Keep the Car Running (5/31)
Oct. 15th, 2014 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (5/31)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Arthur, Eames, Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Moriarty, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Dom Cobb
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow" in the Sherlock universe. This takes place post-movie, so I guess spoilers for "Inception"? But just for the basic fact that it's about dream thieves, nothing in this story depends overly much on the movie's plot.
Disclaimer - I don't own any of them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - If Mycroft Holmes lived in a world where people could steal information from the subconsciouses of others, tell me he wouldn't be all over that when he had Moriarty in custody.
Chapter 5
They were blindfolded for the trip back to the hotel. Mycroft didn’t accompany them, but Eames wasn’t in the mood to talk, and Arthur was quietly reflective. Their escort went with them up the lift and left them in the lobby, and Arthur immediately walked into the living area, pulling his jumper up over his head as he went.
Eames said, truthfully, “I’m knackered.”
“You can have the bed if you want,” said Arthur, and grabbed the laptop that had appeared on the desk while they’d been gone. He picked up a stack of hotel stationery, too, and carried everything over to the coffee table, where he arranged it all very neatly and precisely.
Eames watched him. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to work.” Arthur stuck a pen between his teeth and began tapping at the computer.
Eames cursed internally and collapsed onto the sofa.
Arthur looked at him and took the pen out of his mouth. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t go to sleep while you’re working.”
Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “It’s never seemed to bother you before.”
“This is different,” Eames said. The This is my fault was implied.
Arthur turned back to his computer, tapping away at it again. “It’s really not.”
“Yes, it is.” Eames frowned up at the ceiling. “I don’t like him.”
“Mycroft?” Arthur sounded distracted, already deep into research.
“Moriarty.”
“It’s normally a good thing not to like a mark.”
Not entirely what he’d meant, but Eames didn’t think he could say I thought he was creepy without sounding like an idiot. So he shifted onto his side, watching Arthur work. “Let’s break out of here.”
“I don’t think we can,” Arthur responded absently.
“You said you could fix the phone lines.”
“Eames, we wouldn’t get very far.”
“You don’t think we could disappear? Us?” Eames’s entire life had been about disappearing, and Arthur was good at it when he had to be; Eames knew from the times he tried to locate Arthur and had to expend effort to get it done.
“We’d have to spend the rest of our lives on the run.”
“Don’t we do that already?”
“Speak for yourself.” Arthur began making notes on a piece of paper. “My name is clear.”
“Of course it is,” muttered Eames. Trust Arthur to be able to pull that off.
Arthur’s pen scratched over the piece of paper. Then he said, “I have a family.”
Eames looked over at him in shock. The thought that Arthur had a family had never occurred to him. Some dreamsharers did—Cobb had, after all—but Eames could not believe that he had never heard a whisper about this. “You have children?”
Arthur rolled his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. But I have parents. I have a sister. I have a niece and a nephew. My name is clear because I need it to be for them. So I can go home every so often. I’m not going to go on the run and abandon them. Not if I can help it.” Arthur turned back to his computer and his research and his notes, as if that had not been the most enormous amount of personal information he had ever divulged.
Eames turned it all over in his head. Not Arthur as a father but as an adored and adoring uncle, arriving home on special occasions, weighed down with frivolous presents, swinging a little girl in the air, ruffling a little boy’s hair, the beloved prodigal son returning. He could see it. It made sense. “Do they think you’re a chef?” Eames asked.
“I told you,” Arthur said, pen not pausing. “My bouillabaisse is—”
“Fucking spectacular, yes, I know. What the hell is bouillabaisse?”
“It’s a seafood stew.”
Eames fell silent, watching Arthur work. Arthur was silent, too, and Eames was relieved that Arthur didn’t ask if he had anyone who would miss him in the slightest if he disappeared off the face of the planet. Then again, Arthur probably didn’t ask because Arthur already knew. It made sense that Arthur would have researched thoroughly the background of everyone he’d ever worked with. Eames had never looked into Arthur’s past, because Eames didn’t care about people’s pasts, as a general rule. He considered pasts irrelevant, most of all his. And truthfully, he wanted to know everything about Arthur, but he wanted to hear it straight from Arthur. That would tell him so much more than any digging he could do, the words Arthur used, the expressions on Arthur’s face. Like just now, when he’d admitted he had a family, and it had been completely obvious that it was a family Arthur loved. Otherwise, they would have just been names on paper who Eames might have thought it possible he rang once a year on Christmas.
Arthur suddenly put his pen down and looked at Eames, exasperated. “Are you going to do that all night?”
Eames blinked, surprised. “What?”
“Stare at me. It’s disconcerting.”
“I don’t know. Are you going to work all night?”
“I generally do.”
“Do you really?”
“You usually miss that bit of a dreamshare, but yes, generally speaking, running point requires a couple of all-nighters at the beginning if you’re on a schedule.”
Eames shook his head. “I think that’s just you.”
“No wonder every other point man out there is so fucking incompetent,” Arthur complained.
“This is why I agree to work with you,” Eames told him gravely, “even though you are a seriously irritating person to work with. The most irritating.”
“The feeling is entirely mutual.”
“Slanderer,” said Eames. “I am an absolute prince to work with.”
Arthur said meaningfully, “Rio.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“We had to scale the building to escape because you couldn’t keep it in your pants.”
“In fairness, Arthur, they were twins in Rio.”
“I don’t like heights,” said Arthur.
“I’ve watched you swan-dive off the Empire State Building.”
“That’s in a dream, that’s entirely different. Go to bed now, I need to work.”
“Rio was the first time we ever worked together.”
“Exactly. It set the tone.”
“If you hated me so much, why’d you agree to work with me again in Moscow?”
“Cobb called you in. I had nothing to do with it.”
Eames snorted. “As if you couldn’t get Cobb to leave me off jobs.”
“Why do people always think I could get Cobb to do whatever I wanted? He didn’t always listen to me.”
“You’re the best in the business. Why would you stick so devotedly to someone who didn’t always listen to you?”
“For a lot of different reasons,” said Arthur, as if that was an answer. And then he flipped the question around. “Why do you never stick devotedly to anyone?”
Eames considered him before saying slowly, “For a lot of different reasons.”
“Exactly,” agreed Arthur, hands dancing over his keyboard. Sharing time over. “Now go to bed.”
“I could help you,” Eames suggested.
Arthur shook his head, not looking at him. “This part’s best done alone.” Then Arthur paused and looked up and said, “I always do it alone,” as if to soften the blow.
Eames said, “Do you really not like heights?”
“They’re not my favorite.”
“I’m sorry about Rio, then.”
After a moment, Arthur grinned. “I’m not. I let Cobb call you in again because I was hoping desperately I’d get to watch a furious, aproned grandmother hit you over the head with a rolling pin again.”
Eames grimaced. “She completely overreacted. There was no deflowering of any sort going on during that encounter.”
“Still. It made up for having to scale the building.”
“I had a knot on my forehead for weeks from that.”
“Serves you right. That entire job was a rookie mistake on your part. And you weren’t a rookie, you had more experience than me, so you can’t even use that as an excuse.”
What Eames didn’t say was that he’d been generally more reckless back then. Half of it was the stupidity of youth, he knew. And the other half was, oddly, that he hadn’t met Arthur yet. In Rio, he’d met Arthur, younger than him and greener than him, but so fucking good at everything he did and looking at Eames as if he was an idiot, and Eames had somehow decided to take dreamsharing a little more seriously, to rise up to Arthur’s level, because he’d bloody desperately wanted to work with Arthur again. And Arthur could do as much digging into Eames’s past as he wanted, but Eames had covered up the Arthurian weakness in him very well, if he did say so himself.
What Eames said out loud was: “I didn’t expect a little old lady to start attacking me.”
“You didn’t think the twins turning up in your room was suspicious?”
“Of course not. Arthur, darling. Please do note my roguish good looks.”
Arthur’s dimples flashed in what for anyone else would have been a full-blown belly laugh, which made Eames bright with delight. He seldom got that out of Arthur. Arthur made you work harder for a show of amusement than anyone Eames had ever met.
“Cobb had talked you up as being the best forger ever, you know,” Arthur said, his eyes practically twinkling at him. “I was so furious over the whole debacle, ranting and raving, and Cobb just said, ‘I know, I hear you, so just imagine what the bad forgers are like.’”
“Did he say that?” said Eames, somewhat annoyed.
Arthur nodded, then added, “Then I met bad forgers and saw that Cobb was right and so no, I didn’t fight him as much as I could have on you.” Arthur shrugged. “You’re good at what you do.”
Which was practically awarding a Nobel Prize in forgery to him in Arthur-speak. Eames said, “I do so love it whenever you flash that condescension at me.”
Another glimpse of dimples, and Eames felt warm and content despite the skin-prickling encounter with Moriarty.
Arthur said, “Go to bed. We’ll have a strategy meeting in the morning.”
Eames had zero desire to go to bed alone, not when Arthur was looking so Arthur, calm and competent and note-taking, in his getting-things-done mode, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened. An unusual part of Eames wasn’t even thinking about sex. He was thinking he would stay up all night just talking to Arthur, if Arthur wanted the company.
But Arthur didn’t want the company.
So Eames told him good night and went to bed and didn’t fall asleep for a very long time. He listened to Arthur, typing and writing in the other room, and he hoped for a dream that night, a dream of Arthur.
He got a dream—of Moriarty, of that knowing smirk, of those dead eyes.
This was why dreaming was overrated.
***
Arthur worked through the night, barely noticing it. When what he was doing was interesting—and dreamshares were almost always interesting at the beginning, when they were a puzzle to put into order—he didn’t notice the time that it took. At some point the elevator door opened and an entire trolley of files was pushed off of it. They turned out to be a huge number of classified files, and Arthur dove into them with delight. Some of the incidents in the files had been clearly linked to Moriarty, some were just suspected, but by the time it was morning, Arthur had arranged around him in devastatingly efficient stacks the evidence of a complicated criminal network of which Moriarty was the head.
Arthur glanced over his notes, thinking. He didn’t generally believe in good and evil. Most people were just people, and Arthur didn’t think it was his place to take sides in the complicated transactions human beings had with each other. He had never understood how anyone who had spent any time at all in it could ever think the world black and white enough to believe themselves to always be on the side of good and truth. So Arthur didn’t do dreamsharing out of the goodness of his heart, but he also didn’t do it out of a desire to create chaos. Who was he to say that the secrets he helped extract were better off secrets, shouldn’t have been shared in the first place? Arthur did dreamsharing because he was good at it and he loved it and it paid well, and so few people hit the trifecta of that for what they did for a living. Of course, it also happened to be illegal, which Arthur viewed sometimes as a minor drawback and other times as its main recommendation. He wasn’t weighed down with bureaucracy; he did as he pleased when he pleased, and his life was eminently his own.
Arthur had standards, of course. He didn’t hurt innocent people. He tried not to hurt anyone at all. He didn’t want to cause the downfall of governments, or rain attacks of terror down on unsuspecting populaces, or even gather up blackmail to make himself lots of money. He didn’t want to start World War III, as Eames had pointed out. But Arthur acknowledged that, while he didn’t think his job caused much harm, he didn’t also think it caused a great deal of good. His job just was.
But here, with this, they might actually be doing good. A lot of good. If the information Arthur had read through all night was correct, Moriarty was a terrible, cold, heartless person who had been wreaking havoc on people for no reason other than fun, who had left behind him a wake of nonsensical killings. Moriarty, frankly, was a homicidal and capricious bully who had managed to gather for himself far too much power. He saw now why Mycroft was desperate enough to know Moriarty’s secrets that he would have kidnapped a couple of dreamsharers to get them.
Arthur still wasn’t entirely sure why it had been Eames who had been Mycroft’s first target. He supposed Eames had been local and thus easier, and Eames did have an excellent, well-deserved reputation. But Arthur didn’t think Mycroft was going to be happy about who Eames was clearly going to have to forge, so why get a forger involved at all?
He did it to get to you, said the voice in Arthur’s head, which made even less sense. Arthur was good at what he did, but Mycroft shouldn’t have wanted a good point man; Arthur could already tell they were just going to end up bashing heads.
Maybe it was just that Mycroft didn’t know much about how to put together a dreamsharing team. Maybe official dreamsharing teams were this poorly equipped for their jobs. Maybe that was why they had been going insane trying to go into Moriarty’s brain unprepared.
Maybe someday Arthur would get tired of life in the field and retire and teach responsible dreamsharing to government operatives.
The shower went on in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom. Eames, up and awake. Arthur scrubbed the night of wakefulness off his face with his hands and pulled himself up and into the bedroom, intending to choose an outfit to face the day with. Instead he drew himself up short, halfway over to the closet, and looked curiously at the bed. Which was made. Imperfectly, it was true, but still. Eames had slept in the bed, woken up, and made it.
Arthur smiled at Eames’s made bed because he didn’t really let himself smile at Eames, and then he let himself sprawl across it, because it was good to lay on something that wasn’t as cramped as the couch or as unforgiving as the floor. Two minutes, he thought, turning his head into the pillow. It smelled like Eames, and Arthur smiled again and stretched luxuriously. Just until Eames got out of the shower, and then he’d stop creepily sniffing Eames’s pillow and get up and fill Eames in on what he’d learned.
***
Eames showered and shaved and dressed and walked out of the bathroom in a puff of steam that, after it had dissipated, revealed Arthur, face-down in the center of the bed, snoring.
Damn it, thought Eames. Because, honestly, Eames was well aware that they had jobs that required them to sleep in each other’s presence all the time, but Arthur just was not like this when he slept for work, and Eames was having the world’s most difficult time resisting Arthur when he was like this. Eames wanted to crawl onto the bed with Arthur and settle next to him, and Arthur would stir and mumble something and use Eames as a pillow and fall immediately back to sleep, and Eames would let him sleep for a little while before kissing him awake, and Arthur would kiss back, tug at Eames’s clothing, not say a word except for Eames’s name.
Or Arthur would punch him. This seemed more likely to Eames. Arthur hated to be flirted with. He only glowered at Eames when Eames did it, but Eames had seen him do much more unpleasant things to sources of unwanted attention. Eames had never quite known if this was because Arthur was in love with Cobb or because Arthur just didn’t do sexual entanglements. Eames could see Arthur being the professional type who would try to avoid such things. Whereas Eames thought such things were the spice of life and should be indulged in liberally. It was part of why Arthur fascinated him so much.
So Eames didn’t crawl onto the bed and settled instead for tugging the edge of the duvet up and over Arthur and wondered if he was going to spend the entirety of this job tucking Arthur into bed and whether he would relish it or dread it or equal parts of both.
“Your sleep schedule is a serious fucking mess, love,” Eames informed Arthur solemnly, looking down at him, because if he talked to him it was less stalker-ish to be watching him sleep, surely. Although Eames wasn’t sure talking to a sleeping man wasn’t stalker-ish in and of itself.
Whatever. He decided against pushing Arthur’s sleep-tumbled hair off his forehead and walked out into the living area instead. The living area was a forest of precise piles of paper. Eames shook his head with more fondness than he liked to admit to and picked his way through the piles over to the lift lobby, where there was a trolley of croissants.
“Couldn’t have sprung for a full English?” muttered Eames, irritated, but grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee in a preposterously tiny cup that would contain three swallows, and moved back over to Arthur’s Forest of Research Trees.
Arthur’s notes were carefully laid out, and Eames would have hesitated to read them if he hadn’t known from his experience yesterday that Arthur’s notes were highly professional and incredibly useful. There was no chance he was going to come across a frivolous page delineating all of Eames’s best qualities, more’s the pity.
So, deciding it would save them a great deal of time if Eames used Arthur’s sleep to catch up on what Arthur had learned during Eames’s sleep, he cleared himself enough space to settle on the sofa and read.
Arthur had managed to synthesize together an astonishing amount of information. It was dotted through with cross-references, and Eames eventually found himself on the floor reading through fascinating classified government files while munching on his fourth croissant of the day.
Which was how Arthur found him when he walked out into the living area. He was impeccably dressed and put together, back to a three-piece suit, and Eames realized he’d been so engrossed he hadn’t even heard Arthur showering.
“Good morning,” he said, and turned back to the file, which was detailing a pretty piece of art fraud that Eames had heard discussed admiringly many times in his circles.
“You should have woken me,” said Arthur.
“You needed to sleep, and your notes are as good as you. This stuff is amazing,” said Eames.
“I thought you’d like it,” remarked Arthur from where he was helping himself to the remaining croissants and pouring his own cup of coffee.
“The trouble is that half of these things are such genius I’m furious I didn’t come up with them, and the other half of them are fucking terrifying.”
“Yes,” agreed Arthur, sitting on the sofa. “That is the trouble.”
“No wonder Mycroft wants in his head that badly. Can you imagine what he’s got in there? We could save so many lives, Arthur. I’m seriously thinking we might be knighted.”
“I’m American,” Arthur pointed out. “Can I be knighted?”
“Who the fuck cares?” said Eames. “This is going to be astonishing.”
Arthur looked vaguely puzzled by him. “I didn’t think you were this motivated by…doing good.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, Arthur, human beings can’t do good or bad on this scale, mostly they just exist and do the best they can. But this is a special situation. Also, I hate this bastard and I’m ready to get into his head.”
“He got under your skin yesterday.”
Which Eames didn’t like to admit, but yes. “Occupational hazard of being a forger. You spend a lot of time trying to get to know who a person is as immediately as possible. He wasn’t a pleasant one.”
“It’s what I do, too. It’s not just a forger’s problem.”
Eames shook his head. “You spend a lot of time trying to piece together who the person is.” Eames gestured at all the files. “This has all been fascinating, but it isn’t what I need to know to do what I do. I don’t care about any of this stuff, in the long run. I need to find who he is, not what he’s done. And who he is is even more unpleasant than what he’s done. But.” Eames leaned over and picked up the piece of paper Arthur had left on the top of the main stack, where Arthur’s precise handwriting had written SHERLOCK. Eames had underlined and circled and starred it.
“What the hell did you do to my notes?” asked Arthur.
“Added some proper emphasis.”
“The amount of redundancy you have managed to create in a single word is impressive,” said Arthur.
Eames ignored him. “This is who I have to forge.”
“That’s my thought, too,” Arthur agreed.
“Moriarty is obsessed with him. He’ll spill every secret he has in an effort to impress him. This is foolproof and brilliant and so bloody obvious from the very first moment you see Moriarty’s cell that I thought the other dreamsharers must have tried it and got nowhere. But they never did it the right way, did they?”
“No,” said Arthur.
“Because Sherlock is Mycroft’s beloved little brother.”
“Yes, you caught where we’d heard the word before.”
“Mycroft’s phone conversation about Baskerville. I didn’t remember at first, but it’s all come back to me now. And I’d go all in that Mycroft never let any of the forgers he’s worked with before have proper access to Sherlock to get a good enough forge together.”
“I wouldn’t normally encourage you to gamble, but I think you’d win in that instance.”
“So they did a bad job forging and somehow Moriarty managed to absolutely tear their subconscious apart. How do you think he’s doing that?” Eames furrowed his brow in thought and looked around at Arthur’s paper piles, none of which got him any closer to the answer to that question.
“I still have no idea about that. I put a couple of feelers out there to see if anyone else has ever heard of this happening, but I’ve heard nothing yet. In the meantime, I think we should probably pay a visit to one of the affected people, see if we can glean anything from them in limbo.”
“I think that sounds right,” Eames said, and leaned back on his hands. “I’m not doing this until Mycroft gets us access to Sherlock. And we’re sure those are their real names?”
“No, actually, they’re middle names, for both of them, but they are on their birth certificates, yes. And I wouldn’t let you do this without access to Sherlock. He’s clearly the key to the whole thing.”
“You can build, right?” Eames asked.
“Yes,” Arthur answered, and hesitated. “I’m not the most…”
“Creative?” Eames guessed, raising an eyebrow.
“Shut up,” Arthur said sulkily. “I have other talents.”
“Not denying it,” Eames said magnanimously, amused.
“But I can build. I was thinking a prison. Everything in his mind is a secret. The bigger secrets he’ll store on the inside, maximum security. We’ll work our way into them.”
“It’s a good idea. But I cannot imagine we’re getting this done in just one level.”
“No,” Arthur sighed. “Which means we need to bring someone else in, because it would be suicide to go into the second level alone.”
“Who would you bring in?” Eames asked, bracing himself for the mention of Cobb. Eames didn’t relish having to have an argument about how Eames had vowed never to work with Cobb again considering the last time Cobb had basically almost killed all of them and never even apologized.
But Arthur surprised him by saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anyone else I trust enough to…” Arthur cut himself off and sipped at his coffee.
Eames had a wild moment of wondering if Arthur had just admitted that he trusted Eames more than any other dreamsharer he knew, a thought Eames thought he could get dangerously drunk on if he let himself internalize it. Probably what Arthur meant was that he didn’t trust any dreamsharers, but he was clearly stuck with Eames so there was nothing to be done about it.
Eames said, trying to be practical, “Okay. Well, let’s keep thinking about it, and in the meantime let’s get Mycroft to give us access to Sherlock.”
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Adult
Characters - Arthur, Eames, Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Moriarty, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Dom Cobb
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow" in the Sherlock universe. This takes place post-movie, so I guess spoilers for "Inception"? But just for the basic fact that it's about dream thieves, nothing in this story depends overly much on the movie's plot.
Disclaimer - I don't own any of them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - If Mycroft Holmes lived in a world where people could steal information from the subconsciouses of others, tell me he wouldn't be all over that when he had Moriarty in custody.
Chapter 5
They were blindfolded for the trip back to the hotel. Mycroft didn’t accompany them, but Eames wasn’t in the mood to talk, and Arthur was quietly reflective. Their escort went with them up the lift and left them in the lobby, and Arthur immediately walked into the living area, pulling his jumper up over his head as he went.
Eames said, truthfully, “I’m knackered.”
“You can have the bed if you want,” said Arthur, and grabbed the laptop that had appeared on the desk while they’d been gone. He picked up a stack of hotel stationery, too, and carried everything over to the coffee table, where he arranged it all very neatly and precisely.
Eames watched him. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to work.” Arthur stuck a pen between his teeth and began tapping at the computer.
Eames cursed internally and collapsed onto the sofa.
Arthur looked at him and took the pen out of his mouth. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t go to sleep while you’re working.”
Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “It’s never seemed to bother you before.”
“This is different,” Eames said. The This is my fault was implied.
Arthur turned back to his computer, tapping away at it again. “It’s really not.”
“Yes, it is.” Eames frowned up at the ceiling. “I don’t like him.”
“Mycroft?” Arthur sounded distracted, already deep into research.
“Moriarty.”
“It’s normally a good thing not to like a mark.”
Not entirely what he’d meant, but Eames didn’t think he could say I thought he was creepy without sounding like an idiot. So he shifted onto his side, watching Arthur work. “Let’s break out of here.”
“I don’t think we can,” Arthur responded absently.
“You said you could fix the phone lines.”
“Eames, we wouldn’t get very far.”
“You don’t think we could disappear? Us?” Eames’s entire life had been about disappearing, and Arthur was good at it when he had to be; Eames knew from the times he tried to locate Arthur and had to expend effort to get it done.
“We’d have to spend the rest of our lives on the run.”
“Don’t we do that already?”
“Speak for yourself.” Arthur began making notes on a piece of paper. “My name is clear.”
“Of course it is,” muttered Eames. Trust Arthur to be able to pull that off.
Arthur’s pen scratched over the piece of paper. Then he said, “I have a family.”
Eames looked over at him in shock. The thought that Arthur had a family had never occurred to him. Some dreamsharers did—Cobb had, after all—but Eames could not believe that he had never heard a whisper about this. “You have children?”
Arthur rolled his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. But I have parents. I have a sister. I have a niece and a nephew. My name is clear because I need it to be for them. So I can go home every so often. I’m not going to go on the run and abandon them. Not if I can help it.” Arthur turned back to his computer and his research and his notes, as if that had not been the most enormous amount of personal information he had ever divulged.
Eames turned it all over in his head. Not Arthur as a father but as an adored and adoring uncle, arriving home on special occasions, weighed down with frivolous presents, swinging a little girl in the air, ruffling a little boy’s hair, the beloved prodigal son returning. He could see it. It made sense. “Do they think you’re a chef?” Eames asked.
“I told you,” Arthur said, pen not pausing. “My bouillabaisse is—”
“Fucking spectacular, yes, I know. What the hell is bouillabaisse?”
“It’s a seafood stew.”
Eames fell silent, watching Arthur work. Arthur was silent, too, and Eames was relieved that Arthur didn’t ask if he had anyone who would miss him in the slightest if he disappeared off the face of the planet. Then again, Arthur probably didn’t ask because Arthur already knew. It made sense that Arthur would have researched thoroughly the background of everyone he’d ever worked with. Eames had never looked into Arthur’s past, because Eames didn’t care about people’s pasts, as a general rule. He considered pasts irrelevant, most of all his. And truthfully, he wanted to know everything about Arthur, but he wanted to hear it straight from Arthur. That would tell him so much more than any digging he could do, the words Arthur used, the expressions on Arthur’s face. Like just now, when he’d admitted he had a family, and it had been completely obvious that it was a family Arthur loved. Otherwise, they would have just been names on paper who Eames might have thought it possible he rang once a year on Christmas.
Arthur suddenly put his pen down and looked at Eames, exasperated. “Are you going to do that all night?”
Eames blinked, surprised. “What?”
“Stare at me. It’s disconcerting.”
“I don’t know. Are you going to work all night?”
“I generally do.”
“Do you really?”
“You usually miss that bit of a dreamshare, but yes, generally speaking, running point requires a couple of all-nighters at the beginning if you’re on a schedule.”
Eames shook his head. “I think that’s just you.”
“No wonder every other point man out there is so fucking incompetent,” Arthur complained.
“This is why I agree to work with you,” Eames told him gravely, “even though you are a seriously irritating person to work with. The most irritating.”
“The feeling is entirely mutual.”
“Slanderer,” said Eames. “I am an absolute prince to work with.”
Arthur said meaningfully, “Rio.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“We had to scale the building to escape because you couldn’t keep it in your pants.”
“In fairness, Arthur, they were twins in Rio.”
“I don’t like heights,” said Arthur.
“I’ve watched you swan-dive off the Empire State Building.”
“That’s in a dream, that’s entirely different. Go to bed now, I need to work.”
“Rio was the first time we ever worked together.”
“Exactly. It set the tone.”
“If you hated me so much, why’d you agree to work with me again in Moscow?”
“Cobb called you in. I had nothing to do with it.”
Eames snorted. “As if you couldn’t get Cobb to leave me off jobs.”
“Why do people always think I could get Cobb to do whatever I wanted? He didn’t always listen to me.”
“You’re the best in the business. Why would you stick so devotedly to someone who didn’t always listen to you?”
“For a lot of different reasons,” said Arthur, as if that was an answer. And then he flipped the question around. “Why do you never stick devotedly to anyone?”
Eames considered him before saying slowly, “For a lot of different reasons.”
“Exactly,” agreed Arthur, hands dancing over his keyboard. Sharing time over. “Now go to bed.”
“I could help you,” Eames suggested.
Arthur shook his head, not looking at him. “This part’s best done alone.” Then Arthur paused and looked up and said, “I always do it alone,” as if to soften the blow.
Eames said, “Do you really not like heights?”
“They’re not my favorite.”
“I’m sorry about Rio, then.”
After a moment, Arthur grinned. “I’m not. I let Cobb call you in again because I was hoping desperately I’d get to watch a furious, aproned grandmother hit you over the head with a rolling pin again.”
Eames grimaced. “She completely overreacted. There was no deflowering of any sort going on during that encounter.”
“Still. It made up for having to scale the building.”
“I had a knot on my forehead for weeks from that.”
“Serves you right. That entire job was a rookie mistake on your part. And you weren’t a rookie, you had more experience than me, so you can’t even use that as an excuse.”
What Eames didn’t say was that he’d been generally more reckless back then. Half of it was the stupidity of youth, he knew. And the other half was, oddly, that he hadn’t met Arthur yet. In Rio, he’d met Arthur, younger than him and greener than him, but so fucking good at everything he did and looking at Eames as if he was an idiot, and Eames had somehow decided to take dreamsharing a little more seriously, to rise up to Arthur’s level, because he’d bloody desperately wanted to work with Arthur again. And Arthur could do as much digging into Eames’s past as he wanted, but Eames had covered up the Arthurian weakness in him very well, if he did say so himself.
What Eames said out loud was: “I didn’t expect a little old lady to start attacking me.”
“You didn’t think the twins turning up in your room was suspicious?”
“Of course not. Arthur, darling. Please do note my roguish good looks.”
Arthur’s dimples flashed in what for anyone else would have been a full-blown belly laugh, which made Eames bright with delight. He seldom got that out of Arthur. Arthur made you work harder for a show of amusement than anyone Eames had ever met.
“Cobb had talked you up as being the best forger ever, you know,” Arthur said, his eyes practically twinkling at him. “I was so furious over the whole debacle, ranting and raving, and Cobb just said, ‘I know, I hear you, so just imagine what the bad forgers are like.’”
“Did he say that?” said Eames, somewhat annoyed.
Arthur nodded, then added, “Then I met bad forgers and saw that Cobb was right and so no, I didn’t fight him as much as I could have on you.” Arthur shrugged. “You’re good at what you do.”
Which was practically awarding a Nobel Prize in forgery to him in Arthur-speak. Eames said, “I do so love it whenever you flash that condescension at me.”
Another glimpse of dimples, and Eames felt warm and content despite the skin-prickling encounter with Moriarty.
Arthur said, “Go to bed. We’ll have a strategy meeting in the morning.”
Eames had zero desire to go to bed alone, not when Arthur was looking so Arthur, calm and competent and note-taking, in his getting-things-done mode, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened. An unusual part of Eames wasn’t even thinking about sex. He was thinking he would stay up all night just talking to Arthur, if Arthur wanted the company.
But Arthur didn’t want the company.
So Eames told him good night and went to bed and didn’t fall asleep for a very long time. He listened to Arthur, typing and writing in the other room, and he hoped for a dream that night, a dream of Arthur.
He got a dream—of Moriarty, of that knowing smirk, of those dead eyes.
This was why dreaming was overrated.
***
Arthur worked through the night, barely noticing it. When what he was doing was interesting—and dreamshares were almost always interesting at the beginning, when they were a puzzle to put into order—he didn’t notice the time that it took. At some point the elevator door opened and an entire trolley of files was pushed off of it. They turned out to be a huge number of classified files, and Arthur dove into them with delight. Some of the incidents in the files had been clearly linked to Moriarty, some were just suspected, but by the time it was morning, Arthur had arranged around him in devastatingly efficient stacks the evidence of a complicated criminal network of which Moriarty was the head.
Arthur glanced over his notes, thinking. He didn’t generally believe in good and evil. Most people were just people, and Arthur didn’t think it was his place to take sides in the complicated transactions human beings had with each other. He had never understood how anyone who had spent any time at all in it could ever think the world black and white enough to believe themselves to always be on the side of good and truth. So Arthur didn’t do dreamsharing out of the goodness of his heart, but he also didn’t do it out of a desire to create chaos. Who was he to say that the secrets he helped extract were better off secrets, shouldn’t have been shared in the first place? Arthur did dreamsharing because he was good at it and he loved it and it paid well, and so few people hit the trifecta of that for what they did for a living. Of course, it also happened to be illegal, which Arthur viewed sometimes as a minor drawback and other times as its main recommendation. He wasn’t weighed down with bureaucracy; he did as he pleased when he pleased, and his life was eminently his own.
Arthur had standards, of course. He didn’t hurt innocent people. He tried not to hurt anyone at all. He didn’t want to cause the downfall of governments, or rain attacks of terror down on unsuspecting populaces, or even gather up blackmail to make himself lots of money. He didn’t want to start World War III, as Eames had pointed out. But Arthur acknowledged that, while he didn’t think his job caused much harm, he didn’t also think it caused a great deal of good. His job just was.
But here, with this, they might actually be doing good. A lot of good. If the information Arthur had read through all night was correct, Moriarty was a terrible, cold, heartless person who had been wreaking havoc on people for no reason other than fun, who had left behind him a wake of nonsensical killings. Moriarty, frankly, was a homicidal and capricious bully who had managed to gather for himself far too much power. He saw now why Mycroft was desperate enough to know Moriarty’s secrets that he would have kidnapped a couple of dreamsharers to get them.
Arthur still wasn’t entirely sure why it had been Eames who had been Mycroft’s first target. He supposed Eames had been local and thus easier, and Eames did have an excellent, well-deserved reputation. But Arthur didn’t think Mycroft was going to be happy about who Eames was clearly going to have to forge, so why get a forger involved at all?
He did it to get to you, said the voice in Arthur’s head, which made even less sense. Arthur was good at what he did, but Mycroft shouldn’t have wanted a good point man; Arthur could already tell they were just going to end up bashing heads.
Maybe it was just that Mycroft didn’t know much about how to put together a dreamsharing team. Maybe official dreamsharing teams were this poorly equipped for their jobs. Maybe that was why they had been going insane trying to go into Moriarty’s brain unprepared.
Maybe someday Arthur would get tired of life in the field and retire and teach responsible dreamsharing to government operatives.
The shower went on in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom. Eames, up and awake. Arthur scrubbed the night of wakefulness off his face with his hands and pulled himself up and into the bedroom, intending to choose an outfit to face the day with. Instead he drew himself up short, halfway over to the closet, and looked curiously at the bed. Which was made. Imperfectly, it was true, but still. Eames had slept in the bed, woken up, and made it.
Arthur smiled at Eames’s made bed because he didn’t really let himself smile at Eames, and then he let himself sprawl across it, because it was good to lay on something that wasn’t as cramped as the couch or as unforgiving as the floor. Two minutes, he thought, turning his head into the pillow. It smelled like Eames, and Arthur smiled again and stretched luxuriously. Just until Eames got out of the shower, and then he’d stop creepily sniffing Eames’s pillow and get up and fill Eames in on what he’d learned.
***
Eames showered and shaved and dressed and walked out of the bathroom in a puff of steam that, after it had dissipated, revealed Arthur, face-down in the center of the bed, snoring.
Damn it, thought Eames. Because, honestly, Eames was well aware that they had jobs that required them to sleep in each other’s presence all the time, but Arthur just was not like this when he slept for work, and Eames was having the world’s most difficult time resisting Arthur when he was like this. Eames wanted to crawl onto the bed with Arthur and settle next to him, and Arthur would stir and mumble something and use Eames as a pillow and fall immediately back to sleep, and Eames would let him sleep for a little while before kissing him awake, and Arthur would kiss back, tug at Eames’s clothing, not say a word except for Eames’s name.
Or Arthur would punch him. This seemed more likely to Eames. Arthur hated to be flirted with. He only glowered at Eames when Eames did it, but Eames had seen him do much more unpleasant things to sources of unwanted attention. Eames had never quite known if this was because Arthur was in love with Cobb or because Arthur just didn’t do sexual entanglements. Eames could see Arthur being the professional type who would try to avoid such things. Whereas Eames thought such things were the spice of life and should be indulged in liberally. It was part of why Arthur fascinated him so much.
So Eames didn’t crawl onto the bed and settled instead for tugging the edge of the duvet up and over Arthur and wondered if he was going to spend the entirety of this job tucking Arthur into bed and whether he would relish it or dread it or equal parts of both.
“Your sleep schedule is a serious fucking mess, love,” Eames informed Arthur solemnly, looking down at him, because if he talked to him it was less stalker-ish to be watching him sleep, surely. Although Eames wasn’t sure talking to a sleeping man wasn’t stalker-ish in and of itself.
Whatever. He decided against pushing Arthur’s sleep-tumbled hair off his forehead and walked out into the living area instead. The living area was a forest of precise piles of paper. Eames shook his head with more fondness than he liked to admit to and picked his way through the piles over to the lift lobby, where there was a trolley of croissants.
“Couldn’t have sprung for a full English?” muttered Eames, irritated, but grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee in a preposterously tiny cup that would contain three swallows, and moved back over to Arthur’s Forest of Research Trees.
Arthur’s notes were carefully laid out, and Eames would have hesitated to read them if he hadn’t known from his experience yesterday that Arthur’s notes were highly professional and incredibly useful. There was no chance he was going to come across a frivolous page delineating all of Eames’s best qualities, more’s the pity.
So, deciding it would save them a great deal of time if Eames used Arthur’s sleep to catch up on what Arthur had learned during Eames’s sleep, he cleared himself enough space to settle on the sofa and read.
Arthur had managed to synthesize together an astonishing amount of information. It was dotted through with cross-references, and Eames eventually found himself on the floor reading through fascinating classified government files while munching on his fourth croissant of the day.
Which was how Arthur found him when he walked out into the living area. He was impeccably dressed and put together, back to a three-piece suit, and Eames realized he’d been so engrossed he hadn’t even heard Arthur showering.
“Good morning,” he said, and turned back to the file, which was detailing a pretty piece of art fraud that Eames had heard discussed admiringly many times in his circles.
“You should have woken me,” said Arthur.
“You needed to sleep, and your notes are as good as you. This stuff is amazing,” said Eames.
“I thought you’d like it,” remarked Arthur from where he was helping himself to the remaining croissants and pouring his own cup of coffee.
“The trouble is that half of these things are such genius I’m furious I didn’t come up with them, and the other half of them are fucking terrifying.”
“Yes,” agreed Arthur, sitting on the sofa. “That is the trouble.”
“No wonder Mycroft wants in his head that badly. Can you imagine what he’s got in there? We could save so many lives, Arthur. I’m seriously thinking we might be knighted.”
“I’m American,” Arthur pointed out. “Can I be knighted?”
“Who the fuck cares?” said Eames. “This is going to be astonishing.”
Arthur looked vaguely puzzled by him. “I didn’t think you were this motivated by…doing good.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, Arthur, human beings can’t do good or bad on this scale, mostly they just exist and do the best they can. But this is a special situation. Also, I hate this bastard and I’m ready to get into his head.”
“He got under your skin yesterday.”
Which Eames didn’t like to admit, but yes. “Occupational hazard of being a forger. You spend a lot of time trying to get to know who a person is as immediately as possible. He wasn’t a pleasant one.”
“It’s what I do, too. It’s not just a forger’s problem.”
Eames shook his head. “You spend a lot of time trying to piece together who the person is.” Eames gestured at all the files. “This has all been fascinating, but it isn’t what I need to know to do what I do. I don’t care about any of this stuff, in the long run. I need to find who he is, not what he’s done. And who he is is even more unpleasant than what he’s done. But.” Eames leaned over and picked up the piece of paper Arthur had left on the top of the main stack, where Arthur’s precise handwriting had written SHERLOCK. Eames had underlined and circled and starred it.
“What the hell did you do to my notes?” asked Arthur.
“Added some proper emphasis.”
“The amount of redundancy you have managed to create in a single word is impressive,” said Arthur.
Eames ignored him. “This is who I have to forge.”
“That’s my thought, too,” Arthur agreed.
“Moriarty is obsessed with him. He’ll spill every secret he has in an effort to impress him. This is foolproof and brilliant and so bloody obvious from the very first moment you see Moriarty’s cell that I thought the other dreamsharers must have tried it and got nowhere. But they never did it the right way, did they?”
“No,” said Arthur.
“Because Sherlock is Mycroft’s beloved little brother.”
“Yes, you caught where we’d heard the word before.”
“Mycroft’s phone conversation about Baskerville. I didn’t remember at first, but it’s all come back to me now. And I’d go all in that Mycroft never let any of the forgers he’s worked with before have proper access to Sherlock to get a good enough forge together.”
“I wouldn’t normally encourage you to gamble, but I think you’d win in that instance.”
“So they did a bad job forging and somehow Moriarty managed to absolutely tear their subconscious apart. How do you think he’s doing that?” Eames furrowed his brow in thought and looked around at Arthur’s paper piles, none of which got him any closer to the answer to that question.
“I still have no idea about that. I put a couple of feelers out there to see if anyone else has ever heard of this happening, but I’ve heard nothing yet. In the meantime, I think we should probably pay a visit to one of the affected people, see if we can glean anything from them in limbo.”
“I think that sounds right,” Eames said, and leaned back on his hands. “I’m not doing this until Mycroft gets us access to Sherlock. And we’re sure those are their real names?”
“No, actually, they’re middle names, for both of them, but they are on their birth certificates, yes. And I wouldn’t let you do this without access to Sherlock. He’s clearly the key to the whole thing.”
“You can build, right?” Eames asked.
“Yes,” Arthur answered, and hesitated. “I’m not the most…”
“Creative?” Eames guessed, raising an eyebrow.
“Shut up,” Arthur said sulkily. “I have other talents.”
“Not denying it,” Eames said magnanimously, amused.
“But I can build. I was thinking a prison. Everything in his mind is a secret. The bigger secrets he’ll store on the inside, maximum security. We’ll work our way into them.”
“It’s a good idea. But I cannot imagine we’re getting this done in just one level.”
“No,” Arthur sighed. “Which means we need to bring someone else in, because it would be suicide to go into the second level alone.”
“Who would you bring in?” Eames asked, bracing himself for the mention of Cobb. Eames didn’t relish having to have an argument about how Eames had vowed never to work with Cobb again considering the last time Cobb had basically almost killed all of them and never even apologized.
But Arthur surprised him by saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anyone else I trust enough to…” Arthur cut himself off and sipped at his coffee.
Eames had a wild moment of wondering if Arthur had just admitted that he trusted Eames more than any other dreamsharer he knew, a thought Eames thought he could get dangerously drunk on if he let himself internalize it. Probably what Arthur meant was that he didn’t trust any dreamsharers, but he was clearly stuck with Eames so there was nothing to be done about it.
Eames said, trying to be practical, “Okay. Well, let’s keep thinking about it, and in the meantime let’s get Mycroft to give us access to Sherlock.”
