The Fever Sings in Mental Wires

by eekz

In which ten years pass and an unusual friendship develops from the rubble of the world. A slow-burn Alpha/Adelle featuring an Adelle/Dominic subplot and an evolving psychopath who'd rather not have feelings.

THE FEVER SINGS IN MENTAL WIRES
By Eekz (Nackety)

Disclaimer: The title and subtitles are from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets 2: East Coker," and there's a line from "The Hollow Men" in the text. For the rest, all hail Joss Whedon.

Spoilers: Includes or builds on scenes from 2x08 "A Love Supreme" and both "Epitaphs," and makes references to the entire series.

A/N: This is a slow-burn Alpha/Adelle, but includes some canon shipping plus Alpha's (less than reliable) interpretation of the Dominic/Adelle arc in the middle. There's a smidgen of swearing, a bit of humor, no explicitly sexual content, and an author who should have been writing her thesis when she was writing this.

Key:
. indicates a continuation of the previous scene, or that the scenes occur close together in time.
.. separates scenes that are more distant in time.

---

The entire plan hinges on his being a freak of nature. So it'll probably work.

He lets the Paul imprint take over—he can't trust the others to do this right—and recedes into his mind, clawing for the memories he can't afford to lose. Marked up maps and music beneath the stars, fresh strawberries in wooden boxes and stew that tastes like mop water, chess games and pink blankets, worn smiles and leather-bound books. Her lips at the edge of his, her skin beneath his fingertips.

Alpha waits to forget it all.

I
In my beginning is my end

As the monster prowls her office, Adelle wonders—selfishly—who will mourn her. She supposes Echo will dance on her grave while Topher sings "ding dong the DeWitch is dead," or perhaps Langton will find great pleasure in dismembering her corpse. Perhaps her final resting place will be a landfill.

Alpha tops off her glass. She drinks too desperately.

He asks, "Are you scared?"

"Out of my mind," she answers.

He smirks, slow and lazy, and kicks back in a leather armchair as he replies that he can never be out of his mind. She hears a death sentence when he concludes, "I have you to thank."

She has made such tidy work of destroying everything she was, it seems almost strange that she is suddenly quite certain she wants to live.

.

They both remember their last encounter—a brief moment in the corridor, locking eyes over a sea of bodies. She was within reach of his stolen scalpel; he could have killed her in a heartbeat.

He tipped an imaginary hat and continued his flight to freedom.

.

Alpha has enough people in his head to know that every average schmuck lives and breathes in patterns. Humanity is content to march along in its evolutionary rut, forever entrenched in dull predictability; Echo is the only one who might surprise him.

So when Adelle says, "If it's Echo you want, I could send for her," which is exactly not what she's supposed to say, he's a little miffed. Clearly he overestimated her British stoicism, and her British stoicism is one of the very few reasons he lets her live.

He almost tells her so, but settles for, "That's not very chivalrous of you."

"I've moved beyond chivalry, onto self-preservation."

He wonders what she'd do if he crept into her house in the dead of night, tied her up and told her how he planned to hurt her. Would she scream then, or would she maintain her British stoicism until the pain became too great to bear?

"Well, I'm not here for Echo," he sneers. "She's not ready for me yet."

"The man we're protecting, I'm having him transferred. I'll be happy to furnish you with an address."

He thinks she would beg for mercy. She would beg knowing she doesn't deserve it, knowing he wouldn't grant it, but she would beg anyway. And he would draw out the hours, savoring every moment. It'd be no worse than the things she's done to him.

"All this bargaining," he says. "You don't have anything I want that I can't just take."

.

"So," he starts as he hauls her into the elevator. He grips her arm too tightly, his skin feverish on hers; this compartment has never felt so small before. "I hear you sent faithful old Mr. Dominic to the Attic."

She tenses at the name, and curses herself for it.

"What'd he do, Adelle?" Alpha goads as the doors slide shut. "We'll bet it had nothing to do with his being a two-timing government suit. I think – do you want to know what I think?"

"Not particularly."

"I – no, we think you finally threw yourself at him and instead of having his wicked way with you, he got all, 'With respect, ma'am, I'm just as incapable of sexing up the woman I love as that other federal agent we know.' And you couldn't have that, so you gave the 'off with his brain!' order. Are we right? It's okay. You can tell us."

She doesn't flinch. Doesn't react. Doesn't think of the hideous ways she has changed since that night, or of the man she would have trusted to stride into her office at precisely the right moment to take Alpha (and Harding) down. She doesn't think that if he weren't rotting in the Attic, there would be no need for bargaining or fear now.

She glares at the security cameras and prays someone's watching.

.

His head hurts.

Forty-nine imprints bouncing around his cracked coconut and this is the first one that tries to kill him—the first one that rages through his cortex like a thunderstorm, electrifying everything. He can't think, can't move; it shouldn't be able to do this, it's impossible, but it fucking hurts like nothing has ever hurt before.

He lays low for days, struggling to seize control, to build walls around it like he built walls around the rest. He just has to get through this and then Echo will come to him. He's the only Paul she has left.

II
Bring the world to that destructive fire

All of humanity takes a collective leap off its rocker and goes crazy in ways that make him look like the poster-child of sanity. They slaughter each other brutally, mercilessly, and everything he's ever done looks tame by comparison.

It's beautiful. And funny as hell.

But the Paul imprint is disgruntled about the end of the world, which isn't surprising because the Paul imprint is disgruntled about everything. The trouble is that he's contagious; he seeps over the walls meant to contain him and spreads like disease, corrupting the other imprints with his scruples and self-restraint, until Alpha can't even enjoy a massacre without feeling a twinge of remorse for the bloodied bodies left behind.

(Sometimes Paul goes off on this tragic spiel about the bloodied bodies' families, but Alpha laughs at the notion that sharing someone's DNA makes them any more likeable.)

The novelty of the apocalypse fades, leaving him with these bordering-on-fluffy feelings and the altogether ridiculous idea that he'd liked the world better before it burned. He doesn't protest when Paul decides to return to L.A.

..

Topher blinks at the spoon like he's never seen one before, then tosses it aside.

"Sequential catastrophe," he repeats urgently. "It's afoot. Afeeting, even. We need to restore order."

"Yes, of course we will," Adelle says. "Why don't you tell me about it while we eat? I've brought you some—" she frowns at the watery soup and the untouched breakfast beside it, "brunch."

Topher scoffs, "That doesn't sound like a word."

Biting back the more obvious remarks about 'afeeting,' she favors him with a weak smile. "No, I suppose it doesn't. Lunch, then?"

She insists three times more before he begrudgingly grabs the bowl in both hands, his sleeves tugged over his palms, the spoon laying forgotten in the pod. He takes a brief gulp and then launches back into madness, the soup splashing her dress when he makes an expansive gesture to indicate the magnitude of this new catastrophe. He knits his brow, ogling the bowl as though he can't remember why he has it, and she takes it from him before he can throw it at something.

"We pretend to have the full sequence," he continues after a second's pause. "It looks like the full set but on the inside it's—it's like new oligodendrocytes in damaged matter. It rewires things to the wrong places, hands to feet. Synapses fire but in the wrong direction. Caroline isn't Echo, 'Adelle' doesn't come before 'Bravo.' We habituate but is that what we're supposed to do? It's—"

He stops, unfocused stare abruptly fixing on something behind her—either Bennett's ghost or his nightmares come to life; Adelle never knows. She takes advantage of the lull to retrieve the spoon and shove a spoonful of soup into his mouth; he swallows mechanically, wringing his hands. When he looks back to her, his eyes are unusually clear.

"Catastrophe averted," he says, and tilts his head. "You brought soup!"

He snatches the bowl and spoon from her, dribbling broth on his shirt in his haste. She has let go of the habit of questioning small miracles, so she watches him eat—really eat for the first time in weeks—with weary relief.

Then she hears the laughter.

.

This is what poetic justice looks like.

It might be the most hilarious thing he's ever seen—even funnier than the anarchy raging over their heads or Paul's blank brain-fried stare. His hysterical laughter only grows harsher when Adelle whips around and he sees soup stains on her dress.

"How did you get in here?" she demands, standing surprisingly quickly for a woman who has chosen to brave the apocalypse in heels.

He's still cackling at the memory of Adelle DeWitt spoon-feeding Topher, but eventually he takes a dramatic breath and tells her, "I've always been here."

She eyes him contemptuously, then shows her contempt by doing exactly the opposite of what he wants her to do (again): rather than cringe away from him, she closes the space between them in four long strides and orders, "In that case, you may consider yourself evicted. Get out of my House."

"Look who grew a backbone," he lauds as she brushes by him. She doesn't stop, so he follows her into the corridor. "We're doing just swell by the way, thank you for asking."

"I had no intention of asking."

"No, no, of course not. That's the kind of gratuitous chatter you leave to the plebeians." He smirks and aims for open wounds: "Did you ever think – before you shelved him – that you and Dom could've had little mute babies together? It would've been perfect. Your babies could've worn teeny suits and given everyone stern looks."

"Are you finished?" She sounds amused.

"Never," he promises. His smirk gives way to disgust as they step into the Atrium, and he shrewdly observes, "Taking the wolf to the sheep, I see. More sacrifices in exchange for your life?"

"Not quite."

A second later, someone tackles him to the ground.

.

"You try being a serial killer with a Paul in your head," Alpha grumbles. "It's not an easy task."

Paul smirks, the pleased smirk of a man whose inflexible morals have crippled a psychopath, and Alpha scowls back like he doesn't think Paul has any right to exist. Adelle doesn't think Alpha has any right to be here.

Echo turns away from the broken doll and announces, "I believe him."

"I expect he's playing you for a fool," Adelle notes.

"That's why I believe him. You always trust the liars."

Adelle deigns not to reply, and looks to Paul. "Lock him in the holding cell. If he does so much as make an insolent remark, kill him. Please."

..

Civilizations are crumbling across the globe and yet he finds Adelle at her desk, some two hundred feet above hell's reach, doing paperwork. She turns when he locks the door behind him.

"Did Caroline set you free?" she asks.

He ignores the question and crosses her office calmly, taking care to show her the blade in his hands. It's obsidian and jagged, deliciously wicked, and he revels in the way her eyes flicker from his face to the knife before she rises from her chair. The city is in ruins but her clothes are barely wrinkled, her hair neatly plaited; he's never seen anything so repulsive.

She turns her head, her hand reaching for the small gun on her desk, but he doesn't give her the chance to defend herself: he grabs a fistful of her hair and drags her back to the edge of the platform, pressing the sharp point of his knife to her neck. One wrong move and she'll slit her own throat.

The Paul imprint flounders somewhere in his head, torn between 'murder is wrong' and images of Echo imprisoned and in pain. He has never given up as easily as he does now, apparently cowed by Alpha's conviction that this needs to be done—not for Echo, but for the world. They can't have someone in it who'd sacrifice perfection to save her own pathetic self.

"Well get on with it then," she says.

It doesn't sound like pleading. He'd anticipated pleading.

Slowly, in case she's confused, he explains, "I'm going to kill you."

"I assumed as much."

She eyes him irritably, like his murdering her is little more than an inconvenient disruption in her day. He searches her face for a tell, some sign that he hasn't miscalculated her again—and then Paul gets ahold of the memory and Alpha cringes, the blade slipping, biting into her skin, when the imprint laughs too loudly in his head.

Paul puts the scene into context, insisting that he and Langton wouldn't have let Echo go to her office alone and she'd known that. She wasn't offering an exchange; she was offering to call in the cavalry.

Alpha still hasn't figured out how to make him shut up. He can't stop Paul from viewing the rest of the encounter or making grating comments, and his attempts to quash Paul's voice are grossly unsuccessful. When he finally finds his way back to the moment—to the blade in his hand and the blood beading on her pale throat—he thinks he's had the whole damn argument out loud.

She doesn't even have the decency to look terrified.

With a snarl, he lets her go, shoving her aside so he can paw through the papers on her desk. It's readily apparent that this isn't paperwork, but he can't determine what it is: faded maps, schematics of the tech that ended the world, calculations and chemical formulas, all mixed in with unintelligible pencil scrawls on blank paper.

"How did you escape the holding cell?" she asks quietly, pressing her palm to the cut on her neck.

"Easily."

"And why are you in my office?"

"To kill you – or not to kill you," that's either Paul or the cowardly fashion model taking over, and Alpha dislodges the imprint with a shake of his head. "Because you are, as you know, a useless tea-guzzling inselaffen who shouldn't have crossed over the pond and…"

He trails off, his gaze falling on the open notebook. These notes are written in fresh ink and meticulous cursive, and suddenly he understands precisely what she's doing. He sets his knife on her desk, saying, "No, ask me again."

She snorts, the noise decidedly unAdellelike. "Why are you in my office?"

"To help you save your dolls."

..

"It's what he always was," Alpha says as he flips through Topher's old notes. "Dr. Frankenstein was nuts from the start, building monsters from scrap parts and brain scans. He's just not hiding it anymore."

She wants to hurl something at him or—or—something. He's sprawled out too comfortably on her couch, his ankles crossed on the armrests. She pours more vodka into her glass.

"Don't talk about him like that," she commands, fighting to keep her voice even and low when all she wants to do is scream. She has never felt so frazzled, so close to unraveling, and she's beginning to suspect that the only reason he didn't kill her is he thought it'd be more fun to drive her insane first.

"Why not?"

"It's not his fault. None of this is his fault."

"It's yours." It is neither a question nor an accusation.

She stares at the clear liquid in her glass and says, "I don't know that it matters anymore."

..

Alpha knows with every fiber of his being that Echo belongs to him.

They're unique, the only two of their kind; he is the only thing in the universe that could ever dream of understanding her and she knows that, so she shouldn't be making googley eyes at someone else. He shouldn't have to watch her fawn over the walking vegetable. He shouldn't have a Paul in his skull who starts caterwauling "Mary had a little lamb" every time Alpha wants to shake some sense into her.

Twelve days drudge by before she approaches him, unprovoked and unsolicited, and invites him to spar.

He hobbles into Adelle's office an hour later with fresh bruises and a twisted grin. She, in true Adelle fashion, does nothing more than raise an eyebrow before turning back to the maps.

He collapses onto the couch, every muscle protesting the movement, but keeps his eyes on her as he says, "Echo thinks we should spring Dom from the Attic."

Her reaction is immediate, fleeting, nearly imperceptible: if he hadn't been watching for it, he wouldn't have seen her muscles tense. British stoicism indeed.

"Does she?" she says.

"She thinks he'd be a good man to have on our epic journey to the promised land."

Adelle's lips twitch, very slightly. "Let's make sure there is a promised land before we set him loose on the Dollhouse, shall we?"

..

"Adelle," he says, leaning against the counter beside her, "stop this madness."

She raises an eyebrow in question and realizes too late that she's pouring pepper into the stew instead of basil. To distract him, she says, "Sometimes I think I may be the sanest one here."

"A sure sign of madness," he notes, and grabs her wrist when she reaches for the salt. "More chicken stock. Nothing else will salvage this—this—" Alpha releases her to gesture helplessly at the large pot.

"Stew?"

"Mop water."

She plants a hand on her hip and challenges, "Would you rather cook?"

"If it'll spare us from another of your homemade meals," he says as he takes the wooden spoon from her hand, "then yes, all forty-nine of me would rather cook."

..

After thirty-odd days of studying maps and making calculations, hunting for places that might still be unaffected by the tech (and privately doubting that such places exist), Alpha circles the mountains in red pen and announces, "Found it."

..

Adelle sits.

Numbness creeps through her like a chill, and she's glad for it. She hasn't any idea what to think or feel, what to do; too many years have passed since that man meant anything to her for it to matter now. But the scar on her side stings like a fresh wound, so she sits.

There's a knock at her office door. She shouts back, "Not now!"

"That was just a formality," Alpha tells her as he cracks open the door. He slips into the room, turning the lock behind him.

Adelle slumps gracelessly in her seat. Aside from Dominic, she thinks Alpha may be the last person she wants to see at the moment—and he's barely even a person. Flatly, she says, "If you're here to say that now I can have scowling suit-wearing babies – don't."

"I didn't think of that," he says, and clearly wishes he had. He sinks down to the couch beside her, his knee deliberately bumping hers. "I'm just here to see who won the bet."

"Bet?" she repeats tersely.

"Yeah. So make me a happy man: tell me you shot him and stashed his corpse in the closet."

"And what exactly do you stand to gain from that?"

His mouth curves into an entirely unnerving smile.

She says, "I regret to inform you that he walked out of here alive."

"Was there wild monkey sex first?"

"Pardon?"

"Did you bow-chicka-wow-wow? Take a ride on his disco stick? Get down and—"

"I most certainly did not."

"Was there battering, beating, gunfire?"

She rubs her neck without meaning to, soothing the sore skin. There are small nicks on her arms and glass shards scattered across the carpet, a bullet lodged in the painting behind her minibar. She says, "No."

"So there was," he notes. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Positively peachy, in fact."

Alpha snorts and leans back beside her, his shoulder brushing hers. In the silence, the rampant chaos on the streets below them sounds louder than ever.

Finally, she demands, "What are you waiting for – what do you expect me to say?"

"Nothing."

"Really?" she says icily. "It was my understanding that you attempt to predict everything."

"Almost everything," he corrects. "But not you, not anymore. See, it turns out that you, Miss DeWitt, are a spectator sport only, and none too friendly to gamblers."

"Then why is there a bet?"

He props his booted feet on her coffee table. "Because Paul said he'd shut up for a week—" his voice deepens, "An hour—" he shakes his head and scowls, but his voice is his own, "if you shot Dom. And it seemed like a handy excuse to make sure the Attic-dweller didn't kill my partner in crime."

For a second, she's annoyed. Then the words start to make sense and her annoyance rapidly gives way to confusion.

"I'm not being sentimental," he clarifies petulantly. "I don't do the wishy-washy human feeling thing. But if you go and get yourself axed to pieces, then I'd have to spend all my waking hours with two Pauls. Two of them. I'd eat myself."

..

The Paul imprint smugly insists that he deserves it. Alpha tunes him out.

What Alpha can't tune out are the footsteps behind him and the uneasy certainty that someone is tracking his every move. He's got more than a few paranoid imprints and they're all freaking out, so he congratulates himself for not prying Dominic's eyes from their sockets and tells himself that he's grown as a person.

He lets Dominic stalk him for a few hours before he seizes the opportunity to make it into a game—because Dominic does not look at, speak to, or in any way acknowledge Adelle, but his hackles rise every time Alpha draws near her.

It's an easy game to play.

..

Adelle is quite certain that Alpha is up to something. What she isn't certain of, and can't discern from his behavior, is whether he's up to the kind of thing that might kill them all or if he's crafting some nefarious scheme to steal the last of Priya's cookies.

She tells him so, and he smirks.

"I'm conducting an experiment," he says, which does absolutely nothing to assuage her concerns. His smirk turns sinister, although the effect is somewhat hampered by the pink blanket swaddled around him. "Playing with my shadow."

It is a sad statement on her life that this is one of the more normal things she's heard today.

She rubs her arms against the chill, ignoring the icy prickling in her fingertips, and glances over her shoulder to where Topher is gesturing emphatically at Claire. Softly, so as not to disturb the others in the Atrium, she says, "I hear Caroline accelerated the plans."

Alpha's gaze catches hers, and he inclines his head. "Four more days, then we leave."

..

At Circle, Adelle sits beside him and warns, "I think Mr. Dominic may be planning to kill you when no one's watching."

"I think he's planning to try," Alpha allows, instead of asking if she even knows Dominic's given name. The man in question is currently patrolling the peripheries of the room, and Alpha doesn't need to look to know that Dominic's hand flitted to his holster the moment Adelle sat down.

Adelle smiles wanly, watching the small fire.

Circle is the same every night: survivors standing one by one over the flame and recounting stories from lives long past, yearning for lost loved ones, gushing about the things they're grateful for in this horrible new world. It's a mawkish ceremony, and Alpha can't even begin to fathom why he's compelled to suffer through it so often.

(Once, weeks ago, he stood up and announced that what he missed most about the old world—what he truly, genuinely missed—was either British television or that being a serial killing psychopath set him apart from the Average Joes. No one but Adelle was even remotely amused.)

They're too far from the fire to benefit from its heat and Adelle huddles into her thin sweater, trying to fight the cold with sheer force of will. She's probably the most outrageously obstinate person he's ever met.

He doesn't think about it, not really; he just holds out his arm, offering her the other end of his blanket, and says, "Come here before you freeze."

He doesn't even realize it's odd until she looks at him like he's grown a second head. But before he can reconsider, she slides closer, purposely leaving an inch of space between them even as she tugs his blanket around her shoulders. She stops shivering, and Dominic's glare turns deadly.

Alpha is definitely winning this game.

..

Adelle tucks a second first aid kit into his pack and notes, "You didn't return here to help save anything."

"No," he grunts as he experimentally lifts the pack off the ground, testing its weight. It hits the floor with a heavy thump and he immediately takes out the spare kit, a blanket, a pan, a canteen, jeans.

"Then why did you?" She should ask why he needs fifteen knives.

"Why'd I come back or why'd I help you find a safe haven?"

"Either."

He pauses, and there's something sheepish in his voice when he answers, "I don't know."

..

Alpha has never said goodbye.

Most of his imprints have and they all remember the word's bitter aftertaste, but they're not him. So he waits impatiently for Paul and Echo to finish up their sappy farewells, and then jumps a little when Adelle briefly wraps her arms around him. It's the first time anyone has hugged him, the Alpha-him, and he kind of flails his arms a bit because this is one of those wishy-washy human feeling things that he's not equipped to handle.

"Be safe," she says a second later, releasing him.

"Uh," he says. "Okay. That was—I planned to?"

"Of course." She smiles, small and sad. "Good luck."

"Yeah. Uh. Thanks."

She apparently opens the floodgates to other goodbyes, but these are easier. He shakes Anthony's hand, accepts some of Priya's freshly baked cookies, definitely hears "I hope you die" when Whiskey walks by, and listens to Topher gibbering about a "sequential cat" until Adelle apologetically retrieves her pet madman.

Alpha catches her eye one final time before following the other three to the exit—and promptly crashes into Dominic.

Dominic curses under his breath, then whips around and stomps over to Adelle—who has her back to them now, who can't possibly stop Dominic if he decides to snap her neck. Alpha is quick to shadow him, unsheathing his jagged knife as Dominic seizes her arm and yanks her around; Alpha is prepared to strike when Adelle's indignant protests are cut off by Dominic's mouth crashing down on hers.

Her hands are raised as if to shove Dominic away and Alpha holds his blade at the ready in case she does, but Dominic's arms snake around her—and something must happen, something Alpha doesn't see, because her hands fall and she leans into the kiss. It's artless, furious, all teeth and tongue; nearly seven years' worth of muted desire and harsh hurt in a single stolen moment.

The imprints designed to make Rhett Butler's iconic kiss look like Peter Pan's naïve buttons all surge to the forefront of his mind, commenting and critiquing Dominic's performance, impishly insisting that federal law enforcement officers have no talent for romance—he can't tell whether he says it all out loud or not, but Alpha's not the only one staring and no one seems to be paying him any attention. Something turns to lead in his gut, accompanied by the firm certainty that this needs to stop. Now.

And then it does—they break apart at once, breathing heavily. Dominic braces his forehead against hers, still clutching her like he thinks she'll flee if he loosens his grip. They don't say anything, no one says anything; an eternity seems to pass before Dominic lets her go and leads the charge out of the Dollhouse.

Alpha is the one who looks back.

III
Hunt the heavens and the plains

It's late in the evening and Alpha is restless, the way he only is at night, when everything is still and quiet. The weeks he spent holed up in the Dollhouse should've prepared him for this, but that was different; he wasn't trekking across the Wasteland in sweltering heat, he didn't have to watch Paul and Echo dance their tiresome dance, and he had Adelle to keep him from going stir crazy.

(Our life is fracking weird, remarks the 'handsome geek' imprint.)

"Why'd you stop killing people again?" Dominic asks snidely. It's the first time he's spoken to Alpha without barking orders, and Alpha is sorely tempted to point out that he hasn't stopped killing people—he just kills a different kind of people now.

"Downloaded 'tall, dark and noble' in a misguided attempt to get a girl," he says instead. "Got my wires crossed. Why'd you shoot her?"

Dominic's eyes narrow and for a second, only a second, Alpha wonders if he miscalculated—if Dominic doesn't think in the linear way Alpha assumes he thinks, if Dominic has no idea which 'her' he's asking about. Then Dominic says in a brittle voice, "To leave a scar."

..

Feelings are fickle, fragile, ugly things.

There are forty-nine personalities in his head and they all interpret feelings differently, so it's easiest to push feelings aside and grasp for tangible things, objective things—like the way sunlight catches in Echo's hair, or the undeniable truth that she and he are the same.

But there's this feeling nagging at him when Caroline assumes control of Echo's body, when sunlight catches in Caroline's hair. She's beautiful and Echo lives behind her eyes, but Caroline is… it's not that he dislikes her. He doesn't think he dislikes her. But she never surprises him or steps out of the 'radical human rights activist' persona; she's not boring by any means, but she's predictable.

Also—and he's pretty sure that this is the Paul imprint screwing with his perception again—it's kind of entertaining to watch Paul trail after her like a lost puppy.

..

If he wants to be generous, he might admit that Dominic has every reason to be as unhinged as he is. Three years in hell will do that to a person.

The hell-induced insanity is an asset in a fight, too—except when it moves Dominic to pull stunts that might have worked in Matrix Land but teeter on suicidal in reality. Dominic forgets occasionally (as in, far too often) that the stupid things he does can't be undone.

But what's most interesting about him is that he looks at their maps and sees the same things Alpha sees: not the mountain ranges that Caroline's drawn to or the cities that Paul hones in on, but Adelle's precise cursive denoting danger zones and landmarks.

They're careful not to talk about her.

..

Sometimes he sees things that Adelle would like or they end up in situations she'd find funny, and it takes him a while to sort through all of the wishy-washy human feeling terms and realize that he might miss her. A little.

Which makes sense, Imprint Paul tells him, because she's a friend.

The friend thing is about as weird as feelings.

"I long for the good old days," he says one night, just to hear it said aloud. "Life was simpler when I was a sociopath."

Dominic, sitting in the dirt beside their measly campfire, snorts and continues cleaning his gun. He handles his weapons with uncommon care, always, like they're dear friends. It's an irksome contrast to the bullet in Adelle's office wall and the indelicate way he'd forced himself on her before they left.

Alpha is technically on sentry duty but this valley is calm, an oasis of serenity amidst the war. He crouches by the fire and adds, "Speaking of sociopaths, you realize you're a little sick, right? I mean, the woman you're hung up on sent you to the Attic."

Dominic tenses visibly, his fluid movements turning wooden. Gruffly, he retorts, "At least she's not in love with someone else."

Maybe he deserves that. Echo and Paul are sleeping on the other side of the fire, still lying several feet apart; come morning, they'll be bashful and surprised to wake up so much closer. It truly is a tiresome dance.

Alpha shrugs, "Yeah, but she trusts me."

He's talking about Echo, his sick problem, but the shadows darkening Dominic's face suggest that he's still a subject behind. Alpha considers clarifying—and then Dominic tries to punch him square in the jaw, packing enough force into the blow that it stings when Alpha catches his fist.

..

He sees it in the grass, beside an abandoned Honda Accord with smashed windows and a blood-streaked dashboard. It's a bulky pewter keychain sculpted like a spaceship from one of the shows he'd watched a few times while trying to sort himself out after the Paul debacle. Named for some kind of bug. Topher would know.

He picks it up and attaches it to his pack.

IV
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing

For the first time in months, Adelle steps into the sunlight.

The light is grey, weak, but it simmers on her sheltered skin as humid winds tangle her hair. She'd almost forgotten what it's like to stand on the surface, to breathe open air, to let her boots sink into the mud underfoot, to hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and not need to be afraid.

A shadow falls across her. She turns to see blonde hair and dirtied jeans, and she doesn't bother to suppress her smile.

"Hey," Alpha greets, eying her critically. She is not as fastidious about her clothing as she once was, but she isn't above pointing out that he looks like something that's crawled from a trash bin; she's about to tell him so when he declares, "You've shrunk."

Oh, she thinks. "Yes, well, the heels were becoming rather impractical."

His lips curve into a familiar smirk. "The heels were always impractical."

"Alpha?" Topher pokes his head out of the van, curiosity overtaking his irrational fear of thunder.

"Dr. Frankenstein," Alpha replies, then dangles something small and silver—a keychain replica of a peculiar spaceship—in front of the open door. It immediately catches Topher's attention, and he abandons the safety of the van to snatch the trinket from Alpha's hand.

"Thank you," Adelle murmurs. She'd tried everything she could think of to lure Topher into the grass.

"Don't mention it," he says, then offers her his arm. "Would you like to see the grounds?"

.

She slips her arm through his without hesitation, as if this is something they've done a hundred times—as if he isn't responsible for the sliver of scar tissue on her throat.

It must be a fundamental law of the universe, he thinks, that Adelle DeWitt cannot make sense.

He escorts her around the perimeter, along the inside of the electrified fence, and boasts about his clever alarm system before reluctantly addressing the rest of their unremarkable safe haven. They'd built the main cabin shortly after arriving and furnished it with a long table and a jumble of tiny rooms, but most of the stragglers they've picked up live in makeshift tents outside. Nothing here is as pristine as the Dollhouse or as impeccably decorated as her oceanside home, but she is entirely unbothered, far more pleased to be standing in natural light than he'd expected her to be. She tells him to stop fretting.

"I'm just saying," he says as they walk to the main cabin, racing the storm clouds massing on the horizon, "they don't make quality real estate like they used to."

She smiles faintly, "I suppose the Thoughtpocalypse put something of a damper on the market."

"Excuses, excuses," he mutters, and opens the door.

The others are gathered around the table, laughing and recounting tales from their journeys. Alpha is a little surprised that Dominic is leaning against the far wall rather than lurking by the door, and a little more surprised when Dominic does nothing more than catch Adelle's eye from across the room. She inclines her head in silent acknowledgement before looking away, and reclaims her arm from Alpha with a quiet apology.

She leaves them both behind for Topher.

.

There are things, little things, that became more important after the apocalypse—as though the world suddenly tilted into focus after forty years of viewing it from an angle. Too much of her life seems wasted and despicably shallow, marked by superficial pursuits that mean nothing now; there is no such thing as power or success here, only trust and the broken family she built from the ruins of her life.

The room shakes with every roll of thunder, and Topher curls tightly against her side to escape the sound. Rain hits the cabin in sheets, striking the shutters like a stranger demanding entry. She has never been maternal, nurturing or kind, but she whispers soothing words as she runs her fingers through Topher's hair, and it seems to be enough to ease his trembling.

Echo crouches in front of them and asks, "Can I help?"

"I don't know that I'm helping," Adelle says softly.

For a moment, Echo looks at her with that frustrating combination of spite and wide-eyed pity—but the moment is thankfully interrupted by Alpha's timely appearance.

"There you are," he says to Adelle, striding past Echo without pause. He leans down and, somehow getting ahold of Topher's arms, hauls Topher to his feet. "Come on, I've got something for you and Dr. Frankenstein."

"Do stop calling him that," she chides, but climbs to her feet and follows warily as Alpha steers Topher into the narrow hallway.

He walks past the room set aside for them and stops two doors down, outside a cramped room illuminated by a lantern. The flame casts an orange glow on the mattress and the rectangle in the ground—a rectangle with roughly the same dimensions as a pod, protected against the earth on all sides by wooden planks. There's a mound of tattered blankets at the bottom.

Topher scrambles into the false pod to escape the next clap of thunder, muttering that it's an imposter even as he cloaks himself in the blankets. Adelle has known Alpha to play with the line between cruelty and compassion, but this is… she doesn't know what this is.

"I couldn't sleep one night," he says, as if mild insomnia is an acceptable reason to dig a hole in one's bedroom.

Adelle eyes him owlishly, "You've been very… altruistic since we arrived. Should I be concerned?"

He lets out a snort of laughter, staring down into the hole. In the flickering light, he looks more like a predator lying in wait then a predator-turned-vegetarian. He says, "If you like."

.

Alpha has a CIA agent and a James Bond knockoff in his head who both think 'spying' is a dirty word, so he isn't spying: he just happens to be strategically positioned to prevent Adelle and Dominic from killing one another, and they just don't happen to know.

Exactly three minutes have ticked by in silence since everyone else filtered out of the room, leaving them alone to glare. Alpha supposes they're each trying to outlast the other, that their staring contest is more a battle of wills than a lack of anything to say—which is ridiculous. They're ridiculous.

"Mr. Dominic," Adelle says finally.

Dominic cackles, the sound callous against the soft hum of crickets outside, and Alpha doesn't need to be in the room to know that Dominic has that unhinged glint in his eye again. It's kind of unfortunate; Dominic was getting so much better at staying hinged.

"Really?" Dominic says harshly. "Really, Adelle, that's where you start?"

"Where else should I start?" she asks, dangerously calm. "Shall I hold a gun to your head and rave like a lunatic, or would you rather I avoid you until one of us leaves?"

"Adelle—"

"Mr. Dominic."

Dominic makes an aggravated noise, grumbling something about how infuriating she is, and his feet hit the floor in heavy thuds as he crosses the room. Alpha lunges for the doorknob; he's a second away from bursting in to save her from Dominic's wrath when he hears the unmistakable sound of skin striking skin—the pitch is too high for Dominic to have thrown the blow. Adelle must have slapped him.

"I know it is more difficult for you than most," she says in a voice like a whip, "but do try to use words."

She turns on her heel—it sounds different now that she wears those heavy boots—and Alpha steps back as her footsteps draw near. Then something slams against the door with tremendous force. He hears her stumble.

Dominic's voice, low and savage and close: "You want words, Adelle? How are these for words: I hate you."

"Those are indeed words."

Dominic growls—actually growls, like a wild dog—and kisses her, roughly, it sounds rough. There's a rustle of clothing, shifting weight on the floorboards, a sharp intake of breath. The wooden door shakes; it sounds like Dominic shoved her into it.

"I'm not finished," Dominic snarls.

"You gave up on words. You were finished."

Another growly noise. "Fine. Words. I hate you. I hate you for the Attic, for what you did to me—for sending me back when I fucking died to save you."

"You would have died again."

"I wanted to die! Don't you get it? Don't you have any idea what the Attic is, what it does to your head? Anything would have been better, anything. You sent me to hell twice and it never… I couldn't stop it. I tried to stop it, even after everything, I tried and I couldn't and you always…"

"To be fair, you were well acquainted with my policy on emissaries."

"You're not listening. Listen to me. I hate you because you were my hell. I didn't know I cared that much or at all until you put me in the Attic and it was the same thing, a thousand times, the same thing. Always you. All of the things we've done to each other, and losing you was still the worst thing the Attic could throw at me." He lets out a bark of bitter laughter. "God. You and me, Adelle, we're living the sickest love story anyone's ever told."

"Love story?" she repeats flatly, in a voice suggestive of a raised eyebrow.

"Don't do that. Don't play dumb. It doesn't suit you."

"I'm merely wondering how this tirade progressed from declarations of hatred to a love story."

"I should hate you. I want to."

There's a space of silence in which Alpha privately likens their conversation to a soap opera. Then Adelle says, "You appear to be confused—verging on utterly mad, in fact—so I will make this very simple: there was a time once, many years ago, when I trusted you more than I have ever trusted anyone. You betrayed me. No matter what you believe, no matter how small our apocalyptic world becomes, that will always remain."

Alpha melts into the shadows as the knob turns.

"You kissed me back," Dominic points out. "At the Dollhouse."

"Curiosity, Mr. Dominic," she says as she opens the door. "Nothing more."

She walks by Alpha without noticing his presence, and doesn't respond when Dominic calls her a liar.

..

The night is warm and alive with music—or rather, with garbled renditions of songs from another time, performed on battered instruments and kitchen pots. Adelle would prefer if Romeo sang something other than Rayna, but she aches with nostalgia nonetheless.

Alpha sidles up beside her and says, "May I have this dance?"

There is something devious in his eyes.

"Go," Topher says, poking her with a frosting-coated finger. There are crumbs of dry wedding cake on his shirt. "Be merry. I promise not to take candy from strangers while you're gone."

Reluctantly, with no small sense of trepidation, she accepts Alpha's outstretched hand. He leads her into the throng of survivors, telling her frankly that she needs to have more fun. He doesn't give her an opportunity to protest before he sweeps her into a jarring mockery of a waltz—an animated dance he seems to have created for the sole purpose of swinging and twirling her around until the ground tilts beneath her feet.

She laughs as she stumbles against him, dizzy and drunk on the energy of the crowd. He rights her with steady hands and an indulgent smile.

Romeo makes a spectacular mess of Rayna's "Superstar" before he drops into a chair, hefting a poorly tuned guitar into his lap as Bravo moves to the center of the porch. Bravo was trained as a classical vocalist before he came to the Dollhouse, and it shows in his voice when he begins to sing something more intimate, a song meant for weddings and late evenings under the stars.

Alpha transitions seamlessly from mad waltz to slow dance, one of his hands settling on the small of her back while the fingers of his other hand twine through hers. She rests her palm on his shoulder and tries to remember if any of his imprints were dancers.

"Yes," he says, and grins darkly when she startles. "The first schizophrenic they stuck in my head was supposed to be a dance instructor."

It happened before her time, but she's familiar with the story: a corrupted imprint which spontaneously developed schizophrenia, catatonic type. That was how Rossum discovered the codes to influence neurotransmitter production.

She says, "I didn't ask."

"You didn't have to." He draws her closer, not quite cheek-to-cheek, and adds, "You have a Look."

She arches an eyebrow. "A look?"

"Like a scientist whose lab monkey starts talking."

"You're hardly a lab monkey."

"I am an experiment to you."

She puts enough space between them to look him in the eye, to scan his face for some indication that he's teasing or genuinely believes that he is nothing more to her than a broken doll. Before she can conjure up the correct response, some delicate way to verbally slap him upside the head, he tenses—his grip tightening on her, his shoulder going rigid beneath her hand. For a split second, she thinks the camp has been invaded by Butchers.

When she sees the reason, she almost wishes it had.

.

"May I?" Dominic asks, in a voice that clearly means 'I dare you to try and stop me.'

Alpha knows for a fact that Dominic hasn't spoken to Adelle since their soap opera-esque conversation a few weeks ago, because Dominic stormed out of the camp afterwards and hasn't been back long enough to get her alone. But Alpha can't read her face as well as he can read the line of Dominic's shoulders, and he'll get an earful if he ruins Priya's wedding by picking a fight. He lets go.

Dominic instantly assumes his place, snatching up one of her hands in his and wrapping an arm around her like a restraint.

Alpha can't linger without being painfully obvious, so he slips into the crowd and steals Echo off Paul without asking. By the time he dances her—surreptitiously, very stealth-like—back into earshot of the conversation, Dominic's delivering a monologue about how he never betrayed Adelle.

"What—?" Echo starts. Alpha hushes her and moves them closer.

Dominic prattles on about how he'd tried to protect the Dollhouse, how he'd wanted to protect Adelle, how he hadn't told her a bold-faced lie in years, how he'd thought a couple times that she only exists to drive him crazy, how the Attic proved him right. He calls her 'beautiful' and 'a crazy bitch' in the same breath. As far as romantic proclamations go, this one could've used some work.

Adelle, mistress of selective hearing, skips over all of it. "You would have killed Topher."

"Do you think the world would've ended if I had?"

Echo is eavesdropping as openly as Alpha is, but she whispers, "I can't believe you're spying on them."

"I don't like that word," he mutters back. "This is reconnaissance."

.

The sun is beginning to rise over trampled grass and leftover decorations when Alpha sits on the porch beside her and forces a warm mug into her hands. It smells like tea.

"Thank you," she says quietly.

"That was a pretty speech he gave."

"I should think you'd be pleased," she observes wryly. "You've always been inordinately fascinated by my relationship with him."

"Only because we—I hadn't figured out yet that you're denser than he is, and the combined density prevented either of you from seeing what everyone else saw." He bumps his knee against hers, as he often does when he means to be companionable and helpful but has no idea how to go about it. "But that was a lifetime ago, Adelle. Both of you are different now."

She sips from the tea—it's bland but hot, a pleasant contrast to the morning chill—and wonders how it is that the most insightful person in her life is a psychopath.

She says, "I know."

V
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling

Most of his fundamental truths involved Echo, so sometimes it seems the only fundamental truth that still holds true in their backwards universe is the one about Adelle. Namely that she doesn't make sense. At all. Ever.

He gets bored of twiddling his thumbs, waiting for Paul's busted rib to recover, so he strays out of camp one afternoon and returns a few days later with a pack full of games, stuff to do when they're not doing chores or sharing their feelings over a bonfire. The murderous look Adelle gives him when he lays out his loot on the kitchen table actually (although he will never tell her so) borders on terrifying.

"What did Dom do?" he asks.

"Nothing." Her voice is tense, like piano wires pulled too tight.

"Okay. Uh—" The overly empathetic artist takes over, "What did we do?"

He snarls to himself and pushes the imprint back. That guy bothers him more than the fashion model.

"You left," she says.

"We do that. A lot, actually. What's the—"

"The trouble? You left alone. Without backup or telling anyone where you were off to."

He still has no idea what she's angry about, so he tries, "I found entertainment."

"You could have been ambushed. Killed."

"I looked both ways before I crossed the street. It wasn't my first trip into the big city."

Her glower darkens, her lips pressing into a thin line. He's not making this better.

"Sit down, would you?" he says after a moment, taking the last pieces of the oak chess set from his pack. It'd taken him two days to find a decent board, and he'd refused to return to Safe Haven without one. "I've been wondering for months if your incomprehensible you-ness comes out in chess too."

It does.

..

"Adelle, you're of the womanly persuasion."

She packs more dirt onto the fresh strawberry seeds. "Your powers of perception are staggering."

"It's the James Bond and CIA in me," he says sagely. "The gardener in me says you're trying to suffocate that defenseless plant."

"I don't remember putting a gardener in you," she mutters.

"It kind'a came with the Middle Earth elf package."

He crouches beside her and digs up the seeds only to bury them again. She sees no difference between what he's doing and what she did, but lets him take over without much complaint; this is a dreadfully dull task anyway.

"So, as my – friend," he looks to her for confirmation and she, surprised, inclines her head, "of the womanly persuasion—"

"If you intend to ask for sexual favors, know that I will not hesitate to poison your food."

He snorts. "You sure, Adelle? You're not the tiniest bit curious to find out what the love gods in my head can do, or how many I've got knocking around up here?"

"Quite sure."

"Thirty-four, and three with great potential."

"Alpha," she warns.

"You started it."

She supposes she might have. "What did you want, then?"

"Advice. Womanly advice. On a womanly problem."

There's a mortifying moment in which she thinks of all the womanly problems she would rather not discuss with any man, let alone forty-nine of them (fifty? She has yet to puzzle out whether Alpha counts as a distinct entity). She's rather impressed when her voice is level, "And what is the nature of this problem? Aside from womanly, of course."

"Volatile. Confusing. Echo-shaped. There are too many – feelings," he says the word like a curse. "And here's the kicker: I don't know why I want advice. I don't know which of me decided you'd be the person to go to but all of me thinks it makes sense, so I'm here. I just get tired of talking to myselves, ya know?"

She frowns.

"No," he says softly, reaching for the basket of seeds. "I guess you wouldn't."

..

He stumbles across it in Phoenix—literally stumbles when his foot catches on a stack of books. He glowers at the stack as he regains his footing and for some reason, despite the gun-toting Butchers weaving through the aisles around him, stops to think that the leather-bound volume on top looks like something Adelle would read.

He picks it up. It nearly gets him killed.

He takes a bullet in the first round of gunfire, and it's a stroke of dumb luck that the Butcher hauling around a freaking AK-47 doesn't blow him to bits. He dives behind the Butcher's buddies, using them as shields, and then lets them take themselves out: Butchers are smarter than they ought to be, they learn and adapt and move in packs, but they'll strike anything that dares to strike them first.

The wound still burns in his shoulder a week later when he staggers back into Safe Haven with Echo and Paul, so he subsides in a chair and lets Adelle deal with it.

"You should've been a doctor," he tells her seriously, once she's finished scolding him for not keeping it clean. Her glare softens, but that's the last he sees before he closes his eyes against the sting of alcohol on torn flesh.

"I thought about it once," she says idly.

"What changed?"

"Overseeing medical technology struck me as a far better way to save the world."

The dark irony in her voice is worse than any remark he might make about the Thoughtpocalypse or the human monsters her medical technology created.

He lurches a bit in his seat when he suddenly recalls how he got shot in the first place, and turns away from her to dig the book out of his pack. It has sustained some wear since he found it, the leather binding scuffing against the items he actually needs to survive, but the words are the same and it still feels like history in his hands. He thinks it's a first edition.

"Here," he says, setting it on the table and nudging it toward her. "Happy – whatever commercial holiday's closest. Happy that."

..

The wretched garden finally begins to yield some produce: shriveled tomatoes and small strawberries, nothing quite as luscious as the crops Tango cultivates. But Adelle tucks some of the strawberries into a small wooden box and stops Alpha before he leaves.

"What's this?" he asks when she presents it to him.

"A gift. For the book."

He stands there at the gate, silent and inscrutable and very still. Just as she begins to wonder if he's been overtaken by the catatonic schizophrenia, he bends forward and briefly presses his lips to her forehead.

He says, "You don't owe me anything."

She smiles in reply and lets him think that, even though she fully intends to refill the box with fresh fruit and vegetables every time he leaves. She knows very well what she owes him and everyone else, so she does small things for all of them and knows it will never make up for what she's done to the world.

..

Because he decided to dig a hole in his bedroom floor, he ended up with a nutcase for a roommate. It doesn't bother him too much, though; it means that when he returns to Safe Haven, he finds long strands of mahogany hair on his pillow and blanket. Which is kind of… something.

(Family is just what you make it, Imprint Paul whispers. Doesn't have to have anything to do with DNA.)

He's a little less okay with it when he arrives at Safe Haven one morning and, tired and sore, cracks open his bedroom door only to find Dominic on his mattress, one arm curled possessively around Adelle. She's bundled in Alpha's pink blanket and pressed close against Dominic's side, her head on his shoulder and hand fisted in his shirt. She and Topher sleep like the dead, but Dominic's eyes open when the door hinges squeak.

He glares at Alpha. Alpha closes the door.

..

Adelle hates the weeks in between. The weeks she spends worrying and wondering, with no way to know whether they'll come back alive or dead or not at all.

She tries to explain this to Alpha as his knight drives her king to the corner of the chessboard. He completely misunderstands, saying awkwardly, "He'll come back."

"I mean you," she snaps. For good measure, she adds, "Psychopath."

"Lapsed," he says, and looks inappropriately gratified by her frustration.

"So you claim."

"I missed you too, Adelle."

..

Collecting books is a dangerous hobby. Alpha does it anyway.

The books don't put up much of a fight, but Alpha is a discerning collector: he takes his time perusing the shelves of abandoned buildings, scouting for the oldest books, and rarely seems to find anything worthwhile before Butchers start shooting at him. It's a little irritating; some of the grazes he's gotten will scar.

But Adelle is steadily building a library, and he likes to listen when she reads.

..

Adelle isn't certain when she became the camp nurse, but she prefers stitching wounds to stitching clothes and it seems that everyone would rather she make herbal remedies than meals.

On the rare occasion that Echo sustains a gaping wound, something she can't take care of herself, she grits her teeth and watches Adelle's hands with a trained eye. Laurence mostly does the same but becomes much less complacent the moment Adelle mentions needles or painkillers, and Paul is just endearingly pathetic enough that Echo almost always takes charge of his care.

Alpha sits there with his eyes closed, unmoving and silent. Sometimes, one of his imprints starts to whine about the injury or the neurosurgeon complains about her technique, but the imprint is gone again with a shake of his head.

"I wish you'd stop letting them cut you," she says one evening as she stitches a gash on his thigh.

"I don't let them cut me." He frowns. "Well, okay, I let the one cut me. But the rest, those were lucky shots."

She narrows her eyes, "You let one cut you?"

"You just implied I let them all cut me – I think you should be happy it was only the one."

..

There's something—he isn't sure what—that irks him about this. Irks him in a very physical way, like wires in his muscles and lead weights in his gut.

But he has a rule about not shoving feelings through the kaleidoscope in his head, so he doesn't investigate it. Tangible things only. Like the wires in his muscles and weights in his gut.

The sensations aren't unfamiliar; he recognizes them from the summer he spent staking out Echo and Paul's hideout, except he doesn't remember it being quite so intense then. Doesn't remember ever being so bothered by the sight that he was paralyzed. Which suggests that this irks him more than that did, which is strange since Echo is supposed to be his soulmate and all. Love supreme, etcetera, whatever.

He doesn't, but if he were to investigate the source of the bother then he might trace it to the shadows in Dominic's face. That almost four years after he was freed from the Attic, he still looks at her like he can't decide if he loves or hates her. Alpha has seen Dominic kill enough Butchers to know that the man doesn't flinch from bloodshed and has a disturbing tendency toward insanity (says the serial killer), so someone should be irked that she lets him into her bed when he probably still fantasizes about slitting her throat.

Or maybe it's the rust in her smiles, the exhaustion in her eyes. The way she gives Alpha fresh fruit and tends to his wounds, the way she takes care of Topher and looks after T, all the while thinking she has them fooled—as if he can't see Atlas wince under the weight of the world. He wonders sometimes if she lets Dominic have her to repay the debt she thinks she owes them. And if that's the case, then someone should be irked that she's settling for so much less than she deserves.

So really, irked or not, Alpha is being perfectly rational about this whole disaster.

..

T's first birthday is extravagant by their standards.

Adelle drinks the scotch Alpha brought back from his latest excursion and does her best to explain what he's missed: Romeo and Kilo returning with 'upgrades' and pretty lines about fighting the good fight, Priya telling Anthony to choose between his family and the tech. Echo and Adelle went all out on this celebration but still couldn't mask the father's absence.

"Let's liven it up then, shall we?" he says.

He forces her to dance—more of his exuberant twirling and prancing about—until she's too lightheaded to stand and all but collapses against his chest. Perhaps her alcohol tolerance is not quite what it once was.

He adjusts smoothly, his hands sliding to her waist. Nearby, Bravo croons something that sounds suspiciously like the Spice Girls.

"Where's Dom?" Alpha asks.

"I don't know," she replies tiredly. Her head fits comfortably in the crook of his neck. "I never know."

That's always been part of their problem, part of why they fight more often than they talk. She thinks, hazily, that it's good he isn't here right now; he gets unbearably protective when Alpha's around.

Alpha moves again, his arms encircling her in something more reminiscent of an embrace than a dance. He is solid against her, his grip strong and safe—and she can't help but let out a breath of laughter at the sheer absurdity of feeling safe in Alpha's arms.

"How was the scotch?" he asks in response to the laughter, a touch of smugness in his voice.

"Quite excellent."

They sway to the music and Adelle closes her eyes, focusing on the rhythm of his heartbeat beneath her ear, the gentle movements of his feet on the earth, the warmth of his arms. He is so very different from the man (men?) who strolled into her office six years ago in a paisley tie, claiming to have gone a little Brummell. But she supposes she has changed since then as well; everyone has.

He doesn't react when Echo and Priya walk by, and Adelle swallows the urge to ask when and why he stopped watching Echo with naked desire. She has enough self-control even now to stop herself from asking what might have happened if he hadn't let Echo go, or if he hadn't downloaded Paul; she has learned not to question the good things.

This is a good thing.

..

Alpha finds them in his room.

Topher is curled up in his hole, his head resting on Adelle's lap as she idly strings her fingers through his hair and reads poems from one of the leather-bound books Alpha almost died getting for her. She glances up briefly when he opens the door, but doesn't break meter.

His pink blanket is around her shoulders.

He slides down the wall to sit at the edge of the false pod and closes his eyes, letting the words wash over him. She reads poems like lullabies, in a voice as calming as the sound of waves lapping against the ocean shore. It's probably a skill taught to all British children as they learn how to drink tea and play cricket and not how to pronounce 'r.'

When the nonsense children's rhymes give way to something darker, to a poem he has memorized even though he can't quite recall having ever read or heard it before, he knows that Topher has drifted off to sleep. She is reading for Alpha now, or for herself—or for the Bennett ghost that everyone skirts around and no one talks about.

He interrupts as she nears the end, finishing the poem for her: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper."

She closes the book with a mirthless smile. "If Mr. Eliot only knew."

He inclines his head in silent agreement and climbs to his feet, watching as she—gently, always gently—untangles herself from Topher's grip. Alpha extends his hand to help her out of the false pod; she doesn't need it, but she'd thrown the 'not very chivalrous of you' remark back at him the last time he visited and he feels like being insolent.

She flashes him a knowing look, but she accepts his hand.

..

"What aren't you telling me?" Alpha asks, looking pointedly at the empty bottle between them. His own glass is untouched; she eyes the wine in it covetously.

She says, stiffly, "I'd rather not tell you, if that's alright."

"Fair enough."

His knight takes her queen, leaving her with a smattering of pawns and a poorly defended king. It was probably unwise to agree to a game when she was so intent on crawling into a bottle; he's only toying with her now.

He frowns, but doesn't take out the pawn she is inching across the chessboard. "Have you heard from Dom recently?"

Yes. Just this morning, in fact. She narrows her eyes and says coldly, "If you must make small talk, then talk about the weather. It's been quite dreary as of late."

She doesn't like the way he looks at her, like he can see right through her, so she focuses on the chessboard. It's somewhat blurrier and shinier than it typically is, but she isn't seeing double and is reasonably certain that she's not slurring her words; apparently one bottle isn't enough to wipe this day out of existence. She'd rather hoped it would be.

Four moves more and her king is forfeit.

"Goodnight," she says after collecting her pieces together, then stands with every intention of going to bed—but she must stand too quickly because the earth moves quite suddenly and she loses her footing, would fall into the table if not for Alpha's lightning-fast reflexes. He catches her with an arm around her waist, and does it quickly enough to prevent anyone else in the kitchen from seeing that she can no longer hold her alcohol. Stubbornly righting herself, not looking him in the eye, she says, "Thank you."

"Yeah."

"You can let go now."

"I could," he agrees, "but I won't. Let's get you to bed."

"That won't be necessary. This was nothing but gravity, cerebellar blood flow—I stood too quickly and lost my equilibrium. One of you is a neurosurgeon, you should understand."

"You make the funniest faces when you're drunk," he says, guiding her into the hallway.

"That's not—I am not drunk. At worst, I'm moderately intoxicated."

"Okay. You make the funniest faces when you're moderately intoxicated."

She scowls, and he chortles as he opens the door to her room. His room. The shutters are open to the night air, and Topher's pod is empty; he must have fallen asleep while explaining the finer points of particle physics to two year-old T. Again.

She slumps to the mattress with less grace than she'd meant to. "I've gotten here. Now shoo."

"Adelle," he says softly, the moonlight casting pale shadows on his face. "What's wrong?"

"Moderate intoxication, apparently."

"No." He closes the door and kicks the doorstop under it to keep out unwanted intruders, then kneels on the mattress in front of her. "Before that. The reason for that."

Randomly, she remembers a night many years ago: looking at the shadows on his face and thinking he bore a strange likeness to a predator. She doesn't see the resemblance now, and she has always been more inclined to note such details when there's alcohol in her. Details like the darkness in his eyes and the curve of his lips, the feline quality to his movements, the heat of him so close to her.

Unthinkingly, she reaches out to trace the moonlight on his face, but hurriedly drops her hand when he tenses.

"Sorry," she murmurs, looking away.

For a minute that stretches into an eternity, he's silent—and then she feels calloused fingertips graze across her cheek, moving to tuck stray hair behind her ear. His hand lingers there, curled against her jaw. She looks curiously up at him; there's something strange in his eyes, an intensity that makes her stomach flutter.

He watches his own movements as his thumb brushes across her lips, and her breath catches in her throat; she must be broken or frozen because she isn't telling him to stop, isn't thinking of anything but her skin tingling under his touch. She doesn't push him away when he leans forward, pressing his lips to the tender skin below her ear, or when he trails hot kisses down the side of her neck.

Finally, reluctantly, she stops him, her hand on the back of his neck drawing him away from hers. She should end this now but she kisses him, carefully, uncertain and clumsy from too much wine—and his response is so very sure. He leans in and it's deep, tantalizingly slow; he tastes impossibly like rain. His skin is hot under hers and on hers as she cups his neck and his hands move up her arms, leaving trails of gooseflesh behind.

A soft moan rises unbidden in her throat and he smirks against her lips, then surges forward—her back hits the mattress and he's flush on top of her, kissing her harder, desperately; his hips between her legs, a warm hand sliding beneath her shirt. She tries to keep up despite the wine impeding her movements, dimly aware that she can't possibly match the thirty-four 'love gods' Alpha claims to have in his head, but more aware of the threat in the way he's holding her—the dark (perversely exhilarating) promise that if she doesn't stop him now, she won't be able to stop him at all.

She doesn't want to stop. She has to.

She pushes him back with a palm on his shoulder and looks him in the eye, "Don't do this. Don't trudge up some imprint to cheer me—"

"I'm not an imprint," he interrupts breathlessly. He leans down, his teeth scraping her earlobe, his breath hot on her ear as he whispers, "This is me. I want this."

"I'm not Echo," she forces herself to say.

He makes an aggravated noise, then covers her mouth with his when she tries to protest again.

"Adelle," he breathes, "shut up."

She hesitates when his lips catch hers, but it's easy—much too easy—to melt into this. She runs her fingers through his hair and he makes a sound that's either a growl or a moan before breaking away to kiss the faded scar on her neck, the hollow of her throat, moving slowly down her chest, nimble fingers unbuttoning her shirt as he goes. Her body reacts like it hasn't been touched in years; she shudders as he teases the skin above her jeans—and then loud sirens blare into the night outside.

Safe Haven is under attack.

.

Alpha races to the gate only to find Echo already there, standing over two Butchers.

"That's it?" he asks, aggravated and out of breath.

She says something but he can't hear her over Imprint Paul—who won't shut up, won't quiet down and let Alpha have this. Won't stop insisting that they can't go back because Adelle is drunk and upset, and they (there is no they, damn it, not this time) don't take advantage of inebriated women.

.

Adelle wakes up alone, with the worst hangover she's had since the day (was it eight years ago now? Nine? A lifetime?) she sentenced Echo and friends to the Attic. The night before feels like a dream.

..

Tangible things only.

The sensation of her pressed against him, beneath him, tucked neatly in his arms as they dance. A broken moan deep in her throat. Moonlight in her hair, her hands on him, the taste of her skin. He's been with dozens of women and men, but those feelings were programs. This is painfully real.

I'm not an imprint. This is me. I want this.

There are forty-nine imprints in his head who think it's hilarious he didn't know he wanted that—wanted her—until she touched him. Even Paul's teasing him. He's never been so sick of the mental peanut gallery.

He deals with the feelings by hunting down hapless Butchers and imagining Dominic's face on all of them. It works, gradually, but it's a slow process; a few months pass before he dares to return to Safe Haven.

He finds her in the kitchen.

"Do you want to…," he swallows, "talk about it?"

That's what girls do, isn't it? They talk. Echo and Priya talk about Paul and Victor all the time.

"No," she says coldly. "I want to play chess."

He obliges, and doesn't mention that this is their five hundredth game or that they'll be tied again if he wins this round—mostly because she's channeling rage into the match like he channeled frustration into his fights.

"Four months without a word," she says severely as she clears a swath across the board with her queen. She has abandoned all strategy at this point and is simply taking out every piece she can get to.

"You're not mad about…?"

She narrows her eyes and moves her pawn. "Checkmate."

He tips his king.

.

Adelle is patching up one of T's shirts when Echo appears in the doorway and announces, "Alpha left."

"How unusual," Adelle says dryly. She pulls a stitch through the fabric too vigorously and winces when the needle stabs her finger. It's impractical, she thinks, that little wounds always seem to hurt more.

"He went to find Dom."

"Why on earth would he do that?"

"He wanted to know why you're so unhappy," Echo replies, watching her carefully, obviously searching for something. "I thought it was because no one's heard from Dom in four months but… that's not it, is it?"

..

Dominic gravitates to Fort Meade like the rest of them gravitate to Los Angeles. It takes Alpha less than three weeks to track him down, and Alpha greets him by shoving aside the dead-eyed little girl creeping up on Dominic with a steak knife.

"What do you want?" Dominic demands, thrusting his elbow into another Butcher's gut.

Alpha does not say, 'Your girlfriend.' He swiftly cuts down one, two, three, four Butchers and answers between strikes: "You've been – M. I. A. for – a while – I'm just – making sure – you're alive."

Dominic snorts, and offs the last Butcher with a bullet. He has a few more scars than Alpha remembers, and a fresh gash on his cheek.

He says, "Of course I'm alive."

..

She sees it in his eyes, and her heart stops inside her chest.

He staggers toward her instead of crumbling in the doorway. Never mind the visibly fractured bone in his right leg, the dark stains on his clothes, the shadows in his eyes—he reaches out to touch her face with a shaking hand.

"I'm sorry," Alpha says, his voice raw and terrible, like funeral bells in a thunderstorm.

Something stings behind her eyes, something she hasn't felt in years, and she blinks up at the ceiling to keep the tears in. It hurts more than she thinks it should, and she wonders if this is Alpha's idea of a joke—if he's been waiting patiently all this time to take his sick revenge for the Dollhouse.

He sinks into a wooden chair, grunting painfully with every movement, and she shouldn't have even thought it. He has a twisted sense of humor, finds comedy in the worst things, but he wouldn't do this to her. It must have taken everything he had to crawl back here.

"Are you okay?" she asks pointlessly.

"No," he grimaces. "Everything hurts."

She swallows, but can't prevent the next question from spilling forth: "Did it… was it quick?"

He makes a horrible sound and his fingers brush against her palm. She wonders whose blood is crusted on his hands.

"Adelle," he says, at once gentle and rough, "don't."

..

Echo is eager to return to Safe Haven—to the dreary place where Priya still grieves like a widow and Adelle obstinately presses on. Alpha has put as much distance between himself and that godforsaken place as he can, and he's more certain with every mile that he can never go back.

He slips into the bedlam once known as Reno and does what he always does when he doesn't want to deal with reality: he returns to the Dollhouse.

VI
The whole earth is our hospital

The traitorous Techheads hold their guns to Topher's head, raving like demented junkies craving a better fix, and all Adelle can think is that he came back from Neuropolis so much worse. He doesn't deserve this. She can't lose him again.

"I can take 'em," Echo whispers.

"You'll get him killed."

Anthony enters the Programming Center, either drawn there by some GPS microchip or whatever can be seen through the large windows, and tries to say that the war's over. His perfectly sensible argument is met with urgent insistence that they can keep the fight going, they can rule the Wasteland, and Kilo asks, "Why wouldn't you want that?"

"Because we're not Freakshows," Alpha answers, strolling into the room. Adelle wonders viciously how long he was waiting for such an opening.

And then Kilo shifts, preparing to shoot Alpha in the chest. He—the suicidal psychopath—continues advancing into the fray, spreading his arms to make himself an easier target.

"Well, okay, maybe I am. And Echo. Topher's a little off. But Adelle," he motions at her and it's the closest thing she's gotten to a greeting since they arrived, "she's a class act all the way."

Adelle does not quite roll her eyes.

"It's just that I have worked so hard to have a peaceful life here," he continues. His voice goes dark: "It's harder for me than most."

Anthony makes one last attempt to reason with the unreasonable, delivering an impassioned speech about rebuilding the world without tech and even throwing his drives to the ground for effect. Romeo is so moved by the performance that he moves the barrel of his gun to Anthony's head.

"Sorry, boss. That means you stand with the Luddites."

Alpha's sarcastic laughter freezes Romeo's finger on the trigger. Alpha points at him and looks to Adelle, "Did he just call me a Luddite?"

Then he takes down the large man beside him with a swift blow, and the fight starts—only to end a few seconds later, before Adelle can even slide out of the way. Echo has the drives in her hands and the other two traitors lying at her feet; she barks out orders that Anthony follows, and Adelle forgets all of them as she rushes to Topher's side.

"It's okay. It's okay," she assures him, leaning in close, trying to bring him out of his head. "Everything's going to be okay."

She sees Alpha from the corner of her eye—he's standing there uselessly and open-mouthed, like he knows how bad it's gotten too. There's a spiteful part of her that wants to snap that this is why he shouldn't have staged his death and run off with a bunch of dolls, but Alpha doesn't know what happened, doesn't need to know, and the words come out on their own, a fumbling explanation: "He's tired. He's much worse when he's tired."

Alpha should remember that much; he'd shared a room with Topher, after all.

"Tired?" Topher repeats, and gazes up with wonder: "Bedtime."

He springs out of his chair and bounds into the hall, moving faster than she's seen him move in years. Adelle automatically gives chase and Alpha follows her, but they don't catch up until Topher is leaping into his pod. Everything is as he left it, not a trinket out of place.

"It was like this when I bought the place," Alpha explains wryly.

She watches as Topher nests in the pod like a puppy. He's happy and alive, both men are, but her voice is strained, "Well, I'm very glad you didn't clean up."

"Yeah. It spoke to the schizophrenic in me. Well, both of them, actually."

Topher quickly retrieves a pencil and pad of paper from the mess before curling in on himself, scribbling furiously across the paper. It takes Adelle an embarrassingly long while to realize that this journey back into the depths of hell was never about the tech they might find; it was about an idea.

Topher talks to himself, the way he always has, and she can feel Alpha's eyes on her—but she doesn't know how to say what she wants to say, how to ask why he left her behind and how the Dollhouse, a place he once gutted from the inside, is more peaceful to him than Safe Haven. And perhaps she's being petty, selfish; perhaps their friendship was never as strong as she once thought it was. Perhaps it never existed at all.

"I had to," he says eventually, apropos of nothing.

She bristles, "Did you?"

"I couldn't go back."

"Then why not say so?" she demands. "Why let us think you'd died?"

He eyes her curiously, as if he hadn't expected her to care whether he lived or died—as if he thought it was all the same if he never returned. She rather wants to slap him, and curls her hands into fists to curb the impulse.

"They stole Topher," she says icily, turning away from the pod. She hasn't said this to anyone; she never thought she would. "A few months after you were killed—you and Laurence both, within a month, and then they stole Topher. It felt more like the end of the world than the Thoughtpocalypse ever has. And all this time, you were here."

"Adelle," he says, an edge to his voice, "I couldn't go back."

"Why ever not?"

"Because of you."

She flinches before she can stop herself and closes her eyes, briefly. Honestly, what else had she expected? She was always so adept at driving people away.

"That's not what I meant," he amends haltingly.

"No, that's fine. You needn't bother with me now. Go, do something—"

"I hesitated."

"Before pretending to die? How chivalrous of you."

"Adelle, he died because I hesitated," Alpha says quietly, and she doesn't know what to make of his expression. "I couldn't go back and look at you, knowing that."

"I don't understand."

His eyes are a darker blue than she remembers. He tells her, "He called for backup and I hesitated. Just for a second, that was it, but it was enough: one second and he took a bullet to the liver. We'd stumbled into a Butcher nest and he—wasn't gonna get out. Even if he did, he was gonna die slowly, it was gonna hurt, we both knew it. I offered to kill him fast but he told me to go. Took out most of the guys behind me before they got to him. And after I told you, I just couldn't do it anymore. Any of it. So I quit."

Intelligent as she is, she can't seem to understand this—can't seem to process his words and fit them together into coherent sentences. Alpha moves as if to touch her, but drops his hand so quickly she thinks she may have imagined it.

"The last thing he said to me was 'look after her,'" he adds quietly.

There are a few extraordinarily bitchy comebacks on the tip of her tongue but she lets the comment slide, lets the whole conversation slide into silence. Topher is still working like mad.

Some time passes before it occurs to her ask: "Why did you hesitate?"

He frowns, and stares fixedly at the floor. "I was… angry, I think. I don't know; feelings are hard. But he told me the two of you were done and it didn't take long to figure out that it must've happened the day you and I almost… Until then, I'd thought maybe you wanted me. Which was foolish; I should've known you were just upset, just looking for comfort, but I thought maybe if he died... And then he died and I told you, and I realized you still loved him and—"

"Of course I still loved him," she interrupts coldly. "Regardless of our differences, I love him—and Topher and Echo and T, all of them, and you, you thick psychopath. The lot of you are the closest thing I've ever had to a family, you're the only thing I have, and I don't give a damn what you think you did. You should have come back."

.

Alpha focuses on the wires, the mechanics, and relegates all thoughts of the device's function to the darkest corners of his mind. He is acutely aware of Adelle standing silently behind him, and that whatever bridges he might have mended earlier are going to get blown to hell once someone works up the nerve to tell her what the pulse does.

Topher pauses the recording of Bennett—the Bennett ghost is prettier than Alpha imagined, and realer—and swivels in his chair just long enough to jab at the tech Alpha's working on. "The connection goes there."

"I know," Alpha grunts. He hates Topher for making him do this. "Does this mean we're finished?"

Topher nods.

"Where do we set off the device?" Adelle asks.

Alpha watches Topher through the corner of his eye, wondering when Topher intends to tell her that there won't be a we. Topher answers, "High up. Higher up. Higher the better. Gamma rays bounce off the atmosphere."

"Is my old office high enough?"

"Yes, yes, yes, perfect. It'll hit the stratosphere. A minor explosion cascades into a chain reaction."

There it is.

Alpha keeps his eyes trained on the tech, but he can hear the tension in her voice as she repeats, "Explosion?"

"It does the work for you," Topher tells her.

Adelle walks around Alpha's chair and he clenches his jaw, keeps looking down, doesn't interrupt as she says to Topher, "You said it could only be activated manually."

He hears Topher fidgeting nervously with his hands, trying not to look at her. He hears the hidden plea in Adelle's voice: "You're not coming back."

"Small price to pay," Topher mutters, because he has no fucking clue what they're doing to her. Alpha hears the wrinkling of fabric as Topher leans forward, and hears him whisper: "I didn't want to cause any more pain."

No fucking clue.

He hears Adelle do that thing she does—the vaguely maternal half-hug that doesn't come as naturally to her as it might to others. She won't cry, Alpha knows that much, but he needs to get her mind off this before she does something like offer to go with Topher or instead of Topher.

He leans back in his chair and asks, "Is now a bad time to ask for a favor?"

"Yes," she barks, but it's enough—she's looking at him, she's out of the moment, and he needs to get to the old wedges.

.

"Adelle," he says seriously, standing over the chair. "This doesn't have to be the end. I can—we have both their wedges."

She isn't certain she heard him correctly, but his expression is one of grim resolve. And suddenly, just like that, she understands why he's been watching her with such sympathy, why Topher won't look her in the eye—somehow they figured it out before she did.

This is the end. After this, she will be alone again, bereft of those little things she's learned to care about.

"No," she whispers, without knowing what she's denying. Her legs feel so very weak, and she braces herself against the wall as she stubbornly recovers herself—she has never broken before, she can't afford to start breaking now. Her throat is impossibly tight. "No, that… it won't be necessary."

"Adelle," he says again, coming to stand beside her. His fingers graze her elbow and she can't decide if she wants to turn away or hit him or scream, so she allows him to pull her into a tight embrace—allows herself to find solace in the safety of his arms. He's solid. He's always felt so solid. "I'm sorry."

She grips his shoulders (what a strange time to remember how neatly her head fits against the curve of his neck) and tries to stop her own from trembling. It's the eve of the new world; she has to be strong.

"Do you want me to?" he offers.

"No," she repeats, hushed and hoarse, then rolls onto her toes to press a chaste kiss to the corner of his lips to show that she appreciates the full weight of what he's offering, that she knows what it would cost him if she said yes. "But thank you."

His knuckles brush across her face, and the look in his eyes reminds her of a distant dream, a night that didn't happen a year and a half ago. Except—'the day you and I almost,' he'd said.

This is the wrong moment for this, she thinks frantically; the wrong moment to realize what he was attempting to say before, when all she could hear was 'I think I killed your ex.' (Hasn't he been calling her the 'mistress of selective hearing' for years?) She ducks her head, her fingers curling around his raised wrist, but she can't make herself detach from him. He doesn't let go.

"I'll come back for you," he promises, the words muffled by her hair. "I think—soon if it works, but I can't stay, in case I become what I was. If you see her, tell Echo to dismantle all the tech in the building, okay? Tell her to start with the chair. I need to go."

She nods numbly, still clinging to his wrist, as he steps back. He presses his hand to her face, a fleeting touch, before he kisses her temple and whispers, "I'll come back."

He leaves, and Adelle is alone.

.

This is a really bad plan, Imprint Paul points out.

Alpha's standing in a dried up sewer with stolen chains and a paranoid schizophrenic in his head screeching about crocodiles, so he can understand why Paul's concerned.

"It'll work," he insists anyway as he drills the chains into the stone walls. "The device was meant for the new generation of dolls, the ones without Active Architecture. The signal that started it just hit them on a superficial level, and the pulse will be superficial too. It'll just scratch the surface."

Then why is everyone else staying underground?

Alpha scowls, installing the last chain. "'Cause they're mostly post-Topher and he modified the process, made imprinting a little gentler on the brain. They're not as broken in as me and they're not me, they don't store their imprints like I do. Now shut up. I need you on board with this."

Paul's the only imprint that still exists as a largely discreet entity in Alpha's head, so he gives Paul the key and recedes into his mind, clawing for the memories he can't afford to lose. Marked up maps and music beneath the stars, fresh strawberries in wooden boxes and stew that tastes like mop water, chess games and pink blankets, worn smiles and leather-bound books. Her lips at the edge of his, her skin beneath his fingertips.

Alpha waits to forget it all.

VII
We must be still and still moving

For three hours, Adelle is the unquestioned authority in L.A. She manages to organize a provisional hospital and lay the foundations for a kitchen and registry before someone with a megaphone shouts that they shouldn't be taking orders from a Brit.

Adelle is standing on a piece of fallen concrete, and is just high enough to see him over the crowd of disoriented people: he is tall and dark-haired, streaked with dirt, deep lacerations on his hands. The dried blood plastered to his clothes marks him as a Butcher.

"You shouldn't be taking orders at all," she tells the people gathered around her. "I'm asking for volunteers."

And then Zone—who she thought had wandered off with the little girl, disappearing into the masses never to be seen again—leans out a window several stories above their heads and hollers back, "You got a better plan, pal?"

He would decide to support the first person who challenges her.

"Yeah," the former Butcher replies. "Set up a militia, defend ourselves against the hungry crazies and any more blanket signals. We don't got any use for a frickin' registry—we gotta stay safe."

It sounds like precisely the kind of argument Zone would respect, so she doesn't expect him to snort and say, "DeWitt, I've got a shit ton of food up here and—" he glances over his shoulder, "nine injured. Where'd you put the kitchen and hospital?"

One public display of support is apparently all she needs for now to rally the support of others. The former Butcher is largely ignored, save for the handful of likeminded people who move to him. Everyone else is prepared to move on, to leave the nightmare behind and rebuild what they've destroyed.

..

She is awake for just over forty-eight hours before she finally finds time to rest, and all but collapses with a tattered blanket in the corner of a newly created hostel. She doesn't get nearly enough sleep before she's woken by a movement at her side—the little girl laying down beside her, trying to tug part of the blanket away.

Where Abigail is, Zone is usually not far behind. Adelle blinks sleepily at the crowded room and finds him sitting on the floor a few feet away, his back to them; perhaps she truly is sleep-deprived, because she thinks he's defending their corner against the small group of anxious people hovering around him.

"—British, not a robot," he's saying peevishly. "Let the woman sleep, would you?"

She drifts off again, and he's still there when she wakes up.

She rubs her eyes, "Were you here all night?"

"Don't get used to it," he replies, and waves a pad of paper at her. "Here's the bare minimum of what we've got to get done today."

..

Once the Registry's set up, Adelle retrieves the most recent population tally and asks the girl at the 'A' table, "Would you mind keeping an eye out for someone for me?"

"Anything for you, Adelle," the girl replies. "What's their name?"

"His name is Alpha. No surname, just Alpha."

..

There's something of an election ten days in, because Americans appear to have a bone-deep fear of British rule. Adelle lets the people arrange it, gives a minute-long speech that essentially consists of "I'm the reason you have food to eat and a roof over your ungrateful head," and goes back to sitting with former city planners and plumbers who insist that running water can't be restored.

If she loses the election, she thinks she'll sleep until the end of the year.

She isn't so lucky. A few hours later, Zone moseys into the office she set up above the Registry and says, "If you use your new mayor powers to institute some sort of mandatory teatime, I'm outta here."

..

Adelle shares a room with Abigail and twenty other women. It is a jarring change from sharing a room with Topher; he never asked so many personal questions.

"What about you, Adelle?" one of the women asks, handing her a mug of tea. "You must have had someone special in your life—I mean, look at you."

Adelle has looked at herself recently, actually, and is rather convinced that even a swamp monster might find her revolting. She is the elected mayor and she still wears those heavy boots, the blue hoodie. Her hair is a disaster.

Another woman adds, "Is it Zone?"

"Goodness no," Adelle says, and frowns at the disappointment on Abigail's face.

"I'd like to know too," adds a third woman. They're teaming up on her now. "What was he like—or she like?"

Strangely, unexpectedly, Dominic is not the first man Adelle thinks of.

(I'd thought maybe you wanted me.)

"He," Adelle says slowly, and stops. She doesn't discuss these things, or think of these things. She doesn't daydream or yearn like a schoolgirl, and she doesn't contemplate romance or potential flames unless the man is standing in front of her. She doesn't often dwell on her emotional inadequacies, either.

There are twenty-one pairs of eyes on her. Lovely.

She tells them the truth: "He's the only man I trust completely."

..

"My kid would be about Abigail's age now," Zone says with a small, crooked smile. He's toying with a Nerf ball she thinks he stole from Topher's lab. "If my wife hadn't come over all Butcher on us, I mean."

Adelle is staring at the latest population tally, wondering how they're supposed to feed six thousand people, but she spares him a curious glance. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I'm just telling you why I haven't given her over to your little foster parent project yet," he says, idly tossing the ball into the air and catching it again. "I know you've been wondering. What about you? What happened to your family?"

"You met my family," she says dryly. "The closest thing I had to a kid blew himself up."

"And the closest thing you had to a wife?"

She arches an eyebrow.

He shrugs, his expression decidedly roguish. "Hey, Meg was a lesbo. I don't judge."

Adelle pointedly forces him to focus on the more important problems facing them: the ruptured power grid, the outbreak of lead poisoning, the constant influx of survivors, the fact that L.A. appears to be the only remotely organized city on this side of the continent. When she agreed to shepherd a few dolls, she hadn't intended to shepherd the nation. And Zone—well, she hasn't any idea what he was thinking when he appointed himself her second-in-command.

She doesn't have an opportunity to think about it until much later that night, when she's lying—dead tired and wide awake—on her futon, Abigail curled close against her side.

Adelle knows what happened to most of her chosen family: they're either blown to bits or underground. But she has no idea what happened to Alpha, or where he is, or if he's still alive. It has been more than a month since the explosion; she thinks the deadline for "soon" has passed.

VII
In my end is my beginning

The entire plan hinged on his being a freak of nature. He's not surprised when it works.

He spends a few weeks chained up in the sewers like a feral animal before the memories start to return and the imprints reemerge from wherever they'd slunk off to. Another four days pass before Paul, disgruntled and hungry, remembers where to find the key.

The surface is still a desolate mess of rubble and ash, but the bloodied bodies have been cleared away and the sunlight no longer seems grossly out of place. The people he finds are dirty and tired, but unbelievably human. They all seem to know her name; he laughs when one of them says that she's the elected mayor.

He is directed to the heart of L.A., the epicenter of the Thoughtpocalypse, where the few buildings left standing now serve as hostels, kitchens, hospitals. One is a registry, which records survivors' names and enables them to find lost loved ones.

"Alpha," he tells the woman in the 'A' line.

"Really?" she says, wrinkling her nose. She clearly has the IQ of a cockroach.

"Yes. Alpha. Just 'Alpha.'"

"No, that's not… Adelle said to look out for you, is all. She's upstairs, but uh, maybe you should shower first?"

He narrows his eyes and leaves her behind, then takes the stairs two at a time. He finds Adelle in an office on the second floor, saving the world from a small wooden desk. The room is lined with marked up maps and charts, and Zone instantly unfolds from his chair to point a gun at Alpha's head.

"DeWitt," Zone says, and Alpha thinks it's a slight improvement that he no longer says her name like an insult. "We've got a psychopath."

Adelle peers at him suspiciously over her desk, and for once he knows what she's thinking—she's wondering which version of himself he is, and if Zone's gun will be enough to take him down. He can banish her concerns with a single word: "Lapsed."

Her smile is tired but very real. "You came back."

"Of course," he says, and hugs her tightly when she stands. Tighter than he should, since he probably smells like a month's worth of sewage, but she either doesn't notice or doesn't care; she grips his stolen coat tightly in her hands and holds him close. He doesn't analyze this, doesn't investigate the fluffy feelings fluttering in his gut, but he thinks he might understand what the feelings mean. He murmurs, "You're the only thing I have, too."

---

fin.

A/N: Thank you for reading! If you're so inclined, I would greatly appreciate feedback - particularly on the more intimate scenes. It's been eleven years since my last attempt to write anything more than a pre-romance, and back then I thought "passionate" was an adequate description of everything.