I loved the Dollhouse finale, but I thought that there were things that could have been explained better. This story was originally supposed to happen entirely in the two weeks between 2x12 and 2x13, but due to a computer malfunction I lost the remainder of the story, so I decided to redo it as a sort of filler to explain certain things and possibly fix things that bothered me about the show's ending. It will still be somewhere between 4 and 5 chapters.
Chapter 1
They thought they saved the world, when they returned from Tuscon. They sat in Adele's office with bottles of champagne and guns in their hands. They were prepared for whatever would be thrown their way. They were prepared to defend the Dollhouse at whatever cost.
But nothing happens.
Rossum doesn't send men to apprehend them. They don't order Adele to keep sending out actives under penalty of death. Adele never sees a single complaint in a single e-mail. She doesn't even get e-mails anymore.
For all intents and purposes, they don't exist any longer. The building above them runs just as smoothly as it ever has. Adele still functions as their boss, their head of operations, but there are no more operations for her to be the head of.
Paul knows that the only thing worse than people actively trying to kill them is the anticipation that builds as he stands in the Dollhouse beside Echo and wonders what they're supposed to do now. They're a team of world-defending fighters without a purpose. They're all afraid to try and start lives outside, because they all believe that Rossum is just lying in wait for them to let down their guard.
"We can't do this forever," Echo says quietly. She's looking at Tony and Priya, who are talking in the center of the main floor, their hushed whispers not carrying to the upper level.
"Can't do what?"
"Wait. Anticipate. Rossum wants us to do something, we just don't know what. We need to get one step ahead if we're going to win this war. We cut the head off the snake, but it's going to grow back if we don't torch the body."
"I don't think this metaphor's working anymore."
Echo shrugs, grins a little.
"I don't know, I kind of like it," she admits. "Not exactly realistic, but since when is any of this realistic anyway?"
"Point taken. What do you think we should do?"
Echo is silent, then, obviously trying to figure out exactly how to respond to his question. That, of course, means that it's something he's not going to like. He can think of a few things that could mean. But when she does speak, he's surprised to find out that it's something right up his figurative alley.
"I think that we need to keep fighting. Need to keep taking down the houses one at a time."
"You'll get no argument from me."
"I thought you'd want us to stay here, stay safe."
"That's what Adele wants. I only agree with her because she has the power to wipe me."
Echo chuckles and folds her arms on the railing in front of them. Paul does the same, examining the features of the woman he used to love before a sweater-vest-wearing manchild genius took that away.
"So you'd be willing to come with me? You'd be willing to risk it?"
"I have nothing to lose, Echo," Paul says quietly. Echo puts her hand over his, and for a moment there is a spark of recognition in his brain. Something that remembers the way she put her hand on his during their last night in the apartment together, when she had tried unsuccessfully for the thousandth time to get him to compromise his morals to sleep with her.
He remembers feeling like maybe that time was the time she'd be successful, but he'd triumphed over his instincts in the end. Something that he wasn't sure he would be able to do. She'd used the words aggressively sexual, after all. Normally, that meant it was fair game. But he'd resisted, and he'd gone to sleep that night thinking that he was an idiot.
And now here he was, thinking the same thing. He's willing to go to hell for this woman, and he doesn't even love her anymore. He just knows that he should, and he used to. And maybe, maybe he will, once his brain figures out how to do it again.
"Randolph and Ambrose will have backups somewhere, backups that will know what we've done. Boyd, I'm not sure about, but I wouldn't discount the idea entirely. I wouldn't be surprised if their architecture was rigged as a recording device, record everything that's going on and download it straight to the computer so that the next time they have to use a body, they have everything there. Everything up until the last moment of life. Topher said it was possible, that the tech is out there, but there's never been a use for it because Rossum never used to offer this kind of service. Topher thought it was even beyond their moral depths. I think when he invented it, he was thinking of a crime-solving thing. Only to be used if someone was murdered and we needed to know the truth."
"Topher thinks he's a comic book hero," Paul says.
"Yeah, well, now he thinks he's the villain," Echo sighs, quiet and contemplative. Paul glances over at her, frowning.
"Isn't he? At least a little? Topher, Adele, they're on our side now, but if not for them…"
"If not for them, it would have taken maybe ten years for the tech to develop," Echo admits quietly. "But then we wouldn't be here to stop it. Maybe it's not fair, but the world needs us. We should be grateful we're in a position to do something about it."
Paul sighs and shakes his head, grinning.
"Is that Caroline talking?" he asks. Echo's face breaks into a genuine smile.
"A little," she admits. "I didn't think you'd catch that."
"How does that work, anyway? Does she just overwhelm you sometimes, say what's on her mind?"
"Caroline and I are the same person. You were right when you said that. Bennett's memory was skewed seriously in her favor. I am Caroline, Caroline is me. But I can pull back from Caroline, a little, because I've evolved more highly than her. I have more references than she does. If I'm talking to Topher, I usually push Caroline to the on-deck circle and bring a few of the rocket scientists up to the plate. But Caroline always has a say. It's her body, after all."
"How does she feel about all this?"
"She's me, but with different memories. I can turn the memories off, if I want, but ultimately I'm still her, and she's still me. She is a part of the decision making process, too. I can turn them all off, send them back to the sidelines to watch the game. They others don't like it. They're people."
"Not real people, though."
"Caroline's real. Margaret Bashford is real. The others think they're real, and isn't that what matters? They all know what's going on, because being in my head adds a spin to it. I can control them. But only the ones that Topher constructed. I can see the seams where he fused personalities together. I can talk to individual facets of their personalities, figure out who used to be who. But Caroline and Margaret, they're real people. I can't control them. The most I can do is push them to the back of my mind for a while. Margaret isn't fond of it, but she's also sort of a bitch, so Caroline and I don't feel too guilty about it."
"How do I even know I'm real? That Topher didn't screw around with my memories, give me new ones?"
"Why? You got a male-on-male experience or two that you suspect was put there by a juvenile genius?" Echo asks, a smile playing at her lips again.
"Well, I wouldn't exactly be surprised, but no. Everything feels real, but what if it's not?"
"Whatever's real to you, Paul, that's real."
"But it's not real to you. I don't feel the things for you that I used to feel. But you still do, and you remember a time when I did. There can't be two things that are real. It doesn't work that way."
Echo smiles and says, "It kind of does."
Paul doesn't know how to argue that, so he doesn't. He just takes another sip of his beer and wishes that he had never heard of the Dollhouse. But when Echo puts his hand on hers again, he doesn't move it. He doesn't even want to.
Topher spins in his chair, eyes glued to his computer screen.
"What's the problem?" Paul asks as he enters the room, crinkling his nose at the smell that hits him as soon as he opens the door. "And the smell?"
"The problem is big. And the smell, you can get over. I'm busy trying to save us all. Saviors don't just get a day off to take a shower."
"Five minutes won't kill us," Paul argues. Topher stops spinning and looks over his shoulder, very serious.
"It kind of might," he says.
"What? What did you find?"
"I hacked into the D.C. Dollhouse's server using our doggie door, except then I had to work my way through the firewalls that Bennett set up for Lipman's computer, the one that would store all the super secret evil e-mails and memos."
"Did you get in?"
"Through much ingenious tampering that should not go without notice, yes. I did."
"And the evil e-mails? What did you find?"
"I found a lot," Topher says, his face falling as he descends once again into moroseness. Paul has noticed that his moods have been fluctuating sharply as of late. His normally grating manic personality has dissolved into quick bursts of ego-fueled energy, and Paul finds that he's missing the way it used to be constant.
"Don't rush to tell me or anything," he says impatiently to mask his concern. Topher sighs and clasps his hands together, eyes wide and haunted.
"Lipman's been corresponding with Ambrose, Harding, and a few of the other dollhouse heads. They haven't even mentioned us."
"So that's your big something? Nothing?"
"No. That's the nothing that prefaces the something: the reason they're not talking about us."
"Topher, I swear to God…"
"They're not talking about us because they're talking about something bigger, Paul. They're ready to go global with the tech that we destroyed."
"I thought you…"
"Destroyed it? Yeah. So did I. But I was talking to Echo, and we figured it out. Clyde. Clyde in Dr. Saunders' body. I've always had this theory that there was a way for the imprint to go wireless, to relay information to us that's more advanced than just the brain waves and the vital signs. You know, actual data. Sounds, sights, even smells, one day, once I figured out how to make that work. So if an active died in the field…"
"Right, Echo mentioned this a few weeks ago, right after we got back from Tuscon. Downloading people in real time from out in the field and into the chair. So you think that Clyde was hooked up wirelessly to some computer, and when Boyd told him what the problem was…"
"That information went straight to the hard drives. Yes. The thing is, we destroyed those hard drives. But we didn't get them all. We didn't anticipate that Clyde could be backed up to another house in real time. We assumed that the other copies were all hard copies, but maybe they weren't. Maybe we didn't decapitate the snake, just cut most of it off so there's just a flap of skin holding it on."
"What is with you people and this snake metaphor," Paul grumbles, but Topher seems to understand that his frustration is directly related to his total feelings of helplessness. "What does this mean? Plain and simple. What does this mean for us?"
"It means we're frakked, new best man-friend. Just…frakked."
Adele waits a few months, until it's hopeless, before she orders the Attic to be emptied.
"And no one is to leave this house, understand?" she tells Echo and Paul. Topher is standing behind them, breathing heavily and looking around with wide, practically unseeing eyes.
"We can't keep people from leaving. Especially not after what you put them through up there. If they want to leave…"
"Fine. They can leave if they must, but Caroline you must be sure you impress upon them the gravity of this situation. Life above ground has never been for the faint of heart, and these people came to us because they could not deal with the consequences of whatever life up there meant to them. I believe it's safe to say that things have only gotten worse since they saw it last."
"Half of them were prisoners," Topher puts in. "Prison inmates like Alpha. Not quite so…Alpha, but still. The inmate experiment was, as a whole, pretty much an epic failure. What are we supposed to do with them?"
"Mr. Ballard, I'm sure, will be more than happy to dispatch any threats to you or to anyone else who's in range and needs a white knight, Topher." She turns to go with an indulgent smile for her young employee, a smile that barely tries to hide the anxiety and tenderness behind it. "Oh, and Topher? Do send Mr. Dominic to my office once you've woken him. I wish to address him personally."
She strides to the elevator, missing the knowing expression that Echo gives Topher.
"She's sort of got the hots for Dom," Topher explains absently to Paul when he sees the confusion in his face.
"You know, like how if a boy pulls your hair, it means he likes you," Echo elaborates. "If a girl locks your consciousness in a manmade Hell, it means she wants you in the executive elevator, in a bad way."
"A lethal way," Topher supplies, grinning faintly. It's the first sign of a smile that he's shown in a week, and Paul can hear Echo's sigh of relief even though she tries to keep it quiet.
"That poor bastard," Paul says.
"Oh, he totally digs her in return," Topher replies.
"I think it's sort of how a deer will get stuck in headlights," Echo says as Topher finishes typing something into his keyboard and gets to his feet. "He's so fascinated by the lights that he fails to realize it could get him killed…"
"…until he's trapped in the attic, or, metaphorically, roadkill," Topher finishes.
Paul shakes his head at the both of them, although he can't hide the smile. There hasn't been much to joke about later. Talking about the old days, back when the Dollhouse was just one organization, small and manageable, and filled with mostly amoral people who could still be reasoned with, it almost feels like nostalgia.
That fades, and quickly. Dominic, as soon as he can get some clothes that don't look like something out of a bad pop video, heads upstairs with Paul's pistol to confront his former boss, and Topher paces nervously, descending into nervous rambling as he's been likely to do, lately.
"He'll be back in a little while," Echo says decisively when Topher strikes off down the hall, fleeing from the Attic like something's chasing him.
"Maybe physically. He can't take this, Echo. Every time he has a chance to stop and think about it…it's killing him."
"It's killing all of us."
"Right. Which makes it kill him more."
"Since when do you care about Topher? He's the one that imprinted you, remember? What happened to all that rage and fury? What happened to blaming him for Mellie's death? For the deaths of everyone?"
"You were right when you said that it would have happened eventually. And Caroline was right when she said I should be grateful. Because even though you remain a complete mystery to me most of the time, I at least know that I can trust your judgment. And I know that you feel responsible, too. You think that you should have done more when we had the chance. Which, by the way, is crap. You did everything you knew how to do. This was always bigger than us. Now, all we can do is hope that something goes our way."
"People are being wiped out there, being printed with other people. This wasn't supposed to happen like this. It wasn't supposed to happen this fast. And there's nothing we can do to help them."
Echo is rapidly descending into one of her horribly pessimistic moods, so Paul puts his hands on her shoulders and faces her with determination.
"We're going to do everything we can, and then some. Just like we always do. And we're going to do it together."
She looks up at him with her lips twitching into something like a smile, and her hand comes up to cup his cheek. He isn't surprised when his heart thuds painfully in his chest, but he can't tell if it's love or just the pain that comes with the absence of it that he knows should be there. Like an amputee who still feels a limb that's gone.
Or, in this case, a limb that's slowly and torturously starting to grow back.
"I hope you still feel that way after I tell you my next idea," Echo says, her hand still feather-light against his skin. Paul sighs and looks down at the ground between their feet.
"What's your next idea?" he asks, unable to stop the smile from spreading across his face. Her next words, however, wipe the grin completely.
"We need to find Alpha. And, before you ask, yes. I'm serious."
