Water, Is Taught by Thirst
"Hello, Mr. Dominic."
(They said it felt like being born, but it feels more like being shoved into your skin.)
"Sierra?" The room is half lit, and she stands mostly in shadow, the glow of computer light blue across her face.
"Adelle Dewitt, actually."
She does look like her—maybe, around the edges. Hands behind her back, heels that will probably break that back. The clothes are wrong—nice, but too dark—but it's all in those cold, probing eyes. That's what makes him believe her.
"And I'm—" He stretches his fingers; they tingle like they don't quite fit—damn. His heart starts racing and he will kill her or himself or whatever he can get his hands on first because he is not going to be a doll.
"You've been given an anatomy upgrade, Mr. Dominic." She raises an eyebrow. "I need you."
"Is that what they're calling it now?" He starts to lunge out of the chair but is stopped by a sudden pain in his left leg. He groans and sinks back. Dolls with messed up legs, eerily silent house . . . This can't mean anything good. He resigns himself to this body that isn't his. His stomach turns over and he thinks that if he doesn't get out of the chair, she can't make him. (He doesn't know what she'll make him do, but he isn't sure he wants to find out.)
"There's hardly anyone I can trust anymore, Mr. Dominic. Even given what you did to me," she raises her eyebrows again and he thinks about how Sierra can't get them to raise at the outside edges, the way they should, and he wonders what traits he does not have in this body, "I trust you most."
Victor's heard pounds against his chest as he realizes that everything, everything is wrong. "Where are you?"
Her brow furrows, then smoothes as she understands. "My original self was growing old. She thought it necessary to run—so I assume that she is dead."
"Growing old?"
Sierra's mouth grows into a slow smile. "Fifty is quite old for a Rossum employee, Mr. Dominic. She was finding things . . . difficult, before she ran. But I remain."
She gestures to the door (the house is silent, and part of him wants to be put back on the shelf) and he stands up.
Falls into step behind her as if he were Laurence Dominic himself.
(The difference between existing as yourself, and existing by believing yourself to exist, is only a matter of point of view.
Laurence Dominic is in the attic, but Laurence Dominic walks anew.)
He finds her as enigmatic and compelling as he always has. Her office is dark and he realizes, by the assortment of items around the room, that she has moved in. She sits in her chair, crosses her legs, and gestures to the windows.
"Have a look, Mr. Dominic," she says, leaning her head back against the chair and closing her eyes.
He steps forward, thinking of his body crashing through those windows (it feels like only yesterday) and of himself, wasting away in the attic. Then, as he peers through the blinds, his breath is sucked from between his ribs.
The skyline is disrupted by the mangled carcasses of buildings. The streets swarm with even rows—soldiers, he realizes, dressed in civilian clothes.
She is speaking, to herself. "Your choices tend to slim to three," she mutters, "carry out Rossum's work without question, the attic, or death."
"Ms. Dewitt?" he says, to Sierra.
"We have work to do, Mr. Dominic."
The days are innumerous, stretching out and wrapping around him so easily that sometimes he believes her (he can live forever; life is not chained to a body; our science is god).
He thinks, too often, of what he must look like now. He has never been to the attic, and shudders at the thought of going up there and seeing himself. He thinks, too, of what the real Adelle is like now—he hopes she is alive—but those thoughts are smothered by the sight of the Adelle that is, the one that breathes from Sierra's mouth and attempts to raise Sierra's eyebrows properly.
The house is kept nearly dark. A few dolls roam the corridors—Tango, Foxtrot, Charlie—but their eyes seem far emptier than he remembers them.
When Ambrose comes to visit, it is in another skin. Sierra-Adelle serves him tea, smiles, and concedes to all the orders from on high.
He stands behind her and holds his tongue.
"Our director will be visiting you soon," Ambrose says as she shows him out. "He was pleased to hear that you've upgraded. He's also glad that you've provided yourself with some company."
"Do you see," she says when Ambrose is gone and the building is as silent as death, "why you are the only person I can trust?"
One day he asks: "Echo?"
"She is dead," she answers. "And the only reason we are not in our graves next to her is because I sold my soul."
(It's irrelevant which soul she means.)
He grows restless, goes for a walk outside. The air is crisp against his skin (my skin, dammit) and the city crackles with quiet. He walks until he comes across another person, only to realize that it isn't a person at all, but a Rossum puppet, marching in sync with someone across the street. He follows them at a distance. They round a corner and he is confronted with a mass funeral pyre.
He feels vindicated, because they lost control and he knew they would—
(but he is really stuck in a box and Adelle is really gone and he sees that he can't feel anything at all.)
"I want to be real," he tells her as the sun rises through the gaps in the skyline. "And I want the real me to be real, too."
"You're talking in circles," she tells him, handing him a box of cereal. She's grown too thin. "And it's all irrelevant, anyway."
"Is it? Or are you just too scared to face it?"
She glares at him, rolls her eyes, and pulls off her shirt. He is paralyzed, feels himself grow into the couch (God, he never expected her to be this beautiful, and he has absolutely no idea which him and which her he means, but he doesn't care). She turns around. At first he is distracted by the outline of her bones against her nearly translucent skin, but then he sees the scratched out words I Am Priya Tstetsang across her lower back.
Their eyes meet and he sees that she faces the facts every morning and goes on, and goes on.
When he makes love to her, Sierra and Adelle intermingle and he has no idea who she is or who he is or if he loves her because he always has or because Victor always has, but after, as he watches the corners of her mouth lift into the slightest of smiles, he thinks that maybe it doesn't matter.
(Only it does, and he thinks about it all the time, more than he thinks about anything else.)
"We are fools," she says, but she doesn't clarify. It rains that afternoon, her office saturated in gray hues, and they lie naked on the floor with their birthmarked-backs exposing them as the liars they are.
"I'm going outside."
The moonlight casts deep shadows into the hollows of her face; she is wasting away. "Don't be ridiculous."
But he is already gone: running, running.
He means to head outside but his feet deliver him to the chair, the damned thing that brought him back to life. He is paralyzed in front of it, caught up in existential crisis.
"Do you see?" She appears from nowhere, slinking up behind him and replacing the plastic cover on the chair. "Do you see?"
(I see with eyes that are not mine. I know nothing at all.)
She sits with a glass of vodka in one hand and her forehead in the other. He almost believes that she is Adelle Dewitt incarnate, now.
"I thought I could do both," she says aimlessly, her eyes unfocused on the ghost of Los Angeles.
"Both what?"
Her eyes slide over to where he sits. "Save my life and my soul."
Boyd arrives in a car. It is the only car he has seen since he woke up, and he finds this almost more startling than seeing, in the flesh, the man who manipulated them all along. ("Boyd is the director," Adelle had told him one night. "Do you see?") Boyd walks in with Whiskey on his arm, and the way Sierra-Adelle acts, it's like a dinner date. (The illusion is cracked by meager rations and strained conversation, because everyone at the table knows that the faces do not match, but Boyd smiles, smiles.)
"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Dominic. Last I heard, you were holding Dewitt at gunpoint."
Sierra-Adelle's expression falters slightly. He stares at her for a long while, and does not answer Boyd.
She is stone-faced as Boyd and Whiskey drive away, and it is not until they are back in her office that he speaks.
"So I'm not in the attic."
She will not meet his eyes. "No."
"Then where am I?" He wants to break something, preferably her. "Where the hell am I?"
"I haven't a clue."
His blood is rushing but he can see something in her come undone. "We can't live like this."
"This is the only way to survive, Mr. Dominic. Only the strong survive."
He cannot sleep, so he returns to the chair. Stares at it, remembers it, hates it.
Pulls his true self off a shelf and sits down to die.
(They said it would feel like being born, but it feels more like waking up, reincarnation, born again. A religious experience. Reintroducing yourself to yourself.)
She sits up slowly, like she can't quite sort out the sudden shove into existence.
"Hey," he says. She doesn't look up at him, just leans forward and reaches her arm behind her back, under the hem of her shirt. She looks up at him (he hasn't seen her in years, maybe, but it feels like yesterday) and sighs.
"I am Priya Tsetsang," she says, and her words spread over them, a benediction.
end.
I do not own Dollhouse. Title is from Emily Dickinson's "Water, Is Taught By Thirst."