A/N: This story follows on from Claire 2.0 (which in turn follows Safe) but you don't have to read that one to understand it.

When Claire left the Dollhouse for the second time she packed light: a small suitcase containing a few clothes, a bag of toiletries and a security camera tape, and a laptop stolen from the equipment store onto which she had transferred two files. Both the files came from Topher's home directory: she'd snuck back into his office after he thought she'd gone and hacked his PC, the security of which he apparently hadn't bothered to upgrade since she broke in the first time. He probably would have just given them to her if she'd asked but she didn't want to give him another chance to try and talk her out of leaving or ask any awkward questions about her plans.

The first of the two files Claire knew she would never open; it was the dossier holding the details of her body's original owner. Why she felt the need to take a copy away with her she couldn't quite say, but Claire never had been one to try and forget the things that troubled her and those few thousand kilobytes of data stood as a kind of neat shorthand for a messy emotional tangle of guilt and resentment.

The second file was much larger and more complicated. Claire opened it the same night she left in a motel on the outskirts of San Diego and stayed up perusing its contents until long after dawn. As she read, she made a few jottings on the motel notepaper; names and addresses mainly, with occasional circled words alongside them: 'summer camp,' 'Med school,' 'dated Sean,' 'agoraphobia?' At the end of the list were two names without addresses: 'Dr Michael Saunders' (the only man) was crossed through and 'WHISKEY' in bold capitals was followed by 'SCARS.'

The next day, she bought a map of the country and set about plotting the most efficient route around all the addresses on her list. She was in no particular hurry but it was in her nature to plan everything she did carefully before she started. It seemed she had a physiotherapist from Minnesota to thank for that.

Her tactics were cautious at first; she didn't like the thought of her subjects seeing her, even in passing, so she would simply park outside each woman's house or apartment block and wait patiently for her to emerge. This strategy had a serious flaw, of course, in that Topher's file contained no photographs; why would it? So if her target lived in a large building, or one with several female inhabitants of roughly the right age, and she couldn't find a picture on the internet, Claire would be forced to approach neighbors with elaborate cover stories about tracking down long-lost friends in order to get a physical description. Her reward, the privilege of scrutinizing the mundane daily routines of a succession of perfect strangers: mostly middle-class women around her own age; mostly doctors of various kinds with the occasional social worker or teacher thrown in. Claire stared at them through her windshield as they came and went with their shopping and their briefcases and their babies and tried earnestly to feel some sense of affinity with each one, but none ever came.

Eventually, feeling both frustrated and sufficiently confident that neither she nor any of her subjects were at risk of being struck by a disturbing sense of similarity, she began to accost them. Small pretexts to begin with: she would stop them in the street to ask the time or ring their doorbells to enquire about a missing cat. Gradually, she grew bolder; initiated ransom conversations about the weather, or the price of parking; then later, more ambitious ones based on the fragments of history or personality she knew they shared:

"Sorry to bother you but I can't resist asking: did you ever spend a summer at Camp Farwell in Vermont in around 1985 or six? … You did? Oh my god, so it was you! You see, I used to go every year and I have a vivid memory of a little girl with curly blonde hair and green eyes who was really gifted at the violin…"

"Would you mind if I shared your table? I know there's a free one over there but it's next to that guy with the Doberman and I have to admit I'm terrified of dogs; pathetic I know… Really? You too? That makes me feel better. But I bet that you, unlike me, could cope with something small like a Chihuahua, right?"

"Oh hello, is that Doctor Howard? My name is Claire Saunders, I'm a GP down in LA but I've done a bit of research into psychiatry out of personal interest and I found the article you published in the APA journal a couple of years ago about Borderline Personality Disorder really fascinating. As I'll be in Portland for a conference next week I was wondering if you'd have time to let me buy you a coffee and pester you with a few questions."

Hours and hours of talking to strangers; befriending them, coaxing them to recite her own life story, opinions, deepest fears and desires back to her, piece by tiny piece. It was painstaking work and it went against Claire's natural instinct (or, more precisely, that of Dr Julia Kirilova, MCSP) to avoid any kind of social interaction with people she didn't know extremely well.

Of course, the grand irony here was that Claire did know the people on her list - or at least very specific parts of each of them - better than anyone else could ever hope to; perfectly even. She knew this objectively, but somehow, when she actually met them face-to-face she never really felt it. None of them ever seemed like anything more than what she pretended they were: random women who happened to have been to the same camp or college as her, or who had the same phobia, or had once dated the same guy. In fact, Claire gradually came to realize that these encounters were having the opposite effect to the one she had hoped for when she set out (though when she thought about it now, she felt stupid for ever believing there could be any other outcome). Her memories were becoming less real; they belonged to other, totally separate people; fitted into the fabric of their lives and personalities in an organic, seamless way that no one, not even a genius, could ever artificially recreate.

So, she changed her strategy; put away her list of addresses and turned her attention inward to her own memories. She started with the places: the schools, universities, apartments, parks, beaches and bars where the most significant moments of her life were supposed to have happened. Visiting them was certainly less arduous than the endless conversations, but it was still a strange and ultimately unsatisfying experience. As a scientist, Claire found it interesting to methodically compare each place with her recollections of it; checking off each tiny detail against a mental catalog and marveling a little bit, in spite of herself, every time there was a match. But the sensation the places themselves aroused in her was harder to pin down; she knew she wasn't really qualified to judge as she didn't have anything real to compare it with, but she didn't think you could call it nostalgia. It was hazier than that; closer to déjà vu in the way it felt, but in truth its exact opposite: her subconscious telling her that she hadn't been somewhere before, while her logical mind insisted that she had.

Finally, after she'd exhausted every last coffee shop, library and Laundromat that could possibly be construed as having some minor personal significance, Claire steeled herself for what she feared would be the most emotionally grueling part of her mission yet: tracking down the people to whom she believed she had been close. Obviously, she reflected bitterly, Topher, smart guy that he was, had made sure that there weren't many of them; and none at all who'd remained close enough for her to expect them to get in touch. Her parents (or rather the parents of Alexa Hartley) had been killed in a plane crash when she was in college, thus conveniently endowing her with a chronic fear of flying (nice work there, Dr Brink). She was an only child and had no living family she knew of apart from an elderly great aunt who lived in Zimbabwe. Her group of friends had never been large either and their number had dwindled steadily as she got older, mainly due to the increasing intensity of her assortment of phobias, which eventually prevented her from attending any kind of social occasion and, on her bad days, even from leaving the house. (It all fitted together very neatly when you thought about it; what socially normal person would take a job at the Dollhouse?). Nevertheless, there were still five or six ex-classmates and colleagues that she remembered fondly, even though they'd all given up calling her a long time ago.

Then there were the ex-boyfriends. Only three of them really, if you didn't count the couple of guys she'd dated casually in high school and her one, very uncharacteristic, holiday fling: a Mexican called Jorge who hadn't returned her emails. Needless to say, the three count-worthy relationships had all ended badly and she didn't keep in contact with any of her exes. She did actually have contact details for them, neatly listed in her Outlook address book along with those of many of her other old friends (Topher's attention to detail was impressive; though she'd bet it had been poor old Ivy who had to type them out). But they were all fake, of course; it was so obvious they would be she could hardly even be bothered to check. It didn't matter anyway. It was never difficult to find people who didn't mind being found, especially with computer skills like Claire's. Far more daunting was the prospect of walking up to a person who had once been so important to her and seeing nothing but blank unrecognition in their oh-so-familiar eyes. But it had to be done, because even if they didn't know it, these were people with whom she had once shared some kind of bond; felt a connection. And if she could only recreate that connection with just one of them, even if only briefly, then she would know that there was some part of herself and her experience that was real and authentic and not just a collection of random snippets of other people's lives.

So, Claire made her greatest effort yet, putting all her insider knowledge about each target to work to try and insinuate herself into their affections as quickly as possible; to accelerate through their relationship in a matter of days to a point which would normally take months of rooming, or working or sleeping together to attain. Her most usual tactic was to pass herself off as a distant cousin of the person whose memory the relationship came from: she was new in town; she didn't know anyone here and so her cousin had given her her old friend Hannah-stroke-Martin-stroke-Sunita's contact details, assuring her that they would 'look after her.' And it worked, they looked after her: let her stay at their apartments, accepted her into their social circles, took her out with them, in one case (confusingly, an old friend rather than an ex-boyfriend) even tried to come on to her; and, to Claire's surprise, for the most part, it wasn't an unpleasant experience. The overpowering irrational resentment she expected to feel toward them for not remembering her never materialized. In fact, she found that she didn't even resent them for the things they could reasonably be blamed for, like falling out of touch with her memory's original owner; or, in the case of the ex-boyfriends, a variety of other misdemeanors of varying severity.

But the flip side of the situation, or, more precisely, its cause, Claire reluctantly acknowledged, was that she didn't actually care about any of these supposed friends. Not really; not the way she remembered she had. It wasn't that she didn't like them; on the contrary, they were all, at least superficially, nice enough people, but the sense of deep and genuine connection she hoped so desperately would resurface never did, and Claire became more and more painfully aware that it had never really existed in the first place. Or rather, she corrected herself, the connection had existed but it wasn't she who had experienced it. That emotion, just like her memories, her body and almost everything else that made up Claire Saunders, was stolen property. This supposed voyage of self-discovery she'd been conducting for the last three years was, in fact, an investigation into grand larceny. The perpetrators of the crime itself remained unknown: hundreds of faceless Rossum doctors around the country who had committed repeated identity theft in its most extreme and literal form by making scans of their unwitting patients' brains. No, the unlikely criminal mastermind to whom Claire's inquiries inevitably led was not them but the receiver of the stolen goods; the man who had made her, Claire, into his unwilling and guilt-ridden accessory: a certain Dr Christopher Brink.

Throughout Claire's long and frustrating personal odyssey, and even before, a subconscious part of her had never stopped obsessing over the question of why, when he was piecing together her imprint, Topher had made the choices he had. Why this character trait, or that talent or the other boyfriend? Sometimes it was obvious: skills and attributes to make her the best and most caring doctor possible or phobias to make her too scared to venture outside the Dollhouse; that sort of thing had probably come down on a list of instructions from Dewitt. Often, though, the motivation was more subtle, less easy to interpret, sometimes to the point where Claire would begin to wonder if it existed at all. After all, as Topher himself had once explained, he was designing a person, not a Roomba: once the essential elements of the personality had been furnished, a lot of extra padding was required to turn the imprint into a fully-rounded human being.

Occasionally, though, hidden amongst the necessities and the random filler, Claire would come across a particular memory or attribute which seemed as if it must have been included for Topher's own, purely personal reasons. One of her strongest suspicions was formed during her encounter with Sean, the least fondly-remembered of the ex-boyfriends. Arrogant, immature and unfaithful to boot, Claire had always considered him the most unconvincing part of her life history – Topher's shoddiest work – because, why would she ever have dreamt of going on a date with a jerk like that, let alone living with him for the best part of a year? (True, there were probably a lot of girls who had asked themselves a similar question at some point in their lives, but other girls' personalities hadn't been designed on a computer).

But then, sitting at Sean's kitchen table, smiling and rolling her eyes while he rattled off a string of his half-funny, half-infuriating, self-aggrandizing anecdotes, it had suddenly hit her: he reminded her of Topher. He even looked a bit similar (though she had to admit, grudgingly, that Topher was the more attractive of the two). He even wore sweater vests; that couldn't be a coincidence. It seemed that for all Topher's insistence that he hadn't made Claire hate him, he'd done the next best thing: ensured that the subconscious psychological associations he evoked in her were of angst, conflict and betrayal of trust. Basically, it was a slightly more sophisticated variant on the physical revulsion he'd given her to the scent of his aftershave. And she found it supremely annoying, this subtle, personally-motivated manipulation; it bothered her more than any other aspect of her programming, though logically there was no reason it should.

Another, possibly related, question regarding Topher's personal investment in the design of her imprint was one that had troubled Claire ever since she first discovered she was an Active: the question of whether he had had some kind of prior acquaintance with whoever she used to be, dating from before her arrival at the Dollhouse. Her suspicions had initially been stirred by his apparent eagerness for Claire to discover her original identity (why else would he have given her computer skills advanced enough to allow her to hack his heavily-protected files?) and his tactless assumption that she would want that personality back. The theory had later seemed to be disproved when Topher had disobeyed DeWitt's orders to restore Claire's body to its owner and brought Claire back instead. But now that she was analyzing her imprint in detail, Claire kept coming across tiny, idiosyncratic traits that had no obvious usefulness, yet had been added individually, hence deliberately, to her personality. Her love of 1940s screwball comedies, for example; or her preference for writing in pencil rather than ink; or her habit of clutching anything she was holding protectively to her chest. There was no need or reason for Claire Saunders to have these particular quirks, so she could only conclude that Topher had gone to the trouble of including them because they held some kind of personal sentimental value. Did they represent an attempt to preserve a small portion of her original self? Or were they an homage to some completely other woman he'd once known? Either way, she found the idea both creepy and more than a little sad.

Keen to distract herself from fretting over such matters, Claire decided the time had come to face a task which, at the beginning of her journey, had filled her with dread, but which she now regarded with a dreary sang froid: nothing she had encountered thus far had had any kind of profound emotional effect on her, good or bad; why should this? She dug out the long-neglected CCTV tape from the bottom of her suitcase; ordered an expensive player for it from a Japanese website and then, one day when Dorothy, her college lab partner and current hostess, was safely out of town, she settled down in front of the TV to confront the very last person on her original hit list.

Even though she knew pretty much what to expect, it was still a strange experience to watch herself wander around the Dollhouse doing things she had no memory of doing with that unnerving, blank look on her face. Even stranger was seeing a middle-aged man with glasses sitting in her office and doing all the things she did remember doing every single day for six months, right down to giving out her lollipops; it was unsettling. Claire put the tape on fast-forward until she reached the day the Alpha-shaped hell broke loose. Her own recollections of the incident were blurry and confused; that was only realistic given the speed at which the events had taken place, not to mention their traumatic nature. Watching the scene play out from this objective position was still horrific - of course it was - but it was also very different; literally so, in that Claire's memory of it did not have an authentic source: it was part-composite, part-total fabrication. She'd known it must be from the start, since obviously Topher didn't possess a copy of the late Dr Saunders' memories for that fateful day; in fact, Claire had learned from the file she'd stolen that his last routine scan had been more than two weeks earlier. So all of what she remembered of the events leading up to the crisis had to be pure invention; most likely a computer-generated extrapolation based on a mixture of security camera footage and the doctor's usual, eminently predictable routine. Yet it was still jarring to see the proof unrolling before her eyes, especially when she reached the point at which her memories diverged completely from the actions of her grey-haired alter ego on the screen. Apparently the real Dr Saunders had met his grisly end after he valiantly dashed upstairs to investigate the disturbance in the imprinting room. As Claire remembered it, however, she had been attacked much earlier, downstairs in the activity room; a memory which had clearly been taken, on a sensory level at least, directly from Whiskey, the first of Alpha's victims.

It was surely, Claire reflected, some of Topher's finest work: the way he had embedded the Active's simple, genuine feelings of fear and pain as Alpha slashed at her with his pruning shears into the entirely artificial framing structure of Claire Saunders' supposed actions just before and after the attack. When you thought about it (and she had thought about it a lot, for all her determination not to), Topher didn't even really need to have gone to all that trouble; he could have explained her scars in any number of ways unconnected with Alpha's rampage. Maybe he'd wanted to make her extra keen to ensure that an Active would never go so horrifically off the rails again, or maybe he'd just found something poetic in the idea of giving her back a memory which had been formed in her own brain.

Claire had expected that touch of authenticity, the fact that for a few crucial seconds Whiskey's ordeal corresponded exactly with her own, to push watching it happen on the tape from the harrowing to the unbearable. After all, seeing Victor suffer the same fate had been agonizing enough. But actually, it turned out to be strangely comforting, in a perverse and guilt-tinged way, because, even though she had the same body, Whiskey was so clearly not Claire. She was just an uncomprehending Doll who, after Alpha had been pulled away from her, had lain quietly on the floor, dabbing curiously at the blood streaming from her face as handlers and domestic staff swarmed panicking around her. Claire, on the other hand, had scrambled instantly to her feet, pressing the sleeves of her lab coat firmly to her wounds, while she shouted instructions to her medical staff. Topher had allowed her that much dignity, at least.

Once Whiskey and the body of Dr Saunders had been carried away on their respective stretchers, Claire stopped the tape and went into Dorothy's bathroom, where she scrutinized her own face in the mirror. She traced a finger across the fine network of scars and thought about how important to her they'd once been. She owed them her very existence, and the fear had haunted her, from the day she discovered who she really was - or, more importantly, wasn't - that the day they finally faded away would be the day that existence would be confiscated; her body reduced to the beautiful, smiling shell it had been before Alpha desecrated it.

But even before that, before she ever heard of a Doll named Whiskey, Claire had always seen Alpha's attack as a defining moment in her life; the event that retrospectively justified all her innate paranoia and mistrust of the world at large. The scars were a reminder and an excuse to never let down her guard. They shaped the way others saw her too: an object of pity, to be treated kindly and respectfully but also a little fearfully. Until Boyd, no one at the Dollhouse had ever tried to get close to her and she'd told herself she liked it that way: it wasn't appropriate to form emotional bonds with colleagues. The problem was, of course, that she never met anyone else. She'd made a few half-hearted forays onto a dating website but even as she was paying her registration fee, part of her always doubted that it was anything but fantasy to imagine that she'd ever step outside of the Dollhouse walls.

Now, though, everything had changed. She had left the Dollhouse - twice - and she had accepted at last that the scars on her face, like all the psychological hindrances that had once held her back, were not really hers. True, they had been inflicted on the body she now inhabited but they had no more personal significance to Claire Saunders than the scar on her left knee that she'd supposedly acquired in a roller-skating accident at the age of nine.

Claire sighed and left the bathroom. She sat down at Dorothy's computer and looked up Caroline Farrell's email address on the Tucson Technical Institute website. It was doubtful whether Echo still checked the account but it was the best way Claire could think of contacting her without DeWitt finding out about it.

Dear Echo, she wrote,

I'm writing you like this because I need some information from the Dollhouse and I doubt whether DeWitt would be willing to help me. As you probably know, Topher went against her wishes and restored me to my body, rather than the personality of its original owner. DeWitt found out and was furious, of course, but for some reason she didn't order my immediate termination, so I took the opportunity to escape. I hope you won't condemn me for that. I think, out of everyone, you are the most likely to understand.

I've spent the last few years trying to come to terms with what I am and I've finally decided the time has come to get rid of my scars. If you are still at the Dollhouse, I'd appreciate it if you could look up the name and address of the plastic surgeon who treated Victor and pass them on to me. If you could also get hold of the House's account or payment details, that would be even more helpful. I'm sure DeWitt keeps that kind of information under lock and key but you've always been more than a match for her security.

I hope our paths will cross again one day. Until then, look after yourself and any other former Actives who are with you.

Claire

Weeks passed and no answer came. Tired of Dorothy's incessant, well-meaning attempts to get her a social life, Claire moved out of her house and rented a small apartment of her own. Eventually she gave up waiting for a reply from Echo and started researching other plastic surgeons, but their fees were all far beyond what the dwindling remnants of her savings would allow.

It was her longest period of inactivity since she'd left the Dollhouse and she began, for the first time, to pay some attention to the events happening in the world beyond her immediate surroundings. Worrying things were happening: multiple reports of previously completely sane and regular people going on random killing sprees; a kind of epidemic of irreversible amnesia sweeping across the country; countless unexplained disappearances. Claire wondered if she was being paranoid to assume that Rossum, or at least their technology, was somehow behind it all; blaming Topher Brink and his ilk for everything that was wrong with the world as usual.

Then, almost four months after Claire's message to Echo, an email arrived from a Hotmail address belonging to one Eleanor Penn. Claire smiled and opened it.

Hey Doc,

Great to hear from you. Sorry I haven't been the speediest in replying. We've been kind of busy round here 'cause it turned out that trip to Tucson we took just before you left was a fail – Rossum is still alive and kicking; they've got themselves a new leader and it looks like they've got big and nasty new plans – I guess you've seen all the scary shit in the news about people going psycho for no reason. Topher reckons they've rebuilt the mass-wiping and imprinting tech and it's only a matter of time before they start testing it out on a major scale. I've been out of the House a lot recently trying to figure out a way to stop them – probably shouldn't go into the details here.

Anyways, I'm pleased to hear you've taken some time out to get your head together after all that fucked up stuff with Boyd and the sleeper imprint. You deserved it. IMO DeWitt has owed it to you for a long time to get your scars fixed, so I just went and told her that straight out and she didn't argue - I think underneath that cold British exterior, she feels bad about what happened to you. All the info you wanted is in the attachment. I'm heading off on what might turn into a pretty long trip soon and I doubt I'll be contactable so here's wishing you good luck with the surgery, Sister, and whatever else you decide to do with your life.

Stay safe,

Echo