A/N You can see a little illustration I drew for this story via the link in my profile.
"Look, I know why you don't want to do it and it's completely understandable: you hate to be reminded that you're a Doll."
Claire managed to keep her flinch internal and her eyes on the job in hand as Boyd continued, his voice infuriatingly calm and measured, even though the antiseptic she was applying to his wound must sting like hell.
"But some might see you as more fortunate than the rest of us, in that you've made a conscious decision to be, or rather, to continue being, the person you are. If Rossum carry out Ambrose's threat to liquidate this Dollhouse's inventory, the choice could be taken out of your hands. Do you really want to take that risk? I know I don't want you to. I want to know I can count on you still being here, and being you, when I come back."
Claire's stony silence continued as she carefully wrapped a bandage twice around Boyd's ribcage and pinned the ends together. Finally, she exhaled, looked up and spoke: "OK. I'll do it but only if you promise that you will come back."
"You know I will. Thank you." He pulled down his shirt and took her hand. "Let's go and do it now. Topher and Ivy are downstairs rounding up the Actives, so let's take advantage of the imprinting room being empty for a moment before they get started with the personality restorations. By the way, have you told Topher you won't be wanting yours back?"
"He knows," said Claire shortly. "Let's get this over with then." And she marched out of her office in the direction of the stairs.
"Hello, Whiskey." Adelle treated the girl in the chair to her most soothing smile, though she had to acknowledge that the blood, sweat and dirt which she had not yet washed from her face probably somewhat negated its effect. "How are you feeling?"
"Did I fall asleep?" Whiskey, too, was grimy and scratched, with a nasty lump on her forehead where Echo had knocked her out, but apart from that she seemed unharmed.
"For a little while."
"Shall I go now?"
"Just a moment, my dear. Topher," Adelle turned and addressed the programmer hovering behind her, "are we absolutely sure that all trace of the sleeper imprint has been removed?"
Topher's eyes flitted briefly across the many monitors and displays dotted around the walls, then he nodded.
"Yep, she's just Whiskey: straight-up."
"In that case, Whiskey, why don't you run along with Priya here, who'll get you washed and into some nice clean clothes?"
"I'd like that. I think it will help me to be my best." Whiskey looked down in mild dismay at the tattered suit and necktie she still wore. Priya stepped forward and put a gentle arm around her shoulders, shepherding her from the room.
"Now let's load up her original personality so we can get her out of here as quickly as possible,'" Adelle said briskly.
Topher had wandered out into his office and was watching Priya and Whiskey descend the stairs to the atrium with a strange, vacant expression on his face. At Adelle's words, however, he jerked around and agreed: "Totally. I'll go get the wedge."
But when he reappeared a few moments later he was empty-handed. "They're gone," he said hoarsely. "Both the Whiskey originals: primary and back-up. There's a gap in the storage unit where they should be. What if… someone destroyed them?"
"Nonsense. Why would anyone do that? You or Ivy must have just put them back in the wrong place. Let's go and have a proper look."
Topher opened his mouth to respond but then seemed to think better of it, pressing his fist anxiously against his lips instead as he followed his employer back to the wedge safe.
By the time Priya returned three quarters of an hour later with a clean and bandaged Whiskey in tow, Adelle had emptied the safe completely and was finally admitting defeat. "Well, we don't have time to worry about this now. I'm sure the damn wedges will turn up eventually. In the meantime, Whiskey will just have to wait here in her Doll state."
"I don't mind waiting. I think I'm meant to wait," said Whiskey placidly.
The women left Topher half-heatedly re-checking the random piles of wedges now strewn around his office and escorted Whiskey down to her sleep pod.
On the way across the hall, Priya stopped as a thought struck her. "Hey, Adelle, why don't we get Topher to reprint Whiskey with the Doc Saunders personality? A doctor's always good to have around; especially now."
Adelle shook her head severely. "Absolutely not. Can you imagine what it would do to Topher to have to see Claire Saunders every day and she, poor thing, would have no idea of what she's done and – no, it's out of the question. It's bad enough that we're obliged to keep…" She noticed Whiskey looking at her curiously and changed tack abruptly. "Anyway, Echo has medical skills which are perfectly adequate for our needs at present. Now, come along, Whiskey, let's get you into bed."
"We went over there to see if we could find any information about Rossum's plans and Anthony spent fucking hours drilling into the safe hidden in the bedroom cupboard with some kind of diamond-cutter thing and in the end there was nothing inside at all except… these!" Priya rummaged around in her bag and pulled out a pair of imprint wedges, which she waved in Topher's face with an air of profound irritation. "The label's been ripped off one and the other hasn't been labeled at all but we're guessing one of them is probably the Clyde 2.0 print."
Topher took the wedges and held them delicately side by side under his nose as if trying to see through the plastic and silicone to the personalities encoded within. Priya rolled her eyes. Topher had always been a bit eccentric, in what was surely a half-deliberate way, designed to complement his 'genius' persona. But since the Bennett Halverson debacle and the battle in Tucson, his behavior sometimes made Priya wonder if the description 'mad scientist' wasn't becoming more genuinely appropriate every day.
"But the question is: why would my erstwhile man-friend feel the need to keep Clyde stashed in his bedroom like that?" Topher muttered, half to himself. "As we all know, he already had a way more attractive roomie." He chuckled as he crossed the imprinting room and slotted the unlabeled wedge into a port on one of the blinking banks of machines. The screen above it lit up almost instantly and began to display reams of incomprehensible text and figures, interspersed with the occasional multi-colored diagram of a brain.
Priya turned her attention to Topher, who was staring at the data with an expression which seemed to indicate a mixture of surprise, fascination, anxiety and something else she couldn't quite place. "Well?" she demanded.
"Heh. It looks like the apparently-irrelevant question I raised just a minute ago was, in fact, one hundred percent to the point," he replied, with a touch of the old Topher smugness in his voice. "This isn't Clyde on here; it's Saunders."
"The Doc Saunders imprint? That's weird. Why make a copy of that? The original's still here at the Dollhouse with the others; I saw it a few days ago."
"No, no, no, you don't get it!" Topher wagged both his forefingers back and forth wildly. "This isn't the same Claire Saunders print I created; it's an update – a recent one too – complete with all the memories and modifications she added herself through months and months of being a living, breathing, human person. It's Claire 2.0!"
"So you think she made this?" Priya gestured at the screen.
"Hmmm. Well, I guess it's possible but…" Topher paused for a moment and his fingers froze mid-wag. Then he shrugged. "I dunno. I just kind of doubt it."
"But if she didn't, it must have been Boyd and why would he bother?"
"Maybe he wanted to be able to get her back some day. Maybe he loved her," Topher suggested simply.
Surprised, Priya searched his face for his habitual irony but found none. Could it be, she wondered, that in spite of all his immaturity and egotism Topher Brink actually understood a little about hearts as well as a lot about brains?
"Well, anyway, that's one mystery wedge successfully identified." Priya curtailed her musings and clapped her hands together purposefully. "How about the other?"
Topher ejected the Saunders wedge and placed it carefully in a drawer before inserting the second one. Once again, the expression on his face after the contents had loaded was not easy to read: there was certainly a good helping of pain in the mix, though when he spoke he sounded relieved: "It's another Whiskey imprint. The missing original."
"Oh wow, really? That's great news," Priya enthused. "Now we can finally restore her personality and let her go like everyone else. I'll go tell DeWitt right away."
Topher nodded mutely as Priya hurried off in the direction of the elevator.
"Boyd? Boyd? Where are you? Where did you go? Boyd?" Claire sat up and looked around her, panic mounting in her voice.
Topher edged slowly round to the front of the chair, both hands raised as if in surrender.
"Hello, Dr Saunders."
"Topher! What's happened? Where's Boyd? Did Rossum get to him? Is he OK?" She sprang to her feet and headed for the door but Topher blocked her path.
"Stop! Please don't go out there. I need to talk to you first."
Claire glared at him but allowed herself to be shunted backwards toward the imprinting chair.
"OK. Thanks." Topher said, continuing to hover nervously in front of the door, twisting his fingers together.
"So talk, Topher. What's going on? The last thing I remember is Boyd taking a scan of my mind in case of emergencies and now I wake up; he's gone; you're here and I seem to have acquired –" she prodded gingerly at the bandage on her forehead – "a minor frontal hematoma, so I assume there's been an emergency of some kind. What was it?"
"Yeah. It was definitely an emergency. A team of Rossum goons stormed the House and did a bunch of really bad stuff. They knocked me and you out, you got wiped and then…" He paused and looked away. His expression was suddenly so melancholy that Claire bit back her urge to yell at him to continue the story. "Bennett got shot," he finished finally, in a voice hardly louder than a whisper.
"Oh my God, this is exactly what Boyd said might happen. I'm so sorry, Topher." Claire took a step toward him, arm half outstretched, but he shook his head. Perhaps he didn't want sympathy from her. She could understand that.
"Anyway, so Boyd and Ballard managed to get rid of the goons," Topher resumed, "and we decided to plow ahead with Echo's whole suicidal assault on the Rossum HQ strategy."
"Yes? And so what happened? You're here and this Dollhouse is still standing so the mission can't have been a total failure but…" - it was Claire's turn to fall silent for a moment as she steeled herself to complete her sentence - "what happened to Boyd? Why isn't he here now?"
Topher had never been good at hiding his emotions: his face told her everything before he opened his mouth. Claire sat down heavily, her mind screaming denial even though the logical part of her had known the truth from the moment she opened her eyes in the chair and saw that Boyd wasn't there beside her. She barely heard Topher's clumsy, well-meaning words as he explained how Boyd had died heroically destroying Rossum's new mass-imprinting technology.
"He promised me he'd come back. We had a deal. I was going to wait and he was going to come back," she mumbled, half aware of how pathetic she must sound.
"I know. You even remembered you were supposed to wait when you were Whiskey."
Claire looked up in surprise. "I did?"
Topher smiled wanly and shrugged. "Yeah. If Rossum didn't want to use it to take over the world, I'd think about making some major improvements to the wiping tech. But anyway, listen, Doc – Claire," he crouched down in front of her and gripped her wrist, suddenly very earnest, "you have to get out of here right away. We found the wedge with your body's original personality on it at Boyd's apartment and DeWitt ordered me to reprint you with it because she's letting all the Actives go. She's going to freak out when she finds out I didn't do it. Plus, it's only a matter of time before Rossum regroup and all hell breaks loose. Boyd made this updated imprint so you could carry on living no matter what, and so that's what you have to do. Leave LA and never come back. Go now!" He jumped to his feet and tried to tug her up too but she resisted.
"Jesus, Topher, just give me a chance to take all of this in, will you?" she snapped, shaking off his hand.
"Indeed, Mr. Brink, your current behavior is not polite or gentlemanly. It's hardly surprising it causes people to 'freak out.'" Adelle stood in the doorway holding a cup of green tea and a clipboard and looking furious. "I came to offer my personal greetings to our new arrival, so that I will do: good evening, Dr Saunders. I trust you are well. Why don't you take this?" She handed the tea to Claire, who took it numbly. "Kindly wait here for a moment. Now, Topher, a word in private please."
"Is this revenge? Is that what this is? You couldn't bear the thought that Dr Saunders would remain forever oblivious of what she did? You wanted her to find out what her body had been used for and – what? – accept responsibility for it? You, of all people, should know how unfair and ridiculous that is.
"Or is it that you blame her for being taken in by Mr. Langton? Because you know very well that we all were, in our own ways. Claire was simply the greatest victim of his manipulation and deceit. Did you want her to have to live with that knowledge too?"
Adelle was in full flow, pacing up and down Topher's office with her arms folded like an angry schoolteacher, while he sat hunched miserably on the couch, staring at his feet.
"And how did you think all this was going to end? We have already discovered that the psychological restraints you were supposed to put in place to prevent Claire leaving the Dollhouse are completely ineffective. How are we to know she won't abscond permanently, rendering the poor girl to whom that body rightfully belongs essentially dead? I suppose the answer is that you didn't consider the consequences of your actions at all; you seldom do."
"I did consider! I always consider!" Topher sprang up suddenly and pointed an accusatory finger at Adelle, who took a step back, startled. "Did you consider that most of the decisions I've had to make since I've had this job haven't included an option without bad consequences?" His voice was rising hysterically and the finger pointed at Adelle's nose quivered with nervous energy. She sighed and placed calming hands on his shoulders. Some days she worried that the boy was on the brink of a total breakdown and she couldn't help but feel partially responsible.
"Sit down, Topher, and be sensible please," she said in the soothing voice she usually reserved for the Actives. She pushed him gently back down onto the couch and seated herself beside him. "Maybe the problem is that you keep trying to take decisions that aren't yours to take; that you lack the maturity to take. Genius you may be, but you are only twenty-eight years old and with little life experience at that. Furthermore, as long as you remain in this House I consider you my employee, and therefore I expect you to heed my…"
Before she could finish her sentence, the door to the imprinting room crashed open and Claire burst in. "I killed Bennett Halverson!" she shouted.
Adelle and Topher both stared at her in astonishment. Adelle was the first to collect herself enough to respond: "Yes, I'm afraid you did, in a manner of speaking, but, of course, it wasn't really you; it was a sleeper imprint you were carrying unwittingly and which was activated just prior to Miss Halverson's murder. But surely Topher must have explained all this earlier."
"No, I didn't," Topher said. "Not the part about Bennett. I wasn't ever going to. How did you find out?"
"There was a surveillance camera tape lying on the trolley in there, labeled 'Topher's Snack Cam' or something like that. I thought I'd take a look at it to catch up with some of what I missed."
Claire spoke slowly while she strained to process what she had just seen. If she was honest with herself, the real reason she had watched the tape was to try and get a glimpse of a few of her lost last minutes with Boyd: the brief time they must have shared after he took the scan of her brain. But before she had rewound that far, the horrifying scene with Bennett appeared: a scene like in the kind of nightmare where you watch yourself undergo some terrible ordeal from another's perspective without the power to intervene. And now the nightmare was playing over and over relentlessly in her head: the camera activates, triggered by Topher passing it as he enters the imprinting room; it focuses on the back of Bennett's head, just visible in the corner of the frame as she sits working in Topher's office; she looks up and, a few moments later, Claire's own face appears over her shoulder, smiling; then the camera shifts, refocusing on Topher as he passes it again and comes to stand in the doorway blocking the view of the room beyond; suddenly, Topher's body spasms with shock, he stands frozen for a second and then collapses down onto his knees, revealing Bennett, slumped in her chair, her neck bent backwards out of shot.
"I don't understand though," Claire managed to continue. "Who programmed me with the sleeper imprint? I span back through the whole tape and I was never in the chair except when Boyd..."
Claire faltered as the awful suspicion bloomed, strengthened by the incipient expressions of sympathy on the faces of her two colleagues.
"It was him, wasn't it? He was working for Rossum." She preferred to say it herself like that, bluntly, and pray contradiction would come. But none did.
"I'm so sorry, Claire. Why don't you sit down?" Adelle said, standing up and removing a pile of comics from a chair to make room for her. Claire sat, docile as Whiskey. She should probably be yelling or crying or throwing things right now, she thought, but she felt strangely distanced from the situation, as if she were still watching herself on a screen.
"I daresay you'd find out soon enough so I might as well tell you now that Mr. Langton was, in fact, Rossum's founder. It seems that he came to this Dollhouse undercover to supervise the development of Echo, whom he knew possessed special qualities."
Claire just nodded, pressing her temples with her forefinger and thumb. She didn't even feel particularly shocked. Had she perhaps always subconsciously harbored a grain of distrust toward her lover; so over-qualified for his job as a handler and with a past full of secrets that he had kept even from her? Or had she simply received so much devastating news today that it was no longer registering properly?
"Frankly, I don't know what Topher here was thinking when he imprinted you with the update that Mr. Langton made," Adelle continued, shooting a fiery glance at the programmer, who had resumed his despondent, hunched position. "There was absolutely no reason for you to have to go through all of this. I've already had some severe words with Topher and..."
"He did the right thing," Claire interrupted. Topher uncurled slightly to look at her. "I think he knew this was what I would have wanted, didn't you, Topher? You probably figured out that it was me who stole the wedges with my original personality on them."
"Yeah, I did, but I'd have known even if you hadn't," he replied quietly.
"I want to live and I want to keep hold of my own memories, no matter how bad they may be," Claire went on. "You should have told me everything about Boyd and Bennett yourself straight away, but I can see why you didn't; you were just trying to be kind."
Adelle looked from Claire to Topher and back again, bemused by this sudden display of mutual understanding. Had she missed some kind of significant development in their relationship? As far as she knew, it had never previously extended beyond the professional animosity caused by their very different moral codes, or rather Topher's apparent lack of one. She quickly decided, however, that speculating about such matters was not an appropriate or productive use of her time.
"Well, if both of you can live with your being you, Doctor, I don't think there is anything to be gained by my further involvement in this tangled affair. I still don't approve of your decision, Topher, but I am hardly about to order that Doctor Saunders' existence be terminated now. Perhaps you were right that in our line of work, there are no perfect choices to be made. Good night, both. I hope you sleep soundly," she said and swept out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
Minutes passed. Claire and Topher remained where they were: he on the couch and she in her chair, not looking at one other.
It was she that spoke at last: "I can't believe you wanted to help me after what I did. Why did you?"
It took Topher a moment to reply and when he did it was slow and hesitant, as if he was trying to work out the answer to the question himself as he went along.
"When… it happened, one of the worst parts… Well, obviously, not as bad as Bennett being… but still pretty bad, was that I didn't know… I wasn't sure… I thought it might have been you – you, as in pure Claire Saunders - that did it. I thought maybe you really hated me that much. When we got to Tucson and I found out that Rossum had messed with you, I felt so relieved. Actually, it took me a while to even get my head around it but…"
"You thought I was capable of murder?" Claire interrupted, appalled. "And that bothered you because - what? – your own creation had glitched so badly that she shot your girlfriend?"
"No!" Topher protested, equally appalled. "Jeez, how could I possibly still think of you as my creation after all the shit you put me through? I was bothered because… I liked you and I hated that you might think I deserved… what you did. I guess my own selfish reason for bringing you back was to – I dunno – check it really wasn't you, or prove to myself that you're not the kind of person who would ever do something like that, or something... It sounds dumb when I say it out loud." He dug up a joystick from down the side of the couch cushion he was sitting on and began to fiddle with it.
"So you really don't hate me?" asked Claire, still incredulous. Surely he had plenty enough reasons to despise her even before Bennett's murder; she'd made damn sure of that. Hearing him say he liked her in spite of everything annoyed, touched and baffled her in roughly equal parts.
"Well, I guess maybe a little, but only in a kinda irrational way..." Topher continued to pummel the joystick, which clicked irritatingly. Claire got the impression he was trying to decide whether to say something else.
"You know, you're the one who should really be mad at me," he told her eventually; "if you didn't hate me to the max already, that is. 'Cause… it was me that killed Boyd."
"You? How?" demanded Claire with skepticism rather than anger. This she really could not believe; the thought of Topher even holding a gun was preposterous.
"Yeah, me. OK, it wasn't during some macho shoot-out or hand-to-hand combat scenario," he admitted, apparently reading her thoughts. "I snuck up behind him and zapped him with the portable wiping tech Rossum were developing. I turned him into a Doll and then we loaded him up with explosives and… left him behind to set them off." The end of the explanation was muffled as Topher had abandoned the joystick and covered his face with his hands.
Hardly noticing what she was doing, Claire got up and came to sit close beside him on the couch. She tugged one of his arms down, forcing him to look at her. The eye she revealed was moist and rimmed with pink. "Listen, Topher, Boyd deserved it," Claire said fiercely. "He treated me like a plaything to be wiped and imprinted and used for whatever he liked. I'm glad the same thing happened to him." Saying the words out loud helped her believe they were true and for some reason she wanted Topher to agree. What right had he to be crying anyway; making her want to comfort him over the death of the man who betrayed her? It was perverse and ridiculous.
But now Topher seemed to be trying to pull himself together, dabbing at his eyes with his shirt cuff. When he spoke his voice was thick and indistinct and Claire wondered for a moment if she'd misheard: "I think he loved you though."
"What? What did you say?"
"Boyd. Sure, the guy was more criminally insane than Alpha on a bad day but I think he must have loved you," Topher insisted. "Otherwise why bother making the update of your imprint? I know he needed to get you in the chair to install the sleeper architecture but he could've just told you it was to take a scan; no need to actually make one if he wasn't bothered about getting Claire Saunders back one day. Plus, you know where he put it when he'd made it? Not here with the other wedges but in the safe in his room at home. To me that says it was something personally important to him; not a part of the whole Rossum conspiracy deal.
"I'm sticking to what I said earlier about him wanting you to survive, and I think he meant it when he said he was going to come back for you. I'm really sorry we made it so he couldn't do that, although, OK, not so sorry we stopped him turning the entire human race into mindless... Yeah, anyway…"
He tailed off and shifted away from Claire, looking uncomfortable. This puzzled her at first but then she felt something wet drip down from her face onto her collarbone and she realized she was crying.
"You're a jerk, Topher; you know that?" she said with a grim half-smile. "Why couldn't you just let me try and feel glad Boyd's dead? Things would be so much simpler."
"Hey, I'm not stopping you! It's not like it's any of my business anyway. I just thought you should hear all the facts before you get too comfy in your grave-dancing shoes. It's on you now to think back over your time together and decide if I'm right about Boyd or not. If you decide I'm wrong, and that his memory deserves nothing but a bunch of spitting and cursing then knock yourself out. "
As he spoke, the hand that wasn't doing his usual gesticulating was rummaging further under the couch cushions. Eventually, he pulled out a crumpled packet of tissues, which he handed to Claire without comment.
"Like I'm going to be able to stop analyzing every last thing he ever said to me," she muttered, wiping her nose. "DeWitt's right that I'd probably be much better off without those memories, but I'm a masochist as well as a completist so I do appreciate you giving them back to me."
"No problem. I wouldn't want to not remember Bennett, even though it hurts like hell every time I think about her."
Claire winced slightly as his words caused the images from the tape to abruptly resurface in her mind. Passively, she let them play out, punishing herself. Next to her, Topher had fallen silent too, perhaps watching exactly the same scene unfold in his own head.
"I guess now, at least, we're even in our reasons to hate each other," he said at last, with an air of such serious contemplation that it sounded as if he'd been working out a way to plot hatred on a graph, or maybe devised an equation to measure its justification.
"I don't hate you, Topher," she told him reflexively, and then realized it was true. "I don't, OK?" she repeated, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I did before - a lot - but not anymore; probably not since I first left the House, in fact, and got some other things to think about."
Topher stared at her intently for a while; long enough to make her self-conscious about her tear-stained face. Then he gave a quick nod, as if he had accepted the truth of her statement, and tentatively reached up to touch the hand on his shoulder, brushing it lightly with his fingertips, before pulling away hurriedly.
"Well, I guess I should do like you said earlier and get out of here," said Claire, withdrawing her hand too.
"Now?" Topher asked. "But it's late." He glanced at the Dalek-shaped clock on his desk. It was twenty to midnight. "There's no big hurry for you to leave now that DeWitt knows you're here. Why not wait until tomorrow at least? You could just sleep in your old room; no one's touched it since the last time you left."
Claire hesitated. "No," she said at last, "it's best if I go now before anyone else sees me and asks questions. Anyway, I've got a lot of stuff to sort out in my life and in my head so I should probably get to work right away." The truth was, the thought of starting a life outside the Dollhouse from scratch terrified her and she was worried that if she didn't leave now she never would.
"Where will you go though? What will you do?" Topher persisted. It must be dawning on him too that she had literally nothing outside her former job, except for the home she had briefly established with Boyd, which she was hardly likely to want to go back to.
"I'll be OK," she told him. "I've got quite a bit of money put away from working here for six months without ever leaving the place to spend it."
Topher got up suddenly and crossed to a set of shelves in the corner. Between a row of neuroscience textbooks and a plastic Gremlin was a bowl with a bunch of keys in it. He detached two and held them out to Claire. "I've got an apartment in Pasadena," he explained. "I bought it a couple of years ago but I've never even spent a night there. You're welcome to use it for as long as you want, assuming it hasn't burned down, or been taken over by squatters or something; it's been a while since I went over there to check on it."
"Thanks. I might just do that. Shall I mail these back to you?" she said as she took the keys. She wasn't sure if she really would go and stay in Topher's apartment; it might feel a bit strange, but it was kind of him to offer and she didn't want to hurt his feelings.
"Sure. Whenever." Topher sat down beside her again and busied himself writing the address on a Post-It, but he still looked worried and a bit miserable too. Could he actually be sorry she was leaving? Claire would have thought he'd never want to see her again as long as he lived. Of course, she knew he'd always been attracted to her – that was obvious enough and something she'd exploited ruthlessly in the past – and perhaps he really meant it when he said he liked her as a person too. But, even so, surely now her physical presence in the House was, above all, a constant reminder of an incomparably traumatic experience? At best, his feelings toward her must be similar to her own twisted fondness for the scars that Alpha had left emblazoned across her features.
Topher handed her the Post-It and she scrunched it awkwardly in her fist along with the keys, as there were no pockets in the Active's tracksuit she still wore. "Thanks again, Topher," she said and then, on impulse, leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. As she drew back she noticed that he smelled less repulsive than usual and during the momentary pause it took her to register this change and wonder about its cause – a new aftershave perhaps? - his hand reached out and curled around her face, holding it steady front of his.
Claire's heart gave a quick thud against her ribcage but she didn't pull away. Topher didn't move or speak either; he just stared at her with his sad green eyes. In this situation, how could Claire fail to consider leaning in further and closing the few inches between their lips? After all, kissing Topher Brink would certainly not be the most screwed-up thing that had happened to her recently; not even close. And since today had been a day for brutal truths, she might as well admit that there was a tenacious, treacherous little part of her that had always wanted to, whether it was a result of fiendishly clever reverse-psychology programming or not.
As she turned these things over her in mind, Claire idly counted the sandy freckles that peppered Topher's cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. She'd never really noticed them before and they made her think how ridiculously young and vulnerable he looked. And he was vulnerable: it was always so easy for her to get any kind of reaction out of him she chose; that's why it had been so much fun tormenting him, she had to admit it. If she kissed Topher now and initiated something new between them - something that would necessarily make their relationship even more intense, complex and, let's face it, unhealthy than it already was - then left anyway, as she was determined to do, wouldn't that just be a new form of torment? This was, of course, very different from that other time she had once made advances towards Topher. Then, her motives - the ones she had allowed herself to recognize at least - had been to tease and cause distress; whereas this time she would be acting on the honest desire that she had just painfully acknowledged. The problem was that the involvement of genuine feelings in the scenario would, she knew, only ultimately serve to make her departure more difficult.
Topher must have caught a glimpse of something encouraging in her eyes as he was growing bolder now: his thumb had started to run delicately up and down the nearly-faded scar on her chin and he had moved his head fractionally closer to hers. Full of a regret she scorned herself for feeling, Claire reached up and prized his fingers away from her face; but so that the gesture wouldn't be seen as a reproof, she continued to hold onto them as she stood up and said quietly, "I've got to go now. Bye, Topher."
Topher took a deep breath before he replied, obviously making a big, though not entirely successful effort to keep his voice steady and casual: "OK. Sure. So, do you want me to come down with you to the garage to look for a car? Or… or, do you need any help with…?"
"I got it, thanks. You get to bed." Claire squeezed his hand briefly, then let it drop and headed for the door. But before she opened it she turned back. "I'm not necessarily leaving forever, you know. I really hope you're wrong about the fight with Rossum not being over, but if it turns out you're right and things get so bad around here you need a doctor in the House, tell DeWitt to get in touch. I'll keep my old email address and cellphone number."
"Right. I'll let her know… I guess I'll see you at the apocalypse then." Topher shot Claire an unconvincing, slightly manic grin and then turned away, picking up his joystick again and punching the buttons violently as she walked out of the door.