avoidance of self (open)

[TANGO]

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As if from a nightmare, Tango shot up in bed. Or at least she tried, not making it far before her head smacked hard against the covering of her pod. Her hand instantaneously shot up to her now throbbing skull. The medication and sounds had long since been turned off, allowing the Actives to sleep like any normal human... Or, in Tango's case, any normal person that happened to not have a personality. The same dream had been popping up every now and again. Never really a nightmare, but always leaving her awake, sweating, and fearful. As the last scene of it played in her head, her hands absently reached upward for the gap in the covering.

Tango had been taken to the chair exactly two times since the tech got out. She had awoken the first time with a vague since of self, although it tended to take a back seat. Tango much preferred her simple, routine life as a doll. It was more familiar... and much less complicated. For months she watched as the others around her changed... They were still her friends, but not really. They were becoming new people. Tango understood, on some level, that her body belonged to someone else. Someone who would come back for it, sooner or later.

Yet, somewhere in her head, Tango knew that she didn't want that. She didn't want the real person to come back., for so many reasons. Fear of being erased. Fear of change. Fear of what kind of person she would become. Who would chose a complicated life in the real world, like Topher and the others lived, over the world of the Dollhouse? A world where everything was so simple and beautiful. They had tried to change her one day. That was the dream she kept having. Her handler taking her for a treatment. Sitting down into the chair as it starts to lay back. Then shooting straight up with only one thought on her mind. I don't want a treatment.

Thats what she had told them before quickly leaving Topher's lab, only to have the scene replay in her dreams. Her breathing was finally calm now, but her hands couldn't find the gap in the cover. She'd been leaving it just slightly open for a while now. Had she forgotten? Had someone closed it in the night? Tango wanted out of her pod. She wanted to go to the pool and swim until she was tired again so she could go back to sleep.

Without thinking, her hands began knocking on the glass. At first it was a simple rapping, but with each second it got more frantic. She didn't like being trapped in this coffin of a hole with no way out. Her heartbeat and breathing started to quicken again. Back and forth, she switched between beating on the glass and trying to pry the covering open to no avail. All she could hope was that someone would hear her and wake up and let her out. Then again, it was hard for her to hold up hope as she all but screamed out in her panic.

[CLAIRE SAUNDERS !]

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Claire didn’t sleep. She couldn’t. She might doze off for a few hours in the little room that was hers, surrounded by the mound of paperwork that always seemed to grow despite the lack of assignments, or she might hide herself among the bookshelves in her office and take a nap on a beanbag chair she’d taken from Topher’s office at some point, but she didn’t sleep properly. How could she, when her mind raced constantly? There was so much to think about, with the dolls becoming self-aware and needing things explained that previously would have been unthinkable for them, and the fact that being in the Dollhouse was the only thing keeping them alive. There was the worry that one day, they were going to decide that they didn’t need a doctor any more, and wipe her away in favour of someone who could better serve the cause – a doctor without phobias or issues with people, or maybe an army general who could lead the dolls to Safe Haven. Claire worried about Boyd – and about Echo and Paul, and anyone else who went to the surface, but mainly Boyd – up there in the world where simply passing by a radio could turn him into someone programmed to kill. Alpha still plagued her nightmares, his face looming into her personal space and the glint of a scalpel or knife as he ran it over her now unscarred face, his laugh at her whimpers. He was out there, somewhere. Unless the butchers had killed him, he was out there. He’d got in here once, after they’d all thought he was dead, and Claire wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it wouldn’t happen again. And then there were the dolls themselves—it wasn’t just their state of personality that Claire had to categorise. She’d looked after them for years, and she worried about all of them. How would they survive the apocalypse? Come to mention it, how would any of them survive? They were self-sufficient for air, water and electricity, but they still had to eat. The stocks in the kitchen wouldn’t last forever.

So instead of sleeping, Claire wandered the Dollhouse. She’d already gone through as much paperwork as she could stomach while everyone else slept, and at least the facility was large enough that you didn’t find yourself back where you’d started after only a few minutes. Her heels clacked softly on the wooden floor of the atrium, her pace slow; she had nowhere to be, after all, and nothing to do until morning. As she passed the kitchen, Claire paused in her meandering (when had she become a meanderer? Claire liked to have a purpose, and to find herself stuck, even for a short amount of time, without one was slightly disconcerting) to make herself a cup of tea, letting it steep for a long while before throwing the tea bag away; it was better strong. She didn’t want coffee, because there was still the possibility that she might be able to doze for a couple of hours – not to mention that caffeine tended not to agree with her – but a good cup of tea would probably do her a world of good. Tea made, Claire set off again, her footsteps silent as she stepped onto the carpet areas outside the dormitories. Not all of the dolls slept there any more, but most of them did; she guessed that it felt familiar, after so long. Humans were creatures of habit, after all. Enclosed spaces made you feel safe; Claire knew that. She didn’t sleep in a bod, but her room wasn’t particularly large, and she certainly liked knowing that she was safe inside the Dollhouse. Perhaps her agoraphobia wasn’t something that Topher had stuck into her head, but was a residue left behind from the time she’d been a doll, sleeping in a pod and finding the small space comforting. Claire couldn’t say; she hadn’t been the one playing God. Perhaps it was a good thing that Topher was barely lucid now. It saved her having to find out how many of her faults had been his creations.

She didn’t hear the knocking at first; Claire had just stuck her head around each of the dormitory doors in turn, checking that everything was alright, and she’d practically turned all the way round to carry on down the corridor when the sound registered. Claire frowned, listening for a moment, and then rushing into the dormitory as it grew more frantic. She set her mug down by the door and hurried over to the pod which the noise was coming from, crouching down by it to push the glass lid off. They didn’t have to have the covers on any more – they weren’t set to automatic and there were no gasses pumped into the pods – but Claire guessed it was another thing that made the dolls feel safe. Or perhaps it had been an accident; she didn’t know. As much as she found herself feeling safer in enclosed spaced, Claire didn’t think that she would have liked to sleep in something akin to a coffin. It was too much like dying, and the very thought of that happening (whether she was killed or simply removed from this body, both ended up with the same result—her being dead, to all intents and purposes) terrified her. “It’s alright, Tango,” Claire said, her voice soft and calming as she pushed the cover all the way back, concern on her face as she looked down at the almost hysterical active. “What happened? Did you have a nightmare?”

A lot of people seemed to be getting nightmares now.