Keep the Car Running (12/31)
Dec. 3rd, 2014 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (12/31)
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 12
Arthur was in the hotel suite. In the bedroom instead of the main living area. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, but it wasn’t where he’d intended to go. He’d intended to go to the prison he was working on. He frowned. Ending up in entirely the wrong dream was not a good sign.
There was the murmur of voices from the living area, and he followed them, only when he walked out the living area was empty. He stood and listened hard, but although he could still hear the voices, he couldn’t get them to coalesce into words. What was clear to him, though, was that he was hearing the talking from real life, that the dream was thin enough that a lot was breaking through.
Arthur tried to dream himself a mug of hot chocolate on the table but got nowhere. He tried to remember the last time he’d tried to dream something up and couldn’t. He tried to dream himself a gun so he could shoot himself and get out of the dream and couldn’t even do that.
Arthur sighed and sat on the couch and listened to the hum of conversation he couldn’t take part in. He glanced at his watch to see how much time he’d have to sit here, bored, before the dream would end.
And then, far ahead of when he thought he should have, he woke up.
***
Eames monitored Arthur’s heart rate and blood pressure and thought how two minutes was nothing and Arthur was right that the compound should give them no trouble. But that was no guarantee, and Eames thought he’d feel much better once Arthur woke up.
“So what will he do?” asked Sherlock, sounding insatiably curious.
Eames didn’t want to talk to Sherlock. Eames wanted to worry about Arthur. But he supposed the conversation would help the two minutes go by faster. “He’ll try out the dream, see if he thinks it’ll work for us.”
“And then what?”
Eames almost smiled. “And then he’ll try it again and again and again because he’s Arthur and he’s good at his job.”
“And that’s his job? Trying out the dream?”
“Yes. Trying out everything, really. Like this compound here.”
“Sounds dangerous,” commented John.
“Considering your blog and the fact that you walked in here with a gun that I suspect is illegal tucked into the waistband of your trousers, I find that an interesting assessment,” remarked Eames wryly.
“Do you read his blog?” demanded Sherlock, sounding appalled.
“Do you really not know that the Earth goes around the sun?” asked Eames.
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Everybody gets caught up on that. It’s pointless. What about my blog?”
“Arthur read it,” said Eames, having far too much fun with this conversation. “I fell asleep.”
Sherlock looked so affronted that it took him a few moments to gather himself enough to speak.
But Eames never got to hear what Sherlock was going to say, because Arthur woke up.
“Welcome back,” Eames told him, relieved to have it over. “Not a single glitch up here.”
“It’s not going to work,” said Arthur, pulling the needle out of his arm.
“Why not?”
“It’s too shallow.”
“You said you wanted a shallow dream,” Sherlock pointed out defensively.
“It was too shallow. I never fully got into the dream state. I couldn’t even dream myself a gun to get out of there early. Which is another thing: the time is off. My time in the dream was shorter than I expected it to be. But I suspect it’s always going to be the case with what we’re trying to do, that’s something we’ll just have to watch out for.”
“You said you didn’t want Moriarty’s subconscious to be able to catch hold.”
“I don’t. But it needs to be enough of a dream that Eames and I can do our thing.”
“Especially as I’m rubbish at things topside,” added Eames, to make sure that Arthur didn’t think he’d forgotten that.
Arthur just gave him that patronizing, long-suffering look that Eames adored.
So Eames decided to pile it on and said, “Maybe I should give it a try. Seeing as how I’m better down below than you are.” And Eames waggled his eyebrows, just to put as much innuendo into that phrase as he possibly could, just to see Arthur’s glorious scowl at him. Someday, Eames thought, he might be able to make Arthur smile with as little effort as he made him scowl, and then he would collect his smiles, but for the time being the scowls were good enough.
Arthur said, “Not without fresh bloodwork from you.”
“In case I’ve developed a deadly allergy since the last time you made me do the bloodwork?”
“Exactly that, Mr. Eames,” said Arthur firmly.
Sherlock said, “Teach me how to use the Somnacin.”
“Sherlock—” said Mycroft.
“I need to know how to use it to fix the issues, and it’s perfectly safe,” Sherlock cut through him, and turned to Arthur. “Isn’t it safe?”
Eames had never seen anybody have a bad reaction to Somnacin.
Arthur had apparently had the same experience, because he said, “It’s perfectly safe.”
“If it was perfectly safe,” retorted John, “it wouldn’t be a crime to use it.”
“Because governments only create laws that make sense?” said Arthur. “And anyway,” he indicated Mycroft, “governments use it.”
Mycroft glared at him.
“I need to go into a dream,” Sherlock demanded. “If I’m going to get right the balance that we need, I need to understand what happens in a dream.”
Eames allowed that he had a point. Eames had never heard of a chemist going in as blind as Sherlock was being forced to.
Next to him, Arthur looked at him, hesitating.
Eames wasn’t sure why. He tipped his head and said, “You train people in your dreams all the time.” The rumor was that more dreamsharers had been trained in Arthur’s dreams than any other person. He was renowned for his calm, stable dreams, for how steadily he could hold the world together.
“Right,” Arthur said slowly. “Right. Yes. Of course.” He looked back at Sherlock.
Eames continued to be confused. He wished for probably the millionth time in his life that he could just read Arthur’s mind. Why were Arthur’s thoughts so continuously opaque to him? Was this about whatever dream he’d had yesterday that had clearly unsettled him so much? Eames said, “We could take him into one of my dreams, I guess, but I’m not really set up for training, and this is what you do.” He’d never known Arthur to shirk his own job before.
“No, I know,” said Arthur, although he sounded like he was saying the opposite. “Yes. Absolutely.” He stood. “Ground rules.”
“What?” said Eames, wondering why he was standing.
Arthur just said to Sherlock, “Ground rules. Come with me,” and marched into the bedroom.
Sherlock followed him, and Eames blinked after them.
John said to Mycroft, “This is all a terrible idea. He’s going to end up in Moriarty’s head, and I don’t know what makes you think he’ll be lucky enough to escape destruction a second time.”
Eames pushed aside the weirdness of Arthur dragging Sherlock away and turned to Mycroft and John. Time, he thought, to do a bit of his job while Arthur was theoretically doing his own. “Good choice of conversational topic,” said Eames. “Tell me everything there is to know about Sherlock’s relationship with Moriarty.”
***
Arthur closed the bedroom door, walked into the bathroom, waited for Sherlock to follow, and closed that as well. Sherlock just watched him calmly. He had unsettling eyes, Arthur couldn’t get a read on their color, and they were just so knowing, as if Sherlock already knew everything Arthur was planning to say. He wished suddenly to go into Sherlock’s head, just so he could make Sherlock feel as splayed open.
Arthur said, “The thing about dreams is that you don’t ever have complete control over what’s going on in them. Some of us are better at it than others, and I am very good at it, but you looked at me and in the space of five heartbeats knew more about me than anyone on the planet, so if I’m going to let you in my head, we’re setting ground rules. A ground rule. One.” Arthur met Sherlock’s eyes and said it firmly. “You don’t tell Eames.”
Sherlock was silent for a moment, studying him very closely, perusing him like the pages of a gossip magazine. Arthur thought how inconvenient real life was, that you couldn’t just shoot yourself and wake up out of an uncomfortable situation. “Why not?” Sherlock asked, finally.
“Because he doesn’t know.”
“Obviously. And you don’t want him to know. Also obvious. Why not?”
“Because he—I—wait a second. I don’t have to tell you why anything,” Arthur realized, wondering why he was acting like such a fool. “I’m going to teach you dreamsharing, which you obviously want to know about very badly, and I’m going to do it despite the fact that your brother, who’s holding me hostage, doesn’t want me to. In return, you’re going to keep your mouth shut about whatever it is about me that told you I’m in love with Eames. I’m going to take you into my dream, and I’m going to show you how it works, and you’re not going to say a single word about anything in my subconscious meaning anything about Eames. Do we have a deal?”
Sherlock studied him, his gaze flickering all over him, and then he said, “Yes. You’re a fascinating criminal.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur, turning to the bathroom door.
“And also an idiot,” continued Sherlock.
“I’m sure you think that of everyone,” remarked Arthur drily, his hand on the bathroom doorknob but inexplicably not opening it yet.
“The terms of endearment,” Sherlock said.
“The what?” said Arthur, not following.
“He calls you ‘darling’ and ‘love’ and other ridiculous things, almost constantly.”
Oh. Eames’s terms of endearment. “Yes,” Arthur said. “Because he’s British and a flirt and annoying.”
Sherlock shook his head and sighed. “You see but you do not observe.”
Arthur bristled because he didn’t require the amount of ego-stroking that Eames did but he still didn’t like to be so calmly insulted, especially not about something so personally cherished as Eames’s nicknames for him. “What does that mean?” he demanded.
“He says them because he’s British and a flirt and annoying. So who else does he say them to?” asked Sherlock evenly, and then opened the bathroom door and walked through it as if Arthur was not frozen into place.
Because he’d never heard Eames use a single term of endearment with any other person.
***
John knew two things: One, Sherlock Holmes made stupid decisions. Two, it was John’s job to save him from those stupid decisions. He’d done it on their very first day of cohabitation, killing a man just because Sherlock had been stupid enough to go and get himself in danger. He wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. And he wasn’t going to stop here.
So when Arthur and Sherlock rejoined the living area with the rest of them, John said, “I’m going in too.”
Sherlock gave him an irritated look. “I thought you didn’t approve of dreamsharing.”
“I don’t. But I need to make sure you don’t get into trouble.”
“He isn’t going to get into trouble,” Arthur said, sounding offended, fiddling with the contents of his silver briefcase. “I’ve trained dozens of dreamsharers without incident.”
“There was that time you accidentally got Cecile trampled by a herd of elephants,” said Eames lazily from where he was sprawled on the couch. He’d been drinking in every bit of John’s rant about Moriarty, and he looked reflective now.
Arthur gave him a dark look. “That wasn’t my— How do you even know about that?”
“Darling, it was all over dreamsharing. It’s the only Funny Story About Arthur I’ve ever heard told by someone who wasn’t me.”
“Ignore him,” Arthur said to John. “It wasn’t a herd of elephants, it was a single elephant, and Cecile was an idiot, and nothing happened to her, she just woke up.”
“With a paralyzing fear of elephants,” contributed Eames.
“It wouldn’t have been paralyzing if she’d taken my advice and left the circus,” Arthur snapped.
Eames shrugged.
John stared between them and decided that that insanity settled it. “Sherlock can also be an idiot.”
Sherlock gasped his indignation.
John ignored him. “So I’m going in, too. We can both go in at the same time?”
“Yes,” Arthur said, jerkily doing things with the silver briefcase, and John wished Eames hadn’t put him in a bad mood. “But I am not running a tour group, okay? It’s a training session. I don’t show off bells and whistles. Don’t expect the Great Wall of China with talking parakeets in space.”
“Arthur only does that on special occasions,” said Eames.
“As soon as Mycroft gives me back my gun, I’m going to shoot you,” Arthur told him.
“What makes you think I’m ever giving you back your gun?” Mycroft asked, sounding annoyed.
John thought Mycroft felt as if he had lost control of this entire operation, and Mycroft hated to be out of control. Half of John wanted to congratulate Arthur and Eames for thwarting Mycroft’s controlling nature so thoroughly, and the other half of him was terrified that Arthur and Eames might actually need to be checked by Mycroft.
Arthur said, without missing a beat, “As soon as I steal my gun back from Mycroft, I’m going to shoot you.”
“Oh, petal, stop saying such sweet nothings, you know how they go straight to my head.”
Arthur turned away from Eames, scowling, and held out needles to John and Sherlock. “Here. Hold out your arms and I’ll—”
“I’m a doctor and he’s a recovering drug addict, I think we can find our own veins,” said John wryly.
“Recovering drug addict,” repeated Eames musingly, as if he was filing that tidbit of information away, too.
Sherlock didn’t seem annoyed that John had brought up his drug habit, which normally John did not do. Sherlock was distracted by his obvious glee over getting to go into a dream. John didn’t see what the big deal was. He’d had plenty of dreams and he hadn’t really wanted to live in any of them. John supposed this was how you behaved when you didn’t remember your dreams.
“Two minutes,” Arthur said to Eames.
“Two minutes?” protested Sherlock. “That’s hardly enough time.”
“It’s plenty of time. Time moves differently in a dream. You’ll see.”
“Two minutes to ourselves, Mycroft,” remarked Eames. “What shall we do to pass the time? Do you play poker?”
***
John was systematically shredding a cocktail napkin to bits. Sherlock was drumming his fingers on the shiny, lacquered table.
Arthur was saying, “Pay attention. Both of you. We’re in a dream.”
John looked from the half-drunk glass of scotch in front of him to Arthur himself, dressed in a three-piece suit in a rich shade of brown, with an even darker brown tie with vivid blue thread shot through it in a pattern that wasn’t quite argyle.
Sherlock sucked in a breath and looked around them and said, “Oh. So you’re doing all of this?”
“I’m doing all of this,” Arthur affirmed.
John looked around them. It was a busy bar, full of the chatter of people. He looked back at Arthur, who had a glass of wine in front of him and looked absolutely impeccable and almost bored. “You don’t look like you’re doing anything.”
Every single person in the bar with them vanished. “That’s the trick of it, isn’t it?” said Arthur calmly.
“So what can you do?” Sherlock asked, leaning forward. “What are the limits?”
“It depends on the context of the question. I can do almost anything I want right now, because this is my dream and my subconscious will let me. You? You have limits.”
“What limits?”
“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re an intruder. Right now you’re flying under the radar, haven’t done anything to attract notice, but the more you do, the more you change, the more you wrinkle my subconscious, the more I’m going to start to notice you.”
“And that would be a bad thing?” John guessed, from the edge to Arthur’s voice.
“Here? In my head? Not especially. That’s why I do the training. I have my projections under control. In a mark’s head, it’s a terrible thing. The key to dreamsharing is to get in and get out before the mark’s subconscious fully grasps what you are.”
“Projections?” John echoed.
“The people,” Sherlock said, looking off in the distance.
John followed his gaze. The bar was connected to a lobby, and the lobby was full of people going about their business.
“How far does it go?” Sherlock asked, already sliding off his chair. “Can we hit the edge of it?”
“Depends on the dreamer and the specific dream. This is my standard training dream, so I’ve got the whole city set up. I’ve set it up as a paradox, so it’s a closed dream. All of the blocks lead back to each other.”
Sherlock was walking into the lobby. Arthur followed behind him, and John behind the two of them. He didn’t like being in the dream, he decided. There was an otherworldly difference to it that felt, well, like dreaming. Like this wasn’t quite happening to him. Even though, in this instance, it was. But, at the same time, he wasn’t sure he would have noticed this strange quality if Arthur hadn’t pointed it out to him. It was odd.
Neither Sherlock nor Arthur looked affected by the oddness. John supposed that Arthur was constantly in and out of dreams for a living. And Sherlock was Sherlock, so it was no surprise to him that he was treating the whole thing as some kind of delightful experiment.
They walked through the lobby and outside. The sun was shining brightly, and the cars going by were all newer and well-washed, and everyone around them was well-dressed and attractive, young professional types in suits who were all very busy, dashing about with somewhere to go. Something about it made John think that if he’d tried to predict what Arthur’s dream would look like, he would have predicted something exactly like this.
“Are you controlling the weather?” Sherlock asked, now walking briskly, forcing the crowds of bustling people to part around him. No one really took notice of him.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “I like sunlight.”
“So this is a deep dream,” concluded Sherlock.
“It’s a fairly standard dream. You can get deeper, go down another level, even two, but it’s tricky and not necessary right now.”
“What about my dream was too shallow?” demanded Sherlock, as they continued to walk. Sherlock was now peering into the faces of the projections walking by, all of whom were starting to notice him.
“I couldn’t do this,” said Arthur, and just like that was holding a newspaper.
“But this is your dream,” said John. “Can’t you just…do that?”
“Yes. But you can, too. Anyone can, in a dream. Try it.”
John had no idea what to even do but Sherlock was suddenly holding a newspaper, too.
John stared. “But how did you—”
“It’s a dream, John,” Sherlock said, sounding like an enthusiastic little boy. He’d stopped walking now, and tossed the newspaper to the ground, immediately replacing it in his hand with…a walking stick, which he also discarded. A pipe, which he stuck in his mouth. What looked like a cup of coffee, which he handed across to John. “Drink it. Should be tea perfectly made the way you prefer.”
John sipped suspiciously. And it was. The perfect temperature even.
Sherlock took the pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it. “So this is what you need to be able to do in the shallow dream?”
“Exactly.” Arthur dreamed himself a deerstalker and handed it to Sherlock with a smirk. Sherlock frowned and dreamed it into the black, fuzzy hat of the Queen’s Guard, and then stuck it on his head, satisfied. “We need to have the ability to manipulate the dreamscape to get what we want out of it.”
“While being shallow enough that you don’t want to get pulled down too deeply,” said Sherlock, who had resumed walking. “It’s tricky.”
“Ah, but you’re very smart, aren’t you?”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” John told him.
Suddenly in front of them was a spiral staircase that led up to a small viewing platform. John blinked at it. Sherlock went up it immediately, taking the lay of the land.
“You need to be careful,” Arthur called up to Sherlock.
John would ordinarily have been worried about Sherlock falling off, too, except that he was distracted by the fact that the people passing on the pavement were now starting to jostle him a bit, knocking into him and glaring at him.
“Sorry,” Arthur said to John. “But it’s one thing to dream up objects, and another thing entirely to start inserting structures. My subconscious doesn’t like it.”
John looked at the glaring people walking by. “Sherlock created that viewing platform?”
“Yes. Why would I put a viewing platform in the middle of a sidewalk?”
“I don’t know, it’s a dream.”
Arthur shook his head. “It isn’t the way I dream, and I know it, so I’m growing disgruntled.”
“What happens if Sherlock keeps building?”
“In my dream? Not much. My projections will get progressively more annoyed, progressively frownier. But they won’t attack. Not unless Sherlock does something really outrageous that I can’t brace for.”
John almost snorted. “Well, he’s known for that. So does that mean they’d attack in other people’s dreams?”
“Yes. And, depending on the person, they can be fucking vicious,” said Arthur, with feeling.
“What happens if they attack you?” asked John.
“You die,” answered Arthur nonchalantly. “And then you wake up.”
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 12
Arthur was in the hotel suite. In the bedroom instead of the main living area. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, but it wasn’t where he’d intended to go. He’d intended to go to the prison he was working on. He frowned. Ending up in entirely the wrong dream was not a good sign.
There was the murmur of voices from the living area, and he followed them, only when he walked out the living area was empty. He stood and listened hard, but although he could still hear the voices, he couldn’t get them to coalesce into words. What was clear to him, though, was that he was hearing the talking from real life, that the dream was thin enough that a lot was breaking through.
Arthur tried to dream himself a mug of hot chocolate on the table but got nowhere. He tried to remember the last time he’d tried to dream something up and couldn’t. He tried to dream himself a gun so he could shoot himself and get out of the dream and couldn’t even do that.
Arthur sighed and sat on the couch and listened to the hum of conversation he couldn’t take part in. He glanced at his watch to see how much time he’d have to sit here, bored, before the dream would end.
And then, far ahead of when he thought he should have, he woke up.
***
Eames monitored Arthur’s heart rate and blood pressure and thought how two minutes was nothing and Arthur was right that the compound should give them no trouble. But that was no guarantee, and Eames thought he’d feel much better once Arthur woke up.
“So what will he do?” asked Sherlock, sounding insatiably curious.
Eames didn’t want to talk to Sherlock. Eames wanted to worry about Arthur. But he supposed the conversation would help the two minutes go by faster. “He’ll try out the dream, see if he thinks it’ll work for us.”
“And then what?”
Eames almost smiled. “And then he’ll try it again and again and again because he’s Arthur and he’s good at his job.”
“And that’s his job? Trying out the dream?”
“Yes. Trying out everything, really. Like this compound here.”
“Sounds dangerous,” commented John.
“Considering your blog and the fact that you walked in here with a gun that I suspect is illegal tucked into the waistband of your trousers, I find that an interesting assessment,” remarked Eames wryly.
“Do you read his blog?” demanded Sherlock, sounding appalled.
“Do you really not know that the Earth goes around the sun?” asked Eames.
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Everybody gets caught up on that. It’s pointless. What about my blog?”
“Arthur read it,” said Eames, having far too much fun with this conversation. “I fell asleep.”
Sherlock looked so affronted that it took him a few moments to gather himself enough to speak.
But Eames never got to hear what Sherlock was going to say, because Arthur woke up.
“Welcome back,” Eames told him, relieved to have it over. “Not a single glitch up here.”
“It’s not going to work,” said Arthur, pulling the needle out of his arm.
“Why not?”
“It’s too shallow.”
“You said you wanted a shallow dream,” Sherlock pointed out defensively.
“It was too shallow. I never fully got into the dream state. I couldn’t even dream myself a gun to get out of there early. Which is another thing: the time is off. My time in the dream was shorter than I expected it to be. But I suspect it’s always going to be the case with what we’re trying to do, that’s something we’ll just have to watch out for.”
“You said you didn’t want Moriarty’s subconscious to be able to catch hold.”
“I don’t. But it needs to be enough of a dream that Eames and I can do our thing.”
“Especially as I’m rubbish at things topside,” added Eames, to make sure that Arthur didn’t think he’d forgotten that.
Arthur just gave him that patronizing, long-suffering look that Eames adored.
So Eames decided to pile it on and said, “Maybe I should give it a try. Seeing as how I’m better down below than you are.” And Eames waggled his eyebrows, just to put as much innuendo into that phrase as he possibly could, just to see Arthur’s glorious scowl at him. Someday, Eames thought, he might be able to make Arthur smile with as little effort as he made him scowl, and then he would collect his smiles, but for the time being the scowls were good enough.
Arthur said, “Not without fresh bloodwork from you.”
“In case I’ve developed a deadly allergy since the last time you made me do the bloodwork?”
“Exactly that, Mr. Eames,” said Arthur firmly.
Sherlock said, “Teach me how to use the Somnacin.”
“Sherlock—” said Mycroft.
“I need to know how to use it to fix the issues, and it’s perfectly safe,” Sherlock cut through him, and turned to Arthur. “Isn’t it safe?”
Eames had never seen anybody have a bad reaction to Somnacin.
Arthur had apparently had the same experience, because he said, “It’s perfectly safe.”
“If it was perfectly safe,” retorted John, “it wouldn’t be a crime to use it.”
“Because governments only create laws that make sense?” said Arthur. “And anyway,” he indicated Mycroft, “governments use it.”
Mycroft glared at him.
“I need to go into a dream,” Sherlock demanded. “If I’m going to get right the balance that we need, I need to understand what happens in a dream.”
Eames allowed that he had a point. Eames had never heard of a chemist going in as blind as Sherlock was being forced to.
Next to him, Arthur looked at him, hesitating.
Eames wasn’t sure why. He tipped his head and said, “You train people in your dreams all the time.” The rumor was that more dreamsharers had been trained in Arthur’s dreams than any other person. He was renowned for his calm, stable dreams, for how steadily he could hold the world together.
“Right,” Arthur said slowly. “Right. Yes. Of course.” He looked back at Sherlock.
Eames continued to be confused. He wished for probably the millionth time in his life that he could just read Arthur’s mind. Why were Arthur’s thoughts so continuously opaque to him? Was this about whatever dream he’d had yesterday that had clearly unsettled him so much? Eames said, “We could take him into one of my dreams, I guess, but I’m not really set up for training, and this is what you do.” He’d never known Arthur to shirk his own job before.
“No, I know,” said Arthur, although he sounded like he was saying the opposite. “Yes. Absolutely.” He stood. “Ground rules.”
“What?” said Eames, wondering why he was standing.
Arthur just said to Sherlock, “Ground rules. Come with me,” and marched into the bedroom.
Sherlock followed him, and Eames blinked after them.
John said to Mycroft, “This is all a terrible idea. He’s going to end up in Moriarty’s head, and I don’t know what makes you think he’ll be lucky enough to escape destruction a second time.”
Eames pushed aside the weirdness of Arthur dragging Sherlock away and turned to Mycroft and John. Time, he thought, to do a bit of his job while Arthur was theoretically doing his own. “Good choice of conversational topic,” said Eames. “Tell me everything there is to know about Sherlock’s relationship with Moriarty.”
***
Arthur closed the bedroom door, walked into the bathroom, waited for Sherlock to follow, and closed that as well. Sherlock just watched him calmly. He had unsettling eyes, Arthur couldn’t get a read on their color, and they were just so knowing, as if Sherlock already knew everything Arthur was planning to say. He wished suddenly to go into Sherlock’s head, just so he could make Sherlock feel as splayed open.
Arthur said, “The thing about dreams is that you don’t ever have complete control over what’s going on in them. Some of us are better at it than others, and I am very good at it, but you looked at me and in the space of five heartbeats knew more about me than anyone on the planet, so if I’m going to let you in my head, we’re setting ground rules. A ground rule. One.” Arthur met Sherlock’s eyes and said it firmly. “You don’t tell Eames.”
Sherlock was silent for a moment, studying him very closely, perusing him like the pages of a gossip magazine. Arthur thought how inconvenient real life was, that you couldn’t just shoot yourself and wake up out of an uncomfortable situation. “Why not?” Sherlock asked, finally.
“Because he doesn’t know.”
“Obviously. And you don’t want him to know. Also obvious. Why not?”
“Because he—I—wait a second. I don’t have to tell you why anything,” Arthur realized, wondering why he was acting like such a fool. “I’m going to teach you dreamsharing, which you obviously want to know about very badly, and I’m going to do it despite the fact that your brother, who’s holding me hostage, doesn’t want me to. In return, you’re going to keep your mouth shut about whatever it is about me that told you I’m in love with Eames. I’m going to take you into my dream, and I’m going to show you how it works, and you’re not going to say a single word about anything in my subconscious meaning anything about Eames. Do we have a deal?”
Sherlock studied him, his gaze flickering all over him, and then he said, “Yes. You’re a fascinating criminal.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur, turning to the bathroom door.
“And also an idiot,” continued Sherlock.
“I’m sure you think that of everyone,” remarked Arthur drily, his hand on the bathroom doorknob but inexplicably not opening it yet.
“The terms of endearment,” Sherlock said.
“The what?” said Arthur, not following.
“He calls you ‘darling’ and ‘love’ and other ridiculous things, almost constantly.”
Oh. Eames’s terms of endearment. “Yes,” Arthur said. “Because he’s British and a flirt and annoying.”
Sherlock shook his head and sighed. “You see but you do not observe.”
Arthur bristled because he didn’t require the amount of ego-stroking that Eames did but he still didn’t like to be so calmly insulted, especially not about something so personally cherished as Eames’s nicknames for him. “What does that mean?” he demanded.
“He says them because he’s British and a flirt and annoying. So who else does he say them to?” asked Sherlock evenly, and then opened the bathroom door and walked through it as if Arthur was not frozen into place.
Because he’d never heard Eames use a single term of endearment with any other person.
***
John knew two things: One, Sherlock Holmes made stupid decisions. Two, it was John’s job to save him from those stupid decisions. He’d done it on their very first day of cohabitation, killing a man just because Sherlock had been stupid enough to go and get himself in danger. He wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. And he wasn’t going to stop here.
So when Arthur and Sherlock rejoined the living area with the rest of them, John said, “I’m going in too.”
Sherlock gave him an irritated look. “I thought you didn’t approve of dreamsharing.”
“I don’t. But I need to make sure you don’t get into trouble.”
“He isn’t going to get into trouble,” Arthur said, sounding offended, fiddling with the contents of his silver briefcase. “I’ve trained dozens of dreamsharers without incident.”
“There was that time you accidentally got Cecile trampled by a herd of elephants,” said Eames lazily from where he was sprawled on the couch. He’d been drinking in every bit of John’s rant about Moriarty, and he looked reflective now.
Arthur gave him a dark look. “That wasn’t my— How do you even know about that?”
“Darling, it was all over dreamsharing. It’s the only Funny Story About Arthur I’ve ever heard told by someone who wasn’t me.”
“Ignore him,” Arthur said to John. “It wasn’t a herd of elephants, it was a single elephant, and Cecile was an idiot, and nothing happened to her, she just woke up.”
“With a paralyzing fear of elephants,” contributed Eames.
“It wouldn’t have been paralyzing if she’d taken my advice and left the circus,” Arthur snapped.
Eames shrugged.
John stared between them and decided that that insanity settled it. “Sherlock can also be an idiot.”
Sherlock gasped his indignation.
John ignored him. “So I’m going in, too. We can both go in at the same time?”
“Yes,” Arthur said, jerkily doing things with the silver briefcase, and John wished Eames hadn’t put him in a bad mood. “But I am not running a tour group, okay? It’s a training session. I don’t show off bells and whistles. Don’t expect the Great Wall of China with talking parakeets in space.”
“Arthur only does that on special occasions,” said Eames.
“As soon as Mycroft gives me back my gun, I’m going to shoot you,” Arthur told him.
“What makes you think I’m ever giving you back your gun?” Mycroft asked, sounding annoyed.
John thought Mycroft felt as if he had lost control of this entire operation, and Mycroft hated to be out of control. Half of John wanted to congratulate Arthur and Eames for thwarting Mycroft’s controlling nature so thoroughly, and the other half of him was terrified that Arthur and Eames might actually need to be checked by Mycroft.
Arthur said, without missing a beat, “As soon as I steal my gun back from Mycroft, I’m going to shoot you.”
“Oh, petal, stop saying such sweet nothings, you know how they go straight to my head.”
Arthur turned away from Eames, scowling, and held out needles to John and Sherlock. “Here. Hold out your arms and I’ll—”
“I’m a doctor and he’s a recovering drug addict, I think we can find our own veins,” said John wryly.
“Recovering drug addict,” repeated Eames musingly, as if he was filing that tidbit of information away, too.
Sherlock didn’t seem annoyed that John had brought up his drug habit, which normally John did not do. Sherlock was distracted by his obvious glee over getting to go into a dream. John didn’t see what the big deal was. He’d had plenty of dreams and he hadn’t really wanted to live in any of them. John supposed this was how you behaved when you didn’t remember your dreams.
“Two minutes,” Arthur said to Eames.
“Two minutes?” protested Sherlock. “That’s hardly enough time.”
“It’s plenty of time. Time moves differently in a dream. You’ll see.”
“Two minutes to ourselves, Mycroft,” remarked Eames. “What shall we do to pass the time? Do you play poker?”
***
John was systematically shredding a cocktail napkin to bits. Sherlock was drumming his fingers on the shiny, lacquered table.
Arthur was saying, “Pay attention. Both of you. We’re in a dream.”
John looked from the half-drunk glass of scotch in front of him to Arthur himself, dressed in a three-piece suit in a rich shade of brown, with an even darker brown tie with vivid blue thread shot through it in a pattern that wasn’t quite argyle.
Sherlock sucked in a breath and looked around them and said, “Oh. So you’re doing all of this?”
“I’m doing all of this,” Arthur affirmed.
John looked around them. It was a busy bar, full of the chatter of people. He looked back at Arthur, who had a glass of wine in front of him and looked absolutely impeccable and almost bored. “You don’t look like you’re doing anything.”
Every single person in the bar with them vanished. “That’s the trick of it, isn’t it?” said Arthur calmly.
“So what can you do?” Sherlock asked, leaning forward. “What are the limits?”
“It depends on the context of the question. I can do almost anything I want right now, because this is my dream and my subconscious will let me. You? You have limits.”
“What limits?”
“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re an intruder. Right now you’re flying under the radar, haven’t done anything to attract notice, but the more you do, the more you change, the more you wrinkle my subconscious, the more I’m going to start to notice you.”
“And that would be a bad thing?” John guessed, from the edge to Arthur’s voice.
“Here? In my head? Not especially. That’s why I do the training. I have my projections under control. In a mark’s head, it’s a terrible thing. The key to dreamsharing is to get in and get out before the mark’s subconscious fully grasps what you are.”
“Projections?” John echoed.
“The people,” Sherlock said, looking off in the distance.
John followed his gaze. The bar was connected to a lobby, and the lobby was full of people going about their business.
“How far does it go?” Sherlock asked, already sliding off his chair. “Can we hit the edge of it?”
“Depends on the dreamer and the specific dream. This is my standard training dream, so I’ve got the whole city set up. I’ve set it up as a paradox, so it’s a closed dream. All of the blocks lead back to each other.”
Sherlock was walking into the lobby. Arthur followed behind him, and John behind the two of them. He didn’t like being in the dream, he decided. There was an otherworldly difference to it that felt, well, like dreaming. Like this wasn’t quite happening to him. Even though, in this instance, it was. But, at the same time, he wasn’t sure he would have noticed this strange quality if Arthur hadn’t pointed it out to him. It was odd.
Neither Sherlock nor Arthur looked affected by the oddness. John supposed that Arthur was constantly in and out of dreams for a living. And Sherlock was Sherlock, so it was no surprise to him that he was treating the whole thing as some kind of delightful experiment.
They walked through the lobby and outside. The sun was shining brightly, and the cars going by were all newer and well-washed, and everyone around them was well-dressed and attractive, young professional types in suits who were all very busy, dashing about with somewhere to go. Something about it made John think that if he’d tried to predict what Arthur’s dream would look like, he would have predicted something exactly like this.
“Are you controlling the weather?” Sherlock asked, now walking briskly, forcing the crowds of bustling people to part around him. No one really took notice of him.
“Yes,” said Arthur. “I like sunlight.”
“So this is a deep dream,” concluded Sherlock.
“It’s a fairly standard dream. You can get deeper, go down another level, even two, but it’s tricky and not necessary right now.”
“What about my dream was too shallow?” demanded Sherlock, as they continued to walk. Sherlock was now peering into the faces of the projections walking by, all of whom were starting to notice him.
“I couldn’t do this,” said Arthur, and just like that was holding a newspaper.
“But this is your dream,” said John. “Can’t you just…do that?”
“Yes. But you can, too. Anyone can, in a dream. Try it.”
John had no idea what to even do but Sherlock was suddenly holding a newspaper, too.
John stared. “But how did you—”
“It’s a dream, John,” Sherlock said, sounding like an enthusiastic little boy. He’d stopped walking now, and tossed the newspaper to the ground, immediately replacing it in his hand with…a walking stick, which he also discarded. A pipe, which he stuck in his mouth. What looked like a cup of coffee, which he handed across to John. “Drink it. Should be tea perfectly made the way you prefer.”
John sipped suspiciously. And it was. The perfect temperature even.
Sherlock took the pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it. “So this is what you need to be able to do in the shallow dream?”
“Exactly.” Arthur dreamed himself a deerstalker and handed it to Sherlock with a smirk. Sherlock frowned and dreamed it into the black, fuzzy hat of the Queen’s Guard, and then stuck it on his head, satisfied. “We need to have the ability to manipulate the dreamscape to get what we want out of it.”
“While being shallow enough that you don’t want to get pulled down too deeply,” said Sherlock, who had resumed walking. “It’s tricky.”
“Ah, but you’re very smart, aren’t you?”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” John told him.
Suddenly in front of them was a spiral staircase that led up to a small viewing platform. John blinked at it. Sherlock went up it immediately, taking the lay of the land.
“You need to be careful,” Arthur called up to Sherlock.
John would ordinarily have been worried about Sherlock falling off, too, except that he was distracted by the fact that the people passing on the pavement were now starting to jostle him a bit, knocking into him and glaring at him.
“Sorry,” Arthur said to John. “But it’s one thing to dream up objects, and another thing entirely to start inserting structures. My subconscious doesn’t like it.”
John looked at the glaring people walking by. “Sherlock created that viewing platform?”
“Yes. Why would I put a viewing platform in the middle of a sidewalk?”
“I don’t know, it’s a dream.”
Arthur shook his head. “It isn’t the way I dream, and I know it, so I’m growing disgruntled.”
“What happens if Sherlock keeps building?”
“In my dream? Not much. My projections will get progressively more annoyed, progressively frownier. But they won’t attack. Not unless Sherlock does something really outrageous that I can’t brace for.”
John almost snorted. “Well, he’s known for that. So does that mean they’d attack in other people’s dreams?”
“Yes. And, depending on the person, they can be fucking vicious,” said Arthur, with feeling.
“What happens if they attack you?” asked John.
“You die,” answered Arthur nonchalantly. “And then you wake up.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2014-12-04 03:09 am (UTC)I don't think I like dreaming.
But I DO like Sherlock pointing out that Arthur does not observe (and how), and that Eames pokes so effectively at Mycroft. :)
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Date: 2014-12-04 04:17 am (UTC)And Arthur is clueless. He's actually very clever about most things, but he is so bad at emotions, it's almost comical.
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Date: 2014-12-04 01:43 pm (UTC)In that way he reminds me of a certain consulting detective who drank eyeballs because his best friend told him they were best friends...
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Date: 2014-12-04 09:53 pm (UTC)Wow - quite the dilemma!
Sherlock's caught onto dreaming very easily and very well . . .
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Date: 2014-12-05 01:04 pm (UTC)Sherlock followed him, and Eames blinked after them.
Eames must be all : "WHY THE HELL DID HE TAKE SHERLOCK TO HIS BEDROOM AND I HOPE THIS 'GROUND RULES' THING IS NOT A CODE WORD FOR SOMETHING SAUCY."
“Tell me everything there is to know about Sherlock’s relationship with Moriarty.”
And John must be all, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'RELATIONSHIP' THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'SHERLOCK'S RELATIONSHIP WITH MORIARTY' AND WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M OVERREACTING."
“He calls you ‘darling’ and ‘love’ and other ridiculous things, almost constantly.”
Oh. Eames’s terms of endearment. “Yes,” Arthur said. “Because he’s British and a flirt and annoying.”
And Sherlock must be all, "WELL, I KNOW SOMEONE WHO'S BRITISH AND A FLIRT (with women at least) AND SOMETIMES A TINY BIT ANNOYING AND HE NEVER CALLS ME 'DARLING' AND 'LOVE' WHEREAS I REALLY WISH HE WOULD AND NO I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT JOHN AT ALL."
What looked like a cup of coffee, which he handed across to John. “Drink it. Should be tea perfectly made the way you prefer.”
Aww, this is sweet. He could create anything and he chooses to create something John loves. And he gives him tea, which is, in your fics, the equivalent of a declaration of love. :-)
John would ordinarily have been worried about Sherlock falling off.
I imagine how he'd feel if he had gone through the Reichenbach Fall. We'll be lucky if in this fic Sherlock only falls from dreamy buildings... *looks at you suspiciously*