fic: Monsters (Dollhouse - Claire, Topher; PG)
title: Monsters
rating: PG
characters: Claire, Topher
word count: 500
summary: Sometimes she feels like some kind of Dr. Mengele for what’s she’s doing, and it’s even worse when she catches herself actually saying that they’re not really people anymore, the Actives.
Being there is like being covered up in snow. Claire looks around and everything is beautiful, from the gleaming bare woodwork to the shining blank faces looking back at her, but all she can think is how there’s more vim and vigor in the eyes of a lab rat in a cage.
And at least the rat knows it’s in the cage.
Sometimes she feels like some kind of Dr. Mengele for what’s she’s doing, and it’s even worse when she catches herself actually saying that they’re not really people anymore, the Actives.
(She’s never considered herself to be someone given to philosophical thought, but sometimes she finds her mind wandering that direction. Sure, they look human and smell and sound and feel human to the touch, but are they really people? They have no past, no future, and they speak in a script eerily written only in the present tense. When she catches herself thinking these things, she shakes herself and she tells herself it must’ve been something she ate.)
But she’s also glad it’s her and not someone else. She can’t imagine how someone else might take them apart and put them back together in ways even she thinks are just too wrong. That’s what she tells herself so that she can sleep at night, that she’s doing bad things with a soft hand so that someone with a harder touch can’t.
She stands at the back of the room while Topher wipes an Active, arms crossed over her chest as she watches a bright-eyed, talkative young man who isn’t even real just blinked out of existence, leaving a pretty pile of meat in a chair that looks at them with the dead eyes and slow blink of a babydoll, asks if it can go, then goes.
Topher talks about everything and nothing, talking just to talk, filling the room up with words and saliva and warmth. She thinks that if she had the right filters, she could see his breath, and she pulls her white coat closer around herself. Topher’s wearing a sweater because he’s packed in ice, too. All of the real people are, bundled up because of reality, while The Actives wander around like wind-up toys in yoga pants and tank tops because they don’t feel the cold.
Claire thinks she must be freezing to death, or at least freezing solid. It’s getting harder to shake herself back to life.
Topher skates his fingers across a touchscreen monitor, eyes racing over blue and green vitals. He lapses into humming a song, then goes back to the story he was telling her, all the clever little strands he wove into the personality he just took away. Topher doesn’t look much like a monster, with his mostly mismatched geek chic clothes and his floppy hair, but he is one. It’s totally unconscious for him--an instinct--which makes him a bigger monster than anyone, bigger than Adelle, bigger than Dominic.
She touches her scars. Bigger than Alpha.
End.
I have other things to write, of course, but this was eating at my brain until I got it down.
rating: PG
characters: Claire, Topher
word count: 500
summary: Sometimes she feels like some kind of Dr. Mengele for what’s she’s doing, and it’s even worse when she catches herself actually saying that they’re not really people anymore, the Actives.
Being there is like being covered up in snow. Claire looks around and everything is beautiful, from the gleaming bare woodwork to the shining blank faces looking back at her, but all she can think is how there’s more vim and vigor in the eyes of a lab rat in a cage.
And at least the rat knows it’s in the cage.
Sometimes she feels like some kind of Dr. Mengele for what’s she’s doing, and it’s even worse when she catches herself actually saying that they’re not really people anymore, the Actives.
(She’s never considered herself to be someone given to philosophical thought, but sometimes she finds her mind wandering that direction. Sure, they look human and smell and sound and feel human to the touch, but are they really people? They have no past, no future, and they speak in a script eerily written only in the present tense. When she catches herself thinking these things, she shakes herself and she tells herself it must’ve been something she ate.)
But she’s also glad it’s her and not someone else. She can’t imagine how someone else might take them apart and put them back together in ways even she thinks are just too wrong. That’s what she tells herself so that she can sleep at night, that she’s doing bad things with a soft hand so that someone with a harder touch can’t.
She stands at the back of the room while Topher wipes an Active, arms crossed over her chest as she watches a bright-eyed, talkative young man who isn’t even real just blinked out of existence, leaving a pretty pile of meat in a chair that looks at them with the dead eyes and slow blink of a babydoll, asks if it can go, then goes.
Topher talks about everything and nothing, talking just to talk, filling the room up with words and saliva and warmth. She thinks that if she had the right filters, she could see his breath, and she pulls her white coat closer around herself. Topher’s wearing a sweater because he’s packed in ice, too. All of the real people are, bundled up because of reality, while The Actives wander around like wind-up toys in yoga pants and tank tops because they don’t feel the cold.
Claire thinks she must be freezing to death, or at least freezing solid. It’s getting harder to shake herself back to life.
Topher skates his fingers across a touchscreen monitor, eyes racing over blue and green vitals. He lapses into humming a song, then goes back to the story he was telling her, all the clever little strands he wove into the personality he just took away. Topher doesn’t look much like a monster, with his mostly mismatched geek chic clothes and his floppy hair, but he is one. It’s totally unconscious for him--an instinct--which makes him a bigger monster than anyone, bigger than Adelle, bigger than Dominic.
She touches her scars. Bigger than Alpha.
End.
I have other things to write, of course, but this was eating at my brain until I got it down.