Keep the Car Running (8/31)
Nov. 5th, 2014 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (8/31)
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 8
Arthur was standing on the pavement when Eames stepped out of 221 Baker Street.
“So what do you think?” Eames asked him pleasantly.
“I think I hate this stupid fucking job,” Arthur answered passionately.
“I meant what you thought about whether or not you and I are expected to obediently take the Tube back to our hotel prison, but your thought is a good one, too.”
“Your idea’s a good one. Sherlock’s a good chemist who knows Moriarty, and he’ll be an invaluable resource, but John doesn’t want anything to do with any of this and that’s a red flag to me because John is not someone who necessarily avoids dangerous situations.”
“No, he didn’t strike me that way,” Eames agreed, settling his hands in his pockets. The poker chip was comfortingly there, and he closed a fist around it. “But do we have options?”
“This is why Mycroft kidnapped us instead of hiring us. If he’d hired us, I would have refused to let us do this.”
“Would you have refused to do inception, if you’d known about the sedative and limbo?”
“I don’t know. No. I probably would have done it. But I would have made sure everyone knew going in. So that we’d know what we were facing. I don’t like not knowing what we’re facing.”
“Right, but luckily for you improvisation is where I excel.”
“Eames, when having to come up with a fake conversational topic for us, you chose butterflies.”
“I like to keep people guessing, darling.”
Arthur sighed heavily. Someday, thought Eames, he was going to lean in close enough to catch that exhalation in his mouth.
Eames was distracted enough by that thought that he barely noticed the car pulling up. Then Mycroft stepped out of it, so Eames had to leave off his fantasy.
“I trust you got what you needed?” Mycroft asked Eames.
Oh, Christ, the forgery. In the chemist discussion, Eames had forgotten all about it. “I…could do well enough.” He actually wasn’t sure of that. Sherlock was difficult to get a handle on. But Eames was going to worry about that after they had an actual compound in hand. In the meantime, he would have enough interaction with Sherlock that he would get a better handle on him.
“The more important thing is that your brother’s a chemist,” said Arthur, and Eames had to give him points for blunt straightforwardness.
“Arthur, don’t beat around the bush,” Eames told him, “it’s a dreadful habit you have.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Mycroft frowned.
“We need a chemist. We need a special, very delicate solution of Somnacin to get this right. Your brother’s going to make it for us.”
Mycroft’s frown deepened. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“The deal was that we do this job for you and you don’t ruin our lives. This is the best way to do the job.”
“We have chemists for you to work with—”
“Oh, come off it,” said Arthur. “Your brother’s a genius. I’m not working with whatever terrible, subpar chemists have been managing to get all of your dreamsharers driven insane. Not when I have your brother.”
“I don’t want him involved,” Mycroft bit out. “I told you that. He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and it’s unhealthy, and you were supposed to just go and observe him so Eames could forge him.”
“He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and that’s exactly why I want him involved. He knows Moriarty better than anyone, so he’s our best shot at getting this right, and I need to get this right the first time, don’t I? Now is this our ride back to the hotel, or are we going to stand here arguing on the street about the questionable activities you have us engaged in?”
Mycroft looked furious. Arthur looked calmly unruffled, and Eames loved him like this, loved the way he got calmer and sleeker and more confident the more people around him lost their temper. This, he thought, was when he’d first fallen for Arthur, in Rio, surrounded by chaos, shouting, rolling-pin-wielding grandmothers and miffed marks and incompetent chemists, and Arthur, not a hair out of place, cleaning up every mess. Eames had wanted to see if he could ruffle him in that moment, and he’d been spending the rest of their ensuing acquaintance trying to do just that.
Eames said, “Hey, you got off easy, mate: your lunatic brother immediately wanted in on the dream.”
Which made Mycroft look thunderous, and he stalked off into 221 Baker Street without another word.
Arthur gave him a look that contained the barest hint of dimples and then got into the car. Eames took a deep breath, telling himself not to slide into the car after him and push him back against the seat and kiss him, fuck him, ruffle him.
Then he braced himself and slid in after him. And said to the driver, “Do you have to take us back to the hotel, or can we stop for a bite to eat first?”
***
“You didn’t stop this?” Mycroft demanded, and John was both relieved to have Mycroft on his side and annoyed to be berated for what had just happened.
“I tried,” John snapped. “Maybe you should have given us a bit more information on what’s going on with the Moriarty situation.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Sherlock, looking up briefly from his microscope. “It’s nothing but a chemistry experiment. I do those all the time.”
Mycroft frowned. “Do you think I don’t know you? You’re going to use the chemist thing as a means to leverage yourself into getting into Moriarty’s brain. You know what this is, don’t you? This is Moriarty luring you in again.”
Sherlock mirrored Mycroft’s frown. “No, it isn’t,” Sherlock snapped.
“He’s right,” John contributed, barely keeping his annoyance leashed, and Mycroft looked at him in surprise. “It isn’t Moriarty luring him in. It’s you.”
Mycroft looked highly offended in that way that only Mycroft Holmes could achieve. “Me?”
“You. If you would drop this, then—”
“Do you know the information Moriarty has in his head?” Mycroft cut him off. “Do you know how many lives we could save with the information that he has? We’ve tried everything we can think of to get at it. This is our last chance.”
“Working with ruthless criminals?” John lifted an eyebrow. “This is what you’ve decided to do?”
“Desperate times,” Mycroft said. “And we are all of us criminals under the right circumstances, aren’t we, Dr. Watson?” Mycroft gave him a meaningful look.
John thought of his illegal gun and also of a cabbie, bleeding out on the floor. It was on the tip of his tongue to argue self-defense, to point out how justified it had all been, and then he thought maybe it was wiser to just leave the point alone.
Sherlock took the opportunity to jump back in. “If this is your last chance then don’t you think you should give it the greatest probability of success? Your dreamsharers—who, as I understand it, are the absolute experts in their field—seem convinced that Moriarty will only share his secrets with me. Are you really going to depend on a pale imitation when you could have the real thing to make sure it all goes to plan?”
“First, Sherlock, imitating people is what Eames does, and he’s very good at it, so I hardly think we need you to ensure success. Second, Moriarty’s driving people mad, Sherlock. They go into his brain and they come out so shattered that we have to sedate them just to help them find peace. Do you really want to expose yourself to that?”
Sherlock scoffed. “Do you really think I’d be so stupid as to fall for whatever it is they’re falling for that’s making them mad? Anyway, your clever dreamsharers are finding a way around that. It involves a special solution of Somnacin, which you should get me so that I can engineer it to make sure that this all goes according to plan.”
“The government has chemists, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.
“Idiot chemists,” Sherlock corrected.
Mycroft took a deep breath and looked at John.
But John shook his head. “I am not happy about any of this, and you brought it on yourself. If I had Moriarty, I’d just bloody kill him.”
“Because you’re thinking of you and Sherlock,” snapped Mycroft. “I’m thinking of this country. I’m thinking of the world.”
“Bully for you,” John told him scathingly.
Mycroft looked as if he thought neither of them worth the effort to continue to deal with and stalked his way down the stairs.
John leaned against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, and listened to him go.
Sherlock looked over at him warily. “It’s just a chemistry experiment, John.”
“Mycroft’s right. You’re determined to rush headlong into Moriarty’s head.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Sherlock assured him impatiently.
“Yeah,” John agreed drily. “Because you’ve always had everything with Moriarty totally under control.”
Sherlock at least looked abashed, fiddling with the slide on his microscope, but John decided there was nothing more to be gained by arguing about it at the moment. He shook his head at him and dropped onto the sofa in the sitting room and turned on Top Gear very loud so as to annoy Sherlock as much as possible.
***
It was Eames who suggested they stop for lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. There was no obvious security detail on them, and Eames thought they should test the boundaries of their freedom. It was lunchtime, and they had to eat, so Arthur raised no objection, which was how he found himself sitting opposite Eames watching him peruse a wine list.
“What do you prefer?” Eames asked.
Arthur was wondering if Eames knew about wine. Arthur was realizing that he had no idea because he and Eames had basically never shared a meal like this. They had shared lots of hasty meals while working, scarfing down sandwiches while standing next to each other, poring over dream blueprints. They had never sat down to a meal with the luxury of ordering a bottle of wine. Unless you counted the meal with Mycroft, which Arthur definitely did not.
“Do they have a Nebbiolo?” he asked.
Eames’s eyebrows lifted as he studied the wine list. “Good choice. Yes, they do. And oh, look, excellent, it’s expensive. We are definitely charging this to the room.” He put the wine list down and looked around for a waiter.
Arthur watched him, feeling oddly daring. Which was not to say that he’d never drunk with Eames before, because he had, plenty of times. But this felt so dangerously, thrillingly close to a date. If Arthur squinted just the right way, he could almost make himself believe it was.
“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Eames asked.
“Alba,” Arthur replied. “I ate lots of chocolate and drank lots of wine.”
“And yet retained your girlish figure.”
“Well, there was also a lot of hand-to-hand combat in that job.”
“Be still, my heart,” said Eames, as the waiter arrived. “That Nebbiolo, grazie,” he said, and the waiter looked annoyed at the Italian but hurried off.
“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Arthur asked.
Eames sighed a bit, relaxing fully back into his seat. Arthur felt himself relax backward in response. “A lovely little town on the Po River. I was seducing the daughter of a local vineyard owner. And the son.”
“You know that I know you’re lying about most of your conquests?”
“Tell me, love, is it sad to go through life such a committed cynic?” asked Eames earnestly.
Arthur smiled at him. Partly because he couldn’t help it and partly because he’d decided to squint and treat this as a date and, fuck, he hadn’t even had any wine yet and he was behaving like an idiot.
The waiter arrived with the Nebbiolo and made a great show of presenting it to them and letting them taste it. Arthur hadn’t had Nebbiolo since the job in Alba, really. It brought him immediately back to the unique chaos of that particular job.
“Steak again?” Eames asked him, and Arthur realized he hadn’t even looked at the menu.
“Yes. Fine. Medium.” He couldn’t really care less what he ate, frankly.
Eames said, “Rare. As in ‘still alive on my plate.’ Not literally. But you follow the metaphor, I trust?” Eames smiled sunnily at the waiter.
“He hates you,” Arthur informed him as the waiter moved away with an eye-roll.
“Nonsense. That’s exactly how people behave right before they succumb to my inimitable charm.”
“‘Inimitable’ is the most perfect adjective for your charm that I’ve ever heard.”
“Thank you, petal. Make a note of it, won’t you?”
Arthur thought he was now grinning at Eames, as he dutifully took out his notebook and wrote in it Eames – inimitable charm. Then he replaced the notebook, leaned back in his seat again, sipped his excellent wine, and looked across at his lunch companion. He felt really quite dangerously content with his lot in life, despite the fact that he was currently being held hostage by a frightening government operative who wanted him to take a job that might drive him insane.
“So,” began Eames, “do you think Sherlock will—”
Arthur shook his head, and Eames stopped talking and looked at him curiously.
Arthur said, “Let’s not talk about the job. Let’s talk about anything but this fucking job.”
Eames’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? You’re going to take a lunch off? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take a lunch off.”
“If these are my last few days of sanity, I’m enjoying them,” Arthur replied.
“Fair enough. What shall we talk about instead?”
Arthur had no idea. He looked across at Eames, tongue-tied. This, he thought, was why he didn’t go on dates.
“Okay,” Eames said into his silence, sounding amused. “I’ll go first. You’re stranded on a desert island. One book, one movie, one record, one television show.”
“This is what you want to talk about?”
“You didn’t have a better suggestion, did you?” Eames pointed out and sipped his wine.
He hadn’t. Arthur considered, annoyed. This wasn’t really his type of thing. “Oh, fuck, I don’t know. What’s the longest book you know?”
“The Bible?” Eames guessed.
Arthur frowned. “Well, I don’t want to bring the Bible with me.”
“You’re overthinking,” Eames said. “What’s your favorite book?”
“Casino Royale,” answered Arthur, without trying to think of something more impressively literary than that.
“Good choice,” Eames smiled at him, as if he approved.
“What’s yours?” asked Arthur.
“À la recherche du temps perdu,” responded Eames, deadpan.
Arthur laughed. “Fuck off,” he said.
Eames smiled into his wine. “How do you know I’m not a huge Proust fan? Shame on you for judging me, darling.”
“Not fair when I told you my real favorite book when I could have told you Foucault’s Pendulum.”
“It’s Casino Royale,” said Eames.
“Yes,” Arthur confirmed.
“No, it’s my favorite book, too,” said Eames.
Which struck Arthur momentarily dumb. “Oh,” he said, finally, because he hadn’t expected that. Although he hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about whether he and Eames had similar taste in literature.
“Favorite city?” asked Eames, refilling their wineglasses.
“Paris,” answered Arthur.
“Mais oui,” said Eames.
“Am I that obvious?”
“I’ve seen you in Paris. And I’ve seen you in lots of places that aren’t Paris. You’re different in Paris.”
“I used to dream about Paris,” Arthur said, and had no idea why he was telling Eames this, he’d had one fucking glass of wine, he had no excuse. “When I was a kid. It seemed like the most exotic, far away place I could imagine. As opposite my life as you could get. People in Paris weren’t people, they were models and they drank good wine and smoked sexy cigarettes and ate delicious cheeses and croissants and baguettes and they wrote in charming little cafes on seventeenth-century cobblestones and they spoke French. It doesn’t often happen.”
“What doesn’t?”
“That the things you dream about turn out to be better. Paris was better. Paris was everything and better. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I think to myself, You got to see Paris. As soon as this is over, you can buy yourself a plane ticket and go see it again. And then I feel better.” Eames was looking at him oddly, and Arthur felt foolish and self-conscious and shrugged a little bit and said, striving for lightness, “What can I say? The first time I saw Paris, I fell in love.”
“It’s the best way to see Paris,” said Eames. “Seeing it for the first time.”
“That Touch of Mink,” Arthur recognized the quote.
Eames smiled at him. “How did I never realize you read good books and watch good movies? Arthur, you have been holding out on me, love. I should have guessed, though. I knew you loved Paris, and I always thought that was so fascinating about you. I would have thought…Hong Kong, maybe. Or Dubai. Somewhere sleek and modern and new. But no, you love Paris, and then I started thinking of how everything you wear is so terribly impeccable and this odd, little blend of modern and classic and completely unexpected, and your bloody ties are the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.”
Arthur was worried he was blushing. “They’re just ties, Eames.”
“You don’t get to look at you wearing them all the time,” said Eames.
Arthur poured out more wine and said, to get the subject away from this intimacy he’d introduced, “What’s your favorite city? And if you fucking say Paris, I’ll throw this wine over your head.”
Eames laughed. Sometimes Eames laughed for show, not really amused but keeping to his part, but he laughed now genuinely. Arthur loved that sort of laugh out of Eames, and he never could remember it as accurately as he wanted to. “It isn’t Paris. Although I’m fond of Paris, because Paris is Paris, and only unromantic fools don’t like Paris. I don’t really have a favorite. I like a lot of them, for different reasons. I like New York because I sold my first forgery in New York. I like San Francisco because I shagged my first bloke in San Francisco. I like Buenos Aires because my first dreamshare was in Buenos Aires. I like Vienna because it’s lovely.” Eames shrugged, then said, surprising Arthur, “I like here because I grew up here.”
Arthur hadn’t expected him to say that. Eames had had an unhappy childhood, but Arthur supposed you were partial to anything that felt even the slightest bit like home, when you led the sort of lives Arthur and Eames led. Arthur took a sip of his wine and said carefully, “So you grew up in London?”
Eames gave him a look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know all about it.”
“Eames,” said Arthur, on a little sigh. “It’s what I do. It’s my actual job.”
“I know. I’m not angry with you over it. I’m just saying: Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know everything about it.”
“I don’t know everything about it,” Arthur said. “I know the bare-bones facts. I know the Wikipedia entry of your life. I don’t know anything about you in it.”
Eames looked at him for a moment then said, “It’s why I don’t research the people I have to forge too heavily before getting to know them.”
“What is?”
“You learn more by hearing about a person’s life straight from the person’s mouth.”
The steaks arrived, and Arthur cut into his and tried to determine if the atmosphere at the table had turned awkward and stilted. He said, eventually, “Tell me about forgery. Dream forgery.”
Eames glanced at him. “What about it?”
“What’s it like? To be able to just…do that?”
Eames considered. “I don’t know, it’s… When I was a kid, I used to look in the mirror sometimes, and I used to wonder why I couldn’t be somebody else, anybody else. And now I can. It’s like finally looking in the mirror and seeing someone completely different looking out at you and realizing you can do anything.”
“It sounds amazing,” said Arthur, sounding wistful without really meaning to.
Eames lifted an eyebrow at him. “You’re jealous of forgery?”
“Of course I’m jealous of forgery. Isn’t everybody jealous of forgers?”
“Not in my experience. You can build, create an entire world inside a dream, make it everything you wish it to be and hold it all together. I can’t think big picture like that, can’t get it all to come together. I’ve always been jealous of that.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.” Arthur waved his hand. “That’s just organization. That’s a few streets here, a few trees there, a mountain or a lake or a skyscraper or two and you’re done. There’s only so much you can do. And then after that you’re still just you. Dream after dream after dream, just you.”
Arthur knew Eames was looking at him and wished he hadn’t said anything at all and concentrated on eating his steak.
“You’re not dreaming the right sort of dream,” Eames said, finally.
Which made Arthur bristle. “Right. Yes. Of course. Thank you for pointing out that there’s something wrong with my subconscious.”
“I’m not saying…” Eames sounded frustrated, paused, started over. “I’m saying, when you dream, you should—”
“I don’t dream,” Arthur snipped at him, and then wished he hadn’t.
Eames regarded him.
Arthur felt vaguely panicked that now Eames was going to think that he should stop dreamsharing, retire, fix the damage he’d done (which had been done too long ago to even matter now). “I mean, I dream sometimes still, but not as much, not nearly as much as— Do you still dream?” He was annoyed, because surely he wasn’t unusual.
“Yes. Sometimes. Not as much as I used to. Don’t you use the PASIV?”
“For what?” asked Arthur, uncomprehending.
“To dream.”
“No.” Arthur shook his head. “And end up some ridiculous addict in some dream den somewhere? Never wanting to come out of a dream?” He thought of Dom and Mal, and how it had ruined their lives.
“Sometimes, depending on your life topside, if you end up wanting to live in a dream because you’re happy there, I’m not sure I think that’s such a terrible end to have reached. But it’s not like that’s some kind of inevitable danger. That’s like assuming you’re an alcoholic because you had some wine at lunch today.”
“You use it,” Arthur concluded.
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes don’t you just get tired of… Sometimes don’t you just want to have a really good dream?”
Yes, thought Arthur. He did. He wanted to have a spectacular dream. He didn’t want to be running for his life, or fighting for his life, or stealing someone’s secret, or following someone else’s rules. He liked dreamsharing, he would have stopped if he didn’t, but sometimes he just wanted to have a really lovely dream. He heard himself say, “I don’t even know what I would dream about,” and wondered why he couldn’t stop talking.
“Paris,” said Eames. “Cary Grant. James Bond. Really clever tailors.”
Arthur smiled because he knew Eames was trying to back them off of the heavy edge the conversation had hit.
Eames said, “We need more wine,” and gestured to the waiter for another bottle.
And Arthur didn’t protest.
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 8
Arthur was standing on the pavement when Eames stepped out of 221 Baker Street.
“So what do you think?” Eames asked him pleasantly.
“I think I hate this stupid fucking job,” Arthur answered passionately.
“I meant what you thought about whether or not you and I are expected to obediently take the Tube back to our hotel prison, but your thought is a good one, too.”
“Your idea’s a good one. Sherlock’s a good chemist who knows Moriarty, and he’ll be an invaluable resource, but John doesn’t want anything to do with any of this and that’s a red flag to me because John is not someone who necessarily avoids dangerous situations.”
“No, he didn’t strike me that way,” Eames agreed, settling his hands in his pockets. The poker chip was comfortingly there, and he closed a fist around it. “But do we have options?”
“This is why Mycroft kidnapped us instead of hiring us. If he’d hired us, I would have refused to let us do this.”
“Would you have refused to do inception, if you’d known about the sedative and limbo?”
“I don’t know. No. I probably would have done it. But I would have made sure everyone knew going in. So that we’d know what we were facing. I don’t like not knowing what we’re facing.”
“Right, but luckily for you improvisation is where I excel.”
“Eames, when having to come up with a fake conversational topic for us, you chose butterflies.”
“I like to keep people guessing, darling.”
Arthur sighed heavily. Someday, thought Eames, he was going to lean in close enough to catch that exhalation in his mouth.
Eames was distracted enough by that thought that he barely noticed the car pulling up. Then Mycroft stepped out of it, so Eames had to leave off his fantasy.
“I trust you got what you needed?” Mycroft asked Eames.
Oh, Christ, the forgery. In the chemist discussion, Eames had forgotten all about it. “I…could do well enough.” He actually wasn’t sure of that. Sherlock was difficult to get a handle on. But Eames was going to worry about that after they had an actual compound in hand. In the meantime, he would have enough interaction with Sherlock that he would get a better handle on him.
“The more important thing is that your brother’s a chemist,” said Arthur, and Eames had to give him points for blunt straightforwardness.
“Arthur, don’t beat around the bush,” Eames told him, “it’s a dreadful habit you have.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Mycroft frowned.
“We need a chemist. We need a special, very delicate solution of Somnacin to get this right. Your brother’s going to make it for us.”
Mycroft’s frown deepened. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“The deal was that we do this job for you and you don’t ruin our lives. This is the best way to do the job.”
“We have chemists for you to work with—”
“Oh, come off it,” said Arthur. “Your brother’s a genius. I’m not working with whatever terrible, subpar chemists have been managing to get all of your dreamsharers driven insane. Not when I have your brother.”
“I don’t want him involved,” Mycroft bit out. “I told you that. He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and it’s unhealthy, and you were supposed to just go and observe him so Eames could forge him.”
“He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and that’s exactly why I want him involved. He knows Moriarty better than anyone, so he’s our best shot at getting this right, and I need to get this right the first time, don’t I? Now is this our ride back to the hotel, or are we going to stand here arguing on the street about the questionable activities you have us engaged in?”
Mycroft looked furious. Arthur looked calmly unruffled, and Eames loved him like this, loved the way he got calmer and sleeker and more confident the more people around him lost their temper. This, he thought, was when he’d first fallen for Arthur, in Rio, surrounded by chaos, shouting, rolling-pin-wielding grandmothers and miffed marks and incompetent chemists, and Arthur, not a hair out of place, cleaning up every mess. Eames had wanted to see if he could ruffle him in that moment, and he’d been spending the rest of their ensuing acquaintance trying to do just that.
Eames said, “Hey, you got off easy, mate: your lunatic brother immediately wanted in on the dream.”
Which made Mycroft look thunderous, and he stalked off into 221 Baker Street without another word.
Arthur gave him a look that contained the barest hint of dimples and then got into the car. Eames took a deep breath, telling himself not to slide into the car after him and push him back against the seat and kiss him, fuck him, ruffle him.
Then he braced himself and slid in after him. And said to the driver, “Do you have to take us back to the hotel, or can we stop for a bite to eat first?”
***
“You didn’t stop this?” Mycroft demanded, and John was both relieved to have Mycroft on his side and annoyed to be berated for what had just happened.
“I tried,” John snapped. “Maybe you should have given us a bit more information on what’s going on with the Moriarty situation.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Sherlock, looking up briefly from his microscope. “It’s nothing but a chemistry experiment. I do those all the time.”
Mycroft frowned. “Do you think I don’t know you? You’re going to use the chemist thing as a means to leverage yourself into getting into Moriarty’s brain. You know what this is, don’t you? This is Moriarty luring you in again.”
Sherlock mirrored Mycroft’s frown. “No, it isn’t,” Sherlock snapped.
“He’s right,” John contributed, barely keeping his annoyance leashed, and Mycroft looked at him in surprise. “It isn’t Moriarty luring him in. It’s you.”
Mycroft looked highly offended in that way that only Mycroft Holmes could achieve. “Me?”
“You. If you would drop this, then—”
“Do you know the information Moriarty has in his head?” Mycroft cut him off. “Do you know how many lives we could save with the information that he has? We’ve tried everything we can think of to get at it. This is our last chance.”
“Working with ruthless criminals?” John lifted an eyebrow. “This is what you’ve decided to do?”
“Desperate times,” Mycroft said. “And we are all of us criminals under the right circumstances, aren’t we, Dr. Watson?” Mycroft gave him a meaningful look.
John thought of his illegal gun and also of a cabbie, bleeding out on the floor. It was on the tip of his tongue to argue self-defense, to point out how justified it had all been, and then he thought maybe it was wiser to just leave the point alone.
Sherlock took the opportunity to jump back in. “If this is your last chance then don’t you think you should give it the greatest probability of success? Your dreamsharers—who, as I understand it, are the absolute experts in their field—seem convinced that Moriarty will only share his secrets with me. Are you really going to depend on a pale imitation when you could have the real thing to make sure it all goes to plan?”
“First, Sherlock, imitating people is what Eames does, and he’s very good at it, so I hardly think we need you to ensure success. Second, Moriarty’s driving people mad, Sherlock. They go into his brain and they come out so shattered that we have to sedate them just to help them find peace. Do you really want to expose yourself to that?”
Sherlock scoffed. “Do you really think I’d be so stupid as to fall for whatever it is they’re falling for that’s making them mad? Anyway, your clever dreamsharers are finding a way around that. It involves a special solution of Somnacin, which you should get me so that I can engineer it to make sure that this all goes according to plan.”
“The government has chemists, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.
“Idiot chemists,” Sherlock corrected.
Mycroft took a deep breath and looked at John.
But John shook his head. “I am not happy about any of this, and you brought it on yourself. If I had Moriarty, I’d just bloody kill him.”
“Because you’re thinking of you and Sherlock,” snapped Mycroft. “I’m thinking of this country. I’m thinking of the world.”
“Bully for you,” John told him scathingly.
Mycroft looked as if he thought neither of them worth the effort to continue to deal with and stalked his way down the stairs.
John leaned against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, and listened to him go.
Sherlock looked over at him warily. “It’s just a chemistry experiment, John.”
“Mycroft’s right. You’re determined to rush headlong into Moriarty’s head.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Sherlock assured him impatiently.
“Yeah,” John agreed drily. “Because you’ve always had everything with Moriarty totally under control.”
Sherlock at least looked abashed, fiddling with the slide on his microscope, but John decided there was nothing more to be gained by arguing about it at the moment. He shook his head at him and dropped onto the sofa in the sitting room and turned on Top Gear very loud so as to annoy Sherlock as much as possible.
***
It was Eames who suggested they stop for lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. There was no obvious security detail on them, and Eames thought they should test the boundaries of their freedom. It was lunchtime, and they had to eat, so Arthur raised no objection, which was how he found himself sitting opposite Eames watching him peruse a wine list.
“What do you prefer?” Eames asked.
Arthur was wondering if Eames knew about wine. Arthur was realizing that he had no idea because he and Eames had basically never shared a meal like this. They had shared lots of hasty meals while working, scarfing down sandwiches while standing next to each other, poring over dream blueprints. They had never sat down to a meal with the luxury of ordering a bottle of wine. Unless you counted the meal with Mycroft, which Arthur definitely did not.
“Do they have a Nebbiolo?” he asked.
Eames’s eyebrows lifted as he studied the wine list. “Good choice. Yes, they do. And oh, look, excellent, it’s expensive. We are definitely charging this to the room.” He put the wine list down and looked around for a waiter.
Arthur watched him, feeling oddly daring. Which was not to say that he’d never drunk with Eames before, because he had, plenty of times. But this felt so dangerously, thrillingly close to a date. If Arthur squinted just the right way, he could almost make himself believe it was.
“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Eames asked.
“Alba,” Arthur replied. “I ate lots of chocolate and drank lots of wine.”
“And yet retained your girlish figure.”
“Well, there was also a lot of hand-to-hand combat in that job.”
“Be still, my heart,” said Eames, as the waiter arrived. “That Nebbiolo, grazie,” he said, and the waiter looked annoyed at the Italian but hurried off.
“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Arthur asked.
Eames sighed a bit, relaxing fully back into his seat. Arthur felt himself relax backward in response. “A lovely little town on the Po River. I was seducing the daughter of a local vineyard owner. And the son.”
“You know that I know you’re lying about most of your conquests?”
“Tell me, love, is it sad to go through life such a committed cynic?” asked Eames earnestly.
Arthur smiled at him. Partly because he couldn’t help it and partly because he’d decided to squint and treat this as a date and, fuck, he hadn’t even had any wine yet and he was behaving like an idiot.
The waiter arrived with the Nebbiolo and made a great show of presenting it to them and letting them taste it. Arthur hadn’t had Nebbiolo since the job in Alba, really. It brought him immediately back to the unique chaos of that particular job.
“Steak again?” Eames asked him, and Arthur realized he hadn’t even looked at the menu.
“Yes. Fine. Medium.” He couldn’t really care less what he ate, frankly.
Eames said, “Rare. As in ‘still alive on my plate.’ Not literally. But you follow the metaphor, I trust?” Eames smiled sunnily at the waiter.
“He hates you,” Arthur informed him as the waiter moved away with an eye-roll.
“Nonsense. That’s exactly how people behave right before they succumb to my inimitable charm.”
“‘Inimitable’ is the most perfect adjective for your charm that I’ve ever heard.”
“Thank you, petal. Make a note of it, won’t you?”
Arthur thought he was now grinning at Eames, as he dutifully took out his notebook and wrote in it Eames – inimitable charm. Then he replaced the notebook, leaned back in his seat again, sipped his excellent wine, and looked across at his lunch companion. He felt really quite dangerously content with his lot in life, despite the fact that he was currently being held hostage by a frightening government operative who wanted him to take a job that might drive him insane.
“So,” began Eames, “do you think Sherlock will—”
Arthur shook his head, and Eames stopped talking and looked at him curiously.
Arthur said, “Let’s not talk about the job. Let’s talk about anything but this fucking job.”
Eames’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? You’re going to take a lunch off? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take a lunch off.”
“If these are my last few days of sanity, I’m enjoying them,” Arthur replied.
“Fair enough. What shall we talk about instead?”
Arthur had no idea. He looked across at Eames, tongue-tied. This, he thought, was why he didn’t go on dates.
“Okay,” Eames said into his silence, sounding amused. “I’ll go first. You’re stranded on a desert island. One book, one movie, one record, one television show.”
“This is what you want to talk about?”
“You didn’t have a better suggestion, did you?” Eames pointed out and sipped his wine.
He hadn’t. Arthur considered, annoyed. This wasn’t really his type of thing. “Oh, fuck, I don’t know. What’s the longest book you know?”
“The Bible?” Eames guessed.
Arthur frowned. “Well, I don’t want to bring the Bible with me.”
“You’re overthinking,” Eames said. “What’s your favorite book?”
“Casino Royale,” answered Arthur, without trying to think of something more impressively literary than that.
“Good choice,” Eames smiled at him, as if he approved.
“What’s yours?” asked Arthur.
“À la recherche du temps perdu,” responded Eames, deadpan.
Arthur laughed. “Fuck off,” he said.
Eames smiled into his wine. “How do you know I’m not a huge Proust fan? Shame on you for judging me, darling.”
“Not fair when I told you my real favorite book when I could have told you Foucault’s Pendulum.”
“It’s Casino Royale,” said Eames.
“Yes,” Arthur confirmed.
“No, it’s my favorite book, too,” said Eames.
Which struck Arthur momentarily dumb. “Oh,” he said, finally, because he hadn’t expected that. Although he hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about whether he and Eames had similar taste in literature.
“Favorite city?” asked Eames, refilling their wineglasses.
“Paris,” answered Arthur.
“Mais oui,” said Eames.
“Am I that obvious?”
“I’ve seen you in Paris. And I’ve seen you in lots of places that aren’t Paris. You’re different in Paris.”
“I used to dream about Paris,” Arthur said, and had no idea why he was telling Eames this, he’d had one fucking glass of wine, he had no excuse. “When I was a kid. It seemed like the most exotic, far away place I could imagine. As opposite my life as you could get. People in Paris weren’t people, they were models and they drank good wine and smoked sexy cigarettes and ate delicious cheeses and croissants and baguettes and they wrote in charming little cafes on seventeenth-century cobblestones and they spoke French. It doesn’t often happen.”
“What doesn’t?”
“That the things you dream about turn out to be better. Paris was better. Paris was everything and better. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I think to myself, You got to see Paris. As soon as this is over, you can buy yourself a plane ticket and go see it again. And then I feel better.” Eames was looking at him oddly, and Arthur felt foolish and self-conscious and shrugged a little bit and said, striving for lightness, “What can I say? The first time I saw Paris, I fell in love.”
“It’s the best way to see Paris,” said Eames. “Seeing it for the first time.”
“That Touch of Mink,” Arthur recognized the quote.
Eames smiled at him. “How did I never realize you read good books and watch good movies? Arthur, you have been holding out on me, love. I should have guessed, though. I knew you loved Paris, and I always thought that was so fascinating about you. I would have thought…Hong Kong, maybe. Or Dubai. Somewhere sleek and modern and new. But no, you love Paris, and then I started thinking of how everything you wear is so terribly impeccable and this odd, little blend of modern and classic and completely unexpected, and your bloody ties are the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.”
Arthur was worried he was blushing. “They’re just ties, Eames.”
“You don’t get to look at you wearing them all the time,” said Eames.
Arthur poured out more wine and said, to get the subject away from this intimacy he’d introduced, “What’s your favorite city? And if you fucking say Paris, I’ll throw this wine over your head.”
Eames laughed. Sometimes Eames laughed for show, not really amused but keeping to his part, but he laughed now genuinely. Arthur loved that sort of laugh out of Eames, and he never could remember it as accurately as he wanted to. “It isn’t Paris. Although I’m fond of Paris, because Paris is Paris, and only unromantic fools don’t like Paris. I don’t really have a favorite. I like a lot of them, for different reasons. I like New York because I sold my first forgery in New York. I like San Francisco because I shagged my first bloke in San Francisco. I like Buenos Aires because my first dreamshare was in Buenos Aires. I like Vienna because it’s lovely.” Eames shrugged, then said, surprising Arthur, “I like here because I grew up here.”
Arthur hadn’t expected him to say that. Eames had had an unhappy childhood, but Arthur supposed you were partial to anything that felt even the slightest bit like home, when you led the sort of lives Arthur and Eames led. Arthur took a sip of his wine and said carefully, “So you grew up in London?”
Eames gave him a look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know all about it.”
“Eames,” said Arthur, on a little sigh. “It’s what I do. It’s my actual job.”
“I know. I’m not angry with you over it. I’m just saying: Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know everything about it.”
“I don’t know everything about it,” Arthur said. “I know the bare-bones facts. I know the Wikipedia entry of your life. I don’t know anything about you in it.”
Eames looked at him for a moment then said, “It’s why I don’t research the people I have to forge too heavily before getting to know them.”
“What is?”
“You learn more by hearing about a person’s life straight from the person’s mouth.”
The steaks arrived, and Arthur cut into his and tried to determine if the atmosphere at the table had turned awkward and stilted. He said, eventually, “Tell me about forgery. Dream forgery.”
Eames glanced at him. “What about it?”
“What’s it like? To be able to just…do that?”
Eames considered. “I don’t know, it’s… When I was a kid, I used to look in the mirror sometimes, and I used to wonder why I couldn’t be somebody else, anybody else. And now I can. It’s like finally looking in the mirror and seeing someone completely different looking out at you and realizing you can do anything.”
“It sounds amazing,” said Arthur, sounding wistful without really meaning to.
Eames lifted an eyebrow at him. “You’re jealous of forgery?”
“Of course I’m jealous of forgery. Isn’t everybody jealous of forgers?”
“Not in my experience. You can build, create an entire world inside a dream, make it everything you wish it to be and hold it all together. I can’t think big picture like that, can’t get it all to come together. I’ve always been jealous of that.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.” Arthur waved his hand. “That’s just organization. That’s a few streets here, a few trees there, a mountain or a lake or a skyscraper or two and you’re done. There’s only so much you can do. And then after that you’re still just you. Dream after dream after dream, just you.”
Arthur knew Eames was looking at him and wished he hadn’t said anything at all and concentrated on eating his steak.
“You’re not dreaming the right sort of dream,” Eames said, finally.
Which made Arthur bristle. “Right. Yes. Of course. Thank you for pointing out that there’s something wrong with my subconscious.”
“I’m not saying…” Eames sounded frustrated, paused, started over. “I’m saying, when you dream, you should—”
“I don’t dream,” Arthur snipped at him, and then wished he hadn’t.
Eames regarded him.
Arthur felt vaguely panicked that now Eames was going to think that he should stop dreamsharing, retire, fix the damage he’d done (which had been done too long ago to even matter now). “I mean, I dream sometimes still, but not as much, not nearly as much as— Do you still dream?” He was annoyed, because surely he wasn’t unusual.
“Yes. Sometimes. Not as much as I used to. Don’t you use the PASIV?”
“For what?” asked Arthur, uncomprehending.
“To dream.”
“No.” Arthur shook his head. “And end up some ridiculous addict in some dream den somewhere? Never wanting to come out of a dream?” He thought of Dom and Mal, and how it had ruined their lives.
“Sometimes, depending on your life topside, if you end up wanting to live in a dream because you’re happy there, I’m not sure I think that’s such a terrible end to have reached. But it’s not like that’s some kind of inevitable danger. That’s like assuming you’re an alcoholic because you had some wine at lunch today.”
“You use it,” Arthur concluded.
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes don’t you just get tired of… Sometimes don’t you just want to have a really good dream?”
Yes, thought Arthur. He did. He wanted to have a spectacular dream. He didn’t want to be running for his life, or fighting for his life, or stealing someone’s secret, or following someone else’s rules. He liked dreamsharing, he would have stopped if he didn’t, but sometimes he just wanted to have a really lovely dream. He heard himself say, “I don’t even know what I would dream about,” and wondered why he couldn’t stop talking.
“Paris,” said Eames. “Cary Grant. James Bond. Really clever tailors.”
Arthur smiled because he knew Eames was trying to back them off of the heavy edge the conversation had hit.
Eames said, “We need more wine,” and gestured to the waiter for another bottle.
And Arthur didn’t protest.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-11-06 09:51 pm (UTC)Eames said, “We need more wine,” and gestured to the waiter for another bottle.
And Arthur didn’t protest."
It was lovely finding out a little (tiny!) bit more about Eames and Arthur and what a brilliantly romantic ending!
Sadly, I think tackling Moriarty will not be romantic at all, for any of them . . .
no subject
Date: 2014-11-07 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-07 01:11 am (UTC)The only quibble I have for that date is that if there's no security on them, and Eames wants to test the boundaries ---- why on earth are they eating in the hotel restaurant? Why haven't they flown to some swanky restaurant in a ritzy part of London?
(Then again...if they're in the hotel restaurant, they can charge the food to the room, and get Mycroft to pay. Clearly, Eames is already forging Sherlock, and he doesn't even realize it yet.)
(Probably because he's too busy pretending he's on a date with Arthur to notice.)
Also, I am totally with John. Except if they just shot Moriarty, there would be no story, and Eames and Arthur would go another dozen years pretending they're on dates before ever realizing they've been an old married couple for a decade.
Carry on, author, carry on.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-07 04:18 am (UTC)As for why they're in the hotel restaurant, oh, yes, Eames is taking great glee in charging the meal to the room. Don't worry, next chapter he'll test the bounds of their surveillance a bit more. And I love what you say, you're right, Eames is already subconsciously a great deal like Sherlock in his ability to irritate Mycroft!
I have always thought that the Holmeses were stupid to play with Moriarty as long as they did. I have always thought John should have taken matters into his own hand and gotten rid of him because the Holmeses are so fatally fascinated by him.
Chaos Verse
Date: 2014-11-07 02:03 am (UTC)Re: Chaos Verse
Date: 2014-11-07 04:07 am (UTC)