The Bullet Catch 4/12 (An Inception Fanfiction)
Title: The Bullet Catch 4/12
Author: Mel Wong, @ chn_breathmint on Livejournal and AO3.
Characters/Pairings: Eames, Arthur, Ariadne, Yusuf, OCs. Eames/Arthur flirting, Arthur/Eames attraction, Arthur/Ariadne attraction (and vice versa), Ariadne/Eames attraction (and vice versa), eventual Eames/Arthur/Ariadne OT3, Eames/OMC ex-relationship, Arthur/OFC ex-relationship, Yusuf/OFC relationship (eventually.)
Status: WIP
Rating: R for language, graphic violence, sexuality, drug use, other nasty stuff.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Inception or its characters.
Word Count: 5613
Summary: This is the fic I’ve spent 50k words winding up to - Eames and Arthur finally enact their mission of payback, but to get to their targets they have to go through the Russian mafia first.
Warnings: Foul deeds of murder and darkness, even more gratuitous gunporn, rather naughty Finnish and angst all around.
Notes: Thank you to skiriki for the Finn-picking and to heronymus_waat for the beta. I haven’t translated the Finnish for this because the meaning’s pretty obvious even without.
An improvised sniper roost in an empty office was probably one of the stranger places to hold any kind of heart-to-heart talk, but Eames had had similarly personal chats in odder places, among them the changing room in an exclusive lingerie store and the pantry in a Michelin three-star restaurant. Intelligence work tended to take a man odd places and this was hardly the weirdest.
“Do you think she’s going to stay?” Arthur asked as he glanced through the scope of his new sniper rifle, covering the square beneath them in a slow, careful sweep. Eames didn’t expect their target to come their way this early, but Arthur was still slightly unused to the sights and action on that particular rifle and the grouping on his practice shots had not been as tight as he had liked.
“Ariadne? I think she has what it takes to finish the job, but - ” Eames paused, scrawled the wind direction on a scrap of notepaper and then checked the distance to the street with a laser rangefinder again. “I don’t think she expected us to be committing bloody murder, as it were.”
“Maybe I should have been more clear with her from the start,” Arthur sighed. He put the rifle back down and took a quick sip from a bottle of water, offered it to Eames, who shook his head and pulled his smartphone from his jacket pocket.
“I don’t see how we could have been any clearer when she told us she was going to come along, back in Paris,” Eames said after he pulled an app up on the touchscreen. “Maybe she wasn’t as familiar with her Milton as I had hoped.”
“400 meters is the most I can manage with this rifle,” Arthur whispered as he looked out at the street with Eames’ field glasses. “Hope he doesn’t take too much of a detour picking his kid up from piano lessons.”
“The usual route on his itinerary is well within your range. Trust my working,” Eames grinned slyly at Arthur - a wasted gesture with Arthur still staring down at street level through the field glasses.
“You did say math wasn’t your strong suit,” Arthur said as he checked his watch, glanced at the scribbled calculations on the messy notes Eames had taken.
Eames only held out his smartphone and waved it in Arthur’s direction. “There’s an app for it.”
“Figures,” Arthur muttered as he picked up the phone and checked the calculations against Eames’ own, nodding quietly as the numbers added up. “I do wonder what you have to gain from acting like some kind of idiot.”
“Nothing but your condescension, which is something of an acquired taste,” Eames chuckled half to himself as he pulled a Dunhill from the pack in his shirt pocket, lit it and offered it to Arthur.
“I don’t know if I should be relieved or offended that you’ve started flirting at me again,” Arthur said as he accepted the lighted cigarette from Eames.
Take it as a compliment, Eames thought but did not say as he watched Arthur inhale deeply. He always refused to carry cigarettes or a lighter, a quirk that Eames found vaguely charming - as though that obstinacy made all those cadged cigarettes not count. “What was that about quitting, by the way?” he asked too-gently, “About, oh, two years ago?”
“Quitting is easy. I’ve done it lots of times.” Arthur said. Fragrant smoke curled out of Arthur’s nostrils to mingle with the pepper and frankincense of his cologne. Bluish wisps unfurled about his head to give his sharp features a draconic cast, and Eames could not help but think of how the smoke would taste in Arthur’s mouth if he stole a kiss right now. Instead he lit a cigarette for himself and took a long drag, held it in his lungs until his head filled with light.
This is not the time and place, he reminded himself as he exhaled. We have a job to do. He squinted out of the window and glanced down into the busy street. Christian was somewhere in the lunchtime crowd, spotting from street level so that Arthur could move quickly if their mark decided to take another route today.
We have a man to kill today, Eames thought as he tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the windowsill. Ariadne probably has the right of it - we are murderous bastards.
Eames didn’t think of himself as any kind of saint, but he liked to think that assassination was generally beneath his usual modus operandi. Very few extractions began or ended in any kind of murder - things had often gone irreversibly wrong by the time the guns came out. Any shooting usually happened in self-defense when jobs went wrong or when clients tried to screw them over. This wasn’t a normal extraction, however - for one, dreams were only one part of the train wreck they were heading into. This was the sort of thing he generally considered suicidal - it never paid to get involved in any kind of vendetta, let alone one driven by a former extractor of questionable sanity. The problem with avoidance in this case was that if the intrusions countermeasures made it out of Woodruff’s hands there wouldn’t be an extraction scene left to work in after all was said and done.
This situation left them without the luxury of retreat or a moral high ground when Nikolai had laid out the conditions for their little Russian excursion. The team would be permitted to operate under his protection provided they helped him rub out a rival - an act that would force the team to pick a side. It made perfect sense. They were, for all intents and purposes, a dangerous wild card in a situation that was going to unravel fast once the guns came out. Forcing the team to announce their affiliation in a high-profile assassination meant that they would be unable to turn around and sell him to another faction - a matter of some import considering Christian’s calculated betrayal of Sergey and Woodruff.
That uneasy give-and-take was utterly familiar to Eames, and he knew that most of the others had been in the scene long enough to know how such things worked - which left Ariadne. It was clear that the prospect of outright murder bothered her conscience - she made a game attempt at hiding her discomfort, but in some ways she was as transparent as window glass, and so very young. At least Nikolai had not been stingy on the equipment. Eames had no idea where his people had acquired a VSS Vintorez, but neither he nor Arthur had complained when Vladimir had delivered it to them in its special briefcase.
They waited for another tense half-hour before Eames’ phone buzzed ominously. He checked the caller ID, picked up the call and put it on speakerphone as Arthur picked up the rifle and took careful aim.
“I see his armored car,” Christian whispered from the other end. Eames glanced through his binoculars, spotted Christian across the street from their mark, inconspicuous. “They’re turning the corner right now.”
“I see him,” Eames said. “Do you have him, Arthur?”
“Yeah, I see him,” Arthur murmured. He swiveled the rifle lightly out the open window, making minute adjustments as he settled the crosshairs over the armored car. “One of his bodyguards is getting out first.”
“I see that. Get ready to run interference if we need it, Chris,” Eames said. He checked the range on the shot - a little inside 380 meters, which Arthur could manage with the Vintorez.
“Ehkä,” Christian murmured through his Bluetooth earpiece. Maybe. Eames smiled grimly as he watched Christian stop a decent distance away from their mark and glance around at a crosswalk like any other jaywalker. A near-accident would distract everyone if Arthur needed an extra second to line up the shot.
“He’s getting out now. Come on…” Arthur whispered as he adjusted his aim. Eames watched the mark climb out of his car, flanked by black-suited bodyguards. The late afternoon sunlight gleamed off the rims of his glasses and off his thinning hair, and he looked more like an accountant than the mobster he actually was. The only giveaways were the tattoos showing above the collar of his shirt.
“Pulunnussija needs to hurry up,” Christian hissed. He stood at the crosswalk, smartphone in his gloved right hand as though checking the time.
“Language,” Arthur said mildly as he raised the muzzle of the Vintorez minutely to compensate for drop. “Get ready, Eames.”
You don’t even know what that word means, Eames wanted to say, but did not. Instead he reached into his trouser pocket and let his thumb brush lightly over the trigger button on the detonator, cleared his throat before speaking again. “I’m ready when you are,” he said, turning away from the window as he waited for Arthur’s cue.
“Just a little bit more… two more steps,” Arthur said, his voice dropping to a whisper as he slipped his finger in the trigger guard. His shoulders tensed as he held his breath and then there was the distinctive pssht of the Vintorez as its integral suppressor muffled the report of its subsonic round.
Eames hit the button on the detonator as Arthur fired and was rewarded with a faint-but-distinctive crack a half-second later. Arthur had decided to take advantage of the rifle’s quietness by planting a harmless explosive charge nearly a kilometer away from their position - the sound it made when detonated would convince their target’s bodyguards that the sniper was 800 meters away from where they really were and buy them time to leave the scene discreetly.
“Nice shot,” Christian murmured through his earpiece as he confirmed the kill visually. “See you back at the safehouse.” There was a soft staticky sound as he ended the phone call.
Eames glanced down at the scene through his field glasses as Arthur started to disassemble the rifle and put it back in its carrying case. A messy streak of red had smeared across the plate-glass doors as the man had fallen forward, and hell had started to break loose as pedestrians froze in place and the bodyguards broke forward in a futile attempt to protect their now-dead employer. Christian was nowhere to be seen but Eames didn’t need to see him to know where he was - he could imagine him darting down an alleyway, footsteps light and quick.
“I’m heading out,” Arthur said from his right, and Eames nodded absently as he folded the field glasses and tucked them away in a jacket pocket. He pinched his cigarette out between thumb and forefinger and dropped the butt out of the window before he left the empty office with Arthur’s MP5K in his grip.
The trip back to their temporary hideout was uneventful for the most part, but Eames knew something was amiss when he arrived and found Ariadne pacing amidst the dusty mannequins from when this space had once been a clothing shop.
“What are you doing here, love?” he asked her. “Weren’t you supposed to have gone ahead with Yusuf and Petra?” Christian had arranged for the chemists to set up shop in a former dispensary, and she was supposed to have gone on with them earlier that afternoon.
“I told them I’d wait for you,” she said. She had left her jacket hanging on an empty clothing rack and Eames noticed that she was carrying her Skyph in a holster behind her right hip. “Where’s Christian?” she asked. “Arthur says he should have been here by now.”
“I don’t know. We all took separate routes,” Eames said. He pulled out his smartphone and checked his messages, but there were none.
“I thought he’d have waited to come back with you,” said Arthur as he emerged from the stockroom to stand in the doorway linking it to the front of the shop.
Motes of dust danced in the thin shafts of sunlight leaking through the newspapers taped over the empty windows and Eames had to fight the urge to sneeze. Instead he tucked his phone away and shrugged. “He might have had to double back to lose a tail.”
“I guess I shouldn’t worry about him,” Ariadne said doubtfully, “But I do. Things went okay?” She wiped at her own nose with a tissue and glanced up at him as though afraid, and Eames was fairly sure the red around her eyes was not from any kind of dust or allergy.
“As well as anything like this can,” Arthur said before he vanished back into the stockroom, where he waited for Vladimir to call.
Ariadne nodded silently in reply and then turned away abruptly with the tissue balled up in her fist, knuckles white from tension.
“You’re not all right,” Eames said as the quiet started to ring in his ears.
“No, I’m not,” she said, more curtly than usual. There was a tension in her spine and a stiffness in Arthur’s carriage that made Eames guess as to the source of her recent sniffles. He pondered the wisdom of asking about it but was pre-empted by the sound of the back door opening with a low creak.
“It’s me,” a familiar raspy voice said, the words muffled slightly by the distance as the door swung shut. “Sorry I’m late.” Christian stepped through the doorway into the dusty showroom and the reasons for his lateness soon became obvious. He was still breathing hard, his long hair stuck to his face with sweat, and he sagged against a wall with a weary sigh.
“Christian, you’re - you - “ Ariadne’s voice faltered as she registered the blood spotting his face and the left sleeve of his jacket. She bit her lip then and then turned and retreated to the stockroom, shoulders shaking. Arthur passed her on the way out of the stockroom and shook his head in frustration as the back door slammed behind him.
“What happened to you?” he asked after Christian managed to catch his breath.
“Two of his bodyguards got suspicious. They tailed me, tried to take me down in an alley. Did not work.” Christian dropped his open messenger bag on the floor and shrugged his bloodstained jacket off, wiped the blood splatter off his face with it.
“You’re not hurt?” Eames asked. The only injury that he could see was a fresh graze that glowed vividly against his cheek. Arthur’s cellphone trilled then and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call.
“A few bruises and scratches. One of them tried to introduce me to a brick wall.” He rolled the sleeve of his shirt up to reveal the carbon-fiber socket of his prosthetic, stripped the glove off his right hand. The lifelike silicone of the cosmetic prosthetic that he had worn seemed unnaturally pink against the machined steel connector on the wrist joint.
“You lost them,” Arthur said. It was not a question. Suicidal or not, Eames knew that Christian was smart enough to not lead his pursuers back to a hideout, even a temporary one.
“More than that.” No more needed to be said. Christian unlocked the connector and pulled the cosmetic hand off, replaced it with the titanium Dorrance hook that he wore most of the time. His movements were smooth and practiced as he hooked the cable back up to the quick-lock on the harness he wore. “Ariadne is upset,” he said as he tested the cables, opening and closing the hook experimentally before he rolled his sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff back up.
“She’s only ever done corporate work,” Eames sighed and pulled out a Dunhill, flicked his lighter open. “I don’t think she’s used to people dying.”
“It feels to me like she is expecting Ocean’s Eleven and getting - ” Christian took his left glove off and flexed his fingers, shrugged ruefully. “Us. Maybe I should try to talk with her.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know if she’s still angry about the last time,” Eames said. He took a long drag on his cigarette, ran his finger lightly across his neck to underscore his point.
“I think I should apologize for that, too. Besides, I know how hard she can hit. She has good teachers.” Christian picked his messenger bag back up and tried to stuff his bloodstained jacket in it, his good hand trembling from a mixture of exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.
“Well, don’t bollocks this up,” Eames said, a sudden taste of salt sharp in his nostrils and mouth as he realized just how tired Christian was. “You don’t want to scare her away.”
“No,” Christian said as he fastened the flap of his messenger bag and checked the front of his shirt for any missed bloodstains. If he had noticed Eames staring he had also chosen to ignore it. “She is much too nice for that.”
“Vladimir wants to see me,” Arthur said as he saw the both of them enter the stockroom. “Probably wants me reporting in on the hit.” Ariadne was nowhere to be seen, but Eames caught a glimpse of her in the alleyway outside - someone had propped the door open with a chunk of brick to let fresh air in. Probably Arthur, he thought. Arthur thought of everything.
“Do you want me to come along for translation?” Christian asked carefully. Vladimir’s English was accented but passable and Eames knew that Christian’s offer did not involve any kind of translation whatsoever. Non-survivable stab wounds overcame most language barriers.
“No.” Arthur checked the time on his watch, adjusted the holster in his right trouser pocket. “I don’t want him to think I need armed backup if I’m just reporting in. I’ll be taking Pandora, though.”
“Go ahead.” Eames let him take the MP5K in its briefcase, took the Vintorez from him in exchange. “That makes, what, four guns concealed on your person so far?” he asked.
“Four, yeah,” Arthur nodded, his eyes dark with some kind of worry.
It didn’t take a genius to guess what Arthur was worried about, and Eames was familiar enough with him that he knew no answer would be forthcoming unless he did some prompting of his own. “What happened with Ariadne?” he asked.
Arthur sighed, and when he spoke the words came slowly like droplets of blood from a scratch. “She’s - she’s not too happy with how I shot someone in front of his nine-year-old kid.”
“It’s cruel, but now he’s dead she might have a chance to grow up outside his world.” Christian murmured with a half-shrug as he checked the curved blade of his pruning knife for damage. Is that what you wish had happened to you? Eames wondered silently.
“Look - be nice to Ari, okay?” Arthur said with a warning look in Christian’s direction. “I have to go before Vladimir decides to tell Nikolai I didn’t show.”
“Ari, eh?” Christian asked, pronouncing the word as though it were Finnish. A faint smile of genuine amusement was visible through the unruly hair drifting over his face.
Arthur shook his head and chuckled, and in that moment his neutral façade cracked with the crow’s feet around his eyes. Eames could not help but grin in response. “Don’t tease him, Chris.”
Christian let the smile drop from his face, suddenly respectful. “Don’t worry. I will treat her with kid gloves.”
Arthur nodded once in acknowledgement and left out the front door, leaving them alone in the stockroom.
They found Ariadne sitting on a low crate in the alley behind the stockroom, hunched over with her forearms resting on her thighs. Eames noted with a faint pride that her training had asserted itself even in the midst of an emotional crisis - she had retained enough presence of mind to put her jacket on over her holstered sidearm. Christian crossed over to sit on the ground beside the crate while Eames watched them from the back door. She wiped at her eyes with a wad of tissue paper and sniffed wordlessly as he settled himself to her left, his legs stretched gracelessly before him.
“What is it?” she asked him in a tear-choked voice.
“I’d ask you if you were okay,” he said, as he offered her a clean handkerchief - it looked like the one Petra had given him after his meeting with Nikolai, albeit after having been run through the laundry at least once - “but I think you would agree that it’s a stupid question at this point.”
“Yeah.” Ariadne smiled warily despite herself, and then burst into tears again. She made no move to pick up the handkerchief, and Christian had to get up on his knees and wipe the tears from her chin himself.
“It’s okay,” he said, and then froze as she wrapped her arms around his neck and cried quietly on his shoulder. Help me, he mouthed silently at Eames as he patted her awkwardly on the back. Eames levered himself off the doorframe and took a step towards them, worried about how Christian was going to take this unexpected closeness. He had put a gentle hand on her shoulder when she started to talk, the words coming out in a choppy rush.
“I know you probably think I’m really stupid or just some kind of lightweight,” she said at last, her voice muffled slightly against Christian’s shoulder.
“Why would I think that?” Christian asked her, the tension in his spine easing a little as she let go of him. “You’re smarter than most people I know and you hit very hard.”
“I just can’t get over having to kill a man in front of his little girl,” Ariadne said wearily as she sagged back against the wall. “I know he’s probably all kinds of bastard but I can’t help but think we’re the same kind of bastards too.”
“That I am,” Christian murmured. He rocked back on his heels to get a little distance from her, steadied her with his left hand as he spoke again, “but I think maybe she won’t have to grow up thinking what he did was normal.”
“I know, but it’s still hard for me,” she said, fresh tears running down her cheeks. “Maybe I should have listened to Eames when he warned me in Paris.”
“Now you’ve said this where he can hear you he’s not going to let you forget that, you know,” Christian said with a wicked glance in his direction.
“It isn’t very often that I get to hear I’m right, you know,” Eames said, smiling as he heard Ariadne hiccup weakly as she tried not to laugh and cry at the same time.
“I mean, Arthur’s some kind of badass special operations type, you’re a former spy,” she said to Eames, “and you’re, uh - ” Her words trailed off as she tried to find a polite descriptor for Christian’s rather shady past.
“A hitman and cleaner,” Christian said simply as Ariadne remained silent and stared downwards, her fingers knotted together in her lap. “I don’t make any excuses for what I have done,” he said softly while he wiped the tears gently from her face. “My father decided to start me early and it’s what I’d known since I was nine.”
“Jesus,” she breathed softly as Eames squeezed gently on her shoulder. She looked up at him, her eyes riveted to his in horror and sympathy. “I guess that explains why you’re okay with all this stuff.”
“I am most emphatically not okay,” Christian said with a rueful shrug, “which brings me to my point.”
Ariadne nodded slowly then, as though digesting what she had just heard. “I’m sorry I hit you last week,” she said softly after a few moments of silence. “I was just so scared.”
“I’m sorry too. I’ve been alone so long I forget other people have feelings too.” Christian paused, glanced at Eames, who made an elaborate show of looking skyward, a cupped hand held over his brow. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the flying pigs,” he said archly in a bid to disguise his relief. “I never thought I would live to hear you make any kind of apology.” This at least was true.
Christian’s reply was characteristically him, testy and just a little too straight-faced. “I have a knife, you know,” he said simply.
“I thought you were trying not to scare her.” Eames shrugged in mock innocence and smiled inwardly at the familiarity of that reply. It was the kind of thing he would say every time he wanted Eames out of his way in the kitchen.
“That would not scare her,” Christian said as he stood slowly and stiffly. “She talks about going after professors with a box cutter.”
Ariadne wiped at her cheek with the back of a hand, smiled weakly through her frown. “I probably shouldn’t be glad that you like my attitude, but -” She cut herself off, shook her head and looked up at Eames. “I’m not going to ask if we’re doing the right thing, because I don’t want to convince myself this is right. But we’re doing the best we can, right?”
Eames met her gaze; saw the trust beneath the doubt in those soft dark eyes. “Given the circumstances, I would say yes,” he said slowly as he stepped forward to help her up from her crouch. “That said, I’m not perfect. I could be wrong.”
“We all could be,” Christian murmured. His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket then, and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call. Ariadne watched him leave and then looked down at her hand in Eames’ own as though self-conscious at the contact.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked her as he let go of her hand.
“Some, yeah,” she said with a weak shrug as she glanced in the direction of the store’s back door and the stockroom beyond. “I guess the only thing I can do is keep going. Did you know all that about Christian? From before, I mean, with his dad.”
Eames shook his head a little sadly, let out a long exhalation that wanted to be a sigh. So much made sense now. “This is the first time I’ve heard that,” he said. “Now I understand why he never talked to me about his family.”
To his vague surprise Ariadne reached up and squeezed his bicep gently, echoing his own gesture from before. “Because he feels guilty?” she asked.
“Because he wants so badly to seem normal,” Eames murmured. It was all so obvious now, and he felt a stab of guilt somewhere beneath his diaphragm as he thought about their breakup three years ago. He wasn’t the kind of man who wanted to turn time back - that led to madness - but it didn’t stop him from kicking himself now that he realized how wrong he had been.
“Eames,” Ariadne said, loudly, and he looked down at her and realized he had missed her in his bitter reverie.
“Mm?”
“You can’t blame yourself for this, you understand,” she said with another squeeze at his arm. “Christian’s not exactly the most talkative guy on Earth and you can’t read minds.”
“There are some times I wish I could,” he said pensively, as he pondered Arthur’s own reserve. The problem with having a weakness for the silent type was having to guess constantly at what they were thinking when they felt like being uncommunicative, which was often, and in Christian’s case, almost a mathematical constant.
Ariadne shrugged, glanced up at him. “Yeah, but then you’d get bored because nobody would ever want to play poker with you again,” she said straight-faced, and he could not help but laugh from a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. Even now Ariadne was the most levelheaded person around and he could not help but feel a little ashamed at how he had been indulging in self-pity while she wrestled with being an accessory to murder.
The next few days passed in relative boredom punctuated with minor flurries of activity. Christian had, with a certain amount of back-and-forth with a discreet real estate agent, secured them some space in the shuttered clinic beside the dispensary that Yusuf and Petra had set up shop in. The arrangement would make the inevitable testing and dry runs more convenient and the examination rooms actually worked as passable bedrooms. Not that the pharmacy space was actually much use right now - Eames had yet to receive the data that his contact at Whitehall had promised to send, which meant that for the most part the chemists sat around hypothesizing various angles of attack instead of actually experimenting.
“I’m still billing you for this, you understand,” Petra had said during one of their afternoon meetings. “There’s other shit I could be doing.”
“Like what?” Yusuf asked her. “Drink bad beer and attend metal concerts?”
“That still counts as shit I could be doing besides hanging out with you, but then getting a root canal’s probably preferable to spending time with you,” she said with an insincere grin.
Arthur cleared his throat loudly from behind his Moleskine notebook, shutting both the chemists up. “In any case,” he said, “I’m going ahead with our plan whether or not you figure out a solution for the intrusions countermeasures, which means our top priority is getting out of our mark’s head mostly alive. The first issue I’ve identified is that kicks have to be set up ahead of time. In a setup like this we’re probably not going to get the time or space to do so. That rules out multiple dream levels.”
“There’s always the old standby of shooting ourselves, as long as we keep our realities straight.” Christian sat slouched in his chair, his legs stretched out under the table. He took a long pull on his premixed protein shake and made a slight face. “Is it just me or does this taste like liver? Strawberries should not taste meaty.” He frowned as Petra mouthed something in his direction - something that Eames did not catch but probably amounted to the Finnish or Russian equivalent of big girl’s blouse.
“I’m not the one on four different psychiatric medications here,” Eames said before they could start throwing stationery at each other again. He wasn’t even sure if four was the right number here - he couldn’t remember how many prescriptions Christian had exactly.
“I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy,” Christian said easily. “That is not a problem with me.”
Arthur made a note in his Moleskine. “Okay. So we haven’t got anything more elegant than shooting ourselves in the head. What about the IV protocol issue? Most of the time we run fast-and-loose with it in the field, but cross-contamination is a problem here.”
“I could mark a dedicated line for Christian’s use while we’re testing,” Petra said, “but there’s too much margin for fuckup in the field.” She pulled out her pack of Ziganovs and tucked one behind her left ear for later, gnawed on the lipstick-smudged end of her pencil stub instead.
“Two PASIV units,” Yusuf said with a slight shrug. “We slave one to the other with a hardware connection, the IV systems remain segregated. No chance for a contaminated needle-stick that way.”
“Is that doable?” Christian asked with a glance in Arthur’s direction. “You’re the hardware expert here.”
“Might have some slight lag-time on your end,” Arthur said after a few moments of thought, “but it’s negligible in a single-layer setup. Can you handle being a couple seconds behind everyone?”
“Back home we call that a hangover,” Christian said with his hair hanging over his face, his voice soft with amusement as he rolled one of his pill bottles around in his left hand.
“Cute,” Arthur said dryly. “Ariadne? You looked like you wanted to say something.”
“Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, okay?” she asked. “Right now there’s no reliable way to tell whether or not someone’s had the IC used on them. If they haven’t, then the extraction goes on as normal, and if they have then we’re all in trouble.”
“Right,” Arthur nodded as he saw where she was headed.
“If we’re going in expecting a fight, we probably should all be armed to the teeth, but then I have to figure out a context where that won’t let the mark know he’s dreaming. People don’t walk down the street with grenade launchers. Not in most places, anyway,” she said with a quick glance in Eames’ direction.
“We could dream something up -” he started to say, and then stopped when he realized what she had been trying to say.
“Yeah, but if we change the dream too much the projections all automatically find us. No, if we’re going to have to bring an armory in I’m going to have to cache it, which means we’re going to brush up against suspension of disbelief if we have to start pulling it out. It’s kinda a catch-22.” That was not an angle Eames had thought of initially, and it impressed him. Ariadne really was going to be unstoppable if she decided to continue working in dreamshare after this.
“The weaponry problem would be an issue if we were going to set up an extraction as a regular business meeting, but -” Christian smiled nastily, sharp teeth glinting behind his messy hair. “Do you know how to plan a good bank robbery, Ariadne?”
“No,” she said doubtfully, unsure of where this conversation was going to lead.
His smile widened as he straightened up in his chair and leaned in towards her conspiratorially. “Well, would you like to learn how?” he asked.
Author: Mel Wong, @ chn_breathmint on Livejournal and AO3.
Characters/Pairings: Eames, Arthur, Ariadne, Yusuf, OCs. Eames/Arthur flirting, Arthur/Eames attraction, Arthur/Ariadne attraction (and vice versa), Ariadne/Eames attraction (and vice versa), eventual Eames/Arthur/Ariadne OT3, Eames/OMC ex-relationship, Arthur/OFC ex-relationship, Yusuf/OFC relationship (eventually.)
Status: WIP
Rating: R for language, graphic violence, sexuality, drug use, other nasty stuff.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Inception or its characters.
Word Count: 5613
Summary: This is the fic I’ve spent 50k words winding up to - Eames and Arthur finally enact their mission of payback, but to get to their targets they have to go through the Russian mafia first.
Warnings: Foul deeds of murder and darkness, even more gratuitous gunporn, rather naughty Finnish and angst all around.
Notes: Thank you to skiriki for the Finn-picking and to heronymus_waat for the beta. I haven’t translated the Finnish for this because the meaning’s pretty obvious even without.
An improvised sniper roost in an empty office was probably one of the stranger places to hold any kind of heart-to-heart talk, but Eames had had similarly personal chats in odder places, among them the changing room in an exclusive lingerie store and the pantry in a Michelin three-star restaurant. Intelligence work tended to take a man odd places and this was hardly the weirdest.
“Do you think she’s going to stay?” Arthur asked as he glanced through the scope of his new sniper rifle, covering the square beneath them in a slow, careful sweep. Eames didn’t expect their target to come their way this early, but Arthur was still slightly unused to the sights and action on that particular rifle and the grouping on his practice shots had not been as tight as he had liked.
“Ariadne? I think she has what it takes to finish the job, but - ” Eames paused, scrawled the wind direction on a scrap of notepaper and then checked the distance to the street with a laser rangefinder again. “I don’t think she expected us to be committing bloody murder, as it were.”
“Maybe I should have been more clear with her from the start,” Arthur sighed. He put the rifle back down and took a quick sip from a bottle of water, offered it to Eames, who shook his head and pulled his smartphone from his jacket pocket.
“I don’t see how we could have been any clearer when she told us she was going to come along, back in Paris,” Eames said after he pulled an app up on the touchscreen. “Maybe she wasn’t as familiar with her Milton as I had hoped.”
“400 meters is the most I can manage with this rifle,” Arthur whispered as he looked out at the street with Eames’ field glasses. “Hope he doesn’t take too much of a detour picking his kid up from piano lessons.”
“The usual route on his itinerary is well within your range. Trust my working,” Eames grinned slyly at Arthur - a wasted gesture with Arthur still staring down at street level through the field glasses.
“You did say math wasn’t your strong suit,” Arthur said as he checked his watch, glanced at the scribbled calculations on the messy notes Eames had taken.
Eames only held out his smartphone and waved it in Arthur’s direction. “There’s an app for it.”
“Figures,” Arthur muttered as he picked up the phone and checked the calculations against Eames’ own, nodding quietly as the numbers added up. “I do wonder what you have to gain from acting like some kind of idiot.”
“Nothing but your condescension, which is something of an acquired taste,” Eames chuckled half to himself as he pulled a Dunhill from the pack in his shirt pocket, lit it and offered it to Arthur.
“I don’t know if I should be relieved or offended that you’ve started flirting at me again,” Arthur said as he accepted the lighted cigarette from Eames.
Take it as a compliment, Eames thought but did not say as he watched Arthur inhale deeply. He always refused to carry cigarettes or a lighter, a quirk that Eames found vaguely charming - as though that obstinacy made all those cadged cigarettes not count. “What was that about quitting, by the way?” he asked too-gently, “About, oh, two years ago?”
“Quitting is easy. I’ve done it lots of times.” Arthur said. Fragrant smoke curled out of Arthur’s nostrils to mingle with the pepper and frankincense of his cologne. Bluish wisps unfurled about his head to give his sharp features a draconic cast, and Eames could not help but think of how the smoke would taste in Arthur’s mouth if he stole a kiss right now. Instead he lit a cigarette for himself and took a long drag, held it in his lungs until his head filled with light.
This is not the time and place, he reminded himself as he exhaled. We have a job to do. He squinted out of the window and glanced down into the busy street. Christian was somewhere in the lunchtime crowd, spotting from street level so that Arthur could move quickly if their mark decided to take another route today.
We have a man to kill today, Eames thought as he tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the windowsill. Ariadne probably has the right of it - we are murderous bastards.
Eames didn’t think of himself as any kind of saint, but he liked to think that assassination was generally beneath his usual modus operandi. Very few extractions began or ended in any kind of murder - things had often gone irreversibly wrong by the time the guns came out. Any shooting usually happened in self-defense when jobs went wrong or when clients tried to screw them over. This wasn’t a normal extraction, however - for one, dreams were only one part of the train wreck they were heading into. This was the sort of thing he generally considered suicidal - it never paid to get involved in any kind of vendetta, let alone one driven by a former extractor of questionable sanity. The problem with avoidance in this case was that if the intrusions countermeasures made it out of Woodruff’s hands there wouldn’t be an extraction scene left to work in after all was said and done.
This situation left them without the luxury of retreat or a moral high ground when Nikolai had laid out the conditions for their little Russian excursion. The team would be permitted to operate under his protection provided they helped him rub out a rival - an act that would force the team to pick a side. It made perfect sense. They were, for all intents and purposes, a dangerous wild card in a situation that was going to unravel fast once the guns came out. Forcing the team to announce their affiliation in a high-profile assassination meant that they would be unable to turn around and sell him to another faction - a matter of some import considering Christian’s calculated betrayal of Sergey and Woodruff.
That uneasy give-and-take was utterly familiar to Eames, and he knew that most of the others had been in the scene long enough to know how such things worked - which left Ariadne. It was clear that the prospect of outright murder bothered her conscience - she made a game attempt at hiding her discomfort, but in some ways she was as transparent as window glass, and so very young. At least Nikolai had not been stingy on the equipment. Eames had no idea where his people had acquired a VSS Vintorez, but neither he nor Arthur had complained when Vladimir had delivered it to them in its special briefcase.
They waited for another tense half-hour before Eames’ phone buzzed ominously. He checked the caller ID, picked up the call and put it on speakerphone as Arthur picked up the rifle and took careful aim.
“I see his armored car,” Christian whispered from the other end. Eames glanced through his binoculars, spotted Christian across the street from their mark, inconspicuous. “They’re turning the corner right now.”
“I see him,” Eames said. “Do you have him, Arthur?”
“Yeah, I see him,” Arthur murmured. He swiveled the rifle lightly out the open window, making minute adjustments as he settled the crosshairs over the armored car. “One of his bodyguards is getting out first.”
“I see that. Get ready to run interference if we need it, Chris,” Eames said. He checked the range on the shot - a little inside 380 meters, which Arthur could manage with the Vintorez.
“Ehkä,” Christian murmured through his Bluetooth earpiece. Maybe. Eames smiled grimly as he watched Christian stop a decent distance away from their mark and glance around at a crosswalk like any other jaywalker. A near-accident would distract everyone if Arthur needed an extra second to line up the shot.
“He’s getting out now. Come on…” Arthur whispered as he adjusted his aim. Eames watched the mark climb out of his car, flanked by black-suited bodyguards. The late afternoon sunlight gleamed off the rims of his glasses and off his thinning hair, and he looked more like an accountant than the mobster he actually was. The only giveaways were the tattoos showing above the collar of his shirt.
“Pulunnussija needs to hurry up,” Christian hissed. He stood at the crosswalk, smartphone in his gloved right hand as though checking the time.
“Language,” Arthur said mildly as he raised the muzzle of the Vintorez minutely to compensate for drop. “Get ready, Eames.”
You don’t even know what that word means, Eames wanted to say, but did not. Instead he reached into his trouser pocket and let his thumb brush lightly over the trigger button on the detonator, cleared his throat before speaking again. “I’m ready when you are,” he said, turning away from the window as he waited for Arthur’s cue.
“Just a little bit more… two more steps,” Arthur said, his voice dropping to a whisper as he slipped his finger in the trigger guard. His shoulders tensed as he held his breath and then there was the distinctive pssht of the Vintorez as its integral suppressor muffled the report of its subsonic round.
Eames hit the button on the detonator as Arthur fired and was rewarded with a faint-but-distinctive crack a half-second later. Arthur had decided to take advantage of the rifle’s quietness by planting a harmless explosive charge nearly a kilometer away from their position - the sound it made when detonated would convince their target’s bodyguards that the sniper was 800 meters away from where they really were and buy them time to leave the scene discreetly.
“Nice shot,” Christian murmured through his earpiece as he confirmed the kill visually. “See you back at the safehouse.” There was a soft staticky sound as he ended the phone call.
Eames glanced down at the scene through his field glasses as Arthur started to disassemble the rifle and put it back in its carrying case. A messy streak of red had smeared across the plate-glass doors as the man had fallen forward, and hell had started to break loose as pedestrians froze in place and the bodyguards broke forward in a futile attempt to protect their now-dead employer. Christian was nowhere to be seen but Eames didn’t need to see him to know where he was - he could imagine him darting down an alleyway, footsteps light and quick.
“I’m heading out,” Arthur said from his right, and Eames nodded absently as he folded the field glasses and tucked them away in a jacket pocket. He pinched his cigarette out between thumb and forefinger and dropped the butt out of the window before he left the empty office with Arthur’s MP5K in his grip.
The trip back to their temporary hideout was uneventful for the most part, but Eames knew something was amiss when he arrived and found Ariadne pacing amidst the dusty mannequins from when this space had once been a clothing shop.
“What are you doing here, love?” he asked her. “Weren’t you supposed to have gone ahead with Yusuf and Petra?” Christian had arranged for the chemists to set up shop in a former dispensary, and she was supposed to have gone on with them earlier that afternoon.
“I told them I’d wait for you,” she said. She had left her jacket hanging on an empty clothing rack and Eames noticed that she was carrying her Skyph in a holster behind her right hip. “Where’s Christian?” she asked. “Arthur says he should have been here by now.”
“I don’t know. We all took separate routes,” Eames said. He pulled out his smartphone and checked his messages, but there were none.
“I thought he’d have waited to come back with you,” said Arthur as he emerged from the stockroom to stand in the doorway linking it to the front of the shop.
Motes of dust danced in the thin shafts of sunlight leaking through the newspapers taped over the empty windows and Eames had to fight the urge to sneeze. Instead he tucked his phone away and shrugged. “He might have had to double back to lose a tail.”
“I guess I shouldn’t worry about him,” Ariadne said doubtfully, “But I do. Things went okay?” She wiped at her own nose with a tissue and glanced up at him as though afraid, and Eames was fairly sure the red around her eyes was not from any kind of dust or allergy.
“As well as anything like this can,” Arthur said before he vanished back into the stockroom, where he waited for Vladimir to call.
Ariadne nodded silently in reply and then turned away abruptly with the tissue balled up in her fist, knuckles white from tension.
“You’re not all right,” Eames said as the quiet started to ring in his ears.
“No, I’m not,” she said, more curtly than usual. There was a tension in her spine and a stiffness in Arthur’s carriage that made Eames guess as to the source of her recent sniffles. He pondered the wisdom of asking about it but was pre-empted by the sound of the back door opening with a low creak.
“It’s me,” a familiar raspy voice said, the words muffled slightly by the distance as the door swung shut. “Sorry I’m late.” Christian stepped through the doorway into the dusty showroom and the reasons for his lateness soon became obvious. He was still breathing hard, his long hair stuck to his face with sweat, and he sagged against a wall with a weary sigh.
“Christian, you’re - you - “ Ariadne’s voice faltered as she registered the blood spotting his face and the left sleeve of his jacket. She bit her lip then and then turned and retreated to the stockroom, shoulders shaking. Arthur passed her on the way out of the stockroom and shook his head in frustration as the back door slammed behind him.
“What happened to you?” he asked after Christian managed to catch his breath.
“Two of his bodyguards got suspicious. They tailed me, tried to take me down in an alley. Did not work.” Christian dropped his open messenger bag on the floor and shrugged his bloodstained jacket off, wiped the blood splatter off his face with it.
“You’re not hurt?” Eames asked. The only injury that he could see was a fresh graze that glowed vividly against his cheek. Arthur’s cellphone trilled then and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call.
“A few bruises and scratches. One of them tried to introduce me to a brick wall.” He rolled the sleeve of his shirt up to reveal the carbon-fiber socket of his prosthetic, stripped the glove off his right hand. The lifelike silicone of the cosmetic prosthetic that he had worn seemed unnaturally pink against the machined steel connector on the wrist joint.
“You lost them,” Arthur said. It was not a question. Suicidal or not, Eames knew that Christian was smart enough to not lead his pursuers back to a hideout, even a temporary one.
“More than that.” No more needed to be said. Christian unlocked the connector and pulled the cosmetic hand off, replaced it with the titanium Dorrance hook that he wore most of the time. His movements were smooth and practiced as he hooked the cable back up to the quick-lock on the harness he wore. “Ariadne is upset,” he said as he tested the cables, opening and closing the hook experimentally before he rolled his sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff back up.
“She’s only ever done corporate work,” Eames sighed and pulled out a Dunhill, flicked his lighter open. “I don’t think she’s used to people dying.”
“It feels to me like she is expecting Ocean’s Eleven and getting - ” Christian took his left glove off and flexed his fingers, shrugged ruefully. “Us. Maybe I should try to talk with her.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know if she’s still angry about the last time,” Eames said. He took a long drag on his cigarette, ran his finger lightly across his neck to underscore his point.
“I think I should apologize for that, too. Besides, I know how hard she can hit. She has good teachers.” Christian picked his messenger bag back up and tried to stuff his bloodstained jacket in it, his good hand trembling from a mixture of exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.
“Well, don’t bollocks this up,” Eames said, a sudden taste of salt sharp in his nostrils and mouth as he realized just how tired Christian was. “You don’t want to scare her away.”
“No,” Christian said as he fastened the flap of his messenger bag and checked the front of his shirt for any missed bloodstains. If he had noticed Eames staring he had also chosen to ignore it. “She is much too nice for that.”
“Vladimir wants to see me,” Arthur said as he saw the both of them enter the stockroom. “Probably wants me reporting in on the hit.” Ariadne was nowhere to be seen, but Eames caught a glimpse of her in the alleyway outside - someone had propped the door open with a chunk of brick to let fresh air in. Probably Arthur, he thought. Arthur thought of everything.
“Do you want me to come along for translation?” Christian asked carefully. Vladimir’s English was accented but passable and Eames knew that Christian’s offer did not involve any kind of translation whatsoever. Non-survivable stab wounds overcame most language barriers.
“No.” Arthur checked the time on his watch, adjusted the holster in his right trouser pocket. “I don’t want him to think I need armed backup if I’m just reporting in. I’ll be taking Pandora, though.”
“Go ahead.” Eames let him take the MP5K in its briefcase, took the Vintorez from him in exchange. “That makes, what, four guns concealed on your person so far?” he asked.
“Four, yeah,” Arthur nodded, his eyes dark with some kind of worry.
It didn’t take a genius to guess what Arthur was worried about, and Eames was familiar enough with him that he knew no answer would be forthcoming unless he did some prompting of his own. “What happened with Ariadne?” he asked.
Arthur sighed, and when he spoke the words came slowly like droplets of blood from a scratch. “She’s - she’s not too happy with how I shot someone in front of his nine-year-old kid.”
“It’s cruel, but now he’s dead she might have a chance to grow up outside his world.” Christian murmured with a half-shrug as he checked the curved blade of his pruning knife for damage. Is that what you wish had happened to you? Eames wondered silently.
“Look - be nice to Ari, okay?” Arthur said with a warning look in Christian’s direction. “I have to go before Vladimir decides to tell Nikolai I didn’t show.”
“Ari, eh?” Christian asked, pronouncing the word as though it were Finnish. A faint smile of genuine amusement was visible through the unruly hair drifting over his face.
Arthur shook his head and chuckled, and in that moment his neutral façade cracked with the crow’s feet around his eyes. Eames could not help but grin in response. “Don’t tease him, Chris.”
Christian let the smile drop from his face, suddenly respectful. “Don’t worry. I will treat her with kid gloves.”
Arthur nodded once in acknowledgement and left out the front door, leaving them alone in the stockroom.
They found Ariadne sitting on a low crate in the alley behind the stockroom, hunched over with her forearms resting on her thighs. Eames noted with a faint pride that her training had asserted itself even in the midst of an emotional crisis - she had retained enough presence of mind to put her jacket on over her holstered sidearm. Christian crossed over to sit on the ground beside the crate while Eames watched them from the back door. She wiped at her eyes with a wad of tissue paper and sniffed wordlessly as he settled himself to her left, his legs stretched gracelessly before him.
“What is it?” she asked him in a tear-choked voice.
“I’d ask you if you were okay,” he said, as he offered her a clean handkerchief - it looked like the one Petra had given him after his meeting with Nikolai, albeit after having been run through the laundry at least once - “but I think you would agree that it’s a stupid question at this point.”
“Yeah.” Ariadne smiled warily despite herself, and then burst into tears again. She made no move to pick up the handkerchief, and Christian had to get up on his knees and wipe the tears from her chin himself.
“It’s okay,” he said, and then froze as she wrapped her arms around his neck and cried quietly on his shoulder. Help me, he mouthed silently at Eames as he patted her awkwardly on the back. Eames levered himself off the doorframe and took a step towards them, worried about how Christian was going to take this unexpected closeness. He had put a gentle hand on her shoulder when she started to talk, the words coming out in a choppy rush.
“I know you probably think I’m really stupid or just some kind of lightweight,” she said at last, her voice muffled slightly against Christian’s shoulder.
“Why would I think that?” Christian asked her, the tension in his spine easing a little as she let go of him. “You’re smarter than most people I know and you hit very hard.”
“I just can’t get over having to kill a man in front of his little girl,” Ariadne said wearily as she sagged back against the wall. “I know he’s probably all kinds of bastard but I can’t help but think we’re the same kind of bastards too.”
“That I am,” Christian murmured. He rocked back on his heels to get a little distance from her, steadied her with his left hand as he spoke again, “but I think maybe she won’t have to grow up thinking what he did was normal.”
“I know, but it’s still hard for me,” she said, fresh tears running down her cheeks. “Maybe I should have listened to Eames when he warned me in Paris.”
“Now you’ve said this where he can hear you he’s not going to let you forget that, you know,” Christian said with a wicked glance in his direction.
“It isn’t very often that I get to hear I’m right, you know,” Eames said, smiling as he heard Ariadne hiccup weakly as she tried not to laugh and cry at the same time.
“I mean, Arthur’s some kind of badass special operations type, you’re a former spy,” she said to Eames, “and you’re, uh - ” Her words trailed off as she tried to find a polite descriptor for Christian’s rather shady past.
“A hitman and cleaner,” Christian said simply as Ariadne remained silent and stared downwards, her fingers knotted together in her lap. “I don’t make any excuses for what I have done,” he said softly while he wiped the tears gently from her face. “My father decided to start me early and it’s what I’d known since I was nine.”
“Jesus,” she breathed softly as Eames squeezed gently on her shoulder. She looked up at him, her eyes riveted to his in horror and sympathy. “I guess that explains why you’re okay with all this stuff.”
“I am most emphatically not okay,” Christian said with a rueful shrug, “which brings me to my point.”
Ariadne nodded slowly then, as though digesting what she had just heard. “I’m sorry I hit you last week,” she said softly after a few moments of silence. “I was just so scared.”
“I’m sorry too. I’ve been alone so long I forget other people have feelings too.” Christian paused, glanced at Eames, who made an elaborate show of looking skyward, a cupped hand held over his brow. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the flying pigs,” he said archly in a bid to disguise his relief. “I never thought I would live to hear you make any kind of apology.” This at least was true.
Christian’s reply was characteristically him, testy and just a little too straight-faced. “I have a knife, you know,” he said simply.
“I thought you were trying not to scare her.” Eames shrugged in mock innocence and smiled inwardly at the familiarity of that reply. It was the kind of thing he would say every time he wanted Eames out of his way in the kitchen.
“That would not scare her,” Christian said as he stood slowly and stiffly. “She talks about going after professors with a box cutter.”
Ariadne wiped at her cheek with the back of a hand, smiled weakly through her frown. “I probably shouldn’t be glad that you like my attitude, but -” She cut herself off, shook her head and looked up at Eames. “I’m not going to ask if we’re doing the right thing, because I don’t want to convince myself this is right. But we’re doing the best we can, right?”
Eames met her gaze; saw the trust beneath the doubt in those soft dark eyes. “Given the circumstances, I would say yes,” he said slowly as he stepped forward to help her up from her crouch. “That said, I’m not perfect. I could be wrong.”
“We all could be,” Christian murmured. His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket then, and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call. Ariadne watched him leave and then looked down at her hand in Eames’ own as though self-conscious at the contact.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked her as he let go of her hand.
“Some, yeah,” she said with a weak shrug as she glanced in the direction of the store’s back door and the stockroom beyond. “I guess the only thing I can do is keep going. Did you know all that about Christian? From before, I mean, with his dad.”
Eames shook his head a little sadly, let out a long exhalation that wanted to be a sigh. So much made sense now. “This is the first time I’ve heard that,” he said. “Now I understand why he never talked to me about his family.”
To his vague surprise Ariadne reached up and squeezed his bicep gently, echoing his own gesture from before. “Because he feels guilty?” she asked.
“Because he wants so badly to seem normal,” Eames murmured. It was all so obvious now, and he felt a stab of guilt somewhere beneath his diaphragm as he thought about their breakup three years ago. He wasn’t the kind of man who wanted to turn time back - that led to madness - but it didn’t stop him from kicking himself now that he realized how wrong he had been.
“Eames,” Ariadne said, loudly, and he looked down at her and realized he had missed her in his bitter reverie.
“Mm?”
“You can’t blame yourself for this, you understand,” she said with another squeeze at his arm. “Christian’s not exactly the most talkative guy on Earth and you can’t read minds.”
“There are some times I wish I could,” he said pensively, as he pondered Arthur’s own reserve. The problem with having a weakness for the silent type was having to guess constantly at what they were thinking when they felt like being uncommunicative, which was often, and in Christian’s case, almost a mathematical constant.
Ariadne shrugged, glanced up at him. “Yeah, but then you’d get bored because nobody would ever want to play poker with you again,” she said straight-faced, and he could not help but laugh from a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. Even now Ariadne was the most levelheaded person around and he could not help but feel a little ashamed at how he had been indulging in self-pity while she wrestled with being an accessory to murder.
The next few days passed in relative boredom punctuated with minor flurries of activity. Christian had, with a certain amount of back-and-forth with a discreet real estate agent, secured them some space in the shuttered clinic beside the dispensary that Yusuf and Petra had set up shop in. The arrangement would make the inevitable testing and dry runs more convenient and the examination rooms actually worked as passable bedrooms. Not that the pharmacy space was actually much use right now - Eames had yet to receive the data that his contact at Whitehall had promised to send, which meant that for the most part the chemists sat around hypothesizing various angles of attack instead of actually experimenting.
“I’m still billing you for this, you understand,” Petra had said during one of their afternoon meetings. “There’s other shit I could be doing.”
“Like what?” Yusuf asked her. “Drink bad beer and attend metal concerts?”
“That still counts as shit I could be doing besides hanging out with you, but then getting a root canal’s probably preferable to spending time with you,” she said with an insincere grin.
Arthur cleared his throat loudly from behind his Moleskine notebook, shutting both the chemists up. “In any case,” he said, “I’m going ahead with our plan whether or not you figure out a solution for the intrusions countermeasures, which means our top priority is getting out of our mark’s head mostly alive. The first issue I’ve identified is that kicks have to be set up ahead of time. In a setup like this we’re probably not going to get the time or space to do so. That rules out multiple dream levels.”
“There’s always the old standby of shooting ourselves, as long as we keep our realities straight.” Christian sat slouched in his chair, his legs stretched out under the table. He took a long pull on his premixed protein shake and made a slight face. “Is it just me or does this taste like liver? Strawberries should not taste meaty.” He frowned as Petra mouthed something in his direction - something that Eames did not catch but probably amounted to the Finnish or Russian equivalent of big girl’s blouse.
“I’m not the one on four different psychiatric medications here,” Eames said before they could start throwing stationery at each other again. He wasn’t even sure if four was the right number here - he couldn’t remember how many prescriptions Christian had exactly.
“I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy,” Christian said easily. “That is not a problem with me.”
Arthur made a note in his Moleskine. “Okay. So we haven’t got anything more elegant than shooting ourselves in the head. What about the IV protocol issue? Most of the time we run fast-and-loose with it in the field, but cross-contamination is a problem here.”
“I could mark a dedicated line for Christian’s use while we’re testing,” Petra said, “but there’s too much margin for fuckup in the field.” She pulled out her pack of Ziganovs and tucked one behind her left ear for later, gnawed on the lipstick-smudged end of her pencil stub instead.
“Two PASIV units,” Yusuf said with a slight shrug. “We slave one to the other with a hardware connection, the IV systems remain segregated. No chance for a contaminated needle-stick that way.”
“Is that doable?” Christian asked with a glance in Arthur’s direction. “You’re the hardware expert here.”
“Might have some slight lag-time on your end,” Arthur said after a few moments of thought, “but it’s negligible in a single-layer setup. Can you handle being a couple seconds behind everyone?”
“Back home we call that a hangover,” Christian said with his hair hanging over his face, his voice soft with amusement as he rolled one of his pill bottles around in his left hand.
“Cute,” Arthur said dryly. “Ariadne? You looked like you wanted to say something.”
“Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, okay?” she asked. “Right now there’s no reliable way to tell whether or not someone’s had the IC used on them. If they haven’t, then the extraction goes on as normal, and if they have then we’re all in trouble.”
“Right,” Arthur nodded as he saw where she was headed.
“If we’re going in expecting a fight, we probably should all be armed to the teeth, but then I have to figure out a context where that won’t let the mark know he’s dreaming. People don’t walk down the street with grenade launchers. Not in most places, anyway,” she said with a quick glance in Eames’ direction.
“We could dream something up -” he started to say, and then stopped when he realized what she had been trying to say.
“Yeah, but if we change the dream too much the projections all automatically find us. No, if we’re going to have to bring an armory in I’m going to have to cache it, which means we’re going to brush up against suspension of disbelief if we have to start pulling it out. It’s kinda a catch-22.” That was not an angle Eames had thought of initially, and it impressed him. Ariadne really was going to be unstoppable if she decided to continue working in dreamshare after this.
“The weaponry problem would be an issue if we were going to set up an extraction as a regular business meeting, but -” Christian smiled nastily, sharp teeth glinting behind his messy hair. “Do you know how to plan a good bank robbery, Ariadne?”
“No,” she said doubtfully, unsure of where this conversation was going to lead.
His smile widened as he straightened up in his chair and leaned in towards her conspiratorially. “Well, would you like to learn how?” he asked.