Landry (an Inception fanfic, 1/1)
I guess I write fanfic now, as well as reading it. I was as surprised as anyone when the Inception Reverse Big Bang snared me. It was fun, though!
Landry
Pairings: Gen; or Arthur/Eames implied, if you squint
Rating: R for language and violence
Word Count: 5023
Warnings: Explicit violence
Summary: The mark this time was his teammate once, back when he was still Arthur Landry.
Author's Notes: Written for Round 1 of the Inception Reverse Big Bang ( i_reversebang), for fantastic art by red_rahl . Thank you, Rahl -- you're awesome! Thanks also to Rahl again, to oberstein, and to sho_no_tabi, who did a cracking job of beta-reading this story on much too little notice. I owe all of you guys.
* * *
Dreams begin in medias res.
* * *
Arthur strides into the war room and spares a glance for the bustle around him. Meyer has twigged to them -- it's obvious from the controlled panic of her projections. They're all tacticians and security guards, of course, bent over monitors and trading agitated chatter across tables covered with printouts. The only still point in the room is Meyer herself. She's standing over a big touchscreen, fully kitted out; her stealth suit's skintight fabric and tightly-snugged straps sharpen the powerful lines of her body.
Roslyn Meyer in her stealth gear. Arthur stops, blindsided by memory. There should be four… Four figures ghosting down a corridor, through the smell of floor wax and cordite. Meyer's square fingernails, filed to stubs, drumming hollowly on a card table. The perpetual dull zip as fastidious Sullivan adjusted his webbing belts. Gallagher's coarse jokes and Landry's own quiet, sharp laughter. The team.
He shakes himself. Sullivan's been transferred, Gallagher's retired, and Landry -- Arthur Landry -- is presumed dead. Meyer won't project any of them without Arthur's prompting.
As he moves forward into earshot, Meyer folds her arms. A grizzled projection is bringing her up to speed on the cause of the upset:
"--dropped off the grid at Point G. He was headed for the vault at that time, but we haven't been able to catch him. In all likelihood, we won't bring him down until after he's gotten in."
"Can't let that happen," Arthur interrupts. "He'll just shoot himself then and wake up, make a clean getaway."
The graying projection frowns. "What--"
Arthur cuts across him, addressing only Meyer. "You're both dreaming."
The room falls sharply, deadly silent, every face swiveling to stare at him. He does not tense or fidget. He does not sweat. He does not blink. Blinking now, with every eye in the whole goddamn base on me, would be fatal.
The projections relax. Buzz of renewed conversation. They've accepted him.
He does not breathe a relieved sigh.
* * *
When they first finished the preparatory research, they had gathered in a rented office to sketch out their dream. Inoffensive wallpaper and a circle of chairs: Eames and his regal slouch, Arthur straight-backed but with an ankle up on the opposite knee, Saphala serenely leaning sideways on the conference table, and Fisker straddling his chair backwards. The team.
"No, no." Eames shook his head. "I don't think you're quite appreciating the scope of paranoia we'll be dealing with, Saphala. She's ex-Special Forces. If we plan for her to just not notice us, she'll throw us out of her head in minutes."
"Yeah, and if we actively try to fly under her radar, she'll throw us out just as fast," Arthur retorted, distinctly unimpressed. "Meyer's a highly trained dreamer. She'll know that she's under, and she'll know exactly what to look for."
Fisker lowered his head and breathed something exasperated. "We can't get her to miss us, and we can't expect her not to miss us. Do you gents have any better ideas?"
A brief silence. Dust motes settled in the thick sunlight.
"She won't miss us," Saphala began, slowly, "but is there any chance we could slip a forge past her?"
"It'll have to be damned airtight." Arthur quirked an eyebrow, dubious. "Even Eames will have to admit that pulling one over on an ex-spec-ops agent is no walk in the park."
Instead of returning the jab, Eames gave Arthur an appraising gaze. "Actually, I don't think I'd be doing that part," he answered. "We might not need a forge at all if we used your connections."
The point man cast Eames a sharp look. "There's no way she'll still trust me, if she even still recognizes me."
"But you last parted on good terms?"
"She thinks I died well, if that's what you mean."
"So if our Ms. Meyer were to dream about you naturally, she'd dream of you as you were then."
Arthur frowned. "What are you saying, Mr. Eames?"
"We pull a sort of Mr. Charles." The forger leaned all the way forward then, elbows to his knees, resting his chin on his paired fists. "And don't look at me like that, Arthur. You've seen it work.
"We send you in as her projection, as a trusted memory. The dream will put her somewhere that she'd expect her old teammates to be, so that when you turn up in your Batman regalia -- don't snort at me either; it doesn't suit you -- she'll accept you naturally."
"Pass him off as her defenses taking the form of someone she once relied on?" Fisker's chin dipped. "You're mad."
"It'll work, though."
Arthur scowled into his notebook. "I hate this plan already."
* * *
Meyer looks Arthur in the eye. "I know," she says. "You're here."
* * *
"Audacious." A slow, wicked smile curled Eames' lips. "Imaginative, too. I am impressed."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Meyer taught me half of what I know about shared dreaming, okay? If I didn't know her well enough to trick her, I wouldn't have been paying attention."
Fisker glared at their whiteboard as if trying to cow it into giving up its secrets. "You're not even trying to prompt her," he protested. "You just walk straight in and tell her she's dreaming? It's suicide!"
"I won't be telling her anything she doesn't already know," Arthur explained, "and if I don't do it fast enough, another one of her projections will beat me to it. She always knows when she's dreaming, and if she only knows subconsciously, the projections tell her so." His eyes went momentarily distant. "Back when we were training, she used to complain that her projections wouldn't stop telling her. She had to learn to clamp down on it, or they'd have distracted her in the field."
Fisker wisely chose not to pursue this rare moment of reminiscence. "Then she will believe you when you say you're her projection."
"I won't have to say it. She'll assume that she's dreamed me up as a response to being put under."
"Her subconscious conjuring up her old wingman, so she can take down the extractors with team support." Eames' grin bordered on the Cheshire. "I never thought you had it in you."
"Your condescension is always appreciated," Arthur retorted.
Eames' laughter fairly shook the walls.
* * *
Meyer's long gloved finger traces out an angular path above the monitor. "The last report comes from this camera just outside Stores and Receiving. The cameras say he never actually entered S&R, but there are no records of him doing anything else, either. Eyes on the ground are finding nothing."
Arthur peers intently at the CCTV feeds. He knows precisely where Eames will be, of course, and he could deduce it even if they weren't literal partners in crime. "There." He plants one finger in the midst of a rectilinear warren -- a huddle of small rooms, reduced to scribbles by the scale of the map. "Cell Storage D. He'll hole up there and wait til the furor dies down. It's a camera blind spot, and there's outside access through the vent ducts."
"Too obvious." Meyer dismisses the idea with a firm head-shake. "He'll know we'd look there, and only a stupid extractor would expect my projections to give up."
"This one hasn't been that good," Landry -- Arthur objects. (It is a bizarre feeling to trash his own team's credentials, especially to their mark.) He taps his index finger against one of the CCTV screens. "And look. He's been through here. What janitor would stack boxes like that?"
The stack contains three cardboard crates, all close enough to the same size that the difference between the largest and smallest isn't immediately obvious over the camera feed. With a moment's squinting, though, they resolve very clearly: the largest of the three is on top of the stack and the smallest on the bottom.
Meyer's eyes narrow, the corners of her mouth rising into a soft, predatory smile. "Good work, Landry."
Landry -- Arthur, he reminds himself again -- nods in return. "Let's take him down."
She considers. His nerves stretch taut. If she doesn't accept...
"You'll take point," she tells him. Again, he does not sigh, but an old, warm calm rises around his heart: Landry's on point, Gallagher used to say, and all's right with the world. "Take the vent ducts and find out which storage cell he's holed up in. I'll come behind, keep him from backtracking. Chang's squad will follow to lock down cells as we clear them." Behind her eyes, he can almost see her plan clicking into place. "Go get kitted out for stealth. We can finish briefing on the way down."
* * *
"You can do this, Arthur. It's not like you're trying to forge a completely different person; you're just yourself, a few years ago."
Arthur eyed his reflection narrowly, saying nothing. He still looked exactly like himself. Eames' insistence on teaching him the basics of forgery, so that he could go into Meyer's mind as the younger Arthur she knew and trusted, was a good idea in theory, but Arthur was not a forger and he knew it.
"Try it again," Eames ordered, telling him how for the hundredth time. Arthur sighed and closed his eyes again. "Remember how it felt to be you, back then. You held yourself differently, walked differently, dressed differently. Those photos were really enlightening, you know," he added with a wink. Arthur scowled at him. "Same hair, of course -- you were probably born with that pomade, weren't you? -- but fewer scars and no clients to impress.
"Remember how all that felt. Put yourself into it. Wrap yourself in that skin..."
Eames trailed off. "Open your eyes, Arthur."
Barely daring to move for fear of dislodging his fragile forge, Arthur looked into the mirror. The man staring back at him was only subtly different, but somehow nearly a stranger. Six years younger and a fraction of an inch taller. A tight gray t-shirt and worn khakis. Weight evenly on both feet, without the slight shift to the left to favor modern-Arthur's old shrapnel wound...
Memories of war broke his concentration then, and the young forge sloughed away. Eames nodded and smirked. "You're getting better."
"Condescending prick," Arthur sniped with a grin.
"You wound me, darling." Eames grinned back, bumping their shoulders together. "I was being perfectly honest with you. That was a good start. Next you'll need to learn how to hold it."
Arthur sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.
* * *
He draws the stealth suit's zipper up into the hollow between his collarbones; it subsides into its guard flap to leave the bodysuit smooth across his chest. His boots and gloves, neoprene and tough rubber, mold to his hands and feet as if cast to their form. He shrugs into the main equipment harness; three buckles click shut and its sprawl takes shape, gripping his frame in an easy embrace. The belt's a little high, so he shifts it into place at the small of his back. Nylon webbing cinches down when he tugs, strapping a holster to each thigh.
Equipment check. Sidearm -- Browning, silenced, Condition Three -- in the right thigh holster. Combat knife in the left. Cord, wire, mirror, flashbangs, tac light, lockpicks, wire cutters, field dressings, amps. Radio in his ear, throat mic nestled across his larynx. Last of all, he rolls his totem. Dream, it tells him: he tucks it away too.
Arthur swings easily to his feet and pads out of the locker room. Meyer isn't going to wait for him.
* * *
"I hole up here, then." Eames poked a finger into one of the more intricate segments of Saphala's carefully-assembled model. "You do realize that if I wasn't playing bait for Meyer, I could start from that room and be ten miles from the base before anyone knew I'd gone?"
"Good thing you are, then, isn't it?" It was Arthur's turn to smirk. "If you play dumb, she'll respond appropriately -- won't recognize the threat til we've got what we came for. The situation will be a lot easier to control if she's aiming to take down some small-time extractor than if she's pulled out the big guns for the best in the business."
"I'll choose to take that as a compliment." Eames propped a hip against the table, leaving Saphala's much-tried model alone for the time being. "Just how dumb am I going to be playing, then?"
"Like I said, small-time. In over your head, even. Put a few profiles together, and show me next time we go under; we'll choose one from there."
* * *
Outside the vent duct, the complex growls and grumbles like some huge, ponderously agitated beast. Inside, Arthur Landry slithers down its throat. The insectile eyes of an image-amplification rig rest over his own, lighting the square aluminum esophagus in stomach-acid green.
Ahead, the first of the vent grates throws narrow slats of light up onto the duct's roof. Landry inches close; his practiced grace keeps the duct hanging silent and still above the thin ceiling tiles, without so much as a scrape to betray the grown man moving inside it. He pushes the amps up onto his forehead, the better to see into the lit cell below.
"D1 is clear," he whispers to his throat mic.
"D1 clear, copy," Meyer answers. Her voice is always sharper over their radios. "We'll secure it behind you. Proceed to D2."
He moves on, not waiting to watch the squad sweep noiselessly in behind him and lock the empty cell down tight. D2 is empty, too, of course, and D3 and D4. He doesn't let himself think too much about the fact that he knows exactly which one isn't. Betraying any foreknowledge would be lethal.
D5. D6. D7. At D8 he slides up to the grate, pushes back the amps, and peers through. Something like surprise jolts through him at the sight of Eames, unshaven, sitting hunched on a wooden packing crate.
"Mark sighted! Repeat, mark sighted!" he hisses. "D8."
"Copy, mark in D8." Meyer's voice betrays no emotion. Personal as the matter is, her cool is far from breaking. "Give me a layout."
Landry scans the cell with the crisply honed eye of an agent-on-point. "Room's laid out per floor plans. Wood crates on the east and south walls, stacked knee- to waist-high. Lighting's good. Mark is seated against the east wall, north of the heat register, facing west. Male, mid-thirties, tattooed. Armed -- silenced nine-mil," he adds, glimpsing dull metal in Eames' hand.
"That's the man. And the intel?"
"He's sitting on a leather briefcase." The amps are no longer necessary. He tucks them into one of his hip pockets.
"Copy. Clear and confirmed. We're going in."
Landry presses two fingers to his earbud, gazing down into the cell. "Ready on your mark."
"I'm moving up now." Meyer moves as silently as her point man: there's no footstep or clatter audible through her mic, much less from the cell below. "Hold your position. At my mark..."
"...proceed with due caution." He knows the step. The dance of teamwork is worn into his mind as finger-marks are burnished into the grip of a well-used tool. Meyer will take one minute thirty seconds, give or take, to reach the lower vent; he will use the time to loosen the screws holding in his vent grate. Then, on her mark...
He will not say it, not with the mic clinging to his throat and and Meyer in his ear, but he permits himself the thought. Hope you're ready, Mr. Eames.
* * *
"I do have my doubts about this gambit of ours, you know." Saphala fidgeted with her necklace, twisting the pendant back and forth between her fingertips. "No one's ever done this before."
Fisker looked up from his equipment check. Heavy furrows cleaved his brow. "It's just Mr. Charles."
"No. No, it's not." The chemist wrapped her necklace chain around a fingertip. "Mr. Charles relies on the subject not remembering exactly what his so-called subconscious security chief looks or acts like. Here, we'd be passing Arthur off as a specific projection, one that the subject already has a concept of. We'd open him up to be actively projected onto."
Fisker scoffed openly. "He's not some passive chunk of scenery, Saphala. She can't just--" he had made a dismissive little spiral gesture-- "manifest on him like that."
"We don't know that. It could become, well, a contest of wills."
"So I'll win it," Arthur interrupted, flicking his notebook decisively shut. His lips drew flat. "I don't like this plan much more than you do, but it's good. It'll get us in. I'll just have to make sure we get out before anything weird starts happening."
* * *
"Three. Two. One. Mark."
Landry lashes into motion like an uncoiling spring. His feet smash the grate off its loosened screws and his whole body whips through the narrow opening, landing in an elastic crouch that diffuses the impact through knees and hips, hearing the matching clang as Meyer bursts up through the floor vent. The extractor's back is to Landry, but he's starting to turn -- Landry launches himself back up, every ounce of his wiry weight laser-focused into an expert take-down that slams the mark to the floor and the breath from his lungs. The extractor's gun hits the tile and spins away, clattering against the fallen grate; Landry's jabs squarely into the mark's back.
On the extractor's other side, Meyer has already burst up through the floor vent. Her pistol is locked, unwavering, on his center of mass. The man bucks and tries to twist free, steel-cable muscle threatening to crack Landry's hold, but her foot comes down between his shoulders and the cold black eye of the Browning's muzzle glares at him. "Don't move," she barks.
Prone on the tile and thoroughly disarmed, with Landry's knee grinding into his kidneys and both guns following him as if magnetized, the extractor wheezes and subsides. Landry nods once. Handcuffs come out of his belt pouch; he ratchets them shut around the spy's wrists. The man huffs out a pained breath, pursing his lush, full lips --
Eames!
That's Eames. Arthur snaps back to himself with a swirl of horror. Beside him, Meyer blinks. Jesus. She is projecting on me. That's my partner -- that's Eames, for fuck's sake!
He does not draw a deep, cleansing breath, though Jesus fucking Christ I'd like to. Maybe, topside, he's sighing in his sleep. Down here, his hesitation has lasted only a sliver of a second.
"You take him," he tells Meyer. "I've got the briefcase."
Her sharp, avian nod is permission to stand up. (He deliberately does not allow the familiar gesture to disconcert him, or to pull him back into their shared memories.) With Meyer's pistol ensuring the extractor's -- Eames', damn it -- surrender, he can retrieve the brown leather briefcase. It's still warm where Eames was sitting on it.
This moment is the fulcrum of the heist. Two latches to open the briefcase. Its lid swings up.
Pay dirt, Arthur thinks.
With quick, expert gestures, he flicks through the pages. There are twelve names, each with its own brief dossier. He memorizes them all in moments. Over the lid of the briefcase, he meets Meyer's interrogative gaze and lies bald-faced: "It's your debriefing from the Keller op."
Meyer sucks in a breath and drives her knee harder into Eames' back. "What did you want that for?" she demands. "Who's your employer?"
When Eames looks up, Arthur hardly recognizes him. He knows that face's every honest expression, but the forger is an exceptional actor: this look of scornful cowardice is unfamiliar. "Santa Claus," Eames stammers, lip curling in a masterfully "fear"-stifled attempt at a sneer. He's trembling minutely.
Meyer skewers him with a level, unamused stare. "Try again."
Eames gulps, his eyes riveted queasily on Meyer's gun. Only Arthur, who knows him better than anyone alive, recognizes his little stretching motions for what they are -- not winces of pain or fearful shakes, but subtle tests of the cuffs on his wrists. I've got the names, Eames, he thinks. Your turn.
* * *
"We don't need to be subtle about it," Eames reminded Fisker. "The whole plan relies on her being lucid, you realize. If she begins the dream with a vague recollection of being put under, she'll recognize its unreality even faster."
Fisker spread his hand flat on the floor plans tacked down on the conference table, making the thin paper crinkle almost musically. "Still don't want her twigging to us before we can put her under. She could make things very hard for us, with her CQC skills."
"And her home security system," Arthur reminded them dryly.
"I thought you had that." Fisker frowned.
"I do, but don't count on her not hacking it back up if she knows we're coming."
"Let me be sure I understand, then," Saphala cut in, addressing Eames with a dubiously arched eyebrow. "You're proposing that the three of you break into the house, sneak up on Meyer, grab her from behind, and basically just slap a chloroform-soaked rag over her face. Am I right?"
"Blunt but effective," the forger assured her.
"Oh. Good." A mercurial smile. She settled back into her chair, steepling her fingers contentedly. "I have just the anesthetic for you. Immediate unconsciousness with minimal amnesia, side effects including slight paranoia, and no interactions with somnacin."
Eames grinned at Arthur. "I knew I wanted her on this job for a reason."
* * *
"I'll ask one more time." Meyer has Eames pushed back against the wall now. Death is no threat in a dream, so her pistol is trained on his knee. She curls her finger around the trigger -- this is the last warning before things get ugly. "What did you want with the Ke--"
Something shifts in the faintest way imaginable, and there is suddenly a pistol in Eames' hands. The frightened mask drops from his face and he whips the muzzle up, aiming not for Meyer but the heart of the man beside her. Arthur's blood pounds, anticipating dream-death, as his partner's finger squeezes --
Falcon-quick, Meyer kicks out at Eames' arm. Arthur knows with excruciating clarity exactly how the next second will go: Too fast for Eames. Her foot'll connect as he fires. Simultaneous. She'll knock his aim off. Six inches to the right. Not far enough.
Gunshot.
There is no pain at first, though the shock blasts all strength from Arthur's limbs. He crumples. For an interminable moment he is falling, feeling nothing.
The floor hits him like a freight train. His chest shatters. There is no air, he can't breathe, and something is raking barbed talons under the raw, tender arch of his ribs -- something huge crammed into his chest cavity, impossible pressure crushing his lungs and heart. He bites back a scream and an ocean of molten copper surges in his throat; he chokes on it, coughs, and the thick, ugly noise swallows every other sound. Pain whites out his vision, rips away thought and understanding. Pain is all he knows.
* * *
Anesthetizing Meyer was deceptively easy. Arthur hacked her security system into silence for Fisker to let himself in, picking her lock with practiced dexterity. She was in her living room, reading: despite his bulk, the big Dane moved quietly enough to get within arm's reach by the time she noticed him.
When Arthur and Eames arrived a few minutes later, PASIV in hand, Meyer lay unconscious on the sofa and Fisker sat nursing his right arm. "She's fast," he complained, gingerly testing the shoulder joint.
Arthur shook his head, unsympathetic, and opened up the PASIV on Meyer's coffee table. "I warned you. Did she realize what you did?"
"Sure felt like it," Fisker grumped good-naturedly.
"Good. Here's your line, Eames. Let's go."
* * *
Coming back to awareness is like climbing a sheer cliff without a harness. He can't know how long he was lost before his scrabbling will finds a handhold, only that when he does, he clings with all his tenacity and claws upwards. Facts trickle slowly back to him.
First: he's still lying where he fell.
Second: there's blood on the floor. Too much. Even if he fights through the pain, he won't be able to stand.
Third: he's not alone.
He wrenches himself back to full awareness as his blurring vision registers the two figures against the wall. Meyer has Eames slammed against the plaster, her forearm across his throat. The look on her face is a terrifying hybrid of cold fury and enraged snarl. Eames is choking against her arm, barely getting enough air, and he's bleeding -- bullet in his knee.
They have what they came for, but Eames is being beaten and Arthur's bleeding out.
This has gone far enough.
With all the hardened, indomitable strength left to him, Arthur drags himself up. His fingers shake on the pistol's grip for only a moment before he focuses that strength into stillness. He doesn't need a sniper's aim to put a bullet in his partner's heart from five feet away.
Eames sags against Meyer's arm. With an exclamation of shock, she lets him fall.
"Landry!" she yelps -- actually yelps; Arthur has never heard her sound so off-balance -- as she whips around to face him. Shock and confusion paint her features. He can imagine what she sees: her faithful projection, her memory of the man she'd trusted her life to so many times and whose life she'd been trusted with in turn, having turned on her and sent an extractor off with her secrets. He can tell when she finally realizes that his forge has dropped. He can tell when she knows.
Her grimace of betrayal is the last thing he sees before the friendly kiss of his own bullet shocks him awake.
* * *
Arthur settled the cannula into his vein, strapped it down, and looked up for one last survey. Meyer lay on the sofa, her limbs eerily limp in the sedative's grip. Eames sat slouched in a wingback armchair, Fisker knelt by the PASIV, and Arthur himself lay stretched out across the carpet. His team.
"We ready?" he asked them.
"Say good-night," Eames answered.
Fisker just snorted and pressed the button. The drugs tasted of chalk and exhaustion.
* * *
Arthur wakes with the instant, binary ease of flipping a light switch. The relevant facts slot smoothly into place. He's still lying on the floor. His chest aches dully, and the room feels too cold. Across from him, Eames is opening his eyes and glancing around. Meyer stirs fretfully in her sleep.
"Well?" Fisker rumbles.
"We got it." Arthur pulls himself up. "Let's go."
They leave the house calmly and quietly, as always, and lock the door behind them. Once they're away, Arthur turns Meyer's security system back on, finding himself slightly discomfited by the knowledge that she'll wake to its blare. Something like conscience gnaws at his stomach.
Only when they are two cars and a false hotel reservation away, picking their bags up from Saphala's safe house, does he turn to Eames and Fisker to speak: "We need to split up."
Eames raises an eyebrow. "That's the usual plan, yes."
"More than usual, asshole." He doesn't have the energy for banter. "Go deep. No contact for at least a month. After that, don't call me -- I'll call you." Hastily, to forestall the confused hurt in Eames' eyes, he adds: "She recognized me."
Understanding lights the forger's face, and his mouth sets into a grim line.
"I'm going to drop off the grid," Arthur continues briskly. He cannot yet let himself be tired. There's still too much to do. "You two might want to do the same, at least for a while. She saw all three of us, so she'll look for you two if she can't find me."
"Why you?" asks Fisker, puzzled.
"She recognized me."
The Dane lifts an eyebrow, silently requesting further explanation.
Arthur huffs out a sharp breath. "Look. She thought I was dead, all right? It was most of the reason she resigned -- it broke up the team. She probably mourned me." And isn't that a weird idea. Roslyn Meyer in mourning. "Now I've just popped back up and extracted from her. You do the math." He massages his forehead.
"He betrayed her," Eames supplies quietly. "She is not the type to take that lying down."
"So I'm falling off the grid. See you when I come back." Arthur picks up his single suitcase and the disguised PASIV device and turns to leave.
"She'll hunt you down, you know."
He stops in the doorway and does not turn around, knowing that Eames will hear his resigned annoyance without having to see it. "Why do you think I'm going?"
"Arthur, you idiot." From behind him, a deep sigh and the muted thunk of luggage. Beloved, familiar footsteps. "You're not going alone."
Arthur could protest. He could lay out with cold logic the dozens of ways that it is easier and safer to hide on his own. He could tell the other man that watching his own back is going to be hard enough without having to watch his partner's as well. He could even tell Eames off for risking himself by following into what is sure to be a very dangerous year.
He does none of these things. Staying out of Meyer's reach will be an exhausting, dangerous game of cat and mouse, or spy versus spy, dodging a coldly furious opponent with the resources of the United States government behind her. If he's honest with himself, he'd rather not do it alone -- and who better to do it with than the man who can watch his back as easily as he makes him laugh?
He could use some good company where he's going.
* * *
(fin)
Landry
Pairings: Gen; or Arthur/Eames implied, if you squint
Rating: R for language and violence
Word Count: 5023
Warnings: Explicit violence
Summary: The mark this time was his teammate once, back when he was still Arthur Landry.
Author's Notes: Written for Round 1 of the Inception Reverse Big Bang ( i_reversebang), for fantastic art by red_rahl . Thank you, Rahl -- you're awesome! Thanks also to Rahl again, to oberstein, and to sho_no_tabi, who did a cracking job of beta-reading this story on much too little notice. I owe all of you guys.
* * *
Dreams begin in medias res.
* * *
Arthur strides into the war room and spares a glance for the bustle around him. Meyer has twigged to them -- it's obvious from the controlled panic of her projections. They're all tacticians and security guards, of course, bent over monitors and trading agitated chatter across tables covered with printouts. The only still point in the room is Meyer herself. She's standing over a big touchscreen, fully kitted out; her stealth suit's skintight fabric and tightly-snugged straps sharpen the powerful lines of her body.
Roslyn Meyer in her stealth gear. Arthur stops, blindsided by memory. There should be four… Four figures ghosting down a corridor, through the smell of floor wax and cordite. Meyer's square fingernails, filed to stubs, drumming hollowly on a card table. The perpetual dull zip as fastidious Sullivan adjusted his webbing belts. Gallagher's coarse jokes and Landry's own quiet, sharp laughter. The team.
He shakes himself. Sullivan's been transferred, Gallagher's retired, and Landry -- Arthur Landry -- is presumed dead. Meyer won't project any of them without Arthur's prompting.
As he moves forward into earshot, Meyer folds her arms. A grizzled projection is bringing her up to speed on the cause of the upset:
"--dropped off the grid at Point G. He was headed for the vault at that time, but we haven't been able to catch him. In all likelihood, we won't bring him down until after he's gotten in."
"Can't let that happen," Arthur interrupts. "He'll just shoot himself then and wake up, make a clean getaway."
The graying projection frowns. "What--"
Arthur cuts across him, addressing only Meyer. "You're both dreaming."
The room falls sharply, deadly silent, every face swiveling to stare at him. He does not tense or fidget. He does not sweat. He does not blink. Blinking now, with every eye in the whole goddamn base on me, would be fatal.
The projections relax. Buzz of renewed conversation. They've accepted him.
He does not breathe a relieved sigh.
* * *
When they first finished the preparatory research, they had gathered in a rented office to sketch out their dream. Inoffensive wallpaper and a circle of chairs: Eames and his regal slouch, Arthur straight-backed but with an ankle up on the opposite knee, Saphala serenely leaning sideways on the conference table, and Fisker straddling his chair backwards. The team.
"No, no." Eames shook his head. "I don't think you're quite appreciating the scope of paranoia we'll be dealing with, Saphala. She's ex-Special Forces. If we plan for her to just not notice us, she'll throw us out of her head in minutes."
"Yeah, and if we actively try to fly under her radar, she'll throw us out just as fast," Arthur retorted, distinctly unimpressed. "Meyer's a highly trained dreamer. She'll know that she's under, and she'll know exactly what to look for."
Fisker lowered his head and breathed something exasperated. "We can't get her to miss us, and we can't expect her not to miss us. Do you gents have any better ideas?"
A brief silence. Dust motes settled in the thick sunlight.
"She won't miss us," Saphala began, slowly, "but is there any chance we could slip a forge past her?"
"It'll have to be damned airtight." Arthur quirked an eyebrow, dubious. "Even Eames will have to admit that pulling one over on an ex-spec-ops agent is no walk in the park."
Instead of returning the jab, Eames gave Arthur an appraising gaze. "Actually, I don't think I'd be doing that part," he answered. "We might not need a forge at all if we used your connections."
The point man cast Eames a sharp look. "There's no way she'll still trust me, if she even still recognizes me."
"But you last parted on good terms?"
"She thinks I died well, if that's what you mean."
"So if our Ms. Meyer were to dream about you naturally, she'd dream of you as you were then."
Arthur frowned. "What are you saying, Mr. Eames?"
"We pull a sort of Mr. Charles." The forger leaned all the way forward then, elbows to his knees, resting his chin on his paired fists. "And don't look at me like that, Arthur. You've seen it work.
"We send you in as her projection, as a trusted memory. The dream will put her somewhere that she'd expect her old teammates to be, so that when you turn up in your Batman regalia -- don't snort at me either; it doesn't suit you -- she'll accept you naturally."
"Pass him off as her defenses taking the form of someone she once relied on?" Fisker's chin dipped. "You're mad."
"It'll work, though."
Arthur scowled into his notebook. "I hate this plan already."
* * *
Meyer looks Arthur in the eye. "I know," she says. "You're here."
* * *
"Audacious." A slow, wicked smile curled Eames' lips. "Imaginative, too. I am impressed."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Meyer taught me half of what I know about shared dreaming, okay? If I didn't know her well enough to trick her, I wouldn't have been paying attention."
Fisker glared at their whiteboard as if trying to cow it into giving up its secrets. "You're not even trying to prompt her," he protested. "You just walk straight in and tell her she's dreaming? It's suicide!"
"I won't be telling her anything she doesn't already know," Arthur explained, "and if I don't do it fast enough, another one of her projections will beat me to it. She always knows when she's dreaming, and if she only knows subconsciously, the projections tell her so." His eyes went momentarily distant. "Back when we were training, she used to complain that her projections wouldn't stop telling her. She had to learn to clamp down on it, or they'd have distracted her in the field."
Fisker wisely chose not to pursue this rare moment of reminiscence. "Then she will believe you when you say you're her projection."
"I won't have to say it. She'll assume that she's dreamed me up as a response to being put under."
"Her subconscious conjuring up her old wingman, so she can take down the extractors with team support." Eames' grin bordered on the Cheshire. "I never thought you had it in you."
"Your condescension is always appreciated," Arthur retorted.
Eames' laughter fairly shook the walls.
* * *
Meyer's long gloved finger traces out an angular path above the monitor. "The last report comes from this camera just outside Stores and Receiving. The cameras say he never actually entered S&R, but there are no records of him doing anything else, either. Eyes on the ground are finding nothing."
Arthur peers intently at the CCTV feeds. He knows precisely where Eames will be, of course, and he could deduce it even if they weren't literal partners in crime. "There." He plants one finger in the midst of a rectilinear warren -- a huddle of small rooms, reduced to scribbles by the scale of the map. "Cell Storage D. He'll hole up there and wait til the furor dies down. It's a camera blind spot, and there's outside access through the vent ducts."
"Too obvious." Meyer dismisses the idea with a firm head-shake. "He'll know we'd look there, and only a stupid extractor would expect my projections to give up."
"This one hasn't been that good," Landry -- Arthur objects. (It is a bizarre feeling to trash his own team's credentials, especially to their mark.) He taps his index finger against one of the CCTV screens. "And look. He's been through here. What janitor would stack boxes like that?"
The stack contains three cardboard crates, all close enough to the same size that the difference between the largest and smallest isn't immediately obvious over the camera feed. With a moment's squinting, though, they resolve very clearly: the largest of the three is on top of the stack and the smallest on the bottom.
Meyer's eyes narrow, the corners of her mouth rising into a soft, predatory smile. "Good work, Landry."
Landry -- Arthur, he reminds himself again -- nods in return. "Let's take him down."
She considers. His nerves stretch taut. If she doesn't accept...
"You'll take point," she tells him. Again, he does not sigh, but an old, warm calm rises around his heart: Landry's on point, Gallagher used to say, and all's right with the world. "Take the vent ducts and find out which storage cell he's holed up in. I'll come behind, keep him from backtracking. Chang's squad will follow to lock down cells as we clear them." Behind her eyes, he can almost see her plan clicking into place. "Go get kitted out for stealth. We can finish briefing on the way down."
* * *
"You can do this, Arthur. It's not like you're trying to forge a completely different person; you're just yourself, a few years ago."
Arthur eyed his reflection narrowly, saying nothing. He still looked exactly like himself. Eames' insistence on teaching him the basics of forgery, so that he could go into Meyer's mind as the younger Arthur she knew and trusted, was a good idea in theory, but Arthur was not a forger and he knew it.
"Try it again," Eames ordered, telling him how for the hundredth time. Arthur sighed and closed his eyes again. "Remember how it felt to be you, back then. You held yourself differently, walked differently, dressed differently. Those photos were really enlightening, you know," he added with a wink. Arthur scowled at him. "Same hair, of course -- you were probably born with that pomade, weren't you? -- but fewer scars and no clients to impress.
"Remember how all that felt. Put yourself into it. Wrap yourself in that skin..."
Eames trailed off. "Open your eyes, Arthur."
Barely daring to move for fear of dislodging his fragile forge, Arthur looked into the mirror. The man staring back at him was only subtly different, but somehow nearly a stranger. Six years younger and a fraction of an inch taller. A tight gray t-shirt and worn khakis. Weight evenly on both feet, without the slight shift to the left to favor modern-Arthur's old shrapnel wound...
Memories of war broke his concentration then, and the young forge sloughed away. Eames nodded and smirked. "You're getting better."
"Condescending prick," Arthur sniped with a grin.
"You wound me, darling." Eames grinned back, bumping their shoulders together. "I was being perfectly honest with you. That was a good start. Next you'll need to learn how to hold it."
Arthur sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.
* * *
He draws the stealth suit's zipper up into the hollow between his collarbones; it subsides into its guard flap to leave the bodysuit smooth across his chest. His boots and gloves, neoprene and tough rubber, mold to his hands and feet as if cast to their form. He shrugs into the main equipment harness; three buckles click shut and its sprawl takes shape, gripping his frame in an easy embrace. The belt's a little high, so he shifts it into place at the small of his back. Nylon webbing cinches down when he tugs, strapping a holster to each thigh.
Equipment check. Sidearm -- Browning, silenced, Condition Three -- in the right thigh holster. Combat knife in the left. Cord, wire, mirror, flashbangs, tac light, lockpicks, wire cutters, field dressings, amps. Radio in his ear, throat mic nestled across his larynx. Last of all, he rolls his totem. Dream, it tells him: he tucks it away too.
Arthur swings easily to his feet and pads out of the locker room. Meyer isn't going to wait for him.
* * *
"I hole up here, then." Eames poked a finger into one of the more intricate segments of Saphala's carefully-assembled model. "You do realize that if I wasn't playing bait for Meyer, I could start from that room and be ten miles from the base before anyone knew I'd gone?"
"Good thing you are, then, isn't it?" It was Arthur's turn to smirk. "If you play dumb, she'll respond appropriately -- won't recognize the threat til we've got what we came for. The situation will be a lot easier to control if she's aiming to take down some small-time extractor than if she's pulled out the big guns for the best in the business."
"I'll choose to take that as a compliment." Eames propped a hip against the table, leaving Saphala's much-tried model alone for the time being. "Just how dumb am I going to be playing, then?"
"Like I said, small-time. In over your head, even. Put a few profiles together, and show me next time we go under; we'll choose one from there."
* * *
Outside the vent duct, the complex growls and grumbles like some huge, ponderously agitated beast. Inside, Arthur Landry slithers down its throat. The insectile eyes of an image-amplification rig rest over his own, lighting the square aluminum esophagus in stomach-acid green.
Ahead, the first of the vent grates throws narrow slats of light up onto the duct's roof. Landry inches close; his practiced grace keeps the duct hanging silent and still above the thin ceiling tiles, without so much as a scrape to betray the grown man moving inside it. He pushes the amps up onto his forehead, the better to see into the lit cell below.
"D1 is clear," he whispers to his throat mic.
"D1 clear, copy," Meyer answers. Her voice is always sharper over their radios. "We'll secure it behind you. Proceed to D2."
He moves on, not waiting to watch the squad sweep noiselessly in behind him and lock the empty cell down tight. D2 is empty, too, of course, and D3 and D4. He doesn't let himself think too much about the fact that he knows exactly which one isn't. Betraying any foreknowledge would be lethal.
D5. D6. D7. At D8 he slides up to the grate, pushes back the amps, and peers through. Something like surprise jolts through him at the sight of Eames, unshaven, sitting hunched on a wooden packing crate.
"Mark sighted! Repeat, mark sighted!" he hisses. "D8."
"Copy, mark in D8." Meyer's voice betrays no emotion. Personal as the matter is, her cool is far from breaking. "Give me a layout."
Landry scans the cell with the crisply honed eye of an agent-on-point. "Room's laid out per floor plans. Wood crates on the east and south walls, stacked knee- to waist-high. Lighting's good. Mark is seated against the east wall, north of the heat register, facing west. Male, mid-thirties, tattooed. Armed -- silenced nine-mil," he adds, glimpsing dull metal in Eames' hand.
"That's the man. And the intel?"
"He's sitting on a leather briefcase." The amps are no longer necessary. He tucks them into one of his hip pockets.
"Copy. Clear and confirmed. We're going in."
Landry presses two fingers to his earbud, gazing down into the cell. "Ready on your mark."
"I'm moving up now." Meyer moves as silently as her point man: there's no footstep or clatter audible through her mic, much less from the cell below. "Hold your position. At my mark..."
"...proceed with due caution." He knows the step. The dance of teamwork is worn into his mind as finger-marks are burnished into the grip of a well-used tool. Meyer will take one minute thirty seconds, give or take, to reach the lower vent; he will use the time to loosen the screws holding in his vent grate. Then, on her mark...
He will not say it, not with the mic clinging to his throat and and Meyer in his ear, but he permits himself the thought. Hope you're ready, Mr. Eames.
* * *
"I do have my doubts about this gambit of ours, you know." Saphala fidgeted with her necklace, twisting the pendant back and forth between her fingertips. "No one's ever done this before."
Fisker looked up from his equipment check. Heavy furrows cleaved his brow. "It's just Mr. Charles."
"No. No, it's not." The chemist wrapped her necklace chain around a fingertip. "Mr. Charles relies on the subject not remembering exactly what his so-called subconscious security chief looks or acts like. Here, we'd be passing Arthur off as a specific projection, one that the subject already has a concept of. We'd open him up to be actively projected onto."
Fisker scoffed openly. "He's not some passive chunk of scenery, Saphala. She can't just--" he had made a dismissive little spiral gesture-- "manifest on him like that."
"We don't know that. It could become, well, a contest of wills."
"So I'll win it," Arthur interrupted, flicking his notebook decisively shut. His lips drew flat. "I don't like this plan much more than you do, but it's good. It'll get us in. I'll just have to make sure we get out before anything weird starts happening."
* * *
"Three. Two. One. Mark."
Landry lashes into motion like an uncoiling spring. His feet smash the grate off its loosened screws and his whole body whips through the narrow opening, landing in an elastic crouch that diffuses the impact through knees and hips, hearing the matching clang as Meyer bursts up through the floor vent. The extractor's back is to Landry, but he's starting to turn -- Landry launches himself back up, every ounce of his wiry weight laser-focused into an expert take-down that slams the mark to the floor and the breath from his lungs. The extractor's gun hits the tile and spins away, clattering against the fallen grate; Landry's jabs squarely into the mark's back.
On the extractor's other side, Meyer has already burst up through the floor vent. Her pistol is locked, unwavering, on his center of mass. The man bucks and tries to twist free, steel-cable muscle threatening to crack Landry's hold, but her foot comes down between his shoulders and the cold black eye of the Browning's muzzle glares at him. "Don't move," she barks.
Prone on the tile and thoroughly disarmed, with Landry's knee grinding into his kidneys and both guns following him as if magnetized, the extractor wheezes and subsides. Landry nods once. Handcuffs come out of his belt pouch; he ratchets them shut around the spy's wrists. The man huffs out a pained breath, pursing his lush, full lips --
Eames!
That's Eames. Arthur snaps back to himself with a swirl of horror. Beside him, Meyer blinks. Jesus. She is projecting on me. That's my partner -- that's Eames, for fuck's sake!
He does not draw a deep, cleansing breath, though Jesus fucking Christ I'd like to. Maybe, topside, he's sighing in his sleep. Down here, his hesitation has lasted only a sliver of a second.
"You take him," he tells Meyer. "I've got the briefcase."
Her sharp, avian nod is permission to stand up. (He deliberately does not allow the familiar gesture to disconcert him, or to pull him back into their shared memories.) With Meyer's pistol ensuring the extractor's -- Eames', damn it -- surrender, he can retrieve the brown leather briefcase. It's still warm where Eames was sitting on it.
This moment is the fulcrum of the heist. Two latches to open the briefcase. Its lid swings up.
Pay dirt, Arthur thinks.
With quick, expert gestures, he flicks through the pages. There are twelve names, each with its own brief dossier. He memorizes them all in moments. Over the lid of the briefcase, he meets Meyer's interrogative gaze and lies bald-faced: "It's your debriefing from the Keller op."
Meyer sucks in a breath and drives her knee harder into Eames' back. "What did you want that for?" she demands. "Who's your employer?"
When Eames looks up, Arthur hardly recognizes him. He knows that face's every honest expression, but the forger is an exceptional actor: this look of scornful cowardice is unfamiliar. "Santa Claus," Eames stammers, lip curling in a masterfully "fear"-stifled attempt at a sneer. He's trembling minutely.
Meyer skewers him with a level, unamused stare. "Try again."
Eames gulps, his eyes riveted queasily on Meyer's gun. Only Arthur, who knows him better than anyone alive, recognizes his little stretching motions for what they are -- not winces of pain or fearful shakes, but subtle tests of the cuffs on his wrists. I've got the names, Eames, he thinks. Your turn.
* * *
"We don't need to be subtle about it," Eames reminded Fisker. "The whole plan relies on her being lucid, you realize. If she begins the dream with a vague recollection of being put under, she'll recognize its unreality even faster."
Fisker spread his hand flat on the floor plans tacked down on the conference table, making the thin paper crinkle almost musically. "Still don't want her twigging to us before we can put her under. She could make things very hard for us, with her CQC skills."
"And her home security system," Arthur reminded them dryly.
"I thought you had that." Fisker frowned.
"I do, but don't count on her not hacking it back up if she knows we're coming."
"Let me be sure I understand, then," Saphala cut in, addressing Eames with a dubiously arched eyebrow. "You're proposing that the three of you break into the house, sneak up on Meyer, grab her from behind, and basically just slap a chloroform-soaked rag over her face. Am I right?"
"Blunt but effective," the forger assured her.
"Oh. Good." A mercurial smile. She settled back into her chair, steepling her fingers contentedly. "I have just the anesthetic for you. Immediate unconsciousness with minimal amnesia, side effects including slight paranoia, and no interactions with somnacin."
Eames grinned at Arthur. "I knew I wanted her on this job for a reason."
* * *
"I'll ask one more time." Meyer has Eames pushed back against the wall now. Death is no threat in a dream, so her pistol is trained on his knee. She curls her finger around the trigger -- this is the last warning before things get ugly. "What did you want with the Ke--"
Something shifts in the faintest way imaginable, and there is suddenly a pistol in Eames' hands. The frightened mask drops from his face and he whips the muzzle up, aiming not for Meyer but the heart of the man beside her. Arthur's blood pounds, anticipating dream-death, as his partner's finger squeezes --
Falcon-quick, Meyer kicks out at Eames' arm. Arthur knows with excruciating clarity exactly how the next second will go: Too fast for Eames. Her foot'll connect as he fires. Simultaneous. She'll knock his aim off. Six inches to the right. Not far enough.
Gunshot.
There is no pain at first, though the shock blasts all strength from Arthur's limbs. He crumples. For an interminable moment he is falling, feeling nothing.
The floor hits him like a freight train. His chest shatters. There is no air, he can't breathe, and something is raking barbed talons under the raw, tender arch of his ribs -- something huge crammed into his chest cavity, impossible pressure crushing his lungs and heart. He bites back a scream and an ocean of molten copper surges in his throat; he chokes on it, coughs, and the thick, ugly noise swallows every other sound. Pain whites out his vision, rips away thought and understanding. Pain is all he knows.
* * *
Anesthetizing Meyer was deceptively easy. Arthur hacked her security system into silence for Fisker to let himself in, picking her lock with practiced dexterity. She was in her living room, reading: despite his bulk, the big Dane moved quietly enough to get within arm's reach by the time she noticed him.
When Arthur and Eames arrived a few minutes later, PASIV in hand, Meyer lay unconscious on the sofa and Fisker sat nursing his right arm. "She's fast," he complained, gingerly testing the shoulder joint.
Arthur shook his head, unsympathetic, and opened up the PASIV on Meyer's coffee table. "I warned you. Did she realize what you did?"
"Sure felt like it," Fisker grumped good-naturedly.
"Good. Here's your line, Eames. Let's go."
* * *
Coming back to awareness is like climbing a sheer cliff without a harness. He can't know how long he was lost before his scrabbling will finds a handhold, only that when he does, he clings with all his tenacity and claws upwards. Facts trickle slowly back to him.
First: he's still lying where he fell.
Second: there's blood on the floor. Too much. Even if he fights through the pain, he won't be able to stand.
Third: he's not alone.
He wrenches himself back to full awareness as his blurring vision registers the two figures against the wall. Meyer has Eames slammed against the plaster, her forearm across his throat. The look on her face is a terrifying hybrid of cold fury and enraged snarl. Eames is choking against her arm, barely getting enough air, and he's bleeding -- bullet in his knee.
They have what they came for, but Eames is being beaten and Arthur's bleeding out.
This has gone far enough.
With all the hardened, indomitable strength left to him, Arthur drags himself up. His fingers shake on the pistol's grip for only a moment before he focuses that strength into stillness. He doesn't need a sniper's aim to put a bullet in his partner's heart from five feet away.
Eames sags against Meyer's arm. With an exclamation of shock, she lets him fall.
"Landry!" she yelps -- actually yelps; Arthur has never heard her sound so off-balance -- as she whips around to face him. Shock and confusion paint her features. He can imagine what she sees: her faithful projection, her memory of the man she'd trusted her life to so many times and whose life she'd been trusted with in turn, having turned on her and sent an extractor off with her secrets. He can tell when she finally realizes that his forge has dropped. He can tell when she knows.
Her grimace of betrayal is the last thing he sees before the friendly kiss of his own bullet shocks him awake.
* * *
Arthur settled the cannula into his vein, strapped it down, and looked up for one last survey. Meyer lay on the sofa, her limbs eerily limp in the sedative's grip. Eames sat slouched in a wingback armchair, Fisker knelt by the PASIV, and Arthur himself lay stretched out across the carpet. His team.
"We ready?" he asked them.
"Say good-night," Eames answered.
Fisker just snorted and pressed the button. The drugs tasted of chalk and exhaustion.
* * *
Arthur wakes with the instant, binary ease of flipping a light switch. The relevant facts slot smoothly into place. He's still lying on the floor. His chest aches dully, and the room feels too cold. Across from him, Eames is opening his eyes and glancing around. Meyer stirs fretfully in her sleep.
"Well?" Fisker rumbles.
"We got it." Arthur pulls himself up. "Let's go."
They leave the house calmly and quietly, as always, and lock the door behind them. Once they're away, Arthur turns Meyer's security system back on, finding himself slightly discomfited by the knowledge that she'll wake to its blare. Something like conscience gnaws at his stomach.
Only when they are two cars and a false hotel reservation away, picking their bags up from Saphala's safe house, does he turn to Eames and Fisker to speak: "We need to split up."
Eames raises an eyebrow. "That's the usual plan, yes."
"More than usual, asshole." He doesn't have the energy for banter. "Go deep. No contact for at least a month. After that, don't call me -- I'll call you." Hastily, to forestall the confused hurt in Eames' eyes, he adds: "She recognized me."
Understanding lights the forger's face, and his mouth sets into a grim line.
"I'm going to drop off the grid," Arthur continues briskly. He cannot yet let himself be tired. There's still too much to do. "You two might want to do the same, at least for a while. She saw all three of us, so she'll look for you two if she can't find me."
"Why you?" asks Fisker, puzzled.
"She recognized me."
The Dane lifts an eyebrow, silently requesting further explanation.
Arthur huffs out a sharp breath. "Look. She thought I was dead, all right? It was most of the reason she resigned -- it broke up the team. She probably mourned me." And isn't that a weird idea. Roslyn Meyer in mourning. "Now I've just popped back up and extracted from her. You do the math." He massages his forehead.
"He betrayed her," Eames supplies quietly. "She is not the type to take that lying down."
"So I'm falling off the grid. See you when I come back." Arthur picks up his single suitcase and the disguised PASIV device and turns to leave.
"She'll hunt you down, you know."
He stops in the doorway and does not turn around, knowing that Eames will hear his resigned annoyance without having to see it. "Why do you think I'm going?"
"Arthur, you idiot." From behind him, a deep sigh and the muted thunk of luggage. Beloved, familiar footsteps. "You're not going alone."
Arthur could protest. He could lay out with cold logic the dozens of ways that it is easier and safer to hide on his own. He could tell the other man that watching his own back is going to be hard enough without having to watch his partner's as well. He could even tell Eames off for risking himself by following into what is sure to be a very dangerous year.
He does none of these things. Staying out of Meyer's reach will be an exhausting, dangerous game of cat and mouse, or spy versus spy, dodging a coldly furious opponent with the resources of the United States government behind her. If he's honest with himself, he'd rather not do it alone -- and who better to do it with than the man who can watch his back as easily as he makes him laugh?
He could use some good company where he's going.
* * *
(fin)