Fic: The Pub For Amateur Superheroes [Doctor Who/Inception]
Title: The Pub For Amateur Superheroes
Author: trillianastra
Prompt: Robert Fischer walks into a bar and meets... Mickey Smith
Fandoms: Inception/Doctor Who
Word count: 1725
Disclaimer: None of this is mine, no infringement intended, etc.
Rating/Warnings: drunkenness, spoilers for Inception and (a small one for) “The End of Time”.
Summary: Confused and lost after the death of his father, Robert Fischer goes on an intercontinental pub crawl. Then he walks into the wrong London pub, and finds out that someone's been in his head, and they've left him different to how he was before.
Robert was in a bar.
He had been in a lot of bars lately. Also restaurants, cafes, anywhere that he could get some sort of drink, really. He had started in LA...
... no, that wasn't right, he had started in Sydney, an hour or so after his father died. He'd walked out of the building in a daze, barely aware of his surroundings, and had made his way into the first bar he found, ordered a glass of tequila, and downed it in one. Then he'd ordered another. Eventually someone from the company - an assistant he recognised, sort of - found him. It transpired that Uncle Peter had people out looking for him.
The assistant (Lisa, he thought her name was) handed some cash to the bartender and helped him out and into the limo. The limo took him to his apartment and he fell asleep on the couch, still in his clothes. He woke the next morning, swallowed two aspirin, and steeled himself for the task of getting his father's body back to LA for the funeral.
He'd slept through most of the ten-hour flight, and he'd woken with the impression that he had been wrong about his father, that his father hadn't been disappointed in him after all.
It had been an unusually intense dream. He put it down to a hangover and grief and the effect of being in a pressurised cabin at twenty thousand feet.
He went to the funeral, and he went home afterwards, and he told Uncle Peter that he was taking some time out. Travelling, he said. He had to think, and he couldn't do that in his corner office in the LA building. Uncle Peter had been wise enough not to try to stop him.
So Robert had packed a suitcase and booked a last-minute flight, and left. The first stop was New York, where he walked the streets, got mugged twice, and drank expensive drinks in hotel bars.
Then he tired of New York, and there was a flight to Toronto, and after that Dublin, and then London. By the time his flight arrived in Heathrow, he had tired of first-class hotels and was booking himself into the cheap, anonymous places used by travelling businessmen. There was something about staying in cheap hotels that comforted him.
London, he found out, had an abundance of bars. He avoided the hotel bars this time, knowing that they would be full of young, beautiful, shallow people of the sort he used to count as 'friends', and instead found a small, almost empty place full of dark corners. The bartender looked at him oddly as he walked through the door, and there really were only a few other people inside, but he ignored the looks, bought himself a drink, and found a seat in an unoccupied corner.
He didn't notice the bartender look over at him with a worried expression, before taking out a mobile phone and walking to a back room to make a call. By the time Robert looked up, the bartender - a pretty blonde girl with long hair - was back in position.
He frowned in her direction, thinking something not especially pleasant about rude British bartenders, and concentrated on his drink.
There were two empty glasses in front of him, and a third mostly full glass in his hand, when he heard footsteps and looked up see a man standing near his table, looking down at him.
“God,” the man said, “What happened to you?”
Robert looked up at him. “Trust me, I wish I knew.”
The man - Robert studied him as closely as he could, noting the sturdy boots and the clothes that looked army-surplus and the close-cropped hair, and concluded that this might be a soldier - turned towards the bar. “You were right to call me, Sally, he's in a right state.”
“Will he be OK?”
“I'll take care of him,” the man said before sitting down next to Robert.
“Right, mate, do you know where you are?”
“A bar. London.”
“Good. What's your name?”
“Robert... Fischer.”
“Nice to meet you. Now, I have a question for you, and this is really important. Why did you pick this place?”
“It was quiet. I didn't want anywhere loud, or busy, or full of phonies and fakes.”
“So you pick this place, of course you would...”
“Who are you?”
The man looked surprised. “Me? I'm Mickey. I... kind of own this place.”
“You're not a soldier?”
“You noticed that?”
Robert shrugged. “It was pretty obvious.”
“Not that obvious. I'm more of a freelancer than anything. Where are you from, that's not a London accent...”
“Sydney. I live in LA though.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I've been travelling. My father died. I've been trying to get my head together.”
“By visiting bars?”
Robert just looked at him, and Mickey held up his hands. “Okay, okay, I'm not judging...”
“Why are you even here?”
Mickey hesitated for a moment, unsure what to say. “Okay... I'm not sure how to put this, and you may not understand, but I'll give it a shot. You shouldn't have been able to find this place.”
“You're right, I don't understand. That might be the scotch, though.”
“Right... um, there's a... field, I guess, over this place, that stops most people from being able to just walk in, like you did.”
“How?”
“It basically stops you from seeing it properly. Your eyes still register it, but not properly. Most people, they walk past this place and it's like they're looking at it but they don't want to see it, so they don't.”
“That makes no sense.”
Mickey smiled quickly. “Yeah, it's a lot to take in. But the thing is, you just walked in here, and you shouldn't have been able to, you shouldn't even have been able to see the door. I've done a scan, as far as I can tell there's nothing unusual about you physically... so, Rob, you're a bit of an enigma.”
“Thanks, I think.”
Mickey took out his phone and dialled a number.
“Hey, I'm at the pub. We've got something weird going on, a civilian just wandered in here off the street. I did a scan but it didn't pick anything up.”
He listened carefully as whoever was on the other end of the call replied, then signed off and put the phone away. Then he grinned and said, “Sorry, that was the missus. She's the science expert, I needed some advice. Anyway, she suggested something to me. Have you had any weird dreams lately?”
Robert frowned, and nodded slowly. “Just one, actually. About a week ago. I was flying to LA for my father's funeral.”
Mickey asked a lot of questions about the dream, and Robert answered them as well as he could. At some point Sally came over with a tray, took the empty glasses away and brought them mugs of coffee. Robert took a sip of his gratefully, and smiled at her. Instead of going back to the bar, she sat down next to them.
“What do you think it is?” She said to Mickey.
“I dunno... it's just a theory, but... you remember we found those guys adapting alien tech and using it to get inside people's heads?”
“Yeah, what's that got to do with anything?”
“Those guys were using the tech to rob people, get the information for their bank accounts out of their heads, then take the money. And the victims, they all said they had really vivid, intense dreams right before they were robbed. This guy,” he indicated Robert, “had the same kind of dream. I reckon someone's been in his head. He's not a Londoner, though, so that probably means whoever got inside his head isn't going to be around here either.”
“Someone got in his head, and now he can see through our perception filter?”
“You got a better explanation? We don't know what effect that tech has on people long-term, maybe all the victims from the other case can as well.”
“Well...” Sally chewed her lip, “I don't like that, but I guess there's not a lot we can do. Maybe Martha could take a look at him...”
“Yeah, I'll get her to take a look at him. But for now, I guess we're stuck with him.”
“I don't suppose that retcon stuff would work on him...”
“No idea, but all things considered, we probably shouldn't risk it. It could do anything to him.”
**
They gave him more coffee, and when he was sobered up they took him to meet Martha, who turned out to be an efficient, capable young doctor who smiled at him and asked him questions that would have been odd under any other circumstances. As it was, the whole situation was pretty weird, so he just answered them as well as he could.
Martha, as it turned out, didn't know what to do after all. Her only suggestion was that they monitor him carefully to see if anything else happened. When Mickey passed the idea on to Robert, he asked if he had any plans to move on in the near future.
Robert had to think about that. What was he going to do now? He had no plans, no idea what he wanted to do, just the firm conviction that he wanted to do something new.
So he said that, and they said he could hang around until he knew what he was going to do, and he ended up checking out of the hotel and staying in a guest room over the bar (“the pub,” Sally reminded him, “it's a pub”), and at least nominally working there, even if they were never that busy. Sally at least was glad to have the company, and she explained the rather unusual nature of the pub. She also started giving him some training in their various defensive measures - which turned out to be extremely helpful when a walking blowfish in a bad suit tried to rob them.
Author: trillianastra
Prompt: Robert Fischer walks into a bar and meets... Mickey Smith
Fandoms: Inception/Doctor Who
Word count: 1725
Disclaimer: None of this is mine, no infringement intended, etc.
Rating/Warnings: drunkenness, spoilers for Inception and (a small one for) “The End of Time”.
Summary: Confused and lost after the death of his father, Robert Fischer goes on an intercontinental pub crawl. Then he walks into the wrong London pub, and finds out that someone's been in his head, and they've left him different to how he was before.
Robert was in a bar.
He had been in a lot of bars lately. Also restaurants, cafes, anywhere that he could get some sort of drink, really. He had started in LA...
... no, that wasn't right, he had started in Sydney, an hour or so after his father died. He'd walked out of the building in a daze, barely aware of his surroundings, and had made his way into the first bar he found, ordered a glass of tequila, and downed it in one. Then he'd ordered another. Eventually someone from the company - an assistant he recognised, sort of - found him. It transpired that Uncle Peter had people out looking for him.
The assistant (Lisa, he thought her name was) handed some cash to the bartender and helped him out and into the limo. The limo took him to his apartment and he fell asleep on the couch, still in his clothes. He woke the next morning, swallowed two aspirin, and steeled himself for the task of getting his father's body back to LA for the funeral.
He'd slept through most of the ten-hour flight, and he'd woken with the impression that he had been wrong about his father, that his father hadn't been disappointed in him after all.
It had been an unusually intense dream. He put it down to a hangover and grief and the effect of being in a pressurised cabin at twenty thousand feet.
He went to the funeral, and he went home afterwards, and he told Uncle Peter that he was taking some time out. Travelling, he said. He had to think, and he couldn't do that in his corner office in the LA building. Uncle Peter had been wise enough not to try to stop him.
So Robert had packed a suitcase and booked a last-minute flight, and left. The first stop was New York, where he walked the streets, got mugged twice, and drank expensive drinks in hotel bars.
Then he tired of New York, and there was a flight to Toronto, and after that Dublin, and then London. By the time his flight arrived in Heathrow, he had tired of first-class hotels and was booking himself into the cheap, anonymous places used by travelling businessmen. There was something about staying in cheap hotels that comforted him.
London, he found out, had an abundance of bars. He avoided the hotel bars this time, knowing that they would be full of young, beautiful, shallow people of the sort he used to count as 'friends', and instead found a small, almost empty place full of dark corners. The bartender looked at him oddly as he walked through the door, and there really were only a few other people inside, but he ignored the looks, bought himself a drink, and found a seat in an unoccupied corner.
He didn't notice the bartender look over at him with a worried expression, before taking out a mobile phone and walking to a back room to make a call. By the time Robert looked up, the bartender - a pretty blonde girl with long hair - was back in position.
He frowned in her direction, thinking something not especially pleasant about rude British bartenders, and concentrated on his drink.
There were two empty glasses in front of him, and a third mostly full glass in his hand, when he heard footsteps and looked up see a man standing near his table, looking down at him.
“God,” the man said, “What happened to you?”
Robert looked up at him. “Trust me, I wish I knew.”
The man - Robert studied him as closely as he could, noting the sturdy boots and the clothes that looked army-surplus and the close-cropped hair, and concluded that this might be a soldier - turned towards the bar. “You were right to call me, Sally, he's in a right state.”
“Will he be OK?”
“I'll take care of him,” the man said before sitting down next to Robert.
“Right, mate, do you know where you are?”
“A bar. London.”
“Good. What's your name?”
“Robert... Fischer.”
“Nice to meet you. Now, I have a question for you, and this is really important. Why did you pick this place?”
“It was quiet. I didn't want anywhere loud, or busy, or full of phonies and fakes.”
“So you pick this place, of course you would...”
“Who are you?”
The man looked surprised. “Me? I'm Mickey. I... kind of own this place.”
“You're not a soldier?”
“You noticed that?”
Robert shrugged. “It was pretty obvious.”
“Not that obvious. I'm more of a freelancer than anything. Where are you from, that's not a London accent...”
“Sydney. I live in LA though.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I've been travelling. My father died. I've been trying to get my head together.”
“By visiting bars?”
Robert just looked at him, and Mickey held up his hands. “Okay, okay, I'm not judging...”
“Why are you even here?”
Mickey hesitated for a moment, unsure what to say. “Okay... I'm not sure how to put this, and you may not understand, but I'll give it a shot. You shouldn't have been able to find this place.”
“You're right, I don't understand. That might be the scotch, though.”
“Right... um, there's a... field, I guess, over this place, that stops most people from being able to just walk in, like you did.”
“How?”
“It basically stops you from seeing it properly. Your eyes still register it, but not properly. Most people, they walk past this place and it's like they're looking at it but they don't want to see it, so they don't.”
“That makes no sense.”
Mickey smiled quickly. “Yeah, it's a lot to take in. But the thing is, you just walked in here, and you shouldn't have been able to, you shouldn't even have been able to see the door. I've done a scan, as far as I can tell there's nothing unusual about you physically... so, Rob, you're a bit of an enigma.”
“Thanks, I think.”
Mickey took out his phone and dialled a number.
“Hey, I'm at the pub. We've got something weird going on, a civilian just wandered in here off the street. I did a scan but it didn't pick anything up.”
He listened carefully as whoever was on the other end of the call replied, then signed off and put the phone away. Then he grinned and said, “Sorry, that was the missus. She's the science expert, I needed some advice. Anyway, she suggested something to me. Have you had any weird dreams lately?”
Robert frowned, and nodded slowly. “Just one, actually. About a week ago. I was flying to LA for my father's funeral.”
Mickey asked a lot of questions about the dream, and Robert answered them as well as he could. At some point Sally came over with a tray, took the empty glasses away and brought them mugs of coffee. Robert took a sip of his gratefully, and smiled at her. Instead of going back to the bar, she sat down next to them.
“What do you think it is?” She said to Mickey.
“I dunno... it's just a theory, but... you remember we found those guys adapting alien tech and using it to get inside people's heads?”
“Yeah, what's that got to do with anything?”
“Those guys were using the tech to rob people, get the information for their bank accounts out of their heads, then take the money. And the victims, they all said they had really vivid, intense dreams right before they were robbed. This guy,” he indicated Robert, “had the same kind of dream. I reckon someone's been in his head. He's not a Londoner, though, so that probably means whoever got inside his head isn't going to be around here either.”
“Someone got in his head, and now he can see through our perception filter?”
“You got a better explanation? We don't know what effect that tech has on people long-term, maybe all the victims from the other case can as well.”
“Well...” Sally chewed her lip, “I don't like that, but I guess there's not a lot we can do. Maybe Martha could take a look at him...”
“Yeah, I'll get her to take a look at him. But for now, I guess we're stuck with him.”
“I don't suppose that retcon stuff would work on him...”
“No idea, but all things considered, we probably shouldn't risk it. It could do anything to him.”
**
They gave him more coffee, and when he was sobered up they took him to meet Martha, who turned out to be an efficient, capable young doctor who smiled at him and asked him questions that would have been odd under any other circumstances. As it was, the whole situation was pretty weird, so he just answered them as well as he could.
Martha, as it turned out, didn't know what to do after all. Her only suggestion was that they monitor him carefully to see if anything else happened. When Mickey passed the idea on to Robert, he asked if he had any plans to move on in the near future.
Robert had to think about that. What was he going to do now? He had no plans, no idea what he wanted to do, just the firm conviction that he wanted to do something new.
So he said that, and they said he could hang around until he knew what he was going to do, and he ended up checking out of the hotel and staying in a guest room over the bar (“the pub,” Sally reminded him, “it's a pub”), and at least nominally working there, even if they were never that busy. Sally at least was glad to have the company, and she explained the rather unusual nature of the pub. She also started giving him some training in their various defensive measures - which turned out to be extremely helpful when a walking blowfish in a bad suit tried to rob them.