earlgreytea68 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
earlgreytea68) wrote2015-01-21 09:01 pm
earlgreytea68) wrote2015-01-21 09:01 pm
Entry tags:
Keep the Car Running (19/31)
Title - Keep the Car Running (19/31)
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 19
Sherlock’s projections ran a colorful gamut, much more so than most people’s projections ever did, and they made an interesting crowd jumbling in Arthur’s sleek hotel lobby. Sherlock stood looking between two identical Arthurs, and then they separated.
Eames dashed through the lobby, dodging the projections who paused to look in his direction, and barreled into the stairwell, trusting that Arthur had taken the lift as agreed. Eames didn’t hesitate, taking the stairs two at a time. Arthur, he thought, really wasn’t a bad person to forge. Eames sometimes spent dreams stifled in bodies that weren’t exactly made for running and dodging bullets. It was refreshing to be Arthur.
A door opened above him, and Eames stopped running, stood in the stairwell, listening. A step behind him, measured and precise, and Eames glanced over the railing in time for Sherlock to look up at him, meet his eyes. Then Sherlock had chosen the wrong Arthur, thought Eames, and let himself be a little bit proud of his skill. That meant that Arthur would be working his way toward the extraction.
Eames decided that this meant that Arthur would no longer be worrying about the lift, because Arthur would have realized that Eames had worked as decoy and Arthur would be worrying about the extraction now. And Eames wasn’t about to keep going up and down and all around Arthur’s paradoxical staircases. He needed to present a bit of a challenge or Sherlock would get suspicious. So Eames emerged from the stairwell into the hallway. A couple of projections, just back from a dinner date and walking to their room, gave him a long look as he passed by.
Eames smiled jovially at them and said, “Such a lovely evening, isn’t it?” and they frowned heavily. Eames pressed the button for the lift and kept smiling, just as Sherlock emerged out into the hallway. He wasn’t moving quickly, and Eames wondered if he was still trying to make up his mind if he’d picked the right Arthur. So Eames didn’t give him a cheeky little wave as he stepped onto the lift, because that would have given it away; Arthur would never have done such a thing.
Eames pressed the button for the top floor of the hotel, then emergency stopped it as soon as it started moving. This set off an alarm and Eames hoped it would throw Sherlock’s projections into disarray. It would attract them to this point and away from wherever Arthur was, hopefully.
Eames removed Arthur’s helpfully installed trapdoor—Arthur’s dreamscapes were always so beautifully maintained down to every last detail, Arthur never forgot any of it—and pried open the doors on the floor above. The hallway was deserted, and Eames considered his options, then went back to the stairwell. Eerily quiet. He almost didn’t like it. Where the hell was Arthur; surely he had to be almost done by this point? Arthur moved quickly and knew the layout of this place, knew where it was likely Sherlock would hide the most important things in his head.
Eames began heading up, and, as he went, he realized he was getting light-headed, as if he was climbing a mountain instead of a set of hotel stairs. A headache pressed behind his eyes, bright and urgent. He felt slow and almost dizzy and eventually he realized that he’d stopped moving altogether. He stood on the staircase, disoriented, closing his eyes against it, and he was pondering whether something was going wrong with the compound and whether he ought to shoot himself out of the dream when the little canister landed at his feet and the gas started hissing out of it.
***
Eames did a circuit of the bedroom, gun in his hand, stepping skillfully through the patterns of moonlight on the floor. He was uneasy, and he didn’t know why, couldn’t remember why he’d grabbed the gun and started prowling through the bedroom in the first place.
Arthur said, from the bed, “Come back to bed, would you?” He sounded grumbly and displeased, huddled under the pile of blankets.
Eames couldn’t shake the feeling of something being wrong. Something being off. “I thought I… Did I hear something?”
“It was probably your own snoring,” grumbled Arthur.
“I don’t snore,” Eames protested automatically, and patted himself down for his totem, because there was something wrong about this. Wasn’t there? He was only wearing pants, so there was no surprise that his totem wasn’t on him.
“I didn’t hear anything, you’re being paranoid, come to bed,” said Arthur, all calm authority, and would Arthur have sounded like that if something was wrong?
Eames settled slowly into the bed, putting the gun on the nightstand as he went. “Arthur, how did we get here?” he asked, unable to shake the uneasiness.
“Christ knows,” Arthur said sleepily, even as he cuddled against Eames as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He pressed his face into Eames’s neck and said, “I think you drugged me, because you’re actually the world’s most fucking annoying person, especially when you wake us up in the middle of the night to play with guns, but you’re good in bed and sometimes I think you’re amusing, so I guess there’s that. Now go to sleep, hmm?”
Eames had no idea what to say to that. Eames felt like he couldn’t breathe. Eames still wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. Arthur insinuated a leg between Eames’s and sighed a happy little sigh against him, and Eames thought that was fine, he didn’t want to wake up after all.
No, no, he told himself. Dangerous. Think about this. How did you get here? Where were his trousers? His totem would be in his trousers. His gaze lit on the nightstand, where Arthur’s totem sat, and he reached for it and rolled it. Five. “Arthur, what does your totem come up in a dream?” he asked.
“As if I’d tell you,” said Arthur, suddenly scathing.
Eames hesitated, still feeling so off-balance that he thought it possible he might slide entirely off the planet if he moved the wrong way. Arthur was tucked up against him, warm and solid, but his tone had abruptly been cold and distant. And, granted, Eames had unthinkingly asked a very personal question, but they were cuddled in bed together and Eames wasn’t sure he’d deserved that level of ire. “I just meant—” he began.
“You won’t be happy until you push and push and push at me to make me leave,” Arthur cut him off viciously.
“I…” began Eames, confused. “That’s not—”
Arthur propped himself up, rising over him, his face too in shadows for Eames to see. “Because I will, you know. I’ll eventually leave. You’ll do something wrong, push it too far, and I’ll realize how ridiculous all this is, how absurd, how much better I could do than you. You know that, right? You expect it every moment, don’t you? Wait for me to come to my senses and leave. Wonder why I haven’t done it yet. Well, I have a secret for you: I haven’t left you yet because I’m biding my time. I’d much rather keep you off-balance, you know.”
Eames felt very cold. Cold where Arthur was no longer pressed up against him. Cold where Arthur’s words were curling into him. He was destroying this. He’d had Arthur cuddled next to him in bed and he was already destroying it, effortlessly. To be expected, really. “Arthur—” he began, already feeling the futility of it. Arthur would leave, of course he would leave, because Arthur was sensible and—
Arthur vanished into thin air.
Eames blinked and sat up, alarmed and astonished.
And Sherlock said, standing by the side of the bed, “I see I picked the wrong Arthur. But you get the general idea.” And then he picked up Eames’s gun and shot himself in the head.
***
Arthur made a split-second improvisational decision to forego the elevator, suddenly worrying that maybe Sherlock would have been able to read something about their previously agreed upon plan. So instead Arthur darted around the side of the hotel, back to the service entrance. There were projections there, leaning against the wall smoking, conducting some sort of shady drug deal, juggling. Sherlock’s projections were really quite something, Arthur thought. They glared at him as he went by, but clearly most of Sherlock’s subconscious was focused on Eames. Because Eames had, as Eames always did, done a spectacular job with what Arthur had asked him to do. So this left Arthur the one free to perform the extraction and get them out.
Arthur barked at the projections, giving himself authority so they might believe he belonged there, “Get back to work.”
They looked mainly uncertain at this directive, but they didn’t look inclined to fall upon him and tear him to pieces, so that was good.
Arthur moved through the maze of rooms that led to the hotel safe, which he blow-torched through with ease. A few projections watched him uneasily, but also kept wandering out of the room, plainly distracted by goings-on elsewhere. Whatever Eames was doing, he was still doing a characteristically good job. Arthur worked, feeling relaxed and in-control. This was so easy, at this rate the Moriarty thing would be a piece of cake.
The safe was empty.
Arthur stood for a moment and regarded it, frowning, and then realized that that made total sense and he should have realized that. Sherlock had a tricky and suspicious subconscious, guarded against the invasiveness he showed toward everyone else’s. Of course he wouldn’t have picked somewhere as obvious as the hotel safe for his most treasured thoughts.
Arthur found himself at a momentary loss. No wonder the projections had let him do as he pleased over here. He’d been on entirely the wrong track.
And, to make things worse, he felt…odd. Syrupy. Slow. Like he wasn’t moving as quickly as he normally did, like everything in the dream was beginning to lag ever so slightly. Arthur didn’t like the feeling. He’d never encountered anything like that in a dreamscape before. He wondered what Sherlock was doing to cause it, if that was what Moriarty had done to the other dreamsharers. He pondered if he should kick himself out of the dream and end the experiment, but hopefully Eames was handling himself, and Arthur felt like he had to see this through to its conclusion.
Somewhere alarm bells started clanging. Projections started running toward the scene of the commotion. Eames, buying him time while he made a mess of things. Arthur thought of all the rooms in this hotel he’d populated and cursed himself for choosing the hotel as the architecture. There were so many places to hide and Arthur felt so tired and sluggish.
And then he thought of room numbers. During the inception job, they’d used the room numbers to guide Fischer where they’d wanted him to go. Maybe Sherlock had likewise chosen a room number that was meaningful to him.
Meaningful number, thought Arthur, already making his way to the elevator bank. One of them was out of commission, but he called the other one confidently. No one even looked askance at him as he stepped on, sifting through everything he knew about Sherlock Holmes. The primary one being that the most important person in his life was John Watson. And Arthur knew no numbers associated with John Watson. Except for 221B Baker Street.
Arthur had to fight off some projections to get to Room 221, which only told him he was on the right track. And at least the fighting went well, seemed to resist the odd effect the Somnacin seemed to be having on him. An allergic reaction? But he’d used his own compound, so that seemed unlikely.
Too exhausted to waste time with finesse, he blow-torched his way into the room. And what he found waiting for him was an entire room devoted to John Watson. Practically a fucking shrine.
***
And then Arthur was somewhere he’d never been before. At least, he didn’t think he had been. Although it seemed oddly familiar to him. He was in a large, open living area, in a sleek, modern penthouse. Behind him was a wall of windows. It was nighttime, and the skyline of the city was twinkling at him. Familiar, again, but he couldn’t place it. The penthouse itself consisted of a cozy seating area in front of a gleaming black-and-white fireplace that swept up to meet a state-of-the-art, brand-new-looking kitchen, and then met a marble foyer leading to the door. The furnishings were…surprisingly antiquated for the modern architecture. In fact, there was something about the whole place that felt like Arthur. Which was an odd thing to think, but he liked the juxtaposition of the old with the new, he tended to gravitate toward it, and he would have furnished this penthouse with the antiques he was now looking at.
In fact, he realized, the couch he was staring at was actually his.
He walked over to it. Not just like his, it was his. Arthur had bought it for a song in a street market in Morocco and had it shipped to Manhattan, where it had pride of place in his Greenwich Village pied a terre. And he knew the couch, knew it well, knew the scuff along the left foreleg, knew the scratch on the right arm, just so, to look like a demonic smiley face.
This was his couch. His couch. Arthur looked around the penthouse again, feeling confused. His couch. But not his place. Not any place he could remember owning. He didn’t think. There was a Titian over the fireplace, and a Kandinsky gracing the foyer. And, on the table in the foyer, a hideous vase that Arthur sensed was worth a ton of money and was clearly something Eames would have chosen. And in the kitchen, on the stove, was a pot, and when Arthur removed the cover, it was bouillabaisse.
Something, Arthur thought, was very, very wrong. Where was his totem? He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was much too big for him. No shoes or socks. Glock tucked into his waistband, comforting at the small of his back. But no totem.
A dream, he thought. This had to be a dream. But whose? And how had he ended up there?
He padded over to the adjoining room, which turned out to be an enormous bedroom. Arthur ignored the furnishings in favor of stepping into the large bathroom. He turned on the light and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was loose and curling over his forehead. And his T-shirt was gray with Paris is for lovers written on it in ridiculous curly script. What the actual fuck, thought Arthur. He never looked like this in dreams. He didn’t ever look like this in reality, though, either, so—
And then he heard the door open.
The gun was in his hand before he even thought about it, and he sidled to the bathroom door and waited, listening, ready to make a move.
“Arthur, darling, it’s just me, don’t shoot!” called Eames’s voice.
Arthur breathed a small sigh of relief and went out to the living area slightly more relaxed.
Eames was struggling out of a heavy-looking backpack in the foyer. He looked exhausted, travel-worn and weary, his hair in disarray and his sorry-looking shirt even more wrinkled than usual. His forehead was creased with lines and he was frowning and his stubble had driven right past devil-may-care and was approaching beard-level. Arthur stood in the living area, gun half-raised, wary but hopeful that Eames would help things make sense soon.
Eames glanced at him. And then Eames beamed. There was no other word for it. He saw him and smiled, wider, opener, younger than any smile Arthur had ever seen him smile before, and laugh lines radiated out from eyes that were suddenly brighter, and everything about him seemed to lift and polish somehow, just from looking at Arthur. Arthur froze in the face of it, could not make sense of it, hesitated, confused.
“Christ, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Eames grinned at him, and it wasn’t teasing or mocking, it sounded sincere. He headed across to him, his long strides eating up the space between them. And then, startling Arthur more than he should have when Arthur was still holding a gun, he basically collapsed on top of Arthur, pulling him into an embrace, winding his arms around him and burying his face in the curve of Arthur’s neck and just breathing, one long inhale and, on the exhale, relaxing completely, holding Arthur more tightly.
Arthur had no idea what to do in response to this. He stood awkwardly and let Eames hug him and tried to think of what he could possibly say.
Eames mumbled into his neck, “God, you smell fantastic. And it should be disturbing that I like it when you wear my T-shirts and point a gun at me, shouldn’t it?”
The Eames’s T-shirt explained that detail and yet made everything more confusing all at once. “Eames,” Arthur said carefully, not moving an inch, because he didn’t really want to disturb their position but he also didn’t want to actively participate in this little piece of insanity. “How did we get here?”
Eames chuckled, and Arthur felt the warm whoosh of it against his skin, and Arthur closed his eyes to let the feeling of that sink into him. “All right,” Eames said good-naturedly. “I deserve that.” His lips brushed a kiss against Arthur’s clavicle, and then impossibly started moving up Arthur’s neck. Arthur thought he should tell Eames to stop but really he just tilted his head to make sure Eames had enough access. The nibbling on Arthur’s neck wasn’t exactly conducive to talking, but Arthur had never known Eames to forego talking, ever. “The job took longer than I said it would, I know, but that’s what happens when I have to slum it with other point-men, and don’t I get any credit for saying out loud that I missed you madly, even though you are a complete bastard?” Eames finished his circuit up Arthur’s neck and straightened, looking at him with a small smile playing about his lips.
Eames was confident, Arthur thought. Eames was confident that Arthur was going to kiss him back, say he missed him too, think this was all utterly normal. Where the fuck was Arthur’s totem? he wondered, desperately. Because this was so obviously a dream. He cut his eyes beyond Eames, spotted it suddenly sitting on the kitchen counter, and breathed a sigh of deep relief.
Eames glanced over his shoulder at where Arthur was looking and then turned back to Arthur, still looking good-natured. No, affectionate. “If you bloody check that totem one more time,” he threatened, almost laughing.
“Do I check it a lot?” asked Arthur faintly, still not sure what to do. This had to be a dream, but how and why? Arthur didn’t know what his next move ought to be. He was feeling impossibly confused.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Eames told him, sounding very serious. “Not permanently. Stop checking it. You’re not going to wake up.” And then Eames kissed him. Eames kissed him as if he kissed him all the time. Eames kissed him casually, familiarly, and Arthur was too stunned to even respond, just stood stock still and let Eames kiss him. “Ah, I see,” Eames growled at him after a moment of this. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?” And then Eames closed his teeth around Arthur’s bottom lip and tugged his hands into Arthur’s hair, and Arthur groaned his acquiescence, kissing him back. “Darling,” mumbled Eames into Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur thought how Eames really never stopped fucking talking, “if we have sex right now, will it ruin the bouillabaisse you’re making?”
At least he was talking about good things. Really good things. And at least he was talking as his hands found their way under Arthur’s shirt. Arthur thought that he should try to control this dream he must clearly be trapped in, try to figure out what was going on and why, and decided that that could all wait until after they had sex, absolutely.
“No,” Arthur said definitively, not caring either way. Arthur thought no was the most he was willing to say, given that every word he said was time spent not kissing Eames, and Arthur was against that.
Eames nipped at Arthur’s kiss, resisted Arthur’s attempt to deepen it. “Now, darling, I think you’re just saying that and haven’t seriously considered the condition of the bouillabaisse—”
“Is my bouillabaisse better than sex, Eames?” Arthur demanded crossly.
“Well, it is fucking spectacular, love,” said Eames, grinning at him.
Arthur didn’t know what to do with any of this. They didn’t just have sex, they laughed their way through it. What was this? “Shut up,” Arthur told Eames, thinking that he couldn’t stand any of this anymore. He needed to shoot his way out of this dream—this had to be a dream—but instead he backed Eames up against the penthouse window and dropped to his knees.
“Oh, excellent, we’re making progress,” Eames announced jovially, looking down at Arthur and winking with a good-natured leer.
Arthur shook his head in what he hoped looked like exasperation instead of finding Eames adorable, but he ruined the effect by failing to tear Eames’s pants off of him and instead just leaning his head against Eames’s abdomen, forehead pressed into the cheap fabric of Eames’s terrible shirt. “I missed you, too,” he said, which was ridiculous considering he couldn’t remember anything beyond a few minutes ago but also true in its way, because Arthur missed Eames constantly, Arthur missed Eames even when he was in the room with him, because Arthur never got this.
Eames’s hands, strong yet gentle, full of affection instead of passion or lust, combed through Arthur’s hair. “I know, love,” he said so tenderly, as if he knew exactly how much Arthur ached for him every minute.
And then there was a gunshot.
Arthur registered the sharp retort of it and reached automatically to drag Eames down, but instead Eames pitched forward onto him, and Arthur had to move quickly not to get trapped underneath him. Another gunshot whistled over their heads, shattering the window. Arthur sprawled out on his stomach and aimed the Glock out the window, toward the trajectory where the shots had come from. He emptied his entire clip and then he crawled over to Eames.
Who looked terrible. He was lying in a pool of his own blood, pouring out from the gunshot wound that was in his back. No exit wound, Arthur could see very clearly, although Eames was pressing a hand weakly against his chest, Arthur supposed because it hurt. He was deathly pale and was trembling violently. His breathing was labored. Arthur had taught himself enough medicine to get by in the battlefield that was his life, and he looked at Eames and knew immediately that there was nothing he could do and also could not believe it.
“Eames,” Arthur said, and leaned over him, spoke firmly. “Listen to me: this is a dream.”
“Arthur,” Eames rasped out.
“No. Listen to me. This is a dream. You’re waking up somewhere, okay? And I’ll be right behind you.”
Eames shook his head jerkily and said again, “Arthur.”
“Stop it!” Arthur shouted at him, and Eames flinched, and then Arthur felt remorse, because Eames was bleeding out on the floor in front of him and he’d yelled at him. “Eames, it’s a dream, right?” Arthur pushed Eames’s hair off his forehead, winced at the cold, clammy sweat of it. “It was always a dream. Right?”
Eames shook his head again, a quick, minute movement, and managed, “Dreams aren’t that good.”
“Shut up,” Arthur told him desperately, and pressed his face into Eames’s chest. “Oh my God, be quiet, please, it’s not true, this is a dream, it’s just a dream, we’re going to wake up, please just wake up.” Underneath him, Eames was terribly still, as quiet as Arthur had just begged him to be, and Arthur realized that the ragged, tearing breaths filling the penthouse were his and his alone. “Eames, please,” he said. “Please just wake up.” He knew the gun wasn’t far from him. He needed to dream himself more bullets and wake himself up. Surely he would be able to dream himself more bullets. Because this had to be a dream.
His cell phone rang, startling him. Arthur sat up and wiped at his face, surprised when his hand came away wet, because he hadn’t thought he’d been crying. He dug the phone out of his pocket and frowned at the caller ID, which indicated it was his mother.
“Mom?” he answered.
And his mother said nothing. His mother sobbed in his ear. His mother wailed. In the background, Arthur could hear a gunshot.
Arthur scrambled away from Eames’s body. “Mom, what’s happening? Mom. Tell me where you are.”
His mother didn’t. His mother sobbed. Arthur looked at his gun, which he’d abandoned on the other side of Eames’s body, and he was just about to lunge for it when the world tipped entirely upside-down, sending him careening away from the gun—
He woke up.
He woke up and the first thing he saw was Eames, very alive, offering him a hand to help him up from the floor.
***
By the time Eames scrambled for the gun Sherlock left behind and shot himself out of his dream, Sherlock wasn’t around him. Eames went tearing after him, shooting projections as he went to keep them away from him, but he had no idea where Arthur might be and where Sherlock might go to find him. But the dream was collapsing around him, the architecture of the hotel beginning to sag into impossibilities, chunks falling from the walls and ceilings, and that meant that, wherever Arthur was, he was unable to hold it together anymore, and Eames had to get him out of the second level dream and back to this one so he could kick them all out of it.
Neither Arthur nor Sherlock was anywhere in the lobby. Nor were many projections. This gave Eames pause, and then he realized that obviously following the projections would lead him to Arthur. That dream had thrown him way off. So Eames dodged falling plaster and began following the projections.
Eames found the highest concentration of projections and fought his way through them to Room 222, which was not easy and involved a lot of creative dreamfighting to get there. Sherlock’s subconscious was not welcoming and also, even more unfortunately, could not be easily tricked. But eventually Eames got through.
And what he found was Arthur and Sherlock, both hooked up to a PASIV. Of course. That made total sense now. Sherlock had knocked Eames out, hooked him up to a PASIV, and manipulated his dream. Exactly what he was now doing to Arthur.
Eames considered, and then Eames kicked Arthur out of the dream.
Arthur woke with a gasp and stared up at Eames as if he was looking at a ghost, blinking at him uncomprehendingly.
For long enough that Eames thought of Sarah Miller and her insanity and said, in urgent concern, “Hey. Arthur.” He actually crouched down to be on his level. “It’s me, right? It’s Eames.”
“Eames,” said Arthur, and then suddenly shoved Eames around, his hands splaying over Eames’s back. “Oh, thank God,” Arthur sighed, and Eames wasn’t sure what to make of that, and then Arthur said, “We’re awake? Tell me we’re awake right now.”
“We’re not,” Eames said regretfully.
“Eames,” said Arthur, sounding stricken.
“But you were dreaming.” Eames turned to face him again. “It was a dream, Arthur. You were on the second level.”
Realization dawned on Arthur’s face. “It was a second level dream.”
Eames nodded.
“So this is the first level,” said Arthur. “So we’re still dreaming.”
Eames nodded again, relieved that Arthur seemed to be rallying. Eames had woken disoriented, but whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur seemed to have thrown him more, thrown him enough that he’d woken with literally no idea where the dreams ended and began, which was very unlike Arthur. “We’re dreaming. This is your hotel, you’re holding it together. Check your totem.”
Arthur turned from him and rolled it secretly and then turned back, satisfied, and then he marched over to where Sherlock was and literally threw him out of the chair.
“Arthur,” Eames said, alarmed, as the chair went clattering across the room.
Sherlock was waking dazedly, shaking his head against it, because your first kick was never a pleasant one.
“Hold off the projections,” Arthur snapped at Eames, and then he snarled at Sherlock, who was picking himself up off the floor, “You fucking son of a bitch,” and then he shoved him hard against the wall and landed a vicious right hook that snapped Sherlock’s head against the wall.
“What the—Jesus Christ, Arthur!” exclaimed Eames, and then catapulted himself across the room to slam the door against the projections.
Arthur followed up his right hook with a left hook, because Arthur was equally adept at punching with either hand—that was just Arthur for you.
“It’s a dream,” Arthur bit out. “He’ll be fine. And he deserves it for what he just did.”
Eames wondered in astonishment what Sherlock had done to Arthur. Then he thought of his dream Arthur saying cruel, vicious things to him and vanishing from his arms and he thought that he didn’t want to know. He could kind of understand how Arthur had woken up wanting to knock Sherlock around.
“You asked me to,” Sherlock gasped accusingly. “You told me to show you what Moriarty was doing—”
Eames dragged the dresser in front of the door and tried to be the voice of reason, because maybe Arthur hadn’t gone entirely mad like Sarah Miller but Arthur had clearly woken not entirely himself. “He has a point, Arthur,” he managed.
Arthur didn’t even seem to hear him. “You took that too far. That was over the top. You could have made your point with less.”
Eames crouched down behind the bed, with a perfect sight line to the door, and dreamed himself up a very pretty sniper’s rifle, looking down the sight of it. He didn’t need such a nice rifle for this short distance, but he thought he deserved a bit of a treat. And he thought that maybe Arthur was right, because whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur had apparently been way worse than what he’d done to Eames. Which had been bad enough.
“I really don’t think I could have,” Sherlock snapped. “I went easy on Eames and he doesn’t seem—”
“You did that to Eames, too?” said Arthur.
A projection succeeded in budging the door open a bit, where it collided against the dresser. Eames aimed and shot him down calmly.
“Eames is busy right now,” remarked Arthur, “so I’ll take care of this on his behalf.” Eames glanced over in time to see Arthur deliver a solid punch to Sherlock’s gut.
“Thanks for that, pet,” said Eames, shooting down another projection. “But honestly, darling, he did what we asked him to do and once you settle down you’ll realize how incredibly instructive it is that he managed to get to you this much, hmm? To you. This much. On his first try. It was a dream. A really terrible one, but a dream. Take a deep breath, love. Because I kind of need you here.”
There was silence behind him. Eames shot another project and then snuck a glance over his shoulder.
Arthur had his head in his hands, his fingers tufted tightly into his hair. Eames blinked at him in alarm, as he said shakily, “I lost track. I couldn’t tell. Or I could but I didn’t—” Arthur cut himself off and dropped his hands and took a deep breath, seeming to visibly pull himself together.
Sherlock stood against the wall and watched him with wary irritation, which Eames totally didn’t blame him for.
Arthur said to him, “We are getting out of this ridiculous dream. You’re going to walk me through exactly what you did to me. And you’re going to tell me exactly how I stop anybody from ever doing it to me again.”
“That was the idea,” spat Sherlock.
“Eames,” said Arthur heavily, as he turned to him.
Eames swung the rifle around and aimed it at Arthur’s forehead and said seriously, meeting his eyes, “It’s a dream, darling. We’re going to wake up right now. First you, then me, right behind you.” He had never before felt the need to reassure Arthur in a dream but it was pretty fucking obvious that Arthur needed it.
Arthur gave him a grim smile and just said, “Yeah. That’s what I kept saying.”
Eames hesitated a moment, unsure what to say to that, then decided the answer was to get the fuck out of this miserable dream. So he pulled the trigger.
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 19
Sherlock’s projections ran a colorful gamut, much more so than most people’s projections ever did, and they made an interesting crowd jumbling in Arthur’s sleek hotel lobby. Sherlock stood looking between two identical Arthurs, and then they separated.
Eames dashed through the lobby, dodging the projections who paused to look in his direction, and barreled into the stairwell, trusting that Arthur had taken the lift as agreed. Eames didn’t hesitate, taking the stairs two at a time. Arthur, he thought, really wasn’t a bad person to forge. Eames sometimes spent dreams stifled in bodies that weren’t exactly made for running and dodging bullets. It was refreshing to be Arthur.
A door opened above him, and Eames stopped running, stood in the stairwell, listening. A step behind him, measured and precise, and Eames glanced over the railing in time for Sherlock to look up at him, meet his eyes. Then Sherlock had chosen the wrong Arthur, thought Eames, and let himself be a little bit proud of his skill. That meant that Arthur would be working his way toward the extraction.
Eames decided that this meant that Arthur would no longer be worrying about the lift, because Arthur would have realized that Eames had worked as decoy and Arthur would be worrying about the extraction now. And Eames wasn’t about to keep going up and down and all around Arthur’s paradoxical staircases. He needed to present a bit of a challenge or Sherlock would get suspicious. So Eames emerged from the stairwell into the hallway. A couple of projections, just back from a dinner date and walking to their room, gave him a long look as he passed by.
Eames smiled jovially at them and said, “Such a lovely evening, isn’t it?” and they frowned heavily. Eames pressed the button for the lift and kept smiling, just as Sherlock emerged out into the hallway. He wasn’t moving quickly, and Eames wondered if he was still trying to make up his mind if he’d picked the right Arthur. So Eames didn’t give him a cheeky little wave as he stepped onto the lift, because that would have given it away; Arthur would never have done such a thing.
Eames pressed the button for the top floor of the hotel, then emergency stopped it as soon as it started moving. This set off an alarm and Eames hoped it would throw Sherlock’s projections into disarray. It would attract them to this point and away from wherever Arthur was, hopefully.
Eames removed Arthur’s helpfully installed trapdoor—Arthur’s dreamscapes were always so beautifully maintained down to every last detail, Arthur never forgot any of it—and pried open the doors on the floor above. The hallway was deserted, and Eames considered his options, then went back to the stairwell. Eerily quiet. He almost didn’t like it. Where the hell was Arthur; surely he had to be almost done by this point? Arthur moved quickly and knew the layout of this place, knew where it was likely Sherlock would hide the most important things in his head.
Eames began heading up, and, as he went, he realized he was getting light-headed, as if he was climbing a mountain instead of a set of hotel stairs. A headache pressed behind his eyes, bright and urgent. He felt slow and almost dizzy and eventually he realized that he’d stopped moving altogether. He stood on the staircase, disoriented, closing his eyes against it, and he was pondering whether something was going wrong with the compound and whether he ought to shoot himself out of the dream when the little canister landed at his feet and the gas started hissing out of it.
***
Eames did a circuit of the bedroom, gun in his hand, stepping skillfully through the patterns of moonlight on the floor. He was uneasy, and he didn’t know why, couldn’t remember why he’d grabbed the gun and started prowling through the bedroom in the first place.
Arthur said, from the bed, “Come back to bed, would you?” He sounded grumbly and displeased, huddled under the pile of blankets.
Eames couldn’t shake the feeling of something being wrong. Something being off. “I thought I… Did I hear something?”
“It was probably your own snoring,” grumbled Arthur.
“I don’t snore,” Eames protested automatically, and patted himself down for his totem, because there was something wrong about this. Wasn’t there? He was only wearing pants, so there was no surprise that his totem wasn’t on him.
“I didn’t hear anything, you’re being paranoid, come to bed,” said Arthur, all calm authority, and would Arthur have sounded like that if something was wrong?
Eames settled slowly into the bed, putting the gun on the nightstand as he went. “Arthur, how did we get here?” he asked, unable to shake the uneasiness.
“Christ knows,” Arthur said sleepily, even as he cuddled against Eames as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He pressed his face into Eames’s neck and said, “I think you drugged me, because you’re actually the world’s most fucking annoying person, especially when you wake us up in the middle of the night to play with guns, but you’re good in bed and sometimes I think you’re amusing, so I guess there’s that. Now go to sleep, hmm?”
Eames had no idea what to say to that. Eames felt like he couldn’t breathe. Eames still wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. Arthur insinuated a leg between Eames’s and sighed a happy little sigh against him, and Eames thought that was fine, he didn’t want to wake up after all.
No, no, he told himself. Dangerous. Think about this. How did you get here? Where were his trousers? His totem would be in his trousers. His gaze lit on the nightstand, where Arthur’s totem sat, and he reached for it and rolled it. Five. “Arthur, what does your totem come up in a dream?” he asked.
“As if I’d tell you,” said Arthur, suddenly scathing.
Eames hesitated, still feeling so off-balance that he thought it possible he might slide entirely off the planet if he moved the wrong way. Arthur was tucked up against him, warm and solid, but his tone had abruptly been cold and distant. And, granted, Eames had unthinkingly asked a very personal question, but they were cuddled in bed together and Eames wasn’t sure he’d deserved that level of ire. “I just meant—” he began.
“You won’t be happy until you push and push and push at me to make me leave,” Arthur cut him off viciously.
“I…” began Eames, confused. “That’s not—”
Arthur propped himself up, rising over him, his face too in shadows for Eames to see. “Because I will, you know. I’ll eventually leave. You’ll do something wrong, push it too far, and I’ll realize how ridiculous all this is, how absurd, how much better I could do than you. You know that, right? You expect it every moment, don’t you? Wait for me to come to my senses and leave. Wonder why I haven’t done it yet. Well, I have a secret for you: I haven’t left you yet because I’m biding my time. I’d much rather keep you off-balance, you know.”
Eames felt very cold. Cold where Arthur was no longer pressed up against him. Cold where Arthur’s words were curling into him. He was destroying this. He’d had Arthur cuddled next to him in bed and he was already destroying it, effortlessly. To be expected, really. “Arthur—” he began, already feeling the futility of it. Arthur would leave, of course he would leave, because Arthur was sensible and—
Arthur vanished into thin air.
Eames blinked and sat up, alarmed and astonished.
And Sherlock said, standing by the side of the bed, “I see I picked the wrong Arthur. But you get the general idea.” And then he picked up Eames’s gun and shot himself in the head.
***
Arthur made a split-second improvisational decision to forego the elevator, suddenly worrying that maybe Sherlock would have been able to read something about their previously agreed upon plan. So instead Arthur darted around the side of the hotel, back to the service entrance. There were projections there, leaning against the wall smoking, conducting some sort of shady drug deal, juggling. Sherlock’s projections were really quite something, Arthur thought. They glared at him as he went by, but clearly most of Sherlock’s subconscious was focused on Eames. Because Eames had, as Eames always did, done a spectacular job with what Arthur had asked him to do. So this left Arthur the one free to perform the extraction and get them out.
Arthur barked at the projections, giving himself authority so they might believe he belonged there, “Get back to work.”
They looked mainly uncertain at this directive, but they didn’t look inclined to fall upon him and tear him to pieces, so that was good.
Arthur moved through the maze of rooms that led to the hotel safe, which he blow-torched through with ease. A few projections watched him uneasily, but also kept wandering out of the room, plainly distracted by goings-on elsewhere. Whatever Eames was doing, he was still doing a characteristically good job. Arthur worked, feeling relaxed and in-control. This was so easy, at this rate the Moriarty thing would be a piece of cake.
The safe was empty.
Arthur stood for a moment and regarded it, frowning, and then realized that that made total sense and he should have realized that. Sherlock had a tricky and suspicious subconscious, guarded against the invasiveness he showed toward everyone else’s. Of course he wouldn’t have picked somewhere as obvious as the hotel safe for his most treasured thoughts.
Arthur found himself at a momentary loss. No wonder the projections had let him do as he pleased over here. He’d been on entirely the wrong track.
And, to make things worse, he felt…odd. Syrupy. Slow. Like he wasn’t moving as quickly as he normally did, like everything in the dream was beginning to lag ever so slightly. Arthur didn’t like the feeling. He’d never encountered anything like that in a dreamscape before. He wondered what Sherlock was doing to cause it, if that was what Moriarty had done to the other dreamsharers. He pondered if he should kick himself out of the dream and end the experiment, but hopefully Eames was handling himself, and Arthur felt like he had to see this through to its conclusion.
Somewhere alarm bells started clanging. Projections started running toward the scene of the commotion. Eames, buying him time while he made a mess of things. Arthur thought of all the rooms in this hotel he’d populated and cursed himself for choosing the hotel as the architecture. There were so many places to hide and Arthur felt so tired and sluggish.
And then he thought of room numbers. During the inception job, they’d used the room numbers to guide Fischer where they’d wanted him to go. Maybe Sherlock had likewise chosen a room number that was meaningful to him.
Meaningful number, thought Arthur, already making his way to the elevator bank. One of them was out of commission, but he called the other one confidently. No one even looked askance at him as he stepped on, sifting through everything he knew about Sherlock Holmes. The primary one being that the most important person in his life was John Watson. And Arthur knew no numbers associated with John Watson. Except for 221B Baker Street.
Arthur had to fight off some projections to get to Room 221, which only told him he was on the right track. And at least the fighting went well, seemed to resist the odd effect the Somnacin seemed to be having on him. An allergic reaction? But he’d used his own compound, so that seemed unlikely.
Too exhausted to waste time with finesse, he blow-torched his way into the room. And what he found waiting for him was an entire room devoted to John Watson. Practically a fucking shrine.
***
And then Arthur was somewhere he’d never been before. At least, he didn’t think he had been. Although it seemed oddly familiar to him. He was in a large, open living area, in a sleek, modern penthouse. Behind him was a wall of windows. It was nighttime, and the skyline of the city was twinkling at him. Familiar, again, but he couldn’t place it. The penthouse itself consisted of a cozy seating area in front of a gleaming black-and-white fireplace that swept up to meet a state-of-the-art, brand-new-looking kitchen, and then met a marble foyer leading to the door. The furnishings were…surprisingly antiquated for the modern architecture. In fact, there was something about the whole place that felt like Arthur. Which was an odd thing to think, but he liked the juxtaposition of the old with the new, he tended to gravitate toward it, and he would have furnished this penthouse with the antiques he was now looking at.
In fact, he realized, the couch he was staring at was actually his.
He walked over to it. Not just like his, it was his. Arthur had bought it for a song in a street market in Morocco and had it shipped to Manhattan, where it had pride of place in his Greenwich Village pied a terre. And he knew the couch, knew it well, knew the scuff along the left foreleg, knew the scratch on the right arm, just so, to look like a demonic smiley face.
This was his couch. His couch. Arthur looked around the penthouse again, feeling confused. His couch. But not his place. Not any place he could remember owning. He didn’t think. There was a Titian over the fireplace, and a Kandinsky gracing the foyer. And, on the table in the foyer, a hideous vase that Arthur sensed was worth a ton of money and was clearly something Eames would have chosen. And in the kitchen, on the stove, was a pot, and when Arthur removed the cover, it was bouillabaisse.
Something, Arthur thought, was very, very wrong. Where was his totem? He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was much too big for him. No shoes or socks. Glock tucked into his waistband, comforting at the small of his back. But no totem.
A dream, he thought. This had to be a dream. But whose? And how had he ended up there?
He padded over to the adjoining room, which turned out to be an enormous bedroom. Arthur ignored the furnishings in favor of stepping into the large bathroom. He turned on the light and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was loose and curling over his forehead. And his T-shirt was gray with Paris is for lovers written on it in ridiculous curly script. What the actual fuck, thought Arthur. He never looked like this in dreams. He didn’t ever look like this in reality, though, either, so—
And then he heard the door open.
The gun was in his hand before he even thought about it, and he sidled to the bathroom door and waited, listening, ready to make a move.
“Arthur, darling, it’s just me, don’t shoot!” called Eames’s voice.
Arthur breathed a small sigh of relief and went out to the living area slightly more relaxed.
Eames was struggling out of a heavy-looking backpack in the foyer. He looked exhausted, travel-worn and weary, his hair in disarray and his sorry-looking shirt even more wrinkled than usual. His forehead was creased with lines and he was frowning and his stubble had driven right past devil-may-care and was approaching beard-level. Arthur stood in the living area, gun half-raised, wary but hopeful that Eames would help things make sense soon.
Eames glanced at him. And then Eames beamed. There was no other word for it. He saw him and smiled, wider, opener, younger than any smile Arthur had ever seen him smile before, and laugh lines radiated out from eyes that were suddenly brighter, and everything about him seemed to lift and polish somehow, just from looking at Arthur. Arthur froze in the face of it, could not make sense of it, hesitated, confused.
“Christ, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Eames grinned at him, and it wasn’t teasing or mocking, it sounded sincere. He headed across to him, his long strides eating up the space between them. And then, startling Arthur more than he should have when Arthur was still holding a gun, he basically collapsed on top of Arthur, pulling him into an embrace, winding his arms around him and burying his face in the curve of Arthur’s neck and just breathing, one long inhale and, on the exhale, relaxing completely, holding Arthur more tightly.
Arthur had no idea what to do in response to this. He stood awkwardly and let Eames hug him and tried to think of what he could possibly say.
Eames mumbled into his neck, “God, you smell fantastic. And it should be disturbing that I like it when you wear my T-shirts and point a gun at me, shouldn’t it?”
The Eames’s T-shirt explained that detail and yet made everything more confusing all at once. “Eames,” Arthur said carefully, not moving an inch, because he didn’t really want to disturb their position but he also didn’t want to actively participate in this little piece of insanity. “How did we get here?”
Eames chuckled, and Arthur felt the warm whoosh of it against his skin, and Arthur closed his eyes to let the feeling of that sink into him. “All right,” Eames said good-naturedly. “I deserve that.” His lips brushed a kiss against Arthur’s clavicle, and then impossibly started moving up Arthur’s neck. Arthur thought he should tell Eames to stop but really he just tilted his head to make sure Eames had enough access. The nibbling on Arthur’s neck wasn’t exactly conducive to talking, but Arthur had never known Eames to forego talking, ever. “The job took longer than I said it would, I know, but that’s what happens when I have to slum it with other point-men, and don’t I get any credit for saying out loud that I missed you madly, even though you are a complete bastard?” Eames finished his circuit up Arthur’s neck and straightened, looking at him with a small smile playing about his lips.
Eames was confident, Arthur thought. Eames was confident that Arthur was going to kiss him back, say he missed him too, think this was all utterly normal. Where the fuck was Arthur’s totem? he wondered, desperately. Because this was so obviously a dream. He cut his eyes beyond Eames, spotted it suddenly sitting on the kitchen counter, and breathed a sigh of deep relief.
Eames glanced over his shoulder at where Arthur was looking and then turned back to Arthur, still looking good-natured. No, affectionate. “If you bloody check that totem one more time,” he threatened, almost laughing.
“Do I check it a lot?” asked Arthur faintly, still not sure what to do. This had to be a dream, but how and why? Arthur didn’t know what his next move ought to be. He was feeling impossibly confused.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Eames told him, sounding very serious. “Not permanently. Stop checking it. You’re not going to wake up.” And then Eames kissed him. Eames kissed him as if he kissed him all the time. Eames kissed him casually, familiarly, and Arthur was too stunned to even respond, just stood stock still and let Eames kiss him. “Ah, I see,” Eames growled at him after a moment of this. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?” And then Eames closed his teeth around Arthur’s bottom lip and tugged his hands into Arthur’s hair, and Arthur groaned his acquiescence, kissing him back. “Darling,” mumbled Eames into Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur thought how Eames really never stopped fucking talking, “if we have sex right now, will it ruin the bouillabaisse you’re making?”
At least he was talking about good things. Really good things. And at least he was talking as his hands found their way under Arthur’s shirt. Arthur thought that he should try to control this dream he must clearly be trapped in, try to figure out what was going on and why, and decided that that could all wait until after they had sex, absolutely.
“No,” Arthur said definitively, not caring either way. Arthur thought no was the most he was willing to say, given that every word he said was time spent not kissing Eames, and Arthur was against that.
Eames nipped at Arthur’s kiss, resisted Arthur’s attempt to deepen it. “Now, darling, I think you’re just saying that and haven’t seriously considered the condition of the bouillabaisse—”
“Is my bouillabaisse better than sex, Eames?” Arthur demanded crossly.
“Well, it is fucking spectacular, love,” said Eames, grinning at him.
Arthur didn’t know what to do with any of this. They didn’t just have sex, they laughed their way through it. What was this? “Shut up,” Arthur told Eames, thinking that he couldn’t stand any of this anymore. He needed to shoot his way out of this dream—this had to be a dream—but instead he backed Eames up against the penthouse window and dropped to his knees.
“Oh, excellent, we’re making progress,” Eames announced jovially, looking down at Arthur and winking with a good-natured leer.
Arthur shook his head in what he hoped looked like exasperation instead of finding Eames adorable, but he ruined the effect by failing to tear Eames’s pants off of him and instead just leaning his head against Eames’s abdomen, forehead pressed into the cheap fabric of Eames’s terrible shirt. “I missed you, too,” he said, which was ridiculous considering he couldn’t remember anything beyond a few minutes ago but also true in its way, because Arthur missed Eames constantly, Arthur missed Eames even when he was in the room with him, because Arthur never got this.
Eames’s hands, strong yet gentle, full of affection instead of passion or lust, combed through Arthur’s hair. “I know, love,” he said so tenderly, as if he knew exactly how much Arthur ached for him every minute.
And then there was a gunshot.
Arthur registered the sharp retort of it and reached automatically to drag Eames down, but instead Eames pitched forward onto him, and Arthur had to move quickly not to get trapped underneath him. Another gunshot whistled over their heads, shattering the window. Arthur sprawled out on his stomach and aimed the Glock out the window, toward the trajectory where the shots had come from. He emptied his entire clip and then he crawled over to Eames.
Who looked terrible. He was lying in a pool of his own blood, pouring out from the gunshot wound that was in his back. No exit wound, Arthur could see very clearly, although Eames was pressing a hand weakly against his chest, Arthur supposed because it hurt. He was deathly pale and was trembling violently. His breathing was labored. Arthur had taught himself enough medicine to get by in the battlefield that was his life, and he looked at Eames and knew immediately that there was nothing he could do and also could not believe it.
“Eames,” Arthur said, and leaned over him, spoke firmly. “Listen to me: this is a dream.”
“Arthur,” Eames rasped out.
“No. Listen to me. This is a dream. You’re waking up somewhere, okay? And I’ll be right behind you.”
Eames shook his head jerkily and said again, “Arthur.”
“Stop it!” Arthur shouted at him, and Eames flinched, and then Arthur felt remorse, because Eames was bleeding out on the floor in front of him and he’d yelled at him. “Eames, it’s a dream, right?” Arthur pushed Eames’s hair off his forehead, winced at the cold, clammy sweat of it. “It was always a dream. Right?”
Eames shook his head again, a quick, minute movement, and managed, “Dreams aren’t that good.”
“Shut up,” Arthur told him desperately, and pressed his face into Eames’s chest. “Oh my God, be quiet, please, it’s not true, this is a dream, it’s just a dream, we’re going to wake up, please just wake up.” Underneath him, Eames was terribly still, as quiet as Arthur had just begged him to be, and Arthur realized that the ragged, tearing breaths filling the penthouse were his and his alone. “Eames, please,” he said. “Please just wake up.” He knew the gun wasn’t far from him. He needed to dream himself more bullets and wake himself up. Surely he would be able to dream himself more bullets. Because this had to be a dream.
His cell phone rang, startling him. Arthur sat up and wiped at his face, surprised when his hand came away wet, because he hadn’t thought he’d been crying. He dug the phone out of his pocket and frowned at the caller ID, which indicated it was his mother.
“Mom?” he answered.
And his mother said nothing. His mother sobbed in his ear. His mother wailed. In the background, Arthur could hear a gunshot.
Arthur scrambled away from Eames’s body. “Mom, what’s happening? Mom. Tell me where you are.”
His mother didn’t. His mother sobbed. Arthur looked at his gun, which he’d abandoned on the other side of Eames’s body, and he was just about to lunge for it when the world tipped entirely upside-down, sending him careening away from the gun—
He woke up.
He woke up and the first thing he saw was Eames, very alive, offering him a hand to help him up from the floor.
***
By the time Eames scrambled for the gun Sherlock left behind and shot himself out of his dream, Sherlock wasn’t around him. Eames went tearing after him, shooting projections as he went to keep them away from him, but he had no idea where Arthur might be and where Sherlock might go to find him. But the dream was collapsing around him, the architecture of the hotel beginning to sag into impossibilities, chunks falling from the walls and ceilings, and that meant that, wherever Arthur was, he was unable to hold it together anymore, and Eames had to get him out of the second level dream and back to this one so he could kick them all out of it.
Neither Arthur nor Sherlock was anywhere in the lobby. Nor were many projections. This gave Eames pause, and then he realized that obviously following the projections would lead him to Arthur. That dream had thrown him way off. So Eames dodged falling plaster and began following the projections.
Eames found the highest concentration of projections and fought his way through them to Room 222, which was not easy and involved a lot of creative dreamfighting to get there. Sherlock’s subconscious was not welcoming and also, even more unfortunately, could not be easily tricked. But eventually Eames got through.
And what he found was Arthur and Sherlock, both hooked up to a PASIV. Of course. That made total sense now. Sherlock had knocked Eames out, hooked him up to a PASIV, and manipulated his dream. Exactly what he was now doing to Arthur.
Eames considered, and then Eames kicked Arthur out of the dream.
Arthur woke with a gasp and stared up at Eames as if he was looking at a ghost, blinking at him uncomprehendingly.
For long enough that Eames thought of Sarah Miller and her insanity and said, in urgent concern, “Hey. Arthur.” He actually crouched down to be on his level. “It’s me, right? It’s Eames.”
“Eames,” said Arthur, and then suddenly shoved Eames around, his hands splaying over Eames’s back. “Oh, thank God,” Arthur sighed, and Eames wasn’t sure what to make of that, and then Arthur said, “We’re awake? Tell me we’re awake right now.”
“We’re not,” Eames said regretfully.
“Eames,” said Arthur, sounding stricken.
“But you were dreaming.” Eames turned to face him again. “It was a dream, Arthur. You were on the second level.”
Realization dawned on Arthur’s face. “It was a second level dream.”
Eames nodded.
“So this is the first level,” said Arthur. “So we’re still dreaming.”
Eames nodded again, relieved that Arthur seemed to be rallying. Eames had woken disoriented, but whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur seemed to have thrown him more, thrown him enough that he’d woken with literally no idea where the dreams ended and began, which was very unlike Arthur. “We’re dreaming. This is your hotel, you’re holding it together. Check your totem.”
Arthur turned from him and rolled it secretly and then turned back, satisfied, and then he marched over to where Sherlock was and literally threw him out of the chair.
“Arthur,” Eames said, alarmed, as the chair went clattering across the room.
Sherlock was waking dazedly, shaking his head against it, because your first kick was never a pleasant one.
“Hold off the projections,” Arthur snapped at Eames, and then he snarled at Sherlock, who was picking himself up off the floor, “You fucking son of a bitch,” and then he shoved him hard against the wall and landed a vicious right hook that snapped Sherlock’s head against the wall.
“What the—Jesus Christ, Arthur!” exclaimed Eames, and then catapulted himself across the room to slam the door against the projections.
Arthur followed up his right hook with a left hook, because Arthur was equally adept at punching with either hand—that was just Arthur for you.
“It’s a dream,” Arthur bit out. “He’ll be fine. And he deserves it for what he just did.”
Eames wondered in astonishment what Sherlock had done to Arthur. Then he thought of his dream Arthur saying cruel, vicious things to him and vanishing from his arms and he thought that he didn’t want to know. He could kind of understand how Arthur had woken up wanting to knock Sherlock around.
“You asked me to,” Sherlock gasped accusingly. “You told me to show you what Moriarty was doing—”
Eames dragged the dresser in front of the door and tried to be the voice of reason, because maybe Arthur hadn’t gone entirely mad like Sarah Miller but Arthur had clearly woken not entirely himself. “He has a point, Arthur,” he managed.
Arthur didn’t even seem to hear him. “You took that too far. That was over the top. You could have made your point with less.”
Eames crouched down behind the bed, with a perfect sight line to the door, and dreamed himself up a very pretty sniper’s rifle, looking down the sight of it. He didn’t need such a nice rifle for this short distance, but he thought he deserved a bit of a treat. And he thought that maybe Arthur was right, because whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur had apparently been way worse than what he’d done to Eames. Which had been bad enough.
“I really don’t think I could have,” Sherlock snapped. “I went easy on Eames and he doesn’t seem—”
“You did that to Eames, too?” said Arthur.
A projection succeeded in budging the door open a bit, where it collided against the dresser. Eames aimed and shot him down calmly.
“Eames is busy right now,” remarked Arthur, “so I’ll take care of this on his behalf.” Eames glanced over in time to see Arthur deliver a solid punch to Sherlock’s gut.
“Thanks for that, pet,” said Eames, shooting down another projection. “But honestly, darling, he did what we asked him to do and once you settle down you’ll realize how incredibly instructive it is that he managed to get to you this much, hmm? To you. This much. On his first try. It was a dream. A really terrible one, but a dream. Take a deep breath, love. Because I kind of need you here.”
There was silence behind him. Eames shot another project and then snuck a glance over his shoulder.
Arthur had his head in his hands, his fingers tufted tightly into his hair. Eames blinked at him in alarm, as he said shakily, “I lost track. I couldn’t tell. Or I could but I didn’t—” Arthur cut himself off and dropped his hands and took a deep breath, seeming to visibly pull himself together.
Sherlock stood against the wall and watched him with wary irritation, which Eames totally didn’t blame him for.
Arthur said to him, “We are getting out of this ridiculous dream. You’re going to walk me through exactly what you did to me. And you’re going to tell me exactly how I stop anybody from ever doing it to me again.”
“That was the idea,” spat Sherlock.
“Eames,” said Arthur heavily, as he turned to him.
Eames swung the rifle around and aimed it at Arthur’s forehead and said seriously, meeting his eyes, “It’s a dream, darling. We’re going to wake up right now. First you, then me, right behind you.” He had never before felt the need to reassure Arthur in a dream but it was pretty fucking obvious that Arthur needed it.
Arthur gave him a grim smile and just said, “Yeah. That’s what I kept saying.”
Eames hesitated a moment, unsure what to say to that, then decided the answer was to get the fuck out of this miserable dream. So he pulled the trigger.