Keep the Car Running (15/31)
Dec. 24th, 2014 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (15/31)
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.
Author's Note - This is a very un-Christmas-y chapter. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence. I don't think it's anything too gory but these are unpleasant dreams and they needed to be unpleasant enough to rattle Eames and Arthur so nothing good is about to happen in this fic.
Chapter 15
Arthur liked his botanical garden dream. He was proud of it. There wasn’t much to it, but it was ideal when you wanted something streamlined, with not a lot to worry about.
He didn’t even get the chance to notice if the dream had come in correctly, because Arthur immediately found himself on his back. Sarah Miller leaned over him, her red hair in a wild cloud all around her head.
“Sarah—” Arthur began.
And she hissed at him.
Probably not a good sign.
Arthur tried again, attempting to get back to the dream he’d set up for them, to relax Sarah enough to get information from her. “Isn’t it a lovely day—”
And then she broke his finger.
Arthur had had his fingers broken before, in dreams and out of them, and it was never pleasant. He jerked in reaction and bit down on his curse. And Sarah didn’t let go. Sarah twisted his finger and twisted it again, and Arthur blinked through a fog of horrified pain and tried to get her off of him, and then she was knocked abruptly aside. Which didn’t lessen the pain in his finger at all. Arthur gasped and tried to get his bearings, and then Eames pressed the muzzle of a gun between his eyes and pulled the trigger.
***
Arthur woke and checked his finger reflexively. It throbbed with a phantom pain from the dream, which Arthur knew was all in his head, because his finger was fine.
“That wasn’t five minutes,” Sherlock said, watching him.
Eames woke up before Arthur could respond. “Bloody buggering fuck,” said Eames eloquently.
Arthur could feel everyone looking between them.
“What the hell was that?” demanded Eames, pulling the needle out and standing. “She was on us before we could even get in. Who taught her that?”
“She has been militarized,” Mycroft began.
“Shut up,” Eames said, keeping his eyes on Arthur. “We get around militarization all the time.”
“She caught me by surprise,” Arthur snapped. “You didn’t need to shoot us out of there; I would have recovered.”
“You were planning a garden party, Arthur, and she was trying to twist your bloody finger off, in case you didn’t notice. We need a new plan.”
“We’ll be prepared with the next one—”
“No,” Eames shot back. “New plan. We’re not going to walk into a botanical garden and have tea with these people, Arthur. Whatever Moriarty did to them, we’re not going to reason our way into it.”
“This was one dreamsharer,” said Arthur. “It’s reckless to draw a conclusion based on one experience. For all we know, Sarah Miller was always a bit…” Arthur couldn’t even come up with an adjective.
“You read the files,” Eames retorted. “Don’t pretend that you don’t know exactly how she always was.”
“She attacked you in the dream?” Sherlock deduced, sounding fiercely excited about it.
“She attacked Arthur,” said Eames. “Then I attacked her. And then I shot him. And that wasn’t militarization. I’ve seen militarization. That was—”
“It was insanity, Eames. You said it yourself, about going into an insane person’s head. I don’t think we can know what we’re going to get here. Now calm down. It was a broken finger in a fucking dream. During the Boise job you let me suffocate slowly in an avalanche and didn’t seem to mind,” Arthur reminded him.
“You’re still holding a grudge about the Boise job?”
“I don’t hold grudges,” Arthur denied, even though he absolutely held lots and lots of grudges and was still bitter about the Boise job.
“Arthur, I didn’t have time to dig you out of a fucking avalanche when I was trying to convincingly forge a nine-year-old girl.”
“You could have tried talking to Sarah Miller,” Arthur snapped at him. “You didn’t even try.”
“Fine,” bit out Eames. “Do you want to try talking to Sarah fucking Miller? Fine. Let’s try talking to her.” Eames sat back down and reinserted his needle.
“Just a minute—” Mycroft began.
Eames glared over at Arthur and commanded, “Press the fucking button.”
“Fine.” Arthur leaned over and did it before anyone could stop him.
***
Arthur was tied up. Bloody hell, thought Eames, how was Arthur managing to get into the dream already at a disadvantage?
“Sarah,” Arthur was saying, his voice very calm and patient. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
Eames decided that as soon as they got back topside, he was just going to strangle Arthur. This woman was clearly desperately insane, and he was trying to make small talk with her. Sometimes Eames didn’t even understand how Arthur was real, but he’d checked his totem enough in Arthur’s presence to know that he apparently did exist.
They were in Arthur’s botanical garden dream. At least, Eames assumed they were. He assumed Arthur had miles of gorgeous gardens laid out for this dream, but Eames didn’t have time to admire them because right now Arthur was tied up on the ground and crazy Sarah Miller was humming softly to herself as she loomed over him. Tuneless, terrifying humming. Eames looked around him to get his bearings in the dream and tried to decide what approach to take. Whatever had been done to Sarah Miller’s subconscious, he thought, it had made her extremely suspicious.
“A lovely day to cut—you—up,” announced Sarah in a sing-song voice, and punctuated her words with the slicing of a pair of scissors she wielded over her head.
No, seriously, bloody hell, thought Eames. He didn’t react very well to Arthur being tortured in front of him, thank you very much. Letting him suffocate in an avalanche because he’d needed to hold together the rest of the dream was one thing. Standing by and watching someone twist Arthur’s finger off his body was quite another thing entirely, and Eames couldn’t understand how Arthur couldn’t see the difference.
“Sarah, that’s not necessary,” said Arthur, his voice still even and unhurried, because Arthur was an idiot.
“You have too many ears,” Sarah told Arthur.
Fuck this, thought Eames, and dreamed himself up a mirror and frowned into it in intense concentration. Think like him, he told himself. Be him. He almost shuddered with the effort of making himself ice-cold and empty inside. When he dropped the mirror, forge complete, Sarah was still humming her creepy-as-fuck tune and was now dancing the scissors over Arthur’s ear in a demented caress.
“Can we talk about Moriarty?” Arthur asked.
Sarah sliced at Arthur’s earlobe, not enough to cut it off, just enough to make it bleed. Arthur winced a bit. Sarah said, “No.”
“What a pity,” Eames said. “Now that I’ve come to join the party and all.” He didn’t know if he sounded like Moriarty, but he did know that he looked like him.
Sarah looked up from Arthur, seeming to register Eames for the first time. Except that she wasn’t registering Eames at all. Her eyes widened and she held the scissors out to point at him. “It’s you,” she exclaimed, and then ran at him.
Maybe forging Moriarty hadn’t been a good idea.
***
Forging Moriarty was such a fucking terrible idea, thought Arthur. Eames deflected the scissors, dreamed himself up a gun, held it to Sarah’s forehead, and said, “Look, we just want to talk.”
“Do it,” Sarah said, glaring up at Eames-as-Moriarty. “Finish it off. After you left me this way. This way.” She gestured to Arthur, still tied up on the ground like an idiot, as if he was Exhibit A in her museum of insanity.
“Maybe we could revisit all of that,” said Eames. “Relive how I got you this way.”
Wrong thing to say, thought Arthur.
Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a terrible, awful person,” she whispered.
And then she literally gouged Eames’s eye out with a clawing hand. Eames howled with pain, flailing a bit. The gun went off but the bullet just flew harmlessly up off into the sky. Eames stumbled backward, cursing up a storm, his hand to his eye, blood gushing from it. Arthur cursed his inability to dream his way out of the solid ropes around him and instead dreamed up a rake next to him, because a gun would not have been helpful with his arms tied behind his back.
Arthur was busy positioning himself just right over the rake, so he wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with Eames and Sarah. There was scuffling happening, Eames attempting to fight back with one eye having literally been torn out of its socket. Arthur heard Sarah say, “You have too many ears, too,” and Eames cried out. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and contemplated his career choice and impaled the rake through his throat.
He woke up still with the memory of choking on his own blood, but wasted no time in clumsily scrambling over to Eames’s chair and just knocking it over. Not the most finessed kick he’d ever given but he didn’t fucking care at the moment. And it was possible that Mycroft and Sherlock were both demanding to know what was happening, but Arthur just waited for the moment when Eames hit the ground and opened his eyes.
Eames woke up with a gasp and pressed one hand reflexively to his eye and the other to his ear.
“You’re fine,” Arthur told him, panting, as much to reassure himself as to reassure Eames, and leaned against the wall and tried to get his adrenaline down.
Everyone was staring at them.
Eames collapsed against the wall next to Arthur and said, “Newest plan: We are never going into Sarah Miller’s brain ever again.”
***
They wanted to know what had happened. Eames couldn’t be bothered to tell them, but luckily he was working with Arthur, and Arthur was good at handling client relations, so Eames tipped his head back against the wall and let Arthur give a very professional rundown of: So then she took her fingers and pulled Eames’s eyeball out. Eames resisted the urge to touch his eyeball. He knew it was there. He had been in dreamsharing long enough to be able to shake off what happened in a dream. But still, it did take a measure of self-control to do it, and he allowed himself the comfort of sneaking his hand into his pocket and turning the poker chip over, reassuring himself of the reality of the here and now and his two eyes and two ears.
“It isn’t surprising that she has defenses,” Mycroft was saying. “We militarize our people—”
“This isn’t fucking militarization,” Eames said wearily. “How many times do we have to tell you? We deal with militarization all the time. This isn’t it.”
“Government militarization—” Mycroft began.
Eames picked his head up and looked at him. “Mycroft, if you think you need to talk to us about government-style militarization, your files on us are severely lacking.” Then he looked at Arthur. “You start the dream off wrong. I mean, we get into the dream, and you’ve already been attacked. The dream’s starting mid-attack. How is she doing that?”
Arthur opened his mouth, but John beat him to it. “She doesn’t want to dream.”
Eames looked at John for a second, momentarily uncomprehending. Because dreamsharers who could no longer dream forgot that there were people who didn’t long for the release of a naturally occurring dreamscape.
John said, “If your dream, night after night, was actually a nightmare—if you couldn’t close your eyes without being pulled into something terrible—if you were a government operative trained in the art of arming your self-conscious, wouldn’t you shut down every possible dream before it started?”
There was a moment of silence. Eames watched Sherlock as he studied John closely. Eames thought of dreaming, every time he closed his eyes, of Arthur crying out in pain as his finger was nearly torn off, of hands digging out Eames’s own eyeball. He shuddered and was about to agree when Arthur said, “Yes. Yes, that makes sense.”
“And it makes sense why you start the dream mid-attack,” Eames added. “It’s your dream. You’re the one running the architecture. She’s guarding against you.”
“So she shuts me down right away. She doesn’t even notice you until you force her to notice you.”
“By protecting you.”
“If you left me alone, let her do whatever she wants to me, she’d leave you alone.”
“No. Bad idea.” Eames shook his head. “I’m not going to go snoop around her subconscious while she’s otherwise occupied torturing you.”
“It’s just a dream, Eames—”
As if that mattered to Eames’s ability to handle Arthur’s torture, ultimately. Eames snapped, “Exactly. Sooner or later she’d kill you and it would collapse around me, and you know I hate that.”
“Oh, sorry if you have an unpleasant wake-up call,” drawled Arthur sarcastically. “I’ll try to endure the torture as long as I can for you.”
“When you say ‘it’s Arthur’s dream,’ you mean he’s setting up the scenario you’re in,” Sherlock clarified.
“Yeah,” said Eames. “Her head, but Arthur’s architecture in it.”
“Do you have to go in with an architecture?” asked Sherlock.
Arthur tipped his head. “I…” He looked at Eames. “I don’t know, actually. I suppose you could just…let the dreamer do the dreaming?”
“I’ve done it,” Eames agreed. “It’s messy for an extraction—it’s why it never gets done, you want to know your way around in an extraction. But I tried it for an inception once. Thought it might make the subconscious more amenable to the planting of the idea, if it felt so entirely in control.”
“Did it work?” asked Arthur.
“No. But that’s because the inception didn’t work. The dream was perfectly fine, if ridiculous. It involved a sinking ship. How bloody obvious can one’s subconscious be?”
“So what you’re saying is it didn’t work but you learned a lot,” said Arthur, with a faint smile.
Eames actually managed a smile in return. “I make it a habit never to learn from my mistakes.”
“I’ve noticed,” said Arthur, and then, “So we’ll go in without a dream.”
“No,” said Eames. “My plan was to never go into Sarah Miller’s head again.”
“Then I’ll go in without a dream.”
Eames swore under his breath. “Well, obviously, Arthur, I’m not letting you go into that funhouse bouncy castle of a head alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” Arthur said briskly, picking himself up off the chair and dusting off his arse. Which was really not necessary to do directly in front of Eames’s face.
“I’ll go with him,” Sherlock jumped in.
“No,” said Eames, Arthur, John, and Mycroft in unison.
Sherlock frowned.
Eames pulled himself back up to his chair and said, “We’re trying this one more time, and then definitely not again, yeah?”
“We’ll re-think our approach if this doesn’t work, yes,” Arthur agreed. “But if we go in without a dream, maybe we won’t attract any attention at all and we can just…get the lay of the land.”
“Hang on,” said Eames, and checked his totem one last time. Yes. Still reality.
Arthur’s eyebrows were lifted at him in query.
“You’re encouraging a hare-brained scheme that is never going to work,” Eames pointed out. “It made sense that I would fear that this is one of my most cherished fantasies.”
Arthur gave him a dark look and said, “Shut up and inject yourself.”
***
They were standing on a barren landscape. In front of them was a line of barbed wire, running off in either direction as far as the eye could see. A red, dying sun was sitting low in the sky, casting everything into unpleasant shadows. It was ungodly hot, and Eames dreamed himself out of his jacket immediately and glanced at Arthur next to him. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, but he lost the jacket, too, as Eames watched.
“So,” remarked Eames. “This looks like a very hospitable place. A veritable oasis. It’s obvious we must be dreaming such a lush, fantastic landscape.”
“At least we’re not being tortured,” said Arthur.
“Always a silver lining with you,” said Eames.
“Two buildings,” Arthur said, and pointed.
He was right. There was one several hundred yards to their left and one several hundred yards to their right. Dark, square boxes. Not a single detail on the outside to give away what they might be.
“Warehouses?” Eames guessed. “To store all her grisly memories of whatever this bastard did to her?”
“Then we need to get inside, don’t we?”
“I bet one is filled with headless dolls, and the other is filled with dolls’ heads.”
“You take the one on the left; I’ll take the one on the right.”
“You think we should split up?”
“We’ll be fine,” said Arthur, and pulled a Glock out of its holster.
“Arthur,” Eames sighed, and waved around an assault rifle.
“Eames, if you’re not careful, I’m going to start to think that you’re compensating for something,” Arthur told him.
Eames snorted. “Trust me, darling, you just never dream big enough.”
“Go left, don’t get killed, don’t attract the attention of any projections, don’t kill anyone you don’t have to, and try to gain useful information.”
“As ever, thank you for those condescending instructions. I’m serious about the bet.”
Arthur just looked at him in exasperation. “What bet?”
“About the dolls.”
“You think the warehouses are filled with dolls?”
Eames shrugged. “Why not?”
Arthur sighed and shook his head. “We don’t have time for this.”
“So take the bet, darling.”
“What are we even betting?”
“All of the vodka in the world once this is over. Which of us will have to foot the bill.”
“I support this bet,” Arthur decided. “You’re on.”
“Good.” Eames paused and looked at Arthur and debated saying something really stupid like Be careful, which was so unnecessary, because Arthur was always careful and always professional and really so very good at all of this.
“What?” Arthur asked, when Eames just kept looking at him.
Eames smiled at him. “Just good to see you with a gun in your hand again, love.”
Arthur grinned back. “Likewise,” he said, then started walking off toward his assigned warehouse.
***
Bloody hell, it was bloody, fucking hot, was what Eames was thinking as he reached his building. He was on the wrong side of the barbed wire, and he considered dreaming himself some wire cutters to get through it. But it’d probably set off some internal subconscious alarm of intruders. Eames hadn’t seen another soul for the entirety of his walk. So Eames sighed and got on his belly and crawled through the red dust of the soil. The barbed wire scraped up his back, which hurt like hell, but it was only a dream and he’d be fresh and new with no scars when he woke up, so he didn’t think too much about it.
He cased the building carefully. He didn’t see any external cameras, and there was only one door and no windows, so his options for breaking in were limited. But when he got to the door it swung open easily in his hand. That gave him pause. She’d built herself a warehouse in her subconscious, surrounded it with barbed wire, and then she hadn’t even bothered to give it a lock?
Except it wasn’t a warehouse. Sure, it looked that way at first, and Eames picked his way carefully through a crowded storage room of detritus, dreaming up a torch to give himself some light as he went. There was a lot of furniture and clothing in the room, but there were no dolls, so Eames supposed he was going to be responsible for buying them all the vodka in the world later. He was fine with that; he’d use a fake credit card.
Eames was contemplating the promise of a drunk Arthur—drunk Arthur was delightful, he giggled a lot and told terrible, stupid stories, and he dimpled deliciously at Eames, and Eames loved when jobs were over and had gone well enough that there was time for a celebratory drunken night on the town—when he reached a door.
Eames looked at it for a second, then pressed his ear up against it. There was noise from beyond the door, but it was a distant murmur; it didn’t seem close. Assault rifle at the ready, he opened the door. It swung open soundlessly, and Eames realized he was backstage. This was some kind of…theater. And there was something happening onstage. He couldn’t see from this angle but he could hear, a single voice, raised so that it could project out to the audience. Eames followed it, the words growing clearer as he went.
“She thought she’d come into my head and control me!” said the voice, and then it laughed, cold and brittle. Eames shivered, despite the oppressive heat in the theater, and knew immediately who the voice must belong to. “And now look at her, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her dance!”
Eames found his way to the wings, keeping close to the shadows. The stage was lit brightly, and on it was Moriarty, dressed in a sharp suit that made Eames vaguely think of Arthur but exactly the opposite of how Arthur wore his sharp suits. Moriarty was walking around Sarah Miller, who was dressed in a tutu, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she was twirling en pointe. Twirling twirling twirling. A hideous, tight, pained smile frozen onto her face.
“That’s it, my dear!” said Moriarty, and clapped his hands. “Put on your show. Never stop, never stop. Because I’ll never let you. Put on your show for me. For us.”
A spotlight landed directly on Eames.
Eames said, “Fuck.”
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.
Author's Note - This is a very un-Christmas-y chapter. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence. I don't think it's anything too gory but these are unpleasant dreams and they needed to be unpleasant enough to rattle Eames and Arthur so nothing good is about to happen in this fic.
Chapter 15
Arthur liked his botanical garden dream. He was proud of it. There wasn’t much to it, but it was ideal when you wanted something streamlined, with not a lot to worry about.
He didn’t even get the chance to notice if the dream had come in correctly, because Arthur immediately found himself on his back. Sarah Miller leaned over him, her red hair in a wild cloud all around her head.
“Sarah—” Arthur began.
And she hissed at him.
Probably not a good sign.
Arthur tried again, attempting to get back to the dream he’d set up for them, to relax Sarah enough to get information from her. “Isn’t it a lovely day—”
And then she broke his finger.
Arthur had had his fingers broken before, in dreams and out of them, and it was never pleasant. He jerked in reaction and bit down on his curse. And Sarah didn’t let go. Sarah twisted his finger and twisted it again, and Arthur blinked through a fog of horrified pain and tried to get her off of him, and then she was knocked abruptly aside. Which didn’t lessen the pain in his finger at all. Arthur gasped and tried to get his bearings, and then Eames pressed the muzzle of a gun between his eyes and pulled the trigger.
***
Arthur woke and checked his finger reflexively. It throbbed with a phantom pain from the dream, which Arthur knew was all in his head, because his finger was fine.
“That wasn’t five minutes,” Sherlock said, watching him.
Eames woke up before Arthur could respond. “Bloody buggering fuck,” said Eames eloquently.
Arthur could feel everyone looking between them.
“What the hell was that?” demanded Eames, pulling the needle out and standing. “She was on us before we could even get in. Who taught her that?”
“She has been militarized,” Mycroft began.
“Shut up,” Eames said, keeping his eyes on Arthur. “We get around militarization all the time.”
“She caught me by surprise,” Arthur snapped. “You didn’t need to shoot us out of there; I would have recovered.”
“You were planning a garden party, Arthur, and she was trying to twist your bloody finger off, in case you didn’t notice. We need a new plan.”
“We’ll be prepared with the next one—”
“No,” Eames shot back. “New plan. We’re not going to walk into a botanical garden and have tea with these people, Arthur. Whatever Moriarty did to them, we’re not going to reason our way into it.”
“This was one dreamsharer,” said Arthur. “It’s reckless to draw a conclusion based on one experience. For all we know, Sarah Miller was always a bit…” Arthur couldn’t even come up with an adjective.
“You read the files,” Eames retorted. “Don’t pretend that you don’t know exactly how she always was.”
“She attacked you in the dream?” Sherlock deduced, sounding fiercely excited about it.
“She attacked Arthur,” said Eames. “Then I attacked her. And then I shot him. And that wasn’t militarization. I’ve seen militarization. That was—”
“It was insanity, Eames. You said it yourself, about going into an insane person’s head. I don’t think we can know what we’re going to get here. Now calm down. It was a broken finger in a fucking dream. During the Boise job you let me suffocate slowly in an avalanche and didn’t seem to mind,” Arthur reminded him.
“You’re still holding a grudge about the Boise job?”
“I don’t hold grudges,” Arthur denied, even though he absolutely held lots and lots of grudges and was still bitter about the Boise job.
“Arthur, I didn’t have time to dig you out of a fucking avalanche when I was trying to convincingly forge a nine-year-old girl.”
“You could have tried talking to Sarah Miller,” Arthur snapped at him. “You didn’t even try.”
“Fine,” bit out Eames. “Do you want to try talking to Sarah fucking Miller? Fine. Let’s try talking to her.” Eames sat back down and reinserted his needle.
“Just a minute—” Mycroft began.
Eames glared over at Arthur and commanded, “Press the fucking button.”
“Fine.” Arthur leaned over and did it before anyone could stop him.
***
Arthur was tied up. Bloody hell, thought Eames, how was Arthur managing to get into the dream already at a disadvantage?
“Sarah,” Arthur was saying, his voice very calm and patient. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
Eames decided that as soon as they got back topside, he was just going to strangle Arthur. This woman was clearly desperately insane, and he was trying to make small talk with her. Sometimes Eames didn’t even understand how Arthur was real, but he’d checked his totem enough in Arthur’s presence to know that he apparently did exist.
They were in Arthur’s botanical garden dream. At least, Eames assumed they were. He assumed Arthur had miles of gorgeous gardens laid out for this dream, but Eames didn’t have time to admire them because right now Arthur was tied up on the ground and crazy Sarah Miller was humming softly to herself as she loomed over him. Tuneless, terrifying humming. Eames looked around him to get his bearings in the dream and tried to decide what approach to take. Whatever had been done to Sarah Miller’s subconscious, he thought, it had made her extremely suspicious.
“A lovely day to cut—you—up,” announced Sarah in a sing-song voice, and punctuated her words with the slicing of a pair of scissors she wielded over her head.
No, seriously, bloody hell, thought Eames. He didn’t react very well to Arthur being tortured in front of him, thank you very much. Letting him suffocate in an avalanche because he’d needed to hold together the rest of the dream was one thing. Standing by and watching someone twist Arthur’s finger off his body was quite another thing entirely, and Eames couldn’t understand how Arthur couldn’t see the difference.
“Sarah, that’s not necessary,” said Arthur, his voice still even and unhurried, because Arthur was an idiot.
“You have too many ears,” Sarah told Arthur.
Fuck this, thought Eames, and dreamed himself up a mirror and frowned into it in intense concentration. Think like him, he told himself. Be him. He almost shuddered with the effort of making himself ice-cold and empty inside. When he dropped the mirror, forge complete, Sarah was still humming her creepy-as-fuck tune and was now dancing the scissors over Arthur’s ear in a demented caress.
“Can we talk about Moriarty?” Arthur asked.
Sarah sliced at Arthur’s earlobe, not enough to cut it off, just enough to make it bleed. Arthur winced a bit. Sarah said, “No.”
“What a pity,” Eames said. “Now that I’ve come to join the party and all.” He didn’t know if he sounded like Moriarty, but he did know that he looked like him.
Sarah looked up from Arthur, seeming to register Eames for the first time. Except that she wasn’t registering Eames at all. Her eyes widened and she held the scissors out to point at him. “It’s you,” she exclaimed, and then ran at him.
Maybe forging Moriarty hadn’t been a good idea.
***
Forging Moriarty was such a fucking terrible idea, thought Arthur. Eames deflected the scissors, dreamed himself up a gun, held it to Sarah’s forehead, and said, “Look, we just want to talk.”
“Do it,” Sarah said, glaring up at Eames-as-Moriarty. “Finish it off. After you left me this way. This way.” She gestured to Arthur, still tied up on the ground like an idiot, as if he was Exhibit A in her museum of insanity.
“Maybe we could revisit all of that,” said Eames. “Relive how I got you this way.”
Wrong thing to say, thought Arthur.
Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a terrible, awful person,” she whispered.
And then she literally gouged Eames’s eye out with a clawing hand. Eames howled with pain, flailing a bit. The gun went off but the bullet just flew harmlessly up off into the sky. Eames stumbled backward, cursing up a storm, his hand to his eye, blood gushing from it. Arthur cursed his inability to dream his way out of the solid ropes around him and instead dreamed up a rake next to him, because a gun would not have been helpful with his arms tied behind his back.
Arthur was busy positioning himself just right over the rake, so he wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with Eames and Sarah. There was scuffling happening, Eames attempting to fight back with one eye having literally been torn out of its socket. Arthur heard Sarah say, “You have too many ears, too,” and Eames cried out. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and contemplated his career choice and impaled the rake through his throat.
He woke up still with the memory of choking on his own blood, but wasted no time in clumsily scrambling over to Eames’s chair and just knocking it over. Not the most finessed kick he’d ever given but he didn’t fucking care at the moment. And it was possible that Mycroft and Sherlock were both demanding to know what was happening, but Arthur just waited for the moment when Eames hit the ground and opened his eyes.
Eames woke up with a gasp and pressed one hand reflexively to his eye and the other to his ear.
“You’re fine,” Arthur told him, panting, as much to reassure himself as to reassure Eames, and leaned against the wall and tried to get his adrenaline down.
Everyone was staring at them.
Eames collapsed against the wall next to Arthur and said, “Newest plan: We are never going into Sarah Miller’s brain ever again.”
***
They wanted to know what had happened. Eames couldn’t be bothered to tell them, but luckily he was working with Arthur, and Arthur was good at handling client relations, so Eames tipped his head back against the wall and let Arthur give a very professional rundown of: So then she took her fingers and pulled Eames’s eyeball out. Eames resisted the urge to touch his eyeball. He knew it was there. He had been in dreamsharing long enough to be able to shake off what happened in a dream. But still, it did take a measure of self-control to do it, and he allowed himself the comfort of sneaking his hand into his pocket and turning the poker chip over, reassuring himself of the reality of the here and now and his two eyes and two ears.
“It isn’t surprising that she has defenses,” Mycroft was saying. “We militarize our people—”
“This isn’t fucking militarization,” Eames said wearily. “How many times do we have to tell you? We deal with militarization all the time. This isn’t it.”
“Government militarization—” Mycroft began.
Eames picked his head up and looked at him. “Mycroft, if you think you need to talk to us about government-style militarization, your files on us are severely lacking.” Then he looked at Arthur. “You start the dream off wrong. I mean, we get into the dream, and you’ve already been attacked. The dream’s starting mid-attack. How is she doing that?”
Arthur opened his mouth, but John beat him to it. “She doesn’t want to dream.”
Eames looked at John for a second, momentarily uncomprehending. Because dreamsharers who could no longer dream forgot that there were people who didn’t long for the release of a naturally occurring dreamscape.
John said, “If your dream, night after night, was actually a nightmare—if you couldn’t close your eyes without being pulled into something terrible—if you were a government operative trained in the art of arming your self-conscious, wouldn’t you shut down every possible dream before it started?”
There was a moment of silence. Eames watched Sherlock as he studied John closely. Eames thought of dreaming, every time he closed his eyes, of Arthur crying out in pain as his finger was nearly torn off, of hands digging out Eames’s own eyeball. He shuddered and was about to agree when Arthur said, “Yes. Yes, that makes sense.”
“And it makes sense why you start the dream mid-attack,” Eames added. “It’s your dream. You’re the one running the architecture. She’s guarding against you.”
“So she shuts me down right away. She doesn’t even notice you until you force her to notice you.”
“By protecting you.”
“If you left me alone, let her do whatever she wants to me, she’d leave you alone.”
“No. Bad idea.” Eames shook his head. “I’m not going to go snoop around her subconscious while she’s otherwise occupied torturing you.”
“It’s just a dream, Eames—”
As if that mattered to Eames’s ability to handle Arthur’s torture, ultimately. Eames snapped, “Exactly. Sooner or later she’d kill you and it would collapse around me, and you know I hate that.”
“Oh, sorry if you have an unpleasant wake-up call,” drawled Arthur sarcastically. “I’ll try to endure the torture as long as I can for you.”
“When you say ‘it’s Arthur’s dream,’ you mean he’s setting up the scenario you’re in,” Sherlock clarified.
“Yeah,” said Eames. “Her head, but Arthur’s architecture in it.”
“Do you have to go in with an architecture?” asked Sherlock.
Arthur tipped his head. “I…” He looked at Eames. “I don’t know, actually. I suppose you could just…let the dreamer do the dreaming?”
“I’ve done it,” Eames agreed. “It’s messy for an extraction—it’s why it never gets done, you want to know your way around in an extraction. But I tried it for an inception once. Thought it might make the subconscious more amenable to the planting of the idea, if it felt so entirely in control.”
“Did it work?” asked Arthur.
“No. But that’s because the inception didn’t work. The dream was perfectly fine, if ridiculous. It involved a sinking ship. How bloody obvious can one’s subconscious be?”
“So what you’re saying is it didn’t work but you learned a lot,” said Arthur, with a faint smile.
Eames actually managed a smile in return. “I make it a habit never to learn from my mistakes.”
“I’ve noticed,” said Arthur, and then, “So we’ll go in without a dream.”
“No,” said Eames. “My plan was to never go into Sarah Miller’s head again.”
“Then I’ll go in without a dream.”
Eames swore under his breath. “Well, obviously, Arthur, I’m not letting you go into that funhouse bouncy castle of a head alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” Arthur said briskly, picking himself up off the chair and dusting off his arse. Which was really not necessary to do directly in front of Eames’s face.
“I’ll go with him,” Sherlock jumped in.
“No,” said Eames, Arthur, John, and Mycroft in unison.
Sherlock frowned.
Eames pulled himself back up to his chair and said, “We’re trying this one more time, and then definitely not again, yeah?”
“We’ll re-think our approach if this doesn’t work, yes,” Arthur agreed. “But if we go in without a dream, maybe we won’t attract any attention at all and we can just…get the lay of the land.”
“Hang on,” said Eames, and checked his totem one last time. Yes. Still reality.
Arthur’s eyebrows were lifted at him in query.
“You’re encouraging a hare-brained scheme that is never going to work,” Eames pointed out. “It made sense that I would fear that this is one of my most cherished fantasies.”
Arthur gave him a dark look and said, “Shut up and inject yourself.”
***
They were standing on a barren landscape. In front of them was a line of barbed wire, running off in either direction as far as the eye could see. A red, dying sun was sitting low in the sky, casting everything into unpleasant shadows. It was ungodly hot, and Eames dreamed himself out of his jacket immediately and glanced at Arthur next to him. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, but he lost the jacket, too, as Eames watched.
“So,” remarked Eames. “This looks like a very hospitable place. A veritable oasis. It’s obvious we must be dreaming such a lush, fantastic landscape.”
“At least we’re not being tortured,” said Arthur.
“Always a silver lining with you,” said Eames.
“Two buildings,” Arthur said, and pointed.
He was right. There was one several hundred yards to their left and one several hundred yards to their right. Dark, square boxes. Not a single detail on the outside to give away what they might be.
“Warehouses?” Eames guessed. “To store all her grisly memories of whatever this bastard did to her?”
“Then we need to get inside, don’t we?”
“I bet one is filled with headless dolls, and the other is filled with dolls’ heads.”
“You take the one on the left; I’ll take the one on the right.”
“You think we should split up?”
“We’ll be fine,” said Arthur, and pulled a Glock out of its holster.
“Arthur,” Eames sighed, and waved around an assault rifle.
“Eames, if you’re not careful, I’m going to start to think that you’re compensating for something,” Arthur told him.
Eames snorted. “Trust me, darling, you just never dream big enough.”
“Go left, don’t get killed, don’t attract the attention of any projections, don’t kill anyone you don’t have to, and try to gain useful information.”
“As ever, thank you for those condescending instructions. I’m serious about the bet.”
Arthur just looked at him in exasperation. “What bet?”
“About the dolls.”
“You think the warehouses are filled with dolls?”
Eames shrugged. “Why not?”
Arthur sighed and shook his head. “We don’t have time for this.”
“So take the bet, darling.”
“What are we even betting?”
“All of the vodka in the world once this is over. Which of us will have to foot the bill.”
“I support this bet,” Arthur decided. “You’re on.”
“Good.” Eames paused and looked at Arthur and debated saying something really stupid like Be careful, which was so unnecessary, because Arthur was always careful and always professional and really so very good at all of this.
“What?” Arthur asked, when Eames just kept looking at him.
Eames smiled at him. “Just good to see you with a gun in your hand again, love.”
Arthur grinned back. “Likewise,” he said, then started walking off toward his assigned warehouse.
***
Bloody hell, it was bloody, fucking hot, was what Eames was thinking as he reached his building. He was on the wrong side of the barbed wire, and he considered dreaming himself some wire cutters to get through it. But it’d probably set off some internal subconscious alarm of intruders. Eames hadn’t seen another soul for the entirety of his walk. So Eames sighed and got on his belly and crawled through the red dust of the soil. The barbed wire scraped up his back, which hurt like hell, but it was only a dream and he’d be fresh and new with no scars when he woke up, so he didn’t think too much about it.
He cased the building carefully. He didn’t see any external cameras, and there was only one door and no windows, so his options for breaking in were limited. But when he got to the door it swung open easily in his hand. That gave him pause. She’d built herself a warehouse in her subconscious, surrounded it with barbed wire, and then she hadn’t even bothered to give it a lock?
Except it wasn’t a warehouse. Sure, it looked that way at first, and Eames picked his way carefully through a crowded storage room of detritus, dreaming up a torch to give himself some light as he went. There was a lot of furniture and clothing in the room, but there were no dolls, so Eames supposed he was going to be responsible for buying them all the vodka in the world later. He was fine with that; he’d use a fake credit card.
Eames was contemplating the promise of a drunk Arthur—drunk Arthur was delightful, he giggled a lot and told terrible, stupid stories, and he dimpled deliciously at Eames, and Eames loved when jobs were over and had gone well enough that there was time for a celebratory drunken night on the town—when he reached a door.
Eames looked at it for a second, then pressed his ear up against it. There was noise from beyond the door, but it was a distant murmur; it didn’t seem close. Assault rifle at the ready, he opened the door. It swung open soundlessly, and Eames realized he was backstage. This was some kind of…theater. And there was something happening onstage. He couldn’t see from this angle but he could hear, a single voice, raised so that it could project out to the audience. Eames followed it, the words growing clearer as he went.
“She thought she’d come into my head and control me!” said the voice, and then it laughed, cold and brittle. Eames shivered, despite the oppressive heat in the theater, and knew immediately who the voice must belong to. “And now look at her, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her dance!”
Eames found his way to the wings, keeping close to the shadows. The stage was lit brightly, and on it was Moriarty, dressed in a sharp suit that made Eames vaguely think of Arthur but exactly the opposite of how Arthur wore his sharp suits. Moriarty was walking around Sarah Miller, who was dressed in a tutu, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she was twirling en pointe. Twirling twirling twirling. A hideous, tight, pained smile frozen onto her face.
“That’s it, my dear!” said Moriarty, and clapped his hands. “Put on your show. Never stop, never stop. Because I’ll never let you. Put on your show for me. For us.”
A spotlight landed directly on Eames.
Eames said, “Fuck.”
