i'm a psycho, whoa ) OPEN

[ALPHA !]

don't you come near me.
don't you come close to me.
why don't you fear me?

He didn't sleep anymore. Not here, not in the ruins of Los Angeles where everything was the same grey color. The air hazy with a fog of dust and where every noise was a butcher hot on your tail. So no, he didn't sleep anymore, and neither did he stay hidden in his warehouse anymore. They were likely to catch him there; four walls boxing him in, the window his only escape, and only an escape to death. With the first floor too perilous to live upon, he had inhabited the second, but the fall from even the second story would be sure to leave a pretty mess. And Alpha didn't like cleaning up messes, especially his own. Instead of fretting away in his “home,” he left at night, fled to the sewers where the dank drip, drip, drip, of polluted water and the echoing tunnels would alert him to the presence of another being, especially if they were close to him. And was it so much to fantasize that one day Echo would find her way down here to him and make ripples in the rotten water with him? But he didn't have time to think about this know. Alpha was listening. Waiting for a scream, anything that would draw his attention back to his prey. He had grown restless the day before, on his journey into one of the many desecrated strip malls lining the streets of Los Angeles, and as a result, a cage full of rabbits had been let loose in one of the pet shops. (The poodle had been loosed first, but it hadn't given him much to chase. In the end it seemed the rabbits were smarter.) He had given them the day and half the night to scatter, and set out during the Witching hour to Hunt them out. Alpha had yet to be disappointed by the creatures; the rucksack flung over his shoulder remained empty.

What would Echo think of him if she saw him behaving thus? Not that it mattered, since she seemed determined to keep her eyes focused on her dearest handler, and her handler only. A little respect would have been nice, if nothing else. He had made her after all, had he not? He'd triggered in her the same self-awareness that had been forced on him months ago, and what was her thanks? She fell for the man who Alpha had used to wheedle his way back into the Dollhouse. And why had he gone back into the Dollhouse? Why, what a good question, Alpha! Why? To get her out of course! Alpha snarled; his fingers repeatedly gouging at his temple. Just when he thought he couldn't take much more there was a scuffle, and ahead, done the tunnel a ways, he could see the brief flash of white before the darkness engulfed the little creature again. It wasn't long until the ripples reached where he stood, either, and by that time he was catching up to the poor, helpless rabbit. Not that he cared that it was helpless, they were an easy kill, and while Alpha did enjoy a challenge, he was getting enough of a challenge surviving than trying to make the passing of a magician's hat-trick easier.

Besides, a man could only last so long eating peanut butter, and regressing to the days of the hunter-gatherers seemed to be the least of his problems. Alpha's new-found hobby kept him from obsessing, from letting his desires overpower his logic. He could not go again into the Dollhouse, not until he was sure there was something he could do. Right now, the best idea was to keep fit and fed. Perhaps, if one of the animals proved crafty enough, he might keep it. As a pet. Alpha, with a pet. It could get lonely out in the world. At least with an animal he would have a constant listener. Until peanut butter was no longer an option for him. Then it would be a lonely world again. Alpha snarled again, and in answer, off to his left, across the shallow water, the scurrying animal flashed to a new hiding place. Shaking himself from his dreaming, Alpha focused on the chase. He was safe here, down in the tunnels. For now.

Lyrics - Say Anything

[CHLOË LAFFERTY]

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Chloë hated remaining in the active base camp longer than she had to; she felt like a sitting duck there. The butchers weren’t clever, but she was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be long before they were found out – if they hadn’t been infiltrated already, which was a possibility that needed considering; there were a couple of people that she suspected might be undercover imprints, and given that she’d been doing undercover work for years…well, it bore checking out, anyway. Maybe they were fine, and she was just being paranoid, but Chloë really did not want to sit around in some skanky motel all day and make plans for ‘finding the Dollhouse’. Plans only got you so far; at some point, all you ended up doing was talking yourself round in a circle, and there was nothing else that could be achieved without a little action. It seemed that that point had arrived, at least in Chloë’s eyes; they were getting nowhere. Their numbers were increasing, which was good, because it meant that there were more people out there who were still themselves – and more chance of one of them being her sister – but they were still a pretty raggedy bunch. Chloë didn’t like that; she liked things to be organised, with a clear picture of who did what and, most importantly, who was in charge. If they were going to be a resistance, a proper resistance, they needed to get more organised. Right now, they were simply living by avoiding the butchers (and killing any that they could) and making vague plans to seek out the Dollhouse. If it existed; Chloë was pretty sure that it did by this point, but everything was still speculation. Nobody had been inside, because nobody could find the damn place.

Which was a good thing, she had to admit. There was no point in them seeking out this safe place away from signals and imprints and the threat of being killed only for somebody else to find the exact way in that they had – somebody who wanted them dead, more to the point. She just wished that there was something more that they could do out here; they couldn’t help people who’d already been wiped, so all they could do was keep each other safe and hope for the best. At least her expectations of ‘the best’ weren’t exactly great anymore. All she really wanted was a hot shower, some new clothes and a meal that didn’t come from a tin or packet—and everybody that she knew here to remain alive, of course. Chloë thought that that one was a given at this point. They weren’t really her friends, but they were still people and her whole job had been devoted to locking away the bad ones so that the innocent could live their lives safely; it was hard now that she couldn’t really do that, and there was no telling what sort of person got imprinted and who stayed alive. But she’d do it all the same; what had happened to humanity was worse than a dystopian nightmare, and it was so wrong. It couldn’t be allowed to continue; somewhere, there were other people who believed that but who actually had more chance of doing something about it. Out here, they were just on the run.

This was why she was trying to find another place for them to stay – whether it was a place for them to move to completely or just expand the space of their base camp (Chloë was aiming for expansion, personally, because she was sick of living on top of strangers where there was nothing governing them). Maybe if they went far enough underground, she’d feel confident enough that they weren’t going to be caught unawares by the butchers and be, well, butchered. She didn’t like that option – although it was probably better than simply being wiped; she would die before she let that happen to herself. She’d volunteered for this recon mission mainly because she wanted to get out of the camp while doing something useful, rather than just scouting through what was left of the city as she sometimes did, and also because she wasn’t afraid to use her gun. Some of the other actuals still seemed hesitant to even take the safety off – which she’d done the moment she’d left the motel, and she’d been holding it ready for use the whole way through the sewers. She just hoped that she found something of use down here, because by god it stank. She didn’t even have the promise of a nice, warm shower when she got back, either. Maybe she’d find someone’s swimming pool and jump in that. She’d probably smell of chlorine, but that was infinitely better than smelling of sewage.

Chloë hadn’t gone far when she heard footfalls in a nearby tunnel – and they weren’t the teeny pitter-patter footfalls of rats, either, which she would once have been freaked out by but was no longer, having seen some much worse things in her time. She cocked her gun, wincing at how loud it sounded in the echo-y tunnels, and pressed her back to the wall of the tunnel, inching along until she came to the intersection with the tunnel she thought the noise had come from. Gun first, she turned the corner and looked around, spotting the man in the shadows. “Don’t move!”