~~~~~
Eris wasn’t appreciating his presence much. David didn’t think that Eris appreciated anyone’s presence much, so he didn’t bother to take it personally. He also didn’t bother to take it personally because he really didn’t like Eris. He found himself rather immune to suffering any ill-effects from her glaring or muttering.
He actually rather enjoyed it most of the time. She was so easy to ruffle, and he had been really short on anything that might be construed as amusing for quite some time. He would readily admit (to anyone who wasn’t Eris that bothered to ask) that he was being intentionally petty. In his head, Eris equated with the people who were in the background pulling strings (she did, after all, parrot all of their gobbledygook as if she was a tape recorder instead of an actual person capable of independent thought).
He hadn’t been well or himself or much more than basically functional (if functional consisted of nothing more than going through the motions and doing what one was told) for longer than he wanted to think about.
Hanging out with Katherine earlier had been the closest he had felt to normal in a long time. It would figure that he would get that back right at the point that she was leaving. He couldn’t find it in him to be angry at her over that (he had plenty of anger to go around, but it wasn’t directed at her). It had been nice though -- the just talking and openly admitting that things weren’t okay. It had even been nice (in a messed up sort of a way) the way that seeing Eris going after Katherine and Katherine squaring off with her in return had shaken him out of wherever it was that he had let himself get lost.
She was going. She was going, and she was going to try to work out some way to help. He wanted to believe that that was possible. He wanted to hope that she was going to come charging back with a grand plan and the perfect idea to make everything work out as it should. He couldn’t make himself believe that that was the way it was going to go. He knew too much; he had seen more that told him too much about the things that he wasn’t yet supposed to know. Katherine wasn’t headed into anything very winnable.
He couldn’t completely dismiss her chances either. Kat had a way of surprising him whenever he thought that he had her pegged; there was always the chance that this would be one of those times. Besides, he needed something in his head to hang on to -- a knowledge that there was something beyond the closed little order taking drone existence he was living.
In any case, Katherine and Caleb were going to get the time to sort things out and say their goodbyes that he and Drake hadn’t gotten. He would make sure of that (even if it did mean intentionally stationing himself in Eris’s vicinity).
He swiveled his head to look at Devon as she studied a file folder of building layouts (and pointedly ignored Eris’s whining) while he pondered how Katherine had answered his earlier question. She hadn’t completely shot down his thought process, but she hadn’t told him what he wanted to hear either. He kind of needed Devon to not be Eris in philosophy in a more palatable form. Devon was one of them that had been brought back just as David had been himself -- if she was completely on their side, then did that mean that was where his own road was going to lead?
Best Left Unfinished Page 27