Warning: Character death and implied violence.
AN: Dollhouse/Call of Cthulhu fusion fic. You don't have to be familiar with Lovecraft Mythos to understand, but there are plenty of basic rundowns online if your curious.
In that hazy still dreaming space, before Echo awoke fully, Kiki slipped in, twisting the cover off the mattress, keening like a wounded rabbet. Echo shoved her down, quick enough to stop Kiki from scratching out her eyes, not enough to stop the draw of nails across her cheeks. Echo looked down at her hands, the quick of her nails stained red. Kiki moaned, something she feels more then hears, just like Taffy's insistent shut up shut up before I give you something to cry about.
In the other room, she can hear the hiss of the camp stove and the sizzle-scrape of Paul attempting to make breakfast. She crept out of bed to the tiny bathroom and closed the door.
Clicking on the light from a lone chain hanging from the ceiling, she examined her scratches. The headaches, the phantom pains and twinges in her muscles she's use to but this outright self harm was new. She ran the tap and washes her face with a washcloth. Eyes closed, she looked for Kiki, a mental shuffle through a crowded area, the other personalities restless, breaking away and shuffling in again. Made her temples ache, just when she thought she'd had them under her control they startled like skittish colts.
Margret pointed out they were more like yearlings in the spring and Echo ignored her. Kiki stopped screaming, instead repeating harsh indescribable syllables over and over again. It would be temping to let Kiki in so she could here what she was saying but Echo can't slip into her, not now. Not risk Kiki clawing at her face. Once was more then enough.
Kiki wasn't the only one. Jordan and Bree were doing the same and if she focused too hard on them and the nonsense they moaned, she'd give herself a worse headache the the one forming above her eyes.
She cut the water off and leaned against the sink, forehead touching the cool mirror. Breathing in slow counted breathes, she tried to calm the hysterical chanting in the back her mind, the three fold desire to bash her skull in the mirror.
"Echo?" Paul called from the closed door. She took a deep breath.
"Yeah."
"I have breakfast ready. Hungry?"
Not partially, but they had a long drive ahead of them to Alpha's rendezvous point and she'd have to be prepared to having to ditch the car and hike. She opened the door to take the plate of overdone eggs from Paul.
"What happened?" He reached out and she quelled the instinct to move back, letting him caress her face just beneath the marks with his thumb.
"Kiki freaked this morning. Looks worse then it is."
He followed her back to the bed, sitting at the opposite edge.
"At least let me get a bandage."
"It's just a scratch, I've dealt with worse." She dug into her eggs. He watched her eat, and she could tell by the way he sat that he was wavering between tenderness and FBI protocol.
"It's not as bad as before, when I couldn't control them," she said to appease him.
"I know." Tenderness then. The spy hunter gaged that he'd put his arm around her in about one to three minutes, and keep speaking in that low soft voice.
Her phone rang.
They both tensed. Echo got up, walked across the cabin to where the phone chimed in the microwave. She took it out and flipped it open.
A series of numbers and letters. She answered it.
"Tony?"
"Echo. Christ, Echo somethings happening. Somethings wrong with Priya."
"Tony," she froze. "What's going on?" He didn't hear her, he wasn't talking to her anymore. In the background she could hear Priya wailing.
"Tony, did she answer the phone? Tony?"
He can't here her, a clatter and a plastic crunch and the line goes dead.
She turned to Paul to find him right behind her.
"What do you want to do?" he asked, lightly touching her shoulder.
Keep going. Friends help each other out. Call DeWitt. Find out what the fuck's going on now you don't need to use that kind of languagequite you quite both of you -
"Pack up. We're not far from Alpha, I'll contact DeWitt on the way."
They're on the road most of the day. Paul drove, one hand on the wheel and the other in hers. It bugged her, most times, his need to touch her when they're in mortal danger but Tony hasn't contacted them again and DeWitt wasn't responding ether and the car was too damn quiet and her head too damn full.
Paul squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, leaning her head against the back of the seat, keeping an eye out for the slightest movement along the road. A moving vehicle didn't make them safe, only meant they moved faster then the butchers.
If she thought about Tony and Priya, all kinds of horrible scenario's played out in her head, and Taffy and Eleanor and the other Caroline only added tinder to the them out only meant Kiki and Bree's repetitive thoughts took over. Meditative breathing failed her and Margret wanted a stiff drink.
She had to asked Alpha how he dealt with them. Compare notes.
They sat on the curb outside the motel, not speaking. How much time passed she couldn't, only that the sun dipped almost to the edge of the horizon. Paul started picking up tiny rocks and empty shell casings and flicking them in the empty pool some time ago, the stutteras they hit the bottom. The only sound besides the squeak of the hinge of the door to the manager's office.
When the wind was still, the aired stench of blood didn't drift out of the rooms. Bodies, his rescued flock, sliced up beyond recognition by Alpha's hand. The walls covered in jumbled letters, written in blood. Can't be the kill calls. Not any of the remote imprints, which Alpha should have been immune to. Something new.
Tracks in his shoe size stained red lead out to the desert. The consensus in her head was not to follow, to find answers elsewhere. She doesn't have to ask Paul what he though, doesn't want to hear whatever variation of leopards and spots he would say.
The two day trip to LA was silent as if her chest was bound to tight to speak.
+++
The left the Jeep outside the city limits and approached the Dollhouse's facade on foot. Night travel was dangerous, but the street are empty. She can hear people, crying and moaning and screaming the same gibberish, in tune with the others in her head. No one threatened them, no one called out for aid.
"We're in the right city, right?" Paul said and his flat joke skipped along the building husks.
We're in the wrong city. The city of wrong and madness and I wanna go wanna go home feel it coming wanna go home now-
Paul caught her before she fell on her face. Dozens of them clamor in her brain, wanting to leave, wanting to run, wanting to dig the flesh from her bones to get away. A scream rents her body as she was dragged in a dozen different directions with only her bones to ground her.
+++
She jerked awake in the infirmary, Whiskey gently cleaning the scratches on her face. At least she can see Whiskey, though Esther wouldn't leave her bereft.
"Never been so happy to see you." Echo said, head aching as the whispers and cries overlap in an hectic static.
"No," Whiskey said, "don't be." A hypodermic tucked in her other hand jabbed into Echo's thigh and everything goes black.
She came to on the roof, leather straps banded around her arms and legs. Sam Jennings stood in front of her. No, there was something familiar in the way he holds himself, not Sam at all but-
"Do you trust me?" he asked, smile hooked in one corner of his mouth.
Echo shuddered but it's not the familiar mantra she said in a a spill of words, it's why? Why Rossum? Why the tech? Why the kill call? Why why why?
Boyd, encased in Sam Jennings body, repeated her question, laughed with a joy untouched by reality, the joy of the very young and the clinically disturbed. She'd seen so much madness, but from him, even this proxy of him, was painful. None of them heard him laugh like this before.
If anyone had, would she had suspected what he was? From a place both distant and impossible near; as if from the edge of a very crowded room, Caroline, the original one, whispers yes.
Boyd spread his arms wide, the cloudless Los Angelus sky hazy with smoke from a thousands fires; the rooftop high enough that the smell of charred rubber and flesh and gasoline merely an after thought in the dry wind.
"Soon Echo," he said.
The words from his mouth caused chills to wrack her spine, pulled her tight against the leather straps bound around her wrists.
It was a language, she realized. Not one she'd heard before and collectively she knew thirteen. It sounded just like Kiki's chant, syllables so close to what Alpha wrote over and over in macabre ink, the same waking terror the unlucky few below who didn't pick up the phone are wracked with.
Boyd picked up a velvet bag from his feet and revealed a statue a foot or so in height. Decay green, it seemed to suck the bright midday light around it.
The statue was shaped in a figure from a nightmare, and the brief glance of it before he placed it on the far ledge was enough to make her feel as if she'd been unexpectedly kicked in the solar plexus, out of breath and nauseous.
He repeated the words, garbled harsh sounds. He looked towards the sea, laughed again, an attic dream sound. Echo turned, blinked. Of the 47 personalities, none of them could describe the horror on the horizon. Everyone slipped back, leaving only blank slate Echo, of unwavering curiosity, to peek through.
Something was coming. Something that changed the sunlight and leached color from the sky, slowly like spilled watercolor paint. Something huge. Like a mountain that moved.
Taffy shook off the numbing fear first. She took control, struggled in ernest, jerked Echo sideways, trying to slip her hands under the straps around the arms of the wheelchair she's tied to. The drugs made her sluggish and heavy.
Taffy, for all her fearlessness, didn't want to look, none of them did, but Echo couldn't help it. It seemed no closer, but she knew it was.
"Of all the followers, none of the others ever got this close," Boyd said, from the ledge, his back to her. "I changed the world, changed their mined, made it ready for the Old Ones."
"Cthulhu fhtagn," he said, his words mirrored by so many in her mind. As pinpricks of light in the sky appear, opening like whirlpools of nameless color, growing larger as the mountain moved closer still, it's great wings covering swatches of sky and a writhing ropey mass reached out like some unseen thing at the bottom of the ocean. Boyd began to laugh again said the words again in english: "Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Taffy or maybe blank slate Echo, thought one thing, almost lost to the internal din, not any more.