Keep the Car Running (18/31)

[earlgreytea68]

Title - Keep the Car Running (18/31)
Author - 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 18

John was used to Sherlock staying up all night, used to Sherlock getting fixated on something that intrigued him and foregoing all usual human occupations—eating, sleeping, John would not have been surprised if Sherlock even tried to forget breathing—in order to focus more fully on his preoccupation. John was even used to it happening when Moriarty was involved.

But he hated it when Moriarty was involved.

Normally, John just settled into the different rhythm of the flat when Sherlock was in this sort of mood, as opposed to when he was sulking about how the world was the most boring place. But Sherlock’s all-night violin playing filled him with dread. They lived lives where they were almost killed more than other people, but still John knew that Moriarty was their one true threat. And John didn’t count him out just because he happened to be currently locked up in a government prison somewhere. After all, wasn’t he insinuating himself just as much into Sherlock’s mind? And whatever he’d done to Sarah Miller had been unpleasant, so unpleasant that it had made Arthur and Eames pale and worried-looking, and John hadn’t quite made up his mind about those two yet, but he knew they were not thin-skinned, nervous types.

John spent a sleepless night contemplating the existence of dreamsharing and all the things that could go wrong in a person’s brain, and listening to Sherlock’s absent-minded violin, not even playing a tune so much as individual plaintive notes. Then when it was morning he went downstairs and made them tea. He brought a cup out to Sherlock and put it on the desk for him where he was playing by the window. Then he sat in his chair and inquired pleasantly, “Do you think you’re going to sleep anytime soon?”

“You didn’t sleep,” Sherlock shot back, without even turning to look at him.

“You played the violin all night,” John pointed out.

“Which doesn’t usually bother you,” Sherlock retorted.

John glanced toward the kitchen and said, “Why were you playing all night? I thought you’d be fiddling with the compound.”

“I can’t until I know what happened in Sarah Miller’s dream, because I didn’t get to go into Sarah Miller’s dream.”

“It’s a person’s head, you know. Her innermost thoughts. It isn’t a theme park you’ve been denied admittance to.”

Sherlock waved his hand about and tossed himself petulantly into his chair. John knew he was thinking, once again, that John always made the obvious mistake of thinking so much about people’s personhood. “I don’t know why you’re so worried about all of this. Clearly people have been doing this for ages.”

“Yeah, and sometimes they end up like Sarah Miller, and how would you like that?”

“I wouldn’t end up like Sarah Miller.”

“Of course not, because you’re the great and clever Sherlock Holmes whose life I have to regularly save because of how stupidly you rush into danger.”

“I do that because you like to rush in and play the hero,” Sherlock sniffed.

John didn’t even dignify that with a reply. He lifted his eyebrows and sipped his tea.

Sherlock picked up his mobile and scrolled through it, then sighed and tossed it aside. “Arthur is ignoring my emails.”

“I like Arthur more and more,” John remarked.

Sherlock gave him a dark look. “Don’t you have a date you could go on?” asked Sherlock scathingly.

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” said John.

Sherlock gave him a look that said So? Clearly not understanding John’s point.

John sighed and went into the kitchen and made them breakfast. Sherlock of course ignored the breakfast in favor of playing sulkily on his violin. John went to the shops to replenish their food supply and came back to Sherlock in the middle of a monologue on something—alarmingly, from what little John heard, it seemed like the topic might have been phallic symbols. John said, “I’ve missed this whole thing because I was out,” and Sherlock then sulked about John’s audacity in leaving the flat. John worked on his blog, and Sherlock stared at him unnervingly and made snappish comments about John’s typing abilities. All in all, it was a miserable day and John almost rang Mycroft to tell him to get his dreamsharing criminals to Baker Street so that this entire bloody thing with Moriarty could just be got over with.

And then their doorbell buzzed and Sherlock practically bounded joyously out of his seat and down the stairs. John sighed and put his laptop aside and listened to Mrs. Hudson being very confused over Sherlock’s sudden enthusiasm for opening doors, and introductions were made, and Mrs. Hudson tittered in response to something that probably Eames had said, John thought, and then Sherlock led them into the room.

“Hello,” John said pleasantly. “Nice to see you.” He actually really meant it.

Arthur said drily, “I thought maybe we should come in response to one of the eighteen emails I’ve received so far.”

“You’re terrible at responding to email,” Sherlock snapped at him. “What sort of businessman are you?”

“Not a businessman,” said Arthur, already stripping himself out of his coat. He looked a bit worse for wear, John thought, as if he’d had a tough night. There was no dead giveaway, he was perfectly pulled together as usual, but there was a general feeling of fragility to him, like it was all taking more effort than usual. John thought if he’d asked Sherlock, Sherlock would have been able to point to a million concrete details about Arthur that were giving him away, but John was just left with the general impression.

“Arthur’s a chef, don’t you know?” yawned Eames, and Eames hadn’t made any effort to look anything other than a rough-edged mess.

John lifted his eyebrows and wondered if this had been provoked by Sarah Miller’s dreams. How bad had they been, anyway?

Arthur rolled up his sleeves and sat at the desk and took out his notebook and said, “Let’s work.”

“Finally,” said Sherlock. “Tell me about what happened in Sarah Miller’s head.”

“The first time she had me tackled to the ground and was trying to twist my finger off,” said Arthur dispassionately.

Eames winced, and John didn’t think it was a headache. He looked at John and said hopefully, “Any chance of a cup of coffee?”

John took pity on him, even though he probably shouldn’t, because it wasn’t like Eames had been forced to over-indulge the night before. But he said, “Yeah,” and led Eames into the kitchen.

Their coffee wasn’t fancy because they both much preferred tea, and John sensed that Eames didn’t quite approve but also that Eames didn’t really care at that point. While John got the pot ready, Eames very comfortably retrieved two mugs, as if this were his kitchen. He said, “Will you and Sherlock have coffee?”

“We’ve already had tea,” John said.

“How extraordinarily civilized of you,” remarked Eames, and, yawning, leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing both his arms and his ankles. And then he looked at John critically, suddenly more sharp-eyed than John would have supposed him capable of at the moment, and John wondered if Eames was over-exaggerating his state while Arthur was under-exaggerating his. “Arthur’s good at what he does, you know.”

“I don’t even know what he does,” John said, with a tight smile, because he didn’t want to have this conversation with him.

“I’m just saying that he won’t let Sherlock get into trouble. Arthur doesn’t let me get into trouble on a job. And that takes some doing. So I know you’re worried, and it does seem like Sherlock and Moriarty have a bit of a complicated history—” John snorted “—but Arthur won’t put him in danger. It’s a tricky job, and he needs the help right now, but that’s all this is; it’s perfectly safe.”

“Perfectly safe?” John echoed.

“Yes.” Eames glanced at the coffee pot, which had finished its gurgling and was now ready to be poured, and talked as he poured the coffee. “To be totally honest, if he thought he could get away with it, I think Arthur would try to keep me out of Moriarty’s head for this job, so he’s definitely not going to let Sherlock into it.”

John watched Eames add sugar to one cup of coffee and retrieve milk from their fridge to add to it. He didn’t even blink at the various body parts in there. Then Eames set the cup aside and took a sip from the black cup. Arthur’s coffee, John thought. Eames had just expertly made Arthur a cup of coffee, and John knew the amount of time you had to spend with a person to get their milk and sugar down to the casual science Eames had just displayed.

“Do the two of you always work together?” John asked.

“Often enough,” said Eames. “It depends on the job.”

“You seem to work together well,” remarked John, still fishing.

Eames said, “We either work together very well or we’re at each other’s throats. Makes it entertaining.” He flashed John a smile. “Much, I gather from your blog, like you and Sherlock.” And Eames winked and walked out of the kitchen with the coffee.

John followed behind him as he handed Arthur the coffee and settled against the window. Arthur took the coffee without comment, sipped it, and said, “Sherlock has a crazy idea.”

“It’s the only idea that will work,” said Sherlock sulkily from his chair.

Eames lifted his eyebrows. “And this idea is?”

“He thinks he can do Moriarty’s trick.”

“Moriarty’s trick?” echoed Eames.

“The inception trick,” said Arthur.

“Ah, I see, when you said he was a natural, you meant he was a bloody savant, did you?” Eames’s tone was desert dry.

“Sherlock has a good point. We’re thinking about a different kind of inception, you and I. You always say inception doesn’t work unless the mark gives himself the idea.”

“It’s true. It doesn’t.”

“Moriarty isn’t planting an idea,” Sherlock burst in, clearly having listened to other people’s voices for too long, and, frankly, John was impressed he’d lasted as long as he had. “Moriarty is using the ideas he finds there. He’s taking the ideas you already had and using them against you.”

“Moriarty’s extracting,” Arthur said to Eames, “only instead of taking the idea with him, he’s leaving it in the middle of your head for you to deal with.”

“And that’s enough to drive someone insane?” Eames sounded skeptical.

“The right idea, in the right place. Like watching your husband die over and over and over on the night you met him. If that was all you saw, when you closed your eyes…” Arthur trailed off.

“That doesn’t even seem clever,” said Eames. “Anybody could do that. We could do that whenever we wanted.”

“Then why don’t you?” asked Sherlock.

“Probably because we’re not psychopaths,” Eames snapped at him.

“We don’t deal with a subconscious that way,” Arthur said. “We try to control the subconscious all the time. We’re after very specific stuff. I don’t know that we would know how to let the subconscious just spin out like that. We work very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Okay. So how do we learn how to do it? Or, I guess, more importantly, how to keep Moriarty from doing it to us.”

“That’s Sherlock’s crazy idea. He wants to do it to us so we can see what it’s like and practice resisting it.”

“No,” John said immediately. “No, no, no. Go into a dream again? You? Absolutely not.”

“It’s the only way, John,” said Sherlock.

“We do need to understand better what Moriarty is doing if we’re going to combat it,” Arthur told him.

“This plan lacks a certain je ne sais quoi that I usually associate with a plan of yours, darling. Oh, wait. I do sais ce que c’est,” said Eames. “What’s missing is your usual unquenchable thirst for common sense, and specificity, and lack of suicidalness.”

“I agree with Eames,” said John.

“I like him better than I like you,” Eames told Arthur.

“That’s tragic for me. I’m sure you can imagine how bereft I feel now,” deadpanned Arthur.

“I can, yes, although normally I’m used to at least some rending of garments upon being told something like that.”

“My garments are too nice to rend, though,” Arthur pointed out.

“Can we get back to the point?” John interrupted impatiently. “Which is that I don’t want you going in any more dreams.”

“John, I know that you’ve known for a while that I was going to have to spend time in dreams to help them,” Sherlock snapped. “You’re not an idiot.”

“You’ve certainly changed your tune,” retorted John, glaring at Arthur.

“It isn’t Moriarty’s head,” Arthur inserted calmly. “I wouldn’t let him in there. And do you have a better idea?” Arthur looked at Eames. “Either of you?”

“I have so many fantastic ideas, petal, but usually you’re not interested in hearing them. For instance, I have really, really good ideas about your ties—”

“Ideas about Moriarty,” Arthur clarified.

Eames paused. “Ah, well, you didn’t specify before. No, I have no better ideas about Moriarty, but I’m not exactly wild about the plan of ‘let’s let an amateur poke around my head a bit in an effort to almost but hopefully not quite drive me insane.’”

“Amateur?!” sputtered Sherlock.

“Not your head,” Arthur said.

Eames blinked at him. “What?”

“Not your head. My head.”

Eames carefully put his mug down on the desk and said evenly, “Can I clarify, pet? Just to make sure I have everything right. You know how long it takes me to catch on to things sometimes. Your plan is to let a man, on his second time in a dreamscape, attempt to drive you insane, leaving yourself totally defenseless, vulnerable, open to harm, with absolutely no backup?”

“Eames—” Arthur began.

“Butterflies,” said Eames. “And the fact that I have had to use that code word twice in this job is distressing.”

“It is such a fucking terrible code word, Eames,” Arthur complained.

“Butterflies,” said Eames again, and straightened from the window. “Come along.”

Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “‘Come along’?” echoed Arthur.

“If you don’t come, I will make you come,” said Eames.

“And then I’ll throw you out that window,” replied Arthur.

“And I feel like that would be unfortunate for me.”

“I feel that way, too,” bit out Arthur.

“Then, given your fondness for me, you should just come along, shouldn’t you?”

Arthur glared at Eames for a long moment, then he turned to Sherlock and John and said graciously, as if they hadn’t just witnessed all of that, “We’ll be right back.”

John watched them go, then turned to Sherlock and said, “What are you going to do to him?”

“Show him what he’s up against and thereby save his life,” retorted Sherlock. “And I thought that was what you loved so much: the saving of lives.”

John, recognizing that, as usual, Sherlock had out-argued him, went back into the kitchen to make more tea.

***

Arthur said, as soon as they stepped outside, “It is such a fucking terrible code word and I am changing it, okay?”

“To what?” Eames asked.

“Something normal. Like, I don’t know, ‘outside.’”

“You want the code word for ‘let’s talk outside’ to be ‘outside’?”

“It would make sense.”

“It’s a bit obvious, don’t you think?”

“Like suddenly blurting out ‘butterflies’ isn’t obvious? I don’t understand where that even came from.”

“It’s called imagination, Arthur. And shut up about the bloody fucking code words for two bloody minutes, would you?”

Arthur looked closely at his watch. “Fine. Two minutes. Go.”

“This is a terrible plan. Remember when my plan was to forge Moriarty and you said it was a terrible plan? This is so much worse than my plan.”

“You didn’t run your terrible plan by me,” Arthur snapped. “So there can’t be a comparison between the two. At least I told you I was planning this.”

“You’ve interrupted my two minutes of time,” Eames told him harshly. “You’re not doing this. I’m not letting you do this.”

“Eames, there is no other way to— We can’t have the first time we deal with this be in Moriarty’s head.”

“He has no idea what he’s doing in a dreamscape.”

“Neither does Moriarty.”

“That’s clearly not true. Moriarty clearly knows exactly what he’s doing in a dreamscape.”

“Only because he’s apparently an evil genius. And we have our own genius upstairs, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, and he’s offered to help, and I don’t have another idea. This is what we do; this is the safest plan I can come up with.”

Eames looked at him for a moment. And he hated to admit it but Arthur was right. They had to practice somehow, and Sherlock knew Moriarty well, he had a plausible theory, and he seemed much less likely to destroy them immediately than Moriarty was. “You’re not going in alone,” Eames said flatly.

“That’s my job, Eames.”

“No. Stop it. For Christ’s sake, this isn’t even me being selfless or anything like that. What the hell am I supposed to do if something goes wrong and you get destroyed in there? At least let me go in with you so I can shoot one of you out of the dream if the experiment fails.”

Arthur had an odd fixed expression on his face, and Eames wondered suddenly if he’d given himself away, if it was obvious how much Eames would do to keep Arthur safe at Eames’s own expense.

But Arthur said, “Eames. Could you forge me?”

“Could I forge you?” Eames tried not to be offended. “Arthur, I could forge Moriarty after seeing him for two minutes. Of course I could forge you; I know you better than anyone else in the world.” The words were out before Eames could bite them back as being too starry-eyed.

But Arthur didn’t even seem to register them. “That’s what we’re going to do,” he said, his voice soft with the eureka moment of a plan coming together. “We’re both going to go in, and you’re going to forge me.”

“And what will that accomplish?” Eames asked, not quite following.

“We’re going to treat this like a normal extraction. Like we would if we were extracting Moriarty. Get into Sherlock’s head, get the information he’s keeping a secret, get out. We’ll use the hotel dreamscape from the inception job: because it’s our most recent one together, we’ll probably remember it the best, and we don’t have time right now to come up with a new one.”

“Fine,” Eames agreed.

“He’s going to have to pick one of us to go after. He can’t pick us both because we’ll separate. As soon as we get in the dream. You take the stairs, I’ll take the elevator, and we’ll see who he comes after. Whoever he follows, the other one does the extraction. The one of us being followed, we’ll hold him off, just like we would Moriarty. Make Sherlock work for it. If he thinks he can show us how it’s being done, I want this to be game-time conditions. There’s no way Sarah Miller and her team rolled over for Moriarty, but they probably stuck together, probably made it so he knew which one was forming the dreamscape, which one to target. I don’t want him to know. Once we’ve finished the extraction, whoever it is, we’ll find the other and get us all out of there.”

“So if he decides to follow you?”

“I’m good at merry chases,” Arthur reminded him with a ghost of a grin, dimples peeking through. Of course. Because Arthur was a mad lunatic who was never happier than when he was all tied up with danger. “What if he picks you?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Eames said. “I’ve got another concern about your plan.”

Arthur looked offended. “What’s that?”

“Why do you get to take the lift?” asked Eames, and Arthur rolled his eyes at him, and Eames grinned and said, “Let’s go do this.”