Thank you for reading, everyone! My science gets a little weird in this chapter, but they never said that this ISN'T what happens inside the heads of Alpha and Echo, so I'm sticking with it.
Chapter 2
"She wants to find Alpha," Paul mutters to Topher the following day as he sits down in the chair that Ivy used to routinely occupy. He completely recognizes the absurdity of the fact that he's going to Topher for someone to talk to, but he doesn't have many options. He doesn't have many friends. And, as much as he hates to admit it, Topher is probably the closest thing to a friend that he has. Craziness and all.
"Of course," Topher says, like this is a fucking revelation and not a monumentally bad idea. "If anyone can figure out a way to keep us from getting wiped, it's him."
"What do you mean?"
It's one of Topher's good days. There have been fewer, lately. Most of the time he doesn't even come out of that back room where he sleeps. Most of the time he just stays there, huddled under his blankets, and tries to figure out how to fix the world. Today there's a spark of the condescending, affably amoral man who used to annoy the shit out of Paul on a daily basis. Given the choice between the two of them, Paul chooses this.
"Well, the dude's a freak show, Ballard. His composite event was just the start. Or, well, it was sort of in the middle, but it was the start of the really messed up stuff. He's evolving, just like Echo."
"Yeah, except he's a psychotic."
"And Echo isn't? Maybe you're blinded by love goggles, but she's got the personalities of some seriously messed up individuals knocking around inside her head. One tiny step into the realm of the hypothetical, and she could start blasting us all away without a moral quandary in the world."
"She wouldn't do that. She's not like him."
"Whatever you say, Ballard. Just don't come crying to me when she turns on us, because I'll probably be the first one dead. If she doesn't go after you, first."
Paul scoffs and turns to go, but something stops him. He knows it's likely that Topher might not have the answers that he's looking for, but it's worth asking. Besides, he has to take advantages of days like this.
"How are we supposed to get Alpha to help us? How could she popssibly think this is going to work?"
He doesn't want to consider the possibility that she might be losing it, but then again, they're all losing it.
And then Topher looks at him, and there's something in that look that tells him there's more to this than anyone has mentioned so far. He almost groans aloud.
"What?" he asks. "What could you possibly have to tell me that will fuck up my life even more?"
Topher sighs and says, "Don't be mad, but with all the stuff that happened, we didn't really get the chance to tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"The reason we had an imprint on hand of you."
"What do you mean?"
"You never went through scans, you never got backed up, but we could imprint you with your own personality anyway? Come on, even you have to know something was up with that." He waits for a reaction, but upon getting none he sighs and keeps talking. "Look…after Alpha wiped you, I was able to recreate your brain patterns thanks to the info stored on the harddrive, but…"
"But what?"
"Well, you already know you're not really you, per se, so I don't think this should be too much of a shock…"
Paul feels his blood run cold as he suddenly understands what Topher is too afraid to tell him.
"Alpha. He imprinted himself with me. I'm in Alpha's head? The original me, the one that Alpha wiped, the one before you messed around with my brain, he's in there?"
"Palling around with the whole crew, yeah. And probably not having a good time. Although, who knows, your shared love of a certain brunette might be enough to get the boys singing kumbaya around the campfire…"
"This isn't funny, Topher."
The programmer sobers instantly.
"I know it isn't."
"She thinks that I can convince him to help?"
"I think she's convinced that you can make him a better person. He took over, you know."
"What?"
"You. You took over. The you inside Alpha's head, he pushed those other guys out for just long enough to talk to Echo. I don't think you quite understand how big that is. I mean, I knew you were annoying, but…this is just unprecedented."
"What do you mean?"
"Try and keep up. Those personalities in Alpha's head, they're all their own selves with their own individual thoughts and ideas, but they're all linked, in a way, to the central command. That's Alpha. He's like the administrator of a computer network, okay? Is that simple enough for you? All the personalities that I created for him, they're all malleable. He can twist them and contort them and convince them that certain things are right and certain things are wrong. My work is good, it's the best, but it isn't seamless. It isn't perfect. So he can see those lines where I put these personalities together, and he uses those seams in order to get in there and scramble them around a little. Confuse them, change them. The shapes remain intact, but the gooey insides get a little questionable. So do you get what that means? The dude has an army in his head. For realsies, an army that he is in complete control of. But you? He can't control you, because that imprint is the real deal. Paul Ballard, unabridged. Your soul, to take a humorous term from you. That imprint, that original you, he went up against an army of more than forty people, and he won. He won for just long enough to get a message to the woman he was creepily obsessed with. He did that. You, you did that. Do you even know how huge that is?"
Topher is starting to get flushed with excitement, a bit of his old spark returning to his eyes as he gazes at Paul's concerned face. Paul averts his stare and looks instead down at the main floor where Echo is standing, talking to Dominic with her arms folded across her chest.
"The wedge with my imprint, what happened to it?"
"Alpha destroyed it."
"Why?"
"You're asking me to rationalize the actions of a crazy person."
Paul almost reminds Topher that he was the one who made Alpha crazy, but something stops him. Topher doesn't need any more guilt trips. The guilt is eating away at him as it is. There's no need to make it worse.
"Right," he says instead, getting to his feet. "Okay."
He leaves the room before Topher can say anything else.
They're sitting across from one another in one of the sleeping pods, knees bent up in front of them like spears erected to keep out an army as they stare across the space that seems cavernous.
"Were you going to tell me?" he asks finally. She nods.
"Yes. Of course."
He looks down at his hands, rocked briefly by a wave of nausea as he considers the fact that they're not really his hands. They really belong to a man who's currently probably terrified out of his mind (a phrase that makes him feel even more nauseas), locked in the most fucked-up prison in history.
"What's it like in there?" he asks. "For Caroline and Margaret? The real personalities?"
She understands. Of course she does. When she speaks, her voice is low and gentle, like he's someone who needs to be talked down from the edge, or a wild dog being coaxed from attack.
"I keep it nice. It's my mind, so I can control it, a little. I can give them what they want. Margaret gets to be with her husband. Caroline gets to be with her boyfriend. I can make them see things, experience things. I've got a few schizophrenics in here who are…useful."
"Who do you get to be with?"
"I don't need to be with anybody," Echo answers, straightforward, and Paul's not sure what she means by that, but he's too afraid to ask.
"But they're powerless. Helpless. You mentioned that Margaret doesn't like it."
"No. She doesn't. I'm thinking of taking her out."
"You can do that? Take out one imprint?"
"Topher can. He took out Terry Karrens a few weeks ago. I didn't like having him in here. He was harder to control than the others. How was Topher today?"
"He's having a good day."
"That's two this week. That's better."
She's trying to change the subject.
"But it's not good in there for Margaret, is it?"
"No. Not for her. She's stubborn and used to being in control. In here, there's nothing. There's no control. She can try and fight her way to the top, but I'm better at keeping them away, now. "
"So what I'm going through in Alpha's head…"
"Is probably worse. Yes."
He sighs and leans his head back against the sharp stone, watching the way she watches him with her eyes so filled with concern. He wonders if she still loves him, or if she doesn't love him anymore because he's not the man he used to be. He wonders if that would make her a hypocrite. He thinks it might.
He's surprised to realize that he's feeling a fair amount of anxiety over this. Over whether or not she still cares about him. Does that mean that he cares about her? That would seem to be the implication, but he's not sure. How can he be sure?
He watches her and wonders how he can be sure.
She slowly crawls across the space between them, her eyes never leaving his for an instant, like she's afraid that breaking eye contact will release him from her spell. Maybe it will. Who knows? He takes in a sharp breath and leans back further, as if the stone will yield behind him and let him escape to some other place where he doesn't have to deal with this on top of everything else.
He pushed her away last time because it wasn't his right. Caroline wasn't in there, and Caroline couldn't consent. But Caroline is in there, now, and he can tell from the wicked smile at the corners of her mouth that she's flying co-pilot if she isn't in control of the whole operation.
"Echo," he says, the word barely a murmur, barely a whisper. She keeps coming, eyes still locked on him. But instead of stopping, instead of kneeling in front of him and kissing him like he expects her to, she pulls him forward and snakes her arms around his neck. It's not meant to be sexual, not like it was on so many evenings during their three-month stay together when she would hug him and try to hint to him that she was all right with anything he wanted to try. It's not meant to be comforting for her, as if she needs his comfort when she has the comfort of her own superiority. It's meant to be comforting for him.
She pulls his face to her shoulder and grips his back with her fingers, nails digging through his thin t-shirt and into the flesh beneath. He feels her lips on the side of his head, and he feels every muscle in his body suddenly relax. The tension that has been building for weeks, it just vanishes.
The lights go out around them as Adele flips the switch for the night, and they're left in the darkness with only each other. And it doesn't have to become anything, because it's already something they both need. They lay there silently and slowly fall asleep, their arms wrapped around each other and their hearts beating in time, gradually slower until they both are gone.
When he wakes up, she's gone. And there's an absence that he feels that's not just physical. It's the absence of his wife's clothes in their shared closet, the absence of Mellie's footsteps in the hall every afternoon at four-thirty like clockwork. It's the absence of Echo's body against his as they both grappled for dominance every night for three months. It's an absence that isn't just about the lack of warmth where her head used to be. It's something else. Something stronger, sharper. Something that threatens to override Topher's programming. It feels a little like nausea, only emotional.
Emotional nausea.
He staggers out of the sleeping pod, rubbing a hand through his wayward hair and trying to figure out the tangled emotions that are swirling around in his head. He's dizzy, whether with exhaustion or with this mental reawakening, he doesn't know. He thinks he had a dream about her last night. It's the first time he's dreamed since that day with Alpha. He figures that has to be a good sign, even if he did dream she was dead. Again.
She's sitting on one of the couches on the main floor, a book open in her lap. When he walks into the open, she smiles at him and gestures to the seat beside her. He gratefully acquiesces, shuffling sleepily, sitting close.
"How did you sleep?" she asks in the disarming, doll-like way that always reminds him of what she is.
"Better than usual," he says, and he stops just short of admitting it's because of her. She smiles anyway, slipping a leaf between the pages of her book as a bookmark and pushing it closed.
"Good," she says carefully, and he knows she's about to say something that will make his good night of sleep seem completely wasted. "Because you're going to need your rest."
"You still want to go after Alpha, don't you?"
"Yes."
"You want us to leave today."
"Yes. Tonight. Under cover of darkness."
"We don't even know where he is."
"He'll be at the warehouse."
"We don't know that for sure, Echo."
"I do."
He sighs as he stares into her eyes, trying to detect even the barest hint of doubt there. He sees nothing. She believes fully that she's right. And maybe she is. He doesn't know. He just knows that he trusts her, and she counts on that.
He nods and says, "All right."
She smiles and squeezes his hand. Before he has the chance to squeeze back, she's gone, silently moving away.
He puts his head in his hands as she moves up the stairs. She's going to see Topher, probably. Topher and Adele. Possibly Dominic, who has been much more forgiving of Topher as of late, just like the rest of them.
He feels the couch depress gently beside him, and he glances up to see Priya perched gracefully on the edge of the seat.
"Hi," she says softly, and even though they've barely spoken (other than that time her bounty-hunter imprint took a shine to him), she's got this look in her eyes like they're old friends. Maybe they are. Maybe they're all old friends, by this point. There's nothing like the end of the world to bring people together, after all. And they're the elite few who actually know stuff. They're the elite few who have been grabbing people off the streets and bringing them down to safety, being their saviors, being their only hope.
"Hey," he says as casually as he can manage.
"I don't think it's true, you know. What they say."
"That I'm preachy and judgmental?"
Priya laughs, quiet and birdlike.
"No, I think that's probably a little true. I mean what they say about what Topher did to you. Echo says…Echo says you can't love her anymore. That they had to fix your brain, and in order to do that…"
She breaks off, and Paul nods so she won't have to finish. He doesn't need to hear this again.
"Yeah."
"Well, I don't think it's true."
Paul looks at her doubtfully, at her chin in the air and her hair tossed back defiantly. She has the look of a woman who knows she's right and will stop at nothing to defend her position. He's reminded briefly of Mellie when she insisted that she wasn't good enough to love, and he shoves that thought violently to the back of his mind.
"It is, though. I can't feel anything for her anymore. Not like I used to. Not like I remember. There are little things, little things she does that I can maybe think are…"
He breaks off and shakes his head. No, no, Priya is wrong.
"Look at me and Tony," Priya whispers, glancing at the dark-haired man who is helping a nearby survivor carry a crate into one of the sleeping pod rooms. "They did everything they could to get rid of what we felt for each other, but it stayed all the same. Sierra and Victor fell in love with each other when there was nothing to fall in love with."
"Yeah, but I'm not me," Paul points out. "I'm an imprint. I'm brain damaged."
"Topher says our imprints used to fall in love," Priya replies, unfazed by his self-pitying statement. He suddenly likes her a lot more.
"Attraction is biological. It's not something you can take away from someone. That doesn't mean…"
"Doesn't mean love?" Priya asks when he fails to finish the sentence. He feels embarrassed, like he's been trying to give her relationship advice instead of just pointing out the obvious. She smiles a little and looks over at Tony.
"I know what Topher believes, and I believe he's right about almost everything, but I think he's wrong about this. This wasn't just biology. I saw him across this room, sitting right there, and I knew. I knew with everything in me that I loved him. It wasn't like seeing a guy across a crowded bar and thinking he's cute, Paul. It's something more, something instinctive. And I know you feel that for Echo, somewhere. I know it will come back."
He smiles at her more because of the sentiment than because he actually believes it.
But when he looks up at the window to Topher's office and sees Echo staring down, his heart gives a painful lurch. Their eyes connect. They both smile.
And despite everything that he has believed since Topher woke him up like something out of a demented Sleeping Beauty story, the instinctive thought races through his mind that: it's only a matter of time.
