A/N: This is something I'm writing in my spare, spare time, so while I'm writing this I'm aware that I'm not even sure when this thing is going to get posted. It will, I have faith in that, so I'm still writing this right now. This entire story is Ptera_Waters' fault. I mean it. I was just innocently browsing through Bones stories when I stumbled on the most fascinating crossover with Dollhouse pairing Booth with Ballard. The idea is pure hotness, and it makes sense in a fun sort of way, and I couldn't get it out of my head, so this is what came of that. Blame this entire story on Ptera; in fact, if you don't like it, it's Ptera's fault! (Not really. You know I love you, don't you, Ptera?)

Summary: After dismantling the Rossum Corporation mainframe at the end of "The Hollow Men," Echo and her team still have a long way to go to stomping out the last of the Dollhouses. Their most difficult job will be Washington, D.C. There, Paul Ballard rediscovers an old friend named Seeley Booth and finds that he has to redefine his life and his decisions, even as the remnants of the Rossum Corporation are threatening to rise up and take everything away from him once more...

Warnings: This is a slash story. That means it will contain sexual content between two men. I'm warning you now in big bold letters!!! so that if anyone has any objection to this they'll be adults about it and not read it. Also, this isn't technically a crossover, just to warn you guys: it will contain characters from Bones – most notably Seeley Booth, Temperance Brennan, and Angela Montenegro. It is, however, firmly set in the Dollhouse universe and contains almost no Bones mythology in it.

Spoiler Alerts for "Dollhouse" and "Bones"!!!: This story is set in Dollhouse's second season, immediately after the twelfth episode, "The Hollow Men," and during the ten-year span between "The Hollow Men" and "Epitaph One/Epitaph Two: Return." In terms of Bones, this is going to assume that you've seen through about three episodes into season five, the current season of Bones.

Rating: T (Right now, the sex isn't going to be that heavy and the violence not so gruesome. If anything about this changes, the rating will change, but I think it's going to stay pretty okay on teen.)

Pairings: Seeley Booth/Paul Ballard, mentions of Paul/Mellie and Paul/Echo, Tony/Priya (aka Victor/Sierra), mentions of Topher/Bennett, mentions of Boyd/Claire, allusions to Booth/Bones.

Note: The title of this story is derived from the two albums that inspired this story (in case you haven't read my works before, I'm highly influenced by music while writing and I usually post a soundtrack playlist to each story that I write): "The Sea," the second album by Corinne Bailey Rae, and "The Open Door," the second album by Evanescence. Both start in a dark place and rise toward a hopeful ending, and the allusions and metaphors regarding the ocean particularly helped the artist in me label this piece.

Disclaimer: "Dollhouse" was created by that mastermind known as Joss Whedon, with some help from Eliza Dushku with the concept. It is owned by those TV Show-cancel-happy monsters known as the Fox Network and by Mutant Enemy Co. "Bones" was created by Hart Hanson and is based on a really quite fascinating book series penned by Kathy Reichs. It is also owned by Fox, though Fox has been much kinder to "Bones" than it has to "Dollhouse." Sigh. In any case, I'm making no money nor do I intend to, I'm just having fun. If I did own them, Paul and Echo would have gotten together before the end of the damn series and Booth would have had sex with half of the staff of the Jeffersonian before finally marrying Brennan. Sigh.

And so, with all of that out of the way:

Dollhouse

The Sea

Prologue: The Deep

The sea

The majestic sea

Breaks everything

Crushes everything

Cleans everything

Takes everything

From me

"The Sea" by Corinne Bailey Rae (The Sea, 2010)

Stepping into the Dollhouse once more, Paul Ballard was struck by how comforting it was to see something familiar. There was a vague sort of horror in him that he could almost associate the Dollhouse with a feeling of home, but what else was there? Echo was worried about him, but he couldn't do anything about it. After they set in place all of the locks and reactivated the security system, they'd each gone their separate ways. It made sense; they all needed space. And, according to Echo, they were going to have to keep the Dollhouse as a base for at least the next month while they recuperated and planned their next move.

Topher especially needed to lay down for a while. The man was close to crumbling; any further pressure and that brilliant mind of his would snap like a toothpick in the mouth of a pit bull. Thinking of pit bulls, Paul thought as he watched Adelle DeWitt herd Topher into his office with a matronly look on her face. She'd changed, certainly – they all had. Adelle gave him a look as she guided a mainly numb Topher into his office and shut the door behind her. The glass was shattered on Topher's enormous windows overlooking the Dollhouse proper, but she led him behind a door leading to his sleeping room for privacy.

Tony and Priya were headed for the showers and some much-needed privacy of their own. Priya looked somewhat shell-shocked still, which Paul supposed couldn't be helped. The artist was a kind and giving soul, and her head was a mess right now. Tony himself was playing his cards close to his chest, but the way he was looking at Priya was good. At least they'd have each other in the coming months.

"It isn't over, Paul," Echo said softly, her too-wise eyes seeing things that he could not see. They were driving back to Los Angeles, leaving a smoking ruin and mountains of police cars and Rossum's private security army behind them. Adelle was driving with Topher in the front seat, and Tony and Priya were squished together like ants in one of the pilot seats. The other held the unconscious body of Whiskey, still imprinted with Clyde 2.0 – or at least, that's what Echo told him. He didn't understand any of it. He was still staring backwards, wondering what the explosion had done to Mellie's body.

"What do you mean?" he asked, though he wasn't really listening. She squeezed his hand, her small and deceptively weak-looking hand clasping his.

"They want to celebrate. But all we did was take down the mainframe, take down the guiding hand. There are still more than twenty Dollhouses, each with their own staff and what's left of the technology in them," she explained. She said nothing about the dark, haunted circles under her red eyes, or the bruises and bloody marks springing up all over her beautiful form. He knew intellectually that that beauty had stirred great feeling in him once, but all that was left was hollow knowledge. Paul was a doll now, and Echo had been stolen from him to keep him alive.

"Someone's going to have to finish the job," Paul whispered, staring out of the window.

"Yes," Echo said simply. She didn't have to say that it would be her leading the assault. She'd never rest until Rossum was finished and their prisoners freed. He knew her well enough by now. He also knew that he'd help her, for his own reasons.

Echo was now going to sleep in her old sleeping chamber. She was badly hurt and needed a doctor to tend to her, but until they sorted out the mess that the bastards at Rossum had done to Claire Saunders, there wasn't anyone in the house with medical knowledge but Echo herself, still drawing on the nursing skills of her Rebecca Mynor imprint. Topher had shown a spark of his old curious self again when Echo had told him how she could control the muscle memory sets he'd gifted her with for each imprint.

In the last week, they had all been defeated on so many levels that Paul was still more than shocked that they'd managed to come out on top somehow. When Echo had done the impossible and fought her way out of the Attic with a mission to find Caroline's memories of meeting the founder of Rossum, none of them had ever expected what they had unleashed within their midst. Boyd. Boyd Langton...

Paul felt an agonizing twist in his guts, and he forced it down. A power-hungry maniac, Boyd Langton had helped the original Clyde Randolph found Rossum in the first place. When Caroline had stumbled into his grasp, he'd found the final tool he'd wanted in his plans for global domination: her spinal fluid. Whenever the gene within that spinal fluid was exposed to the mind-wiping technology of the Dollhouse, it grew stronger, eventually allowing Caroline/Echo to survive the wipes intact altogether. And so Boyd had disguised himself as the moral center of the Dollhouse, becoming Echo's handler in a twisted father/daughter relationship, the implications of which were twisted enough to make bile rise in the back of Paul's throat.

Boyd had played them all for fools for years, putting Adelle and Topher each through hell as he forged them into the weapons he'd believed would be his "family" after Rossum erased humanity and left those who were administered with Echo's cure behind as the only human beings left. And when Topher and Bennett Halverson had nearly recovered Caroline, Boyd had seduced Claire Saunders and used her weakened mental state to coerce her into taking her revenge on Topher by murdering Bennett in front of him. And what did that get her? Sacrificed to Clyde 2.0, with her mind jettisoned off into the techno-ether where broken dolls get thrown, he thought as he wheeled the woman's unconscious body into the medical wing where she'd once taken care of them all.

When Echo had fought through it all to download Caroline's personality within herself, Boyd had interfered, but not soon enough. According to Echo, she had all of Caroline's memories, but she, Echo, the true soul of whatever she was, had evolved far too much. Caroline was gone and would never return, no matter how she lived on in Echo.

The physical pain she'd been through in that final fight, including getting her spinal fluid tapped by a deadly machine, had been nothing to Echo compared to having to fight Boyd, Paul knew. He himself had trusted the man more than anyone else in his life other than Echo, and Boyd had triggered Mellie's sleeper-assassin trigger in an effort to kill Paul and Mellie at once. Well, his plan half-worked. Paul fought down the images of Mellie's lifeless body jerking to a bloody halt at his feet, and bowed his head. In a twist of sickening irony, Topher had used Boyd's own weaponry on him, erasing Boyd's personality and leaving him a doll. Echo had turned him into a suicide bomber at the heart of the headquarters to take out the system mainframe, which Topher assured them all had shut down the Attics worldwide and killed Rossum's central computer system.

According to Echo, they hadn't harvested enough of her spinal fluid to have put her life in danger, but Paul had a feeling that she'd be sleeping for a while. She was exhausted; they all were. He finished tightening the straps on Whiskey/Clyde, making sure to follow Echo's instructions and leave nothing within arm or foot reach of her body and tightening the head restraints to ensure that she/he didn't try to commit suicide by snapping his/her own neck. When he was satisfied, he injected their final dose of tranquilizers into Whiskey's arm and left her to sleep.

Paul couldn't sleep, no matter how tired he was, and he couldn't face Echo right now, or anyone else. All he wanted to do was curl into a ball and cry, but he couldn't even do that. He was beyond tears. Feeling like a raw nerve, Paul headed into the only empty, private room left – the swimming pool. He closed his eyes and emptied his mind as he peeled his shirt off and shucked his pants and his underwear off. Naked, empty, and utterly exhausted beyond sleep, Paul slipped into the warm, silky water and let it wash over him, settling into its rocking depths and wishing more than anything that he truly was a doll and that none of this was real, that it was all an engagement that he could wipe away whenever Topher emerged from the programming room.

"Please don't do this," he begged, and something flickered in those cold, dead eyes as November's face became Mellie's once more. Large doe eyes that had begged him for love, for sex, for peace, for solace filled with tears as her entire body shook as she forced herself to lower the gun, and he had meant what he'd said, damn it; they were both dolls now and all they had left was what they felt. She loved him, and he loved her, no matter how confused he was or how empty.

"Paul," she whispered, and it was stunning how much pain this woman could emote with that one syllable that took his breath away and then the gun was turning toward her and NO! "You made me feel real..." a murmur, a whisper, a promise of love from lips made for kissing as a gentle woman surrenders to love and to reality and no matter how he reached for her it didn't matter as a look of utter peace washed over her face and in those tears leaking from her eyes there was something holy and real, and that was when she turned the gun on herself and blew her brains out, dark matter spattering the walls and blasting through silk-smooth hair he'd run his hands through as she saves him, dark, meaningless him and that's her blood washing down his face...

NO!

The first tear trickled out of the corner of one of his eyes as the water washed over his face and took his body into its comforting depths.

A/N: Inspiration for this scene came from the original (and vastly superior) Dollhouse pilot, "Echo," with Echo holding herself underwater. I'd also like to credit Miracle Laurie, the actress who portrayed November/Mellie/Madeline Costley over the course of the series; she was absolutely stunning in "The Hollow Men" and I hope that she goes on to greater things after this.

And, in fact, just to add to all of that: congratulations to the entire cast and crew of Dollhouse on the second season, which was just a remarkable feat of television, and thank you for finding a way to bring a masterful conclusion full of closure for us fans of this strange, lovely, and darkly disturbing short-lived television show.