[Inception fic] Somnambulism - Part 2
Had this all ready to post last night, so of course LJ went down. XD; Ah well, not too much later than I was planning for.
Title: Somnambulism
Chapter: 2/2
Summary: [Superpowers AU] The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
Characters/Pairing: Implied Eames/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 8400 (this part, 17800 overall)
Warnings: Not much more than you’d see in the movie. Violence, characters involved in morally dubious activities, writer tackling fandoms and/or subject matter outside her usual range - the usual.
Link to part 1
Reverting from forgery back to one’s natural appearance is usually considered the easy part of the process. Eames has taken it several steps further than most.
The golden age was well and truly over when Eames started learning forgery; never again would anyone be able to believe they were too good to lose themselves in their own cons. He'd been no more than a rookie when they warned him what his future had in store, and he'd thought no more of it than any other beginner would, drunk on the sheer possibility of the career stretching out in front of him. But within a few weeks more he'd heard enough of the stories - seen enough of the results - to swallow his pride and make himself bury the naïve assurance it could never happen to him. It could and it would, unless he found a way to stop it.
He made a resolution then and there that he was going to keep track of himself no matter what it took, and promptly set about cultivating a narcissistic streak the width of the English Channel. There was no-one he could ever want to be more than Eames, and he made himself believe it.
It wasn't just the indecent number of hours he spent ensconced between his mirrors, revelling in his own imperfections (the crooked teeth, the minute asymmetries of the crinkles around his eyes), learning himself as thoroughly as he would any mark. It was about learning how his body changed by honest means and making certain he kept up. He got all his tattoos done the old fashioned way, always double checking he'd gotten the new ones right whenever he shed a skin. Once in a while when between jobs he'd deliberately ruin his diet, stop his morning runs and let himself go for a months at a time, just to see it happen. He could always tweak the details if anyone he wanted to impress was going to see what he looked like under his shirt (and really, the forger who doesn't bother to see if they can hold shape through an orgasm is in the wrong business).
While he worked at fine-tuning his imitations as hard as anyone else, there was no-one who put as much work into learning to revert back to his own features as Eames did. Perfecting any face he hadn't improvised on the fly became a two-stage process; how to shift in, and how to shift back out - on and off, up and down, until it was coded into muscle memory. An average forger could drop an imitation in seventeen seconds; an experienced one might get it as low as five. Eames could do it in naught-point-four. He worked at it until it was reflex, so easy that he worried a little that some day someone would sneak up behind him and yell 'boo!' and he'd find he'd dropped his carefully crafted forgery on the spot. If it worked, though, it would be well worth that risk.
He'd never had any real idea if any of it would work, mind. But he reasoned that at least if he ever was reduced to messing around with forgeries of himself, he'd know himself well enough to do a better than half-arsed job.
***
The next five minutes feel like an hour. Adrenaline is emphatically not his friend today.
Whether because of Eames' weight or his injury or both, the point man keeps his route unusually grounded on the way back. Pressed against the man's body, Eames is very much aware of the tension in the arm wrapped over his hips, the angle of his shoulders, the note of labour in his breathing - that, to put it bluntly, the ability to work around gravity on your own terms doesn't equal true superstrength, and carrying Eames is real work for him. Nonetheless, they're making much faster progress than the security team had managed, so if it seems to Eames that this has gone on forever he has only himself to blame.
It's a good thing he has ample excuse for being tense, because Eames has not in years felt so unprofessional about his ability to control his own reactions mid-forge. No, he hadn't planned for this, but objectively it doesn't make one bit of difference how he gets to the facility. Eames is just having a little difficulty being objective while slung over the shoulder of a man who's shot him on four different occasions and whom he'd seen sliced open on an autopsy table less than twenty-four hours ago. He's forged a thousand marks, bluffed his way effortlessly through a hundred sticky situations, but this is not one he's ever dealt with before.
Eames is never at his most focused when he has a bullet in his leg, no matter how many nerves he's shut off between it and the rest of him, and knowing that it's only paranoia that has him thinking the point man is going to recognise him any second - if he hasn't already - is not helping him relax. The urge to shift back thrums under his skin like a second heartbeat, worse every time a movement jars his leg some uncomfortable way.
The point man stops abruptly. “You hanging in there?” He sounds sympathetic, if not particularly concerned.
Eames groans in answer.
“We're almost there,” the point man promises. “I'm just trying to sort out the best way to get us over this wall without shaking you around more than I have to.”
“That bad?”
“Nah. Just weighing my options.”
It's easy to picture him doing it - the fast way straight over or the slow way around. He's probably used to flying clean over obstacles like this without thinking twice about it. Eames is likely forcing him to think twice about everything just by being here.
“The scientific method, hm?” he mutters.
It takes him a moment too long to realise he said this aloud.
The pause before the point man asks him, “What was that?” is a moment too long too.
That's when Eames panics and shoots him in the back of the head.
***
Crawling under the wall is one method that had probably not been in the point man's short list, but when Eames finds the opening that makes it possible after a short limp along the base he's in no condition to be picky. Halfway through he bangs his leg and swears blue murder, though it's not as though there's anyone around to hear him. The point man had been right about how close they were to their destination; from the far side of the wall Eames can see the main gate in the boundary fence that surrounds the main facility - not in a direct line from where he's standing (or rather, leaning), but close enough that he'll be able to make it without trouble, bullet wound or no.
He feels like a right fool, but the thing to focus on is that the mission is salvageable. The guards at the gate will have been close enough to hear the gunshot, and they're very likely expecting him, so when he limps up, alone, with a story about seeing the point man shot out from under him and crawling away without seeing the shooter, they'll probably usher him in quickly and without question. He's actually in the act of pushing himself off from the wall to make his way over when he sees the gate open from the inside to let someone out, and quickly presses himself back into the nearest shadow, out of sight.
It's not much more than gut instinct that makes him hide, but he has ample reason to be glad of it a moment later when he gets a look at the face of the man who's just stepped outside in the glare of the floodlights over the gate.
It's the same man Eames shot in the head not five minutes ago, and not half a block away.
The point man pauses under the light for only a handful of seconds before he vanishes into the gloom of the labyrinth ahead with a start of speed.
Eames is suddenly very glad he's put even a little distance between himself and the place he'd panicked and shot the point man in the head, because it's bound to be a pretty good guess that's where he's heading. It's possible that the point man doesn't know it was the same man he was carrying home who shot him. It's similarly possible that he hasn't just told the gate guards to triple-check Matthews' identity if he shows up. Eames is not about to bet his welfare on either possibility.
It also dawns on Eames that he's still far too close for comfort, and he drops both forgery and leg wound like hot potatoes and runs, as quietly as he can, in the opposite direction.
He spends most of the rest of the night wedged into a crack between two buildings, trusting to any number of deities that he doesn't believe in that they can't possibly look everywhere tonight, can they? To distract himself he passes the time revising his estimates of how much of his kingdom he'd give for a mobile phone, because he wants nothing more than to call Charles up, send him down to the morgue and have him confirm right to Eames' ear that the point man's body is still there, and maybe send him a photograph or two for good measure.
Actually it's probably a good thing he doesn't have a phone, because he'd have another kind of merry hell to deal with deciding whether he dared make even that much noise when he's sure he hears the point man pass by outside too many times to dare coming out.
(He never could decide later whether to count this as their sixth meeting, given that the point man never even saw him, but none since the second had left nearly so much impression.)
***
By dawn, Eames is finally feeling confident enough that the search will have been called off to lever himself out of his crack and look around, in time to witness a population estimated at forty thousand getting up and going about their business, mostly headed for jobs in surrounding industrial zones built on firmer foundations. The whole area is well-nigh unrecognisable in daylight, and not least for the sight of a few thousand surprisingly well-dressed and neatly groomed slum-dwellers casually finding sliproads through the chaos of old debris as though doing so posed no more challenge than any other early-morning commute. Eames can blend like nobody's business, but he can't help feeling like the one bug in Escher's House of Stairs that has no idea where it's going and doesn't dare ask for directions. It seems suddenly laughable to remember the game of espionage and gunfire he'd been waging over all these people's heads only hours before.
You did see signs of habitation at night - the odd man or woman out on the streets in the dark, a light shining through a window somewhere (Proclus' presence here does at least mean they've gotten the water and power connected to the mains again, for what good it does the small proportion of the infrastructure here that's still in a condition to make use of it). Nonetheless, it was sometimes a little too easy to forget that virtually any liveable building still standing within the boundaries probably had squatters packed into it like sardines. Why Charles was so sure that one couldn't just walk in here in daylight and take a good look around Eames can't imagine, and he'd have taken some time to give the matter more thought except that any theory he comes up with here and now is only bound to make him paranoid.
The security patrols are still a visible presence on the streets in daylight, but they don't look any more on edge than the bored security detail you see anywhere, and they pay no more attention to Eames than anyone else. In the light of dawn it's suddenly painfully obvious how the point man keeps finding them, night after night, when every time Charles' teams set foot here they must pass within hearing of dozens of people who would happily report the presence of a stranger for a reward. This seems like just the revelation he needed for exactly as long as it takes him to start thinking about all the problematic logistics of a false positive every time a neighbour comes home drunk and noisy, and whether they have some equivalent concept to the shame of being a tattletale in this part of the world, and what proportion of the community would even have access to a working phone, and has to settle on the conclusion that he's only going to drive himself mad trying to make sense of it all.
The most he has to show for the whole night is the knowledge that, however they've found him out in the labyrinth in the past, hiding in one place within only a couple of dozen metres of their base seems to be enough to fool it. He's so close to his goal now that it seems a waste to turn around and walk back out, but without a plan to get inside the facility proper he might as well be back on the outer perimeter. The world may be full of metas for whom an eight-foot concrete wall topped with razor wire poses no obstacle, but Eames was not born to be one of them. Security has found him easily time and again even when he wasn't trying to bypass a structure he can see perfectly well is dotted with discretely placed closed-circuit cameras.
If they haven't already, they're bound to find the real Matthews soon, left out in the open not far from where he was first apprehended, and (hopefully) drugged out of remembering any details of what he'd seen the previous night. Between that and what the point man is bound to have told them about Eames' behaviour they'd be fools not to build some suspicion that the Matthews they almost got back to base last night wasn't the real thing - probably not enough for them to put all the pieces together, but he knows he's blown any chance to get the same gambit to work again.
Even so, he's here, further in than Charles' people have ever been before, and he's earned at least the chance to do some proper sightseeing. Nor is a quick inventory of his position entirely discouraging: he's working on very little sleep and he didn't come in carrying any food or water, but he does have a little money on him and there's bound to be someone around this morning who'll be willing to exchange the latter for the former. For all practical purposes he's got all day to think about what to do next.
He starts by doing a full lap of the facility, making sure to weave in and out of sight at intervals and vary his appearance whenever he moves out of camera range. A clear barrier zone never less than a dozen feet wide separates the outer wall from the nearest extent of the variously decrepit structures that surround it - there's certainly going to be no climbing over it that way. There's no back entrance either, making the main gate the only way in he can see, and even that isn't large - it wouldn't need to be when most of their employees take a helicopter to work. Only security personnel would ever need to go in and out at ground level.
He could probably take on the guards stationed at the gate directly, but with so little idea what he'll find inside he can't risk triggering the alarm before he's made it that far. If he's going to make it through he'll have to start by convincing them that he's a legitimate employee; unfortunately, sneaking onto another security team is out of the question at this point. He won't have nearly the time he'd need to study his forgery target beforehand, and after last night's incident he can count on them to be more suspicious than usual of anyone who seems to be acting a little odd.
On the other hand, there is one employee who Eames has enough familiarity with that he might be able to pull off a convincing forgery - who he's seen coming and going alone through that gate, and who might even wield enough authority to avoid much questioning.
It's the ballsiest plan he's contemplated since he can't remember when, but in the absence of any obvious alternative it's not long before it becomes far too tempting to pass up. It's a risk and a big one, but if he's going to blow this then at least he won't be doing it halfway.
***
Eames' mirrors left Proclus' domain with Charles' team, but he can manage just as well without them. Like most forgers he carries them by habit, but he only really uses them to double check the details - and, it must be said, to indulge in a certain amount of vanity at the sight of a forgery well done. Without so much as a reference photo on hand he'll be working from memory, mirrors or no.
He's worn forgeries that sat more comfortably than the point man's skin does tonight, but the sensation that runs through him as he accepts that he won't get to see how this one looks on him before the job is nothing more serious than a little mild disappointment; there's no real doubt in his mind he's done a perfectly good job. He can't actually fly over walls like the real thing so he plans his approach with care - from an angle, he decides, so that the guards won't be able to see him scrambling his way around any of the obstacles that the point man could waltz across.
He's just about to step out of his cover into the wide gap that separates the facility from the edge of the old industrial zone when he hears the unmistakeable sound of a gun being cocked.
“Don't move, please, Mr Eames,” says a voice.
Eames goes very still. It's a reaction that has only a little to do with the instruction, or the gun, or the fact he hadn't even heard anyone coming, and everything to do with the rug-from-under-his-feet rush of vertigo that comes with hearing his name on the point man's lips.
“Now I want you to turn around - slowly. We both know one bullet won't take you down, but we can always see how you deal with the whole clip.”
“I'd rather not find out,” Eames admits, hating the way his voice shakes, and rotates around in a tight circle. Running into the real thing had always been a risk he was prepared to take, but this is something else altogether. He hasn't been made to raise his hands and his gun is tucked into his pants at the small of his back; he could draw it in less than the space of a second, but with the point man watching his every move he doesn't feel nearly brave enough to try it.
He finishes turning to see the other man standing a few feet out of his reach, a gun raised in his outstretched arm and pointed at Eames' head. The point man takes in the sight of his own features on Eames' body consideringly. There's little if any trace of surprise in his expression; he almost has the air of someone judging a spectacle arranged for their amusement.
“Impressive work,” he says. Then, just as thoughtfully, he pulls the trigger.
The next thing Eames hears is the point man's voice saying, “Forty seven seconds. I had it right the first time, didn't I? The chest shots didn't take you down for nearly as long.”
Eames opens his eyes, already enjoying his usual splitting headache - only magnified thanks to his having not actually slept in the last twenty four hours. The point man is crouching over where Eames is lying on the ground, the better to keep his gun trained between Eames' eyes, and holding Eames' gun in his other hand. Any lingering sense memory of being patted down while he was out is lost under the headache.
“Are you always this sadistic?” Eames demands. Diplomacy is only going to go to waste on a man who will apparently shoot him for nothing more than his own amusement.
The point man shrugs, unapologetic. “If you think back to last night you'll find I owed you one. You've built quite the reputation on your ability to survive headshots.”
And isn't there a wealth of meaning behind that statement. Even without Eames' stupid mistake it probably wouldn't have taken a lot of extrapolation to guess that the forger who could hold shape with a bullet in his leg and the man who'd traded bullets with the point man four times in the last few days might be one and the same, and that's a set of defining features that define Eames very narrowly, but to have tracked down his name with only that to go on within the space of twenty-four hours is no mean feat.
“You've got me at something of a disadvantage here,” Eames admits, weakly.
The point man raises his eyebrows, appearing to consider this. “It's Arthur,” he says.
Eames has the nasty feeling he's missed something. “...what is?”
“That was me evening up your disadvantage,” explains the point man, slowly.
“Well, I'm much obliged, Arthur, but it hasn't exactly been the mystery of your name that's been keeping me up at night lately.” Eames fails rather spectacularly at modulating his tone, but the point man appears irritatingly unfazed by any of it.
“You're talking about what happens to me when I'm shot?” he asks.
A response seems superfluous at this point.
“Have you ever died in a dream, Mr Eames?”
“I suppose.” Eames tries to decide if this is the non-sequitur it seems to be.
“What happened?” prompts the point man.
“I woke up, in bed, with a cold sweat and a pounding heart and all the other usual clichés.”
“There's your answer, Mr Eames.” The point man is almost whispering. “That's what happens to me.”
“I'm fairly sure neither one of us is dreaming.” Eames is, in point of fact, suddenly a lot less sure of this than he wants to be.
“So am I.” The light is not quite good enough for Eames to tell if he's smirking. “But there it is - shoot me, and I wake up. Safe in bed.”
He seems casual, but Eames can only think of one reason why this... this Arthur would be telling him all this, and it doesn't bode well for his future. He probably has a decent chance of surviving the whole clip; he'd be happier not to find out given the choice, but he's bet his life on worse odds. The trouble is that there's no reason to assume the point man will stop there if it doesn't work. He doesn't think he could survive a beheading, for example, and the only reason he's not entirely certain is that no-one has ever tried it before.
Unless the real reason is that the point man is assuming that Eames won't have the first idea what to do with the information, and the worst of that is he's right.
Eames realises he's gaping at the point man like a beached fish and quickly shuts his mouth. But before he can come up with an actual response to whatever the hell is going on, there's the sounds of footsteps and voices closing in - more security summoned by the sound of the gunshot, no doubt.
“It's alright,” Arthur calls to them, rising to his feet, and gesturing with a wave of his gun for Eames to do likewise. “I've caught our thief.”
***
The part Eames had tried not to dwell on back when he was putting the finishing touches on his strategically cultured narcissism was how much it was all long-term planning of the most optimistic kind when, statistically speaking, he had perhaps even odds of living long enough for it to matter. Forgery did not make one any more invincible than any other mortal human, and actually left one considerably less fit for combat situations than most other common meta-abilities. The people they tended to be hired to fool were rarely happy to discover a forger in their midst, and even when the forger themselves didn't slip up (and everyone slipped up eventually), it was not uncommon for a forger to find out the hard way just how many enemies the people they impersonated really had. Background research is half the job, and even more so when one's clients are regularly inclined to understate the risks involved.
Even then, you didn't always research the right person, or Eames might have found out before it was too late that the man hiring him for the Moldez job had been working for Mr Christopher Moldez himself all along, in an elaborate plan to stage his own death in front of multiple witnesses and a video camera with Eames in the starring role.
He was not, put simply, expecting the job to end with a hitman shooting him in the head.
He was expecting it even less when he'd panicked, shifted back into himself on reflex, and discovered that what his subconscious had been trained to recognise as 'himself' was now conspicuously free of bulletholes.
Among the things everyone knows about forgers is that the fastest way to force them to lose form is to punch a hole in them, so the one good thing to be said about Moldez's plan was that it had been staged so that he'd drop out of direct sight behind a table after being shot, and that had given him the crucial seconds he'd needed to pull himself together, get his head around some sort of provisional understanding of how conspicuously not dead he seemed to be, and crawl away. How he'd gotten out of the building afterwards always remained a blur. If he hadn't gotten hold of a copy of the video footage later, he might never have been able to make himself believe it had happened at all.
For a long time afterwards (and this was even not counting the time it took to track Moldez down and explain to him exactly how Eames had felt about the affair) he'd been understandably reluctant to tempt fate by testing to see whether it would work again. But when at last he did work up the nerve to bite the not-particularly-proverbial bullet - and how that happened was a story in itself - the results were all that mattered.
Severe head injuries would remain his least favourite aspect of his new abilities, always guaranteeing him a world of discomfort, but anywhere else on his body a bullet hardly slowed him down. Whether or not he was wearing his own face beforehand made little difference - Eames shifted right back into his own skin, good as new. He stopped short of actually chopping off a finger to see if he could grow it back (he was curious, just not that curious), though if life ever gave him the chance, well, a week or two of calcium supplements and protein shakes, and who knew? The unexpected side-effect of cultivated narcissism had been to convince his own system he was invincible.
The euphoria over this discovery lasted only as long as it took for him to catch himself shedding a practice forgery to heal himself from nothing more serious a stubbed toe, and the extra months it took to train himself not to shift on reflex for non-life-threatening injuries were... not the most enjoyable part of his career, to say the least. By the time he was done refining that aspect of his new talents to the point of pulling off the trick that let him keep a bullet in his leg for half an hour while forged, it seemed a small price to pay.
(He usually glosses over most of that when he tells the story. How he discovered himself to be immortal after being shot in the head makes an excellent story - the months of tentatively feeling out his limits it took before he dared trust it, not so much.)
How widely he ought to publicise his new invulnerability was a matter Eames had been in two minds about ever since, even among the tight circles of his few trusted contacts. It's a diplomatic issue as much as anything else; of the dozen-or-so common meta-abilities (and the few dozen more less common ones), none came close to offering the bearer true invulnerability - and least of all forgery. It's one of the few reliable rules of Eames's world that no matter if you're against an opponent who can run up the side of a building or walk through a wall, a bullet to the head will still get the job done, and he'd probably feel guilty about ruining that for the world if he hadn't been so terribly fond of staying alive. On a more grounded level, there was real reason to worry that his ability to play dead convincingly would be severely compromised if people knew there was a forger out there who could un-forge a bullethole. On the other hand, there was just no fun in having a uniquely specialised skill if no-one knew to hire you for it, and it didn't take a genius to see that the applications could go well beyond being able to afford to take more risks than he used to. As unpleasant and tedious as he may have later found his developing side-business in voluntarily helping clients fake their own deaths, the money was excellent. Not something he'd want to get used to doing too often for all manner of reasons, but well worth the necessity of sharing a few secrets.
He wonders now and then whether any forger could learn the same trick, given a few pointers to get them started, or to what degree he'd be qualified to teach someone else how to do what he himself had only stumbled on by accident. He's always got one ear open for rumours of anyone else who might have hit on the same revelation - he knows he's not the only forger in his generation to dream up similar methods to avoid losing himself in others' faces. Oft times it seems inevitable that he can't be so unique, that the secret will get out eventually no matter how much care he takes. The third generation of forgery may well be the one that comes in the wake of the world discovering that forgers aren't nearly so fragile as they used to be.
But after five years being Eames, the one and only, and not so much as a whisper that anyone else in the world has learned to do what he does, Eames had stopped assuming it was inevitable and started to wonder if there was ever going to be anyone else to hit on his strange brand of immortality. It's one of the few facts of forgery is that no two people approach it in quite the same way; another forger might well be able to replicate every step of Eames' process without achieving the same result. In a world with so few shapeshifters and even fewer forgers, maybe there is only the one of him. He's a better chance of making to retirement than most of his ilk, but thoughts of some day taking on some young protege to pass on his secrets becomes a lot less appealing when set against the question of how many young proteges he'll need to go through before he finds one who'll master his tricks before they get him or her killed.
He's not lonely. Invulnerability is no kind of curse.
There are just some days when it all seems a bit too easy to be any challenge anymore, like the world has let him down.
***
The security team that had found him at the point man's mercy don't seem to know what to do with him at first. Taking prisoners probably isn't something anyone working here has had to do before.
Underdeveloped as the details may have been in Eames' plan to get inside Proclus' facility, being led through the hallways at gunpoint with cuffs on his hands and a bag over his head were definitely not part of them.
Eames goes quietly. There are a lot of guns pointed at him, at least a couple at his head, and Arthur has already demonstrated his willingness to remind the prisoner of his place. Between the headache, the indignity and the pressing distraction of how very much trouble he's in, it isn't until well after they've got him inside that a couple of oddities in the proceedings stand out enough to make him wonder, and begin to reassess some of his assumptions about exactly which details the point man has told his colleagues about his encounters with Eames thus far. The men forming his escort are clearly aware that shooting Eames does not work, but Arthur has at least had the decency not to demonstrate this for any skeptics in their numbers. No-one in his hearing has discussed the possibility of any more creative ways to deal with him, beheading or otherwise - in fact, the general buzz of hushed conversation suggests that shooting him at all is being treated like a last resort. Eames is so grateful for that that it takes a while for him to notice that he hasn't heard anyone use the word 'forger' since they picked him up either, and he's been listening very carefully.
He has no secrets from Arthur, that much has been made very plain, whereas he still hasn't more than half-formed suspicions about how a man he's seen dissected on a slab keeps coming back, night after night. But if he didn't know better, he'd think that the rest of Proclus' security team are labouring under the assumption that he and Arthur are the same kind of creature, and that Arthur is letting them. Arthur really doesn't seem like the sort of person to forget to clarify something like that.
He's on the tail end of that thought when he's hustled through a doorway (he knows this, because he was allowed to stub a toe on the frame on the way in), and handcuffed to what feels like some sort of wall-fixing. There is the sound of footsteps retreating away, then of a door being shut and locked, then more footsteps at a greater distance until they fade out of hearing.
After a couple of tries, he succeeds in shaking the bag off his head without anyone stopping him. He's in what looks like a disused office, paint peeling off the walls and bare of furniture but for one table and a wheelie chair with its back missing. Outside the door, someone coughs once, and then there's silence.
That, it appears, is the limit to the resources they've seen fit to spend keeping him here. Eames would be insulted if he wasn't so busy fishing a lock pick out of the cuff of his sleeve.
***
Fischer's people may have actually been right with their guess that Proclus' entire security budget had gone into external measures. The highest security Eames has so far encountered in here is a locked door.
He can't have long before someone discovers that their improvised cell now contains one (1) unconscious guard and no Eames, but in the meantime, Eames is taking his time to explore the facility under the guise of the eminent Dr Marianne Kochevski, an employee who is, based on the ridiculous hours that she works, either fanatically devoted to her work or merely forever slightly behind her deadlines (with a number of hours spent studying all the surveillance Mr Charles has on her, Eames' money is on a combination of the two).
The corridors are all but empty this time of night, the only other staff he encounters hardly nod to him as he goes past. Given the surprisingly real suspicion he's nursing that almost no-one here has the faintest idea there's a forger involved it all seems a little too easy.
It would be nice if he had more than the vaguest idea where to look.
***
The eighth time they meet, Eames finds Arthur sleeping in an infirmary bed behind a locked door. He's lying on his back with his arms by his sides, laid out like a body arrayed for a final viewing, too neat for natural sleep. There's a heart monitor beeping away on the shelf above him, reading a beat so slow that Eames almost startles at the first noise it makes, and an IV line running from a saline bag on a stand to his left wrist, the sight of the bare arm lying over the covers adding a strange of vulnerability to the scene that no other detail quite achieves. Eames is relatively certain it will take more than a shake to the shoulder to wake him up.
“Weren't you wearing a different shirt earlier, Marianne?”
Eames almost - literally - jumps out of his skin, and whips around to the sight of Arthur standing behind him. He's wearing the same tightly buttoned black ensemble that Eames has gotten used to seeing in outline against the shadow of his body whenever they encounter one another outside, and he's carrying a loose-leaf folder under one arm. Eames hadn't even heard him come in.
He can't stop himself from darting a glance to the bed and back again, one Arthur to the other. If he's honest with himself he's been expecting... something very much like this for a long while now, but faced with the proof he's left at a loss for words. Where do you even start?
Arthur watches him put it together with what may be the most frustrating poker face Eames has encountered for a long time, then pulls his gun from the holster on his hip and flicks off the safety.
The sight drags Eames back to himself very quickly, the pleasantly tired features of Dr Kochevski tumbling from his body. “Christ, you do realise you could just ask me if you want to speak to my face,” he blurts out, words almost tumbling over each other. He's still got the headache from the last time they did this.
Arthur raises his eyebrows at Eames, very slightly, which should really be far too small a gesture to convey that much amusement. “I wasn't planning on shooting you. We're even, remember?”
“Then-” Eames starts, stopping as Arthur flicks the gun over in his hand and holds it out to him, the barrel pointing back towards his own body.
“You wanted to know what happens when I get shot?” he offers.
Eames swallows, but he takes the gun and presses the muzzle to Arthur's temple. “You're sure?”
Arthur closes his eyes. It's no gesture of trust; this is a man with absolutely nothing to fear.
Eames pulls the trigger and Arthur drops like a stone. Over the echoes of the gunshot, Eames hears the beeping of the heart monitor speed up.
He turns to the bed in time to see Arthur opening his eyes. He takes a couple of seconds to reorient himself, then he's pushing the covers back and swinging his legs to floor, his new body dressed only in a thin hospital gown. He treats Eames to a quick glance before applying himself to the serious business of fishing a packet of cotton buds out of a drawer and sliding the IV needle out of his wrist with the efficient movements of someone who's done all this a hundred times before.
“Are you satisfied with your answer, Mr Eames?” If he's experiencing even the slightest headache or nausea for his stunt he's hiding it so well Eames can't spot it, and he suddenly finds himself obscenely jealous. This may be one of the reasons why the next thing he does is to point the gun back at Arthur's head.
“So what happens if I pull the trigger now?” he asks, with no real idea whether he means to.
“You'll hear a click, indicating to you that there aren't any bullets left in the clip.” Arthur looks up, meeting Eames' eyes properly. “Each of these bodies costs nearly twenty thousand dollars to produce. You've already cost my employer quite enough over the last week.”
Eames takes a second to do the maths behind that one, suddenly seeing each time he's shot Arthur thus far in a shockingly mercenary light. “If it's any consolation, I'm costing my own employer considerably more than that.”
“Fischer?” says Arthur. Before Eames can deny it, he adds, “We know, Eames. We've known all along. If anything, I think Saito's been deliberately baiting him to see how far he'll go.”
“Well,” says Eames. There doesn't seem much point in pretending otherwise.
Arthur jerks his chin towards where his old body is lying behind Eames on the floor. “Under my arm - those should be the files you came here for.”
Eames is getting used to the constant urge to gape at every other thing Arthur says. He tugs the folder free of the used body's grasp and flicks through the contents. He's no way of knowing if it's genuine, except that, painfully unreadable as he's finding Arthur, he just can't quite make himself believe he'd be that obvious.
“Why?” You let me in here. You showed me what you can do. You gave me all of this.
Arthur, for once, has the decency to look a little sheepish. “It's going to go straight to your head if I tell you you've been the most interesting part of my job since you showed up, isn't it?”
Eames snaps the folder closed and tries out the idea that this is, actually, happening to him. For the first time in days he's feeling like he has his balance back, and that's almost definitely why his reply comes out as, “Might not be my head you need to worry about that going to, dear.”
Arthur actually laughs at that, short and startled. He shakes his head, and for a moment he looks like he's about to say something else, but then he checks himself, the smile fading. He pushes himself up off the bed, reaching for the new set of clothing that sits folded on a chair beside it. “There must be at least half a dozen people on the way to see where that gunshot came from by now,” he says, and sounds like he regrets it. “I'll give you a two minute head start.”
Eames hesitates.
Arthur waves him away. “Go on, Eames. You don't get paid unless you make it back intact. You've already wasted your first fifteen seconds.”
Not for the first time that day, Eames has no idea what to say, so in the end he doesn't; just slips the good doctor's face back on and slips out of the room.
***
Whatever game they're playing now, it's far too late to go back by the time Eames realises that Arthur hadn't gotten as far telling him what the rules are. Presumably, he's expected to lead Arthur on another chase through the labyrinth, his skill against Eames, may the best man win, and all that. He's really not sure what he expects Arthur to do if he catches him again.
But the simple truth is that even with a two minute head start, there's no way he's going to make it. He's not even sure he's going to get out of the gate with any of his pre-prepared forgeries and the thick folder he's carrying under his arm.
Instead, Eames heads for the roof, where the good people of Proclus Global have helpfully stationed a waiting helicopter complete with bored pilot enjoying a quiet smoke against the wall out of the wind. He's prepared to explain in no uncertain terms exactly what will happen to the pilot if he doesn't feel like cooperating, but it turns out that Dr Kochevski is in the habit of flying back and forth at odd hours of the night on such a regular basis that she hardly even gets a blink when she turns up wanting a ride home.
Eames has never been inclined to pay much attention to a gift horse's tonsils, but all the way back he can't shake the awful feeling that he's cheating.
***
He doesn't look inside the file again before delivering it to Mr Charles, who takes all of fifteen seconds to rifle through its contents in Eames' presence before vanishing into his office. Within an hour, one of his underlings is telling Eames that the remainder of his fee has been transferred into his account and showing him the door.
He doesn't know what else Arthur expected him to do.
And with that, apparently, it's all over.
***
The fee from the Fischer job is enough to keep Eames living in relative luxury for the rest of the year. Within a week, he's gambled two thirds of it away at a series of casinos in Monte Carlo, and he's not even sure he hadn't meant to.
Morals haven't given Eames any serious concern in more than two decades, but what on earth he'd be doing living it up on money that was practically handed to him on a platter by an employee of the very organisation he was infiltrating he can't figure out. He takes a job while he's there, small potatoes stuff (forgery, with just enough of a risk of being shot at to make it interesting), and completely fails to distract himself from the state of his head with work.
By the time he comes around to the admission that he's felt like he left unfinished business in Johannesburg ever since he left, a month has gone by, and the first thing he sees on the news is that Proclus has closed down their whole facility overnight, citing untenable expenses, and disappeared. Fischer's name remains absent from the media.
Eames decides he never did like South Africa anyway.
So he does what he always does - he puts it out of his mind, and gets on with it.
***
Eames has enough of a reputation that he can afford to be difficult to find and still know that work will find him as often as he wants it (and not too much more so, generally, or he'd work harder at making himself harder to find). One of the ways it finds him is through Matilda, who was a very average forger once upon a time, up until the day she decided that her true talents lay instead in the business of knowing everyone else and how to get in contact with them, which she found infinitely more lucrative and considerably less risky. She's probably still a very average forger, Eames hasn't seen her face to face in years, and mostly suppresses the urge to tease her about it.
She does have uncannily good timing in amongst her new skill set, so Eames doesn't think anything of it when she calls him up within twenty four hours of him completing his latest job - the third he's done in the two months since the Fisher job, and the least exciting yet.
“Please tell me this is going to be more challenging than the last one,” he begs her, over the phone. “And by challenging, of course what I mean is 'lucrative'.”
“How challenging do you find espionage?” says Matilda.
“Corporate?”
“Think more a long the lines of second-world war zone.”
“Oh, excellent,” says Eames. “Where do they want me to meet them?”
They want him to meet them in an upmarket hotel, which is one of the more civilised options for their profession. His contact is a man called Dominick Cobb who meets him at the door (“The Dominick Cobb?” he'd asked Matilda. “Very funny, Eames,” she'd said. “And no, I've never heard of him before either.”). He's thirtyish and well-dressed, and projects an aura of competence and trustworthiness that probably inspires many marks to entrust him with their darkest secrets within hours of their meeting. He shakes Eames by the hand in the doorway, and invites him in to meet the rest of his team.
Eames is very good with names, though he blanks spectacularly as Cobb gets to the part that goes, “...though I gather you've met Arthur already. He assures me you're the best forger he's ever worked with.”
Eames knows a few different Arthurs. The one now stepping forward to shake his hand is the one he's least likely to ever forget.
The first proper thought he manages is something like of course - this was how it was meant to go. The second is probably crazy, but he's too giddy not to wonder just a little whether two minutes and two months would sound so very different when you're stressed enough to hear whatever you expect.
“I'm looking forward to working with you again, Mr Eames,” Arthur says, with a smile full of secrets. “You're a hard man to track down.”
“Even for a man of your talents?” Eames says, and he's running on automatic, really, but idle banter has been second nature all his life. “I'm going to have to take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” says Arthur, and finally releases his hand.
Author's notes: Um, so, I think I mentioned this was my first attempt at Inception fic? Feedback would be very much appreciated, and concrit is entirely welcome.
I am in two minds about whether there is likely to be a sequel to this. There is still an awful lot of extra backstory in my head about Arthur and exactly what Proclus has been up to that didn't fit anywhere in the story, and it is entirely plausible that Eames will be hearing about all of it in detail in his near future. On the other hand, I have an awful lot of other WIPs in other fandoms still hovering on my conscience and the trouble with 'Eames hears about Arthur's history and gets to know Cobb's team' is that it doesn't add up to anything with a lot of plot on its own. So, certainly possible, but I wouldn't want to make any promises just yet. ^^;
Title: Somnambulism
Chapter: 2/2
Summary: [Superpowers AU] The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.
Characters/Pairing: Implied Eames/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 8400 (this part, 17800 overall)
Warnings: Not much more than you’d see in the movie. Violence, characters involved in morally dubious activities, writer tackling fandoms and/or subject matter outside her usual range - the usual.
Link to part 1
Reverting from forgery back to one’s natural appearance is usually considered the easy part of the process. Eames has taken it several steps further than most.
The golden age was well and truly over when Eames started learning forgery; never again would anyone be able to believe they were too good to lose themselves in their own cons. He'd been no more than a rookie when they warned him what his future had in store, and he'd thought no more of it than any other beginner would, drunk on the sheer possibility of the career stretching out in front of him. But within a few weeks more he'd heard enough of the stories - seen enough of the results - to swallow his pride and make himself bury the naïve assurance it could never happen to him. It could and it would, unless he found a way to stop it.
He made a resolution then and there that he was going to keep track of himself no matter what it took, and promptly set about cultivating a narcissistic streak the width of the English Channel. There was no-one he could ever want to be more than Eames, and he made himself believe it.
It wasn't just the indecent number of hours he spent ensconced between his mirrors, revelling in his own imperfections (the crooked teeth, the minute asymmetries of the crinkles around his eyes), learning himself as thoroughly as he would any mark. It was about learning how his body changed by honest means and making certain he kept up. He got all his tattoos done the old fashioned way, always double checking he'd gotten the new ones right whenever he shed a skin. Once in a while when between jobs he'd deliberately ruin his diet, stop his morning runs and let himself go for a months at a time, just to see it happen. He could always tweak the details if anyone he wanted to impress was going to see what he looked like under his shirt (and really, the forger who doesn't bother to see if they can hold shape through an orgasm is in the wrong business).
While he worked at fine-tuning his imitations as hard as anyone else, there was no-one who put as much work into learning to revert back to his own features as Eames did. Perfecting any face he hadn't improvised on the fly became a two-stage process; how to shift in, and how to shift back out - on and off, up and down, until it was coded into muscle memory. An average forger could drop an imitation in seventeen seconds; an experienced one might get it as low as five. Eames could do it in naught-point-four. He worked at it until it was reflex, so easy that he worried a little that some day someone would sneak up behind him and yell 'boo!' and he'd find he'd dropped his carefully crafted forgery on the spot. If it worked, though, it would be well worth that risk.
He'd never had any real idea if any of it would work, mind. But he reasoned that at least if he ever was reduced to messing around with forgeries of himself, he'd know himself well enough to do a better than half-arsed job.
***
The next five minutes feel like an hour. Adrenaline is emphatically not his friend today.
Whether because of Eames' weight or his injury or both, the point man keeps his route unusually grounded on the way back. Pressed against the man's body, Eames is very much aware of the tension in the arm wrapped over his hips, the angle of his shoulders, the note of labour in his breathing - that, to put it bluntly, the ability to work around gravity on your own terms doesn't equal true superstrength, and carrying Eames is real work for him. Nonetheless, they're making much faster progress than the security team had managed, so if it seems to Eames that this has gone on forever he has only himself to blame.
It's a good thing he has ample excuse for being tense, because Eames has not in years felt so unprofessional about his ability to control his own reactions mid-forge. No, he hadn't planned for this, but objectively it doesn't make one bit of difference how he gets to the facility. Eames is just having a little difficulty being objective while slung over the shoulder of a man who's shot him on four different occasions and whom he'd seen sliced open on an autopsy table less than twenty-four hours ago. He's forged a thousand marks, bluffed his way effortlessly through a hundred sticky situations, but this is not one he's ever dealt with before.
Eames is never at his most focused when he has a bullet in his leg, no matter how many nerves he's shut off between it and the rest of him, and knowing that it's only paranoia that has him thinking the point man is going to recognise him any second - if he hasn't already - is not helping him relax. The urge to shift back thrums under his skin like a second heartbeat, worse every time a movement jars his leg some uncomfortable way.
The point man stops abruptly. “You hanging in there?” He sounds sympathetic, if not particularly concerned.
Eames groans in answer.
“We're almost there,” the point man promises. “I'm just trying to sort out the best way to get us over this wall without shaking you around more than I have to.”
“That bad?”
“Nah. Just weighing my options.”
It's easy to picture him doing it - the fast way straight over or the slow way around. He's probably used to flying clean over obstacles like this without thinking twice about it. Eames is likely forcing him to think twice about everything just by being here.
“The scientific method, hm?” he mutters.
It takes him a moment too long to realise he said this aloud.
The pause before the point man asks him, “What was that?” is a moment too long too.
That's when Eames panics and shoots him in the back of the head.
***
Crawling under the wall is one method that had probably not been in the point man's short list, but when Eames finds the opening that makes it possible after a short limp along the base he's in no condition to be picky. Halfway through he bangs his leg and swears blue murder, though it's not as though there's anyone around to hear him. The point man had been right about how close they were to their destination; from the far side of the wall Eames can see the main gate in the boundary fence that surrounds the main facility - not in a direct line from where he's standing (or rather, leaning), but close enough that he'll be able to make it without trouble, bullet wound or no.
He feels like a right fool, but the thing to focus on is that the mission is salvageable. The guards at the gate will have been close enough to hear the gunshot, and they're very likely expecting him, so when he limps up, alone, with a story about seeing the point man shot out from under him and crawling away without seeing the shooter, they'll probably usher him in quickly and without question. He's actually in the act of pushing himself off from the wall to make his way over when he sees the gate open from the inside to let someone out, and quickly presses himself back into the nearest shadow, out of sight.
It's not much more than gut instinct that makes him hide, but he has ample reason to be glad of it a moment later when he gets a look at the face of the man who's just stepped outside in the glare of the floodlights over the gate.
It's the same man Eames shot in the head not five minutes ago, and not half a block away.
The point man pauses under the light for only a handful of seconds before he vanishes into the gloom of the labyrinth ahead with a start of speed.
Eames is suddenly very glad he's put even a little distance between himself and the place he'd panicked and shot the point man in the head, because it's bound to be a pretty good guess that's where he's heading. It's possible that the point man doesn't know it was the same man he was carrying home who shot him. It's similarly possible that he hasn't just told the gate guards to triple-check Matthews' identity if he shows up. Eames is not about to bet his welfare on either possibility.
It also dawns on Eames that he's still far too close for comfort, and he drops both forgery and leg wound like hot potatoes and runs, as quietly as he can, in the opposite direction.
He spends most of the rest of the night wedged into a crack between two buildings, trusting to any number of deities that he doesn't believe in that they can't possibly look everywhere tonight, can they? To distract himself he passes the time revising his estimates of how much of his kingdom he'd give for a mobile phone, because he wants nothing more than to call Charles up, send him down to the morgue and have him confirm right to Eames' ear that the point man's body is still there, and maybe send him a photograph or two for good measure.
Actually it's probably a good thing he doesn't have a phone, because he'd have another kind of merry hell to deal with deciding whether he dared make even that much noise when he's sure he hears the point man pass by outside too many times to dare coming out.
(He never could decide later whether to count this as their sixth meeting, given that the point man never even saw him, but none since the second had left nearly so much impression.)
***
By dawn, Eames is finally feeling confident enough that the search will have been called off to lever himself out of his crack and look around, in time to witness a population estimated at forty thousand getting up and going about their business, mostly headed for jobs in surrounding industrial zones built on firmer foundations. The whole area is well-nigh unrecognisable in daylight, and not least for the sight of a few thousand surprisingly well-dressed and neatly groomed slum-dwellers casually finding sliproads through the chaos of old debris as though doing so posed no more challenge than any other early-morning commute. Eames can blend like nobody's business, but he can't help feeling like the one bug in Escher's House of Stairs that has no idea where it's going and doesn't dare ask for directions. It seems suddenly laughable to remember the game of espionage and gunfire he'd been waging over all these people's heads only hours before.
You did see signs of habitation at night - the odd man or woman out on the streets in the dark, a light shining through a window somewhere (Proclus' presence here does at least mean they've gotten the water and power connected to the mains again, for what good it does the small proportion of the infrastructure here that's still in a condition to make use of it). Nonetheless, it was sometimes a little too easy to forget that virtually any liveable building still standing within the boundaries probably had squatters packed into it like sardines. Why Charles was so sure that one couldn't just walk in here in daylight and take a good look around Eames can't imagine, and he'd have taken some time to give the matter more thought except that any theory he comes up with here and now is only bound to make him paranoid.
The security patrols are still a visible presence on the streets in daylight, but they don't look any more on edge than the bored security detail you see anywhere, and they pay no more attention to Eames than anyone else. In the light of dawn it's suddenly painfully obvious how the point man keeps finding them, night after night, when every time Charles' teams set foot here they must pass within hearing of dozens of people who would happily report the presence of a stranger for a reward. This seems like just the revelation he needed for exactly as long as it takes him to start thinking about all the problematic logistics of a false positive every time a neighbour comes home drunk and noisy, and whether they have some equivalent concept to the shame of being a tattletale in this part of the world, and what proportion of the community would even have access to a working phone, and has to settle on the conclusion that he's only going to drive himself mad trying to make sense of it all.
The most he has to show for the whole night is the knowledge that, however they've found him out in the labyrinth in the past, hiding in one place within only a couple of dozen metres of their base seems to be enough to fool it. He's so close to his goal now that it seems a waste to turn around and walk back out, but without a plan to get inside the facility proper he might as well be back on the outer perimeter. The world may be full of metas for whom an eight-foot concrete wall topped with razor wire poses no obstacle, but Eames was not born to be one of them. Security has found him easily time and again even when he wasn't trying to bypass a structure he can see perfectly well is dotted with discretely placed closed-circuit cameras.
If they haven't already, they're bound to find the real Matthews soon, left out in the open not far from where he was first apprehended, and (hopefully) drugged out of remembering any details of what he'd seen the previous night. Between that and what the point man is bound to have told them about Eames' behaviour they'd be fools not to build some suspicion that the Matthews they almost got back to base last night wasn't the real thing - probably not enough for them to put all the pieces together, but he knows he's blown any chance to get the same gambit to work again.
Even so, he's here, further in than Charles' people have ever been before, and he's earned at least the chance to do some proper sightseeing. Nor is a quick inventory of his position entirely discouraging: he's working on very little sleep and he didn't come in carrying any food or water, but he does have a little money on him and there's bound to be someone around this morning who'll be willing to exchange the latter for the former. For all practical purposes he's got all day to think about what to do next.
He starts by doing a full lap of the facility, making sure to weave in and out of sight at intervals and vary his appearance whenever he moves out of camera range. A clear barrier zone never less than a dozen feet wide separates the outer wall from the nearest extent of the variously decrepit structures that surround it - there's certainly going to be no climbing over it that way. There's no back entrance either, making the main gate the only way in he can see, and even that isn't large - it wouldn't need to be when most of their employees take a helicopter to work. Only security personnel would ever need to go in and out at ground level.
He could probably take on the guards stationed at the gate directly, but with so little idea what he'll find inside he can't risk triggering the alarm before he's made it that far. If he's going to make it through he'll have to start by convincing them that he's a legitimate employee; unfortunately, sneaking onto another security team is out of the question at this point. He won't have nearly the time he'd need to study his forgery target beforehand, and after last night's incident he can count on them to be more suspicious than usual of anyone who seems to be acting a little odd.
On the other hand, there is one employee who Eames has enough familiarity with that he might be able to pull off a convincing forgery - who he's seen coming and going alone through that gate, and who might even wield enough authority to avoid much questioning.
It's the ballsiest plan he's contemplated since he can't remember when, but in the absence of any obvious alternative it's not long before it becomes far too tempting to pass up. It's a risk and a big one, but if he's going to blow this then at least he won't be doing it halfway.
***
Eames' mirrors left Proclus' domain with Charles' team, but he can manage just as well without them. Like most forgers he carries them by habit, but he only really uses them to double check the details - and, it must be said, to indulge in a certain amount of vanity at the sight of a forgery well done. Without so much as a reference photo on hand he'll be working from memory, mirrors or no.
He's worn forgeries that sat more comfortably than the point man's skin does tonight, but the sensation that runs through him as he accepts that he won't get to see how this one looks on him before the job is nothing more serious than a little mild disappointment; there's no real doubt in his mind he's done a perfectly good job. He can't actually fly over walls like the real thing so he plans his approach with care - from an angle, he decides, so that the guards won't be able to see him scrambling his way around any of the obstacles that the point man could waltz across.
He's just about to step out of his cover into the wide gap that separates the facility from the edge of the old industrial zone when he hears the unmistakeable sound of a gun being cocked.
“Don't move, please, Mr Eames,” says a voice.
Eames goes very still. It's a reaction that has only a little to do with the instruction, or the gun, or the fact he hadn't even heard anyone coming, and everything to do with the rug-from-under-his-feet rush of vertigo that comes with hearing his name on the point man's lips.
“Now I want you to turn around - slowly. We both know one bullet won't take you down, but we can always see how you deal with the whole clip.”
“I'd rather not find out,” Eames admits, hating the way his voice shakes, and rotates around in a tight circle. Running into the real thing had always been a risk he was prepared to take, but this is something else altogether. He hasn't been made to raise his hands and his gun is tucked into his pants at the small of his back; he could draw it in less than the space of a second, but with the point man watching his every move he doesn't feel nearly brave enough to try it.
He finishes turning to see the other man standing a few feet out of his reach, a gun raised in his outstretched arm and pointed at Eames' head. The point man takes in the sight of his own features on Eames' body consideringly. There's little if any trace of surprise in his expression; he almost has the air of someone judging a spectacle arranged for their amusement.
“Impressive work,” he says. Then, just as thoughtfully, he pulls the trigger.
The next thing Eames hears is the point man's voice saying, “Forty seven seconds. I had it right the first time, didn't I? The chest shots didn't take you down for nearly as long.”
Eames opens his eyes, already enjoying his usual splitting headache - only magnified thanks to his having not actually slept in the last twenty four hours. The point man is crouching over where Eames is lying on the ground, the better to keep his gun trained between Eames' eyes, and holding Eames' gun in his other hand. Any lingering sense memory of being patted down while he was out is lost under the headache.
“Are you always this sadistic?” Eames demands. Diplomacy is only going to go to waste on a man who will apparently shoot him for nothing more than his own amusement.
The point man shrugs, unapologetic. “If you think back to last night you'll find I owed you one. You've built quite the reputation on your ability to survive headshots.”
And isn't there a wealth of meaning behind that statement. Even without Eames' stupid mistake it probably wouldn't have taken a lot of extrapolation to guess that the forger who could hold shape with a bullet in his leg and the man who'd traded bullets with the point man four times in the last few days might be one and the same, and that's a set of defining features that define Eames very narrowly, but to have tracked down his name with only that to go on within the space of twenty-four hours is no mean feat.
“You've got me at something of a disadvantage here,” Eames admits, weakly.
The point man raises his eyebrows, appearing to consider this. “It's Arthur,” he says.
Eames has the nasty feeling he's missed something. “...what is?”
“That was me evening up your disadvantage,” explains the point man, slowly.
“Well, I'm much obliged, Arthur, but it hasn't exactly been the mystery of your name that's been keeping me up at night lately.” Eames fails rather spectacularly at modulating his tone, but the point man appears irritatingly unfazed by any of it.
“You're talking about what happens to me when I'm shot?” he asks.
A response seems superfluous at this point.
“Have you ever died in a dream, Mr Eames?”
“I suppose.” Eames tries to decide if this is the non-sequitur it seems to be.
“What happened?” prompts the point man.
“I woke up, in bed, with a cold sweat and a pounding heart and all the other usual clichés.”
“There's your answer, Mr Eames.” The point man is almost whispering. “That's what happens to me.”
“I'm fairly sure neither one of us is dreaming.” Eames is, in point of fact, suddenly a lot less sure of this than he wants to be.
“So am I.” The light is not quite good enough for Eames to tell if he's smirking. “But there it is - shoot me, and I wake up. Safe in bed.”
He seems casual, but Eames can only think of one reason why this... this Arthur would be telling him all this, and it doesn't bode well for his future. He probably has a decent chance of surviving the whole clip; he'd be happier not to find out given the choice, but he's bet his life on worse odds. The trouble is that there's no reason to assume the point man will stop there if it doesn't work. He doesn't think he could survive a beheading, for example, and the only reason he's not entirely certain is that no-one has ever tried it before.
Unless the real reason is that the point man is assuming that Eames won't have the first idea what to do with the information, and the worst of that is he's right.
Eames realises he's gaping at the point man like a beached fish and quickly shuts his mouth. But before he can come up with an actual response to whatever the hell is going on, there's the sounds of footsteps and voices closing in - more security summoned by the sound of the gunshot, no doubt.
“It's alright,” Arthur calls to them, rising to his feet, and gesturing with a wave of his gun for Eames to do likewise. “I've caught our thief.”
***
The part Eames had tried not to dwell on back when he was putting the finishing touches on his strategically cultured narcissism was how much it was all long-term planning of the most optimistic kind when, statistically speaking, he had perhaps even odds of living long enough for it to matter. Forgery did not make one any more invincible than any other mortal human, and actually left one considerably less fit for combat situations than most other common meta-abilities. The people they tended to be hired to fool were rarely happy to discover a forger in their midst, and even when the forger themselves didn't slip up (and everyone slipped up eventually), it was not uncommon for a forger to find out the hard way just how many enemies the people they impersonated really had. Background research is half the job, and even more so when one's clients are regularly inclined to understate the risks involved.
Even then, you didn't always research the right person, or Eames might have found out before it was too late that the man hiring him for the Moldez job had been working for Mr Christopher Moldez himself all along, in an elaborate plan to stage his own death in front of multiple witnesses and a video camera with Eames in the starring role.
He was not, put simply, expecting the job to end with a hitman shooting him in the head.
He was expecting it even less when he'd panicked, shifted back into himself on reflex, and discovered that what his subconscious had been trained to recognise as 'himself' was now conspicuously free of bulletholes.
Among the things everyone knows about forgers is that the fastest way to force them to lose form is to punch a hole in them, so the one good thing to be said about Moldez's plan was that it had been staged so that he'd drop out of direct sight behind a table after being shot, and that had given him the crucial seconds he'd needed to pull himself together, get his head around some sort of provisional understanding of how conspicuously not dead he seemed to be, and crawl away. How he'd gotten out of the building afterwards always remained a blur. If he hadn't gotten hold of a copy of the video footage later, he might never have been able to make himself believe it had happened at all.
For a long time afterwards (and this was even not counting the time it took to track Moldez down and explain to him exactly how Eames had felt about the affair) he'd been understandably reluctant to tempt fate by testing to see whether it would work again. But when at last he did work up the nerve to bite the not-particularly-proverbial bullet - and how that happened was a story in itself - the results were all that mattered.
Severe head injuries would remain his least favourite aspect of his new abilities, always guaranteeing him a world of discomfort, but anywhere else on his body a bullet hardly slowed him down. Whether or not he was wearing his own face beforehand made little difference - Eames shifted right back into his own skin, good as new. He stopped short of actually chopping off a finger to see if he could grow it back (he was curious, just not that curious), though if life ever gave him the chance, well, a week or two of calcium supplements and protein shakes, and who knew? The unexpected side-effect of cultivated narcissism had been to convince his own system he was invincible.
The euphoria over this discovery lasted only as long as it took for him to catch himself shedding a practice forgery to heal himself from nothing more serious a stubbed toe, and the extra months it took to train himself not to shift on reflex for non-life-threatening injuries were... not the most enjoyable part of his career, to say the least. By the time he was done refining that aspect of his new talents to the point of pulling off the trick that let him keep a bullet in his leg for half an hour while forged, it seemed a small price to pay.
(He usually glosses over most of that when he tells the story. How he discovered himself to be immortal after being shot in the head makes an excellent story - the months of tentatively feeling out his limits it took before he dared trust it, not so much.)
How widely he ought to publicise his new invulnerability was a matter Eames had been in two minds about ever since, even among the tight circles of his few trusted contacts. It's a diplomatic issue as much as anything else; of the dozen-or-so common meta-abilities (and the few dozen more less common ones), none came close to offering the bearer true invulnerability - and least of all forgery. It's one of the few reliable rules of Eames's world that no matter if you're against an opponent who can run up the side of a building or walk through a wall, a bullet to the head will still get the job done, and he'd probably feel guilty about ruining that for the world if he hadn't been so terribly fond of staying alive. On a more grounded level, there was real reason to worry that his ability to play dead convincingly would be severely compromised if people knew there was a forger out there who could un-forge a bullethole. On the other hand, there was just no fun in having a uniquely specialised skill if no-one knew to hire you for it, and it didn't take a genius to see that the applications could go well beyond being able to afford to take more risks than he used to. As unpleasant and tedious as he may have later found his developing side-business in voluntarily helping clients fake their own deaths, the money was excellent. Not something he'd want to get used to doing too often for all manner of reasons, but well worth the necessity of sharing a few secrets.
He wonders now and then whether any forger could learn the same trick, given a few pointers to get them started, or to what degree he'd be qualified to teach someone else how to do what he himself had only stumbled on by accident. He's always got one ear open for rumours of anyone else who might have hit on the same revelation - he knows he's not the only forger in his generation to dream up similar methods to avoid losing himself in others' faces. Oft times it seems inevitable that he can't be so unique, that the secret will get out eventually no matter how much care he takes. The third generation of forgery may well be the one that comes in the wake of the world discovering that forgers aren't nearly so fragile as they used to be.
But after five years being Eames, the one and only, and not so much as a whisper that anyone else in the world has learned to do what he does, Eames had stopped assuming it was inevitable and started to wonder if there was ever going to be anyone else to hit on his strange brand of immortality. It's one of the few facts of forgery is that no two people approach it in quite the same way; another forger might well be able to replicate every step of Eames' process without achieving the same result. In a world with so few shapeshifters and even fewer forgers, maybe there is only the one of him. He's a better chance of making to retirement than most of his ilk, but thoughts of some day taking on some young protege to pass on his secrets becomes a lot less appealing when set against the question of how many young proteges he'll need to go through before he finds one who'll master his tricks before they get him or her killed.
He's not lonely. Invulnerability is no kind of curse.
There are just some days when it all seems a bit too easy to be any challenge anymore, like the world has let him down.
***
The security team that had found him at the point man's mercy don't seem to know what to do with him at first. Taking prisoners probably isn't something anyone working here has had to do before.
Underdeveloped as the details may have been in Eames' plan to get inside Proclus' facility, being led through the hallways at gunpoint with cuffs on his hands and a bag over his head were definitely not part of them.
Eames goes quietly. There are a lot of guns pointed at him, at least a couple at his head, and Arthur has already demonstrated his willingness to remind the prisoner of his place. Between the headache, the indignity and the pressing distraction of how very much trouble he's in, it isn't until well after they've got him inside that a couple of oddities in the proceedings stand out enough to make him wonder, and begin to reassess some of his assumptions about exactly which details the point man has told his colleagues about his encounters with Eames thus far. The men forming his escort are clearly aware that shooting Eames does not work, but Arthur has at least had the decency not to demonstrate this for any skeptics in their numbers. No-one in his hearing has discussed the possibility of any more creative ways to deal with him, beheading or otherwise - in fact, the general buzz of hushed conversation suggests that shooting him at all is being treated like a last resort. Eames is so grateful for that that it takes a while for him to notice that he hasn't heard anyone use the word 'forger' since they picked him up either, and he's been listening very carefully.
He has no secrets from Arthur, that much has been made very plain, whereas he still hasn't more than half-formed suspicions about how a man he's seen dissected on a slab keeps coming back, night after night. But if he didn't know better, he'd think that the rest of Proclus' security team are labouring under the assumption that he and Arthur are the same kind of creature, and that Arthur is letting them. Arthur really doesn't seem like the sort of person to forget to clarify something like that.
He's on the tail end of that thought when he's hustled through a doorway (he knows this, because he was allowed to stub a toe on the frame on the way in), and handcuffed to what feels like some sort of wall-fixing. There is the sound of footsteps retreating away, then of a door being shut and locked, then more footsteps at a greater distance until they fade out of hearing.
After a couple of tries, he succeeds in shaking the bag off his head without anyone stopping him. He's in what looks like a disused office, paint peeling off the walls and bare of furniture but for one table and a wheelie chair with its back missing. Outside the door, someone coughs once, and then there's silence.
That, it appears, is the limit to the resources they've seen fit to spend keeping him here. Eames would be insulted if he wasn't so busy fishing a lock pick out of the cuff of his sleeve.
***
Fischer's people may have actually been right with their guess that Proclus' entire security budget had gone into external measures. The highest security Eames has so far encountered in here is a locked door.
He can't have long before someone discovers that their improvised cell now contains one (1) unconscious guard and no Eames, but in the meantime, Eames is taking his time to explore the facility under the guise of the eminent Dr Marianne Kochevski, an employee who is, based on the ridiculous hours that she works, either fanatically devoted to her work or merely forever slightly behind her deadlines (with a number of hours spent studying all the surveillance Mr Charles has on her, Eames' money is on a combination of the two).
The corridors are all but empty this time of night, the only other staff he encounters hardly nod to him as he goes past. Given the surprisingly real suspicion he's nursing that almost no-one here has the faintest idea there's a forger involved it all seems a little too easy.
It would be nice if he had more than the vaguest idea where to look.
***
The eighth time they meet, Eames finds Arthur sleeping in an infirmary bed behind a locked door. He's lying on his back with his arms by his sides, laid out like a body arrayed for a final viewing, too neat for natural sleep. There's a heart monitor beeping away on the shelf above him, reading a beat so slow that Eames almost startles at the first noise it makes, and an IV line running from a saline bag on a stand to his left wrist, the sight of the bare arm lying over the covers adding a strange of vulnerability to the scene that no other detail quite achieves. Eames is relatively certain it will take more than a shake to the shoulder to wake him up.
“Weren't you wearing a different shirt earlier, Marianne?”
Eames almost - literally - jumps out of his skin, and whips around to the sight of Arthur standing behind him. He's wearing the same tightly buttoned black ensemble that Eames has gotten used to seeing in outline against the shadow of his body whenever they encounter one another outside, and he's carrying a loose-leaf folder under one arm. Eames hadn't even heard him come in.
He can't stop himself from darting a glance to the bed and back again, one Arthur to the other. If he's honest with himself he's been expecting... something very much like this for a long while now, but faced with the proof he's left at a loss for words. Where do you even start?
Arthur watches him put it together with what may be the most frustrating poker face Eames has encountered for a long time, then pulls his gun from the holster on his hip and flicks off the safety.
The sight drags Eames back to himself very quickly, the pleasantly tired features of Dr Kochevski tumbling from his body. “Christ, you do realise you could just ask me if you want to speak to my face,” he blurts out, words almost tumbling over each other. He's still got the headache from the last time they did this.
Arthur raises his eyebrows at Eames, very slightly, which should really be far too small a gesture to convey that much amusement. “I wasn't planning on shooting you. We're even, remember?”
“Then-” Eames starts, stopping as Arthur flicks the gun over in his hand and holds it out to him, the barrel pointing back towards his own body.
“You wanted to know what happens when I get shot?” he offers.
Eames swallows, but he takes the gun and presses the muzzle to Arthur's temple. “You're sure?”
Arthur closes his eyes. It's no gesture of trust; this is a man with absolutely nothing to fear.
Eames pulls the trigger and Arthur drops like a stone. Over the echoes of the gunshot, Eames hears the beeping of the heart monitor speed up.
He turns to the bed in time to see Arthur opening his eyes. He takes a couple of seconds to reorient himself, then he's pushing the covers back and swinging his legs to floor, his new body dressed only in a thin hospital gown. He treats Eames to a quick glance before applying himself to the serious business of fishing a packet of cotton buds out of a drawer and sliding the IV needle out of his wrist with the efficient movements of someone who's done all this a hundred times before.
“Are you satisfied with your answer, Mr Eames?” If he's experiencing even the slightest headache or nausea for his stunt he's hiding it so well Eames can't spot it, and he suddenly finds himself obscenely jealous. This may be one of the reasons why the next thing he does is to point the gun back at Arthur's head.
“So what happens if I pull the trigger now?” he asks, with no real idea whether he means to.
“You'll hear a click, indicating to you that there aren't any bullets left in the clip.” Arthur looks up, meeting Eames' eyes properly. “Each of these bodies costs nearly twenty thousand dollars to produce. You've already cost my employer quite enough over the last week.”
Eames takes a second to do the maths behind that one, suddenly seeing each time he's shot Arthur thus far in a shockingly mercenary light. “If it's any consolation, I'm costing my own employer considerably more than that.”
“Fischer?” says Arthur. Before Eames can deny it, he adds, “We know, Eames. We've known all along. If anything, I think Saito's been deliberately baiting him to see how far he'll go.”
“Well,” says Eames. There doesn't seem much point in pretending otherwise.
Arthur jerks his chin towards where his old body is lying behind Eames on the floor. “Under my arm - those should be the files you came here for.”
Eames is getting used to the constant urge to gape at every other thing Arthur says. He tugs the folder free of the used body's grasp and flicks through the contents. He's no way of knowing if it's genuine, except that, painfully unreadable as he's finding Arthur, he just can't quite make himself believe he'd be that obvious.
“Why?” You let me in here. You showed me what you can do. You gave me all of this.
Arthur, for once, has the decency to look a little sheepish. “It's going to go straight to your head if I tell you you've been the most interesting part of my job since you showed up, isn't it?”
Eames snaps the folder closed and tries out the idea that this is, actually, happening to him. For the first time in days he's feeling like he has his balance back, and that's almost definitely why his reply comes out as, “Might not be my head you need to worry about that going to, dear.”
Arthur actually laughs at that, short and startled. He shakes his head, and for a moment he looks like he's about to say something else, but then he checks himself, the smile fading. He pushes himself up off the bed, reaching for the new set of clothing that sits folded on a chair beside it. “There must be at least half a dozen people on the way to see where that gunshot came from by now,” he says, and sounds like he regrets it. “I'll give you a two minute head start.”
Eames hesitates.
Arthur waves him away. “Go on, Eames. You don't get paid unless you make it back intact. You've already wasted your first fifteen seconds.”
Not for the first time that day, Eames has no idea what to say, so in the end he doesn't; just slips the good doctor's face back on and slips out of the room.
***
Whatever game they're playing now, it's far too late to go back by the time Eames realises that Arthur hadn't gotten as far telling him what the rules are. Presumably, he's expected to lead Arthur on another chase through the labyrinth, his skill against Eames, may the best man win, and all that. He's really not sure what he expects Arthur to do if he catches him again.
But the simple truth is that even with a two minute head start, there's no way he's going to make it. He's not even sure he's going to get out of the gate with any of his pre-prepared forgeries and the thick folder he's carrying under his arm.
Instead, Eames heads for the roof, where the good people of Proclus Global have helpfully stationed a waiting helicopter complete with bored pilot enjoying a quiet smoke against the wall out of the wind. He's prepared to explain in no uncertain terms exactly what will happen to the pilot if he doesn't feel like cooperating, but it turns out that Dr Kochevski is in the habit of flying back and forth at odd hours of the night on such a regular basis that she hardly even gets a blink when she turns up wanting a ride home.
Eames has never been inclined to pay much attention to a gift horse's tonsils, but all the way back he can't shake the awful feeling that he's cheating.
***
He doesn't look inside the file again before delivering it to Mr Charles, who takes all of fifteen seconds to rifle through its contents in Eames' presence before vanishing into his office. Within an hour, one of his underlings is telling Eames that the remainder of his fee has been transferred into his account and showing him the door.
He doesn't know what else Arthur expected him to do.
And with that, apparently, it's all over.
***
The fee from the Fischer job is enough to keep Eames living in relative luxury for the rest of the year. Within a week, he's gambled two thirds of it away at a series of casinos in Monte Carlo, and he's not even sure he hadn't meant to.
Morals haven't given Eames any serious concern in more than two decades, but what on earth he'd be doing living it up on money that was practically handed to him on a platter by an employee of the very organisation he was infiltrating he can't figure out. He takes a job while he's there, small potatoes stuff (forgery, with just enough of a risk of being shot at to make it interesting), and completely fails to distract himself from the state of his head with work.
By the time he comes around to the admission that he's felt like he left unfinished business in Johannesburg ever since he left, a month has gone by, and the first thing he sees on the news is that Proclus has closed down their whole facility overnight, citing untenable expenses, and disappeared. Fischer's name remains absent from the media.
Eames decides he never did like South Africa anyway.
So he does what he always does - he puts it out of his mind, and gets on with it.
***
Eames has enough of a reputation that he can afford to be difficult to find and still know that work will find him as often as he wants it (and not too much more so, generally, or he'd work harder at making himself harder to find). One of the ways it finds him is through Matilda, who was a very average forger once upon a time, up until the day she decided that her true talents lay instead in the business of knowing everyone else and how to get in contact with them, which she found infinitely more lucrative and considerably less risky. She's probably still a very average forger, Eames hasn't seen her face to face in years, and mostly suppresses the urge to tease her about it.
She does have uncannily good timing in amongst her new skill set, so Eames doesn't think anything of it when she calls him up within twenty four hours of him completing his latest job - the third he's done in the two months since the Fisher job, and the least exciting yet.
“Please tell me this is going to be more challenging than the last one,” he begs her, over the phone. “And by challenging, of course what I mean is 'lucrative'.”
“How challenging do you find espionage?” says Matilda.
“Corporate?”
“Think more a long the lines of second-world war zone.”
“Oh, excellent,” says Eames. “Where do they want me to meet them?”
They want him to meet them in an upmarket hotel, which is one of the more civilised options for their profession. His contact is a man called Dominick Cobb who meets him at the door (“The Dominick Cobb?” he'd asked Matilda. “Very funny, Eames,” she'd said. “And no, I've never heard of him before either.”). He's thirtyish and well-dressed, and projects an aura of competence and trustworthiness that probably inspires many marks to entrust him with their darkest secrets within hours of their meeting. He shakes Eames by the hand in the doorway, and invites him in to meet the rest of his team.
Eames is very good with names, though he blanks spectacularly as Cobb gets to the part that goes, “...though I gather you've met Arthur already. He assures me you're the best forger he's ever worked with.”
Eames knows a few different Arthurs. The one now stepping forward to shake his hand is the one he's least likely to ever forget.
The first proper thought he manages is something like of course - this was how it was meant to go. The second is probably crazy, but he's too giddy not to wonder just a little whether two minutes and two months would sound so very different when you're stressed enough to hear whatever you expect.
“I'm looking forward to working with you again, Mr Eames,” Arthur says, with a smile full of secrets. “You're a hard man to track down.”
“Even for a man of your talents?” Eames says, and he's running on automatic, really, but idle banter has been second nature all his life. “I'm going to have to take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” says Arthur, and finally releases his hand.
Author's notes: Um, so, I think I mentioned this was my first attempt at Inception fic? Feedback would be very much appreciated, and concrit is entirely welcome.
I am in two minds about whether there is likely to be a sequel to this. There is still an awful lot of extra backstory in my head about Arthur and exactly what Proclus has been up to that didn't fit anywhere in the story, and it is entirely plausible that Eames will be hearing about all of it in detail in his near future. On the other hand, I have an awful lot of other WIPs in other fandoms still hovering on my conscience and the trouble with 'Eames hears about Arthur's history and gets to know Cobb's team' is that it doesn't add up to anything with a lot of plot on its own. So, certainly possible, but I wouldn't want to make any promises just yet. ^^;