Bright Spark
Part one in the series ONE SHOCK FOR YES (TWO FOR NEVER) or electricity-verse.
Author: BadActs
Word count: ~4500
Rating: Age 16+/M
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Disclaimer: I don't own Nolan's characters.
Warnings: Slash, non-explicit sex, swearing, an appalling lack of knowledge concerning spies.
Summary: Eames is a spy. Arthur is an arsehole.
A/N: This series kind of took over my brain while I was on holiday. There's not much to say for it beyond that, to be honest. Except EAMES IS MUCH EASIER TO WRITE THAN ARTHUR. JUST SAYING. Also, italics on lj are a freaking pain in my arse.
Despite the paycheque - impressive, because Eames is good at his job, thank you very much - working in Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not really at all like a James Bond movie.
Yes, Eames does occasionally wear a tux and get into car chases that culminate in fiery explosions as his tails miss a corner or collide with oncoming traffic. However, currently he is most likely to be found in East London, living in a crumbling, mouldy townhouse while working as a mechanic. His neighbours think that he’s some kind of minor crim running a chop shop, but they seem to be too frightened by his tattoos and thug-short hair to mention it.
It’s kind of like the life he imagined for himself while stuck in his posh public school, except with more leaks and less sex.
What can he say - it’s hard to maintain a relationship when he lies like a rug to anyone he gets in his bed, and casual sex isn’t much to his taste. Also, his inability to buy a bed frame or a decent couch isn’t much of a drawcard. Fucking bigwigs apparently think that poverty is a neat cover while he’s been recovering from his last mission, which ended up with him taking a bullet.
These are the reasons why Eames is sitting at a café in the trendy part of London, knocking knees with his superior. Agent Willard is the kind of man who puts on the accent that Eames came about naturally. Not that he’s judging, he’s just saying. Also, he’s the kind of repressed arsehole who attempts to look repelled by Eames while secretly staring at his mouth whenever he talks. Willard has a wife and two gorgeous children - Eames has seen the picture in his office.
So if Eames leans back and arches his back a little, raising an arm to wrap his hand around the back of his neck, making his bicep bulge, well - then it is obviously his overdeveloped sense of the dramatic that prompts him to do so, not a will to revenge the fact that he’s been sleeping on a mattress on the floor lately. Willard’s eyes nearly cross with a combination of equally disturbing emotions.
So, okay, Eames hates his superior agent.
Willard shoves a dossier into Eames’s hands and waits in silence for him to flick through the range of intrusive notes and stalkerish photographs. Apparently, his new mark is a man called Peter Miles. Eames takes the photo of the man, long-distance of course, and examines it. The older man isn’t armed, that much is obvious from the way his clothes sit. Also, he doesn’t look like someone who has been trained in physical combat - built heavily but not particularly muscular, tall but not really powerful. He is walking with an exquisitely beautiful woman, dark-haired and perhaps a little older than Eames.
“So, what have Peter Miles and his lovely counterpart done to incur the deadly suspicion of British Intelligence?” Eames asks in his current accent, a thicker, baser drawl.
“The girl is his daughter, Mallorie Miles, currently residing in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, aged twenty-eight,” Willard rattles off, and Eames wants to smack him for calling her a girl. “She’s not a concern. Miles, however, is an Architect.”
Eames actually stiffens, the first real tic he has made in who knows how long. “You know I don’t do that shit anymore.” Eames’s brief stint with the military and his even briefer stint with the SAS would have been a lot longer if not for experimental dream-sharing.
Willard gives him a long look that is meant to be a warning but comes off as bloody cautious instead. Eames doesn’t blame him. He’d loved the SAS for the most part - been good at it, too - but rather hates what dream-sharing made him. He didn’t leave the division quietly when he came here. It was cruel, cruel and sadistic and dangerous, what they were doing, and he’d already lost too many friends and comrades to the side effects of lucid dreaming.
Eames is extremely valuable in the area, though. He knows it, and knows just as well that it’s the main reason he got this job so easily. However, he had hoped that since then his other numerous skills had made him seem more desirable in other areas. Apparently the high-ups have longer memories than he gave them credit for.
“You are the only person with the right…accreditations for this particular job,” Willard states, too careful. Eames wonders if the bastard thinks that appealing to his ego will make him go quietly, when in fact all Willard has to do is order him. Apparently he has a rep for not following orders.
Well, it never was a particular strong point for him in the later days of his employment with the SAS, but he’s never defied a single one since transferring.
Eames sighs, barely resists rolling his eyes. “Tell me more.”
Willard actually scrambles to do just that. Eames wonders how big this job really is. “Miles works as a professor at a Parisian university now. But he was there in the very beginning of the British dream-share program as an architectural specialist. He almost certainly trained the architects you worked with.”
“Remind me to thank him,” Eames mutters, remembering the morons who’d failed to explain the technicalities of building dreams, the scientists who had nearly caused them to fall into Limbo before they realised just how easy it was to do so. He also remembers the people who did fall, and yeah, he’s still furiously, furiously angry at the mere thought of it.
Willard clears his throat. “Now he’s apparently working with a similar team in the American military.”
And then Eames gets it, why this is such a big deal. It makes him laugh, a brash, bright, bitter sound.
“I’m sorry, were you wanting me to spy on Miles or the Americans?”
“We want to know what Miles is teaching them. But…any information on their version of the project would be valuable to us,” Willard replies.
“So I’m the honey-trap,” Eames says, voice gone a little absent as he scans the data. “What’s my in? I mean, I can’t exactly see that the US Army allows just anyone in to watch practise. Think of the fuss they’d make about psychological damage if that got into the news.”
“Lots of people would kill to work with someone like you. Sell yourself as a soldier turned independent academic, looking for something a little more refined than our own project. Spin it, I’m sure you can manage,” Willard says, passing over a folded piece of paper. It’s booking information for a return flight to LA, under the name Maximillion Eames. It’s actually his real name, unlike what he’s registered as in the agency. Anyone who tracks him by that - and oh God, who actually calls their child Maximillion - will find his schooling and service records and not much else.
“It wouldn’t be hard to find something more refined, I could point out,” Eames says, standing. He doesn’t shake the tosser’s hand: he has a plane to catch, and people to fool.
XXX
Eames ends up kind of wishing that he was in the sort of career where he could con the American military for cash, because it is ridiculously easy. They swallow the line about him wanting to broaden his horizons without a whisper, and so the guards at the front of their super-secret compound wave him through after only a cursory check of his photo ID.
If the familiar things - spit-polished boots, neat uniforms, that crisp, easy way of walking - make his stomach churn, then no one is the wiser. His persona for the moment is business-cool and collected, with a straight face that poker champions would envy.
The dream research facility is home to their main team. Apparently dream tech is still used for training in the wider military community, as it was in Eames’s time, but this is something altogether different. Eames doesn’t even need to go under to see that.
The largest clues are in the team itself. Miles is both working as the architect for their training runs and acting as the dreamer, doing his own research. The Americans aren’t from any one branch of the military; the charming arsehole of an extractor they’ve got is from the air force, while their architect is from the Navy. Their forger, who Eames suspects is completely useless, is from the FBI of all places.
Most interesting of all is the new position they’ve formed, the point man. The guy is a Marine who still wears his dark hair regulation length despite his new position. His fatigues are well used enough to indicate several overseas tours. The others call him Sparkie, but he is introduced to Eames as Captain Arthur Bright.
They take him under with them on the first day. God, Eames could steal every bloody secret they have and they’d be none the wiser, because they don’t really understand the things he can do in dreams. They don’t even ask about what he can do in dreams, the idiots.
They don’t make him the subject, which is lucky for them. The architect dreams and the point man is the dreamer in a world full of mirrors. This is a training run for their forger, mainly, which makes Eames smirk a little. Better and better.
It’s a city, the dreamscape, and the architect isn’t half-bad for all he has a bit too much of a preoccupation with straight lines. It’s probably an army thing, Eames thinks: the SAS architects had had the same problem in his time. When he opens his eyes, Eames is surrounded by reflections of himself. An elevator, apparently. It’s very apt.
His reflections start to flicker in and out without him even paying attention. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Miles’ greying hair, the mousy woman from the house next door to his London flat, the man who worked the checkout last time he bought groceries. He focuses, blinking into the skin of his childhood nanny. She’d had cornflower eyes and soft brown hair and had screamed like a harpy whenever he dirtied his expensive clothing. God, he’d hated her.
He steps out of the elevator into a hotel and into the street, joining a crowd of projections. Bright’s are all sharp-eyed and dangerous, with the hovering threat of guards hiding just out of sight. It’s not the first time Eames has been glad that he can disguise himself like this.
Miles is walking ahead of him with White, the forger. He trails them discreetly, and he certainly isn’t the only one: they haven’t even done anything and the projections are already stirred up. Bright, the architect and the extractor, Nelson, join them from the other direction.
Eames sits on a park bench and dreams up a book to read. Wuthering Heights. He’s not sure why that choice seems as appropriate as it does.
“We’ve lost the tourist,” Bright points out, eyes everywhere at once despite the fact that he’s the only one with nothing to fear. Miles frowns thoughtfully.
“You don’t think he has already been ejected from the dream, do you?” he asks, brow furrowing.
One corner of Bright’s mouth lifts humourlessly. “I’m sure we would know about it if he had been. White?”
“Okay,” White says, and swallows. His face is pale and set and yeah, Eames can tell for sure now that the man is useless and knows it as well. White examines his reflection in the mirrored glass of the nearest building and changes into an old man, eighty if he is a day, skin paper-fine and veined.
Every projection in the square turns to look at him, all at once.
The others back off as White loses his forge, the image shattering. Then the projections swarm like sharks smelling blood in the water, and Eames can’t see the other man any more. It doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for them to disperse, leaving a mangled body behind.
Jesus. Eames wonders if Bright is some kind of psychopath. He’s never met anyone so strongly militarised, short of the extremely paranoid who come by their mental defences naturally. Not that getting inside Eames’s head is any kind of cake-walk, but it’s completely different from this basic brutality.
The others look a little shaken, but they’ve clearly seen this happen many times before. Nelson snorts and shakes his head. Miles’ mouth is a hard twist. The architect, Smith, looks irate. Bright seems bored.
“This is a waste of our time. White is insane if he thinks this is at all useful to us,” Smith says, throwing up his hands. Eames presumes he’s talking about forgery. Well, in the architect’s shoes he might think the same thing. “How much time on the clock, Sparkie?”
“Forty-seven minutes,” Bright deadpans. “Anyone for a game of cards?”
Eames puts down his book on the bench beside him, wincing a little when the spine gets damaged. “You could always shoot yourselves awake.”
The way the dreamers turn to look at him is oddly, unnervingly reminiscent of the way projections act when they sense something is wrong. However, the actual projections don’t even spare him a glance.
Bright blinks, his cool apparently shaken as he tries to discern whether one of his projections is getting chatty. Eames doubts that they ever do, given the taciturn nature of the man.
“I’m not from your head,” Eames says, slipping into another skin: a man in his fifties, a bit of a silver fox, hands clasped loosely in his lap. A few projections look to him, but it’s nothing serious.
“Mister Eames?” Miles guesses, and Eames offers him up the kind of smile his forge would use. Too many teeth, bright white and perfect, a veneer of an expression. The older architect blinks too quickly, eyes brightly unnerved.
“Indeed,” Eames agrees, standing and walking over to them with a quick businessman’s stride. “That seemed a little cruel and unusual, don’t you think? You could have at least taken him into a mind a little less militarised than this.”
“There’s no point in making it easy,” Bright says with a one-shouldered shrug.
Eames bets that that statement is his motto in life.
“You should probably fire him,” Eames suggests. “He’s no natural at this gig, and the more he works at it, the more likely it is that he’ll lose himself. Plus, you know, all the mental scarring that comes from being repeatedly torn apart by the subconsciousnesses of psychopaths he is meant to be able to trust implicitly.”
“Are you referring to me?” Bright asks, and he sounds rather amused about it.
“So this is what White is aiming for?” Smith asks, and he sounds suitably impressed. Eames approves of this wholeheartedly. “You make it look simple.”
“It’s something of an art, rather than a science,” Eames lies, because actually half of it is anatomy and physics, even if the other half is simply pulling it off. “It’s harder than it appears. You’ll excuse my immodesty when I say that I’m the best at forging that I know of.”
“You’re the best I’ve ever seen,” Miles asks, head tilted. “What are your defences like?”
Eames imitates the little twitch, knowing how much it bothers people to see those movements, find them familiar, and still not be able to identify them from last time they looked in the mirror. “Different. I can show you, if you’d like.” He dreams up a Sig Sauer, holds it to his head.
The response this gets is somewhat startling: Smith makes an abortive movement for his own weapon, Nelson yelps and Bright goes so still that he could double as a rather attractive statue. Miles is the only one who looks unmoved.
Eames pauses.
“You don’t do this?” he asks, taking in the Americans.
“It’s against policy,” Bright supplies through what looks like a ridiculously tense jaw. “Too many people shooting themselves in the head in real life, thinking that they’re under.”
Eames knows rather too much about that, and he thinks it must show dark and honest on his face, because Bright blinks. Before he can give anything else away - a first, to be sure - Eames pulls the trigger and opens his eyes topside to White’s curious, army-groomed gaze.
God. He would have had a few drinks with breakfast if he’d known that dream-walking again was going to get to him so easily.
Instinct tells him to pull the needle out, to get up and pace like he always does when he feels like this, his skin itchy and too tight. He holds himself still in his seat instead, hands clasped gently in his lap. He watches the timer count down to zero. He and White don’t speak, don’t even look at each other after that first glance.
The others wake in the same instant, although they all do it differently. Smith reaches for his gun again before he even opens his eyes. Nelson sighs a little and blinks a few times, like he might be coming from a natural sleep, as though he has to shake weariness off. Miles stretches, vertebrae popping. Bright wakes up like Eames: eyes open, instantly alert, no ticking movements or noises to betray his sudden consciousness.
“So, this time I’m the subject,” Eames says, not giving any of them a chance to yelp at him for going against policy or whatever. “Who’s the dreamer?”
“I will be,” Bright supplies, fiddling with the PASIV. “Any special requests?”
“Anything you like, darling,” Eames says, just to see the other man scowl. By no right should such an ugly expression look so lovely. “Except you should only give us twenty minutes down there.”
Bright makes the change he needs to and depresses the button, and Eames falls again.
XXX
Eames’s mind, as usual, looks like something out of a demented room of mirrors. It doesn’t matter what the dreamer imagines up: there are always huge numbers of reflective surfaces. Eames is quite proud of that - it took time to train his subconscious into the habit, but it’s never failed to work since.
All six of them are together on a street corner in an approximation of New York City. The projections mill about them, apparently uninterested in any of them.
The weird thing about Eames’s mind, of course, is that the projections change.
Eames has already taken on another form, without even realising it: a tall woman made taller by spiked heels, an almost exaggerated hourglass figure and thick blonde hair spiralling down about her shoulders. However, his reflection in the mirrored glass of the building next to them is still him, for now.
“Fascinating,” Miles says. “Are they aggressive at all?” A projection brushes past him, not the bump of suspicion that they often start to give but a soft touch to excuse them as they walk by. Bright startles as he gets the same treatment on the other side of Eames.
Eames starts to walk, hips swaying gently, feet one in front of the other like a cat. “As much as anyone’s, if they sense something is wrong. The advantage lies in the fact that no one can ever find me if I don’t wish them to.”
“Even if they catch you by surprise?” Smith asks, and then snaps, “God, can you tell your subconscious to stop feeling me up?”
“Of course. I can always tell when I’m dreaming, because if I don’t hold my own form, I’ll lose it,” Eames supplies. His reflection is her now, the blonde. One of the projections walking towards them takes on his own face and then loses it again. “My projections are always a little touchy-feely. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s my subconscious desire to cuddle small children and baby animals showing through.”
Bright snorts. “Yeah. That’s probably it.”
Eames shoots him a look, and the point man smiles. “I did some research. I know you’re ex-SAS.”
“Being ex-SAS doesn’t automatically exempt me from being a sappy bastard,” Eames retorts evenly. “It just means that I’m a sappy bastard who can kill you nine different ways with my bare hands.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Bright mutters. It’s not very mature. However, Eames never claimed to be particularly mature either.
“On that note,” Miles interrupts, and he sounds exactly like the teacher he is, “why don’t we see what we can do to wind Mister Eames’s projections up?”
Eames changes his form again, this time to Smith. “Well, seeing as you lot don’t forge, in about thirty seconds they’re going to be all over you.”
“We’ve only got a few minutes left on the clock,” Bright observes, pulling his gun out from the holster from his thigh. Eames’s projections immediately pause, hands fluttering in a way that wasn’t threatening a moment ago but now really, really is.
“I didn’t want to have to wait long after you lot are all deconstructed corpses,” Eames drawls, and gets out of the way.
He doesn’t watch: hearing it is bad enough. He turns away and walks back up the street, changing forms a dozen times before he even goes a block. Bright must last a while, because the dream is only just collapsing when Eames is yanked back topside.
The others are gasping in their chairs, clasping their chests and limbs where they were almost certainly torn away. Eames smiles and says, “they may not be as sharp as yours, Captain Bright, but my projections don’t lack imagination.”
Bright, to his surprise, actually laughs.
XXX
Eames doesn’t mean to end up having sex with Captain Arthur Bright. He really, really doesn’t.
However, when Bright presses him against the bricks in an alley behind the bar where they’ve shared a few drinks, Eames doesn’t say no. He continues to not say no when Bright murmurs, “I know how much you want me, you aren’t that good a liar,” in that incredible voice that could keep Eames up nights all by itself, low and rough with promise. He doesn’t say no, and his body is giving a resounding yes, fucking yes.
Unfortunately it’s only after, when the two of them are lying entangled and sweaty under the sheets of Eames’s hotel bed, that the many reasons why it’s not a good idea to fuck a gorgeous special-ops soldier with a talent for dream-sharing start to recirculate through Eames’s mind.
For one thing, despite his reputation as a charmer, Eames is not actually as easy as he generally appears on first glance. The fact that he just happily led Bright - Arthur, now, he supposes - back to his hotel is bound to go wrong, mostly because he sincerely doubts that Arthur is interested in a long-term relationship. Eames was a soldier, once. He remembers how sex and the military don’t really go together.
Arthur is an arsehole. He’s cocky and electric and young and stunningly, stunningly gorgeous. He’ll get under Eames’s skin and tear him apart, because Eames is here to find out his secrets and give them away. He doesn’t even pretend to think that he can keep that from Arthur forever.
He wonders, as Arthur traces his tattoos with sated, indolent fascination, whether the point man will kill him when he does find out.
Also, Arthur is one of the best dream-walkers he’s ever seen. This is the real deal-breaker, because Eames has known people like him before. People almost too intelligent for the real world, who can shape the dreams and navigate them with deadly precision, who understand the subconscious with hardly any training. Half those people are criminals: the other half are dead.
Eames could choke on the irony of being one of the good guys acting like a criminal, while he speculates on the likelihood of one of the best people he’s met actually becoming one. He refuses to think of Arthur ending up dead.
Arthur stays the night, and they fuck in the shower again the next morning: the water, sweet in Eames’s mouth as he presses Arthur cheek and chest to the cold tiles, leaving finger-shaped blue stains on his hips and wrists to match the ones on Eames’ own. Arthur is stronger than he looks. That doesn’t surprise Eames in the slightest.
When he’s gone - and Eames can read from his face, thanks, that was good, don’t expect anything else except more fantastic, meaningless sex, as he makes his exit - Eames calls Willard and tells him everything he knows about the American dream-share program and the people involved in it. He tells him about what Miles is doing here. He tells him about Arthur and his role in the team. He even mentions the things he’s shown them, because in many ways it pays for the two countries to be equal in the things they know so that they can work together.
He doesn’t tell Willard about sleeping with Arthur. He should, and he knows he should: it’s policy, because sex more than anything else - theft, murder, et cetera - leaves a trail behind a spy. But he doesn’t.
It’s the first mistake he makes.
Author: BadActs
Word count: ~4500
Rating: Age 16+/M
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Disclaimer: I don't own Nolan's characters.
Warnings: Slash, non-explicit sex, swearing, an appalling lack of knowledge concerning spies.
Summary: Eames is a spy. Arthur is an arsehole.
A/N: This series kind of took over my brain while I was on holiday. There's not much to say for it beyond that, to be honest. Except EAMES IS MUCH EASIER TO WRITE THAN ARTHUR. JUST SAYING. Also, italics on lj are a freaking pain in my arse.
Despite the paycheque - impressive, because Eames is good at his job, thank you very much - working in Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not really at all like a James Bond movie.
Yes, Eames does occasionally wear a tux and get into car chases that culminate in fiery explosions as his tails miss a corner or collide with oncoming traffic. However, currently he is most likely to be found in East London, living in a crumbling, mouldy townhouse while working as a mechanic. His neighbours think that he’s some kind of minor crim running a chop shop, but they seem to be too frightened by his tattoos and thug-short hair to mention it.
It’s kind of like the life he imagined for himself while stuck in his posh public school, except with more leaks and less sex.
What can he say - it’s hard to maintain a relationship when he lies like a rug to anyone he gets in his bed, and casual sex isn’t much to his taste. Also, his inability to buy a bed frame or a decent couch isn’t much of a drawcard. Fucking bigwigs apparently think that poverty is a neat cover while he’s been recovering from his last mission, which ended up with him taking a bullet.
These are the reasons why Eames is sitting at a café in the trendy part of London, knocking knees with his superior. Agent Willard is the kind of man who puts on the accent that Eames came about naturally. Not that he’s judging, he’s just saying. Also, he’s the kind of repressed arsehole who attempts to look repelled by Eames while secretly staring at his mouth whenever he talks. Willard has a wife and two gorgeous children - Eames has seen the picture in his office.
So if Eames leans back and arches his back a little, raising an arm to wrap his hand around the back of his neck, making his bicep bulge, well - then it is obviously his overdeveloped sense of the dramatic that prompts him to do so, not a will to revenge the fact that he’s been sleeping on a mattress on the floor lately. Willard’s eyes nearly cross with a combination of equally disturbing emotions.
So, okay, Eames hates his superior agent.
Willard shoves a dossier into Eames’s hands and waits in silence for him to flick through the range of intrusive notes and stalkerish photographs. Apparently, his new mark is a man called Peter Miles. Eames takes the photo of the man, long-distance of course, and examines it. The older man isn’t armed, that much is obvious from the way his clothes sit. Also, he doesn’t look like someone who has been trained in physical combat - built heavily but not particularly muscular, tall but not really powerful. He is walking with an exquisitely beautiful woman, dark-haired and perhaps a little older than Eames.
“So, what have Peter Miles and his lovely counterpart done to incur the deadly suspicion of British Intelligence?” Eames asks in his current accent, a thicker, baser drawl.
“The girl is his daughter, Mallorie Miles, currently residing in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, aged twenty-eight,” Willard rattles off, and Eames wants to smack him for calling her a girl. “She’s not a concern. Miles, however, is an Architect.”
Eames actually stiffens, the first real tic he has made in who knows how long. “You know I don’t do that shit anymore.” Eames’s brief stint with the military and his even briefer stint with the SAS would have been a lot longer if not for experimental dream-sharing.
Willard gives him a long look that is meant to be a warning but comes off as bloody cautious instead. Eames doesn’t blame him. He’d loved the SAS for the most part - been good at it, too - but rather hates what dream-sharing made him. He didn’t leave the division quietly when he came here. It was cruel, cruel and sadistic and dangerous, what they were doing, and he’d already lost too many friends and comrades to the side effects of lucid dreaming.
Eames is extremely valuable in the area, though. He knows it, and knows just as well that it’s the main reason he got this job so easily. However, he had hoped that since then his other numerous skills had made him seem more desirable in other areas. Apparently the high-ups have longer memories than he gave them credit for.
“You are the only person with the right…accreditations for this particular job,” Willard states, too careful. Eames wonders if the bastard thinks that appealing to his ego will make him go quietly, when in fact all Willard has to do is order him. Apparently he has a rep for not following orders.
Well, it never was a particular strong point for him in the later days of his employment with the SAS, but he’s never defied a single one since transferring.
Eames sighs, barely resists rolling his eyes. “Tell me more.”
Willard actually scrambles to do just that. Eames wonders how big this job really is. “Miles works as a professor at a Parisian university now. But he was there in the very beginning of the British dream-share program as an architectural specialist. He almost certainly trained the architects you worked with.”
“Remind me to thank him,” Eames mutters, remembering the morons who’d failed to explain the technicalities of building dreams, the scientists who had nearly caused them to fall into Limbo before they realised just how easy it was to do so. He also remembers the people who did fall, and yeah, he’s still furiously, furiously angry at the mere thought of it.
Willard clears his throat. “Now he’s apparently working with a similar team in the American military.”
And then Eames gets it, why this is such a big deal. It makes him laugh, a brash, bright, bitter sound.
“I’m sorry, were you wanting me to spy on Miles or the Americans?”
“We want to know what Miles is teaching them. But…any information on their version of the project would be valuable to us,” Willard replies.
“So I’m the honey-trap,” Eames says, voice gone a little absent as he scans the data. “What’s my in? I mean, I can’t exactly see that the US Army allows just anyone in to watch practise. Think of the fuss they’d make about psychological damage if that got into the news.”
“Lots of people would kill to work with someone like you. Sell yourself as a soldier turned independent academic, looking for something a little more refined than our own project. Spin it, I’m sure you can manage,” Willard says, passing over a folded piece of paper. It’s booking information for a return flight to LA, under the name Maximillion Eames. It’s actually his real name, unlike what he’s registered as in the agency. Anyone who tracks him by that - and oh God, who actually calls their child Maximillion - will find his schooling and service records and not much else.
“It wouldn’t be hard to find something more refined, I could point out,” Eames says, standing. He doesn’t shake the tosser’s hand: he has a plane to catch, and people to fool.
XXX
Eames ends up kind of wishing that he was in the sort of career where he could con the American military for cash, because it is ridiculously easy. They swallow the line about him wanting to broaden his horizons without a whisper, and so the guards at the front of their super-secret compound wave him through after only a cursory check of his photo ID.
If the familiar things - spit-polished boots, neat uniforms, that crisp, easy way of walking - make his stomach churn, then no one is the wiser. His persona for the moment is business-cool and collected, with a straight face that poker champions would envy.
The dream research facility is home to their main team. Apparently dream tech is still used for training in the wider military community, as it was in Eames’s time, but this is something altogether different. Eames doesn’t even need to go under to see that.
The largest clues are in the team itself. Miles is both working as the architect for their training runs and acting as the dreamer, doing his own research. The Americans aren’t from any one branch of the military; the charming arsehole of an extractor they’ve got is from the air force, while their architect is from the Navy. Their forger, who Eames suspects is completely useless, is from the FBI of all places.
Most interesting of all is the new position they’ve formed, the point man. The guy is a Marine who still wears his dark hair regulation length despite his new position. His fatigues are well used enough to indicate several overseas tours. The others call him Sparkie, but he is introduced to Eames as Captain Arthur Bright.
They take him under with them on the first day. God, Eames could steal every bloody secret they have and they’d be none the wiser, because they don’t really understand the things he can do in dreams. They don’t even ask about what he can do in dreams, the idiots.
They don’t make him the subject, which is lucky for them. The architect dreams and the point man is the dreamer in a world full of mirrors. This is a training run for their forger, mainly, which makes Eames smirk a little. Better and better.
It’s a city, the dreamscape, and the architect isn’t half-bad for all he has a bit too much of a preoccupation with straight lines. It’s probably an army thing, Eames thinks: the SAS architects had had the same problem in his time. When he opens his eyes, Eames is surrounded by reflections of himself. An elevator, apparently. It’s very apt.
His reflections start to flicker in and out without him even paying attention. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Miles’ greying hair, the mousy woman from the house next door to his London flat, the man who worked the checkout last time he bought groceries. He focuses, blinking into the skin of his childhood nanny. She’d had cornflower eyes and soft brown hair and had screamed like a harpy whenever he dirtied his expensive clothing. God, he’d hated her.
He steps out of the elevator into a hotel and into the street, joining a crowd of projections. Bright’s are all sharp-eyed and dangerous, with the hovering threat of guards hiding just out of sight. It’s not the first time Eames has been glad that he can disguise himself like this.
Miles is walking ahead of him with White, the forger. He trails them discreetly, and he certainly isn’t the only one: they haven’t even done anything and the projections are already stirred up. Bright, the architect and the extractor, Nelson, join them from the other direction.
Eames sits on a park bench and dreams up a book to read. Wuthering Heights. He’s not sure why that choice seems as appropriate as it does.
“We’ve lost the tourist,” Bright points out, eyes everywhere at once despite the fact that he’s the only one with nothing to fear. Miles frowns thoughtfully.
“You don’t think he has already been ejected from the dream, do you?” he asks, brow furrowing.
One corner of Bright’s mouth lifts humourlessly. “I’m sure we would know about it if he had been. White?”
“Okay,” White says, and swallows. His face is pale and set and yeah, Eames can tell for sure now that the man is useless and knows it as well. White examines his reflection in the mirrored glass of the nearest building and changes into an old man, eighty if he is a day, skin paper-fine and veined.
Every projection in the square turns to look at him, all at once.
The others back off as White loses his forge, the image shattering. Then the projections swarm like sharks smelling blood in the water, and Eames can’t see the other man any more. It doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for them to disperse, leaving a mangled body behind.
Jesus. Eames wonders if Bright is some kind of psychopath. He’s never met anyone so strongly militarised, short of the extremely paranoid who come by their mental defences naturally. Not that getting inside Eames’s head is any kind of cake-walk, but it’s completely different from this basic brutality.
The others look a little shaken, but they’ve clearly seen this happen many times before. Nelson snorts and shakes his head. Miles’ mouth is a hard twist. The architect, Smith, looks irate. Bright seems bored.
“This is a waste of our time. White is insane if he thinks this is at all useful to us,” Smith says, throwing up his hands. Eames presumes he’s talking about forgery. Well, in the architect’s shoes he might think the same thing. “How much time on the clock, Sparkie?”
“Forty-seven minutes,” Bright deadpans. “Anyone for a game of cards?”
Eames puts down his book on the bench beside him, wincing a little when the spine gets damaged. “You could always shoot yourselves awake.”
The way the dreamers turn to look at him is oddly, unnervingly reminiscent of the way projections act when they sense something is wrong. However, the actual projections don’t even spare him a glance.
Bright blinks, his cool apparently shaken as he tries to discern whether one of his projections is getting chatty. Eames doubts that they ever do, given the taciturn nature of the man.
“I’m not from your head,” Eames says, slipping into another skin: a man in his fifties, a bit of a silver fox, hands clasped loosely in his lap. A few projections look to him, but it’s nothing serious.
“Mister Eames?” Miles guesses, and Eames offers him up the kind of smile his forge would use. Too many teeth, bright white and perfect, a veneer of an expression. The older architect blinks too quickly, eyes brightly unnerved.
“Indeed,” Eames agrees, standing and walking over to them with a quick businessman’s stride. “That seemed a little cruel and unusual, don’t you think? You could have at least taken him into a mind a little less militarised than this.”
“There’s no point in making it easy,” Bright says with a one-shouldered shrug.
Eames bets that that statement is his motto in life.
“You should probably fire him,” Eames suggests. “He’s no natural at this gig, and the more he works at it, the more likely it is that he’ll lose himself. Plus, you know, all the mental scarring that comes from being repeatedly torn apart by the subconsciousnesses of psychopaths he is meant to be able to trust implicitly.”
“Are you referring to me?” Bright asks, and he sounds rather amused about it.
“So this is what White is aiming for?” Smith asks, and he sounds suitably impressed. Eames approves of this wholeheartedly. “You make it look simple.”
“It’s something of an art, rather than a science,” Eames lies, because actually half of it is anatomy and physics, even if the other half is simply pulling it off. “It’s harder than it appears. You’ll excuse my immodesty when I say that I’m the best at forging that I know of.”
“You’re the best I’ve ever seen,” Miles asks, head tilted. “What are your defences like?”
Eames imitates the little twitch, knowing how much it bothers people to see those movements, find them familiar, and still not be able to identify them from last time they looked in the mirror. “Different. I can show you, if you’d like.” He dreams up a Sig Sauer, holds it to his head.
The response this gets is somewhat startling: Smith makes an abortive movement for his own weapon, Nelson yelps and Bright goes so still that he could double as a rather attractive statue. Miles is the only one who looks unmoved.
Eames pauses.
“You don’t do this?” he asks, taking in the Americans.
“It’s against policy,” Bright supplies through what looks like a ridiculously tense jaw. “Too many people shooting themselves in the head in real life, thinking that they’re under.”
Eames knows rather too much about that, and he thinks it must show dark and honest on his face, because Bright blinks. Before he can give anything else away - a first, to be sure - Eames pulls the trigger and opens his eyes topside to White’s curious, army-groomed gaze.
God. He would have had a few drinks with breakfast if he’d known that dream-walking again was going to get to him so easily.
Instinct tells him to pull the needle out, to get up and pace like he always does when he feels like this, his skin itchy and too tight. He holds himself still in his seat instead, hands clasped gently in his lap. He watches the timer count down to zero. He and White don’t speak, don’t even look at each other after that first glance.
The others wake in the same instant, although they all do it differently. Smith reaches for his gun again before he even opens his eyes. Nelson sighs a little and blinks a few times, like he might be coming from a natural sleep, as though he has to shake weariness off. Miles stretches, vertebrae popping. Bright wakes up like Eames: eyes open, instantly alert, no ticking movements or noises to betray his sudden consciousness.
“So, this time I’m the subject,” Eames says, not giving any of them a chance to yelp at him for going against policy or whatever. “Who’s the dreamer?”
“I will be,” Bright supplies, fiddling with the PASIV. “Any special requests?”
“Anything you like, darling,” Eames says, just to see the other man scowl. By no right should such an ugly expression look so lovely. “Except you should only give us twenty minutes down there.”
Bright makes the change he needs to and depresses the button, and Eames falls again.
XXX
Eames’s mind, as usual, looks like something out of a demented room of mirrors. It doesn’t matter what the dreamer imagines up: there are always huge numbers of reflective surfaces. Eames is quite proud of that - it took time to train his subconscious into the habit, but it’s never failed to work since.
All six of them are together on a street corner in an approximation of New York City. The projections mill about them, apparently uninterested in any of them.
The weird thing about Eames’s mind, of course, is that the projections change.
Eames has already taken on another form, without even realising it: a tall woman made taller by spiked heels, an almost exaggerated hourglass figure and thick blonde hair spiralling down about her shoulders. However, his reflection in the mirrored glass of the building next to them is still him, for now.
“Fascinating,” Miles says. “Are they aggressive at all?” A projection brushes past him, not the bump of suspicion that they often start to give but a soft touch to excuse them as they walk by. Bright startles as he gets the same treatment on the other side of Eames.
Eames starts to walk, hips swaying gently, feet one in front of the other like a cat. “As much as anyone’s, if they sense something is wrong. The advantage lies in the fact that no one can ever find me if I don’t wish them to.”
“Even if they catch you by surprise?” Smith asks, and then snaps, “God, can you tell your subconscious to stop feeling me up?”
“Of course. I can always tell when I’m dreaming, because if I don’t hold my own form, I’ll lose it,” Eames supplies. His reflection is her now, the blonde. One of the projections walking towards them takes on his own face and then loses it again. “My projections are always a little touchy-feely. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s my subconscious desire to cuddle small children and baby animals showing through.”
Bright snorts. “Yeah. That’s probably it.”
Eames shoots him a look, and the point man smiles. “I did some research. I know you’re ex-SAS.”
“Being ex-SAS doesn’t automatically exempt me from being a sappy bastard,” Eames retorts evenly. “It just means that I’m a sappy bastard who can kill you nine different ways with my bare hands.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Bright mutters. It’s not very mature. However, Eames never claimed to be particularly mature either.
“On that note,” Miles interrupts, and he sounds exactly like the teacher he is, “why don’t we see what we can do to wind Mister Eames’s projections up?”
Eames changes his form again, this time to Smith. “Well, seeing as you lot don’t forge, in about thirty seconds they’re going to be all over you.”
“We’ve only got a few minutes left on the clock,” Bright observes, pulling his gun out from the holster from his thigh. Eames’s projections immediately pause, hands fluttering in a way that wasn’t threatening a moment ago but now really, really is.
“I didn’t want to have to wait long after you lot are all deconstructed corpses,” Eames drawls, and gets out of the way.
He doesn’t watch: hearing it is bad enough. He turns away and walks back up the street, changing forms a dozen times before he even goes a block. Bright must last a while, because the dream is only just collapsing when Eames is yanked back topside.
The others are gasping in their chairs, clasping their chests and limbs where they were almost certainly torn away. Eames smiles and says, “they may not be as sharp as yours, Captain Bright, but my projections don’t lack imagination.”
Bright, to his surprise, actually laughs.
XXX
Eames doesn’t mean to end up having sex with Captain Arthur Bright. He really, really doesn’t.
However, when Bright presses him against the bricks in an alley behind the bar where they’ve shared a few drinks, Eames doesn’t say no. He continues to not say no when Bright murmurs, “I know how much you want me, you aren’t that good a liar,” in that incredible voice that could keep Eames up nights all by itself, low and rough with promise. He doesn’t say no, and his body is giving a resounding yes, fucking yes.
Unfortunately it’s only after, when the two of them are lying entangled and sweaty under the sheets of Eames’s hotel bed, that the many reasons why it’s not a good idea to fuck a gorgeous special-ops soldier with a talent for dream-sharing start to recirculate through Eames’s mind.
For one thing, despite his reputation as a charmer, Eames is not actually as easy as he generally appears on first glance. The fact that he just happily led Bright - Arthur, now, he supposes - back to his hotel is bound to go wrong, mostly because he sincerely doubts that Arthur is interested in a long-term relationship. Eames was a soldier, once. He remembers how sex and the military don’t really go together.
Arthur is an arsehole. He’s cocky and electric and young and stunningly, stunningly gorgeous. He’ll get under Eames’s skin and tear him apart, because Eames is here to find out his secrets and give them away. He doesn’t even pretend to think that he can keep that from Arthur forever.
He wonders, as Arthur traces his tattoos with sated, indolent fascination, whether the point man will kill him when he does find out.
Also, Arthur is one of the best dream-walkers he’s ever seen. This is the real deal-breaker, because Eames has known people like him before. People almost too intelligent for the real world, who can shape the dreams and navigate them with deadly precision, who understand the subconscious with hardly any training. Half those people are criminals: the other half are dead.
Eames could choke on the irony of being one of the good guys acting like a criminal, while he speculates on the likelihood of one of the best people he’s met actually becoming one. He refuses to think of Arthur ending up dead.
Arthur stays the night, and they fuck in the shower again the next morning: the water, sweet in Eames’s mouth as he presses Arthur cheek and chest to the cold tiles, leaving finger-shaped blue stains on his hips and wrists to match the ones on Eames’ own. Arthur is stronger than he looks. That doesn’t surprise Eames in the slightest.
When he’s gone - and Eames can read from his face, thanks, that was good, don’t expect anything else except more fantastic, meaningless sex, as he makes his exit - Eames calls Willard and tells him everything he knows about the American dream-share program and the people involved in it. He tells him about what Miles is doing here. He tells him about Arthur and his role in the team. He even mentions the things he’s shown them, because in many ways it pays for the two countries to be equal in the things they know so that they can work together.
He doesn’t tell Willard about sleeping with Arthur. He should, and he knows he should: it’s policy, because sex more than anything else - theft, murder, et cetera - leaves a trail behind a spy. But he doesn’t.
It’s the first mistake he makes.