[FIC] The Visit - PG-13 - 3022
Title: The Visit
Author: koushi
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Eames/Yusuf
Word count: 3022
Warnings: Some mention of injury/blood
Summary: Their first meeting wasn't under ideal circumstances.
Note: Written for sobota for forgerness's incept_santa.
It was dark out when Eames let himself into the humble apothecary shop at the end of the alley. Despite his tiptop physical condition-thanks to regular and grueling military training exercises-he was out of breath, the blood pounding at his temples. The man loved a good chase, a fresh injection of adrenaline coursing through his veins, jumpstarting every last cell in his body to a tingling awakening. A necessary kick to the proverbial arse considering the ever-looming prospect that this one could be the last.
But he definitely wasn’t out of the water yet. The screeching of ornery hinges and creaking of footsteps on the stairs reverberated from the basement at an eerie volume in contrast with the silence of the night, in which the only other audible sound was his own hurried breathing. Light sleeper, Eames grimaced. And then the lights flickered on.
“Might I ask who you are and what you’re doing in my shop in the dead of night?” a voice demanded through the haze of sudden brightness.
“Dead is what we’ll both be if you don’t turn that light back off,” Eames replied matter-of-factly in a loud whisper, blinking as if doing so would persuade his pupils to shrink.
He caught a glimpse of the man of the house. Dark curls, tired eyes behind wire frames, average stature with a healthy joviality that shone through his outraged expression. The warm glow of the ceiling lamp illuminated the colorful array of jars and canisters lining the shelves behind him.
“Excuse me?” Yusuf said. There was an intruder in his beloved shop: highly probably dangerous, judging from the calm urgency in his tone. Nonetheless there was something about the fellow desperately hunched over behind his desk near the window that caused Yusuf to obey without protest: it was as if he had no choice in the matter whatsoever, roused from his state of half-consciousness only to be thrust into some life-and-death hostage situation. There was something surreal about this whole matter, a dream-like quality in a sense.
Both of them held their breaths in the pitch darkness as Eames sat peering through the slit in the blinds. Half a dozen men cloaked in dark trenchcoats prowled through the empty streets of Mombassa, as all the kiosks had been packed away until morning. The leader of the unit directed his underlings to knock on the doors of a few suspicious looking houses only to be greeted by angry silhouettes in their bedroom robes and to leave empty-handed.
One of the men darted his eyes over to the shop, and Eames could almost feel his glare boring through the shade to fall right on him. His instinct told him to duck, but if anything it was futile by this point. He bit his lower lip in anxiety as the suit took a few steps forward, only to change his mind just a few yards away, retracing his steps to group up with the rest of his posse. They walked out of his range of vision and were gone.
Eames heaved a gigantic sigh of relief.
“Mind filling me in on what’s going on?” Yusuf spouted once the coast was presumably clear. “I can see you’re also a British ex-pat, which would normally invite camaraderie, but, from what I can tell, you have no intention of sharing friendly banter.”
His uninvited guest coughed and said hoarsely, “Under better circumstances, I’d love to have a chat with you…”
“But housebreaking isn’t exactly the warmest conversation topper, now, is it?” Yusuf chuckled dryly. “Anyway, what are you? A thief of some kind?”
“Mm, a bit more complicated than that.”
“So what then?”
Eames coughed again, softer this time, and replied, tongue-in-cheek, “Congratulations, sir, you have just been made an accomplice in the desertion of a top-level operative in Her Majesty’s service. An honor, I should say, that doesn’t befall just anyone.”
Yusuf’s eyes widened in the darkness. The man couldn’t be serious? “Wait just one bloody second, I had nothing to do with this. In fact, I’d like nothing more than for you to leave so I can get back to counting sheep-” Yusuf started before he was interrupted by a loud crash and thud.
His reflexes directed him to flip the light switch once again, and there-collapsed before him-was Eames, the handle of a small metal valise still gripped in his hand. He was dressed in civilian clothing: a T-shirt and slacks, but Yusuf had barely registered this fact when he realized that the shirt was soaked through with bright red blood.
“Holy shit,” he swore under his breath. That the man was injured to this extent and was able to keep himself from shouting out in pain was incredible by itself, not to mention that he’d remained conscious and rather lucid with his rate of blood loss. What do I do?
He weighed his options. Scurry out the door after the searchers and alert them to the traitor’s presence, leaving only a bloodstain on his floor to prove it wasn’t a hallucination and washing his hands of this mess entirely. Or… or he could act against all logic and reason and mire himself further in some grand scheme of governmental conspiracy or what have you.
But he was tired of playing it safe. His whole damn life had been one “right” choice after another. Yet where does that land you in the end? When adventure knocks on your doorstep-or, as in this case, barges in of its own accord-you don’t slam the door in its face. You welcome it with open arms and embrace it like an old friend. Yusuf slung Eames’ arm over his shoulder and gently lifted him from the floor of his shop, walking him slowly but steadily towards the basement steps.
***
Yusuf watched over the sleeping figure with a strange sense of envy. Oh, how he longed to immerse himself so soundly in the world of dreams. Eames, he’d found an ID card with his name and vitals in his wallet, seemed at peace swathed in bandages and bedsheets. He’d been unconscious for twenty hours, which would have been worrisome if it didn’t appear that the man hadn’t slept for about three days prior to the incident. Every once in awhile Eames’ eyelashes would flutter as his eyes rolled around in his head, stirred, perhaps, by some passing thought.
The makeshift operation had been successful. Although he wasn’t trained specifically in surgical procedures, Yusuf was able to extract the bullet, which had missed any major organs, without obvious complications. It felt like his first time in a chemistry lab, where he was but a clumsy novice guessing at every turn, sweating profusely lest he make some fatal mistake. He then stitched up the wound as best he could, thankful that Eames was sufficiently unconscious not to have felt anything.
Yusuf’d been able to sit there reading a book, as he was able to hear any sounds from the ground floor. As usual, no customers even ventured into the little shop, save the old man who swept the floors in the morning. He wasn’t needed today, however, since Yusuf had mopped up the bloodstains in case of any future investigation. In honor of his melancholy, he decided to indulge in an especially guilty pleasure of his: sappy musical romance movies.
Eames awoke to the sounds of bangles and drums. Rubbing his eyes, he winced and froze in mid-stretch as a sharp pain stabbed at his right side, where a thick bandage wrapped around his waist. He was disoriented, an unhappy state for someone with his background. The room was unfamiliar, but the melody brought him waves of nostalgia from his early days in the military, back when he believed in something.
He stumbled out of bed, ignoring the throbbing, as well as the flood of memories. He’d trained himself to stop believing in pain, in anything really. Living was just living, and there really didn’t exist anything more complicated than that.
Eames stepped into the next room to find the owner of the shop sniffling at a particularly tear-jerking moment in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. He, too, was a fan of Rani Mukherjee, although he’d never let anyone know about his shared penchant for Bollywood flicks.
In that split second of unmasked vulnerability, he studied the man anew, with a bit more precision than was allowed at first impression. This was the man who had presumably saved his life, although for what reason he failed to fathom. What did this ordinary little shopkeeper care if he lived or died, some belligerent stranger who’d picked his lock and put both lives in peril? What he saw there, though, he couldn’t understand in his current condition: it was something he’d long forgotten… that sense of yearning for something more than the closed room of one’s own mind.
“Good evening,” Eames uttered, clearing his throat while leaning his uninjured side against the doorframe.
Yusuf met his gaze, quickly composing himself and hitting pause on the remote. Under normal circumstances he’d have been embarrassed to be discovered in the depths of cathartic drudgery, but since the night before, he’d felt like he was in some waking dream. “Y-you’re awake, finally.”
“You could say that, yes,” Eames said, taking a step forward.
“Are you feeling okay?” Yusuf asked, pondering the results of his recent foray into medicine.
“Not bad, actually. All things considered.” He demonstrated his tolerable physical shape by holding his arms out, parallel to the ground, but grunted and let them drop as the pain overloaded his senses. So much for being a non-believer.
Yusuf had to grin at the macho display. “That’s good, I suppose.”
“Mind if I…?” Eames asked, feeling a bit woozy and requesting permission to sit down next to his host.
“No, uh, go ahead,” Yusuf said, shifting to one side of the couch.
“You can keep watching the movie: don’t let me bother you,” Eames suggested as he sank into the soft cushioned leather.
Yusuf nodded and pressed play, diverting his eyes back to the screen. They watched the rest of the film quietly.
Myriad questions swam in both men’s minds, but it was as if they had tacitly agreed to a treaty of silence. There’s no need to ask, to really know for sure, when you can understand so much more from the thousand words that remain unuttered.
***
”Sedatives.”
”What?”
“There’s no money in what you’re doing, peddling crackpot herbal remedies,” Eames said bluntly but with good intention. He was sitting in the shop across the desk from Yusuf, sharing a pot of tea as they awaited the customers that hadn’t come for the past week. You’re in trouble: I can tell this. But, like me, you’re too proud to admit that you’re floundering.
Uh huh, like I’m going to get dragged into more of your shit. “Let me guess, this, like all other activities you engage in, is illegal, am I right?” Yusuf countered dismissively.
“No, this is perfectly legal. But I s’pose you haven’t heard much about it since it’s only the next big thing. Besides, what’s illegality to a guy like you, harboring a fugitive of all things?”
Yusuf couldn’t stop himself from grinning at the truth of the matter. “Perhaps I made the wrong decision in that after all.” In a way, he had to admit, he enjoyed having Eames to break up the monotony of his life. The abrasive fellow certainly grew on him, his sarcastic wit a fitting companion for his own snarky remarks.
“Trust me, you could make a fortune on sedatives. And I’m not talking about the kind that drug lords deal, no. I’m talking about a stabilizing and cognitive enhancement agent for shared dreaming.”
“You’ve alluded to this a few times. What is it?” Yusuf couldn’t help his sudden bout of curiosity. Perhaps he could dream after all; he just needed some help in getting there.
“Do you still have the little briefcase I had with me the first night?”
“Yeah,” Yusuf said, bending down in his rolling chair to retrieve it from under the desk and sliding it across the surface to Eames, who promptly opened it up to reveal a complex-looking device.
“This is the PASIV. The United States military developed it to use for training exercises, and I was sent by my superiors to collect this technology for their own use. Needless to say I didn’t fancy the idea of giving it up to them.”
“So you were a spy then?”
“I prefer the term ‘forger’ myself, from the false documents I had to counterfeit. A bit less political because, well, Lord knows my political affiliations lie solely with the Eames party,” he chuckled.
“Well, what made it so important that you had to risk your life-and mine now that I think of it-to protect this device?”
Eames chuckled. “You’ll see. Come now, I’ll teach you to dream.”
Yusuf didn’t know what to expect from his first dream in years, and he couldn’t say with any sort of veracity that he wasn’t nervous about it. Restless nights and sporadic insomnia had plagued him to such a crippling extent that he’d almost forgotten the satisfying sensation of sharing a conversation with one’s own mind. Although this time there would be another subconscious bantering with his own.
With the hiss of the machine hooked up to his wrist, the elements of time and space changed as Yusuf closed his eyes to sweet, sweet sleep.
They were in London, standing on the pavement near his old flat, the one he’d rented while studying chemistry in college. The clouds weighed heavily in the grey sky, signaling an impending rain.
“Sod it, man, this feels far more real than reality,” Yusuf said, stretching out his dream body and rushing to a wall to feel the gritty texture under his fingers.
“And the effect is doubled, even tripled, with the help of a properly formulated sedative,” Eames said with an amused nod. Typical first timer.
He followed Yusuf as he explored the playground of his dream, fascinated with every minute detail like a child opening his eyes to the realization of his own existence.
“Are there any limits? You know, to what you can do here,” Yusuf asked, unable to hide his excitement as he roamed the streets, waving hello to the projections that he passed by. The café he practically lived in during his finals. The Greek restaurant he dined at on his twenty-third birthday. Around every corner was a rediscovery.
“Only the limits imposed by your own imagination.”
When his rampage grinded to a halt, Yusuf stopped to catch his breath in front of a subway station. “These sedatives, you say, will be in high demand?”
“Could you honestly say you wouldn’t return to this world, now that you’ve witnessed its potential?”
Yusuf didn’t answer. He couldn’t anyway: he was too busy grinning.
***
Yusuf whistled to himself as he returned from the morning market, his arms loaded with fresh produce. With Eames’ advice, he’d already laid the groundwork for a planned sedative, although further experimentation would be necessary to gauge its effectiveness.
He felt like he’d been blind his whole life until the night a visitor came to his door and showed him that he had a choice in matters, that his life wasn’t on some inescapable plateau. Every night he slept a bit more soundly, his organic dreams starting to flourish without the aid of the PASIV.
But when he arrived back at the shop, he was met with a pale-faced Eames.
“I have to go,” Eames said expressionlessly as he stood near the entrance in a borrowed paisley shirt and brown trousers.
“What are you talking about? What happened?” Yusuf questioned him, furrowing his brow in concern and surprise.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied gruffly. That agent who came by, threatening to turn me in? I’ll deal with him myself. Usually I have no qualms about throwing others by the wayside, but I figure I owe you a ticket out. I’m the only one who should have to carry my baggage. “Just forget I ever came into your life.”
You think you can just show up one night, uninvited and unannounced, and leave just as unceremoniously? Yusuf laid his groceries on the desk next to the shiny silver case and turned back around to face Eames in unspoken outrage. “It’s that simple for you, is it?”
Eames managed a bittersweet smile as he opened the door. “I’m an expert at forgetting by now.”
He let himself out as easily as he’d entered. Saying goodbye wasn’t really his style after all.
It was all a blur. Yusuf stood there stunned, for how long he had no inkling. What just happened? What’s gotten into you? And most of all, why do you seem to care so much about this vagabond?
When he finally shook himself from his stupor, he shuffled himself around his desk to the cabinet behind it, grasping for his bottle of scotch.
But before he could find it, he heard a soft “meow” come from his office chair. Yusuf spun it around to reveal a small kitten crouched next to a note, which read:
Dear Yusuf,
I don’t typically say things like this, but thank you. Thank you for making the wrong decision for my sake. Thank you for believing in someone who didn’t believe in anything himself. Maybe this will change someday, but that will be for you to judge if and when our paths cross again.
Please take Maggie (short for Magnesium, your favorite element as you said) as a token of my appreciation. I hope that having her at the foot of your bed helps to ease you into your dreams.
Until next time,
Eames
That night, contrary to his expectations, Yusuf fell asleep in a matter of minutes. He dreamed with crisp clarity that he was reorganizing the vials on his shelves when he heard someone knock on the door.
He smiled to himself and said, “Please, let yourself in.”
Author: koushi
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Eames/Yusuf
Word count: 3022
Warnings: Some mention of injury/blood
Summary: Their first meeting wasn't under ideal circumstances.
Note: Written for sobota for forgerness's incept_santa.
It was dark out when Eames let himself into the humble apothecary shop at the end of the alley. Despite his tiptop physical condition-thanks to regular and grueling military training exercises-he was out of breath, the blood pounding at his temples. The man loved a good chase, a fresh injection of adrenaline coursing through his veins, jumpstarting every last cell in his body to a tingling awakening. A necessary kick to the proverbial arse considering the ever-looming prospect that this one could be the last.
But he definitely wasn’t out of the water yet. The screeching of ornery hinges and creaking of footsteps on the stairs reverberated from the basement at an eerie volume in contrast with the silence of the night, in which the only other audible sound was his own hurried breathing. Light sleeper, Eames grimaced. And then the lights flickered on.
“Might I ask who you are and what you’re doing in my shop in the dead of night?” a voice demanded through the haze of sudden brightness.
“Dead is what we’ll both be if you don’t turn that light back off,” Eames replied matter-of-factly in a loud whisper, blinking as if doing so would persuade his pupils to shrink.
He caught a glimpse of the man of the house. Dark curls, tired eyes behind wire frames, average stature with a healthy joviality that shone through his outraged expression. The warm glow of the ceiling lamp illuminated the colorful array of jars and canisters lining the shelves behind him.
“Excuse me?” Yusuf said. There was an intruder in his beloved shop: highly probably dangerous, judging from the calm urgency in his tone. Nonetheless there was something about the fellow desperately hunched over behind his desk near the window that caused Yusuf to obey without protest: it was as if he had no choice in the matter whatsoever, roused from his state of half-consciousness only to be thrust into some life-and-death hostage situation. There was something surreal about this whole matter, a dream-like quality in a sense.
Both of them held their breaths in the pitch darkness as Eames sat peering through the slit in the blinds. Half a dozen men cloaked in dark trenchcoats prowled through the empty streets of Mombassa, as all the kiosks had been packed away until morning. The leader of the unit directed his underlings to knock on the doors of a few suspicious looking houses only to be greeted by angry silhouettes in their bedroom robes and to leave empty-handed.
One of the men darted his eyes over to the shop, and Eames could almost feel his glare boring through the shade to fall right on him. His instinct told him to duck, but if anything it was futile by this point. He bit his lower lip in anxiety as the suit took a few steps forward, only to change his mind just a few yards away, retracing his steps to group up with the rest of his posse. They walked out of his range of vision and were gone.
Eames heaved a gigantic sigh of relief.
“Mind filling me in on what’s going on?” Yusuf spouted once the coast was presumably clear. “I can see you’re also a British ex-pat, which would normally invite camaraderie, but, from what I can tell, you have no intention of sharing friendly banter.”
His uninvited guest coughed and said hoarsely, “Under better circumstances, I’d love to have a chat with you…”
“But housebreaking isn’t exactly the warmest conversation topper, now, is it?” Yusuf chuckled dryly. “Anyway, what are you? A thief of some kind?”
“Mm, a bit more complicated than that.”
“So what then?”
Eames coughed again, softer this time, and replied, tongue-in-cheek, “Congratulations, sir, you have just been made an accomplice in the desertion of a top-level operative in Her Majesty’s service. An honor, I should say, that doesn’t befall just anyone.”
Yusuf’s eyes widened in the darkness. The man couldn’t be serious? “Wait just one bloody second, I had nothing to do with this. In fact, I’d like nothing more than for you to leave so I can get back to counting sheep-” Yusuf started before he was interrupted by a loud crash and thud.
His reflexes directed him to flip the light switch once again, and there-collapsed before him-was Eames, the handle of a small metal valise still gripped in his hand. He was dressed in civilian clothing: a T-shirt and slacks, but Yusuf had barely registered this fact when he realized that the shirt was soaked through with bright red blood.
“Holy shit,” he swore under his breath. That the man was injured to this extent and was able to keep himself from shouting out in pain was incredible by itself, not to mention that he’d remained conscious and rather lucid with his rate of blood loss. What do I do?
He weighed his options. Scurry out the door after the searchers and alert them to the traitor’s presence, leaving only a bloodstain on his floor to prove it wasn’t a hallucination and washing his hands of this mess entirely. Or… or he could act against all logic and reason and mire himself further in some grand scheme of governmental conspiracy or what have you.
But he was tired of playing it safe. His whole damn life had been one “right” choice after another. Yet where does that land you in the end? When adventure knocks on your doorstep-or, as in this case, barges in of its own accord-you don’t slam the door in its face. You welcome it with open arms and embrace it like an old friend. Yusuf slung Eames’ arm over his shoulder and gently lifted him from the floor of his shop, walking him slowly but steadily towards the basement steps.
***
Yusuf watched over the sleeping figure with a strange sense of envy. Oh, how he longed to immerse himself so soundly in the world of dreams. Eames, he’d found an ID card with his name and vitals in his wallet, seemed at peace swathed in bandages and bedsheets. He’d been unconscious for twenty hours, which would have been worrisome if it didn’t appear that the man hadn’t slept for about three days prior to the incident. Every once in awhile Eames’ eyelashes would flutter as his eyes rolled around in his head, stirred, perhaps, by some passing thought.
The makeshift operation had been successful. Although he wasn’t trained specifically in surgical procedures, Yusuf was able to extract the bullet, which had missed any major organs, without obvious complications. It felt like his first time in a chemistry lab, where he was but a clumsy novice guessing at every turn, sweating profusely lest he make some fatal mistake. He then stitched up the wound as best he could, thankful that Eames was sufficiently unconscious not to have felt anything.
Yusuf’d been able to sit there reading a book, as he was able to hear any sounds from the ground floor. As usual, no customers even ventured into the little shop, save the old man who swept the floors in the morning. He wasn’t needed today, however, since Yusuf had mopped up the bloodstains in case of any future investigation. In honor of his melancholy, he decided to indulge in an especially guilty pleasure of his: sappy musical romance movies.
Eames awoke to the sounds of bangles and drums. Rubbing his eyes, he winced and froze in mid-stretch as a sharp pain stabbed at his right side, where a thick bandage wrapped around his waist. He was disoriented, an unhappy state for someone with his background. The room was unfamiliar, but the melody brought him waves of nostalgia from his early days in the military, back when he believed in something.
He stumbled out of bed, ignoring the throbbing, as well as the flood of memories. He’d trained himself to stop believing in pain, in anything really. Living was just living, and there really didn’t exist anything more complicated than that.
Eames stepped into the next room to find the owner of the shop sniffling at a particularly tear-jerking moment in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. He, too, was a fan of Rani Mukherjee, although he’d never let anyone know about his shared penchant for Bollywood flicks.
In that split second of unmasked vulnerability, he studied the man anew, with a bit more precision than was allowed at first impression. This was the man who had presumably saved his life, although for what reason he failed to fathom. What did this ordinary little shopkeeper care if he lived or died, some belligerent stranger who’d picked his lock and put both lives in peril? What he saw there, though, he couldn’t understand in his current condition: it was something he’d long forgotten… that sense of yearning for something more than the closed room of one’s own mind.
“Good evening,” Eames uttered, clearing his throat while leaning his uninjured side against the doorframe.
Yusuf met his gaze, quickly composing himself and hitting pause on the remote. Under normal circumstances he’d have been embarrassed to be discovered in the depths of cathartic drudgery, but since the night before, he’d felt like he was in some waking dream. “Y-you’re awake, finally.”
“You could say that, yes,” Eames said, taking a step forward.
“Are you feeling okay?” Yusuf asked, pondering the results of his recent foray into medicine.
“Not bad, actually. All things considered.” He demonstrated his tolerable physical shape by holding his arms out, parallel to the ground, but grunted and let them drop as the pain overloaded his senses. So much for being a non-believer.
Yusuf had to grin at the macho display. “That’s good, I suppose.”
“Mind if I…?” Eames asked, feeling a bit woozy and requesting permission to sit down next to his host.
“No, uh, go ahead,” Yusuf said, shifting to one side of the couch.
“You can keep watching the movie: don’t let me bother you,” Eames suggested as he sank into the soft cushioned leather.
Yusuf nodded and pressed play, diverting his eyes back to the screen. They watched the rest of the film quietly.
Myriad questions swam in both men’s minds, but it was as if they had tacitly agreed to a treaty of silence. There’s no need to ask, to really know for sure, when you can understand so much more from the thousand words that remain unuttered.
***
”Sedatives.”
”What?”
“There’s no money in what you’re doing, peddling crackpot herbal remedies,” Eames said bluntly but with good intention. He was sitting in the shop across the desk from Yusuf, sharing a pot of tea as they awaited the customers that hadn’t come for the past week. You’re in trouble: I can tell this. But, like me, you’re too proud to admit that you’re floundering.
Uh huh, like I’m going to get dragged into more of your shit. “Let me guess, this, like all other activities you engage in, is illegal, am I right?” Yusuf countered dismissively.
“No, this is perfectly legal. But I s’pose you haven’t heard much about it since it’s only the next big thing. Besides, what’s illegality to a guy like you, harboring a fugitive of all things?”
Yusuf couldn’t stop himself from grinning at the truth of the matter. “Perhaps I made the wrong decision in that after all.” In a way, he had to admit, he enjoyed having Eames to break up the monotony of his life. The abrasive fellow certainly grew on him, his sarcastic wit a fitting companion for his own snarky remarks.
“Trust me, you could make a fortune on sedatives. And I’m not talking about the kind that drug lords deal, no. I’m talking about a stabilizing and cognitive enhancement agent for shared dreaming.”
“You’ve alluded to this a few times. What is it?” Yusuf couldn’t help his sudden bout of curiosity. Perhaps he could dream after all; he just needed some help in getting there.
“Do you still have the little briefcase I had with me the first night?”
“Yeah,” Yusuf said, bending down in his rolling chair to retrieve it from under the desk and sliding it across the surface to Eames, who promptly opened it up to reveal a complex-looking device.
“This is the PASIV. The United States military developed it to use for training exercises, and I was sent by my superiors to collect this technology for their own use. Needless to say I didn’t fancy the idea of giving it up to them.”
“So you were a spy then?”
“I prefer the term ‘forger’ myself, from the false documents I had to counterfeit. A bit less political because, well, Lord knows my political affiliations lie solely with the Eames party,” he chuckled.
“Well, what made it so important that you had to risk your life-and mine now that I think of it-to protect this device?”
Eames chuckled. “You’ll see. Come now, I’ll teach you to dream.”
Yusuf didn’t know what to expect from his first dream in years, and he couldn’t say with any sort of veracity that he wasn’t nervous about it. Restless nights and sporadic insomnia had plagued him to such a crippling extent that he’d almost forgotten the satisfying sensation of sharing a conversation with one’s own mind. Although this time there would be another subconscious bantering with his own.
With the hiss of the machine hooked up to his wrist, the elements of time and space changed as Yusuf closed his eyes to sweet, sweet sleep.
They were in London, standing on the pavement near his old flat, the one he’d rented while studying chemistry in college. The clouds weighed heavily in the grey sky, signaling an impending rain.
“Sod it, man, this feels far more real than reality,” Yusuf said, stretching out his dream body and rushing to a wall to feel the gritty texture under his fingers.
“And the effect is doubled, even tripled, with the help of a properly formulated sedative,” Eames said with an amused nod. Typical first timer.
He followed Yusuf as he explored the playground of his dream, fascinated with every minute detail like a child opening his eyes to the realization of his own existence.
“Are there any limits? You know, to what you can do here,” Yusuf asked, unable to hide his excitement as he roamed the streets, waving hello to the projections that he passed by. The café he practically lived in during his finals. The Greek restaurant he dined at on his twenty-third birthday. Around every corner was a rediscovery.
“Only the limits imposed by your own imagination.”
When his rampage grinded to a halt, Yusuf stopped to catch his breath in front of a subway station. “These sedatives, you say, will be in high demand?”
“Could you honestly say you wouldn’t return to this world, now that you’ve witnessed its potential?”
Yusuf didn’t answer. He couldn’t anyway: he was too busy grinning.
***
Yusuf whistled to himself as he returned from the morning market, his arms loaded with fresh produce. With Eames’ advice, he’d already laid the groundwork for a planned sedative, although further experimentation would be necessary to gauge its effectiveness.
He felt like he’d been blind his whole life until the night a visitor came to his door and showed him that he had a choice in matters, that his life wasn’t on some inescapable plateau. Every night he slept a bit more soundly, his organic dreams starting to flourish without the aid of the PASIV.
But when he arrived back at the shop, he was met with a pale-faced Eames.
“I have to go,” Eames said expressionlessly as he stood near the entrance in a borrowed paisley shirt and brown trousers.
“What are you talking about? What happened?” Yusuf questioned him, furrowing his brow in concern and surprise.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied gruffly. That agent who came by, threatening to turn me in? I’ll deal with him myself. Usually I have no qualms about throwing others by the wayside, but I figure I owe you a ticket out. I’m the only one who should have to carry my baggage. “Just forget I ever came into your life.”
You think you can just show up one night, uninvited and unannounced, and leave just as unceremoniously? Yusuf laid his groceries on the desk next to the shiny silver case and turned back around to face Eames in unspoken outrage. “It’s that simple for you, is it?”
Eames managed a bittersweet smile as he opened the door. “I’m an expert at forgetting by now.”
He let himself out as easily as he’d entered. Saying goodbye wasn’t really his style after all.
It was all a blur. Yusuf stood there stunned, for how long he had no inkling. What just happened? What’s gotten into you? And most of all, why do you seem to care so much about this vagabond?
When he finally shook himself from his stupor, he shuffled himself around his desk to the cabinet behind it, grasping for his bottle of scotch.
But before he could find it, he heard a soft “meow” come from his office chair. Yusuf spun it around to reveal a small kitten crouched next to a note, which read:
Dear Yusuf,
I don’t typically say things like this, but thank you. Thank you for making the wrong decision for my sake. Thank you for believing in someone who didn’t believe in anything himself. Maybe this will change someday, but that will be for you to judge if and when our paths cross again.
Please take Maggie (short for Magnesium, your favorite element as you said) as a token of my appreciation. I hope that having her at the foot of your bed helps to ease you into your dreams.
Until next time,
Eames
That night, contrary to his expectations, Yusuf fell asleep in a matter of minutes. He dreamed with crisp clarity that he was reorganizing the vials on his shelves when he heard someone knock on the door.
He smiled to himself and said, “Please, let yourself in.”