Fic: Awake The Nation: Chapter VI (b)
Aside from being extremely dusty and rectangular rather than square, the room they were now locked in wasn't much different from their 'cell' on Station Nine. It had a bed, that Eames was currently stretched out on in exhausted sleep, and a hard metal chair as its only furnishings. It did connect to an even tinier bathroom with a sink and a toilet which, thank all lords, by some miracle seemed to still function.
What the room did not have was room to pace, a loss that Arthur was feeling quite strongly at the moment.
He hadn't realized how much better he thought when he moved, or at least had the option of moving, until their escape from the Gates-Planet, and their enforced confinement on the Mandell while they waited for Eames to fix things up for them on Station Nine.
And at least then he had been given a little room to move backward and forward, if he needed to. Not far, but enough to give him breathing space. Here there was hardly even that, and he had the terrible feeling it was what used to pass for a Psion's single quarters; might even have been thought of as fairly well-appointed.
But then, the Psions, as far as he had been able to tell from Eames, thought better when they stayed still, were unaffected by small spaces and narrow areas, considered any space around them irrelevant for what they needed to do and how they focused. It was where they were headed that mattered, never where they actually were.
And after watching Eames's forced, unrelenting time-jumps, Arthur could see only too well why being able to stay in one place, no matter how small or confining, would be seen only as respite, and not as the endurance test he was currently undergoing.
Right now he was just happy that Eames normally slept like a stone once he got comfortable- although his comfort often meant Arthur was used as the human equivalent of a pillow or cuddle toy- and that even with the pain Eames had to be in, this was no exception to the rule. Arthur wasn't a doctor, but he'd had enough medic training to know that Eames was probably suffering from a concussion, a broken arm and most probably at least two broken ribs. He'd only let him drift off to sleep after assuring himself that the concussion was minor and that Eames would wake up again.
He was very carefully not thinking about the fact that none of that was going to matter to Cato one bit. As soon as he worked through his latest set of results, and even half-managed to work out how Eames was resisting any actions that resulted in the incremental changes that would bring about the landslide reversal of the Psions' fate, Cato would be operating the time-jack again.
For the first time, Arthur was beginning to understand just why the Psions weren't thought of as human. Cato might breathe the same air as them, might need to sleep and eat, his blood probably pumped from his heart like any other man's, but Arthur was in no doubt of what he really was.
Cato was a monster. And it wasn't becoming a Psion that had made him so.
It was how he had been born.
"Yer head's g'n explode," Eames's weary, slurred voice came from the bed, "thinkin' too loud."
"Well, one of us needs to and you're in no shape for it," Arthur was immediately at Eames's side checking him over and trying to make him more comfortable. "Not that you ever are."
"Tha's it. Hit me wh'n 'm down."
"I keep hoping it will knock some sense in." In spite of their normal snark, Arthur knew his voice was anything but normal- soft and gentle, where it usually would have be sharp and cutting.
"Need it th'n. 'S all b'n knocked out."
"How can you tell?" Arthur asked mildly, and got a decidedly lopsided glare for his efforts. "Yeah, okay, so apart from the splitting headache and not being able to see out of one eye, how can you tell?"
He wasn't sure whether Eames was pretending to consider that, in the spirit of attempting normality, or really was trying to work out the answer. Both options were more than a bit worrying, being as neither should have involved more than surface brain activity.
He was starting to wonder what time-jumping did to the brain, never mind the body- which was perfectly fucking obvious, so he didn't need to wonder at all on that score- when Eames said a lot more clearly,
"Still not there. Wasn'. Promised."
And Arthur really, really wished he didn't know what that meant. He didn't want to think that he was having any effect on a made and remade decision that even he was beginning to wonder about, and he didn't want to believe that he was being weighed up in the balance of importance against the resurrection of a planet, and he didn't want to look too carefully at the fact that he hoped to every known power and void in existence that in the end, he was going to matter more.
Arthur knew what his decision would be if the situation were reversed. There had been no one in his life that he cared about- loved- the way he did Eames, whether he ever said the words aloud or not. Given a choice between reviving those who had already died and Eames, Arthur would choose Eames hands down. Selfishly, he hoped that Eames felt the same. Unselfishly, he wanted Eames to choose what would bring him the most happiness, even if it meant they would once again be on opposite sides of a war that would not have ended on AR-724.
Even if it meant they would never have met.
It was a chilling thought, and deep in the dark recesses of Arthur's mind, a tiny voice was urging him to wrap himself around Eames and beg him, beg something, anything, anyone, choose me, choose me, lords please, please, let him choose me.
Instead he smoothed a gentle hand over Eames's face, "And neither was I. I'll just- just wait here for you... until then."
Always, he thought, because some part of him would remain unchanged, no matter what Eames chose, no matter what Cato forced on time and chance and place, some part of him would always be waiting, held forever in a moment in time that nothing could ever touch or alter.
He had no idea what kind of temptation this chance, repeated over and over again, was presenting to Eames. He couldn't understand, he would never understand, just what it meant to hold time in the hollow of his hand, and be able to decide what should be done with it, what could be done with it. He would never know what it felt like to grasp at infinity.
He only knew what it was like to love someone who made that choice, each and every moment that he lived; what it was like to sit in a tiny narrow room and watch that choice be at the forefront of someone's mind; watch it be made again and again with every breath, every holo-like flicker of existence, every flare of the time-jack into an impossible power.
Arthur's fused mod had condemned him to see the things that no-one else could, long before. But it had never hurt this much, it had never mattered this much that all he could do was stand to the side and never know anything but the reality of now, here.
And for a brief, appalling moment, he wondered if it would be better if Eames did what Cato wanted, and changed everything; better if they never met, better not to feel like this.
He slid his hand into Eames's just as the door slid open and Cato's goons looked in, followed by Cato himself. "Time to try again."
~*~
Robert Fischer was nothing like and yet everything like Dom imagined. There was a strength in him that even his feelings of guilt could not overwhelm. Dom had expected arrogance though, in place of the evident, quiet thoughtfulness, and an innate sense of command rather than an ability for surprisingly calm, unsubservient acquiescence. The acquiescence made sense though, in this instance, since neither one of them had much idea of what exactly was going on- and until they could sort that and make a play, they both were going to have to compromise and work together.
The guilt was a little more difficult to understand. Dom had an image of everyone connected with Fischer and the Gates-Corps built up in his head, and the fact that Robert felt guilt for the things that his family, his company, had done to so many people, to Mal, simply did not fit in with that view.
"Is there something in particular that I should look out for?"
Dom grunted back at him as he crawled back out from under the bunk, "I don't know. I'm not really that familiar with how an ex-Corps soldier would think. If you were going to hide something, hide it securely, but make it easy enough for someone who knows you to find it, what would you do?"
"I wouldn't be hiding it at all, I'd get rid of it," Robert said a bit blankly, and then, "Oh, right, you mean if you want it found?"
Really, Dom was beginning to wonder if the man was not so much acquiescent and guilt-stricken as half-witted. "Yeah," he said slowly, wondering if this was how Yusuf felt all the time when he tried to explain things to people. "Something you want found. By someone you know."
"But they didn't," Robert said, equally carefully. "They didn't know. Or when they did, they didn't come back here, they didn't get a chance to. I was the next one on the ship. So I'm not sure what you're after."
"Some kind of fucking answer would be nice," Dom snarled, and tried to modulate his tone a bit better, because the fact that Arthur and Eames were somewhere on the Boneyard was not Robert's fault. "Sorry. Sorry."
"No, that's fine..." Robert said, tapping his upper lip with his index finger. It was a habit that Dom guessed would get very annoying very quickly. "I mean, you'd store it, wouldn't you?"
"Huh?"
"Back up storage. If you- if they had an actual plan, they weren't just guessing, they'd put it in storage. For someone they know to find. Right? On the system?"
Dom wished Robert didn't feel he had to phrase everything as a question. It made him feel like he had to answer.
"Um, possibly. Yeah. Why isn't it coming up on the AI, then?"
Robert looked at him incredulously.
"Because I overrode the AI to fly the ship?"
"Oh," said Dom, feeling like an idiot, because yes, right, that had been why they'd had to communicate the first time with direct interfacing, wasn't it. "Er. Yes. Let me just-" He reconnected the coding for the AI to the ship's interface, logging it through his own code to begin with and planning to divert it as soon as things were up and running. "Yeah, there we go, that should for fuck's sake Saito what what what -!"
"Dominic," Saito said, sounding irritable. "May I remind you that turning everything off when I operate via a permanent interface is an exceptionally bad idea?"
"Tell me," Dom said to Robert, "that I'm hallucinating. Please."
"I wish I could?" Robert said, staring at the screen. "Wow. Um. Is that Saito?"
"Yeah, it's hi-"
"Dominic, why is Robert Fischer on the Mandell?" Saito's tone was sharp. It was the closest that Dom had ever him come to yelling.
"Oh, yeah. He was tracking Arthur and-"
"Tracking? For what purpose?"
"I might be able to tell you, if you'd just stop cutting me off."
"Look," Robert interrupted, "would you like me to leave so you can have this conversation? Saito has no reason to trust any of my family, I'm sure."
"No I fucking well do not want you to leave," Dom almost yelled. "Saito, shut up. Robert, stay where you are. And someone get me Yusuf."
"I am here," said the radio. Robert jumped like a startled rabbit.
"Your fucking ship,, man," he squeaked.
"Yeah, I need an upgrade," Dom snapped. "And an update. Saito. What the fuck. Are you doing. Back in the Mandell's system."
"That would be me," said the Yusuf-radio.
"No, that's definitely Saito," Dom said grimly.
"I put him back in the system after all the temp-mods crashed," Yusuf continued, and Dom clutched at his hair.
"Okay, Yusuf, shut up, Saito, you can talk, Robert, yeah, same as before, stay there and stop fucking mumbling."
Saito scowled for a moment before he continued, "Thank you so much, Dominic, for your permission."
"Sorry. I just didn't want things to get more out of hand." Dom shrugged.
His words seemed to at least partly placate Saito. "It appears that Mr. Eames has managed to get himself into a jam. Do you know precisely where he is?"
"I do... generally. It might be more accurate to say that I know where, but I'm not sure about when."
"Ah, then you do realize the difficulties." Saito nodded. "Yusuf believes that someone is repeatedly triggering his jack in a specific pattern."
"Someone? You don't think Eames has control then?"
"No," the Yusuf-radio crackled. "I think he found the other Psion."
"That's why they -!" Robert started, and then cut himself off. "Sorry."
"Yeah, that's who they thought you were, glad you're not, moving on," Dom said quickly. "Okay, great. So this other Psion's triggering the time-jack. Question for the peanut gallery, yes, those of you who can't shut up when told to, Yusuf, that means you. Probability range of unavailable and untraceable meaning 'very fucking dead'?"
He couldn't get detached enough to ask the question outright, and he couldn't say anyone's name, and he was not designed by anything to be a leader, so why, why did it always seem to be him who ended up in these positions?
Yusuf was silent.
Saito froze as though his coding had been disconnected.
And it was, unbelievably, Robert who replied. "Your City-Corps man, you mean? He's alive."
"How can you be sure?" That was Yusuf, but Robert only shrugged, diffident as ever, but oddly certain beneath that.
"Because whatever this other Psion is trying to change? Nothing has, yet."
Yusuf's exhalation of relief sent everyone into a world of painful feedback, and Dom, cursing and relieved at once, nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, okay, I'll buy that."
"Dominic, you cannot be certain that-"
"That if Arthur was dead, Eames would have already torn every world we know down to component atoms and none of this conversation would even be happening?" Dom almost laughed. "Yeah, actually. Yeah, I can. I can be absolutely fucking certain."
"Do you really think that he would be that out of control?" Saito demanded, sounding almost personally insulted.
"Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be half of a whole?" Dom retorted, and shook his head. "Yes, absolutely he could... he would."
Dom knew that, oh lords and lights, how he knew it, he knew it painfully and wholeheartedly. If he could have torn all of the Fischer Corps and Cobol and the Gates-Planet itself down to the ground when they took Mal from him with their endless space-control battles, he would have without a moment of hesitation.
"Yes," Saito said, and he was as close as he ever came to smiling, though his voice was as solemn and steady as ever, "yes, of course. You are right. Yes."
Saito knew, too. Saito, who had built up a planet and enforced a new kind of peace for the sake of his love, would know the other side of that coin as well as anyone.
"Hah," said the Yusuf-radio, sounding smug and delighted enough that Dom could almost see his friend folding his hands in front of him, and leaning back in satisfaction. "What price invisible armies, hey?"
"You're all fucking batshit," was all Robert said. "Can we go back to facts, now?"
"Fine. Look, Robert, you were on Station Nine. Do you know this Psion- Cato, right?- at all? Can you give us any insight?"
"Yes," Robert began. "About that... it might be my fault that your friend was captured. I meant it for the best, really."
The last bit of his speech was cut off the voiced of those around him and Dom had to quiet everyone down in order for him to continue.
"Cato is a Psion, obviously, and he was looking for others of his race, just as, I'm sure, Eames has been. He told me that he was afraid of just approaching Eames because of Arthur."
"But he approached you?"
"I was City-Corps, too, sort of. Just- Gates-Corps is different in general, was different, sorry. All of it got taken to a different level than Arthur ever had to deal with. And I was management... which puts me above the petty squabbles and battles between sides. I directed, I didn't interact."
"So you would have seemed safe," Dom said. Robert shrugged, and winced.
"Yeah. I- maybe? Maybe he was playing me. Look, I didn't care much, okay? I worked with the salvagers, I bought what I needed, I tried not to think. And I really didn't fucking think about this place." He gestured at the Mandell's tiny windows, out to the Boneyard. "It was a colossal screw-up. Yeah, yeah, I know, we acted on the Gates like it was this huge damned victory, up the Horn and the Onyx, down with the monsters. You know," he said to the Yusuf-radio, which sighed in agreement. "It wasn't, though. Just an order gone wrong. So we made the best of it."
"You annihilated an entire people," Dom said in quiet horror, "and you call what you did making the best of it?"
"Boom," Yusuf said into the silence, "and aren't the sparkles pretty."
"I was getting out before Cobol ever took our Corps out of the quadrant," Robert said. "And I don't know who gave your friends the idea that I was their lost Psion, but I've never hidden my ash-marks. Because they're not. They're ink. Why would I try and hide that?"
"Guilt?" Saito asked coldly.
Robert's smile was twisted. "Yeah," he said. "Exactly. So why would I hide that, either?"
"And this Cato would have known that," Saito said. Robert nodded.
"Everyone knew that," he said simply. "Everyone who came to Station Nine. And I thought Cato needed help. So I gave it to him. I gave him what I thought I could."
"He played you like he thought you'd played the Psions," Dom said, understanding.
"Yeah," Robert agreed. "And I worked that part out just a bit too late."
And now they were on a planet of dust and bone-cinders and flesh-ash, because none of them, none of them except Arthur, knew just what the dust and the ash of the Boneyard truly meant to the Psions. To the rest of them, it was guilt and loss and grief, but to Eames- and thus to Arthur- it was a graveyard, a charnel house- and a lasting memorial. It was the horizon that rose up in reds and purples and gaudy orange, and faded to show the stars that they all loved.
It was the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Vanished armies and old houses and air-preserved-bodies, held together by that very airlessness and ultimately dissolving when that vacuum was broken, crumbling before their eyes into dust, into nothing, into a sigh in the stillness, nothing left but the sound of memories fading and regrets that descended to take their place.
Crumbling citadels and vanished armies and a lost people...
... charred letters, faded heliotrope, rose petals fallen from a dead hand...
Regrets and memories, those were things that Dom knew about. But now he had to turn all of them into a plan so that regrets and memories didn't turn into dust and sorrow.
At least he wasn't alone. He had Robert and Yusuf and, thank all lords, Saito. Surely they could come up with something.
Something that, even if it couldn't change what had been done to the Psions, could bring those Dom loved back home.
Back to Seisui.
~*~
The sands shifted slightly under their feet as they walked toward the main entrance of the underground complex. The going was tough, the damage in that area much more complete, the sand burned to glass in spots and mixed with plascrete and metal in others. The bare bones of support structures poked out of the sides of blast pits and the ghostly remains of vehicles and ships of different sizes lay here and there, tossed aside by the powers of concussive force. The Boneyard's ground was the Psions' graveyard, and these were her monuments to them.
"This will be better. Closer to the action. More likely to have to make chances if you're in direct danger."
Fuck, was all that Eames could think.
He wasn't sure how much more his brain could take physically, never mind what was happening to his mind. Every jump rattled things inside his skull, bruised the inside of it. He knew that one of his eyes was already halfway to being completely blown out, that this was something worse than the concussion it felt like, and that every jump through time was compounding whatever the damage was, every return to the starting point was tearing something intrinsic somewhere inside him.
He was already thinking on two different levels; one an oddly clear and focused depth, where he could understand and theorize and knew just what he had to try and do to get out of this, just how damaged he was; the other a scrambled, code-broken mess that made even single words almost impossible to vocalize, a complete disconnect.
It was getting to the point where they were about to start bleeding over into each other, and he wasn't sure if he was going to make anything at all, never mind chances, when that happened.
"You can't keep doing this," That was Arthur's voice. He was on Eames's bad side, protecting his weakness as he always did. "Can't you see what's happening? If you get him killed where will you be? No jack and no Eames."
The pained grunt and silence that followed only served to show how crazy Cato was- no one hit Arthur and got away with it. No one.
But Cato had. Cato had got away with it because Arthur was holding himself back, trying not to make things worse.
Something would have to be done... and if he could get his brain working properly he just might remember what that was.
I wasn't there, he told himself in a fragmented attempt at stability as the time-jack flared up again, a last clutch at sanity as the world dissolved around him and began to remake itself into a new hell. I can't change anything, no matter what Cato does or when or where he sends me, because I wasn't there.
Aure's ghost-like, dust-thickened, terrified screaming filled his ears again as the past solidified around him once more, filled his ears and his eyes and ran down his nerve-endings into a bitter taste, and synesthesia the deeper, hidden part of his mind registered, I can't -
He focused, tried not to
taste
hear what he had never actually witnessed, only imagined, dreamed of, mourned.
The ground shook, and he stumbled, curling up as he fell down into the harsh-dark shadow of a wall. There was a flicker, like a jump in a replay, but it wasn't Cato calling him back. It was something...
"You've got to get up, mon chéri. It is not safe."
He looked around but there was nothing, nothing but dust and concussion and -
Eames ran. Ran from the destruction and fire, the man-created desolation. He could see the ships overhead, small and fast and-
and the Boneyard was bright, the sun blinding and reflective as it shone down on glass-sand and destruction-
"Hang on, Eames... please..."
He wanted to, for Arthur, but there was no time... and nothing but time -
"There is only time. We move through it. You know this. Psion."
Mal's last words to him, but he was hearing them, hearing them now, and that wasn't possible, that couldn't be possible -
A hand in his, small and cold like Ariadne's, but unscarred, the fingers longer, the grip less determined and more desperate.
Your hand in my hand.
"Look at me."
No, no, he had said that. He had said that on the Mandell, after Cobol's destruction. Not Mal. Mal had never -
"Look at me, Psion."
If he did, the world would end.
"Look at me!"
The world would end.
There is only time.
He was supposed to change that. Supposed to stop the world ending- no. No. His choice. His choice. The world had to end.
The world would end.
Again, and again, and as many times as he could bear it before his body gave in and he joined the dust of the Boneyard -
Your hand in my hand.
Phantom or illusion, Mal was holding on to him, he could feel it, he could hear her, they were two distinct things, they were real, they were there, and Mal had never been on the Boneyard, and he had not been present at its destruction and -
Eames looked up.
And saw the Mal he had never known, the Mal from the holo-vid captures around her home on the Gates-Planet, Mal without her high-necked clothing, and wearing her jewel-gleaming mods on one arm alone, none of the filigreed glow visible on breast or throat or ear, Mal in a summer dress and her eyes very wide and very young.
"Psion," she said, and her voice was very kind, and very soft, and completely without fear.
You weren't there and nor was I.
We weren't there. We weren't there. Not that day.
We weren't there.
And neither was Mal.
Or was she? She was there and holding his hand, and yet somehow nothing was changed or changing.
"There is only time. We move through it," Mal said again. "I know what you are and you- I think you know me. Let me give you strength."
"I... I have something to do. Cato. I-"
"Even that would be a change, chéri."
There was another blast, and it rocked both of them this time. "You have to go. You have to be safe... for Dom and..."
"You mean I will not be?" She was smiling.
Eames paused at that, and forced linear thought through the waves of his burning mind.
And he remembered.
He remembered meeting Mal for the first time, how he had thought for a second, as Arthur introduced her, that she too could see through holos, because Arthur had given his name, and-
She knew it already, Eames realized. She couldn't see what I looked like, that wasn't it at all, she recognized my name.
He remembered the- what? Vision? Hallucination?- that he had seen on one of the other jumps, of Mal with the child who was both no-one he knew and Philippa at once, Mal saying "That's Eames, remember? The magician?"
"I have not met you yet, not as you will meet me," Mal was saying. "But I will. And that has not changed, because you still know me. This happened. This is happening. This is where you will have been, on the day your planet died. Here and not here. With me and not yet meeting me. You changed time before it happened. You are changing time now. This is what will have happened, because you are not here and nor am I, and you will be here and so will I. We will meet, and you have met me already, and I know this because you know Dom, and you know me, and there is so much wonder waiting for me, there is so much I will have, and it will be so hard to wait! All I know now is none of the wonder yet, only the knowledge that I traveled to see a war, and I found you instead. I know that here is your loop, here is what I came to see, here is time, here is the change you made, here is your choice, and you made it when you looked at me and knew me. I know that here is what has always been. Here is time, and we are moving through it, Psion, and I will remember for you, and remember you, until it becomes your here and your now. I will remember until you know."
Her hands were on either side of his face, now, and her mods were glowing brightly in his peripheral vision, and she was healing whatever had been done to him, she was undoing all Cato's damage from the inside out, unraveling time and pain and reversing the irreversible.
"My name's Eames," he said, as warm tendrils curled through his blood and bones, knitting up damage and compressing swollen tissue as they went. He said his name because he had to have told her, here on the Boneyard; she couldn't have known it unless he had told her, and so he had to say it, so that she would know it when she met him again, even though she wouldn't know his face.
He couldn't even remember what face he had been wearing, when he first met her. It wasn't important. But that she should know he might look different was important, and he spilled out words as fast as he could, trying not to waste whatever time they had left here. "I'm a holo-master, I work for Dom. And- I made a promise. Before I came here, I made a promise that I would always come back, that I would wake up with someone. Mal-"
She lowered her hands.
"You are not only a holo-master. You are not only a Psion. You are these and more, too, because you are a magician," she said. "And I will remember your promise. And you."
Eames remembered, too, remembered Mal dying amidst her wires, an unholy icon, standing against fate.
"You promised someone else, frère, before either of us."
She had always known.
She had always remembered.
This had always happened.
And of course, of course, when he had first met Mal, that had been her primary use of all her modifications, to travel the worlds, to go where she pleased; computers and holos and ship-travel all at her command, to take her wherever she most wished to be, right then and right there.
Mal the adventurer, Mal the traveler. No wonder she had come from choice to the centre of the worst war the Gates-Planet had known.
Where else would she have been, that day? Where else could she possibly have been, if any of them had stopped to think about it? She could never have resisted it.
"You have to leave, Mal. Take a shuttle. Get out of here. This... no one is going to survive it."
"I will," she replied simply. "And I will not be afraid or worried, because I will know you. And we shall be friends, amis, yes?"
"Yes." There was another concussion and he was torn away, rolling down to the bottom of one of the dunes. Rolling until-
"No! You've still got it wrong!" Cato was leaning over him. Eames could see Arthur behind him, struggling against the two men holding him.
"I really haven't," Eames said, and took a moment to enjoy the fact that he didn't hurt, that he wasn't dying, that he knew all of his five senses from one another, and that sand was incredibly fucking irritating.
And that he had seen Mal, he had seen Mal and his last memory of her was no longer a shell of light and power, but the Mal Dom still mourned, the Mal who had been loved beyond worlds, whose first perm-mods had been made to travel and to heal and to wonder at the glories of all life could hold.
Mal who had saved him, the first and last time they had ever met and would ever meet.
"Again," Cato said, and Eames pushed himself up on his elbows without a single twinge from his ribs or his head or his arms, and laughed in his face.
"Fuck off," he said cheerfully. "Also? No."
~*~
It was fortunate that sand and hills muffled noise, because Dom knew he wasn't exactly the most stealthy person around. He was definitely a mod-creator, not a spy, and his movements reflected that. Robert had already scowled at him and shushed him several times, but it was really a pointless gesture, because although he knew he was doing it wrong, he had no idea how to do it right.
Robert, on the other hand, for all his claims about only having been management during his time at the head of the Gates-Corps, and his not very subtle hints about only having even got that position due to his name, was moving absolutely silently (bar the irritated shushing) and managed to give the impression of having turned into just another drifting sand-shadow.
Dom, who was focusing more on not treading on his own feet when he tried to put them down quietly, was suffering from a sort of frustrated envy that had nothing to do with covetousness and a great deal to do with wondering why he seemed to surround himself with people who had every single skill he was never going to attain.
He did, however, manage to stop instantly, freezing in his tracks when Robert held his hand up in the proper signal. Stop was pretty much stop, whether verbal or with a hand signal.
"They're just around the curve," Robert whispered curtly. "You go that way. I'll circle around to the right and try to get behind them."
Dom nodded, holding his handgun at his side as he slowly advanced.
He heard voices up ahead. One particularly loud one was berating someone, "No! You've still got it wrong!"
"I really haven't." The reply was typical snarky Eames, even if his voice seemed a bit rough.
Silence, and then the voice spat out -
"Again."
And there was something, something singing through the air, something Dom could almost touch, it was so strong, and he knew that it was time, that Cato was pulling at time, and using Eames to do it, and what if this time he-
Like a wind suddenly dropping on a hot day, the feeling stopped, left the air, left Dom's skin, and the familiar sound of Eames's slightly mad laughter replaced it.
"Fuck off," he said, and his voice was smoother this time, evening out around the edges into its usual half-slur. "Also? No."
"Not s'wise," Cato answered him back. "But black 'n' blue suits the toy... 'r mebbe red?"
"Yeah, not happenin'." Eames sounded positive. And mildly amused, which was never a good sign.
Dom peered around the corner of the mound of sand. Arthur was pinned face-down on the ground, a size fifteen boot and the man attached to it, in the middle of his back. Then suddenly he wasn't. The man fell to the ground, grabbing his neck, blood squirting out from between his fingers.
Arthur had obviously been prepared to take advantage of any opening, because as soon as the weight was gone he spun and flipped, scissor-kicking the one of the other men, taking him down in an instant.
That left one more- and Cato himself.
"Warned you," Eames said almost dreamily to Cato, who was standing very still, and whose frozen position seemed to have become contagious, because not even Arthur was moving.
"You know," Robert said in horribly similar if much more shaken tones, forcing Dom to look at him, "that's the first time I've killed someone? And hey, look, if you throw a knife holding the blade, you cut your hand, did you know that?"
"Yeah," Dom said a bit helplessly. "More I kind of guessed, but yeah."
"Huh," said Robert. "Never did that in training. Weird, right?"
Dom gave up on him as seven kinds of utterly useless, even, apparently, at being quiet when he wasn't concentrating on being some kind of weird sand-ghost, and turned his attention back to the frozen tableau in front of him.
"Eames," Arthur said, still not moving, his hands open at his sides and his voice very quiet and very steady. "Don't."
Don't what? Dom thought madly, and then froze into immobility himself as the time-jack on Eames's shoulder flared up into wild pulses of virulent orange, glaring off the grey dust and the dead-ash sands.
"You were there when it began," Eames said, and took a step toward Cato. "I wasn't."
Cato was staring at him, still not moving, but it wasn't Arthur's unflinching, rock-steady determination that was keeping him immobile. It was the paralyzation of a wolf with the steel jaws of a trap around its neck.
"You ran," Eames continued. "I didn't have the choice."
"I was disabled -!" Cato said, and Eames closed the last of the distance between them, and put his hands almost gently on Cato's shoulders.
"You were there when it began," he repeated, "and like everyone else who was there, there's one thing can't be changed."
"Don't," Arthur repeated, and then, hopelessly, earnestly, the sound of his voice like a prayer for the dying, "please. Please don't."
Dom wasn't sure what he meant by that. He thought Arthur probably wasn't sure, either. He rather thought that whatever had happened on the Boneyard had made every certainty of cause and effect into as much of a question as Robert's bastardized, answer-requiring sentences.
The time-jack wasn't even pulsing now, burning like a steady, malevolent sun, and its light half-blinding Dom, so that he had to squint to make out the shapes in front of him. But it made no sound, and Eames's words were clear and carrying.
"You belong dead," he said in a voice that Dom knew he would hear again and again in his nightmares, and the light and power from the time-jack burned his eyes until he had to close them, and there was something that was almost like a sound and wasn't, and it hurt.
~*~
The air around him transformed from hot and clear to the smoke and dust filled atmosphere of the Boneyard-that-was, was-becoming, or possibly just AR-724 now- Eames barely knew what to call it with all the jumping he'd been doing. This was why Psions carved names and dates into their skin- the past, the present, the future and all the timelines got so confused that it was the only way for them to have some concept of linearity. It was one of the reasons that they were so feared, not only because they could jump, change time, and were born to be ruthless, but because the confusion of jumping often drove them insane.
It was also the reason it had been so easy for Eames to say Stop! No more! Hanging on to the remains of his sanity when his whole race had been destroyed had been difficult enough.
But on whatever version of AR-724 they were on, the ground rocked as another impact made itself felt, and Eames straightened, pushing Cato away from him.
"How-" Cato started, and Eames couldn't even find enough bitterness in him to laugh, all of a sudden.
"I got fixed," he said, and then he did laugh, because that was what you said about dogs when they were neutered, and whatever Mal had done to him was so much better than that, there weren't even words for it.
Healed, he thought, and knew it was more accurate. Mended, perhaps, though not the truly broken parts of him.
Those belonged to the dead.
No, fixed worked. If only because it was a word that meant something to him, and had done ever since he had flared up at Ariadne, when she had first begun making the scarred ash-tat across her palm.
There are words she doesn't get to use, and one of them is broken, he had said to Arthur, Arthur with his fused perm-mod, who always snapped that he didn't need or want to be 'fixed'.
"I got fixed," he repeated, "and time is mine."
"No." Cato shook his head, backing away. "No. Sent you back. If you was fixed proper something would have changed. Damn and all, Eames! D'you want to be an oddity, alone and smashed?"
"Y'see, that's the thing," Eames smirked at him. "Not alone."
"Just you and me," Cato argued. "All else are gone. Th' City Corps saw to it. You know it."
"No," Eames said. "See, that's the thing, Cato. No I don't."
And if Mal was right about how time worked, he never had been alone. He hadn't been since the day the Boneyard happened, even though for him it was minutes ago and for everyone else it was years. Everything else had been- inevitable, an eventuality, waiting for its moment. Arthur had always been waiting for him, in that bar with its battered tops of old pitted marble and chipped wood. He himself had always been ready to look across at the right second, and see those long killer's fingers tapping out a warning, in a code that was so very close to what he and his dead had used.
I'm not alone, he had said to Arthur back on Seisui, before their quixotic, lunatic journey to Station Nine. You never let me be.
"It was never you and me," he said. "Nor meant to be. It was just me. But that never meant alone. Yusuf was right." He laughed, and it didn't taste bitter. It tasted dusty-clean. "It's the human condition. Not some peculiarity the Psions got warped into."
"That's yer toy's words, Eames. He's not a Psion. Don't fool you. He'll not understand." Cato looked up at Eames and recited words ingrained from birth. "We live and we jump and we fight and we bring about change. It's not just what we do, it's what we are."
"Then what are you, with no jack?"
"Still a Psion. Still, always, a Psion," Cato insisted. "I got the Rules. I got the Way. Always a Psion."
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Eames said, fed up. "Yeah, yeah, you're a Psion and so am I, and Ari's an Academe and Arthur still works for the Corps. As in, don't be so fucking stupid, Cato. You don't have to be just one thing forever, no-one tied you."
"What, you even forget they did?"
"No, they didn't," Eames insisted. "We chose. And we were good. And it's over."
"No. No it's not. We can change it." Cato told him again.
"Can't change a place or time you never were." Eames said with finality, "I wasn't here. I'm not here now."
Eames reached up to activate his jack, fading away, fading back to Arthur and Seisui and his family... but in the last moment before AR-724 became the Boneyard, he thought he saw a shape scurry out of the shadow of a tumbled down wall, and a voice, "Oh, hello, Monsieur. Tell me, do you know how to pilot a shuttle?"
And he fell back into time through the lurid glow of warped worlds and his own astonished amusement, because perfect. Perfect.
In the end, it wasn't he who had looped Cato into a perpetual eternity of self-destruction, it wasn't he who had brought about the time-diseased madness in the man who now truly was the only remaining Psion, and would be for as long as time existed.
It was Mal.
~*~
When Dom reopened his eyes, Cato was gone, and there was only Eames. Eames falling slowly, so slowly it was almost like he was caught in time.
Which, Dom supposed, he probably was.
Eames never actually hit the ground. Arthur had already covered the short distance and caught him, the weight sending him to his knees on the rough glass-sand.
"Eames," Arthur's voice sounded regretful more than anything else. "I'm so sorry."
"For what?"
"You lost them all again. All the Psions."
"I made a promise."
"I know, but-"
"I made a promise."
Dom wondered if he and Mal had ever been this impossibly stupid. He thought probably not. For all their failings, they had always known exactly what they were saying to each other and just how much it meant- and how it could never be taken back. Not the good, not the bad, not the joy and wonder or the pain and devastation. Nothing said in and for and from love could ever be reversed or taken back or changed.
Eames knew that now, better than most. Dom thought Cato might have worked that out, in his last moments.
Arthur, on the other hand...
"I want to wake up with you and you with me..." The words were soft, quiet enough that Dom barely heard them, but there.
Well, so maybe Arthur did understand, after all, he thought, and turned his attention back to Robert, who was still staring at his bleeding hand in fascination.
"Yeah, cuts do that," he said wearily. "Let's get you back and find a skin-regen machine, shall we?"
~*~
chapter vii