Reliance
Summary: Adelle/Topher hurt/comfort fic. Once she had depended on him to get her through the day, but now he had come to rely on her for his very existence. Spoilers for Epitaph One. Angsty one-shot. Reviews are appreciated.
She needed him more than she would ever admit. She needed him and his exuberance to get her through the darkest and toughest days at the Dollhouse; the days when she was plagued with guilt over what she did for a living. She needed his goodness to reassure her that she was doing the right thing, that she was helping people. She needed his humour, his casual sarcasm and the way he said all the things to Laurence Dominic that she wished she could be was unable because it would be both inappropriate and unprofessional. More than anything she trusted and relied upon him to get the job done better than anyone else.
But now the tables could not have been turned more completely. Now he needed her to even survive, to take the impossibly strong medication which would still not really assuage his guilt. He needed her to know that he would do anything to make right what had gone so disastrously wrong. He needed her touch, her reassurances and the terms of endearment she used only for him, to stop him losing his painfully weak grip on reality and sanity.
Adelle held the trembling young man, not much more than a boy really, in her arms and whispered softly to him, trying to calm him and stop him from repeating the same pointless but somehow meaningful phrases again and again. It was then that she realised that once she had depended on his presence to make her day more bearable, but now Topher had come to rely on her entirely.