~~~~~
The door slammed shut cutting off the main living area from the dark, small bedroom in which David dropped a still objecting Katherine from his arms to the floor. The somewhat indignant noises that had been muffled behind his back as he moved away from their audience ceased as the sound of her feet bouncing once as they hit the wood beneath her seemed to mark some sort of a cut off of her vocal protestations. There was nothing further to be heard as they both seemed to be waiting for something that was apparently not forthcoming as the lack of both sound and movement lingered in the cocooning atmosphere of the room.
David was the one who broke the standoff of sorts that they were engaged in with an action (an action that most people would have taken upon first entering the space). He reached out a hand and slid it up the wall bumping a switch. The sudden influx of light left Katherine blinking behind the lenses of her glasses. The distraction proved to be only seconds in duration as she quickly recovered and moved into a semi-defensive posture as her arms crossed in front of her. She looked up at David with a frown and a raised eyebrow.
“Seriously?” She asked him sounding every bit as ready to protest as she had been on her rather undignified journey (but also as if she was a little bit amused by some part of it all in spite of herself). “Being overly dramatic much there?”
He looked neither intimidated nor impressed by her display or her tone (appearing as if he did not even register that she had spoken). He launched into his own conversational direction with a couple of demands of his own.
“Have you gone nuts?” He asked keeping his voice carefully lowered (one would assume in acknowledgement that while there was now a closed door providing a barrier between the two of them and the three others still in the other room, it was only a door with walls that were not the thickest and by no means soundproof). There was, after all, little point in creating the separation if every word that he and Katherine directed at each other could still be overheard. “What is it that you think you were doing in there?” His arms flailed backward gesturing vaguely toward their previous location. “Goading Eris like that?” He tacked on as if it was a necessary addition in order to prevent any attempts at prevarication from Katherine. It may have been needed as her mouth (which had opened as if she was about to offer a comeback) snapped closed, but her expression looked less like she had been cut off and more like she had been surprised by his final question.
“Have I been hallucinating the way you have been goading Eris over the past few weeks?” She inquired looking a mix of challenging and confused.
“I haven’t been goading Eris; I don’t even speak to Eris,” he insisted somehow managing to sound strangely petulant as he did so (which would be a decided indication that Katherine had struck a nerve with her question).
“It’s Eris, David,” she told him -- her tone making it clear that she wasn’t buying his denial. “Ignoring her is goading her. Doing anything that isn’t exactly what Eris wants when she wants it how she wants it done and by whom she wants it goads Eris. She makes temperamental look like the epitome of calm.”
“The point is . . .,” he started before Katherine cut him off midsentence.
“That you don’t have any room to talk,” she finished for him smiling at him in a disarming manner. She reached out and rested a hand on his arm as she took a step closer to him. “It’s really nice to have you back,” she said softly.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” he huffed.
“Except the only place that none of us could follow you,” she countered letting her hand slide down and drop back to her side.
“It wasn’t . . .,” she cut him off again with a shake of her head.
“I wasn’t asking for you to provide justification,” she said. “I just want you to know that I’m happy to see that you snapped out of it.”
“None of this is the point,” he looked annoyed at her derailing of the conversation. “I want to know what it is you are trying to do.”
“Yet,” she tilted her head to the side and gave him a pondering look, “you didn’t think that Caleb needed the same level of explanation.”
“I didn’t think you would tell me the actual answer if Caleb was looming over you.” He responded in challenge.
“Caleb doesn’t loom,” she dismissed with a wave of her hand.
“Hover, loom, whatever you want to call it,” he rolled his eyes at her. “You knew what I meant.”
“I don’t lie to Caleb.” She told him with a shrug of her shoulders as if his reasoning was so fundamentally flawed that she need make no further response.
“No,” he agreed, “but the two of you don’t always elaborate on uncomfortable topics with each other either, do you?” His arms tightened as they crossed his chest (almost as if he was bracing himself for some sort of a blow). “Are you trying to make excuses to leave?”
“When I leave . . .,” she began.
“So, it’s when not if.” He muttered as his arms tightened even further, and he seemed to shrink in on himself a bit.
“Don’t you look at me like that,” she commanded. “You know what’s going on here, and you’re still staying -- you don’t get to make judgment calls about other people’s decisions.”
“I keep thinking . . .,” his eyes rested on a spot behind her just above her head, and he broke off with a small shake of his own.
“You keep thinking what?” She demanded. “I’m not a mind reader, David, and I would really like to understand what is going on in that head of yours.” His eyes dropped so that they rested on her face, and he studied her for a moment as if considering whether or not he had an answer to the request.
“I keep thinking that it can’t possibly be as bad as it looks from the outside, you know?” He finally told her. “Because it would just be crazy if it is, so it can’t be. All of this can’t be for . . . .”
“And every time that you turn around something else happens that makes you think that it isn’t as bad as it looks from the outside -- it’s worse?” She finished for him with a small, rather sad smile that he returned with the same sadness.
“Yeah, something like that.” He agreed.
“And?” She prompted.
“And?” He echoed.
“That can’t be the end of your thought process,” she told him. “You’ve been sitting around doing nothing but brooding and passive aggressively ticking off Eris for weeks. You have to have gotten further along in your thinking than that.”
“How did this get turned back around on me?” He responded narrowing his eyes at her in a suspicious manner. “You’re supposed to be sharing what it is that’s going through your head. I’m not a mind reader either.” His voice (already being used in a soft manner) dropped a little further. “Unless they’ve done something else that they haven’t bothered to tell us about.”
“That, that right there,” she accused pouncing on the under the breath muttering and shaking her finger at him. “That’s why this conversation is about you and not about me right now -- that little under current you’ve got going there. If that’s all that you’ve managed to get out of all that thinking, then you haven’t done nearly enough of it. Or you stopped thinking early on and let yourself get stuck somewhere that I have no problem forcibly kicking you out of -- that’s why we’re talking about you. We can talk about me and what I’m thinking after we get that straightened out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he frowned at her in confusion. “Could we go for a little less cryptic or something?”
“You seem to think that all of this somehow makes some sort of a difference to you personally -- like it changes the you that you were before you even knew that all of it existed.” She summarized.
“And you think you’re the same person you were before you knew?” He looked at her with a visible portion of disbelief.
“Of course I am,” she replied looking at him as if he had just asked her somethin
g completely off of the topic at hand. “Knowing any of it doesn’t change that, David, it just changes what we do and how we go about doing it.” She shook her head. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“That’s debatable,” he shrugged. “I’m not going to end up being Caleb.”
“Meaning what exactly?” She asked dropping down on one of the twin beds in the room and leaning back against her palms as if making herself comfortable for the coming answer.
“That I’m not going to wait for them to take someone to hold over my head to get me to do what they want.” He told her as he moved to sit on the other bed (where instead of mirroring her posture he scooted up and leaned against the headboard).
“You’re figuring that as long as you are going through the motions of playing nicely and doing what you’re told that they’ll leave you mostly alone.” It was her turn, apparently, to look disbelieving.
“It’s working so far,” he responded with just the faintest touch of huffiness.
“And when it doesn’t?” She sat up straight and managed to look rather intimidating for a petite woman sitting on top of a fluffy bedspread. “When it becomes a question of something that you can’t or won’t do for them?”
“I’ve been kind of hoping that it won’t get that far.” He told her as his head fell back (possibly to stretch and release some tension from his neck and possibly as an excuse to avoid eye contact with her).
“It isn’t already straddling that line?”
“I’m still getting by.”
“That isn’t enough,” she insisted -- eyes boring into him until he looked back at her.
“You’re what,” he inquired sounding marginally defensive. “Blowing this popsicle stand early on because you know that you can still walk away? That they’ll probably throw you a party to send you off as you go?”
“Don’t let’s pretend that I’m just going to walk off and act like everything’s fine while ignoring what’s coming,” she told him still staring intently as he looked in her general direction but refused to make eye contact.
“What if it’s not coming, Kat?” He asked sounding as if he might be pleading (although what it was that he might be pleading for wasn’t readily apparent). “What if we’re both wrong?”
“Didn’t you just say that you didn’t want to end up being Caleb?” She reminded him.
“Maybe that was . . .,” he trailed off sounding as if he was desperate for some word (any word) to finish that sentence but couldn’t manage to come up with any. Katherine supplied some for him.
“A misunderstanding?” She offered. “Something we all imagined?” She tried. “What? Blackmail and kidnapping don’t just accidently happen. You know you know better.”
“And you’re going to take off and what?” He finally made eye contact and glared at her.
“You’re angry at me.” She observed. He didn’t respond.
“You are.” She said with a small nod of her head as though she was agreeing out loud with some internal conversation to which he was not privy.
“I just thought that maybe you were a little solider than that,” he scoffed at her. “I guess that might be one thing that Devon has figured out right about . . . .”
“If the words ‘your kind’ were about to come out of your mouth, then I’m going to take the chance and smack you upside the head -- I don’t care what it does to my wrist.” She told him in a tone that was downright dangerous in its deliberately forced level of calm.
“You know I don’t mean it the way they do,” he offered as if apologizing.
“But you’re willing to compromise on the vocabulary.”
“What do you want from me?” He asked rubbing a hand over his eyes as if he was tired.
“For you to stop acting like you want everything both ways,” she responded instantly. “You can’t be ticked off at Drake for leaving when you keep saying that you’re only staying to keep everyone you care about out of it. Or does the list of people that you care about no longer include your brother?”
David shook his head and took a deep breath before twice trying to begin the next sentence out of his mouth -- cutting it off before the completion of the first syllable each time. Katherine didn’t interrupt. She gave him the time he needed to sort out how to put his thoughts into words.
“You and Caleb are practically attached at the hip,” was where his words finally settled. “What do you know about what it’s like to cope with being alone?”
“Were.” She stated.
“Huh?”
“Caleb and I were practically attached at the hip,” she told him. “I know you’ve been on your little mental clarity journey lately, but you might take a moment to pay attention to the fact that I’m losing him. He’s losing himself. I can’t just stand around and let that happen, and that’s all that’s happening with me here.” He looked at her as if he was mentally reviewing some sort of tape of experiences in an attempt to either confirm or deny the accuracy of her assertion. His facial expressions went through a few incarnations of different emotions before settling on resigned.
“The knowledge that I’ve pretty much sucked to be around lately isn’t lost on me; I’m aware,” he had that apologetic tone again. “If that’s part of what’s pushing you out . . . .”
“As thrilled as I am that you’ve broken out of your semi-hibernation mode, it doesn’t change what needs to be done. I can’t work from inside here. I need maneuverability and resources and space.”
“And Eris not breathing down your neck like she’s waiting for the opportune moment to stick a knife in your back?”
“Wouldn’t that be beneath her to go to all that trouble to dispatch a lower life form?” She raised an eyebrow at him and offered him a morbidly amused look.
“Nah,” he returned both the raised eyebrow and amused look. “She’d probably think about it like stepping on a cockroach.” The two of them smiled at each other for a moment of unified dark humor before David rolled his eyes and frowned at her.
“I can’t believe we’re joking about this.”
“What else are we supposed to do?”
“Be serious?” He offered making it sound like a question. “Try to make sense of it? Something.”
“We’ve been doing that.” She replied.
“Not really working for any of us, is it?”
“Not so much.” She agreed.
“When are you going?”
“No more objections?”
“Just to you goading Eris into choking you to death before you can go.”
“It wouldn’t have gone that far.” She reassured him, but he didn’t appear to be reassured.
“I’m not always so sure about that,” he sounded contemplative. “She’s not stable.”
“And so you want to not make calls based on her because it doesn’t seem like a fair representation?” She asked sounding like she was figuring out something that had been eluding her.
“Whatever I say about wanting it to turn out to the contrary, I do know that what they’re doing can’t end well. I would, however, like to think that Eris’s particular brand of crazy isn’t the common one.”
“It might be better if it were.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because it isn’t that difficult to tell that Eris is . . . you know . . . whatever Eris is. No one is going to buy her trying to be charming or think that the things that come out of her mouth are interesting ideas because of how she is and how she says them. Someone else, someone who isn’t quite as obvious as she is, someone who can couch things in all the right rhetoric to make it sound appealing . . . that would be someone who could do a lot of damage before anyone even realized that there was damage being done -- maybe even until it was too late to fix it.”
“You don’t talk about you mom much,” he observed.
“That was random.” She retorted.
“Was it?” He tilted his head and st
udied her.
“What are you trying to ask me, David?” She inquired with a small sigh.
“Which kind is she?”
“It’s been a long time. She’s not really either as I remember it. She’s more of a background figure. Cecilia Murray makes the tools; someone else does the using.”
“Our charismatic leader problem?” He sounded as if he was figuring out something that had been eluding him as well. “You’re thinking Dr. Sutton.”
“Among others,” she agreed.
“I don’t like the sound of others if you’re planning on tackling what I think you’re planning on tackling.”
“Five minutes ago you were mad at me.” She reminded with a smile.
“And now I’m worried,” he smiled back. “I’m a complex guy.”
“They aren’t all like Eris.”
“Devon seems mostly stable.”
“I think Devon is mostly desperate to not act like Eris.”
“Which has got to be a mark in favor of mental stability.” He argued.
“Do you think she knows?” He asked after a few moments of silence between the two of them.
“I can’t read Devon’s mind any more than I can read yours.” She told him giving him a look that seemed to be asking if he really wanted to continue down the path that he was about to take.
“But you have an idea,” he insisted. “If something happens with Caleb out of the picture because they’ve got his hands tied, then which way does Devon go if it is me against Eris?”
“Whichever way makes things go the way Devon’s decided they should.”
“That’s kind of not comforting.”
“We’re dealing with people who assigned you to a ‘cell’ and send you no further explanation forthcoming assignments to complete. I think we left comforting behind a long time ago.”
Clearly, David didn’t have any words to combat that conclusion; he let the two of them drift into another round of silence. This one carried none of the awkwardness of their entrance to the room. The two of them merely sat in quiet companionableness as they both got lost in processing their respective thoughts.
Best Left Unfinished Page 17
