Eventually, they all begin to scatter. Echo and Paul in one direction, Tony and Priya in another. Even Adelle spends less and less time in the Dollhouse until finally leaving it behind altogether. There is a sense of urgency to it, like they all know, somehow, this cannot last and they must take advantage of the current calm.

Claire has nowhere to flee to. There is blood on her hands and there are holes in her memory, and she isn't sure of anything anymore. The one man she thought she could trust used her worse than anyone, and the one man she felt safe in hating has been the most honest with her. Every time she thinks she understands (alpha is dead, i know who i am, you design someone to hate you to convince them to love you, are you scared? not anymore) her world is turned upside-down.

When Topher finally, reluctantly leaves, she follows.

What else can she do?

Topher has three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room, which is frankly two bedrooms and a living room more than he needs. He'd rented the place impulsively shortly after joining the Dollhouse staff and realizing his new salary gave him the ability to live in such a ludicrously large apartment in the middle of LA.

He's never really appreciated the spare rooms before now (he hardly even uses the main one), but he finds he's suddenly grateful. Whether it's because neither he nor Claire has to sleep on a couch or because the extra space means they can still avoid each other nearly as well as they used to despite the close quarters, he's not entirely sure. Sometimes he reaches for the door and stops, letting his hand linger in the air, because he can hear her moving about on the other side, the soft sounds of her footsteps.

He lets his hand drop and waits.

Loneliness is new to Claire. It's different from the simple feeling of being utterly alone. In the Dollhouse she was disconnected, an outsider, but she was always surrounded by other employees or Actives. When she left, Boyd had found her almost immediately. Here her only company is the fleeting glimpses of Topher she sees when they barely keep from crossing paths.

She's not used to being the one who is avoided. It eats at her more than she expected, every time she almost catches sight of him. She resents that he is now the one making this choice. She starts to think, try that again, couldn't ignore you then, couldn't just turn away. A horrible idea. But it did give her the answers she so desperately needed once.

Eventually, in the dark, early hours of the morning, Claire creeps from her room and silently pads across the hall to Topher's. She turns the knob – unlocked, so he's not yet that desperate to keep her isolated – and slips into the room.

She is more direct this time, climbing onto the bed and straddling him immediately, hovering over his sleeping form. She is not sure what she's thinking or if she's thinking at all, really. Her emotions toward the man beneath her have always been a complex and contradictory arrangement that resulted in her being both repelled by and strangely drawn to him. She couldn't begin to put a name to it. Hate used to be the dominant feeling, but that's been largely overwhelmed by guilt now.

She doesn't fully know what her intention is this time. She places a hand on his chest and waits for him to stir.

She counts out several of his heartbeats passing beneath her fingertips before he even begins to wake up. When he sleeps, he sleeps deeply. Slowly, his body shifts, head turns, and eyes open and begin to focus.

And he jumps, though not as dramatically as the first time, and backs away until his shoulders hit the headboard. "What–?" he spits out in surprise. He holds a hand out in front of himself defensively, fingers spread wide, and breathes heavily. After a few moments to take in the scene – Claire still balanced on her hands and knees in front of him, watching him blankly – he lets the hand drop with a sigh. "What did I do now?" he asks, sounding weary and resigned.

(The casual way he says it makes some small part of her want to laugh. She wonders if he's beginning to believe this is her normal reaction to great offenses. For all she knows, it could be.)

She shakes her head at the question before answering him. Ignored me, she thinks, put me back and took me home and then pretended I'm not here and I don't know if you're saving me or punishing me. Out loud, she says, "That's not what this is," and begins to close the distance he's put between them.

Topher eyes her uneasily, but there's nothing particularly vicious or predatory in her gaze. He flinches when her hand brushes his knee, swallows, and says, "What is it?"

Claire pauses a hair's breadth away from him, frowns. "I don't know yet," she admits, and continues to lean forward.

He tilts his head back, sighs, "Claire…" like a warning, but he doesn't squirm or push her away.

"Shh," she whispers, touching her lips to his. "Please."

Topher closes his eyes and obeys.

Topher's heart still aches for Bennett, but it aches for so many people, now. For Claire and Priya. For Adelle and Ivy. For Echo and Paul and Tony, and even, when he doesn't let himself think too deeply about it, for Boyd.

In the end, Topher files that hurt away with all the others and waits until the inevitable breakdown forces them all back to the surface.

It becomes a thing in the dark between them. At night Claire comes to his room (he never dares to come to hers), and before the morning she is gone. She's just as adept at slipping out as she is at slipping in.

While the sun is up, they fall back on avoidance, barely glimpsing each other.

It gets easier and easier to give in to her.

(Sometimes, rarely, there are in-between moments when they allow themselves to talk in hushed tones. Or early morning hours when the sun is just barely beginning to peek through the windows and Topher delicately reaches out to brush his fingertips across Claire's skin before she wakes up and disappears.)

The loneliness has abated, just barely, but Claire knows it's a false feeling. The only thing she's really done is set them both on the same downward path.

After a time, they go back to the Dollhouse, because they don't really belong anywhere else and they can't shake the uneasy feeling. They're the first ones to return (and they think first, because the others will be back eventually; no one ever really leaves here). They reoccupy their offices and turn on the computers and the emergency power but leave the main lights off.

It's always night when you're four stories underground, and their unspoken rule gets blurred. Claire likes to push him back into the imprint chair and rest her hand near the controls or sit on her desk and drag her nails down his back and scream because no one else is there. (And the dark puts Topher on edge, and he can't tell if it's better when he can touch her or if this is just a purer form of terror he feels, but he buries his face in her hair all the same.)

Topher knows there's been a darkness to Claire for as long as she's existed, creeping out at her lowest moments – though now he can't remember if that was something he had put there deliberately or something she managed on her own – but he's surprised at the deeply buried parts of himself she brings out.

They're walking past the pods when Claire stops suddenly, looks at him, and asks, "Which one was Whiskey's?" And when he points it out after a moment of hesitation, she strides over and climbs inside.

And he watches her shift and settle back with her head on the pillow, and something in his mind snaps. He slips into the pod with her and crawls over her, kisses her, shoves her skirt up past her knees. And his head bumps the hard edge, and her arms scrape against the sides, because the pods were meant for one almost-person sleeping sedately, not two people doing this. (She presses her mouth to his throat, and he swears he feels her lips twist into a smile – her lowest moments.)

He falls asleep afterwards, curled uncomfortably into the corner. It's the soundest he's slept in months.

When Adelle comes back, she seems no better for her time away. She doesn't look surprised to see them, but she does look slightly disappointed, as if she'd hoped they would manage what she could not. With a resigned expression, she asks, "What have you been doing here?"

Topher stutters over an answer while Claire keeps her eyes downcast and doesn't speak to her, and Adelle frowns at them.

Later, when she manages to get Topher alone for a moment – no longer the easy task it used to be; Claire lingers in whatever room he's in, and if she leaves, he tends to follow – she sits him down and takes a long look at him. On the surface, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong, no despair behind his eyes or lingering guilt. He even offers a familiar nervous grin when he asks what this is about. He looks tired, but he's looked tired since the Alpha incident. It's the lack of anything worse that alarms her.

She leans forward, chin against the back of her hand, and asks quite simply, "Are you alright?"

Topher blinks. "What? Yeah," he says. "I mean, not working for a secret underground organization anymore takes some getting used to, but otherwise…" He trails off with a chuckle and shrugs.

And Adelle knows she won't get anything more helpful out of him, that pushing the issue will just lead to nervous laughter and anxious hand gestures. Topher has his own way of keeping secrets.

When she gives up and leaves, she sees Claire hovering just beyond the doorway.

Echo is the last one back, returning even after Paul (who faked a smile when he saw them all but had disappointment clear on his face – he had lost track of Echo and hoped to find her here). It enforces a sense of normalcy, everyone being present. Topher becomes more himself, or at least puts on a convincing imitation. Claire finds her own comfort zone again, withdrawing and observing.

She still isn't used to the changes that have occurred: Echo's evolution, Paul's acceptance, Victor and Sierra becoming Tony and Priya. She watches Priya and Topher interact with something like affection, and she can remember sitting down, angry, with a stack of crude watercolors and the words anxiety and rage associated with Topher Brink. Claire wonders what else she got wrong.

It doesn't last long, of course. Echo in particular is very uneasy. She'll spend an afternoon pacing, and then she'll vanish for hours, days, weeks. She always comes back eventually, but no one can ever guess when.

There are times when Topher forgets to act like Topher. Something comes out in the wrong tone of voice, or he makes the wrong sort of comment, or he doesn't laugh or smile at the right moment. It makes the others stop and give him worried looks, and he has to backtrack to find the mistake, try to fix it with a more suitable response.

Claire hardly reacts to his faltering. She spares him a glance to acknowledge the oddity, but the look is neither pitying nor concerned. If no one else is around, she may reach out and let her fingers brush his cheek.

Topher sighs with something like relief and allows himself to lean into her, just a little. She's never bothered to pretend she was okay for his sake, so he doesn't bother to pretend for hers.

Claire knows the problem is that he thinks too much now.

Not in the way he used to, with ideas to test the laws of nature rushing through his mind faster than he could keep up, faster than he could explain or make anyone understand. It's the kind of thinking that slows his actions, dulls his sense of curiosity down to nothing. Someone put the concept of consequences in his mind, and he's never shaken it off. All hesitation now.

There was a time, she knows, that she would given anything for Topher to stop and give five seconds' consideration to the repercussions of what he was about to do. (Would it have made a difference if he'd learned earlier to think in the long term, or were they doomed to this from the start?)

Now, though. Now his hand stalls at her hip, and his fingers stop tracing the seam of her skirt while his eyes glaze over, his expression taking on a look of subtle horror at what he's allowing himself do.

And right now she desperately needs him to keep moving, to keep up this pretense of skin-on-skin with no people controlling the motion, because if he stops now it will give her too much time to start thinking.

She feels him begin to pull away ever-so-slightly and quickly grabs for his wrist to hold him in place (too late to stop the thoughts from flooding her mind).

One day Echo comes back leading two people Claire recognizes as Bravo and Juliet, and she spends a few seconds trying to reconcile her knowledge that they were released from their contracts before anyone went to Tucson with the fact that they are clearly in a tabula rasa state.

Echo is angry when she explains, "Found them wandering around near one of the buildings Rossum owns. It didn't affect anyone else, so I don't think they've managed to rebuild Topher's design, but they're testing something, and they're testing it here for a reason."

Topher is numbly shaking his head in disbelief, looking like he might be ill.

Adelle is the first to speak up, says, "We still have their original personalities on file. For the moment, we can fix that much," and that's when Claire first begins to consider the possibility.

"You realize you're still technically under contract. There's no reason to rush this," Adelle tells her, offering up the excuse to bend the rules. They do that so well here. But Claire says no, it should be done as quickly as possible.

Like ripping off a band-aid, she thinks, a bit madly. (Only that's going to sting no matter how fast you do it, and if you put it on wrong or the cut hasn't fully healed yet you could be doing more damage.)

She talks to Topher in the dark, where the lights from his computers throwing blue shadows on his face and make him look like a ghost. He's suffered from the last few days; she knows for a fact he hasn't slept since Echo came back. His expression is shell-shocked when he asks, "But what happens to you?"

Claire shrugs like it's nothing, like she didn't run away from this once already. "I don't know. I assume the imprint wedge will be kept somewhere. I guess that's up to you, isn't it?" He flinches, and she looks away. It's not as satisfying as it once was. "It doesn't matter. I'm not real anyway."

Topher has his arms wrapped around himself. He hunches his shoulders and looks down, mumbles, "You have to be." He squeezes his eyes shut for several seconds, holding back some outburst of emotion or a fit of nausea. Then he lifts his head to say, "How long until you…?"

"As soon as the scars are gone." Like the damage was never done. Whoever owns her body will never even know of it.

She sees Topher's fingers twitch and takes a step back before he can reach out to touch her face. It would be far too easy to lose her resolve.

From Topher's perspective, she chose the worst time to go through with this, while he's still reeling from the idea that his efforts haven't finished causing damage. He'd asked her several times why she wouldn't seek out her original identity; now he's all but begging her not to.

Claire tells herself it's not her problem and certainly won't be the owner of this body's problem once she's taken it back. Better to end it quickly. She tries to focus solely on being Dr. Saunders again, following her programming: treat patients, quietly disapprove, avoid Topher, never even think of running no matter how terrifying the prospect of this death might be.

When Topher's fits of guilt keep him awake for too many hours at a time, Claire hands him sleeping pills and water, doesn't linger in his room or sit beside him until she feels his breathing slow.

In the end, none of it matters. The remote wipe is perfected for use without Active architecture while she's still recovering from the last surgery, and whoever Whiskey used to be gets lost in the chaos once more.

Hushed voices in Adelle's office: "I don't understand why Rossum would so blatantly use this as a weapon. They've always valued the controlled secrecy of their operation over everything else."

"I don't think it is Rossum. This tech's all over the world; it'd be easy for it to leak. This is exactly what they were afraid of."

Echo corners Topher on one of the walkways. "Was he right? Is there a way to fix what's happened to them?" She points down at the main floor, where the victims they've managed to locate mingle with the former clients and dolls who sought them out in a terror.

Topher takes a step back; she still makes him nervous. "I don't know. It's possible in theory." He gestures in her direction. "Obviously, something in you keeps the wipes from taking. If it could be isolated, you might be able to find a way to pass that immunity on. Ulterior motives aside, the guys at Rossum knew their stuff." With a shake of his head, he finishes, "But it wouldn't be a cure, more like…the remote wipe version of a flu shot. I don't know how to reverse something like this…" (His gaze drifts to the side, watching their growing refugee camp, and he mumbles under his breath, "Can't fix it, can't fix anything.")

She sighs. "It's somewhere to start."

It's the last they see of Echo or Paul for over a year.

It's surprisingly easy for Claire to keeping being Dr. Saunders, even now that it's for the long term again. For all that's changed, so much is the same: blank dolls wandering, injuries to tend, trouble with Echo, confused and contradictory news about Alpha, the inability to leave or seek help from anyone. The lie is easy enough to maintain.

Avoiding Topher is no longer possible, though. He's one of her most frequent patients. Adelle, desperate, said, "He's breaking down," and Claire wanted to say, "I know," but instead said, "I'll do what I can." (She feels some sympathy for Adelle, who took on the role of leader because no one else would and must listen to the more ridiculous ones whisper of 'Caroline' as a savior to come. Setting her shoulder once, Claire heard Adelle grit out through the pain, "Lot of good she's doing us out there.")

And if he's not in her office to take his pills, she's following him and monitoring his behavior, trying to work out the right mix of chemicals to make him function again, though she knows, deep down, that it won't work. (He reaches out to touch her where the scars should be. "They fixed her, but I'm keeping you broken.")

She watches as he starts to scribble on walls instead of paper and despairs at the way he keeps spiraling downward while she manages to stay afloat somewhere in the middle. She wishes they were still on the same path (though to drag him up or let herself fall, she isn't sure).

After an attack leads to them sealing off the entrance, Topher throws himself, suddenly and completely, into some project involving the chair. He dismantles it piece by piece, puts it back together in new ways, cannibalizes the other machines in the room for parts. He doesn't offer an explanation, and nobody is willing to try and interrupt.

Claire brings him his medication and Adelle goes up twice a day to make him eat something, but for the most part, people avoid the upper levels while he works. The cynical ones look up through the windows and mutter darkly about him snapping and using the tech on all of them (and Adelle isn't there to hear it, so it's Priya who has to snap, "He wouldn't do that," to keep the rumors under control).

More than a week later, the imprint room comes to life with a burst of blue light and noise, and Adelle and Claire exchange a frantic look before rushing upstairs.

They find Topher sitting on the floor in front of the chair, gazing up at it with a satisfied grin like he hasn't worn in ages. He's bleeding lightly from a patchwork of shallow cuts along his arms, and there's a burn mark on his left wrist; he must have been working all night while no one was watching him. A cursory glance tells Claire none of the injuries are serious, so she moves tentatively closer to the chair while Adelle crouches down beside him.

"What happened, darling?" Adelle asks gently, cupping his cheek.

Topher keeps smiling and looking forward. "Fixed it," he breathes. "Only thing I can."

Adelle looks over her shoulder at Claire, who is inspecting the panel now installed beside the chair. "What did he do?"

Claire shakes her head, watching as the screen comes to life with her touch. "I don't know. He changed the interface." She runs through the files, trying to make sense of it. She has the knowledge required to understand Topher's programming and break into his most secure systems, but even before his mind had begun to fracture she couldn't follow the train of his thoughts. However this system is organized makes no clear sense to her. "It looks like an imprint database, but they're incomplete…"

Adelle looks concerned. "What purpose would a partial imprint serve?"

Topher speaks up again, "To remember." His gaze shifts away from the chair as he finally acknowledges the other two. "That's important. Memory, not the whole person. Don't want to waste. No room for mistakes."

Claire looks down again. Now she can see the dates imbedded in the numbers of the file names and the letters that must represent people.

"Better," Topher says with a nod. Then he gets up, walks straight out of the imprint room and out of the lab, and never comes back upstairs.

Claire begins to split her time between doing her job and trying to understand and simplify the new imprint chair.

She tests on herself first without telling a soul – somewhat suicidal in her case, but she finds herself caring less and less. A few days of work tell her she can copy memories to and from the system with no lasting damage (beyond the unsettling experience of watching herself hold guns trained on Echo and Adelle while a different person talks for her. Of course Topher would have used his own memories). The process is safe enough for someone with Active architecture.

She recruits Tony to help her with the more complicated procedures, because he's always been a bit more fascinated than afraid when it came to the technology. Once Adelle figures out what they're doing, she only scolds them briefly before volunteering herself to test the process further. (Priya is uneasy about the whole idea, and after a harshly whispered argument with Tony, she beings collecting photos and trimming them down, preserving memory in a way that better suits her own talents.)

Claire spends most of her time that isn't spent in the imprint room in the only occupied sleeping chamber, coaxing food and pills into Topher's mouth, clearing his toys and notebooks from the pod so that he might try to sleep even if he won't leave. He's getting worse and worse, and she keeps him strictly on haloperidol now, because it works as well as anything will and changing the meds just makes him sick. She can count the number of good days he's had this month on one hand.

When he's lucid, he shows her his notebooks and the scribbles on the walls, babbles on excitedly about what he's figured out. More often, she deals with his fits and moods, trying to keep him as calm as possible and remembering the time when they were both just a little wrong in the head (now she's still a little wrong and he's too far gone to accommodate the scale anymore).

And it only happens one more time.

She's sitting at the edge of the pod trying to talk him down, pill bottle clutched discreetly in her left hand, when Topher suddenly grabs for her arms. It's surprising. He doesn't usually cling to her; he saves that for when Adelle is looking after him. (When Claire walks in, he flinches, and she's afraid he's beginning to remember only the sound of a gunshot when he sees her.) It throws her off, and she just stares for several seconds. His eyes are bright, focused on her face and not glazed over, so it must be a good day even if he isn't acting it.

He glances down at her hand and back up quickly. "I don't want to take those today," he mumbles. "It'll be harder to think." His fingers shift and slide around to her shoulders, making her lean closer, and he rests his forehead against hers. "Please, Claire."

And at the sound of her name, the pill bottle slips from her fingers and rolls away behind her. She feels overwhelmed, like she might cry or scream or something as she leans in, changes the angle of her head, and presses her mouth to his. She feels him freeze up for one terrible moment before falling back on instinct or old habits. His eyes slide closed a moment before hers do.

And this is okay, she thinks as her hands slip under his clothng. All she's doing is invoking the biological fact that men tend to become drowsy after sex. After this, Topher will be calm even if he refuses to take his medication today. He'll sleep without nightmares and won't wander the halls. This is perfectly fine. (She covers his mouth when he gets too loud. The last thing she needs is for Adelle to come running.)

The aftermath is that she tries to foist most of caretaking duties onto Adelle.

"He's more likely to listen to you," she says, straight-faced. "He likes to fight with me. That's what I was built for."

And Adelle sighs, rightfully put upon, but if she's ever had a weakness it's Topher. She takes the pill bottle from her hand and forces a smile, and Claire bites her lip and watches her leave.

Echo comes back and ends their waiting game in an instant. They barely have time to register that, yes, it really is her standing there before she launches into a whirlwind of explanations and commands. Most everyone falls over themselves to obey. People crowd around. Tony eagerly leads her and Paul to the weapons stores. (Adelle is the last to lower her weapon, and her expression shifts rapidly from disbelief to relief to disgust.)

Claire has to all but force Echo to sit down long enough to get the gash in her leg stitched up. Even then, she keeps shifting, looking around. They exchange the briefest of pleasantries and evade certain lines of questioning, and Echo continues to talk plans and problems between it all.

She says, "I need Topher to put me in the chair."

And Claire looks down and whispers, "Topher doesn't go up there anymore." Shakes her head, moves the conversation forward. After all the changes she's made, Claire can probably work the chair better than Topher could when he reassembled it.

Echo nods and doesn't push. "I know exactly where we're going," she explains. "Someday someone may need to know."

"How will they know where to look?" But even as she says it, things begin to fall into place in Claire's mind.

Echo mumbles, "I'm working on that," and doesn't meet her eye.

Claire assesses the contents of her shelves and begins to divide it up among several small bags, trying to strike the balance between what they need to carry and what they can carry. It's impossible to travel light and be fully prepared for a medical emergency.

Adelle stands at the doorway to hand each one out as she finishes. When Claire closes the last one, she turns around to hand it to Adelle, and she holds up a smaller pack in her other hand. "These are Topher's," she explains. "Make them last as long as you can. I know they don't do much for him, but they do help."

Adelle nods. "Thank you, Dr. Saunders." She tucks both packs under her arm and gives Claire an appraising look. "You're sure you won't come with us?"

Claire looks down slightly and shakes her head. "Someone who can access Echo's imprint has to stay if anyone else is going to find your safe haven."

"Perhaps no one else needs to find it." Claire looks up sharply, and Adelle sighs and shakes her head. "I shouldn't bother. You've made your decision. You're as bad as her."

Claire offers a small smile. "I do appreciate the sentiment."

The pill bottles rattle as Adelle shifts her weight. "He's not going to be pleased when he finds out you're staying behind."

"I'm not going to talk to him and cause a scene. I won't even let him see me. You can tell him once you get there so it doesn't make the journey difficult."

Adelle smiles wryly. "He'll figure it out before then." She turns to leave. "We're leaving the door unsealed. Be careful."

Claire nods. "And you."

Echo is the last person she sees. Claire hears her walk into the room as she's cleaning up the remaining medical supplies, but she doesn't talk right away. So Claire keeps putting away rolls of bandages and collecting empty boxes while the other woman leans against the sliding door and watches.

She closes the cabinet, and Echo finally says, "You know this won't end well for you. No matter what happens, it's gonna be bad here."

Claire doesn't turn around. She takes a deep breath and lets go of the handle. "I know."

"You'll lose your mind."

"I know."

Echo waits, but Claire doesn't offer anything more. She pushes away from the door and hefts the bag on her shoulder before it can slide down her arm. "If you change your mind, you know where to look to find the way."

This time Claire turns just enough to look across the room. "Thank you."

Echo nods and leaves to take her place at the head of the pack. Claire listens as she leads everyone out into the light, listens until the sounds of movement, the clicks of weapons, the worried whispers fade into distant echoes and then into nothing. In the silence, she picks her way across the floor strewn with abandoned belongings nobody could afford to carry until she reaches the sleeping chambers.

Topher's things are untouched; he brought none of it with him, probably wasn't allowed to. A few objects have fallen into the pod and a stack of books has toppled over, but he must have fussed very little when Adelle told him to move. One candle is still burning.

Claire strides across the floor and kneels down to clear a space in the pod before she sits down inside. She looks at the writing on the walls and delicately runs her fingers over it, too soft to smudge. Most of it is numbers and equations no one but Topher understands, but there are some words and phrases, half-formed thoughts. Names. She's there twice, she knows, if only technically. Claire is scrawled between Adelle and Echo, below Bennett. To her left, crowded just below the rim of the pod, is Whiskey. Claire underlines it with her thumbnail, tries to remember if this was Whiskey's pod or not. She doesn't know if there was a method to where he made his burrow.

She shakes her head and pulls her hand back. She'll have plenty of time to wonder. There are facts and figures still stored away, files on computers if she's ever daring enough to access them. Claire blows out the candle and leans back until her head touches the pillow, settling in for an even longer waiting game.