Keep the Car Running (21/31)
Feb. 4th, 2015 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (21/31)
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 21
Arthur’s notebook was full to the brim with chemical equations, and he was taxing his chemistry knowledge badly, and Sherlock kept snapping at him for not reaching conclusions quickly enough, but really the only conclusion Arthur could reach was that a few tweaks of the Somnacin compound while in a dream state would result in a much more potent drug that would manipulate dreamers into spilling secrets with ease. He didn’t understand how no one had ever stumbled upon this before. Granted, Sherlock was a chemical genius, but not everyone in dreamsharing was a slouch.
It was dark by the time Arthur became aware that someone’s thumb was pressing behind his ear, a deep, thorough caress that made him have to bite back a groan because it was soothing the headache tense around Arthur’s scalp. Arthur actually reflexively worked the jaw he was clenching, and Eames’s index finger—because it had to be Eames—pressed at the joint of his jaw and said, “Are you coming back to the land of the living now?”
“What are you doing?” Arthur asked, by which he intended to mean Stop what you’re doing, but instead he tipped his head forward so that Eames could shift and splay his hand along the back of Arthur’s head, combing through hair that Arthur knew had probably traitorously started to cowlick along his neck.
“Trying to get your attention because you and Sherlock have been so mutually caught up in each other that, frankly, I’m jealous.”
Arthur looked past his notebook for what felt like the first time in hours and said, in surprise, “You brought me coffee,” because there was a to-go cup sitting within arm’s reach. He didn’t think he’d really expected Eames to fulfill his request.
“I did. And you drank it. And I’ll have you know it was mostly sugar and cream and chocolate and not at all coffee and you loved every sip.”
“I don’t even remember drinking it; how do you know I enjoyed it?”
“I could tell.” Eames’s fingers were still kneading along the back of Arthur’s neck. “I am very good at recognizing enjoyment on the faces of others. You should see how I excel at this in horizontal situations involving low lighting.”
Arthur rolled his eyes and listened to the negotiation occurring in the kitchen, where Sherlock and John appeared to be debating the necessity of eating dinner.
“John suggested we order something,” said Eames. “Sherlock had a strop over that. They moved the argument to the kitchen. I decided that I was going to break you out of your workaholic fit to tell you that I’m knackered and we should go back to the hotel room and see if they’ve replenished our minibar.”
“No more trick drinking games,” Arthur said, pressing his fingers against his eyes. “I still haven’t gotten rid of that headache.”
“The drinking game was your idea,” said Eames.
Because Eames was right, Arthur decided to ignore him. “And why are you knackered? What did you do all day?”
“I would have stayed and helped,” Eames pointed out, “but I was summarily dismissed.”
Arthur felt a twinge of guilt about that. But having Eames in the room for a discussion about how having Eames die in front of him was the worst thing Sherlock could think of to do to him had not been an option, so it wasn’t like he could really apologize for it. “I know. So what did you do all day instead?”
“I had pints with John, and we talked about unrequited loves and Hobbesian theories of morals and the dichotomy of real life and dream life.”
“Oh, so just a typical day for you,” Arthur said drily.
Eames sounded amused when he said, “Exactly. Anyway, I want to know what’s got you frowning so hard, but I’d prefer a breakdown somewhere that doesn’t involve non-dreamsharers who think they know more than they do.”
“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, on a sigh, because he was tired and all he wanted to do was sprawl on one of the couches while Eames sprawled on the other and they could talk this nonsensical situation through together. “Let’s go home,” he said, and didn’t analyze when he’d started to consider the hotel suite prison home.
***
They picked up Chinese on the way back to the hotel and sat on the floor around the coffee table—because the dining room table was completely colonized by this point and the coffee table had been easier to clear—and Arthur went over what he’d learned from Sherlock.
“But Somnacin can’t do that,” Eames said, stealing some of Arthur’s beef and broccoli.
“I know. I kept telling him that.”
“If Somnacin could do that, we’d do that all the time. Hell, we’d be out of jobs, really, if it was that easy.”
“I know. I told him all of this, and he insists that it’s true, that you can shift the compound to make the dreamer more suggestible, more manipulable.”
“I mean, I know you can make modifications to it, make it better. Yusuf was very good at that sort of stuff. There was usually some kind of drawback, a wicked hangover or something like that, but you could usually make it a little bit more potent. But you and I, we are not easy heads to crack, ever, and he walked right in, on his first try, and turned us both upside-down.”
Arthur toyed with his beef and broccoli, turning it over in his chopsticks without interest. “Which means he’s got to be telling the truth. I can’t find a motivation for him to lie, and I know what he did, so it’s got to be true.”
“I’ve never even heard rumors about this sort of thing, though. How can that be?”
Arthur shrugged and leaned back against the couch behind him and studied the rest of his food critically. He looked exhausted, Eames thought. He hadn’t looked good all day—Eames tried to think if Arthur had really drunk that much more than him—and whatever Sherlock had done to him in the dream hadn’t helped. Sherlock had been deliberately harder on Arthur than Eames, and just that little push more had made a noticeable difference in their psyches. Eames could imagine how easily that could be tipped into the state Sarah Miller had fallen into.
And Eames was over his anger at being sent off on a coffee run like an errand boy. Whatever Arthur and Sherlock had discussed all day, it had clearly involved whatever had happened in Arthur’s dream, and knowing what had happened in his own dream, Eames knew why Arthur had felt the need for some privacy in that discussion.
So Eames just said, “That’s enough for today, I think. You’re exhausted.”
Arthur shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. And I drank you under the table last night, so it’s okay that you’re a broken, hungover mess today.”
“You didn’t drink me under the table.”
“I did.”
“That’s because you cheated at Never Have I Ever,” Arthur accused petulantly.
“Arthur, darling, have you met me? I cheat for a living.”
Arthur leaned his head back against the couch and sighed up toward the ceiling. And then he said, “We have to figure out the antidote to what Moriarty’s doing. We have to figure out a way to fight him off.”
“Is Sherlock working on that?”
“Trying to, anyway.”
“Then there’s nothing more we can do tonight. Go to bed.”
“I had the bed last night.”
“I’m not tired,” Eames said. “Because I was the one drinking you under the table, not the one being drunk under the table.”
“Cheater,” Arthur grumbled at him, getting to his feet.
“Aw, darling, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever called me,” said Eames and grinned when Arthur just glowered on his way to the bedroom.
Eames sat and listened to the sounds of Arthur getting ready for bed. He turned on his Korean drama at a low volume, in case Arthur decided to stop back in before curling up in bed. But Arthur didn’t. After twenty minutes of silence from the bedroom, Eames got up to check. Arthur was a lump underneath the blankets, and when Eames stood over him he could hear that his breathing was deep and even. Satisfied, Eames went back out into the living room and stole Arthur’s laptop and hacked into Arthur’s email. Well, tried to hack into Arthur’s email. Bloody paranoid Arthur had more protections built around his email than Eames felt like dealing with, frankly.
So instead he gave up on the hacking and just went into his own email and sent Yusuf a quick note. Working a job with Arthur–I think he’s told you? Chemist is telling us that we can make a few tweaks to the Somnacin in dream-state to make the subject completely pliable and defenceless. Seems too good to be true to me and Arthur. Thoughts? Have you been holding out on me all these years? –E.
Eames played a couple of games of Solitaire before he got a reply. You’re as bad as Arthur with these all-business emails. Long time, no see, nice catching up with you. Somnacin is basically as potent as we can make it without serious side effects to both the dreamer and the dreamsharers. Trust me, those experiments have been done and the results were ugly and you don’t want any part of them. I don’t know who your chemist is but tell him to stop being an idiot and back off. I’m surprised A doesn’t know how dangerous that whole thing can be, his boyfriend was involved in it years and years and years ago (this predates all of us). Ahlam is doing well, thanks so much for asking. I’ll be sure to send you a cigar when the baby is born.
Eames read the email over twice, especially the part about Arthur’s boyfriend being involved. Then he wrote back. How dangerous? Like, stop the chemist immediately dangerous? Why haven’t I heard anything about Cobb and dangerous Somnacin experiments?
The reply was instantaneous. YES, STOP THE CHEMIST IMMEDIATELY. And did you ever hear anything about Cobb inceptioning his own wife before that whole disaster of a job? No. You didn’t. Cobb plays closer to the chest than Arthur, why do you think they’re friends?
Eames tapped his finger on the edge of the laptop, considering, then wrote back. Thanks for the info. Don’t bother to send the cigar, I’ll just show up on your doorstep one day when you least expect it and be a very bad influence on your child while charming your wife thoroughly.
Yusuf wrote one last email back. Fuck off.
Eames smiled and took the laptop into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed next to Arthur, not even bothering to be gentle about it.
Arthur, as expected, twitched into immediate action and sprawled over him, pinning him down.
“I highly encourage this position,” Eames informed him, “and don’t let me talk you out of it, but I need to talk to you about Cobb and Somnacin experiments and yes, I realize that is the least seductive thing I could have said to you at this moment.”
Arthur blinked down at him for a bleary-eyed moment, then leaned fully over him to roll his die twice on the nightstand. Eames held his breath and thought of a terrible pickle-breathed politician he’d had to forge once, because otherwise he would think of Arthur, warm and sleepy on top of him, rubbing against him in all the very best places, and that would be no good.
Arthur moved off of him, sitting up in the bed and switching on the bedside lamp and pushing his tumbled hair off his head. It was still respecting the remnants of the gel, caught halfway between curly and straight, and Eames added another file to his internal folder of Arthur Looking Adorable. “You need to talk to me about what?” Arthur asked, his voice still rough with sleep. “And you had to wake me up in the middle of the night to do it?”
“Look, I emailed Yusuf after you went to bed because I didn’t understand how we’ve never heard about Somnacin being able to do this. And it’s not good.” Eames picked up the laptop he’d put by the side of the bed and showed Arthur.
Arthur read through the email chain carefully, then read it again. “So Dom was running experiments with Somnacin on Mal? That’s what you want me to believe?”
“That isn’t what Yusuf says. It’s just that Cobb keeps secrets and—”
“Fuck,” Arthur said, and opened a new email from Eames’s account.
“Um,” said Eames. “You’re logged in as me, so—”
But Arthur just emailed Sherlock with the subject line STOP ALL SOMNACIN EXPERIMENTS and sent it.
“You think he’s going to listen to you?”
“No,” Arthur said. “I don’t. Email John Watson and tell him the same thing.” Arthur pushed the laptop back over to Eames and then rolled himself over to the phone on the other side of the bed, picking it up and saying again, eloquently, “Fuck.”
“What now?” Eames asked, already navigating to John’s blog.
“Mycroft fucking broke the fucking phone again and when this is over, I’m putting a hit out on him.”
“If you put a hit out on him now, it would make our lives a lot easier,” Eames remarked, as Arthur rolled himself fully out of bed. He was dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and serious things were happening in their lives and Eames really did not have time to drool over Arthur, he really, really didn’t.
Arthur disappeared into the suite’s walk-in closet. Eames sent John a quick, terse email. Arthur emerged from the closet in a pair of jeans that hugged him in all the right places and a lavender pullover that looked impossibly soft. It was like quick-change magic, Eames thought, like Superman going into a phone booth to put on his costume.
Arthur walked into the bathroom and Eames eyed the rear view and said, “Jesus Christ, Arthur, do you even tailor your jeans?”
“Are you coming,” Arthur called through the door, “or are you just going to stay here obsessing over my clothing?”
Eames thought he would be totally okay with staying in the hotel and obsessing over Arthur’s clothing in blessed privacy, but that was not the sort of coming Arthur was asking about and Eames needed to remember he was a professional and do his job now, so he said, “Where are you going?”
“Baker Street.” Arthur came out of the bathroom, hair freshly put back into Arthur-approved stiffness. “I need to call Dom and I don’t have time to deal with whatever stupid thing Mycroft’s done because he thinks he can pretend to hold us prisoner here. Are you coming?”
“Unless you think I could do you more good here,” Eames said honestly, because they were at the point where this was Arthur’s show and Eames was going to help however Arthur said he could.
Arthur hesitated, then said, “No. Come.”
And that settled that.
***
Baker Street was clearly the sort of place that was used to middle-of-the-night visitors. Sherlock didn’t even blink an eye at their arrival, and John looked equally unsurprised, although he had to be roused from bed for the conversation.
Arthur looked at the chemistry equipment all over the kitchen and said, “You have to stop all work with the Somnacin.”
Sherlock frowned. “Why?”
“Because our chemist tells us that use of the Somnacin this way leads to unpleasant side effects.”
Sherlock lifted his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. “Unpleasant side effects?”
“Arthur’s being very delicate,” Eames said.
“What kind of side effects?” Sherlock demanded. “Moriarty seems to be fine.”
“Moriarty is the exact opposite of ‘fine,’” John said.
Arthur didn’t feel like getting into a fight over this. “I need to borrow a phone.”
“Fine,” said Sherlock, and handed his over without a second thought.
“For what?” asked John, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, because John was always going to be the one who thought they were untrustworthy criminals, thought Arthur.
“He needs to get more information on these vague side effects he’s worrying about,” Sherlock snapped. “Obviously.”
“Is there somewhere private I can make this call?” Arthur asked.
“Private?” echoed Eames, and arched an eyebrow at him.
Arthur gave him a quelling look that would have sent anyone else into stammers, but Eames was too fucking used to Arthur and just kept arching that eyebrow at him, and Arthur thought they had to start working together less.
“You can use my bedroom,” John offered. “It’s at the top of the stairs.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur primly and snatched the cell phone and walked upstairs.
Probably Eames would have been able to tell Arthur a thousand details about John based on John’s room, because that was how Eames was. Really, Eames and Sherlock would get along well. Eames wasn’t freakish with deductions, but he was really good at reading people in a way Arthur just wasn’t. Reading people wasn’t easy for Arthur, he worked very hard at it.
Which was why it stung him so much whenever people gave him those pointed looks about Dom. Arthur was well aware that his judgment when it came to people wasn’t as good as it could have been. After all, he’d gone and fallen in love with Eames, and if that didn’t prove poor judgment, Arthur didn’t know what did. He knew that, as a result, he was prickly and, if you were being unkind about it, paranoid, cool and distant and arm’s-length in dealings, because he just never knew about people.
But he had trusted Dom, above and beyond any other business associate, and that was the kind of old habit that it was hard for Arthur to break. Actually, truthfully, Dom wasn’t a business associate, had been a close friend for ages now, and he hated that people thought his loyalty to him made him a suspect lunatic.
Arthur got Dom’s voicemail, which didn’t surprise him because no competent dreamsharer would ever answer a call from an unknown number like that. So Arthur left a message. “It’s me. Call me at this number.”
And Dom called back immediately, and when Arthur answered he said, “Arthur? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
And this was why Arthur was loyal to Dom. Because Dom may have had a little bit of a nervous breakdown in the wake of what had happened with Mal, but who could blame him for that, and Arthur had always known—always—that if it had been Arthur in the middle of the nervous breakdown, Dom wouldn’t have left his side. Arthur could call Dom at any moment and have Dom ready to find a sitter for his kids so he could get to Arthur to offer help. He and Dom had been together through thick and thin, complementing each other well enough that they had neither one of them ever thought of finding other people to work with. And then, when it had all gone to hell, Arthur had stayed because he’d known that Dom would have done the same for him. Arthur had never been in love with Dom, the teasing dreamshare rumors notwithstanding, but he had always understood how Mal had been, because Dom was smart and charming and also, underneath it all, in the part you had to hide so often to survive, nice.
Arthur smiled despite himself. He leaned against the wall and looked out John Watson’s window and said, “I’m in London, and I’m fine.”
There was a moment of suspicious silence. Then Dom said, “‘Fine’ on what number on a scale from one to ten?”
Arthur laughed. “No, really, I’m fine. I’m on a job. With Eames.”
Dom had always had a high opinion of Eames’s professional capabilities, so Arthur could practically feel Dom’s relaxation all the way from L.A. “Oh. Well, tell him I said hello.”
“I will. I have a question.”
“I assumed, because you have never once in our years of acquaintance called me just to talk.”
Arthur ignored this and got right to the point. “Did you do experiments with Somnacin to make the dreamer more suggestible, more easily manipulated?”
“Somnacin is the easiest it can be. Don’t you think if we could get it easier, we would?”
The dodge made Arthur’s stomach swoop. “Not what I asked.”
“Arthur, there’s no way to get Somnacin more effective topside. Believe me, I’ve tried. Numerous chemists have tried. There’s no way.”
The careful choice of words lit up the alarm bells in Arthur’s brain. No way to get it more effective topside. But Sherlock had used his solution while they’d all been below. And so had Moriarty. “What about in a first level dream? Can you tweak it there?”
There was a long moment of silence.
Arthur bit out, “Dom, I need to know this information.”
“You can do it.” Dom sounded reluctant to admit it. “It can be done. Your chemist would need to be a genius and you run the risk of the first-level dream collapsing while you’re doing it. But it technically could be done.”
“So why don’t we do it?” Arthur demanded.
“Because it’s not good, Arthur.”
It sounded to Arthur like a vast understatement, and he said suddenly, immediately, “Is that what happened to Mal? Is that why she got so confused? Were you fucking with the Somnacin?”
Dom sighed heavily. Arthur had thought he would snap back viciously, but he just sounded sad and tired when he answered. “In the early days of dreamsharing, the experiments on Somnacin were commonplace. Everyone thought they could refine it, make it better. I wasn’t experimenting on Mal so much as the experimentation, on everyone, was just constant. Chemists were throwing things together like they were making brownies.”
Arthur let it go. They had long since passed the point of blame when it came to Mal, he thought. “So what happened with the first-dream version of Somnacin?”
“The drug was too potent. Its use ends with the dreamsharers going insane.”
“All of them?” Arthur clarified, thinking of Sarah Miller but also thinking of Moriarty. “Not just the person who’s head is being extracted from?”
“All of them,” Dom confirmed. “The whole team. Everyone on that first level dream who went down to the second level with the altered Somnacin. It was…terrible. The chemist who first had the idea, he was a genius. And it seemed okay to start with. And then, after prolonged, continued use, the members of his team started going insane, one by one. It ended with the chemist shooting all of them and then turning the gun on himself. Another genius chemist replicated his efforts, with the same end result. So people stopped messing with the Somnacin in that particular way, and life moved on.”
“I’ve never heard about any of this. Me or Eames.”
“It predates your involvement in dreamsharing. It was very early days. And chemists who kept insisting on trying to get it better usually ended up dead eventually, so it wasn’t like institutional knowledge was being passed on. You’d need a genius, though, to even be close to getting it to the compound you need. Who are you working with?”
“He’s new to dreamsharing,” Arthur said automatically, his mind ticking over everything.
“Well, tell him to stop what he’s doing. Do a standard dreamshare and extract the information. You and Eames are good enough to get it done, even with an idiot chemist.”
Arthur said, “I’m not the one trying to use it. It’s being used against me.”
“Then walk away from the job,” Dom said immediately.
“I can’t,” said Arthur. “I have to find some way to deal with this. Some…antidote or something.”
There was a long moment of silence. Arthur thought Dom was also thinking about the antidote problem, but instead Dom said, “Don’t do something stupid, Arthur.”
Arthur was confused because he almost never did stupid things and Dom knew that. “What?”
“Eames is in trouble, isn’t he? You don’t take jobs that you can’t walk away from, and you’re so clean you squeak. So if you’re trapped by some kind of blackmail situation, it’s Eames who’s trapped, not you.”
“We’re not trapped,” Arthur protested futilely, “we’re—”
“So I’m telling you not to do some stupid, self-sacrificing act because of the fact that you’re hopelessly in love with Eames.”
Which rendered Arthur absolutely, utterly silent.
“Do you hear me?” Dom demanded. “I’d tell him afterward that you did it all for him, and then he’d feel incredibly guilty for the rest of his life.”
Arthur stammered, “I’m not— I didn’t—”
“Arthur, really.” Dom’s voice was impatient and exasperated. “You’ve been in love with him since Rio. I thought maybe it was just some kind of dazzled crush, but no, trust you to be as steadfast in who you choose to fall in love with as you are with everything else, and I’m offended that you really seemed to think I wouldn’t notice.”
Arthur felt hot with humiliation, which was not exactly a feeling he was accustomed to these days. “Who else knows?” he asked, horrified at this revelation, feeling his entire carefully constructed world tumbling down around him.
“No one,” Dom said. “If people knew, they’d be using him against you constantly. Which is obviously why you keep it a secret, but I don’t know why you kept it a secret from me.” Dom sounded petulant.
“I…” said Arthur helplessly. Because Arthur knew everything about Dom, had been privy to every single breakdown of his marriage, and had never once shared with him that he was in love with Eames. He had told Mal, once, drunkenly, not really coming right out and saying it but beating around the bush, and he knew she had understood and apparently she’d kept the secret. Arthur had one of those moments where he missed her so much it hurt. He said, “It’s so stupid. Everyone falls in love with Eames.” It was why he’d told Mal and only Mal. Mal wouldn’t pity him. Mal would ooh and aah over the additional love in the world because Mal was French. Mal wouldn’t consider it unrequited, she’d consider it slow-moving. Mal and her firm belief in happy endings, and look how that had turned out.
And Dom laughed. Arthur’s most precious secret, and Dom laughed. “Oh, Arthur, you think that because you’re in love with him, and when you’re in love with someone you think everyone must be, you can’t imagine how everyone isn’t. But trust me: everyone is not in love with Eames. I know of seventeen large bounties on his head just thinking back over it now. I’m sure I could recall a few dozen more if I really thought about it.”
Great. Dom had told him his dreamshare was a disaster and there was nothing he could do about it, pulled out of him the fact that he was in love with Eames, and now was running over the likelihood that one of Eames’s stupid, fucking slip-ups would eventually catch up with him and kill him. Like Arthur didn’t spend enough of his life worrying about that, like Arthur hadn’t personally taken care of a couple of the threats just to improve Eames’s odds.
“Now,” Dom continued, as if all this had not just happened, “promise me you won’t do anything to sacrifice yourself to save Eames. You’re better with Eames than you are without him, and you know it. Stick with him, get the job done, come out for a visit. Promise me, Arthur.”
Arthur looked bleakly out John’s bedroom window at the London street below and said, “Yeah. I promise.”
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 21
Arthur’s notebook was full to the brim with chemical equations, and he was taxing his chemistry knowledge badly, and Sherlock kept snapping at him for not reaching conclusions quickly enough, but really the only conclusion Arthur could reach was that a few tweaks of the Somnacin compound while in a dream state would result in a much more potent drug that would manipulate dreamers into spilling secrets with ease. He didn’t understand how no one had ever stumbled upon this before. Granted, Sherlock was a chemical genius, but not everyone in dreamsharing was a slouch.
It was dark by the time Arthur became aware that someone’s thumb was pressing behind his ear, a deep, thorough caress that made him have to bite back a groan because it was soothing the headache tense around Arthur’s scalp. Arthur actually reflexively worked the jaw he was clenching, and Eames’s index finger—because it had to be Eames—pressed at the joint of his jaw and said, “Are you coming back to the land of the living now?”
“What are you doing?” Arthur asked, by which he intended to mean Stop what you’re doing, but instead he tipped his head forward so that Eames could shift and splay his hand along the back of Arthur’s head, combing through hair that Arthur knew had probably traitorously started to cowlick along his neck.
“Trying to get your attention because you and Sherlock have been so mutually caught up in each other that, frankly, I’m jealous.”
Arthur looked past his notebook for what felt like the first time in hours and said, in surprise, “You brought me coffee,” because there was a to-go cup sitting within arm’s reach. He didn’t think he’d really expected Eames to fulfill his request.
“I did. And you drank it. And I’ll have you know it was mostly sugar and cream and chocolate and not at all coffee and you loved every sip.”
“I don’t even remember drinking it; how do you know I enjoyed it?”
“I could tell.” Eames’s fingers were still kneading along the back of Arthur’s neck. “I am very good at recognizing enjoyment on the faces of others. You should see how I excel at this in horizontal situations involving low lighting.”
Arthur rolled his eyes and listened to the negotiation occurring in the kitchen, where Sherlock and John appeared to be debating the necessity of eating dinner.
“John suggested we order something,” said Eames. “Sherlock had a strop over that. They moved the argument to the kitchen. I decided that I was going to break you out of your workaholic fit to tell you that I’m knackered and we should go back to the hotel room and see if they’ve replenished our minibar.”
“No more trick drinking games,” Arthur said, pressing his fingers against his eyes. “I still haven’t gotten rid of that headache.”
“The drinking game was your idea,” said Eames.
Because Eames was right, Arthur decided to ignore him. “And why are you knackered? What did you do all day?”
“I would have stayed and helped,” Eames pointed out, “but I was summarily dismissed.”
Arthur felt a twinge of guilt about that. But having Eames in the room for a discussion about how having Eames die in front of him was the worst thing Sherlock could think of to do to him had not been an option, so it wasn’t like he could really apologize for it. “I know. So what did you do all day instead?”
“I had pints with John, and we talked about unrequited loves and Hobbesian theories of morals and the dichotomy of real life and dream life.”
“Oh, so just a typical day for you,” Arthur said drily.
Eames sounded amused when he said, “Exactly. Anyway, I want to know what’s got you frowning so hard, but I’d prefer a breakdown somewhere that doesn’t involve non-dreamsharers who think they know more than they do.”
“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, on a sigh, because he was tired and all he wanted to do was sprawl on one of the couches while Eames sprawled on the other and they could talk this nonsensical situation through together. “Let’s go home,” he said, and didn’t analyze when he’d started to consider the hotel suite prison home.
***
They picked up Chinese on the way back to the hotel and sat on the floor around the coffee table—because the dining room table was completely colonized by this point and the coffee table had been easier to clear—and Arthur went over what he’d learned from Sherlock.
“But Somnacin can’t do that,” Eames said, stealing some of Arthur’s beef and broccoli.
“I know. I kept telling him that.”
“If Somnacin could do that, we’d do that all the time. Hell, we’d be out of jobs, really, if it was that easy.”
“I know. I told him all of this, and he insists that it’s true, that you can shift the compound to make the dreamer more suggestible, more manipulable.”
“I mean, I know you can make modifications to it, make it better. Yusuf was very good at that sort of stuff. There was usually some kind of drawback, a wicked hangover or something like that, but you could usually make it a little bit more potent. But you and I, we are not easy heads to crack, ever, and he walked right in, on his first try, and turned us both upside-down.”
Arthur toyed with his beef and broccoli, turning it over in his chopsticks without interest. “Which means he’s got to be telling the truth. I can’t find a motivation for him to lie, and I know what he did, so it’s got to be true.”
“I’ve never even heard rumors about this sort of thing, though. How can that be?”
Arthur shrugged and leaned back against the couch behind him and studied the rest of his food critically. He looked exhausted, Eames thought. He hadn’t looked good all day—Eames tried to think if Arthur had really drunk that much more than him—and whatever Sherlock had done to him in the dream hadn’t helped. Sherlock had been deliberately harder on Arthur than Eames, and just that little push more had made a noticeable difference in their psyches. Eames could imagine how easily that could be tipped into the state Sarah Miller had fallen into.
And Eames was over his anger at being sent off on a coffee run like an errand boy. Whatever Arthur and Sherlock had discussed all day, it had clearly involved whatever had happened in Arthur’s dream, and knowing what had happened in his own dream, Eames knew why Arthur had felt the need for some privacy in that discussion.
So Eames just said, “That’s enough for today, I think. You’re exhausted.”
Arthur shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. And I drank you under the table last night, so it’s okay that you’re a broken, hungover mess today.”
“You didn’t drink me under the table.”
“I did.”
“That’s because you cheated at Never Have I Ever,” Arthur accused petulantly.
“Arthur, darling, have you met me? I cheat for a living.”
Arthur leaned his head back against the couch and sighed up toward the ceiling. And then he said, “We have to figure out the antidote to what Moriarty’s doing. We have to figure out a way to fight him off.”
“Is Sherlock working on that?”
“Trying to, anyway.”
“Then there’s nothing more we can do tonight. Go to bed.”
“I had the bed last night.”
“I’m not tired,” Eames said. “Because I was the one drinking you under the table, not the one being drunk under the table.”
“Cheater,” Arthur grumbled at him, getting to his feet.
“Aw, darling, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever called me,” said Eames and grinned when Arthur just glowered on his way to the bedroom.
Eames sat and listened to the sounds of Arthur getting ready for bed. He turned on his Korean drama at a low volume, in case Arthur decided to stop back in before curling up in bed. But Arthur didn’t. After twenty minutes of silence from the bedroom, Eames got up to check. Arthur was a lump underneath the blankets, and when Eames stood over him he could hear that his breathing was deep and even. Satisfied, Eames went back out into the living room and stole Arthur’s laptop and hacked into Arthur’s email. Well, tried to hack into Arthur’s email. Bloody paranoid Arthur had more protections built around his email than Eames felt like dealing with, frankly.
So instead he gave up on the hacking and just went into his own email and sent Yusuf a quick note. Working a job with Arthur–I think he’s told you? Chemist is telling us that we can make a few tweaks to the Somnacin in dream-state to make the subject completely pliable and defenceless. Seems too good to be true to me and Arthur. Thoughts? Have you been holding out on me all these years? –E.
Eames played a couple of games of Solitaire before he got a reply. You’re as bad as Arthur with these all-business emails. Long time, no see, nice catching up with you. Somnacin is basically as potent as we can make it without serious side effects to both the dreamer and the dreamsharers. Trust me, those experiments have been done and the results were ugly and you don’t want any part of them. I don’t know who your chemist is but tell him to stop being an idiot and back off. I’m surprised A doesn’t know how dangerous that whole thing can be, his boyfriend was involved in it years and years and years ago (this predates all of us). Ahlam is doing well, thanks so much for asking. I’ll be sure to send you a cigar when the baby is born.
Eames read the email over twice, especially the part about Arthur’s boyfriend being involved. Then he wrote back. How dangerous? Like, stop the chemist immediately dangerous? Why haven’t I heard anything about Cobb and dangerous Somnacin experiments?
The reply was instantaneous. YES, STOP THE CHEMIST IMMEDIATELY. And did you ever hear anything about Cobb inceptioning his own wife before that whole disaster of a job? No. You didn’t. Cobb plays closer to the chest than Arthur, why do you think they’re friends?
Eames tapped his finger on the edge of the laptop, considering, then wrote back. Thanks for the info. Don’t bother to send the cigar, I’ll just show up on your doorstep one day when you least expect it and be a very bad influence on your child while charming your wife thoroughly.
Yusuf wrote one last email back. Fuck off.
Eames smiled and took the laptop into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed next to Arthur, not even bothering to be gentle about it.
Arthur, as expected, twitched into immediate action and sprawled over him, pinning him down.
“I highly encourage this position,” Eames informed him, “and don’t let me talk you out of it, but I need to talk to you about Cobb and Somnacin experiments and yes, I realize that is the least seductive thing I could have said to you at this moment.”
Arthur blinked down at him for a bleary-eyed moment, then leaned fully over him to roll his die twice on the nightstand. Eames held his breath and thought of a terrible pickle-breathed politician he’d had to forge once, because otherwise he would think of Arthur, warm and sleepy on top of him, rubbing against him in all the very best places, and that would be no good.
Arthur moved off of him, sitting up in the bed and switching on the bedside lamp and pushing his tumbled hair off his head. It was still respecting the remnants of the gel, caught halfway between curly and straight, and Eames added another file to his internal folder of Arthur Looking Adorable. “You need to talk to me about what?” Arthur asked, his voice still rough with sleep. “And you had to wake me up in the middle of the night to do it?”
“Look, I emailed Yusuf after you went to bed because I didn’t understand how we’ve never heard about Somnacin being able to do this. And it’s not good.” Eames picked up the laptop he’d put by the side of the bed and showed Arthur.
Arthur read through the email chain carefully, then read it again. “So Dom was running experiments with Somnacin on Mal? That’s what you want me to believe?”
“That isn’t what Yusuf says. It’s just that Cobb keeps secrets and—”
“Fuck,” Arthur said, and opened a new email from Eames’s account.
“Um,” said Eames. “You’re logged in as me, so—”
But Arthur just emailed Sherlock with the subject line STOP ALL SOMNACIN EXPERIMENTS and sent it.
“You think he’s going to listen to you?”
“No,” Arthur said. “I don’t. Email John Watson and tell him the same thing.” Arthur pushed the laptop back over to Eames and then rolled himself over to the phone on the other side of the bed, picking it up and saying again, eloquently, “Fuck.”
“What now?” Eames asked, already navigating to John’s blog.
“Mycroft fucking broke the fucking phone again and when this is over, I’m putting a hit out on him.”
“If you put a hit out on him now, it would make our lives a lot easier,” Eames remarked, as Arthur rolled himself fully out of bed. He was dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and serious things were happening in their lives and Eames really did not have time to drool over Arthur, he really, really didn’t.
Arthur disappeared into the suite’s walk-in closet. Eames sent John a quick, terse email. Arthur emerged from the closet in a pair of jeans that hugged him in all the right places and a lavender pullover that looked impossibly soft. It was like quick-change magic, Eames thought, like Superman going into a phone booth to put on his costume.
Arthur walked into the bathroom and Eames eyed the rear view and said, “Jesus Christ, Arthur, do you even tailor your jeans?”
“Are you coming,” Arthur called through the door, “or are you just going to stay here obsessing over my clothing?”
Eames thought he would be totally okay with staying in the hotel and obsessing over Arthur’s clothing in blessed privacy, but that was not the sort of coming Arthur was asking about and Eames needed to remember he was a professional and do his job now, so he said, “Where are you going?”
“Baker Street.” Arthur came out of the bathroom, hair freshly put back into Arthur-approved stiffness. “I need to call Dom and I don’t have time to deal with whatever stupid thing Mycroft’s done because he thinks he can pretend to hold us prisoner here. Are you coming?”
“Unless you think I could do you more good here,” Eames said honestly, because they were at the point where this was Arthur’s show and Eames was going to help however Arthur said he could.
Arthur hesitated, then said, “No. Come.”
And that settled that.
***
Baker Street was clearly the sort of place that was used to middle-of-the-night visitors. Sherlock didn’t even blink an eye at their arrival, and John looked equally unsurprised, although he had to be roused from bed for the conversation.
Arthur looked at the chemistry equipment all over the kitchen and said, “You have to stop all work with the Somnacin.”
Sherlock frowned. “Why?”
“Because our chemist tells us that use of the Somnacin this way leads to unpleasant side effects.”
Sherlock lifted his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. “Unpleasant side effects?”
“Arthur’s being very delicate,” Eames said.
“What kind of side effects?” Sherlock demanded. “Moriarty seems to be fine.”
“Moriarty is the exact opposite of ‘fine,’” John said.
Arthur didn’t feel like getting into a fight over this. “I need to borrow a phone.”
“Fine,” said Sherlock, and handed his over without a second thought.
“For what?” asked John, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, because John was always going to be the one who thought they were untrustworthy criminals, thought Arthur.
“He needs to get more information on these vague side effects he’s worrying about,” Sherlock snapped. “Obviously.”
“Is there somewhere private I can make this call?” Arthur asked.
“Private?” echoed Eames, and arched an eyebrow at him.
Arthur gave him a quelling look that would have sent anyone else into stammers, but Eames was too fucking used to Arthur and just kept arching that eyebrow at him, and Arthur thought they had to start working together less.
“You can use my bedroom,” John offered. “It’s at the top of the stairs.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur primly and snatched the cell phone and walked upstairs.
Probably Eames would have been able to tell Arthur a thousand details about John based on John’s room, because that was how Eames was. Really, Eames and Sherlock would get along well. Eames wasn’t freakish with deductions, but he was really good at reading people in a way Arthur just wasn’t. Reading people wasn’t easy for Arthur, he worked very hard at it.
Which was why it stung him so much whenever people gave him those pointed looks about Dom. Arthur was well aware that his judgment when it came to people wasn’t as good as it could have been. After all, he’d gone and fallen in love with Eames, and if that didn’t prove poor judgment, Arthur didn’t know what did. He knew that, as a result, he was prickly and, if you were being unkind about it, paranoid, cool and distant and arm’s-length in dealings, because he just never knew about people.
But he had trusted Dom, above and beyond any other business associate, and that was the kind of old habit that it was hard for Arthur to break. Actually, truthfully, Dom wasn’t a business associate, had been a close friend for ages now, and he hated that people thought his loyalty to him made him a suspect lunatic.
Arthur got Dom’s voicemail, which didn’t surprise him because no competent dreamsharer would ever answer a call from an unknown number like that. So Arthur left a message. “It’s me. Call me at this number.”
And Dom called back immediately, and when Arthur answered he said, “Arthur? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
And this was why Arthur was loyal to Dom. Because Dom may have had a little bit of a nervous breakdown in the wake of what had happened with Mal, but who could blame him for that, and Arthur had always known—always—that if it had been Arthur in the middle of the nervous breakdown, Dom wouldn’t have left his side. Arthur could call Dom at any moment and have Dom ready to find a sitter for his kids so he could get to Arthur to offer help. He and Dom had been together through thick and thin, complementing each other well enough that they had neither one of them ever thought of finding other people to work with. And then, when it had all gone to hell, Arthur had stayed because he’d known that Dom would have done the same for him. Arthur had never been in love with Dom, the teasing dreamshare rumors notwithstanding, but he had always understood how Mal had been, because Dom was smart and charming and also, underneath it all, in the part you had to hide so often to survive, nice.
Arthur smiled despite himself. He leaned against the wall and looked out John Watson’s window and said, “I’m in London, and I’m fine.”
There was a moment of suspicious silence. Then Dom said, “‘Fine’ on what number on a scale from one to ten?”
Arthur laughed. “No, really, I’m fine. I’m on a job. With Eames.”
Dom had always had a high opinion of Eames’s professional capabilities, so Arthur could practically feel Dom’s relaxation all the way from L.A. “Oh. Well, tell him I said hello.”
“I will. I have a question.”
“I assumed, because you have never once in our years of acquaintance called me just to talk.”
Arthur ignored this and got right to the point. “Did you do experiments with Somnacin to make the dreamer more suggestible, more easily manipulated?”
“Somnacin is the easiest it can be. Don’t you think if we could get it easier, we would?”
The dodge made Arthur’s stomach swoop. “Not what I asked.”
“Arthur, there’s no way to get Somnacin more effective topside. Believe me, I’ve tried. Numerous chemists have tried. There’s no way.”
The careful choice of words lit up the alarm bells in Arthur’s brain. No way to get it more effective topside. But Sherlock had used his solution while they’d all been below. And so had Moriarty. “What about in a first level dream? Can you tweak it there?”
There was a long moment of silence.
Arthur bit out, “Dom, I need to know this information.”
“You can do it.” Dom sounded reluctant to admit it. “It can be done. Your chemist would need to be a genius and you run the risk of the first-level dream collapsing while you’re doing it. But it technically could be done.”
“So why don’t we do it?” Arthur demanded.
“Because it’s not good, Arthur.”
It sounded to Arthur like a vast understatement, and he said suddenly, immediately, “Is that what happened to Mal? Is that why she got so confused? Were you fucking with the Somnacin?”
Dom sighed heavily. Arthur had thought he would snap back viciously, but he just sounded sad and tired when he answered. “In the early days of dreamsharing, the experiments on Somnacin were commonplace. Everyone thought they could refine it, make it better. I wasn’t experimenting on Mal so much as the experimentation, on everyone, was just constant. Chemists were throwing things together like they were making brownies.”
Arthur let it go. They had long since passed the point of blame when it came to Mal, he thought. “So what happened with the first-dream version of Somnacin?”
“The drug was too potent. Its use ends with the dreamsharers going insane.”
“All of them?” Arthur clarified, thinking of Sarah Miller but also thinking of Moriarty. “Not just the person who’s head is being extracted from?”
“All of them,” Dom confirmed. “The whole team. Everyone on that first level dream who went down to the second level with the altered Somnacin. It was…terrible. The chemist who first had the idea, he was a genius. And it seemed okay to start with. And then, after prolonged, continued use, the members of his team started going insane, one by one. It ended with the chemist shooting all of them and then turning the gun on himself. Another genius chemist replicated his efforts, with the same end result. So people stopped messing with the Somnacin in that particular way, and life moved on.”
“I’ve never heard about any of this. Me or Eames.”
“It predates your involvement in dreamsharing. It was very early days. And chemists who kept insisting on trying to get it better usually ended up dead eventually, so it wasn’t like institutional knowledge was being passed on. You’d need a genius, though, to even be close to getting it to the compound you need. Who are you working with?”
“He’s new to dreamsharing,” Arthur said automatically, his mind ticking over everything.
“Well, tell him to stop what he’s doing. Do a standard dreamshare and extract the information. You and Eames are good enough to get it done, even with an idiot chemist.”
Arthur said, “I’m not the one trying to use it. It’s being used against me.”
“Then walk away from the job,” Dom said immediately.
“I can’t,” said Arthur. “I have to find some way to deal with this. Some…antidote or something.”
There was a long moment of silence. Arthur thought Dom was also thinking about the antidote problem, but instead Dom said, “Don’t do something stupid, Arthur.”
Arthur was confused because he almost never did stupid things and Dom knew that. “What?”
“Eames is in trouble, isn’t he? You don’t take jobs that you can’t walk away from, and you’re so clean you squeak. So if you’re trapped by some kind of blackmail situation, it’s Eames who’s trapped, not you.”
“We’re not trapped,” Arthur protested futilely, “we’re—”
“So I’m telling you not to do some stupid, self-sacrificing act because of the fact that you’re hopelessly in love with Eames.”
Which rendered Arthur absolutely, utterly silent.
“Do you hear me?” Dom demanded. “I’d tell him afterward that you did it all for him, and then he’d feel incredibly guilty for the rest of his life.”
Arthur stammered, “I’m not— I didn’t—”
“Arthur, really.” Dom’s voice was impatient and exasperated. “You’ve been in love with him since Rio. I thought maybe it was just some kind of dazzled crush, but no, trust you to be as steadfast in who you choose to fall in love with as you are with everything else, and I’m offended that you really seemed to think I wouldn’t notice.”
Arthur felt hot with humiliation, which was not exactly a feeling he was accustomed to these days. “Who else knows?” he asked, horrified at this revelation, feeling his entire carefully constructed world tumbling down around him.
“No one,” Dom said. “If people knew, they’d be using him against you constantly. Which is obviously why you keep it a secret, but I don’t know why you kept it a secret from me.” Dom sounded petulant.
“I…” said Arthur helplessly. Because Arthur knew everything about Dom, had been privy to every single breakdown of his marriage, and had never once shared with him that he was in love with Eames. He had told Mal, once, drunkenly, not really coming right out and saying it but beating around the bush, and he knew she had understood and apparently she’d kept the secret. Arthur had one of those moments where he missed her so much it hurt. He said, “It’s so stupid. Everyone falls in love with Eames.” It was why he’d told Mal and only Mal. Mal wouldn’t pity him. Mal would ooh and aah over the additional love in the world because Mal was French. Mal wouldn’t consider it unrequited, she’d consider it slow-moving. Mal and her firm belief in happy endings, and look how that had turned out.
And Dom laughed. Arthur’s most precious secret, and Dom laughed. “Oh, Arthur, you think that because you’re in love with him, and when you’re in love with someone you think everyone must be, you can’t imagine how everyone isn’t. But trust me: everyone is not in love with Eames. I know of seventeen large bounties on his head just thinking back over it now. I’m sure I could recall a few dozen more if I really thought about it.”
Great. Dom had told him his dreamshare was a disaster and there was nothing he could do about it, pulled out of him the fact that he was in love with Eames, and now was running over the likelihood that one of Eames’s stupid, fucking slip-ups would eventually catch up with him and kill him. Like Arthur didn’t spend enough of his life worrying about that, like Arthur hadn’t personally taken care of a couple of the threats just to improve Eames’s odds.
“Now,” Dom continued, as if all this had not just happened, “promise me you won’t do anything to sacrifice yourself to save Eames. You’re better with Eames than you are without him, and you know it. Stick with him, get the job done, come out for a visit. Promise me, Arthur.”
Arthur looked bleakly out John’s bedroom window at the London street below and said, “Yeah. I promise.”
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Date: 2015-02-05 04:45 am (UTC)