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person4Title: Human Nature
Fandom: Dollhouse
Pairing: Topher/Claire
Notes: For June fic-a-day. Spoilers for the entire first season.
He never would have noticed it at all if it hadn't been for Tango. It had been one of the rare times when he'd really wished he had veto power over the jobs they took; the parents of a rich socialite were tired of watching their precious little girl get her heart broken by guys who were mostly interested in her wealth and fame and wanted a perfect matchmaker to find her true love, which, great, love was awesome, except that the human mind was a crazy thing and even if Tango found the girl her one true love they might just crash and burn worse than any of her past relationships. Who would be blamed then? Not human nature, no, it would be the Dollhouse and, though they wouldn't know his name, Topher and the mental mojo he'd performed in whipping up one Miss Annie Maylor, love expert, even though he'd done his job perfectly.
Her handler was a few minutes late grabbing her to take her to her mission, leaving Topher with the always awkward task of pretending he had people skills while chatting with someone who only had one major interest in life that didn't interest him at all. Luckily they'd gotten word that Quebec had been shot in the line of duty, so the good doctor was there to take some of the burden off of him while she waited to pounce on her patient the moment he was wiped.
Or the moment his transport pulled into the parking lot, as the second a call came through from Quebec's handler saying that they were almost there she immediately excused herself and headed for the elevator.
"Lucky boy," Annie said once she was gone. "I see you won't ever need my services."
"Huh?" Topher asked, completely baffled by the sudden change in topic from her former rambling about the mission, and how glad she was to be able to help 'that poor girl' in her quest for love.
"Well, clearly your Dr. Saunders there had a little thing for you. Now, some people say that a workplace romance is always a terrible thing, but I'll tell you that as long as neither of you is the boss of the other and there's no conflict of interests involved I think there's no problem."
At the time he'd just passed it off as a quirk of her imprint. Since she was only looking for a guy for the client he hadn't bothered tossing in much knowledge on how to read women, just what she'd need to be able to tell when their socialite wasn't hitting it off with a guy at all. So she'd misread politeness towards a co-worker as attraction, whatever. Her main focus was going to be on how the potential beaus acted anyway.
Besides, you couldn't judge an active's carefully designed mind the same way you would anyone else's anyway.
• • •
The first time he caught a look Saunders had on her face as she looked at him as he passed outside of her office and he realized that maybe, just maybe, Annie, he stayed up all night pouring over all the data he had about Whiskey's imprint.
It shouldn't have been possible. She shouldn't have developed an attraction towards anyone with the futzing around he'd done to make sure she'd never want leave the Dollhouse, although he supposed that falling for a member of the staff who she'd be able to see regularly without going anywhere wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, but she especially shouldn't have started having those types of feelings about him.
Heck, if she was going to start having a crush on anyone it shouldn't have even been a guy, unless Old Doc Saunders had been hiding a thing or two from them that Topher hadn't even caught while tweaking his mind to turn him into a female shut-in.
But he found nothing. Nothing that would indicate a romantic propensity towards handsome, charming, funny, very very brilliant men, no mental disturbances that would make her equate hate with love, no naughty office-sex fetishes.
She should just hate him, nothing more or less.
• • •
When she stopped to ask him if he wanted to go to lunch with her, he embarrassed himself by practically running away from her. Would have run away from her if he'd been paying attention to which way he was going and didn't end up backing towards a wall with no exit. Curse his apparently faulty fight-or-flight instincts for not realizing that he was supposed to head in a direction that wasn't closed off.
"Ah, ah, you know I'd love to but I promised Boyd I'd write up a report on... imprint... related... stuff, and I've already procrastinated too much and if I don't get it to him by tonight he'll make that stern disapproving face he does so well. So I won't be able to go to lunch. With you," he babbled, trusting that Boyd would have his back if she checked with him about it. They were buddies. Man buddies. Man buddies covered for each other.
She looked at him like she thought he'd gone completely insane. "Fine, just make sure that you get some real food into yourself at some point. You can't survive entirely on junk food, and part of my job is making sure that staff members don't die of malnutrition." There was suddenly a flash of bitterness in her smile before she turned and left. "If I let that happen, I wouldn't be my best."
• • •
The second time, he went back all the way back to the wedge holding the original Dr. Saunders, in case the modifications he'd made to it had hidden something and muddled the information he got out of it. He dug into it deeper than ever, checking parts that he hadn't bothered with the last time because they weren't directly related to how she formed emotional attachments.
He thought he found his answer there, in a small but potentially incredibly stubborn section of her mind that got contrary when she was told how she was supposed to feel about something. He thought it was probably the same part that kept insisting on treating the dolls like they were more than empty shells no matter how many times they were wiped clean.
She could have happily just gone on trying to hide the fact that she completely loathed him forever, if she'd never broke into his computer and read the details of her imprint. But now that she knew that was his doing...
Well, didn't he feel special knowing that she only liked him because deep down inside she was annoyed that she needed to hate him.
• • •
The first time he ever realized that, oh crap, he might possibly, potentially, maybe be able to feel something for her in return beyond just thinking that she was as good looking as every other doll in the house was on a day when, following the continuing trend of things going wrong every time they turned around, the air conditioner was on the fritz overheating the whole building and melting all his candy bars.
Uniform had sprained her ankle on her last mission and Boyd, in a move not at all fitting the way a person ought to treat a friend who had, if he needed to be reminded, risked getting sent to the attic to give him time to run if he had been a traitor, had sent Topher down to be the one to see if she was fit to go on an engagement where the client had specifically asked for her. A client who had specifically asked for her five times in the past two months, so he'd be getting the 'Don't give them the same imprint on multiple occasions!' lecture along with the one for 'You can't just rush them out the door the minute you think they're healed enough!'
In the heat she'd taken off her labcoat and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt for once, but had unfortunately choosing one in a color that got darker when wet so it was obvious just where and how much she was sweating. She'd tied back her hair, even though he knew she hated the way doing so drew even more attention to her face and its scars, but it was frizzing around the top and a few strands had escaped to stick to her sweaty neck and cheeks. She didn't even notice him entering the room, she was so busy glaring at whatever she was working at on her computer like it had personally insulted her.
She looked completely human, nothing at all like a perfect unattainable doll who was empty of anything but what he put in her.
It was a very good look on her.
• • •
He guessed that it was panic which made him do it.
The thing was, Adelle would kill him, or, worse, wipe away his brilliant mind and send him up to rot in the attic if he ever so much as asked Saunders out even if it wasn't like he could actually take her anywhere, just pick up take out and maybe a DVD and settle down for a night in every time, but that was beside the point. Anybody else in the Dollhouse, maybe they could get away with it since it wasn't like she was really a doll anymore, but Topher wasn't just anybody.
If anything ever happened, anything at all, they'd think he put something into Whiskey's imprint to make it happen. Which... wasn't entirely untrue, but it wasn't like he knew she'd twist it around like that. This was what happened when they let a doll stay imprinted long enough to start becoming an actual person again; human nature! It snuck in when they found themselves facing situations that none of their previous experiences prepared them for, or having a conversation that made them think new things, or just watched a movie or read a book they'd never picked up before and learned something new from it, and it started messing up his perfectly designed personas until they started darting off their prepared mental paths in ways nobody could have seen coming.
And the next thing you knew, somebody who was supposed to hate him forever kept staring at his mouth when they were having a conversation.
So, he panicked one night when they were both up working in the middle of the night and the urge to ask her 'Hey, do you want me to bring in a movie sometime that we could... watch? Together? Without anybody else?' grew almost strong enough to overwhelm his half-asleep inhibitions, and instead he said, "Whiskey, are you ready for your treatment?"
Her face should have gone doll-blank for at least a moment at the code phrase, but it never came. Instead she just looked tired, and sad, and like she was Dr. Claire Saunders and not Whiskey at all. "I don't have a choice, do I?"
"Don't worry, I'm not taking away any of your memories or anything. You're still going to remember, well... everything that Adelle would run me out on a rail for never telling her you know," he assured her, awkwardly aware that she wouldn't really be any less angry about what he was doing now, just in different ways that were somewhat less likely to end in him losing his job in one unpleasant way or another. "Just a little upkeep. Make sure your scan is up to date. You know how it is?"
"At two in the morning?" she asked, although she followed him even though she could see that it was odd. It wasn't like she had a choice.
"Well, you know me. Always with the procrastinating. Just got done with all the work I had to take care of first," he rambled. His imprint room was as bright and cheery as it ever was; he always felt like it was inviting him in, aside from that one unfortunate incident with the gun and the almost having his brain destroyed, but she looked like she was dreading it. "Just sit in the chair. You know how it goes."
She watched him as went about preparing the chair and her wedge for what was to come. "Does this mean that you're my handler?" she asked.
The question was ridiculous enough to make him laugh out loud. "Me? Really? Do you trust me?"
"Barely as far as I could throw you," she said, which, hey, was a little bit further than he would have inspected. "But I don't trust anyone here. Not the way that they do."
"Yeah, so, there's your answer. We've still got the number of the guy who used to work with you if we ever need it, but as long as you stay here we're good without him." He finished the last of the adjustments he needed to make to prepare the chair for her. "I'm ready. Just lean back."
"I know." She squeezed her eyes tightly shut as she let her head drop back into the head piece of the chair, her body stiff enough to make it obvious that she was afraid.
He swallowed thickly as he watched her, then came to a conclusion and stepped up to the chair quickly before he could change his mind. "Wait!" he said, "there's one more thing."
She had just opened her eyes to look up at him questioningly when he leaned down to kiss her. He half expected her to hit him, or shove him away from her, or slide off the chair and run, but instead she sighed against his lips after a second and the frightened tension slowly drained out of her body. When her lips began to part a little, an invitation that even he could recognize at once, he pulled away, unwilling to take it. He'd gone too far already, and wasn't completely insane.
"Sorry," he said, rubbing the back of his head as he edged away to his control console. "I just kind of wanted one chance to know what it would have been like."
He switched the chair on before she could understand what he must mean, and he tried his best not to notice that it looked a lot more like he was performing an initial wipe on her than like he was removing an implanted personality.
And then he set to work neatly slicing out anything that would make her care for him, as Whiskey sat in the chair and blankly watched.
Fandom: Dollhouse
Pairing: Topher/Claire
Notes: For June fic-a-day. Spoilers for the entire first season.
He never would have noticed it at all if it hadn't been for Tango. It had been one of the rare times when he'd really wished he had veto power over the jobs they took; the parents of a rich socialite were tired of watching their precious little girl get her heart broken by guys who were mostly interested in her wealth and fame and wanted a perfect matchmaker to find her true love, which, great, love was awesome, except that the human mind was a crazy thing and even if Tango found the girl her one true love they might just crash and burn worse than any of her past relationships. Who would be blamed then? Not human nature, no, it would be the Dollhouse and, though they wouldn't know his name, Topher and the mental mojo he'd performed in whipping up one Miss Annie Maylor, love expert, even though he'd done his job perfectly.
Her handler was a few minutes late grabbing her to take her to her mission, leaving Topher with the always awkward task of pretending he had people skills while chatting with someone who only had one major interest in life that didn't interest him at all. Luckily they'd gotten word that Quebec had been shot in the line of duty, so the good doctor was there to take some of the burden off of him while she waited to pounce on her patient the moment he was wiped.
Or the moment his transport pulled into the parking lot, as the second a call came through from Quebec's handler saying that they were almost there she immediately excused herself and headed for the elevator.
"Lucky boy," Annie said once she was gone. "I see you won't ever need my services."
"Huh?" Topher asked, completely baffled by the sudden change in topic from her former rambling about the mission, and how glad she was to be able to help 'that poor girl' in her quest for love.
"Well, clearly your Dr. Saunders there had a little thing for you. Now, some people say that a workplace romance is always a terrible thing, but I'll tell you that as long as neither of you is the boss of the other and there's no conflict of interests involved I think there's no problem."
At the time he'd just passed it off as a quirk of her imprint. Since she was only looking for a guy for the client he hadn't bothered tossing in much knowledge on how to read women, just what she'd need to be able to tell when their socialite wasn't hitting it off with a guy at all. So she'd misread politeness towards a co-worker as attraction, whatever. Her main focus was going to be on how the potential beaus acted anyway.
Besides, you couldn't judge an active's carefully designed mind the same way you would anyone else's anyway.
The first time he caught a look Saunders had on her face as she looked at him as he passed outside of her office and he realized that maybe, just maybe, Annie, he stayed up all night pouring over all the data he had about Whiskey's imprint.
It shouldn't have been possible. She shouldn't have developed an attraction towards anyone with the futzing around he'd done to make sure she'd never want leave the Dollhouse, although he supposed that falling for a member of the staff who she'd be able to see regularly without going anywhere wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, but she especially shouldn't have started having those types of feelings about him.
Heck, if she was going to start having a crush on anyone it shouldn't have even been a guy, unless Old Doc Saunders had been hiding a thing or two from them that Topher hadn't even caught while tweaking his mind to turn him into a female shut-in.
But he found nothing. Nothing that would indicate a romantic propensity towards handsome, charming, funny, very very brilliant men, no mental disturbances that would make her equate hate with love, no naughty office-sex fetishes.
She should just hate him, nothing more or less.
When she stopped to ask him if he wanted to go to lunch with her, he embarrassed himself by practically running away from her. Would have run away from her if he'd been paying attention to which way he was going and didn't end up backing towards a wall with no exit. Curse his apparently faulty fight-or-flight instincts for not realizing that he was supposed to head in a direction that wasn't closed off.
"Ah, ah, you know I'd love to but I promised Boyd I'd write up a report on... imprint... related... stuff, and I've already procrastinated too much and if I don't get it to him by tonight he'll make that stern disapproving face he does so well. So I won't be able to go to lunch. With you," he babbled, trusting that Boyd would have his back if she checked with him about it. They were buddies. Man buddies. Man buddies covered for each other.
She looked at him like she thought he'd gone completely insane. "Fine, just make sure that you get some real food into yourself at some point. You can't survive entirely on junk food, and part of my job is making sure that staff members don't die of malnutrition." There was suddenly a flash of bitterness in her smile before she turned and left. "If I let that happen, I wouldn't be my best."
The second time, he went back all the way back to the wedge holding the original Dr. Saunders, in case the modifications he'd made to it had hidden something and muddled the information he got out of it. He dug into it deeper than ever, checking parts that he hadn't bothered with the last time because they weren't directly related to how she formed emotional attachments.
He thought he found his answer there, in a small but potentially incredibly stubborn section of her mind that got contrary when she was told how she was supposed to feel about something. He thought it was probably the same part that kept insisting on treating the dolls like they were more than empty shells no matter how many times they were wiped clean.
She could have happily just gone on trying to hide the fact that she completely loathed him forever, if she'd never broke into his computer and read the details of her imprint. But now that she knew that was his doing...
Well, didn't he feel special knowing that she only liked him because deep down inside she was annoyed that she needed to hate him.
The first time he ever realized that, oh crap, he might possibly, potentially, maybe be able to feel something for her in return beyond just thinking that she was as good looking as every other doll in the house was on a day when, following the continuing trend of things going wrong every time they turned around, the air conditioner was on the fritz overheating the whole building and melting all his candy bars.
Uniform had sprained her ankle on her last mission and Boyd, in a move not at all fitting the way a person ought to treat a friend who had, if he needed to be reminded, risked getting sent to the attic to give him time to run if he had been a traitor, had sent Topher down to be the one to see if she was fit to go on an engagement where the client had specifically asked for her. A client who had specifically asked for her five times in the past two months, so he'd be getting the 'Don't give them the same imprint on multiple occasions!' lecture along with the one for 'You can't just rush them out the door the minute you think they're healed enough!'
In the heat she'd taken off her labcoat and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt for once, but had unfortunately choosing one in a color that got darker when wet so it was obvious just where and how much she was sweating. She'd tied back her hair, even though he knew she hated the way doing so drew even more attention to her face and its scars, but it was frizzing around the top and a few strands had escaped to stick to her sweaty neck and cheeks. She didn't even notice him entering the room, she was so busy glaring at whatever she was working at on her computer like it had personally insulted her.
She looked completely human, nothing at all like a perfect unattainable doll who was empty of anything but what he put in her.
It was a very good look on her.
He guessed that it was panic which made him do it.
The thing was, Adelle would kill him, or, worse, wipe away his brilliant mind and send him up to rot in the attic if he ever so much as asked Saunders out even if it wasn't like he could actually take her anywhere, just pick up take out and maybe a DVD and settle down for a night in every time, but that was beside the point. Anybody else in the Dollhouse, maybe they could get away with it since it wasn't like she was really a doll anymore, but Topher wasn't just anybody.
If anything ever happened, anything at all, they'd think he put something into Whiskey's imprint to make it happen. Which... wasn't entirely untrue, but it wasn't like he knew she'd twist it around like that. This was what happened when they let a doll stay imprinted long enough to start becoming an actual person again; human nature! It snuck in when they found themselves facing situations that none of their previous experiences prepared them for, or having a conversation that made them think new things, or just watched a movie or read a book they'd never picked up before and learned something new from it, and it started messing up his perfectly designed personas until they started darting off their prepared mental paths in ways nobody could have seen coming.
And the next thing you knew, somebody who was supposed to hate him forever kept staring at his mouth when they were having a conversation.
So, he panicked one night when they were both up working in the middle of the night and the urge to ask her 'Hey, do you want me to bring in a movie sometime that we could... watch? Together? Without anybody else?' grew almost strong enough to overwhelm his half-asleep inhibitions, and instead he said, "Whiskey, are you ready for your treatment?"
Her face should have gone doll-blank for at least a moment at the code phrase, but it never came. Instead she just looked tired, and sad, and like she was Dr. Claire Saunders and not Whiskey at all. "I don't have a choice, do I?"
"Don't worry, I'm not taking away any of your memories or anything. You're still going to remember, well... everything that Adelle would run me out on a rail for never telling her you know," he assured her, awkwardly aware that she wouldn't really be any less angry about what he was doing now, just in different ways that were somewhat less likely to end in him losing his job in one unpleasant way or another. "Just a little upkeep. Make sure your scan is up to date. You know how it is?"
"At two in the morning?" she asked, although she followed him even though she could see that it was odd. It wasn't like she had a choice.
"Well, you know me. Always with the procrastinating. Just got done with all the work I had to take care of first," he rambled. His imprint room was as bright and cheery as it ever was; he always felt like it was inviting him in, aside from that one unfortunate incident with the gun and the almost having his brain destroyed, but she looked like she was dreading it. "Just sit in the chair. You know how it goes."
She watched him as went about preparing the chair and her wedge for what was to come. "Does this mean that you're my handler?" she asked.
The question was ridiculous enough to make him laugh out loud. "Me? Really? Do you trust me?"
"Barely as far as I could throw you," she said, which, hey, was a little bit further than he would have inspected. "But I don't trust anyone here. Not the way that they do."
"Yeah, so, there's your answer. We've still got the number of the guy who used to work with you if we ever need it, but as long as you stay here we're good without him." He finished the last of the adjustments he needed to make to prepare the chair for her. "I'm ready. Just lean back."
"I know." She squeezed her eyes tightly shut as she let her head drop back into the head piece of the chair, her body stiff enough to make it obvious that she was afraid.
He swallowed thickly as he watched her, then came to a conclusion and stepped up to the chair quickly before he could change his mind. "Wait!" he said, "there's one more thing."
She had just opened her eyes to look up at him questioningly when he leaned down to kiss her. He half expected her to hit him, or shove him away from her, or slide off the chair and run, but instead she sighed against his lips after a second and the frightened tension slowly drained out of her body. When her lips began to part a little, an invitation that even he could recognize at once, he pulled away, unwilling to take it. He'd gone too far already, and wasn't completely insane.
"Sorry," he said, rubbing the back of his head as he edged away to his control console. "I just kind of wanted one chance to know what it would have been like."
He switched the chair on before she could understand what he must mean, and he tried his best not to notice that it looked a lot more like he was performing an initial wipe on her than like he was removing an implanted personality.
And then he set to work neatly slicing out anything that would make her care for him, as Whiskey sat in the chair and blankly watched.