[Title from Shakespeare's Hamlet.]
in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!
by lostlikealice/thinkatory
There's kind of a joke in the whole "Topher Brink caused the apocalypse" thing, if you think about it for a while. It's the same kind of admittedly unfunny joke that characterizes his job.
Topher Brink is really bad at people.
But Topher Brink is really good at people.
Get it?
The problem is that people are more than brains. If that makes any sense at all. He suspects it probably doesn't, but it's better when things don't. Every time things start making sense to him, it just makes things worse.
Whiskey is still passed out an hour after they arrive at the Dollhouse, thanks to the tranquilizers. Topher refuses to be trapped in the back of the van with her, so Ballard drives with her in the front seat. It's not her fault, but actually, it is.
She killed Bennett. It's all he sees when he looks at her. She killed Bennett and splattered her blood and beautifully, incredibly smart brains all over his lab, and he is starting to not really care about things like forgiveness or sense or thinking. Everyone is to blame. Boyd gave them all the matches, and they burned down the world with it.
No, no. That metaphor's all wrong. He's not a metaphor person though. See, that metaphor makes him the firemaker Prometheus, but humanity flourished with fire. He's Pandora. He just couldn't stand to leave the box shut.
Yep. Blaming himself again. That should at least wait until the world actually ends. Let's blame everyone else first, he resolves.
"Topher," Dewitt says in her zen voice, the frozen ice queen of all cold bitches trying to be comforting at this of all times. "We need you upstairs."
The imprint room. The lab. The tech. It's like he's got a bad hangover from the adrenaline, the angst, and the futility of it all is fueling this sort of awful desperate desire to destroy so he doesn't have to think about it anymore. He says nothing and follows Dewitt up the stairs in awkward, tense silence, because all he can think on the way up is, trash the lab. Delete it from existence, and then just for a little while it can be like he undid what he's done.
Then he sees Whiskey in the chair, serene and silent.
"No," he says evenly. "I won't."
"You will," Dewitt says, sharp and spat out like gunfire. (He's not good at metaphor, but he knows about PTSD and he can taste the tang of adrenaline in the back of his mouth like he wants to be sick, and he can pretend like his ears are still ringing from the shot that killed Bennett, and all Dewitt's tone does is send his gaze straight up at the blood-spattered monitor.) "We need Dr. Saunders back."
From the sudden outside perspective he's gained observing himself in the grip of teeth-clenching, fist-throwing rage, the way he's losing control is fascinating. The rest of him wants to scream or at least get out an amazing my-head-is-exploding line like "there are four lights" or "my god, it's full of stars," but this is real life. "To which Dr. Saunders do you refer? The avuncular physician cut down so brutally in front of me, or the one you had me imprint after who hated me enough to murder someone in front of me?"
"She was a sleeper," Echo says from behind him.
"And I don't care," Topher enunciates in her direction. He bolts to the desk, though it's more like scurrying, because he has to move fast before they realize what he's doing. He has the drawer open before Echo takes a step forward, and seizes the gun. He scrambles back before Echo can do some sort of ninja move in his direction and points the gun at Whiskey and the chair.
"TOPHER," Dewitt shouts, either pissed off or panicked or both but that's really entertaining, and damn it, she deserves it. The gun lets off this really big bang at the same time, and he drops it before Echo can even take it away from him, his hands shaking.
Echo hauls him back a few steps. "You missed," she says, with a hand on his shoulder that makes him think his collarbone might get broken if he tries anything else.
Whiskey says, in mild doll-alarm, "Noise is upsetting," and Topher snaps completely.
"FUCK YOU," he shouts. His voice cracks, and the next split second his vocal chords allow he's choking on nothing short of insane laughter. "Fine! Fine, I'll imprint her! What's the worst that can happen, right? It can't be the end of the world!"
For some reason, no one else laughs.
When he's trying to sleep that night, he realizes he really could have killed her.
Dude, that is fucked up.
He pukes in the nearest garbage can. He can feel his grip loosening on everything, his mind grasping and trying to focus the way it used to - just the facts man - but he's losing it. Whatever he had left, it's slipping away.
And he's still so angry.
By five AM he has three theories on how Rossum could still get away with this. How they could do it, what they would need, the only thing he doesn't understand is why. They're evil, that's supposed to be enough. It's not. Evil means you do things because you want to and you don't care what happens to people, which is totally Rossum, but it also means you have a plan, right? Otherwise he is, too...
"I'm the bad man," Topher murmurs into the mattress in his server room.
He closes his eyes and passes out from exhaustion, but a bloody naked Nolan Kinnard mocks him as he's draining the arteries and cutting him into easy-to-handle pieces.
"Topher Brink," Nolan says as his left foot comes clean off, tone acidic but apparently thrilled for the opportunity, if the rictus smile is any indication. "Neuroplastic savior of the innocent and lost."
"Hey, creepy undead rapist. Shut up," Topher advises. He doesn't turn around. At any cost. He knows what's there. (Bodies. Millions. Past, present and future innovations in death by Topher Brink, because he didn't care enough to think beyond R and fucking D.)
It's different when he wakes up. He couldn't tell you how, but it's harder to breathe.
Two days later a hard drive arrives in the mail from Rossum. Topher isn't about to touch it and in fact suggests they jump up and down on it but Echo (or Caroline), she insists there's no real danger, and sets Ballard on guard duty while telling Topher to imprint Victor - Tony? whoever - with the wedge, to get it over with.
Victor snaps his fingers the instant the chair rises, and sits up. "Take me to the kitchen."
Topher exchanges a look with Ballard. "Sorry, who are you?" he asks. "The packaging didn't say."
"My name is Clive Ambrose," Victor says, with that putting-up-with-an-idiot tone, and Topher freezes. "Now take me to the kitchen."
Ten minutes later, Ambrose says the words "complete anatomy upgrade" to Dewitt. Topher knows Rossumspeak fluently, having coined a few terms himself, so it's pretty obvious what the hell that means. He decides that reality is for chumps, and he's going to stop thinking about it.
That's harder than it sounds when it means the worst of Rossum are becoming basically immortal.
This is your fault.
"Listen carefully. This is the time to choose, Adelle, Mr. Brink, whether you want to be someone who lives on in the endless epic arc of history or a quickly discarded decomposing vessel enriching the soil. You've both earned a place on the ark; Mr. Brink, you practically built it. So you can take this body if you want, I won't fight. Right now I'm in ten others, having this conversation in ten other houses. If you do reclaim this body, though, we'll know. And you'll have made a choice. A defining choice. So - what do you say?"
Topher knocks him out with the disruptor, and he keels forward, hitting the kitchen floor with a satisfying thunk.
"We weren't going to do that, right?" he asks Dewitt.
Adelle actually smiles. "No," she says. "Absolutely not."
Sleeping is not going to happen. Nope. Someone sends Saunders to his pod to try and medicate him with something, but he just shuts the glass shade and ignores her until she goes away. He hasn't slept for any significant period of time (i.e., more half hours in exhaustion here and there) in fourteen days. Supposedly a human being can't go a week without sleep, but that's always been an old wives' tale, and the brain is capable of functioning on so much less than what people think. It's a magnificent machine.
Not the point!
Sleep is for people who don't have other things to do, whose hardware isn't suffering hairline cracks. (And his is. He's not in denial. He knows what's happening, and there's nothing he can do about it, because there's no drug or cocktail that can fix the fact that the apocalypse everyone is desperately trying to prevent is your fault.) He has things to do, so he doesn't sleep.
R&D isn't a huge department in the LA Dollhouse – mostly, it was helmed in Topher's office – but all the equipment and drafting stuff is still in the R&D room. For ten days now, he's had a project. Okay, two projects, but this one...
It's a surprise for Dewitt. She'll love it.
Finally on day eleven, when his body clock is telling him it must be morning, it's finished. He drags himself away from the designs of the prototype long enough to convince himself to destroy them. His head snaps up from the trash can fire in front of him as the door opens, and he realizes that there, in fact, is Dewitt. "Adelle! You're here! Let me show you things!"
She looks a little alarmed to see him playing with fire. "Topher. We were hoping you could join us."
"Yeah, about that. How did you know I was here?" Topher asks.
Dewitt almost sort of cracks a smile. "I know you."
"You do! We're old friends. Great friends." He's not making sense, but he doesn't expect himself to anymore. "I have something to show you. Multiple things."
She pulls up a wheelie-chair beside him. "Show me," she encourages.
"We need to be careful," he tells her urgently. "Very careful, because... this is something I really shouldn't have done. But WHATEVER," he presses emphatically, "we need to be able to fight back. And this? This will help." He picks up the prototype and waves it at her.
She looks plausibly concerned as it points at her, and only relaxes once it's out of her face. "What is this?"
"I call it the butcher relay." Topher pretends to aim at the door and then lowers it. "It... I got the tech from Alpha. He left it here when he killed Ballard."
"Butcher relay," she repeats slowly. "So... it's the technology he used to turn our Actives into killers."
"And she's got it! I combined it with the, the thoughtpocalypse technology and boom. Hook this thing up to a loudspeaker or a phone system, you have instant killers."
"Topher." Dewitt puts her hand over his, on his knee. "How can this help us?"
"Get enough people in a confined space, they'll want to kill each other anyway," Topher says brightly. "This'll just convince them to do it."
She squeezes his hand and holds it. "But do you understand what you're saying?" she presses.
"I'm saying, who needs bombs?" Doesn't she see? "No one else needs to die, none of us needs to die - "
She looks disturbed. Dewitt looks disturbed.
She doesn't get it. "I don't want you to die," he bursts out. "I did more. I made it so we can stay here forever without anyone getting close enough to hurt us, besides food, I haven't figured that out, but - "
He's shaking. He doesn't realize it until Dewitt's arms are around him and he's quivering there, but he's shaking. She doesn't move until he stops making these horrible sounds in the back of his throat like whimpers. "Come downstairs, Topher," she tells him, stands, and offers her hand.
He follows.
Topher falls asleep at the computer in the lab after his final tweaks to the venting system, and wakes up to Tony shouting, "Rossum incoming!" and the sound of breaking glass. He instantly panicks, but fights the instinct to hide under his desk until it's over, because his friends are going to die, his friends who have forgiven him for everything he's done and given him a second chance.
He grabs the phone and opens up the intercom system. "Up here, lab, everyone, now, now now now," he shouts to the Actives still fighting the Rossum forces. He recognizes the patterns they form – military. Aha.
Dewitt walks backward into the lab after firing off a shot, and turns to see Topher rummaging through his pockets. "Topher, what are you doing - " she starts, but he waves her into silence, plugging the butcher relay into the USB port and typing as quickly as possible to get into the Rossum mainframe, then Scytheon - "What's going on?" Echo is demanding of Dewitt as she and Priya rush in.
"Trust him," Dewitt says stolidly. "He's got a plan. Where are the others?"
"Here we go," Topher says to himself, and he hits enter.
"No," Echo is shouting, and tries to put her hands on him, but Dewitt gets in the way. It's too late. The Scytheon forces are murdering each other left and right and maybe his friends, but – no, there's footfalls on the stairs and Ballard and Tony go immediately to Echo and Priya's sides.
"Trust me," Topher says breathlessly to them. "Right here, it's right here." He types like a demon, gets to the security protocols, then the oxygen and gas venting system protocols that he's just fooled around with. "Here, here it is, wait for it!"
There's a whoosh in the main chamber of the house, and Topher ushers everyone into the imprint lab and shuts the doors, shushing them until the silence finally settles over the Dollhouse.
"Topher, darling," Dewitt begins, with concern, but he ignores her.
"It should have dispersed by now," he says mildly, sitting back against the nearest wall.
They go out to look. He just sits and laughs, and Dewitt strokes his hair as she glances out of the broken windows at the poisoned and ravaged bodies.
"I win," he tells her.
Topher isn't entirely clear on the overall plan these days, but Echo and Ballard disappear for three days to track down something and don't seem to come back with it. "They wiped everyone," Echo says, with a tinge of anger to her even tone, and everyone stops murmuring, or possibly even thinking too loudly.
"What do you mean, they wiped everyone?" Dewitt asks, brusque.
"The whole building was wiped," Ballard says grimly. "Everyone was in doll-state. They were supposed to help."
"We were supposed to get the vaccine away from Rossum. They knew we were coming," Echo says, and exchanges a look with Ballard. "We think they hacked the Scytheon network to get into the head of one of ours."
"Whoa, whoa," Tony interrupts. "You think they were in my head? That it's my fault?"
"Whoa," Topher echoes. "I uninstalled that stuff."
Ballard looks skeptical. "How else would they know - "
"Because going after the vaccine is the smart thing to do," Dewitt says pointedly. "Let's move on, shall we? How could they have done this?"
Topher buries his face in his hands. "Not it," he mutters.
Dewitt reaches out to him, and he just about flinches. "Please, darling. Just think."
"Refraction," Topher says into his hands, and then finally raises his head when he has words. "It's a signal. All they need is a signal. Anything with a speaker, boom, it's playing your song, Topher." He's talking to himself and they're all watching him. "Do you get it? They can, they can do that now. But we're ahead."
"Of course," Dewitt says, hushed.
Topher nods, to the uncomfortable and silent group. "Trust me."
They kind of have to. It's not as though they have a choice in the matter.
"Are you certain about this?" Dewitt asks him.
Topher shuts down the security, locks down the doors, and sends her a bland smile. "It'll work."
And that's all that matters. He hacks the phone system of the DC Dollhouse and broadcasts the butcher relay.
Boom. There's another hundred people dead, for the cause.
He laughs so he doesn't cry, except he does, when no one but Dewitt is there to see it. He cries. He dreams and he hallucinates and it becomes near impossible to tell the real world from dreams after all, which makes them nightmares. Because he's always been in control. He's always known better. He's always known.
I know what I know.
Soon the only way to tell reality from the absurdist play they're all performing in his head is Bennett. Beautiful, awesome Bennett is with him, talking to him as though she was never shot through the head, whispering things to him that he's never heard but always known. But she's dead.
That doesn't stop him from talking to her.
"You're right. All we need to do is streamline the process," he says enthusiastically. "Got to be another way to wire the brain to take imprints even faster. Instant install USB. Wouldn't that be awesome?"
"You need to take a break, Topher. Everything will be okay."
"Topher? Topher," Dewitt persists. His head swims. "Come back to me, Topher."
"We're nearly done," Topher tells her, and blinks. Bennett has barrettes in her hair, and she smiles.
"Stay with me, Topher. Come here, please."
"Dr. Saunders?" Dewitt calls sharply. "Dr. Saunders, I need you here. Topher, come here."
"Nope," Topher says, and laughs. He takes a few steps towards Bennett, who is made up of tiny lights in the skyline. Broken glass crunches under his feet. That's when he realizes where he is.
Jump. LA pavement is just three steps away. Jump. The world will end no matter what he does. Jump. He starts to laugh. It's hilarious. There's nothing else for him to do.
One, two steps and then a hand is on his arm and hauling him back, and a hard slap to his face brings him back to reality. Bennett is gone. Dewitt is there, lines in her face and fury there too, and she slaps him again for good measure.
"You don't get to leave me," she snaps at him. "Do you understand?"
Topher has the chance to nod before he realizes there's a syringe plunging into his arm. "Thanks," he says breezily to whoever just spared him more slaps, and faints forward into Dewitt's arms.
Topher Brink now lives in a pod. He doesn't go anywhere or do anything. He doesn't join their meetings unless Dewitt leads him there literally by the hand. There are books in his pod, they bring him food, and once he has a laptop-tablet there with an ethernet cord plugged in the side (how quaint, right? Practically steam-powered) he doesn't need anything else.
"No. No, let me try one more time," he insists, as Dewitt pulls gently on his hand. "I have an idea and all I need is another me, a good me, an old me."
"There's no one to imprint," Dewitt informs him. "We don't do that anymore."
"Not true. Not true." Topher makes a face back at her as she sends him an unimpressed look. "I can't do it on my own! I can't! I'm - "
"No one expects you to do anything," she tries to tell him.
"I expect me to! I expect me to help! I expect me to not let everyone die because I, I, I," and that's when he starts to break down again, breathing hard. At least it's only the first time today "Just tell me, are we winning? Are we? Can we?"
"We are and we will." Dewitt moves closer to his pod, and the touch of her hand on his forehead makes him want to weep. "Let me tell you everything, Topher. I promise. We can do it."
It looks like they've got NYC and Tokyo on their side, except Takahashi is a hack and not even the good kind, Topher may be cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs but he knows that, but then, ha ha, of course, the NYC Rossum building is "blown up by terrorists" and Takahashi turns up dead from an apparent suicide. This is just the way things work. Dewitt is a liar. They lose.
President Perrin gave his State of the Union recently as though everything was normal. And for everyone else, Topher supposes it is. He supposes his parents are drinking wine and discussing what they read in The Atlantic this week and whether this Perrin's just going to spend the country into oblivion, and he briefly considers calling them to let his dad know that the national debt will no longer be a problem because everyone will be dead.
He laughs at that, apropos of nothing, and picks up his piece of chalk. Bennett silently watches him write on the side of the pod, and he knows this is love, because he's so happy that she's there but he wants to puke from the horribleness of it all.
"They buried you," he murmurs, trying to remind himself, and crosses his ts.
"We need to get out of here," Echo is saying in a clipped undertone to Dewitt, and Ballard, Tony and Priya are all packing up the guns. "It's started."
"You mean it's over," Dewitt retorts.
"Don't start with me, Adelle."
Topher crawls out of his pod and prods at Priya's leg. She jumps. "What's happening?" he hisses.
She doesn't seem to know what to say, but the mixed fear and revulsion on her face just looking at him says a lot. "It's over?" he asks.
"It's started," Priya returns, gently. "It was China... I'm sorry."
"We can't leave yet," Topher says, and scrambles up to his feet and to Dewitt's side. "Adelle! Adelle, we can't leave yet. I have an idea."
"Great," Ballard says, and is instantly hushed by just about everyone else.
Dewitt nods to Topher, businesslike, and it's almost like the old days. "What is it? Tell me."
"I need me," he says, to the point. "Give me me and then I can help."
"He's lost it," Tony mutters.
"He means he needs someone to be imprinted with his backup wedge," Dewitt says evenly.
"No. No way," Tony swears. "I freaking refuse - "
Priya exhales. "I'll do it."
The other Topher stops being distracted by being a girl with girl-parts after about an hour, but that doesn't make it any easier to explain to her/him what's going on. "Dude. You are not making sense," the Sierra-Topher says.
"He's making more sense than usual," Dewitt says flatly. She's giving Sierra the stinkeye, and Topher can't help but laugh, even though he knows how ridiculous he looks and sounds and everything else.
"Maybe to you he is, but I'm trying to get me to tell me what the frak he's come up with. Come on, me!" Sierra's hands fly up as he screws up his face and then seizes the tablet with a faint grin. "Stop smiling! Focus! Tell me what your masterplan is!"
"USB," Topher answers, eyes on the screen.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Sierra smacks herself on the side of the head, frustrated. "I've freaking lost it. I mean, I was never a model of mental health but right now, man, this is a special level of crazy hell I've entered. Why am I even here? Me-me, not him-me. Although - "
"USB," Topher interrupts. "A more direct link to the brain, more easily swapped out information and imprints, ones that can be consciously taken by people with Active architecture. I just can't figure out how. I can't figure out how to, where, I know what I know but I don't know."
Dewitt clears her throat. "Well, Topher, I think we should return Priya to her - "
"Wait, no, wait. Let me see that." Sierra snatches up the laptop-tablet he's got and starts looking at what he's scribbled out in the drafting program. "Oh, I still got it! Go me!"
"Are you saying..." Dewitt raises her eyebrows.
"I'm saying I know what he's talking about and the two of us can do it. Come on, Shortbus!" Sierra encourages Topher, and the whole thing is just so ridiculous that he starts laughing, following her closely. "Gather around, tech-heads! These mad scientists need a volunteer!"
Sierra becomes Priya again after Tony gets the operation (which is just about 100 percent successful), even though Topher begs Dewitt to let him keep a copy of himself. It terrifies him, how he can't think anymore, how his mind is cracked like an egg and constantly contrarian. It terrifies him whenever his mind works and he realizes what he's done, what he's created, and how far off the reservation he's gone. Bennett never leaves but he can't touch her no matter how often he cries for mercy, but Dewitt is always there when he does.
They call this new place Safe Haven, and it's Alpha's handiwork. Alpha is good. Alpha saves people. Topher doesn't understand the world anymore.
Dewitt is holding him tightly as he shakes and rocks, but it doesn't stop the fit. "It's time to go, Topher."
"I can't. I can't. I can't." He can't see what he's done. He knows, and that's bad enough. If he sees the apocalypse in front of him, everything that is him might disappear completely into the crazy. The genius, that's what makes Topher Brink worth anything. What would they do to him once it was gone?
(They say - or they used to say, before the world ended - that if you could tell you were crazy, you weren't crazy. And that's crazy, because crazy knows crazy. It just can't do anything about it.)
"We're going to Safe Haven," Dewitt tries to explain, quietly. "We'll be safe there. Tony and the rest of the tech-heads will keep us safe."
"No," Topher says, loudly. "No no no no no!"
"Topher," Dewitt retorts, then softens, releasing him. He's still shaking. "Whiskey is staying."
He flinches at the memory. Whiskey. The blood on the monitor, on his face. The body covered with a blanket with her girly sandals sticking out from underneath. Whiskey is staying.
"You can't stay here with her."
He nods at Dewitt and wipes his cheeks.
"Let's go, darling."
They go, hand in hand.
He stays in the van. The van is almost like a room, and rooms are more like buildings than the real world. He couldn't stand the real world before it became a nightmare-scape, and now it's just so much worse. He doesn't want to see or hear anything.
No one talks to him. It's just Topher and Dewitt. It's always been Topher and Dewitt, even when they were at odds. The brains and the cunning.
Bennett hovers nearby, sober and sad and a bit sour, and he feels as though he's failed her. He has to think. He has to make things okay, at least for now. "I made Alpha," Topher says faintly to Dewitt. "And you hired me. And Alpha made Echo. So we're going to save the world, too."
"Shh," Dewitt hushes him, stroking his hair away from his forehead. "Everything is going to be all right."
"That's not true," he answers. The van moves underneath them, around them, and people are talking, but he doesn't listen, doesn't want to hear.
"We're good," she says, firmly. "And good wins, Mr. Brink."
He shakes his head at her, and clings to her arm. "I'm not good," he confesses in a whisper.
She presses a kiss to his forehead.
"No," she says. "You're the best."
One night halfway to Safe Haven he's half-asleep, dreaming about pinwheels and Frank Miller's Joker, when there's the sound of breaking glass and the van door opens.
"NO," Dewitt is shouting, and there are gunshots, all around him. He hates guns. He tries to scramble out, following Echo and Ballard, but there's hands on him and a needle slips into his vein. He manages to say "what the frak" before he collapses into a heap in his captor's arms.
They call it Neuropolis. He actually smiles when they tell him that, and asks, "Are you serious?"
He doesn't smile again after they pistol-whip him.
"Is it done?" they ask him, each day, and when he tries to explain that what they're asking is insane and impossible and some people just can't be imprinted and what is wrong with you anyway, a bullet goes to the brainpan of the nearest civilian.
"No," he learns to say, and barely flinches at the bang of the gun anymore.
He doesn't sleep anymore, not until he collapses. He doesn't eat until they forcefeed him, and he doesn't resist. There's no way he can let himself live. Every death is a reminder of all the death, and he doesn't need reminders. But they're everywhere, the reminders.
"All you have to do is think, Topher." Bennett speaks to him more gently than she ever would have in life. He feels her hand pressing to her face, and it's the best thing he's felt in years. He cries, and she stays by him.
"If anyone can do this, you can."
"How?" he asks faintly.
"I trust you, Topher. Everyone does. You are a brilliant mind."
You're the best, Dewitt said. He wishes he was. Then he could give them what they wanted, and everything would be over, for him and everyone else.
It strikes him in the middle of the night, fluorescent lights buzzing over his head like electric fireflies, how it could be done. Not what they want; what they need. He looks into the reflection of the screwdriver and almost, sort of, smiles.
"Bennett?" he whispers. "Bennett, I did it. For us. For everyone."
But she's gone.
Out of nowhere there are two Carolines and a Ballard and other people, and he totters out of Neuropolis, into their Hummer. "Good morning, Tucson," he says nonsensically to the sunset.
When he wakes in a house, a home, with curtains and the smell of food being cooked, he buries his face into the pillow, but a hand to his cheek draws him out, and there she is, her face lined with stress and grief but mostly just a smile.
He throws himself into Dewitt's arms, and she hugs him tightly.
"I can do it," he murmurs.
"I knew you could," she answers, and she's proud. For now, that's all he can ask for.