Inception/Mysterious Skin - Every Me and Every You (4/30)
Title: Every Me and Every You (4/30)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 2,921
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
Neil was sitting in a bar. It reminded him of the one back in Hutchinson with the annoying, twangy country music, but the patrons and at least some of the décor seemed a bit more classy like the bars in NYC. He didn't really give a shit either way, sitting in his booth with a beer, taking small sips from the mouth of it occasionally and watching the room for other people.
He was pretty sure he had come here for a reason, but he didn't quite remember what that was. He was sure it would come to him eventually.
Neil sat back and yawned, bored, and thought about ditching the place and going somewhere with more excitement. He'd fucked every john in this bar, and he was far from interested in fucking them again even if they constantly glanced over at him with the eyes of a starved animal. He must have been looking pretty damned good tonight simply because of the amount of attention he was getting.
Still, sometimes he liked to make them starve, so he finished his beer and checked for a set of keys that he discovered he didn't have, and then he headed out the door. It wasn't dark yet, but Neil couldn't find the sun in the sky, so he wasn't entirely sure what the time was. It wasn't particularly hot or cold, but he was still wearing a nice leather coat that…
…that he'd bought earlier…
Realization dawned on him. He was dreaming right now, and Eames was somewhere in his subconscious, looking for secrets.
"So this is my subconscious then," Neil whispered, staring at the scenery around him. He was obviously in a city, very reminiscent of New York with its urban style of buildings, but underneath it all was still this hokey, mid-Western feel of Hutchinson, Kansas. Neil wandered down the street, weaving through crowds of people who all looked familiar and all stared at him with hungry eyes, and he wondered where Eames might be looking for the answers to his secrets. He tried to think of where people would store things in a city that no one wanted to see. A prison? A bank? A hospital?
Neil was already sure he knew that none of those places were where he kept his. In fact, he was almost positive that he knew exactly where they were.
He knew Eames would never guess it, so Neil kept sauntering down the street, keeping his eye out for anyone who didn't look familiar. He knew that Eames could literally be anyone, but he figured the man had to at least have a tell. No one had a perfect poker face after all. Still, it was hard to look at everyone in the crowd, and frankly it was difficult to tell one person from another.
He decided that Eames would likely attempt to follow him, so he turned down a less populated street and then another and another, allowing these streets to appear at his will. He imagined seeing the city from above, creating his own mental map, gleeful at the way it obeyed him, and he continued walking for at least twenty minutes.
Soon enough, the city's buildings grew shorter and then gave way to open grassland. There were crops of corn and cows loping around their pastures and then a smaller city, one much more like Hutchinson. He wandered into it, turning down Monroe Street to find his own house sitting there, the lawn dead, the bushes a bit overgrown. He was tempted to go inside for a moment, but he figured there'd really be nothing of interest there. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was following him. He didn't see anyone, so he shrugged and shoved on.
It didn't take long until he found what he'd been searching for.
His secrets of course would be stashed here, in the house near the fairgrounds with the blue security light. It looked exactly the way it had in his memory, crystal clear despite the summer being so many years ago. A wave of some sort of emotion welled up in Neil's chest, but he couldn't quite identify what it was. It wasn't as happy as he expected by any means.
His projections still wandered about the streets, gathering in groups to talk about this or that, kids playing, teenagers from his high school days sulking on the hoods of old cars, glaring at him and yet still… wanting. Neil did find his subconscious's fascination with him just the slightest bit unnerving even though it also was a bit thrilling. He almost felt like a god in this world.
He decided to enjoy himself a little.
He approached the group of sulking teens, shoving his hands into his pockets. "What'chu gawking at?" he asked, smirking. His smirk slid away from him suddenly as an arm wrapped around his shoulder from behind, a hand sliding down the front of his t-shirt. A gasp was pulled from him as he found he recognized the feel of those cold fingers.
Neil jerked away and turned around and Coach was standing there in his baseball cleats, smiling at him. Neil could do nothing but gape back at him for several seconds, and then he felt one of the teenagers move behind him. He caught the figure in his peripheral vision, seeming to wander away like many of the projections did (no one seemed to notice anything was going on), but Neil knew better.
Suddenly every building on the street was hidden behind rising brick walls with no doors and no windows, and he looked directly at the teenager that had been making his way towards Coach's house. He glanced back towards Coach, but he was gone.
All of his projections turned towards him and the teenage boy who stared back at Neil as if waiting for something to happen. No one moved.
…then…
From behind the wall that shielded Coach's house from view, there was a scratching sound… like someone was on the other side, trying to break out… a little boy who was crying, desperate for escape, and Neil immediately thought it's Brian. It has to be… Brian…
Neil narrowed his eyes and focused on the boy to keep from focusing on that sound, and said, "You're not fooling anyone. I know it's you, Eames."
A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and a familiar voice said, "Do you?"
Neil turned and saw one of the neighbors, a chubby, middle-aged woman in a pair of overly starched jeans. She looked completely typical except for the very atypical expression on her face, one Neil was sure was Eames's.
The projections weren't staring at him and the boy. They were staring at Eames. Neil had suspected Eames was nearby and they'd zeroed in on the one not like them.
"Don't feel bad," the woman said with Eames's accent but her own voice. "The subconscious is better at finding out of the ordinary things in the mind than the conscious is."
"You still haven't found my secrets," Neil said softly, and his projections were moving closer to them. Eames noticed this of course, but didn't seem too terribly concerned.
"Who's Brian then?" Eames asked, and Neil felt his stomach drop to his knees. He turned around to stare at the brick wall and found Brian's name written across it in graffiti. "Is he your baseball playing boyfriend? Does he know you like to sell your body to other blokes?"
"You… you got it wrong," Neil said, and his voice was shaking. Eames probably thought that he was badly bluffing, but he wasn't. He was just much more concerned with the fact that Brian's cage was announcing its presence.
The ground started to rumble and Eames's confidence faltered as he realized Neil wasn't taking back his statement, that he looked genuinely fearful that something else was going on. "You… you're bluffing," Eames said, even though Neil knew that Eames knew that he wasn't. "Your mind has been putting up clues the entire time we've been down here. The… the billboards that say Brian, Brian, Brian again and again… th… the man in the baseball cleats appearing in every crowd, following you, and the way he touched you! You're telling me that…"
He trailed off, turning to look at the projections. "Hold up now… what is this…?" Eames whispered, and Neil realized he had shifted back into himself. Neil didn't really understand what was bothering him though until he said, "Why are they all looking at you? They should be looking at me… In fact, they should have attacked me by now…"
He turned his eyes back on Neil. "You tricked me, didn't you?" he growled. "You… you're some sort of dreamshare spy sent on me, aren't you?"
"What? No!" Neil cried out, and the ground rumbled again. The wind kicked up and Neil was reminded of the time when he was a kid and a tornado had swept through Kansas. He'd hidden under his mother's bed while she was out barhopping with her boyfriend and looked at her Playgirl magazines.
"You are, you are," Eames said. "I'm not that stupid. I've played your game up until now, but I know you have to be because no beginner would be able to build mazes like that."
"Mazes? What the fuck are you talking about?" Neil shouted over the wail of the wind. The projections gathering around them were increasing in number. Neil could see the faces of his mother, Wendy, and Eric standing in the crowd. All of them had their eyes locked directly on him, and their expressions were just like the ones of the men in the bar.
It started raining, but the water fell in straight, constant lines, like it was being sprayed from a showerhead.
The scratching and the sobs from behind the brick wall grew louder. Brian's name in paint started to run, leaving long blue lines cascading towards the pavement below the wall.
Neil could see Coach standing in the crowd, somehow taller than all of them and somehow completely dry. Coach still only existed in that sweltering summer heat. The water could not touch him.
"Tell me the truth!" Eames shouted as the wind grew so loud and fast that Neil thought he might be lifted off of the ground. "Stop trying to distract me with all of this nonsense!"
"You think I'm doing this on purpose?" Neil shrieked back, covering his ears to try and block out the howling of the wind. His clothes were sticking to him and the crowd was moving closer. Chunks of the streets and buildings broke off like pieces of chocolate bars and were carried off into the air, and Eames looked around, expression growing more and more distraught. Neil realized that Eames had merely been hoping this was being done purposely. He realized that something had gone horribly wrong.
The walls around the houses extended ever higher.
"Neil!" Eames screamed, and somehow Neil could hear it even through his hands and the wind.
He opened his eyes (when had he closed them?) and only had a split second to see before his projections descended upon him, an entire crowd smothering him with the heat of their bodies as they ripped at his clothing, greedy hands wanting more and more. Neil wasn't entirely sure if he was screaming, couldn't hear it over the wind. Neil tried to fight them off, but it didn't do much good considering the sheer number of them. His jacket and shirt and jeans had been torn from him, meaning he didn't have his knife on his person.
Someone grabbed hold of his testicles, and he squirmed and tried to get out of their hand, but then they were twisted painfully and spots danced before his eyes. People were scratching at his legs and torso, arms being pulled until they felt like they were going to come out of socket. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of the gun back in Eames's hotel room, wishing he had it now. He could feel the weight of it in his mind and then in his hand, and he realized he'd allowed it into existence, just as he had the many alleyways in the city.
He didn't bother to aim, firing blindly into the crowd, and a few of his projections fell dead to the ground. Before they descended upon him again, Neil constantly firing through them, he saw Eames attempting to pull them off of him, pale and wide-eyed as a ghost, and then Neil tilted his head back, saw the running blue paint from Brian's name, and how it had all run together at the bottom of the wall behind his head, spelling out one word.
SLUT.
Over the wind, Neil almost thought he heard music playing, but he didn't bother with it. Instead he shouted in the direction he'd last seen Eames, "Wake me up! Please, for the love of God, wake me up!"
Neil opened his eyes, looking around for any sign of the crazy mob.
There was only Eames, looking how Neil felt, removing the needle from his own arm. He turned towards Neil and pressed a hand to the side of his face. "Are you all right?" he asked, and his voice was shaking.
Neil looked at the ceiling, at the alarm clock still softly playing music, at the curtains and the city in the window. "Yeah… I'm… I'm okay…" he said, feeling like his throat was clogged.
Eames removed the needle from Neil's arm and helped him sit up, and Neil realized that his hands were shaking.
"Good god," Eames mumbled, and he couldn't seem to stop touching Neil's hair or face or shoulder or hands. "I've never seen someone's subconscious turn on them before. Something has got to be wrong with this batch of somnacin. I knew something was weird…"
It seemed the only reason Eames was talking was to fill up the room with something other than terror because Neil wasn't really listening to him. He mostly just waited until Eames finished muttering to himself and then said, "I'm not a spy… I swear to god I'm not."
Eames looked into his eyes, hesitated, and then nodded. "Right… um… yeah…"
For a moment there was nothing to be done but sit there and let their heart rates calm down. Eames still kept a hand on Neil's shoulder, thumb pressed up close to his jugular, as if to make sure he was still there.
"So, um…" Eames said when the silence had dragged on too long. "Um, you've never used the PASIV device before then."
"Not before today," Neil replied.
Eames shook his head, obviously impressed. "You can build mazes. You don't understand how important that is in mind crime, how hard it is for people to do. Your architecture itself is a little plain, a little difficult to believe, but the layout of your city was remarkable."
"So… that's good then," Neil said. "Does that mean I pass the test?"
Eames stared at him, seeming to have forgotten why they'd gone under in the first place.
"I mean," Neil continued, "you didn't get any of my secrets. The one you thought you got was wrong."
"So … so baseball man isn't your boyfriend then?" Eames said.
Neil shook his head. "No," he replied.
"And he isn't Brian."
"Brian would cry if you thought he was," Neil said but didn't elaborate when Eames's eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
Eames sighed, raking a hand through his own hair. "Well, fine, I'll admit that I haven't seen someone pick up on it quite so quickly… you're still pretty rough around the edges, but I will say that with some training… and some decent somnacin… you could probably be… pretty good at this."
"So you'll teach me?" Neil asked, a smile cracking through his sober expression. It seemed ludicrous to even want to go back down there, but… well, he did.
"Oh, no, no, I don't have the time to teach you. I'm on a job."
Disappointment flooded through Neil, shoulders slumping. "So all that build up for nothing then? You're a fucking cocktease."
"Look, I'm not saying you can't try. I don't really have the time to teach you the basic how-to's is all. I'm sorry."
"Well, maybe I can help you on the job."
Eames snorted. "I don't think a rookie like you could do much-"
"Who's your mark?"
Eames sighed, rolling his eyes. "A businessman who works here, the son of the owner of Winchester Industries... You know, ah… George Winchester Jr. I'm forging as his fiancée to find out if he's the one who poisoned his father, trying to get the company into his own hands."
"So, what can I do to help?"
"There's nothing you can do except maybe find us a better pointman. The arse we've got on our team can't dig up information for shit."
Neil's smile returned. "If I can get you the information and help you with this job, will you train me?"
Eames laughed. "If you can get the information on Winchester and help with this job, I'll bloody blow you."
Neil got up off of the bed, sliding back into his coat. "All right. I'll be back in two days."
"You'll never manage it," Eames said.
Neil turned and winked at him. "Watch me."
The door slammed shut behind him.
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 2,921
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
Neil was sitting in a bar. It reminded him of the one back in Hutchinson with the annoying, twangy country music, but the patrons and at least some of the décor seemed a bit more classy like the bars in NYC. He didn't really give a shit either way, sitting in his booth with a beer, taking small sips from the mouth of it occasionally and watching the room for other people.
He was pretty sure he had come here for a reason, but he didn't quite remember what that was. He was sure it would come to him eventually.
Neil sat back and yawned, bored, and thought about ditching the place and going somewhere with more excitement. He'd fucked every john in this bar, and he was far from interested in fucking them again even if they constantly glanced over at him with the eyes of a starved animal. He must have been looking pretty damned good tonight simply because of the amount of attention he was getting.
Still, sometimes he liked to make them starve, so he finished his beer and checked for a set of keys that he discovered he didn't have, and then he headed out the door. It wasn't dark yet, but Neil couldn't find the sun in the sky, so he wasn't entirely sure what the time was. It wasn't particularly hot or cold, but he was still wearing a nice leather coat that…
…that he'd bought earlier…
Realization dawned on him. He was dreaming right now, and Eames was somewhere in his subconscious, looking for secrets.
"So this is my subconscious then," Neil whispered, staring at the scenery around him. He was obviously in a city, very reminiscent of New York with its urban style of buildings, but underneath it all was still this hokey, mid-Western feel of Hutchinson, Kansas. Neil wandered down the street, weaving through crowds of people who all looked familiar and all stared at him with hungry eyes, and he wondered where Eames might be looking for the answers to his secrets. He tried to think of where people would store things in a city that no one wanted to see. A prison? A bank? A hospital?
Neil was already sure he knew that none of those places were where he kept his. In fact, he was almost positive that he knew exactly where they were.
He knew Eames would never guess it, so Neil kept sauntering down the street, keeping his eye out for anyone who didn't look familiar. He knew that Eames could literally be anyone, but he figured the man had to at least have a tell. No one had a perfect poker face after all. Still, it was hard to look at everyone in the crowd, and frankly it was difficult to tell one person from another.
He decided that Eames would likely attempt to follow him, so he turned down a less populated street and then another and another, allowing these streets to appear at his will. He imagined seeing the city from above, creating his own mental map, gleeful at the way it obeyed him, and he continued walking for at least twenty minutes.
Soon enough, the city's buildings grew shorter and then gave way to open grassland. There were crops of corn and cows loping around their pastures and then a smaller city, one much more like Hutchinson. He wandered into it, turning down Monroe Street to find his own house sitting there, the lawn dead, the bushes a bit overgrown. He was tempted to go inside for a moment, but he figured there'd really be nothing of interest there. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was following him. He didn't see anyone, so he shrugged and shoved on.
It didn't take long until he found what he'd been searching for.
His secrets of course would be stashed here, in the house near the fairgrounds with the blue security light. It looked exactly the way it had in his memory, crystal clear despite the summer being so many years ago. A wave of some sort of emotion welled up in Neil's chest, but he couldn't quite identify what it was. It wasn't as happy as he expected by any means.
His projections still wandered about the streets, gathering in groups to talk about this or that, kids playing, teenagers from his high school days sulking on the hoods of old cars, glaring at him and yet still… wanting. Neil did find his subconscious's fascination with him just the slightest bit unnerving even though it also was a bit thrilling. He almost felt like a god in this world.
He decided to enjoy himself a little.
He approached the group of sulking teens, shoving his hands into his pockets. "What'chu gawking at?" he asked, smirking. His smirk slid away from him suddenly as an arm wrapped around his shoulder from behind, a hand sliding down the front of his t-shirt. A gasp was pulled from him as he found he recognized the feel of those cold fingers.
Neil jerked away and turned around and Coach was standing there in his baseball cleats, smiling at him. Neil could do nothing but gape back at him for several seconds, and then he felt one of the teenagers move behind him. He caught the figure in his peripheral vision, seeming to wander away like many of the projections did (no one seemed to notice anything was going on), but Neil knew better.
Suddenly every building on the street was hidden behind rising brick walls with no doors and no windows, and he looked directly at the teenager that had been making his way towards Coach's house. He glanced back towards Coach, but he was gone.
All of his projections turned towards him and the teenage boy who stared back at Neil as if waiting for something to happen. No one moved.
…then…
From behind the wall that shielded Coach's house from view, there was a scratching sound… like someone was on the other side, trying to break out… a little boy who was crying, desperate for escape, and Neil immediately thought it's Brian. It has to be… Brian…
Neil narrowed his eyes and focused on the boy to keep from focusing on that sound, and said, "You're not fooling anyone. I know it's you, Eames."
A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and a familiar voice said, "Do you?"
Neil turned and saw one of the neighbors, a chubby, middle-aged woman in a pair of overly starched jeans. She looked completely typical except for the very atypical expression on her face, one Neil was sure was Eames's.
The projections weren't staring at him and the boy. They were staring at Eames. Neil had suspected Eames was nearby and they'd zeroed in on the one not like them.
"Don't feel bad," the woman said with Eames's accent but her own voice. "The subconscious is better at finding out of the ordinary things in the mind than the conscious is."
"You still haven't found my secrets," Neil said softly, and his projections were moving closer to them. Eames noticed this of course, but didn't seem too terribly concerned.
"Who's Brian then?" Eames asked, and Neil felt his stomach drop to his knees. He turned around to stare at the brick wall and found Brian's name written across it in graffiti. "Is he your baseball playing boyfriend? Does he know you like to sell your body to other blokes?"
"You… you got it wrong," Neil said, and his voice was shaking. Eames probably thought that he was badly bluffing, but he wasn't. He was just much more concerned with the fact that Brian's cage was announcing its presence.
The ground started to rumble and Eames's confidence faltered as he realized Neil wasn't taking back his statement, that he looked genuinely fearful that something else was going on. "You… you're bluffing," Eames said, even though Neil knew that Eames knew that he wasn't. "Your mind has been putting up clues the entire time we've been down here. The… the billboards that say Brian, Brian, Brian again and again… th… the man in the baseball cleats appearing in every crowd, following you, and the way he touched you! You're telling me that…"
He trailed off, turning to look at the projections. "Hold up now… what is this…?" Eames whispered, and Neil realized he had shifted back into himself. Neil didn't really understand what was bothering him though until he said, "Why are they all looking at you? They should be looking at me… In fact, they should have attacked me by now…"
He turned his eyes back on Neil. "You tricked me, didn't you?" he growled. "You… you're some sort of dreamshare spy sent on me, aren't you?"
"What? No!" Neil cried out, and the ground rumbled again. The wind kicked up and Neil was reminded of the time when he was a kid and a tornado had swept through Kansas. He'd hidden under his mother's bed while she was out barhopping with her boyfriend and looked at her Playgirl magazines.
"You are, you are," Eames said. "I'm not that stupid. I've played your game up until now, but I know you have to be because no beginner would be able to build mazes like that."
"Mazes? What the fuck are you talking about?" Neil shouted over the wail of the wind. The projections gathering around them were increasing in number. Neil could see the faces of his mother, Wendy, and Eric standing in the crowd. All of them had their eyes locked directly on him, and their expressions were just like the ones of the men in the bar.
It started raining, but the water fell in straight, constant lines, like it was being sprayed from a showerhead.
The scratching and the sobs from behind the brick wall grew louder. Brian's name in paint started to run, leaving long blue lines cascading towards the pavement below the wall.
Neil could see Coach standing in the crowd, somehow taller than all of them and somehow completely dry. Coach still only existed in that sweltering summer heat. The water could not touch him.
"Tell me the truth!" Eames shouted as the wind grew so loud and fast that Neil thought he might be lifted off of the ground. "Stop trying to distract me with all of this nonsense!"
"You think I'm doing this on purpose?" Neil shrieked back, covering his ears to try and block out the howling of the wind. His clothes were sticking to him and the crowd was moving closer. Chunks of the streets and buildings broke off like pieces of chocolate bars and were carried off into the air, and Eames looked around, expression growing more and more distraught. Neil realized that Eames had merely been hoping this was being done purposely. He realized that something had gone horribly wrong.
The walls around the houses extended ever higher.
"Neil!" Eames screamed, and somehow Neil could hear it even through his hands and the wind.
He opened his eyes (when had he closed them?) and only had a split second to see before his projections descended upon him, an entire crowd smothering him with the heat of their bodies as they ripped at his clothing, greedy hands wanting more and more. Neil wasn't entirely sure if he was screaming, couldn't hear it over the wind. Neil tried to fight them off, but it didn't do much good considering the sheer number of them. His jacket and shirt and jeans had been torn from him, meaning he didn't have his knife on his person.
Someone grabbed hold of his testicles, and he squirmed and tried to get out of their hand, but then they were twisted painfully and spots danced before his eyes. People were scratching at his legs and torso, arms being pulled until they felt like they were going to come out of socket. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of the gun back in Eames's hotel room, wishing he had it now. He could feel the weight of it in his mind and then in his hand, and he realized he'd allowed it into existence, just as he had the many alleyways in the city.
He didn't bother to aim, firing blindly into the crowd, and a few of his projections fell dead to the ground. Before they descended upon him again, Neil constantly firing through them, he saw Eames attempting to pull them off of him, pale and wide-eyed as a ghost, and then Neil tilted his head back, saw the running blue paint from Brian's name, and how it had all run together at the bottom of the wall behind his head, spelling out one word.
SLUT.
Over the wind, Neil almost thought he heard music playing, but he didn't bother with it. Instead he shouted in the direction he'd last seen Eames, "Wake me up! Please, for the love of God, wake me up!"
Neil opened his eyes, looking around for any sign of the crazy mob.
There was only Eames, looking how Neil felt, removing the needle from his own arm. He turned towards Neil and pressed a hand to the side of his face. "Are you all right?" he asked, and his voice was shaking.
Neil looked at the ceiling, at the alarm clock still softly playing music, at the curtains and the city in the window. "Yeah… I'm… I'm okay…" he said, feeling like his throat was clogged.
Eames removed the needle from Neil's arm and helped him sit up, and Neil realized that his hands were shaking.
"Good god," Eames mumbled, and he couldn't seem to stop touching Neil's hair or face or shoulder or hands. "I've never seen someone's subconscious turn on them before. Something has got to be wrong with this batch of somnacin. I knew something was weird…"
It seemed the only reason Eames was talking was to fill up the room with something other than terror because Neil wasn't really listening to him. He mostly just waited until Eames finished muttering to himself and then said, "I'm not a spy… I swear to god I'm not."
Eames looked into his eyes, hesitated, and then nodded. "Right… um… yeah…"
For a moment there was nothing to be done but sit there and let their heart rates calm down. Eames still kept a hand on Neil's shoulder, thumb pressed up close to his jugular, as if to make sure he was still there.
"So, um…" Eames said when the silence had dragged on too long. "Um, you've never used the PASIV device before then."
"Not before today," Neil replied.
Eames shook his head, obviously impressed. "You can build mazes. You don't understand how important that is in mind crime, how hard it is for people to do. Your architecture itself is a little plain, a little difficult to believe, but the layout of your city was remarkable."
"So… that's good then," Neil said. "Does that mean I pass the test?"
Eames stared at him, seeming to have forgotten why they'd gone under in the first place.
"I mean," Neil continued, "you didn't get any of my secrets. The one you thought you got was wrong."
"So … so baseball man isn't your boyfriend then?" Eames said.
Neil shook his head. "No," he replied.
"And he isn't Brian."
"Brian would cry if you thought he was," Neil said but didn't elaborate when Eames's eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
Eames sighed, raking a hand through his own hair. "Well, fine, I'll admit that I haven't seen someone pick up on it quite so quickly… you're still pretty rough around the edges, but I will say that with some training… and some decent somnacin… you could probably be… pretty good at this."
"So you'll teach me?" Neil asked, a smile cracking through his sober expression. It seemed ludicrous to even want to go back down there, but… well, he did.
"Oh, no, no, I don't have the time to teach you. I'm on a job."
Disappointment flooded through Neil, shoulders slumping. "So all that build up for nothing then? You're a fucking cocktease."
"Look, I'm not saying you can't try. I don't really have the time to teach you the basic how-to's is all. I'm sorry."
"Well, maybe I can help you on the job."
Eames snorted. "I don't think a rookie like you could do much-"
"Who's your mark?"
Eames sighed, rolling his eyes. "A businessman who works here, the son of the owner of Winchester Industries... You know, ah… George Winchester Jr. I'm forging as his fiancée to find out if he's the one who poisoned his father, trying to get the company into his own hands."
"So, what can I do to help?"
"There's nothing you can do except maybe find us a better pointman. The arse we've got on our team can't dig up information for shit."
Neil's smile returned. "If I can get you the information and help you with this job, will you train me?"
Eames laughed. "If you can get the information on Winchester and help with this job, I'll bloody blow you."
Neil got up off of the bed, sliding back into his coat. "All right. I'll be back in two days."
"You'll never manage it," Eames said.
Neil turned and winked at him. "Watch me."
The door slammed shut behind him.