Chapter Text
The rest is the easy part, for Charlie. With the dolls re-personed, trying to meld old memories with new (or is it the other way around?), and the leadership decimated by its top tier all just disappearing in one flash of light, she's left as the person with the most passwords and security clearance in the whole widespread organization. Of course, she wasn't necessarily given the passwords, or the clearance, but the point still stands.
So here she is, in the Dollhouse again.
There was a minute, after everything went down and all the dolls were sent on their way, when she thought she'd never have to come back here.
Sure, her job was awesome, from a strictly scientific point of view. Brains are the most complicated computers she's ever gotten to mess around in, after all. But it also terrified her, how good she was at it, how easy it was to turn off her compassion and her empathy, even just for show.
Saving the world is great and all, but the cost to her sometimes felt pretty high. So for the most part? She’s glad it’s over.
But now comes the long, complicated process of dealing with the fallout.
Some of the dolls are easy. Dean’s adjusting well, camped out in Sam’s spare room while he gets his bearings. Cas is on their couch, for now, but Charlie’s not sure how long that’ll last. The thing he and Dean had as dolls? That was weird, but now they’re figuring out what it means for them as actual, real people. But he’s not moving out any time soon, that’s for sure.
Sam isn’t around much, back at his old job, which suddenly got more complicated when his boss vanished unexpectedly. Charlie has her suspicions about the timing, but no proof.
Ash is–well, he’s pretty much the same as he was as a doll. Wicked smart, and totally zen, he’s become her right-hand-man in this whole thing.
Krissy she’s a little worried about, since the kid’s apparently barely twenty and got dolled before she hit 17. Charlie’s not sure how that happened, since it was before her time, but it’s definitely not what Naomi’s rules specified. But she stopped trying to make the Dollhouse make sense within weeks of being hired.
Then there’s Amanda, Naomi’s–host? active? She’s not sure the term for “body she hijacked to try and achieve immortality”.
She’s been an active since she was thirteen, apparently, a runaway who was offered comfort and wealth and freedom from everything she was trying to escape. The last thing she remembers in sitting back in the chair, thirty years ago.
She’s having a rough time, not just with the idea that she’s in her forties, but with things like iPods and boy bands and Harrison Ford being an old guy.
She’s dealing, though, figuring out how to handle it all, and Charlie’s got to give her an A for effort. And Charlie’s pretty sure there’s something cathartic about Amanda playing Naomi to access all the biometrically locked files and ID-requiring bank transactions.
Charlie’s been hard at work on her own plans, too. She’s feeling a little like she’s channelling her inner Slytherin as she sends out messages, photos, and a few bribes to journalists and police. Most of the clients they’ve had over the past few years have been relatively harmless. Sure, some have been weird (okay, most of them have been weird), but not–creepy weird. More just lonely or socially awkward or in the sort of position that makes meeting people difficult.
But some of them aren’t so harmless.
There’s the clients that left bruises on actives, or sent them back dehydrated or terrified or panicked. There’s the ones whose requests were strange and dangerous and that’s why they were turning to the Dollhouse instead of more traditional services. And then there were the ones who had normal enough assignments, but who are so personally awful, whether in their politics or their behavior in the world outside the Dollhouse, that Charlie couldn’t live with herself sitting on the information.
She only needs a few minutes of waffling before she hits the send button on that group of clients. If she has the power to improve the world by taking down a few evil douchebags? She’s gonna use it, no matter how immoral it might seem.
She knows there will be a shitstorm of epic proportions, soon enough. The law and the clients will come hunting the Dollhouse soon, for justice or payback or just to destroy any other evidence they might have, but she’s ready for that, too. She’s erased all the data that kept track the actives, past and present, erased it and its backups and burned (physically, in a fire) the hard drives that stored them.
The drives in the attic and those sitting around, the ones that might be the only copies of real people? Those are a little more complicated.
Naomi’s backup she burns.
Everyone else? Those she puts in a box and buries, deep under the front stoop of her safehouse. There aren’t any bodies for them, not now, and hopefully there never will be. But she can’t quite bring herself to destroy them: among them are former dolls whose bodies are gone, and the Dollhouse owes them so much more than this, but it’s the best Charlie can do.
When it’s all done, when all the data is safely distributed or destroyed and the funds all funneled through various subsidiaries and Caribbean banks back to the dolls and to various positive political causes, Charlie takes one final look at the door to #9 Joy Street, the above-ground entrance to the Dollhouse (She’s always enjoyed the irony, of so much horror taking place under a street named Joy). Unfortunately, she can’t do what she’d do for most other locations, which is burn the place to the ground, since it’s both brick and attached to other houses on either side. Instead, she’s gotten a cement mixer and a long set of piping and snaked it through the door to punch a hole straight through the floor of the elevator and into the shaft that leads downward.
The neighbors won’t be thrilled by the sound of the machine at 4 in the morning, but it’s the only time the streets are clear enough for what she’s got to do. It’ll take at least a half hour for the police to be called and to respond, and another ten minutes for them to get the truck turned off. By then, she’ll be long gone and the shaft filled securely. There’ll be nothing anyone can do. And since Jody’s got friends on the City police force who owe her a favor, any official report of the incident will be filed away directly into the shredder.
Ash and a few other former dolls will be by in a few days, breaking in and renovating just enough that it looks like a typical apartment, hiding the elevator and everything beneath it. And hopefully, that will be enough.
She flips on the switch and the barrel turns, tubing shaking as the cement begins to flow. As the elevator shaft fills, Charlie can’t help but smile.
We did it, she thinks. We saved humanity.
Then she turns and starts back down the road, towards–well, she’s not really sure what. Towards Victor and Benny, Cas and Dean, Sam and Jody and everyone else who’s free, now, from the Dollhouse.