Staring at the ceiling, he wondered what he used to think about before he realized Tavelin was cheating on him.

There simply wasn't any other way to look at it. The intimate way she betrayed him was the equivalent of having an affair—except this time, the lover wasn't another person, but her work. And that, he felt, was worse.

At least with another person, he could've taken his anger and frustration up with the perpetrator. But how could he fight her desire to work for a cure?

How he wished he could go back to when he still thought they loved each other equally. When he naively dreamed of the future with her and believed she was doing the same. He knew he loved her more than she loved him, but because he knew the truth of it, he could never bring it up to hear it confirmed.

For an interminable amount of time, he loitered in bed. With the sky cloudy, only a dim light trickled through the windows. When he couldn't stand a moment more of his own thoughts, he padded downstairs and fed their allotment of rabbits. Tavelin wouldn't have thought to do it. Just like it never crossed her mind to boil two eggs instead of one, so that he could have one when he got up. But no, not even such efficiency could give him false hopes. Instead of starting a fire to make his own breakfast, he left the house on an empty stomach.