Keep the Car Running (20/31)
Jan. 28th, 2015 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (20/31)
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 20
John sat, frustrated, watching dreamers dream and drumming his fingers against the desk.
And then Arthur woke up, followed by Sherlock, followed by Eames, and all hell broke loose.
“That was all uncalled for,” Sherlock snapped, hands feeling over his face.
“Oh, shut up, you’re absolutely fine,” Arthur shot back.
“I was only doing what you told me to do.”
“You could have warned us.”
“If I’d warned you, it would have defeated the point. The dreamsharers who dealt with Moriarty weren’t warned.”
“Right, but the goal was to not drive us insane,” Arthur told him scathingly.
“And I didn’t. You’re fine, aren’t you? I could have made that so much worse, and you know it. Things that happened on the phone could have happened—”
Arthur turned abruptly to John. “Shut him up, or I’m going to kill him.”
“Okay,” John said, confused. “What the hell happened in there?”
“A garden party,” said Eames, and then, “Arthur, check your totem.”
“What the fuck,” said Arthur, “we weren’t three levels down.”
“Check it,” Eames said again.
Arthur, frowning, turned away from them and rolled the die, once, twice. Then he collected it and turned back to them, lifting his eyebrows in inquiry at Eames.
“So this is reality,” Eames said.
“Yes. Verified.”
“Okay. So shake off the bloody dream and sit down and do your job.”
Arthur blinked at him. And then Arthur obeyed, and John couldn’t tell if he was astonished by that or if that was perfectly predictable. Arthur pulled out his notebook and said to Sherlock, “Walk me through exactly how you did that.” And then, “Eames, can you go out and get us coffee? Fancy-coffee-drink coffee?”
“Can I what?” Eames seemed surprised by the request.
“Coffee,” Arthur repeated flatly. “Can you get some.”
“You want me to get us coffee?”
“I have every confidence in your ability to do that, yes,” said Arthur, already scrawling in his notebook, although John couldn’t imagine what he was writing, as Sherlock hadn’t actually said anything yet.
“Absolutely, Arthur,” drawled Eames sarcastically. “Best forger in dreamsharing, but you think that I might be able to handle fetching coffee. Makes sense. I certainly wouldn’t want to get in the way of you two geniuses as you work.”
“Thank you, Eames,” said Arthur lightly.
Eames said to John, “It’s his fucking condescension that makes me love working with him so much.” And then he marched out of the room.
John listened to him stomp his way down the stairs.
Sherlock said, “Go with him.”
John stared at him. “What?”
“Stop him from pickpocketing people,” said Arthur, still scribbling away. “He’ll do it in his current state and it’s not that he’ll get caught but it’s inconvenient to have to deal with all the stolen wallets later.”
Sherlock stood and bodily steered John out of the room. “Good-bye, John. Come back with coffee.”
John sighed and huffed his way down the stairs and wished he had learned the trick of not just getting shoved around wherever Sherlock wanted him to go.
Eames was standing on the pavement outside Baker Street, and for all John knew he was actively plotting how to divest the next passerby of his wallet. John didn’t really want that to happen, so he said jovially, “We can get coffee here,” and indicated Speedy’s.
Eames said, “Fully half of the time I want to bloody strangle him.”
John said, because Eames left himself wide open for it, “And the other half of the time?”
Eames surprised him by laughing, because John would have thought that Eames would have had some kind of sharp retort about that. But Eames just laughed and said, “Yes, that is the problem, it’s true. You know how it is.” Eames moved past John to put a hand on the door of Speedy’s.
John frowned and said, “No, I don’t.”
Eames lifted skeptical eyebrows at him. “You don’t?”
“Look, I know very well about wanting to strangle someone half the time, but the rest of the time isn’t…like that.” John was aware he finished that whole sentence lamely.
Eames cocked a single eyebrow at him and said mildly, “Okay,” and went to open the door.
“Hey,” John said sharply, hating being dismissed like that. “I’m not gay.”
“So you don’t do gay relationships and Arthur doesn’t do relationships, period. I actually think that makes me the winner in the unrequited sweepstakes, since you at least understand what a relationship is.”
John snorted. “And you think Sherlock does?”
“He’s clever.”
“So’s Arthur.”
Eames sighed. “I know this is going to shock you, given how frivolously Arthur has been behaving, but Arthur doesn’t mix business with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t even mix pleasure with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t…pleasure.”
“Why are we having this conversation?” John asked suddenly.
“I have no idea. It’s been a strange day.”
“You’re telling me,” said John.
“And you haven’t even had your head messed with,” replied Eames.
“Sod the coffee,” said John. “Want a pint?”
“I very, very badly want a pint,” said Eames.
***
“That’s it,” Arthur said, as soon as he heard the Baker Street door close behind John. “You need to stop using that against me. I don’t care what else you use, but it has to stop being Eames.”
“I didn’t choose Eames,” Sherlock replied, retrieving his violin and scratching his bow annoyingly against it. “You did.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Arthur.
Sherlock put his violin down just as abruptly as he’d picked it up. “Do you ever wonder what’s in your safe? What you keep close because it’s precious?”
Arthur thought of long days with Mal, when he was still a green recruit, when she was teaching him militarization. In those days, it had been his family. He hadn’t met Eames yet, and by the time he’d met Eames, he’d grown used to thinking of his subconscious as an impenetrable fortress. “You shouldn’t have been able to get in,” Arthur said, instead of thinking anymore about what exactly he kept in his subconscious safe. “We’re trained, Eames and I. Not fake, government training from people who have never seen combat. We’d die if we couldn’t protect ourselves against the sort of thing you just did.”
“It’s all in the Somnacin,” Sherlock said lazily.
“I used my own compound.”
“Not the Somnacin on this level,” Sherlock said, and looked at him.
“The Somnacin you used for the second level,” Arthur realized. “What did you do to it?”
“Made it lower your defenses. Make you unable to resist the dream. Blur the lines between what you want and what you have, and you didn’t want out of that dream. You did the work for me. You wanted that dream so badly you could taste it. So I gave it to you. And then I took it from you. It’s what Moriarty would have done to them, only worse, he would have pushed it harder, twisted it harder. Surely you can see how I could have done that, how I actually went easy on you, gave you a fairly standard-grade nightmare, as they go.”
Arthur’s mind raced through what Sherlock was saying. “But Somnacin doesn’t do that. Do you know how easy it would make my job if I could get Somnacin to do that?”
“Well, you’ve been working with idiots, because Somnacin definitely does that if you just tweak the compound a bit.”
Arthur tipped back on the desk chair and considered. “So you knocked me out and drugged me—”
“I’d been drugging you from the moment you stepped into the dream,” Sherlock said. “Both of you. I drugged the air you were breathing.”
“But we weren’t breathing,” Arthur said. “It was a dream.”
“Of course you breathe in a dream. You can suffocate in a dream, can’t you? I needed to slow your reflexes to have a chance to get close enough to you to get you under. I would imagine Moriarty tries a similar technique.”
Arthur scribbled absently in his notebook, then realized he was writing Eames over and over. He needed to rip that page out. “But…that’s not what Moriarty did to Sarah Miller. Sarah Miller’s memories were destroyed. You gave me a…fantasy,” Arthur admitted. “Sarah Miller was trying to protect what she had, but I don’t have that to protect.”
Sherlock shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Not for the effect you need. Either would be enough, if pushed properly, to drive a person insane. The thing is: tweaking the compound guarantees that the dreamer dreams about something precious and important to them. Sarah Miller had precious and important memories. You don’t. Most of what’s precious and important to you is a fantasy.”
Arthur suppressed his flinch, because, well, it was harsh to hear it set out as bluntly like that: When you dream about the most important thing in your life, it’s a relationship that doesn’t even exist. So instead Arthur said, “So you use the tweaked Somnacin to find out what’s most precious and important to a person. It’s not necessarily a secret they have locked up, like I would be looking for, it could be right out in the open, like Sarah Miller’s love of ballet and her husband. It could be anything. But once you find out what it is, you take it and you destroy it.”
“Yes,” Sherlock agreed. “Poison it. Plant the seed of the idea in their head and—”
“And it grows,” Arthur finished. “Because it’s nothing they haven’t already been worrying about, in the deep dark recesses they don’t admit.”
***
Sherlock sat and watched Arthur as he scribbled furiously in the notebook. Sherlock was ninety-seven percent convinced that Arthur wasn’t writing anything substantive, that Arthur wrote as a distraction, to give him time to consider his next steps. Arthur, Sherlock thought, was one of those very deliberate people who gave thought to every move they made. Such people were deadly boring, Sherlock thought.
If Sherlock hadn’t just been in Arthur’s brain, he would have been inclined to think Arthur, yes, extraordinarily dull and dismiss him. The fact that he was a career criminal was intriguing, it was true, but Arthur’s obsessive practicality made him little more than a Mycroft who’d made a left instead of a right, Sherlock had thought. But Sherlock had just been in Arthur’s brain. Remarkable thing, Somnacin, exposing to you immediately the hidden bits that Sherlock could only try to guess at. Sherlock hated to admit that there was any guesswork in what he did, but there were limits to the science of deduction.
Like the fact that, although Sherlock had seen immediately that Arthur fancied Eames, he had not supposed that it was quite the depth that Arthur had exposed. He would not have thought that Arthur…longed as much as it was clear he did when you were in his brain, when you could feel it. Sherlock rather thought a straightforward sex dream, as unpleasant as that would have been, would have been easier to manage. And, also, would not have inspired the violent reaction Arthur had had. Sherlock could see quite easily how little effort it would take to break someone, once you were in their head poking around the things they held most precious. He had, of course, understood it in the abstract, but it had been impossible to prepare himself for how intensely it operated in practice. And there was a part of him that didn’t envy Arthur and Eames their jobs. There was a very large part of him that much preferred probing people’s brains from outside of them.
Sherlock thought about John. Sherlock thought of Arthur having been clever enough to find Room 221. Sherlock thought of how Somnacin had lost a little of its luster for him, now that he had to worry about how it would have been had Arthur been clever enough to somehow turn it onto Sherlock instead. Sherlock’s dream would have been a fantasy, too, he thought.
Arthur’s thoughts must have been traveling a similar path, because he said, “Well, at least we have mutually assured destruction now.”
“What does that mean?”
“You say anything to Eames about me, and I’ll tell John how your most precious thing is devoted entirely to him.”
Sherlock looked over at him. “I’m not going to tell Eames.” He couldn’t imagine anything worse than someone just blurting out to John how precious he was to Sherlock. Sherlock was many things, but he liked to think he was not actually cruel, not about something as personally applicable as this.
Sherlock plucked at some strings on his violin. He thought of Eames’s dream. He said hesitantly, uncertainly, “But you should.”
Arthur laughed. “Sure thing. Just as soon as you tell John.”
Sherlock shook his head, frustrated. This, he was willing to admit, was not his forte, all of this emotion. “It’s different.”
“In what way?”
Sherlock regarded Arthur for a moment. He considered what he would think if someone—if Arthur, perhaps—had said to him, John’s in love with you, too. You’ll be perfect together. It will end splendidly. He would have…considered the astonishing loveliness of the idea, and then been furious at being teased that way, and pretend to wave it away but it would be worse, to feel so terribly mocked. He’d never believe it coming from someone else.
And maybe Sherlock had it all wrong, anyway. Maybe Eames’s dream hadn’t meant what Sherlock thought it meant. Maybe getting in the middle of whatever complicated emotional relationship existed between Arthur and Eames was the opposite of what Sherlock should do. He was supposed to be solving the puzzle of Moriarty, and the rest of this was all just distracting nonsense. Why would Arthur ever say anything to Eames? Why would anyone, ever, take such an extraordinary risk?
So instead Sherlock took a deep breath and said, “Let me explain to you what I did to the Somnacin.”
***
The pub was basically deserted, because it was still fairly early for pints, but John didn’t care. He fetched them two and joined Eames where he’d settled at a corner table, his back to the wall, giving himself a good view of the entire pub. John knew the tendency to sit that way. He was slumped deep in the chair, eyes watching everything raptly, but his posture made it look as if he was barely paying attention. He was also flipping a poker chip over his knuckles neatly.
“Cheers,” he said, when John slid his pint over to him.
“I should have made you buy,” John grumbled, trying to remind himself that he was having a pint with a criminal right now. Not that John necessarily had anything against criminals, in the abstract. John knew there were two sides to every story and not all criminals were bad people. John had very personal reasons for understanding that. But these were criminals who made their living invading other people’s brains and were now supporting Sherlock’s involvement in a Moriarty scheme, so John thought it made sense that he was wary of them.
“I make it a point never to buy alcohol. Luckily, I always carry counterfeit currency for just that purpose. Or I just steal it from the hotel minibar. That’s what we did last night.”
John sighed. “You are determined to emphasize with every statement how much you like to flaunt the law.”
“You’re one of those people,” Eames said, waving his hand dismissively. “Those…strong moral compass people, world in black and white, good and evil, and you know which side you’re on and you know which side I’m on. You were born knowing everything in the universe. Christ, I wish I was as sure about anything as you lot always are about being right. For instance, you have Greedy CEO One come to you and say that he wants you to steal the secrets of Greedy CEO Two, and between the two of them, who’s to say which is the good and which is the evil? Or that they’re not both evil? Or that I’m not doing some kind of public service?”
“By stealing liquor?” John said.
“I don’t actually steal liquor,” Eames said. “First rule of working with a forger: We lie about practically everything.”
“So you didn’t steal the liquor from the hotel minibar last night?”
“Oh, no, that we absolutely did, but Mycroft deserved that bill.”
John shook his head and sighed but didn’t really argue that point. He said, instead, “I heard rumors about it in the army.”
“Dreamsharing?” Eames guessed. “Yes, that’s how it all got started. Military.”
“Is that how you got involved in it?”
“Do I look like someone they’d let in the military?”
John snorted. “You look exactly like someone they’d let in the military.”
Eames laughed. “All right, fair enough. But no, we philosophical types who read too much Hobbes while drunk have a difficult time going the Queen and country route. We choose a different kind of battlefield entirely.”
“But still a battlefield,” noted John.
“That’s just life. Only delusional fools think otherwise,” Eames replied.
“I don’t know. In my experience, life can get pretty bloody boring pretty bloody quickly.”
Eames chuckled. “Well, that’s when you go out and meet some mad detective who’ll fix that for you.”
The jibe made John uncomfortable. He wished Eames would drop that discussion. And, if he wasn’t going to, then he was going to push it right back at Eames. “Or a bloke in a really expensive suit.”
“Or that,” Eames allowed good-naturedly, eyes surveying the pub for threats. “Although yours is a bloke in a really expensive suit, too.”
“They could have a contest over the most unnecessarily tight tailoring,” John agreed drily.
“Those two should never have a contest over anything,” Eames replied. “They’re both so competitive, I shudder to think of it. Arthur’s not pleasant when he loses.”
“Neither is Sherlock.”
“I can imagine. Although Arthur is prone to brandishing guns, so his loss would worry me more.”
“Sherlock also brandishes guns if I let him. So I don’t let him.”
Eames looked suitably impressed. “I’m amazed you can exercise that amount of power.”
“I once watched him scratch his own head with the barrel of a loaded revolver,” John said.
“Well, Arthur would never do that. Not even in a dream. Do you know that I recently found out Arthur won’t smoke even in a dream because he says it smells vile? As if you couldn’t dream away the smell of smoke.”
The casualness of this comment made John’s head whirl a bit, how easily Eames existed in two simultaneous worlds like that. “Do you get the dream and real life confused?”
“Not if we can help it,” Eames said, thinking of Arthur’s panic when Eames had kicked him out of the second level dream. “That’s a recipe for disaster. Once a dreamsharer genuinely has trouble telling the difference, the dreamsharer should probably give it up. But we all have our little tricks.”
“Arthur with the die,” John realized.
“Exactly. What we call a totem. Makes sure we know when we’re in a dream versus when we’re in real life. Wouldn’t do to shoot someone in the face in real life, thinking you’re just waking them up.”
“That’s what I mean. I would be terrified about that all the time.”
Eames shrugged. “I don’t know. You just get to know it after a little while. The biggest thing is the reflexes, really. We’re under constant attack in a dream, so we start to act like everyone is always out to get us.”
“Like sitting in a corner to survey the whole pub,” John pointed out.
Eames smiled faintly. “Exactly. Our real lives are dangerous, too, but I think we mostly overreact because our adrenaline is out of balance.”
“So how did you even get into all this?” John pushed again.
“How do you get into anything? How did you end up a famous blogger of an impossible flatmate detective? Just happenstance, right? Just chance. One day I stumbled into dreamsharing, and I was good at it, so I did it. And that’s how it happens. For almost everyone in the universe except for Arthur, who has meticulously planned out every detail of his life. Do you know I met him on a beach? Rio, close to Carnival, not that it really matters for Rio. Everyone around me was basically naked, and Arthur was wearing this linen blazer thing. Dressed down for him, but I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘He is wearing a bloody blazer on the beach in Rio. What a pretentious prick.’” Eames sipped his pint and said, “So naturally I never stood a chance, because you know how that goes.”
“No,” John said with polite firmness, “I don’t.”
“Oh, come off it,” said Eames, finishing his pint and looking as if he wished another one would just materialize there. “I’ve read your blog and I’ve met the two of you and I read people for my literal living, so just come off it. You fell in love with him the first time you met him and you’ve been falling ever since. The thing about you, though, is that your problem is the dichotomy problem. You were born knowing right from wrong and up from down and left from right. It’s why you hated being in the dream: you need the dichotomy, you can’t have all the possibilities all at once the way the dream is. So you thought you knew what you wanted, and you thought you knew what you wanted was a woman. You found what you wanted, and it turned out not to be a woman, but you can’t imagine having been wrong all this time, so you’re just being an idiot about the whole thing.”
“Oh, really?” said John, smarting. “I’m being an idiot in knowing my own sexuality?”
“No, you’re an idiot for not knowing it at all. Here’s the thing, right?” Eames talked expansively, his hands stacking his argument into a tower for John. “The odds of meeting a person that makes you feel alive, that makes you feel like getting up every morning is worth it, the odds of meeting that one person who makes you smile just knowing they’re in existence somewhere, Christ, those odds are so vanishingly small. We spend our whole lives searching for a needle in a haystack to get that person, and who are we to limit our choices by only looking at half the population? I’m not saying that you’re gay, and to be honest I’d never say I was, either. But I’m clever enough to know that what I decided to call myself matters not one bit in the face of the fact that I met someone who made me want to be a better person, gender be damned. You haven’t got there yet. And that’s stupid of you. Because you lead dangerous lives, you two, and something might happen, and you’ll kick yourself for never having admitted how you felt, for having wasted the time with him.”
John stared at Eames, feeling furious, and he hated to admit that he wasn’t sure if he was furious over how wrong Eames was or how right he was. “That’s quite something,” he bit out, “coming from someone who I know has never breathed a bloody word to Arthur about how he feels”
“But that’s because I have a reason for that,” Eames said, with a smile that was more sad than happy. “You’ve met Arthur, and you’ve met me, so you know that Arthur deserves better. Arthur is better, in every way. It would be pointless to—”
“I don’t know what Arthur ‘deserves,’ but he’s here with you now, isn’t he?”
“Arthur likes me, he respects me, we work well together, and he’d never wish me harm. That’s different, though. That’s not the way I want him.”
“It’s the only way you’ll have him unless you tell him,” John pointed out viciously.
“I know,” Eames sighed reflectively, looking out over the pub, and then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Go and get us another pint and we’ll drink to being cowards together.”
John didn’t analyze the fact that he did just that.
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 20
John sat, frustrated, watching dreamers dream and drumming his fingers against the desk.
And then Arthur woke up, followed by Sherlock, followed by Eames, and all hell broke loose.
“That was all uncalled for,” Sherlock snapped, hands feeling over his face.
“Oh, shut up, you’re absolutely fine,” Arthur shot back.
“I was only doing what you told me to do.”
“You could have warned us.”
“If I’d warned you, it would have defeated the point. The dreamsharers who dealt with Moriarty weren’t warned.”
“Right, but the goal was to not drive us insane,” Arthur told him scathingly.
“And I didn’t. You’re fine, aren’t you? I could have made that so much worse, and you know it. Things that happened on the phone could have happened—”
Arthur turned abruptly to John. “Shut him up, or I’m going to kill him.”
“Okay,” John said, confused. “What the hell happened in there?”
“A garden party,” said Eames, and then, “Arthur, check your totem.”
“What the fuck,” said Arthur, “we weren’t three levels down.”
“Check it,” Eames said again.
Arthur, frowning, turned away from them and rolled the die, once, twice. Then he collected it and turned back to them, lifting his eyebrows in inquiry at Eames.
“So this is reality,” Eames said.
“Yes. Verified.”
“Okay. So shake off the bloody dream and sit down and do your job.”
Arthur blinked at him. And then Arthur obeyed, and John couldn’t tell if he was astonished by that or if that was perfectly predictable. Arthur pulled out his notebook and said to Sherlock, “Walk me through exactly how you did that.” And then, “Eames, can you go out and get us coffee? Fancy-coffee-drink coffee?”
“Can I what?” Eames seemed surprised by the request.
“Coffee,” Arthur repeated flatly. “Can you get some.”
“You want me to get us coffee?”
“I have every confidence in your ability to do that, yes,” said Arthur, already scrawling in his notebook, although John couldn’t imagine what he was writing, as Sherlock hadn’t actually said anything yet.
“Absolutely, Arthur,” drawled Eames sarcastically. “Best forger in dreamsharing, but you think that I might be able to handle fetching coffee. Makes sense. I certainly wouldn’t want to get in the way of you two geniuses as you work.”
“Thank you, Eames,” said Arthur lightly.
Eames said to John, “It’s his fucking condescension that makes me love working with him so much.” And then he marched out of the room.
John listened to him stomp his way down the stairs.
Sherlock said, “Go with him.”
John stared at him. “What?”
“Stop him from pickpocketing people,” said Arthur, still scribbling away. “He’ll do it in his current state and it’s not that he’ll get caught but it’s inconvenient to have to deal with all the stolen wallets later.”
Sherlock stood and bodily steered John out of the room. “Good-bye, John. Come back with coffee.”
John sighed and huffed his way down the stairs and wished he had learned the trick of not just getting shoved around wherever Sherlock wanted him to go.
Eames was standing on the pavement outside Baker Street, and for all John knew he was actively plotting how to divest the next passerby of his wallet. John didn’t really want that to happen, so he said jovially, “We can get coffee here,” and indicated Speedy’s.
Eames said, “Fully half of the time I want to bloody strangle him.”
John said, because Eames left himself wide open for it, “And the other half of the time?”
Eames surprised him by laughing, because John would have thought that Eames would have had some kind of sharp retort about that. But Eames just laughed and said, “Yes, that is the problem, it’s true. You know how it is.” Eames moved past John to put a hand on the door of Speedy’s.
John frowned and said, “No, I don’t.”
Eames lifted skeptical eyebrows at him. “You don’t?”
“Look, I know very well about wanting to strangle someone half the time, but the rest of the time isn’t…like that.” John was aware he finished that whole sentence lamely.
Eames cocked a single eyebrow at him and said mildly, “Okay,” and went to open the door.
“Hey,” John said sharply, hating being dismissed like that. “I’m not gay.”
“So you don’t do gay relationships and Arthur doesn’t do relationships, period. I actually think that makes me the winner in the unrequited sweepstakes, since you at least understand what a relationship is.”
John snorted. “And you think Sherlock does?”
“He’s clever.”
“So’s Arthur.”
Eames sighed. “I know this is going to shock you, given how frivolously Arthur has been behaving, but Arthur doesn’t mix business with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t even mix pleasure with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t…pleasure.”
“Why are we having this conversation?” John asked suddenly.
“I have no idea. It’s been a strange day.”
“You’re telling me,” said John.
“And you haven’t even had your head messed with,” replied Eames.
“Sod the coffee,” said John. “Want a pint?”
“I very, very badly want a pint,” said Eames.
***
“That’s it,” Arthur said, as soon as he heard the Baker Street door close behind John. “You need to stop using that against me. I don’t care what else you use, but it has to stop being Eames.”
“I didn’t choose Eames,” Sherlock replied, retrieving his violin and scratching his bow annoyingly against it. “You did.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Arthur.
Sherlock put his violin down just as abruptly as he’d picked it up. “Do you ever wonder what’s in your safe? What you keep close because it’s precious?”
Arthur thought of long days with Mal, when he was still a green recruit, when she was teaching him militarization. In those days, it had been his family. He hadn’t met Eames yet, and by the time he’d met Eames, he’d grown used to thinking of his subconscious as an impenetrable fortress. “You shouldn’t have been able to get in,” Arthur said, instead of thinking anymore about what exactly he kept in his subconscious safe. “We’re trained, Eames and I. Not fake, government training from people who have never seen combat. We’d die if we couldn’t protect ourselves against the sort of thing you just did.”
“It’s all in the Somnacin,” Sherlock said lazily.
“I used my own compound.”
“Not the Somnacin on this level,” Sherlock said, and looked at him.
“The Somnacin you used for the second level,” Arthur realized. “What did you do to it?”
“Made it lower your defenses. Make you unable to resist the dream. Blur the lines between what you want and what you have, and you didn’t want out of that dream. You did the work for me. You wanted that dream so badly you could taste it. So I gave it to you. And then I took it from you. It’s what Moriarty would have done to them, only worse, he would have pushed it harder, twisted it harder. Surely you can see how I could have done that, how I actually went easy on you, gave you a fairly standard-grade nightmare, as they go.”
Arthur’s mind raced through what Sherlock was saying. “But Somnacin doesn’t do that. Do you know how easy it would make my job if I could get Somnacin to do that?”
“Well, you’ve been working with idiots, because Somnacin definitely does that if you just tweak the compound a bit.”
Arthur tipped back on the desk chair and considered. “So you knocked me out and drugged me—”
“I’d been drugging you from the moment you stepped into the dream,” Sherlock said. “Both of you. I drugged the air you were breathing.”
“But we weren’t breathing,” Arthur said. “It was a dream.”
“Of course you breathe in a dream. You can suffocate in a dream, can’t you? I needed to slow your reflexes to have a chance to get close enough to you to get you under. I would imagine Moriarty tries a similar technique.”
Arthur scribbled absently in his notebook, then realized he was writing Eames over and over. He needed to rip that page out. “But…that’s not what Moriarty did to Sarah Miller. Sarah Miller’s memories were destroyed. You gave me a…fantasy,” Arthur admitted. “Sarah Miller was trying to protect what she had, but I don’t have that to protect.”
Sherlock shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Not for the effect you need. Either would be enough, if pushed properly, to drive a person insane. The thing is: tweaking the compound guarantees that the dreamer dreams about something precious and important to them. Sarah Miller had precious and important memories. You don’t. Most of what’s precious and important to you is a fantasy.”
Arthur suppressed his flinch, because, well, it was harsh to hear it set out as bluntly like that: When you dream about the most important thing in your life, it’s a relationship that doesn’t even exist. So instead Arthur said, “So you use the tweaked Somnacin to find out what’s most precious and important to a person. It’s not necessarily a secret they have locked up, like I would be looking for, it could be right out in the open, like Sarah Miller’s love of ballet and her husband. It could be anything. But once you find out what it is, you take it and you destroy it.”
“Yes,” Sherlock agreed. “Poison it. Plant the seed of the idea in their head and—”
“And it grows,” Arthur finished. “Because it’s nothing they haven’t already been worrying about, in the deep dark recesses they don’t admit.”
***
Sherlock sat and watched Arthur as he scribbled furiously in the notebook. Sherlock was ninety-seven percent convinced that Arthur wasn’t writing anything substantive, that Arthur wrote as a distraction, to give him time to consider his next steps. Arthur, Sherlock thought, was one of those very deliberate people who gave thought to every move they made. Such people were deadly boring, Sherlock thought.
If Sherlock hadn’t just been in Arthur’s brain, he would have been inclined to think Arthur, yes, extraordinarily dull and dismiss him. The fact that he was a career criminal was intriguing, it was true, but Arthur’s obsessive practicality made him little more than a Mycroft who’d made a left instead of a right, Sherlock had thought. But Sherlock had just been in Arthur’s brain. Remarkable thing, Somnacin, exposing to you immediately the hidden bits that Sherlock could only try to guess at. Sherlock hated to admit that there was any guesswork in what he did, but there were limits to the science of deduction.
Like the fact that, although Sherlock had seen immediately that Arthur fancied Eames, he had not supposed that it was quite the depth that Arthur had exposed. He would not have thought that Arthur…longed as much as it was clear he did when you were in his brain, when you could feel it. Sherlock rather thought a straightforward sex dream, as unpleasant as that would have been, would have been easier to manage. And, also, would not have inspired the violent reaction Arthur had had. Sherlock could see quite easily how little effort it would take to break someone, once you were in their head poking around the things they held most precious. He had, of course, understood it in the abstract, but it had been impossible to prepare himself for how intensely it operated in practice. And there was a part of him that didn’t envy Arthur and Eames their jobs. There was a very large part of him that much preferred probing people’s brains from outside of them.
Sherlock thought about John. Sherlock thought of Arthur having been clever enough to find Room 221. Sherlock thought of how Somnacin had lost a little of its luster for him, now that he had to worry about how it would have been had Arthur been clever enough to somehow turn it onto Sherlock instead. Sherlock’s dream would have been a fantasy, too, he thought.
Arthur’s thoughts must have been traveling a similar path, because he said, “Well, at least we have mutually assured destruction now.”
“What does that mean?”
“You say anything to Eames about me, and I’ll tell John how your most precious thing is devoted entirely to him.”
Sherlock looked over at him. “I’m not going to tell Eames.” He couldn’t imagine anything worse than someone just blurting out to John how precious he was to Sherlock. Sherlock was many things, but he liked to think he was not actually cruel, not about something as personally applicable as this.
Sherlock plucked at some strings on his violin. He thought of Eames’s dream. He said hesitantly, uncertainly, “But you should.”
Arthur laughed. “Sure thing. Just as soon as you tell John.”
Sherlock shook his head, frustrated. This, he was willing to admit, was not his forte, all of this emotion. “It’s different.”
“In what way?”
Sherlock regarded Arthur for a moment. He considered what he would think if someone—if Arthur, perhaps—had said to him, John’s in love with you, too. You’ll be perfect together. It will end splendidly. He would have…considered the astonishing loveliness of the idea, and then been furious at being teased that way, and pretend to wave it away but it would be worse, to feel so terribly mocked. He’d never believe it coming from someone else.
And maybe Sherlock had it all wrong, anyway. Maybe Eames’s dream hadn’t meant what Sherlock thought it meant. Maybe getting in the middle of whatever complicated emotional relationship existed between Arthur and Eames was the opposite of what Sherlock should do. He was supposed to be solving the puzzle of Moriarty, and the rest of this was all just distracting nonsense. Why would Arthur ever say anything to Eames? Why would anyone, ever, take such an extraordinary risk?
So instead Sherlock took a deep breath and said, “Let me explain to you what I did to the Somnacin.”
***
The pub was basically deserted, because it was still fairly early for pints, but John didn’t care. He fetched them two and joined Eames where he’d settled at a corner table, his back to the wall, giving himself a good view of the entire pub. John knew the tendency to sit that way. He was slumped deep in the chair, eyes watching everything raptly, but his posture made it look as if he was barely paying attention. He was also flipping a poker chip over his knuckles neatly.
“Cheers,” he said, when John slid his pint over to him.
“I should have made you buy,” John grumbled, trying to remind himself that he was having a pint with a criminal right now. Not that John necessarily had anything against criminals, in the abstract. John knew there were two sides to every story and not all criminals were bad people. John had very personal reasons for understanding that. But these were criminals who made their living invading other people’s brains and were now supporting Sherlock’s involvement in a Moriarty scheme, so John thought it made sense that he was wary of them.
“I make it a point never to buy alcohol. Luckily, I always carry counterfeit currency for just that purpose. Or I just steal it from the hotel minibar. That’s what we did last night.”
John sighed. “You are determined to emphasize with every statement how much you like to flaunt the law.”
“You’re one of those people,” Eames said, waving his hand dismissively. “Those…strong moral compass people, world in black and white, good and evil, and you know which side you’re on and you know which side I’m on. You were born knowing everything in the universe. Christ, I wish I was as sure about anything as you lot always are about being right. For instance, you have Greedy CEO One come to you and say that he wants you to steal the secrets of Greedy CEO Two, and between the two of them, who’s to say which is the good and which is the evil? Or that they’re not both evil? Or that I’m not doing some kind of public service?”
“By stealing liquor?” John said.
“I don’t actually steal liquor,” Eames said. “First rule of working with a forger: We lie about practically everything.”
“So you didn’t steal the liquor from the hotel minibar last night?”
“Oh, no, that we absolutely did, but Mycroft deserved that bill.”
John shook his head and sighed but didn’t really argue that point. He said, instead, “I heard rumors about it in the army.”
“Dreamsharing?” Eames guessed. “Yes, that’s how it all got started. Military.”
“Is that how you got involved in it?”
“Do I look like someone they’d let in the military?”
John snorted. “You look exactly like someone they’d let in the military.”
Eames laughed. “All right, fair enough. But no, we philosophical types who read too much Hobbes while drunk have a difficult time going the Queen and country route. We choose a different kind of battlefield entirely.”
“But still a battlefield,” noted John.
“That’s just life. Only delusional fools think otherwise,” Eames replied.
“I don’t know. In my experience, life can get pretty bloody boring pretty bloody quickly.”
Eames chuckled. “Well, that’s when you go out and meet some mad detective who’ll fix that for you.”
The jibe made John uncomfortable. He wished Eames would drop that discussion. And, if he wasn’t going to, then he was going to push it right back at Eames. “Or a bloke in a really expensive suit.”
“Or that,” Eames allowed good-naturedly, eyes surveying the pub for threats. “Although yours is a bloke in a really expensive suit, too.”
“They could have a contest over the most unnecessarily tight tailoring,” John agreed drily.
“Those two should never have a contest over anything,” Eames replied. “They’re both so competitive, I shudder to think of it. Arthur’s not pleasant when he loses.”
“Neither is Sherlock.”
“I can imagine. Although Arthur is prone to brandishing guns, so his loss would worry me more.”
“Sherlock also brandishes guns if I let him. So I don’t let him.”
Eames looked suitably impressed. “I’m amazed you can exercise that amount of power.”
“I once watched him scratch his own head with the barrel of a loaded revolver,” John said.
“Well, Arthur would never do that. Not even in a dream. Do you know that I recently found out Arthur won’t smoke even in a dream because he says it smells vile? As if you couldn’t dream away the smell of smoke.”
The casualness of this comment made John’s head whirl a bit, how easily Eames existed in two simultaneous worlds like that. “Do you get the dream and real life confused?”
“Not if we can help it,” Eames said, thinking of Arthur’s panic when Eames had kicked him out of the second level dream. “That’s a recipe for disaster. Once a dreamsharer genuinely has trouble telling the difference, the dreamsharer should probably give it up. But we all have our little tricks.”
“Arthur with the die,” John realized.
“Exactly. What we call a totem. Makes sure we know when we’re in a dream versus when we’re in real life. Wouldn’t do to shoot someone in the face in real life, thinking you’re just waking them up.”
“That’s what I mean. I would be terrified about that all the time.”
Eames shrugged. “I don’t know. You just get to know it after a little while. The biggest thing is the reflexes, really. We’re under constant attack in a dream, so we start to act like everyone is always out to get us.”
“Like sitting in a corner to survey the whole pub,” John pointed out.
Eames smiled faintly. “Exactly. Our real lives are dangerous, too, but I think we mostly overreact because our adrenaline is out of balance.”
“So how did you even get into all this?” John pushed again.
“How do you get into anything? How did you end up a famous blogger of an impossible flatmate detective? Just happenstance, right? Just chance. One day I stumbled into dreamsharing, and I was good at it, so I did it. And that’s how it happens. For almost everyone in the universe except for Arthur, who has meticulously planned out every detail of his life. Do you know I met him on a beach? Rio, close to Carnival, not that it really matters for Rio. Everyone around me was basically naked, and Arthur was wearing this linen blazer thing. Dressed down for him, but I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘He is wearing a bloody blazer on the beach in Rio. What a pretentious prick.’” Eames sipped his pint and said, “So naturally I never stood a chance, because you know how that goes.”
“No,” John said with polite firmness, “I don’t.”
“Oh, come off it,” said Eames, finishing his pint and looking as if he wished another one would just materialize there. “I’ve read your blog and I’ve met the two of you and I read people for my literal living, so just come off it. You fell in love with him the first time you met him and you’ve been falling ever since. The thing about you, though, is that your problem is the dichotomy problem. You were born knowing right from wrong and up from down and left from right. It’s why you hated being in the dream: you need the dichotomy, you can’t have all the possibilities all at once the way the dream is. So you thought you knew what you wanted, and you thought you knew what you wanted was a woman. You found what you wanted, and it turned out not to be a woman, but you can’t imagine having been wrong all this time, so you’re just being an idiot about the whole thing.”
“Oh, really?” said John, smarting. “I’m being an idiot in knowing my own sexuality?”
“No, you’re an idiot for not knowing it at all. Here’s the thing, right?” Eames talked expansively, his hands stacking his argument into a tower for John. “The odds of meeting a person that makes you feel alive, that makes you feel like getting up every morning is worth it, the odds of meeting that one person who makes you smile just knowing they’re in existence somewhere, Christ, those odds are so vanishingly small. We spend our whole lives searching for a needle in a haystack to get that person, and who are we to limit our choices by only looking at half the population? I’m not saying that you’re gay, and to be honest I’d never say I was, either. But I’m clever enough to know that what I decided to call myself matters not one bit in the face of the fact that I met someone who made me want to be a better person, gender be damned. You haven’t got there yet. And that’s stupid of you. Because you lead dangerous lives, you two, and something might happen, and you’ll kick yourself for never having admitted how you felt, for having wasted the time with him.”
John stared at Eames, feeling furious, and he hated to admit that he wasn’t sure if he was furious over how wrong Eames was or how right he was. “That’s quite something,” he bit out, “coming from someone who I know has never breathed a bloody word to Arthur about how he feels”
“But that’s because I have a reason for that,” Eames said, with a smile that was more sad than happy. “You’ve met Arthur, and you’ve met me, so you know that Arthur deserves better. Arthur is better, in every way. It would be pointless to—”
“I don’t know what Arthur ‘deserves,’ but he’s here with you now, isn’t he?”
“Arthur likes me, he respects me, we work well together, and he’d never wish me harm. That’s different, though. That’s not the way I want him.”
“It’s the only way you’ll have him unless you tell him,” John pointed out viciously.
“I know,” Eames sighed reflectively, looking out over the pub, and then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Go and get us another pint and we’ll drink to being cowards together.”
John didn’t analyze the fact that he did just that.
