Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Devon Wiltshire was unsure of many things in her life (not that the casual or not so casual observer would ever be able to tell). She didn’t let on; she didn’t give indications that she was pondering or wondering or wavering. She did what needed to be done when it needed doing, and she tried to be as nonchalant as possible about it. That was her way; that was her path. She had been following it for a long time (or at least it seemed that way to her), and she had no intention of stopping because she found that it worked rather well. One of the few things in her life that she was absolutely certain about was the fact that her circumspect, aloof way of dealing with the world (and all the events and people that she encountered in it) drove a certain subset of the people in her immediate vicinity absolutely, irrationally crazy. She was equally certain about the fact that that fact of the reactions she garnered being what they were had never once induced her to think about changing her habits.

  In that respect, her choices were clear. On the other end of the spectrum, there were the reasons (buried in the murky depths of her mind where she didn’t care to probe too closely) why she chose to keep the name Wiltshire for common use when it would have been all too easy to leave it behind and never have to look at it or hear it again.

  It wasn’t as though the Society wasn’t capable of providing her with whatever form of documentation that she might choose. They could have done so with little trouble, and it would be one of the very few things that she would have been able to ask for without anyone thinking about trying to draw deeper meanings from it. Eris, after all, had three or four sets of documents on her at any given point in time that could be produced to declare her whatever person with whatever credentials she decided would be most expedient at any particular moment.

  Devon never asked. All the paperwork that she ever carried and all of the documentation that she possessed listed her as Devon Dawn Wiltshire -- and she had never sought to change it. She wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone why -- at the very least because she would have considered the posing of such a question a personal affront to which she would not deign to respond (but mostly because she didn’t have any answer to give).

  It was, perhaps, lucky for her that it had never occurred to anyone to ask (or it had never been decided that the answer served enough of a purpose to make it worth digging for). Thus, she continued to carry the name of the couple who had adopted her as a toddler and subsequently abandoned her before she had finished her eighth year.

  There were days that she thought that she held on to the name to remind herself how bitter she was over that -- to remind herself that people weren’t trustworthy even when they tried to be. People made bad choices; everyone around them suffered for them. People got sick or had accidents or were just too weak and broken to be dependable. It served her best to remember what happened when one let down one’s guard and allowed one’s self to get caught up in those who only existed to let down.

  There were other days that she thought that maybe there were other reasons that trumped the renewal of her memories. There were days that she thought that she kept the use of the Wiltshire at the end of her name as a sign of respect to the people who had tried to take her in during her early childhood. There were days that she found herself studying some of the others (Eris in particular as she was the one with whom she was expected to spend the most time) and pondering what it was that marked her as different than them. If the credit belonged to Rachelle and Chad, then they deserved whatever mark of appreciation she was capable of giving them (in spite of their deficiencies).

  She was inclined to hold in deep regard anything that offered her separation from Eris. Eris was a perpetual thorn in Devon’s side when it came to her carefully structured rules for herself about her reactions, interventions, and posture of being untouched by her surroundings. Eris grated on her in a hundred different ways that were as difficult to define and nameless as they were numerous. It wasn’t that she was unpleasant (she was, but Devon was far beyond being driven to break her composure by mere unpleasantness). It was, perhaps, that Eris served as a never ending reminder of all the reasons that Devon held in the back of her mind for remaining unsure.

  Eris was a Society prototype of the highest order. She had never been out of their guidance and control (never been corrupted or infected by the influence of outsiders as the more hardline members as well as Eris herself referred to those of them who had spent some segment of their childhood outside of their child rearing programs). As such, she should have been a shining example of everything that the Society professed to be creating displayed for all to see.

  That the other woman displayed many of the traits that Devon saw on a regular basis seemed to provide a never ending contradiction of all that they (and Devon herself) were supposed to be espousing. She was often undisciplined, overly emotional, and displayed an inability to adjust to changes or deviations from her expectations that Devon found deeply troubling for her own personal piece of mind. She thought, sometimes, that she would find it easier to accept that she really did believe all that she was supposed to believe if she hadn’t been assigned to the same cell as Eris.

  It was trying on the best of days, and it was maddening to the stability of Devon’s convictions on the worst of them.

  Her problem (one of the other of the few things about which she was very certain) was that she was far more prone to overthinking and analyzing than doing any actual choosing. Thus, she did not appreciate her assignment that kept her tied to Eris’s whims and inconsistencies, yet she never made any attempt to request that she be transferred to where the other woman would no longer directly affect her on a daily basis. She stayed where she had been told. She did what she had been told, and she avoided confrontation with Eris unless it could be justified beyond any shadow of a doubt she might toss at herself that it was necessary to prevent a disruption in that doing of what she had been told.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant of circumstances, but she wasn’t supposed to be concerned with the pleasantness or unpleasantness of anything as it related to her. She was supposed to remain focused on the bigger picture, the long range goals, and whether the situation at hand furthered them appropriately or not.

  Besides, there were other items to offset the negative aspects of being expected to function around and work with Eris. Along with being assigned to a cell with Eris came being assigned to work with David. David left her every bit as unsure as being around Eris did, but he did not bring with him the grating quality that Eris could not seem to shake. David, she often found herself thinking, made learning to be better at ignoring unsettling aspects of Eris’s personality worth it. That was mostly because she had decided that David needed her.

  David was unsettled, but he didn’t seek to hide it in the way that Devon had learned to do. She had wondered whether she had had a similar look of lost confusion in her own early days after the Society had reclaimed her. No one had ever gone out of their way to attempt to help her to adjust. David needed to learn. He could be unsettled; he could ponder and try to turn observations into logic within his head. He just couldn’t let them see. He couldn’t let anyone see. She could teach him if he would let her. She could help him. She could save him years of trial and error and figuring that he might not have. She had wisdom to share (the kind that had been earned), and she need only work on David until he was ready to hear and to heed it.

  Providing assistance to David was another of those things about which she was unclear -- it might be a deeply bad idea. It might be more trouble than it was worth. It might unsettle her further when she should be striving for the opposite. It might push her back toward the realm where people depended on each other when she already knew better. She didn’t care. She would provide David with assistance -- she just needed to bide her time until he was ready for the bulk of it. That he was skittish and reticent meant one less lesson for her to teach him; he was already coming to understand why trus
t was a bond that needed to be disbanded.

  He had demonstrated a drastic shift in personality in the time since Drake had abandoned him, but she did not find it to be concerning. She remembered very well her own time of adjustment, and she recognized the expressions that she caught shifting across his face in the aftermath. She even recognized the detachment that had arrived to take their place. He even shared her disinclination for dealing with Eris. She didn’t think it took any special powers of observation to see that. Even without her recognition of the stages through which David was passing, it should be obvious that he was openly treating Eris as persona non grata. He didn’t look, speak, or acknowledge her presence with a singularity of purpose that sometimes left Devon awestruck with jealousy. It couldn’t last; David would come to understand that such individuality of focus must not be openly engaged in -- it was best left to private reflection.

  In the meantime, she could find amusement in Eris’s ever increasing frustration as David took direction and offered answers only to her. It was petty of her, but she allowed herself to continue in her amusement as a private indulgence. She had few enough of those that didn’t cause her an equivalent amount of uncertainty and concern over her uncertainty.

  David would evolve as she had and become someone who would be available as an ally (that was the most she allowed herself in terms of personal relationships any longer). She would have liked to have been as confident that Caleb would come to a similar state of being.

  She wasn’t.

  Caleb was a more difficult entity to place than either Eris or David. He didn’t grate on her per se, but she found the man and his inclusion in their cell troubling for other reasons. There was one point upon which she and Eris were united (although they never discussed or commented on their commonality). They both believed that the coercion that resulted in Caleb working with them should never have happened. Eris looked at it that way because she believed that it should never have been necessary, and Devon looked at it that way because she believed that it displayed one more way in which the Society failed to demonstrate that its philosophy did, in fact, lead to where they claimed it did.

  It didn’t feel right to Devon -- the methods used to draw Caleb. She preferred to avoid thinking about it whenever she could manage to ignore the elephant in the room. Caleb was a constant source of discord in conjunction with Eris -- the two of them flailed against each other and were combative, prodding and dissonant chords that should not be played together (she quickly shook off that thought as it led to her childhood and moments spent sharing a piano bench).

  Their constant negative interactions underscored the constant brushing against each other of her own competing for predominance ideas and philosophies. She didn’t care for it.

  As for Caleb himself, she had not bothered to form an opinion in one way or another. He didn’t follow the recognized paths that David was treading. He fought -- openly and loudly at times -- and acquiesced by turn in some sort of pattern that she failed to follow.

  That, of course, might change. David had been equally incomprehensible to her at the beginning (in the time when the one who claimed the status of brother had dogged his footsteps and claimed his confidences). Caleb might come around when the time for him to sever his tetherings to the outside came as well. The problem was that she was having difficulty seeing them all making it to the point where that happened without some sort of catastrophic blow up happening first.

  That was a difference between her experience and both David and Caleb. She had experienced a complete break in her realms of before and after. There had been a time when she had been a part of the Wiltshire family and there had been a time when she had been under the Society’s direction. The two did not intertwine. There were separate. They did not mix. It was a clearly defined break.

  David had brought part of his past along with him. The two worldviews and lifestyles had been in the same place at the same time, and Devon knew that they were never intended to do that. They were mutually exclusive. They could not coexist. The one existed to destroy the other. That was a basic tenet of everything the Society stood for (even if they never came out and said specifically that in front of those of the level of inclusion of which Devon knew she was a part). At least for David, that cognitive dissonance had ceased to be.

  For Caleb, it was still every day present. The piece of his past that he clung to hadn’t gone away yet. She would. That was fact -- people always let you down. For now, she was still present causing additional conflict (and confusion on Caleb’s part) and doing untold damage to the speed of their progress in their tasks just through the sheer distractive power of her being there in the first place. It was really no wonder that Caleb was such a strange mix of contradictions when he was living in such a state.

  When Katherine finally left him, then he would have a chance. Katherine grated on Devon nearly as much as Eris did but in a very different way. In a lot of ways, Katherine was strangely both the same and the polar opposite of the other woman all at the same time. She too seemed to operate with sentiment and emotion over logic (but that was to be expected of her kind as much as it should be unexpected in Eris).

  There were times, however, when she got the distinct impression that Katherine was playing a game of chess for which Devon could not see all of the pieces. She didn’t like that. It made her uncomfortable, and things that made her uncomfortable (Eris’s inability to behave in a consistently rational manner for example) were threats to her aloofness (and aloofness was vitally important to Devon’s further wellbeing).

  Katherine was a watcher of things (and while Devon had learned to be so via necessity, Katherine seemed to be one by nature). Devon was not entirely pleased to be watched in the same manner that she watched others. She was always watched, but she had grown accustomed to being watched most often by those who saw little beyond what they wanted to see on the surface. Being watched by someone who pondered and calculated (as she thought that Katherine did) was something that should be avoided. She would be pleased that it had come to an end whenever Katherine finally got around to leaving.

  She would have, she decided, dealt better with Katherine if Katherine had tried to deal with her in some manner or another. She caught the other woman looking at her with a thoughtful expression sometimes; she didn’t like the implications of the fact that she held her tongue after she did so.

  Devon wasn’t clueless, and she was not without curiosity. She had looked for information once upon a time (information that she should not have that had opened doors that were best left closed). She knew what the name Wiltshire would mean to Katherine, and she suspected that Katherine knew the connection. What she found disturbing was that Katherine never approached her on the subject. That she never tried to trade information or insinuate things to see what Devon might be willing to accede to or offer in counter was something that set Devon on edge just as much as the worst of Eris’s temper tantrums. She had lived for so long in a world where information existed for the purpose of leverage that Katherine displaying no indication of using it as such made her feel jittery.

  Leverage was something that every member of her cell seemed to fail to understand the importance of -- except maybe for Caleb, but his experience of being the one leveraged against would likely distort his comprehension of its use.

  Caleb might be a lost cause, but she was never going to know that (the Society was never going to know that) until Katherine was no longer in the midst of the field. David might even be taking longer to work his way to where he needed to be because of the discombobulation caused by her presence. Her presence might be causing him to second guess his trust adjustments, and those were better made sooner over later. They needed to know whether Caleb was untrainable sooner over later.

  They were all better off the sooner everything was settled. When the Society reached their goals, Devon would no longer have other possibilities to run through the filters in her head
to cause her doubts.

  Devon didn’t request transfer to a different cell (she wasn’t altogether certain that that request would even be heard let alone honored). She only openly countered Eris when she was doing something that was costing them time or endangering an efficient completion of their next task. She facilitated David’s transition whenever she could. She watched and noted details about Caleb so she would be prepared to make appropriate assessments later. She hoped each day that it would be the one where Katherine finally bowed out (even as she pushed away any and all thoughts that led her down the path of appreciating the other woman’s tenacity).

  She watched and observed. She wondered and waited. She did it all calmly and quietly, and she never allowed any hint of the turmoil in her head to show. She waited and she waited and she waited. She followed directions, completed the next task, moved to the next place, and checked off the next box on the list -- because every step closer on the path to what the Society wanted was one step further toward a world where the Society’s philosophy had prevailed. That world was what Devon was waiting for because if there was nothing left to contradict the things that Devon was supposed to be certain of, then maybe she would finally find her certainty.

  Certainty was what she wanted. Certainty was what she was counting on to finally bring her an internal calm to match her external appearance. Certainty was something to be craved. Certainty was something to be desired, longed for, and worked toward. Devon could (if she tried) remember a time when she had believed in many things. She had let go of all of them along her way. That certainty would be worth whatever it cost her to arrive at it was the only belief she maintained.