4. dr eames (Part 1)
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Eames/Robert
Genre: romance
Rating: T
Words: 12,047
Other locations: fanfiction.net
Discaimer: Nolan wrote about them first and you'll never convince me that he didn't intend for them to fall in love
Summary: The forger can be anyone he wants, and always comes highly recommended. When a billionaire announces that he's breaking up his empire, the man's sanity is in question, and one of his many doctors isn't like the rest
Part 1
... ... ...
It wasn't the first time Eames played a doctor. It wasn't even the first time he played a psychiatrist. Hell, he'd spent most of 2003 in a mental institution in Russia treating the insane while attempting to extract secrets from the shredded mind of a patient who'd been in politics before his psychotic snap. Eames still had the white lab coat and all the credentials from that con. So basically he just walked right in.
Nurses grinned at him, eyes darting up and down his figure and he grinned back, greeted them warmly as if he knew them. In this manner, he owned every hallway he turned down until he'd found the proper room, where he found the proper information. Robert Maurice Fischer Jr.'s file was thin, his committed date recent, his room number nearby.
Eames headed that way, whistling and reading as he went. Most of it he already knew. Robert had been committed after a particularly violent outburst, attributed to his psychosis. He was diagnosed after it was confirmed he hadn't been himself since his father died, and seemed to be fixated on delusional ideas about his father, his godfather, the company, and himself.
The file went on to explain that Robert was violent towards anyone attempting to reason with him, and he admitted to insomnia since his father's death, brought on by vivid nightmares, which he refused to talk about. The supplied picture showed a Robert that was almost villainous in appearance; there were dark circles under his eyes, which were hard and glaring coldly at the camera, his mouth set in a straight line.
Eames' stride missed a beat looking at it; the man looked absolutely hollow. Green eyes traced the contours of Robert's face before landing on those ice cold eyes once more. He swallowed, flipped the folder closed just as he reached his destination.
Robert's room was a private suite (only the best for a Fischer, even an insane one). It was nothing at all what a suite was supposed to be, but it was significantly better than the rooms for other patients. Furnished a little more like a livable space and not a hospital room, it was still frightfully bare, being stripped of anything that could be used as a weapon in any way.
No one was home.
Eames disturbed the nurse at the desk outside the room, who was marking charts, to ask her the whereabouts of the patient. Her reply was that he was most likely in the common room with the others for daily activities. Eames nodded, "Fetch him for me, will you? Send him to my office." She nodded and hurried on her way. The moment she was out of sight, Eames reached down behind the counter to the desk and plucked up what was unmistakably the key to the suite.
He pocketed it, picked up his files, and continued on toward his office, whistling merrily.
… ... ...
The office door already had his name on it: Dr. Victor Reynolds. He opened it to find the nurse had done as she was asked and brought in the patient, who sat in one of the big chairs, his elbows on his knees, staring at the tip of a lit cigarette held in slim fingers.
Robert looked different in hospital clothes: a thermal shirt of white, the long sleeves of which he'd crammed up above his elbows. His sweat pants and slippers were a calming pastel green, the exact shade as the walls in the hallways, which had to make the poor man feel like a piece of furniture or something that belonged here. He looked up when Eames entered and his blue eyes narrowed.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Dr. Reynolds." He held out a hand, which Robert ignored completely.
"What happened to Holten?"
"You'll still meet with him," Eames reassured as he lowered himself into the chair behind the desk, "we're just adding me to your schedule."
"What for?"
Eames dropped one knee over the other, bounced his hanging foot, and studied his most recent mark from behind templed fingers. He allowed himself a grin. "I'm interested in your dreams."
Robert rolled his eyes, "They're just dreams."
"They are never just dreams," Eames replied smoothly, "Especially when you let them keep you from sleeping."
Robert didn't answer, took a long pull from the cigarette in his fingers instead. Eames leaned forward, reached for the smoke and made a motion as if prompting the younger man to share. Robert hesitated, frowned, then handed it over. Eames put it out instantly with a wicked grin, "Smoking is bad for you."
Scoffing, Robert reached into his pocket for a pack. He had a fresh one out and between his lips before he realized he didn't have a lighter. He looked to Eames expectantly and Eames only grinned back. Robert sagged, "You gotta be fucking kidding me," he breathed.
"I'm only looking out for your health, love."
"Thanks, but I look out for myself," he said, dropping the unlit cigarette back into the pack and pushing his hand through his hair. His forehead looked wider when his hair was back like that, and it was wrinkle free; he appeared to be a kid without a care in the world. But his eyes confirmed otherwise.
"And you did that swimmingly for twenty seven years but look where that got you," Eames lifted his hands to indicate the hospital, then landed a second wicked grin on the beautiful youth. "Why don't you let me take it from here?"
Robert stood, "Are you a lung doctor or a dream doctor?"
Eames had briefly been both in his time, actually, but out loud he only answered, "Dreams are where I do most of my work."
It dawned on the younger man and he looked around for the iconic silver case, found it on the table in the corner, as he asked, "You're a PASIV specialist aren't you?
"Yes," Eames answered steadily. "I'm from the Sydney Institute. They've asked me to come over and have a look at you. You're their primary priority, you know."
Robert had gone over to the case and opened it, examined the complicated gizmos inside. "How is shared dreaming going to help me?"
Eames straightened his spine, tugged at the lapels of his coat as he answered, "The PASIV sessions will allow you to show me your nightmares, even your memories."
"I'll bet when Holten couldn't find anything wrong with me in the cat scans, Peter hired you to find some sort of evidence in my dreams that I'm not stable enough to run the company."
"No one is working for your godfather, darling," Eames said. "They told me that you've become paranoid about him and his intentions towards you. Is that true?"
"The bastard's trying to take what's mine. That doesn't make me paranoid." Robert shut the case, with gentle acknowledgement to the delicate technology inside, and continued to pace the room, "He blew a minor public disagreement of ours way out of proportion in order to claim I was insane so that he could take everything from me."
"What if he just loves you and wants what's for the best?"
Robert harrumphed, pressed on his eyes, "If someone loved me I'd know it."
Eames balked at the unwarranted confession, and in the long silence that followed (which was Eames forgetting to be a head doctor) Robert blinked rapidly and then shook his whole body, bouncing in place, like a boxer loosening up for a match, clearly warding off sleepiness. The motion was just violent enough to snap Eames out of it. He opened the folder on his desk and focused on the file, clicked a pen, reminders to work.
"When was the last time you slept?"
Robert waved a hand, could care less. He paced the office restlessly. Eames dared a glance up to find Robert with his back to him, studying the art on the walls like he gave a damn.
"Tell me about your nightmares," Eames urged. Robert groaned. "I need a cigarette!" he cried as if Eames hadn't spoken.
"You were never an avid smoker, darling," Eames responded before he could stop himself.
Robert twisted around, looked at him. "What makes you say that?"
"A lucky guess," Eames recovered.
"Well it's not lucky. It's wrong. I've been smoking since I was a kid. I hide it-have to for public relations. Good business is all about the image. Everyone hates a smoker these days."
Eames grinned, "For good reason."
Robert rolled his eyes like a teenager under a lecture from his father and Eames dropped it, leaned back until the chair creaked and put his feet up on the corner of the desk. "I'll give you a light if you give me a dream."
Thin shoulders sagged and Robert's eyes left the red socks that were showing at the ends of his Eames' trousers, found the loud matching shirt under the lab coat and then his scruffy face. "Blackmail?"
"I've stooped to lower levels for what I want," Eames said with a shrug. Robert narrowed his eyes, clearly unsure how to take that or even whether to believe it or not. He pulled the cigarette out with a dry, "Deal."
Eames retrieved a lighter from the desk drawer and struck it to life. Robert leaned in to sink the tip of the cigarette into the flame. Eames noticed the way the orangey glow illuminated his pale face and the way the tiny firelight danced in his eyes. As Robert breathed out a satisfying plume of smoke, Eames pocketed the lighter, "Your turn."
There was a long silence, filled with plumes sprouting from soft lips. Eames waited until it was obvious Robert was not going to speak. He prompted, "Tell me about the last nightmare you had."
"Wouldn't you rather just crawl into my head and see it for yourself?
"I will it if comes to that," Eames assured, "I'd rather hear you talk about it first. So talk. The last nightmare you had, please, Robert."
The patient sighed, pushed his hand through his hair again, "Sure, that one's easy."
Eames waited. Robert watched red light eat at the delicate paper in his fingers and said, "I'm falling through a hurricane. I have no idea where I am, it's some kind of city but it's going away and the wind hurts like it's filled with sand and I'm falling. Just falling. Then I wake up."
It wasn't what Eames had expected, but he knew that it was likely he was talking about his time in Limbo. Ariadne had mentioned that the kick they'd used was a leap from a skyscraper. He nodded, "Sounds common enough."
"Yeah, right," Robert harrumphed.
"No, it is. You have no idea how often people are falling in their dreams-"
"Not like this," Robert cut in firmly, glancing up from his cigarette. His intense blue eyes met Eames' green and then bounced back down to studying his fingers. Whatever indifference he'd had before was gone now; he looked unsure and vulnerable. Seeing he was working up to say more, Eames remained quiet.
"This feels real-more real even than life does sometimes. And, and it's like I know why I'm there even though I can't remember. And it's like I can feel-" He cut off abruptly, squeezed his eyes shut, scratched his hairline with the fingers of his smoking hand. He finished, "I can feel hands on my chest, cold and calloused and heavy."
Eames dropped his hands behind the desk, curled his fingers into fists over all of his callouses as Robert continued with his eyes locked on the floor,
"I'm falling and the invisible hands are touching the skin of my chest and I don't know who it is, but I want to know, and I feel like all I have to do is open my eyes and I will see who it is. But then I wake up, I'm alone in my bed and I realize it was all just a dream."
A long silence followed this. Eames cleared his throat, "What do you mean it feels more real than life does sometimes?"
"I knew you'd jump on that the minute I said it," Robert said and to Eames' surprise, he was smiling as he leaned back into the chair. He looked up at the ceiling pensively, contentedly, as he took a long draw, answered in a cloud of white smoke, "I don't know what I meant by it, really. I think it just feels… It feels closer than real life, closer to me-as in, physically closer. The whole world is happening out there, and I'm not connected to any of it, but this is happening in here and it has everything to do with me because it's a part of me."
Another silence grew fat in the office, then Eames drew a sudden breath, surfacing from things he should have known better than to sink into and flipped the file closed on his desk with a deliberate clear of his throat, but his voice was still slightly strained as he said, "Well, that's an excellent start, darling. I think that's enough for today."
Robert stood, fixed him with a cold look and asked, "Are you going to prescribe psychotics for me to take now?"
"No," Eames said.
"Good, I wouldn't have taken them anyway," he said, "because I'm not crazy. I'm just awake."
… ... ...
Eames had a copy of Robert's room key made, so the first thing he did was drop the stolen one on the floor behind the desk, half-hidden between the filing cabinet and the trashcan. All of the rooms were locked at night, and if it became necessary for Eames to pull Robert under without his knowledge, then being able to get in to him at night would be useful.
Having heard the dream about limbo, Eames was on edge. If Robert was remembering limbo then without a doubt he was remembering shallower levels. The question was, what parts of the inception job were returning to him at night and how much did they reveal?
… ... ...
The next morning, it didn't take long for Robert to find that arrangements had been made that meant none of the staff was allowed to lend a light to him. If he wanted a smoke, he'd have to track Dr. Reynolds down and tell him about a dream first. He stormed straight into the office without knocking.
Eames was in the middle of talking to another patient (he was legitimately practicing the medicine under his forged license) and she leapt to her feet at his intrusion. She was young, a suicide attempt. Robert ignored her completely, storming straight to Eames' side.
He wore the same clothes as before, only now over it all he wore a robe clearly from home, which was a deep almost black green with a crimson boarder, pure silk and hanging open with one pocket weighed by the spirals of a thick memo-pad and the tip of a pencil.
"You cannot take away my right to smoke!" he cried.
"True," Eames said, leaning back in his chair and clicking his pen, "but I can prevent you from being within ten feet of dangerous objects, matches and lighters being right at the top of the list."
"You go to hell."
Eames reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the silver lighter. "Tell me another dream and you'll get your light."
Robert stared him down for several moments, his brilliant blue eyes unnervingly steady. Eames stared back and the girl with thick bandages all the way up her arms watched them. Robert looked away first and Eames laughed openly in his triumph.
Humbled, Robert pulled out his pack of cigarettes and Eames turned to the girl, "Julia, I'm so sorry, dearest, but I have to deal with this. You can work on the pictures we were talking about and we'll continue this later, hm?"
She nodded and, throwing a last glance at Robert from head to foot, blushed and left.
The lighter sparked to life and Robert drew the heat from it into the cigarette before heading towards the office window. "God, I hate it here," he said on the release of the smoke.
"You're treated far better than any other patient here, duck. Your money gives you a private room and gourmet food."
He snorted, "But I'm forced to wear pajamas, can't speak to anyone in the outside world, someone is always there to watch me shave, and I have to try to explain myself to people like you as if it's any of your business why I want to break up the empire. Now, I can't even get a nurse to light a fucking cigarette for me!"
"Did you sleep last night?"
"No." Robert turned and demanded, "Why have they stopped giving me sleeping pills?"
"You can't be on them and use a PASIV, the combination of extra sedatives and the dreaming compounds can be…" Eames' eye ticked as he remembered being trapped in Robert's head about to fall into Limbo at any moment, and he finished, "dangerous."
Robert looked across the office to the silver case in the corner. "Are we using the PASIV for today's session?"
"No, we're just talking for now," Eames answered, "But we've stopped your sleeping meds anyway just in case a situation arises where it's necessary to take you under."
"Necessary shared-dreaming?" Robert asked. And Eames shrugged, reassured, "It's just protocol. When you work with the mentally unstable, you prepare for anything."
Robert snorted.
"Tell me about another dream," Eames prompted.
He sighed, "This is stupid. Everyone has dreams; it doesn't mean I'm crazy."
"I'm not trying to prove that you are crazy."
"That makes you the only one," Robert said. "Uncle Peter would love it if he got permanent control of the company."
"I'm here to make sure that doesn't happen," Eames said and it was the honest truth. It was in Saito's interest that Robert maintained control long enough to carry out his plans of dismantling the empire. It was also in everyone's best interest to make sure that the nightmares haunting the young man weren't revealing too much of what had happened en route from Sydney to LA.
Robert turned and leaned his weight on the glass of the window, crossed his ankles. At the sight of it, Eames killed a grin before it stretched his lips. In the soft comfortable clothes, Robert was significantly less intimidating than he was in Armani; in fact, he was adorable. The young man grinned, "Trying the technique where you convince me you're on my side so that I open up to you?"
"I figure it wouldn't hurt," Eames replied with a shrug. Robert barely smothered a grin and looked away. The sight of something akin to shyness from Robert sent a lone little butterfly looping through Eames' stomach. He sniffed and got them back on topic, "So, erm, tell me about another nightmare-anymore where you're falling?"
"Yeah," Robert's gaze was steady and driving into him. "I have another one where I'm falling down a mountain in an avalanche of snow."
Eames allowed a grin as he asked, "Any invisible hands in that one?"
"No, just certainty that I'm going to die," Robert replied still staring unblinkingly. Seriously, he must have won every staring contest he'd ever been in.
"Do you?" Eames asked.
"No, I wake up."
"Is that all there is to it?"
"No," and then without any prompting whatsoever, Robert elaborated. And he finally glanced away as he did so, "It's like I know I'm going to die but it wouldn't be a problem if I did. I'm dying, right? I should be worried about it, but I'm more worried about the snow that's getting down my shirt and in my pants because it's uncomfortable, wet and freezing cold. I'm dying but I just wish I had gone to a beach or someplace warm."
Eames smiled, but Robert wasn't looking at him anymore. With his eyes on the floor, he'd found momentum and wasn't stopping, "and there's someone with me, but I don't know who he is, and there are others around but not close. I know they are trying to help me, and that they're a part of me. We're there because we're looking for something, and we might not find it. If we don't find it, it'll be bad. In the dream I know what this thing is, but I can never remember it once I wake up."
This was far too close for comfort. Eames did what he was there to do and started downplaying everything, laying a false trail of logic for him to follow, leading him away from the conclusion that strangers had broken into his subconscious. "That doesn't sound too strange to me, darling. It's human nature to be searching for something."
"I'm not crazy," Robert said with a nod as if to reiterate it into simpler terms.
"Doesn't sound like it, does it?"
"Then let me go home."
"Can't, sorry," Eames shrugged, "You beat up your uncle and broke a crystal platter over the head of the body guard who pulled you off of him."
Robert laughed, "I was angry."
"Some would say insane with anger."
Cold blue eyes fixed on Eames, "He's a liar, attempting to make everyone believe I'm crazy."
"You've mentioned that once or twice already, I think."
"It sounds paranoid to you," Robert observed and jutted a chin at the file, "Hasn't Holten left a note about what Peter did to get them to lock me up in here?"
"No, he didn't."
"Peter is trying to prove that my father didn't love me," Robert said. "How fucked up is that? He has actually forged journal entries in Dad's writing that say these horrible things. He shoved them in my face and told me to stop being a girl and face up to the fact that Dad was disappointed that I couldn't be him and that if I was going to honor his memory at all, I should try harder to live up to his name."
"You're certain he wasn't?" Eames asked, "Disappointed, I mean?"
"Dad wanted me to be myself, that's what all of our fights were about. All of his challenges were his way of pushing me to act on my own, to do what I wanted and make my own decisions. Yeah, he was disappointed, but only because I didn't see what he was doing until it was too late, but now I can see. He was trying to help me. If I want to honor him and live up to his name, I have to be me in the same way that he was never anything but him. Don't you see?"
"This sounds very healthy, actually," Eames said, with a pat on his own back; he'd been afraid the inception had somehow grown sour.
"Exactly!" Robert cried, "But Uncle Peter is twisted. He's trying to prove that I'm delusional, that I snapped when Dad died and created this whole fantasy about how we were together."
"You said something about diaries?"
"Yeah," Robert grinned. "I got all the money and Peter got the diaries. You see, Maurice wrote in one every day for fifty years. He and Uncle Peter go about that far back, so he left all of them to him."
"Well, that's sweet, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but Uncle Peter doesn't see it that way. He's pissed that I got control of the company and all he got was second fiddle again and a box full of books. That's why he burned them and made up the fakes."
Eames' stomach dropped, "Fakes?"
"Yeah, he showed them to me trying to make his point about my so called delusions," Robert rolled his eyes. "As if Dad would actually write about how much he hates me for not being the son he expected to have. He loved me, dammit, and I don't need to prove that to anyone."
Eames thought he could puke. Clearly, the diaries weren't fakes. Clearly, it would be impossible for a man to forge twenty years' worth of diary entries about Robert, so clearly when the diaries contradicted the son, the son must be a little loony. It was easy for Eames to imagine how Robert could become violent towards anyone attempting to prove to him that his father despised him.
Robert approached the desk and splayed his hands on the wood, leaned his weight on them as he peered at Eames, "Don't you see how important it is that I get out of this place? I have to unmask Peter for the greedy asshole that he is and then live for no one but myself."
Something came back to Eames in that moment, a memory from the job. Sweet, innocent, Ariadne as they were crowded in a speeding van through a raining city, So you're going to destroy the only positive relationship this guy has?
No, we're going to repair his relationship with his father whilst revealing his godfather for what he truly is, Eames had replied. Oh how self-assured he'd been. Had he known about the goddamn diaries, he'd have picked a different strategy all together. How in the hell was he supposed to get Robert out of this place now?
… ... ...
That night, Eames made a call. Arthur answered on the first ring, "Yeah?"
"It's me," Eames said. "I've been talking to Fischer."
"And?"
"We're in the clear so far. But getting him outta here isn't going to be so easy."
"Why?" Arthur asked, adding lowly, "The idea hasn't consumed him, has it? Like it did with Mal-"
"No," Eames cut in. "The inception worked, better than we thought. He has all the right ideas and he's stable about it. Aside from the drastic, unexplained change in opinion, he's perfectly lucid. But there's a problem."
"How is any of that a problem?"
Eames explained about the journals and how Robert had made a scene declaring that Peter must have forged fakes. Arthur swore. "What do we do?"
"Use that pretty little head of yours, darling," Eames said. "We're thieves. Put a team together and go in and steal the journals, destroy them. After that, it'll be Fischer's word against Browning's. No one else has actually read them that I know of."
"On it," Arthur said.
"I knew I could count on you, love," Eames replied and killed the connection.
… ... ...
The next day, Robert arrived after lunch, a dream for a light. He studied Eames closely for several long moments before speaking, "You don't seem like a doctor."
"How's that?"
"Well, for one thing you haven't asked how anything makes me feel," Robert said and he was smiling. "That's all Holten cares about, how things make me feel."
"I don't really care how you feel," Eames said. "I just want to know why you can't sleep at night."
"I slept last night, for a few hours anyway, the longest in a while without meds."
"I know, the night nurse told me. That's excellent, darling, do you have any idea why?"
"Because of you," Robert admitted and that shy look was back but Eames only saw it briefly because the mentally-questionable billionaire turned to look out the window, "Talking to you. I haven't had anyone like you to talk to in... ever."
"Like me?"
"Accepting,"
"Ah,"
"Most people are judgmental," Robert said, "if they care at all."
"Most people are shit," Eames assured.
"Mainly they only care that I make their checks out properly. They're happy to see me in here if even for a moment they think they won't get paid. Everyone wants me trapped in here."
"I don't want you trapped in here anymore than you do, trust me on that one, love."
"Why do you do that?" Robert turned from the window, "You call people by pet names. Do you even realize you're doing it?"
"Ah, yes," Eames rubbed the back of his neck. "It is a habit of mine-a bit cultural, I'm afraid. I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable-"
"No," Robert cut in and then he shrugged and looked back out the window with a little smile and color in his cheeks.
Eames' heart fluttered down into his stomach and back. He found his reflection in a decorative mirror across the room and gave himself a hard warning look that killed his blush. Now is so not the time to be you, Eamesy-boy, his practical side said to his tender side. You're here to keep your ass out of prison and don't forget it.
"So," he said abruptly with a clear of his throat, "you owe me a nightmare."
Robert put his cigarette out on the table nearest him, using a decorative crystal bowl. "Well, I have two left and I can't decide which one I want to tell you…"
"I'm open to hearing both, but that wasn't part of the deal. So, er, let's go with whichever is the easiest."
Robert was quiet for a long time. He pressed his fingertips to the cool glass and answered, "It's a memory. I'm at my father's deathbed. He's dying. He can't breathe, can't talk, but he pulls me close. He tells me I disappointed him by trying to be him, by never showing him who I really was. Then he's gone, and it's crashing down around me that I've been living a lie, breaking his heart by not attempting anything on my own, by not chasing my own dreams and building my own fortune as he did. Then I think that my mother would be ashamed of me. Then I wake up, and the worst part of it is, it wasn't just a dream. It happened. It's all true, it's all still there crashing down around me and I can fix it, but I can't fix it fast enough, and now I'm stuck in here where I can't do a goddamn thing!"
The silence that followed was thick as if they'd both been buried in an avalanche much like out of Robert's dreams. Eames cleared his throat to break the spell and said, "That's a demon you'll conquer eventually, dearest, but step one is for us to get you declared sane."
Robert turned, "You really believe that I'm sane, don't you?"
"I know for a fact your feelings about how your father felt didn't come out of nowhere."
"Thanks," Robert said. The billionaire held out a hand for a shake. His hand was soft, small in Eames' paw but strong, his slender fingers had a grip that was impressively firm. Eames tried his best to surreptitiously shake out the tingles the touch had left in his fingers as Robert lingered for just a moment, with a genuine smile that Eames couldn't help but to return, and then he turned and left the office.
Part two