connection in an isolating age {open}

[CLAIRE SAUNDERS !]

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After a couple of discussions with Boyd, Claire had made the decision that she was running out of excuses for staying in her office the whole time, just as she’d run out of excuses for staying in the Dollhouse before. There was no need for her to do it, when she was generally more comfortable around people now, or at least comfortable enough in herself to tolerate their company, and those who were in here – they were the people who she was likely to spend the rest of her life with, given that the outside world wasn’t safe (and she had no desire to be out there, even if it was). She had never been sociable, even as a child, but she had no reason to fear the people here; there wasn’t enough of them to be a crowd, and…well, Claire was feeling a little lonely. Sure, she spent time with Boyd when she could, but he was busy too, and she was still wary around most of the other staff, and while she saw many actives a day, there was a limit to how much they could stave off the loneliness simply because of the way their minds were. She’d never thought she’d be lonely; she’d always been overtly self-sufficient, even when in a relationship – not that those ever seemed to have lasted for a lengthy amount of time for her, even before she’d come to the Dollhouse and got attacked – and why should the apocalypse be any different? Sure, things had changed recently, but she was still herself. Maybe it was Whiskey that was making her feel that way; Claire knew that Whiskey was there, though whether the trigger for these new aspects of her personality had been the recollection of her memories or they’d been things that would have happened regardless, she didn’t know. Whiskey had always liked company – the company of her fellow actives and the company of the staff here. She’d liked the company of Alpha in particular, until he’d gone and attacked her. Neither Whiskey nor Claire liked him anymore. Neither of them were violent – Whiskey because she was a doll and Claire because preserving life was what she did – but both of them wished he was dead.

However, even her fear that Alpha would somehow have avoided being wiped (she’d be worried that he’d be imprinted with the personality of a psychopathic serial killer, but wait…that was what he was already) and was coming to the Dollhouse to kill them all couldn’t keep her hiding in the dark of her office forever. It wasn’t as though she was claustrophobic – of all her phobias, that was one that she had avoided – but even she was beginning to crave a bigger space. Sure, she ventured into the main Dollhouse regularly, but she never really stayed. She didn’t belong there, among the actives, but she didn’t belong among the staff either; they knew she was a doll, she knew it too – and she knew they knew. Maybe she was being paranoid when she thought they were judging her for it (she could almost hear the comments: oh, why has she got so many problems? Couldn’t the imprint have been more efficient?, but that was something that they needed to take up with Topher, and given that he was rarely in his right mind these days, that would probably be a little difficult), but she wasn’t one of them. She was moral where they weren’t, she voiced her opinions where they followed Dewitt blindly—she was everything they weren’t. Claire wasn’t necessarily sure that that was a good thing. And yet again, she had Topher to thank for it. It was funny how one person seemed to have controlled her life, especially when she hated him as much as she did. The only person Claire hated more than Topher was Alpha – and she wasn’t thinking about him. Thinking about him made her remember the attack, and that made her scared, and really, she could be doing without that at the moment; she was doing so well. She wasn’t even in her office at the moment.

In fact, she was sitting in the middle of the cafeteria, a bowl of ice cream in front of her; Claire figured that if she was going to take a leap like this, she at least deserved a reward for it and though she’d made a resolution to cut back on the sugary things she ate (having a jar of lollipops in her office was just too much of a temptation, most days), she thought she could let it go, just this once. And she did happen to like ice cream a lot; she was just glad that they hadn’t run out of it yet. In fact, the Dollhouse was surprisingly well stocked; once they ran out of perishables, she was sure that there was enough food in here to last for – well, lifetimes, probably. She guessed that was the point; the Dollhouse was supposed to be self-sufficient, when necessary. And alright, so she hadn’t entirely left her work behind – she had a file on the table next to her bowl and was currently skimming it, and a pen in her pocket in case she had notes, but it was a change. Claire abhorred change, but she knew that sometimes it was necessary; you just had to take a big leap of faith and roll with it. Sometimes, it didn’t end up being as terrible as you predicted. This little trip, for example, was actually turning out to be quite good.

[ECHO]

Sometimes she thought the life of a doll was about a thousand times simpler than the life she was currently leading. But from experience the young female knew that the life of a doll wasn’t much of a life at all. You were nobody, an empty slate waiting to become somebody, somebody that didn’t belong to you, someone who wasn’t the real you. Echo had once been one of those empty slates, waiting to become somebody. Now, however she was somebody. She was Echo. Maybe Echo didn’t rightfully own this body, Maybe Echo wasn’t supposed to exist, but she did. And she wasn’t going anywhere, at least not without a fight. Caroline wasn’t a nice person, at least not from what the young female had discovered. Caroline had, after all, given her body to the dollhouse right? Finder’s Keeper, Loser gets to be stored on a disc or whatever it was, somewhere that wasn’t inside the former doll’s brain. Echo was in charge of this body, Echo had control. Not Caroline, Never again Caroline. Echo wasn’t supposed to be Echo, at least not in the “I’m a real person, hear me roar” sort of way. She was supposed to be a zombie, just another body, another blank state. However, she wasn’t any of those things, she had been her own person. The dollhouse was there to create people, and then erase them. Echo was an anomaly, one created because she was different - and because of Alpha.

Alpha had been the one to dump thirty six personalities into her head, at one time. That was just a small part of it, Echo became a person - accidentally. She wasn’t like the other dolls, and now because of it she had a job to do. She had to lead the resistance, she had to take down Rossum even if it killed her - which to be honest, it just might do that. Not in the sense that she’s dead, her body isn’t breathing - but in the sense that she’ll no longer be Echo. Instead, she’d be Caroline. That was the final straw, the final weapon if they absolutely needed it. She’d already decided this after coming back from the attic. She’d only bring in Caroline if they needed her, for Caroline knew information on the Dollhouse and Rossum, information no one else on her team had known. At least not to Echo’s knowledge - which is sort of the problem isn’t it? Ever since her return from the Attic, Echo had become the overprotective leader and sister type of the group. Why shouldn’t she be? She had the knowledge and the skill to protect everyone, she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. Even though that was enough to make anyone crash, and break under the pressure, Echo did not. She knew she did what she had to do, and she knew why she had to do it. Echo was always the one who wanted to save people, even when Caroline was in control of the body that Echo now possesses.

A soft sigh escaped past the former active’s lips as she made her way through the area of the Los Angeles Dollhouse. She was rather hungry, she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten something real. She’d recently gotten back from a salvage mission, the more and more time that passed the less and less food her people had left. Being Echo she went to get them more food, with the help of Anthony (formerly Victor) and Paul Ballard. Paul Ballard, was a subject that made her heart race and her stomach tumble in knots. It was clear that by the time she had spent with him when they were both AWOL, that she loved him. But now wasn’t a good time for love, now they had to fight this war. Maybe later, maybe later there would be some time to stop worrying about the war unfolding around her. She ignored the thin, long cut that rested upon her upper arm, one that she had received earlier that day. There would be time for fixing that up later, Right now she needed something to eat. She entered the kitchen and began to rummage around for something to eat, finally she settled on a brownie and a bowl of ice cream.

One of her past imprints must have been the owner of one hell of a sweet tooth. After putting her “meal” together she lifted it up into her arms and entered the Cafeteria. A small smile formed upon her face as her sight landed on Dr. Claire Saunders, Whiskey. Rolling her shoulders back a soft sigh escaped her lips and she began to walk towards the other female. She placed her ice cream down on the table and sat down across from the doctor. She jammed her spoon into the mounds of ice cream in her bowl and then looked over at the female that sat across from her. ”Hello, Doctor Saunders” she began, her tone friendly and soft ”How’s the ice cream?” she said noticing the other woman was eating the same thing, Echo wondered if she had brownie on the bottom of the bowl as well.

[CLAIRE SAUNDERS !]

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There were times when it was simpler to pretend that there wasn’t a war on, that most people weren’t dead or no longer themselves and that Rossum – the very reason that they were all here – hadn’t decided that taking over the world was its next best political move. None of those things were true, but it was easier, somehow, to only think about the now. Claire had no idea what would happen in the future; would she still be Claire, or would she die? (She wasn’t going to let them wipe her, because like it or not, they had made her this way and she was not letting them take that away, but she couldn’t control what Rossum were doing.) Would they all be dead, for that matter? She just knew that now, she had to look after the people in the Dollhouse, even those that she didn’t like, and write down her findings both for her reference and just in case someone in the long and distant future wondered what had really happened in the last surviving Dollhouse – the renegade Dollhouse. Claire wasn’t a novelist, but she wrote reports all the time; she was simply reporting on what was happening, with as an objective view as she could manage. She knew how bad it was out there – she had always known that the world wasn’t a good place to be in, that she was safer down here in the Dollhouse were nobody and no signals could get in or out – but even she wanted to pretend that things were just normal, sometimes. That they hadn’t healed her scars and that she wasn’t terrified of all these people in her care being made into something terrible, like Alpha…that the world wasn’t ending. Claire might not have given off the impression that she liked the world – she didn’t, especially – but she didn’t want it to be over, either. She didn’t want to die.

Claire wasn’t a creative person, by any stretch of the imagination. While Whiskey had enjoyed drawing and pruning bonsai trees (the latter of which now terrified the part of Claire that knew what Whiskey felt), Claire didn’t have any of those escapes; her work was what was important to her, so much so that she could get lost in it. Even so, Claire still had the capabilities to imagine that things were different; if she’d really had the power to change things in the past, there was a lot she would have done. Changing the present was harder to imagine, though, because it was happening right now; Claire knew there was a war on, that they were possibly the only resistance fighters and that there was very little likelihood of them ever being able to save the entire world – but also that they were going to try anyway. She’d help, the best she could; she had no desire to fight, but she was a doctor, and looking after people was her job. As long as they didn’t expect her to fire a gun, that was absolutely fine. Claire had never handled a weapon in her life – she couldn’t even touch knives, now, without cringing and wanting to hide so she could have a panic attack in private – and that was one thing that wouldn’t change. Fighting against the people in charge was one thing; harming others, especially if they weren’t themselves, was quite another. The only person she really wanted to kill was Alpha – and even then, Claire wasn’t sure if it was just a whole load of hot air. Could she kill another human being? She was a doctor; she’d vowed never to harm. Claire didn’t know, and frankly she didn’t want to think about it; she just wanted to read her report and eat her ice cream, and not have to worry about anything for a little while.

”Hello, Doctor Saunders. How’s the ice cream?”

Swallowing her mouthful, Claire finished the sentence she was reading, using her finger to mark her place before looking up. “Hello, Echo,” she replied. Of all the company in the Dollhouse, Echo was one of the better people to be around; she wasn’t like any of the other actives, and Claire liked that – it made her feel that she wasn’t alone, being an imprint who remembered who she was before. Echo understood what she felt better than anyone else, and the same was true in reverse. They were both anomalies, broken dolls, and though Claire didn’t really consider herself to have friends, she thought that Echo was one of the closest she had. “It’s good, thanks. I’m just glad the freezers still work.” In fact, she was glad that they still had power at all; she thought that it was probably one of the first things to be cut, in the outside world, but given that the Dollhouse had its own generator and could basically be self-sufficient forever, it wasn’t an issue. She looked down at the report she’d been reading, making a note of which page she was on before flipping it shut; she might not have spent much time in other people’s company, but she still knew not to be rude. “How are things going?”

[ECHO]

The Dollhouse. Simple name, Complex nature. Feelings, moments, all of it was very complex , very - out of the ordinary. Then again Echo wasn’t even close to being ordinary, and that wasn’t because she was a doll. It was because she was a person, she became a human being. One with her own thoughts, her own emotions and feelings and one who was indeed real. Or as real as anyone was these days. Who exactly was themselves? Topher Brink had gone insane, Paul Ballard had was now some sort of doll, Doctor Saunders was an active. It seemed the only people who are themselves are Victor and Sierra because they had their original imprints, Victor, Sierra , Juliet and the others who were their original selves still wandered the dollhouse and she could not help but to wonder why. Why would you stay in the place that literally mind raped you? It didn’t make a lot of sense, unless of course it was the safest place around. And lately the Los Angeles Dollhouse was seemingly the safest place. No Rossum, No Imprinting, Secluded location - It was safe. But Echo didn’t feel safe. Not with the approaching war, one she had to lead. Not with the possibility of Caroline resurfacing and taking control of her body, erasing what Echo is and becoming the monster she heard Caroline was. Echo needed Caroline in this war, She needed her and she had to get help getting her back. In good time. All in good time.

Time that was hopefully lengthy and far away from the given moment. It was a disaster out there, in the real world. It was a battlefield, it was just like in Clyde’s nightmare in the attic. Stupid Clyde. If he hadn’t helped whoever his partner had been create the dollhouse then no one would have been in this position. It was their fault, they were Rossum and they were bringing upon the apocalypse. The end of the world, of freedom and free will. It was Echo who was in charge of stopping it all. No pressure there, none at all. It was a relief for one moment to site down with a friend and have some ice cream. It was a relief to be even semi normal, to not have to make her rounds and check on everyone, get them what they needed. Plan their next move, Go to sleep and start the entire routine over again. No, that would come later, hopefully a lot later. She looked over at Doctor Claire Saunders, Formerly Whiskey, Formerly well honestly Echo didn’t know who she was once upon a time. She didn’t care to be honest, she liked Doctor Saunders, she was her friend, and she didn’t want her to go away. “ It is a good thing that we have even the smallest amounts of electricity ’’ she said as she shoved some ice cream into her mouth. She rolled her shoulders back a shoved her spoon back into her bowl. “Alright I suppose. We went on a ‘salvage’ mission earlier, managed to get some food and medical supplies. Those are in your office” she said making sure to only say the positive things.



( ooc:: sorry it's so short and delayed, not feeling so great lately & been busy lol )

[CLAIRE SAUNDERS !]

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It wasn’t often that Claire allowed herself the time to sit in a public area and just watch what was happening; she was a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist, and observations of human behaviour held only a little interest for her—not enough that she wanted to do it instead of something else. Claire liked to keep busy, both mentally and physically, and sitting doing nothing wasn’t something that she found especially easy. But looking round here, she could observe that a lot had changed recently, in the way that the dolls were treated and what they were allowed to do. They’d always been well looked after, but they’d not been allowed to socialise; now they were grouping, but more than that, they were aware of what had happened to them, and it wasn’t being stopped. Claire thought it a good thing, as they were all human beings and deserved to be treated as such, but she remembered not that long ago the threat of dolls being sent to separate houses if they so much as had a conversation. There were too many changes happening far too quickly. She had no routine anymore, no precedents for dealing with actives who remembered who they were or what they’d been forced to do – other than Echo, who’d always been the exception and even now, she was different to the other self-aware actives in that she had multiple personalities in her head and was able to access them at any time – and Claire hated not having a routine. She liked to know what she was doing, and change…change didn’t fit well into her personality. She wasn’t afraid of it, per se, at least not in the same way that she was afraid of other things, but she preferred it not to happen. But right now, everything was changing; the world was changing, the actives were changing…she was changing. That was just a little too much change for Claire to take; she had to purposely keep some things in her life exactly the same…like ice cream. Claire had always liked ice cream; that was one thing that hadn’t changed at all.

“It is a good thing that we have even the smallest amounts of electricity.”

Claire looked down at her bowl, swirling the half-melted ice cream around it with her spoon. “We have a generator,” she said, although her knowledge of the Dollhouse’s electrical systems was limited, to say the least. She knew very little about machines; she could run the imprint chair, and she knew how to adjust things from the control panels within the Dollhouse, but send her off to fix the generator and she’d be completely lost. She had computer skills, not mechanical or engineering ones, which was a shame given that she couldn’t use computers anymore. “Technically, we should be self-sufficient for years.” They’d run out of food before then, though; water, air and energy could all be recycled as well as rationed, but they needed food to survive. Perhaps they should start planting vegetables while they still could; she was sure that there was some room or other in this place that wasn’t being used for anything productive and there were plants dotted around the open areas so there had to be compost somewhere; more plants would also mean more oxygen, so it wasn’t a bad idea. She’d have to suggest it next time she met with Adelle. There were a lot of things that she wanted to suggest, or at least voice her concerns about; she’d have to start writing a list, if she came up with anymore…and Claire thought she might talk to Boyd about them first. Adelle still scared her, despite being the only person who could deal with Topher properly, and Boyd was much more likely to listen to her ideas. He kind of had to, really; Claire smiled at the thought.

“We went on a ‘salvage’ mission earlier, managed to get some food and medical supplies. Those are in your office.”

Anyone else might have asked what the state of the world was like; Claire didn’t. The outside world scared her, even having been out in it not that long ago – she’d spent a long time in her apartment doing very little – and she didn’t want to hear about how desolate it was, or how it looked as though there was no-one else alive. At least if you didn’t know what was happening, you could hope that somehow, there was still something good left outside of these four walls. The bigger picture didn’t concern Claire – why should it, since she was a doll and therefore her whole life was here, stored on some wedge somewhere that she had absolutely no desire to find? – all that she cared about was making sure that the actives and staff here were safe. “Thank you,” she said; well, it looked like she’d be doing inventory later. It was a good thing that Echo had stocked up on supplies, really, as Claire was beginning to think that she was running low; the more aware actives got, the more they seemed to desire medication. “And you’re alright? When are you going out again?” It worried her, Echo, Paul, Priya, Anthony, Boyd going outside (especially Boyd); Claire would have been much happier if they’d all just stayed in the Dollhouse. She guessed that was why they were leading this resistance, and she was just the medic. They were all much braver people than she was.