I started this fucking ages ago. I finished it in the hope of comments.
Title: Schiffers-Chigorin
Fandom: Inception/Torchwood
Word Count: 5,842
Rating: PG/PG-13
Pairing: None
Warnings: Author is white, able-bodied, cisgender, and European.
Content Advisory: I wrote it. ME. Muaha.
Disclaimer: This shit is the property of Chris Nolan and Rusty, some film folken, and the BBC. Not me! Also; an unreliable narrator is talking about a liar. Believe nothing.
Summary No gimmicks this time; just banging two characters off each other. Eames has something John wants, and vice versa.
As soon as the door shuts behind him, the late afternoon light is sliced off and replaced by the eerie glow of blue-white stripes in the ceiling; offsetting the stripes on the carpet like some strange, rotated mirror of the patterns beneath his feet.
John Hart skips past the slot machines and through to the more grown-up section of this American-style casino in a European city, as if the distinctions of land-masses mean a thing to a man who's seen every corner of the galaxy and had sex with most of it. He stretches his shoulders and loosens his step, strolling through like he owns the place.
His mark is easy enough to find; the craps tables may well be heaving with badly-dressed tourists and people who've clearly had their style bought for them by subordinates, but among their self-satisfied heads, the fake breasts, the real diamonds, and three or four people who will go on to become his ancestors after they are arrested for massive fraud, there is a man who looks as if he is uncomfortable and overheating in the air-conditioned room, but entirely at ease with his own discomfort.
This mass of contradictions in a staggeringly ugly shirt (it is peach with dark pink palm trees printed on it; John knows because he has heard the staff complaining about it) and too much hair product is gazing along the green baize at the shooter with an unwavering intensity of focus.
It's hard not to swagger as he approaches the table; his bloodstains are hidden by the jacket, but he still has his pants tucked into his riding boots and there is little to no chance of John being mistaken for a member of civilised society - and he's never much liked pretending to be someone less than he is for long. It made Jack the better con.
John only just resists the urge to spit at the thought of his former partner's name.
People turn to stare at him, of course, but as he expected they turn away when the security guards do nothing, muttering to each other about his clothes and his peculiar stink the way people always did; give it five minutes and they'd be swooning and suggestible, because John Hart didn't pay that much money for pheromone implants for them not to work.
"Move over," John says, shoving his bony hip in between a woman in a very good fake ocelot summer cape and a woman in a bad real snakeskin dress. "I said move over, I'm very important."
Both women glare at him; he roots around in his pocket for a minute and finds that, in the grand tradition of ever trip he has ever taken to a casino on this planet, he has absolutely nothing resembling enough money. It doesn't matter. He knocks over Ocelot Woman's drink on purpose and turns his attention to the point of his visit; easy money.
"Evening," he says, leaning around Snakeskin Woman to incline his head at the craps-player in the astoundingly ugly shirt.
"Hello," says the gambler, half-perplexed, half-flirtatious. "Nice jacket."
It's a good thing John is the most compulsively mendacious man in the history of history, or he'd balk at returning the compliment; his mark's jacket is anything but nice. "Same to you."
The shooter is taking her sweet time.
"I hear you have something that doesn't belong to you," John says, stifling the urge to just pin him to the table with a gun in his nostrils. Things usually went messily when he did things like that; then again, they often went more quickly.
"Unless you're talking about this uncharacteristic streak of luck," his mark says, smirking over the top of his stack of chips, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Protected government property," John says, mouthing the words more than he speaks them; his lips are clearly no match for the outrageous beestings on the mark's face (they can't possibly natural - where and when John comes from, people do obscene things to the structure of their genes to ensure their children will have faces like his), but he shapes the words just as clearly, "In your possession. People will be coming after you soon."
"Could I trouble you to either blow on my dice or piss off?" says the mark, with a close-lipped smile. "Only I have every intention of cleaning out this table."
"I can make you a much better offer," John says, knocking over Ocelot Lady's chips. "Much better than the men who'll come after me will."
"Heard that before," the mark mutters, almost too quietly for John to hear.
"Now," John says, leaning over the craps table until his jacket touches the green baize, "it really is very important that you take me to where you're keeping that thing." He produces a sheet of psychic paper and waves it under the man's nose. "All kinds of terrible things could potentially happen to you, and it's my job to protect you from them, do you understand me, Mr Eames?"
"Of course," says the chubby idiot in the bad suit, and, "You're in the way of my game."
"There are bigger things at stake here," John says, leaning in to whisper against the side of the man's head. He disabled his olfactory implants before he got in - no 21st century casino ever smelled anything but nauseating - but he gets the impression that this man would smell of Brylcreem and mutton if he hadn't stuck a laser screwdriver up his own nose twenty minutes ago.
Eames looks up at him with an expression of barely-concealed irritation. "What will it take to stop you bothering me all evening?"
John cranks up the charm and the sincerity as high as he can. "Your cooperation would be beneficial not only for me and the agency I represent, but for you - the people who are coming after me aren't going to be this polite, Mr Eames, and they will be a lot more armed."
"Should I take it from that that you aren't carrying a gun?" says Eames out of the side of his mouth, apparently wholly diverted by the impossibly coy craps-shooter and her stupid luck ritual. "Because I am quite armed myself."
John runs a brief mental tally of all the weapons he has concealed about his person, but he keeps his face as straight as possible. "I think it best if we avoid shooting innocent civilians, don't you?"
Eames pushes all the chips onto two, and tells Snakeskin Lady, "Your bet now," with an extravagant wink. Rather than taking this act of generosity with the gratitude appropriate to suddenly receiving a sum of money that large, she glares at him as if he's just offered to stick an eel up her arse.
"This way," John says, ushering the sweaty Englishman away from the craps tables and toward the backrooms; he stands so that his hip juts out like a rock from the sands of a beach not because he wants to show that off right now, but to carefully outline the most deliberately visible of his guns with the fabric of his jacket. Maybe casino security will see it, and maybe they won't; maybe John doesn't care. He knows he's timed this just right. They're treating him with a surprising amount of respect.
"I'm not sure what I've got is what you want," says Eames, sucking his teeth. "You know you could just have taken the chips."
John just about avoids laughing in the man's face. "I'm trying to save your life and all you have to offer is pocket change? Charming."
"Do you even know what this device does?" Eames smiles, as the door clicks shut behind them, and John hears in it the swoosh of airlocks, the slam of prison doors, and even the clang of a portcullis. "This device that everyone is so keen to get their hands on?"
The taunt hangs in the air like the echoes of a gunshot, but John shoulders it away and watches Eames extract a silver briefcase from the back-room's safe as delicately as someone carrying a glass bauble. "I'm being paid to recover it and remove the threat of death from your head," John says severely, "I don't need to know what it does."
"But you want to know," Eames says, catching his eye.
Of course he fucking wants to know. He'd been considering taking it back to base and putting a gun in someone's face until they told him, but this sneaky fucker clearly wants to show off - it's written on his face like bad graffiti. "Maybe it's better that I do," John says, pursing his lips and trying to pull off that hands-on-hips authority that bloody Jack suddenly acquired.
"I thought you might say that." Eames smirks at him and opens the catch on the briefcase. There isn’t so much as a basic combination lock on the thing; the laxest security possible for what is apparently so valuable that John could buy an entire solar system for the reward for this anachronistic technology.
The contents are, for all this internal fanfare and the hum of transferring funds in his imagination, unimpressive. There is a flat rubber button which looks faintly hydraulic, a number of what look like spools and ports, and a conspicuous red LED counter of the kind favoured by the 21st century like they favoured herpes and tiresome sexual binary. For a fleeting moment it flashes through his brain that this might very well be a bomb.
But John knows bombs like he knows his own pubic hair, and he knows bombers a sight better than he does the various genitals that have banged up against his; this man is no bomber, and this strange, light, phial-filled contraption is no bomb.
"You'll need to take off your wristband … thing," Eames says, brandishing what looks like a Freudian nightmare tool, a thin phallic tube topped with a sharp - needle.
John removes the Vortex-Manipulator and thrusts it pointedly into his hip pocket, rolling up his jacket sleeve into a bulky mountain of red. There are few things in the twenty-first century which he hasn't been immunised against, few things that the application of a little tender loving medication from his home time won't put a stop to - of course, slashing his arteries will leave him just as exsanguinated. He fishes out one of his smaller guns with his free hand and holds it up. "Don't try anything … excitable."
"I promise you I am as calm as the leafy glade," Eames says levelly, showing him the needle. "Sit down, this won't take two seconds and it's quicker than explaining."
John gives him a look he knows is as boggle-eyed as it is suspicious and which is not at all attractive, and half-sits on the edge of the desk next to the contraption.
"Suit yourself," says Eames, swiping John's wrist with something white and alcohol-smelling, leaving a cold tingle over his veins. "You're going to get one hell of a crick in your neck, mind."
The needle barely registers - so many punctures in John's skin over the course of his chronologically impertinent lifespan that one more cannot perturb him - and he can feel it retract on its own as the tiny tube settles in place, which is surely an illegal anachronism of the sort that would, once, have brought at least a small team of Time Agents tumbling down on a place to remove the device and anyone's memories of it ever having existed.
But they're not here, which means that this little pin-prick and the associated tomfuckery are his and his alone, and that no one ever tells his former employers; John catches Eames's eye as the man slips a similar tube into his own wrist, sprawling over one of the office chairs. He sees the chubby Englishman's surprisingly inscrutable smile march over his lips again, and before he's marshalled his thoughts the big puffy button in the middle of the case goes down.
His eyelids follow it a millisecond or two later.
John Hart has been deprived of consciousness against his will enough times to know well the abrupt transition from one moment in time to another, and how different it is to travel with the Vortex Manipulator; he knows, too, the dislocation in space - the lack of shock in waking up in a different place, surrounded by different people, and quite frequently in some form of restraints with a weapon pointed at an important part of his anatomy.
Here the buildings rise like beautiful glittering teeth from a litterless pavement, their bases shining with pale blue windows and the bobbing green heads of palm trees rustling in a breeze that doesn't make it down to where he stands. The road is empty of cars, with only an occasional cyclist disappearing around the many corners of the roads.
"Welcome to the scientific miracle of shared dreaming," says Eames, from behind him.
John executes a very graceful whirl on the heel of his boots; Eames has his hands in his pockets and looks as infernally smug as he did before, but there's something different about his clothes. He looks thinner, and it's only after a bit of staring that John realises he actually is a little slimmer, not just being catered to well by somewhat better tailoring.
"Don't ask me about the specifics because I have absolutely no idea how it works," Eames continues, as fat and murky clouds the colour of sickness roil across the sky like a warning, "but the basics are that I stick my pre-constructed dream rudely into your mind, where your own set piece would otherwise be, and you fill it with your subconscious. With your secrets, most pertinently."
"Bullshit," John says, and he taps his Vortex Manipulator. He's sure he took it off, but he's also sure that he wouldn't be that fucking stupid. Anyway, it's on his wrist now, and the screen blurs as he tries to read it.
"Getting a good reading?" Eames asks, closer and quieter than before. "Or is it proving impossible to see anything?"
"I'm inside my own head?" John asks, looking around at the glittering buildings. "I don't think so, sunshine. Not enough stuff on fire, no corpses, and no one is screaming."
"We've only been here a minute," Eames says, his hands still in his pockets as he surveys the heights of some glass-walled skyscraper. "Give it time."
"A minute is normally enough," John says, as glibly as he always does. There are palm trees. He had no idea that his was the kind of subconscious that had palm trees in it, but here they are. Clearly those visits to threaten people on Ursa Minor Beta have stuck in his psyche more than he first realised. Well. They did have such fantastic parties there. "Also, no one is trying to kill me."
"That's because they're projections of your subconscious," Eames says, putting a cigar in his mouth. He didn't smoke when John wasn't dreaming, but he smokes now, blowing rings that are as fat and sumptuous as his lips. "The only person they're likely to attack is me."
"Oh, normally the projections of my subconscious are quite keen on murdering me in a variety of … inventive and familiar ways," John says carelessly, plucking the cigar out of Eames's mouth. Normally his dreams like to diminish the golden light that habitually surges through his veins when he's battering someone to death, and slay him often and with ease.
"No," Eames says, raising his eyebrows. "Those are memories."
"No they're not," John persists, as clouds begin to form overhead and the street fills up with cars, chugging slowly in from all directions. "None of those things have really happened." Which is almost true. Some of them have never really happened. Some of them he just wishes never had.
Eames sighs, and gestures to the wide glass doors of the nearest building. "Let's go inside before it starts raining, and I will explain things for you."
"What's this building?" John asks, peering up at it as Eames holds the door open for him.
"A bank?" Eames suggests. "The main thing is it's not raining in there."
A bank. John makes a performance of entering the building and is amused when not a single head turns to stare at him; the clock on the wall seems frozen at ten past four, and there is an elegant water feature in the middle of the smooth, seamless stone floor. As ever, it just makes him want to piss in the thing and maybe dunk someone's face in it.
There are several impressively-coiffed women working behind the main counter, and John thinks he recognises at least a few of their faces - one is clearly not human and that should really be a dead give-away; after all, he's never encountered aliens working openly on 21st century Earth - and they studiously ignore him with the measured cool of professionals who are not expecting to be, say, robbed at gunpoint in a minute or two.
Eames catches his eye and says, "I have to wonder," in a tone of voice that suggests that he's not wondering because he already knows, "if you're thinking what I'm thinking."
"Unless it involves fucking her, killing … her, and stealing everything in this place, probably not," John says, pointing them out one by one. It's the opposite way around to the events as he remembers them; Nai was the one he'd tried and not quite succeeded in killing, and Vee-Ji was the one he'd fucked, but there was nothing like a little variety to spice up an otherwise pedestrian bank robbery.
"That sounds like an excellent plan," Eames says, as if they're talking about going for dinner. "Although I might skip the first two parts in order to save time."
John shrugs. "Alright, kill both of them, then. Or all of them. Whichever's quickest." The idea strikes him as an excellent one; there might well be anything inside a bank vault in his own mind, but as he usually ends up captured and killed before he gets this far it'll be interesting to have an accomplice. And that's if dreaming this way works the way it does when he's really, truly under.
"After you," says Eames, and there is a dare in his voice.
John pulls his gun out of his armpit and spatters Nai's head across the opposite wall; to his disappointment there is the same diminished return on the violence as when the head he is shooting is alive, awake, and real. Guns are very convenient and very pretty and, when occasion commits, a quite satisfactory form of currency or indeed sex toy, but for the surge of golden light through his veins and the thumping, chaotic chant of I am alive, I am alive, he needs to thump something heavy into the just-yielding-enough tension of someone's body. He needs the burn of his shoulder muscles and the wild counterweight against his swing.
Eames responds by smiling; the rest of the bank staff - who all look faintly familiar, now John thinks about it - just mill around as if there hasn't been a bloody and loud murder in their midst. They get straight back to work, shuffling paper and poking computers with looks of well-groomed boredom.
He stares, but the bank staff just carry on regardless.
"I did just blow her head off?" John mutters, squinting at the spray of blood over the wall.
"You're dreaming," Eames says pleasantly. "Now, if I shot someone they'd be down on me like a tonne of bastards, but you could shoot all of them and nothing would happen."
John considers this. "I can't work out if that's the most fun it's possible to have with your clothes on or disappointingly boring." He's visited a few places where shooting someone in the head didn't cause a single person to turn around, but those were more "oppressive military regimes" than they were shared dreams.
"Depends on who you're shooting," Eames nods, and John brings the barrel of his gun to bear on the security guard standing by the door to the vault. This is the most ridiculous bank he's ever seen; the vault is a vast round door with an airlock dial on the front of it, and it's just there in the middle of the foyer with one security guard in front of it. Pitiful. "I find shooting exes a highly therapeutic activity."
John snorts. The security guard isn't an ex - Kittin isn't anyone's ex because of some crazed religious foible; he had millions of them - but considering the other attachment and loyalties Kittin's had in the past shooting him in the face would be 'therapeutic'. Or at least funny. And they're robbing the place.
He shoots Kittin in the face.
"Were you intending to shoot his ear off, or -?"
"Shut up," John mutters, bringing the gun to bear on a bewildered-looking Kittin and focussing a little more intently on the man's big bald tattooed head. "If you think you can do any better -"
"Ah, but I can't. If I kill anyone this whole place will come down on me."
"The bank?"
"The projections. Stop being a coward and shoot the man. He's not real."
"Well that takes all the fun out of it," John murmurs, shooting Kittin; the man's head explodes in a shower of skull and blood, and John beams at the destruction with a faint twinge of pride.
"Much better," Eames says, apparently impressed. John can't work out if he means it or if this is some sort of handling behaviour of the kind he could never be bothered to learn; the vault is unprotected now, and that's what matters.
"Isn't going in via the front a bit … obvious?" John asks. No one is rushing over to see why he's just shot Kittin in the head so thoroughly that he has no head left, and though Kittin's body is lying there like a punctured blood bag, leaking all over the shiny floor rather than fading away like the simulations from his long-ago training days, no one is even looking at him. They're just ignoring John standing there in with a gun in his hands, which has never been a recipe for continued survival.
He trains on a face which is slightly familiar but to which he can put no name, a sallow green face with exceptionally beautiful multi-faceted eyes, and pulls the trigger to a satisfactorily loud bang and resultant shower of ichor.
When John looks back at Eames both of the man's eyebrows are raised. "And here I thought you liked making an unnecessary entrance."
"Only when it's interesting. This is dull and predictable."
"Suit yourself," Eames sighs. "Shall we find a side door?"
"A side door to a vault?" John points his gun at the floor. No point in holstering it when there are people everywhere apparently begging to have their heads blown off, but also no point in waving it in Eames's face right at this moment.
"This is a dream," Eames explains, as if he's talking to an extremely backward child or a door-to-door canvasser, "and it's one I made. Come on."
The bank was, like one or two other things John had encountered in his travels, clearly significantly bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside. The staircases Eames led him up, down, around, and occasionally upside-down seemed to stretch onward through infinity. They might faze someone from this time period, but as John had seen exploding stars sucked backward through time loops, given blowjobs in chronoanomalies, and set fire to a space-ship just as it entered its own timeline from behind, it was going to take a little more than a few bendy staircases to impress him.
"Where is the fucking mythical side-door, Mister Eames?" he asked, as they hit another landing somewhere in the belly of the building, and drew a bead on the man's knees - people were uncooperative with answers when missing a head, but in his experience they were very talkative when faced with the prospect of going through life with a patella missing.
"You're the one who wasn't happy with going in through the front of the bloody thing," Eames mutters, ignoring the gun.
"Get us into the vault or stop having knees," John advises, waggling the barrel of the gun.
"Fine," Eames says in a very put-upon voice, still ignoring the gun - John's tempted to pop him one in the shin just to make him understand the gravity of having it pointed at his legs. "Here we … go."
A door opens next to John, almost crumbling away out of the sheer marble wall.
"Dreams," Eames reminds him, although John hasn't said a fucking word.
The darkness beyond the sharp-edged hole in the marble wall is illuminated only by a low red light hidden somewhere in the roof, but with it John can see the vault is enormous; it's like a spacecraft hangar, one of those interior areas that's so impossibly huge that it has its own microclimate, like the meeting halls back home which were generally used to intimidate anyone stupid enough to try and negotiate with the Cousinry.
"After you," Eames says, with what is definitely a smirk.
"No," John says, pointing his gun at him. "After you."
Eames shrugs and hops down two steps into the red-lit darkness, and John follows him, gun drawn and ready.
In the centre of the vast, empty room, on a plinth with nothing near it, is a locker-box with a number pad lock. There is nothing else in the entire vault.
"Oh this had better be good," John grunts, lowering his gun with a groan. Important shit occasionally came in small packages - he'd smuggled plenty in various body cavities - but a vault this size usually implied something a lot bigger.
"You want to have a crack at it?" Eames asks, extending his arm. "I'm shit at locks."
The number pad is more familiar - one of the kind that requires only a delicate movement of the fingers in the general direction of each number - laid out in hovering shapes in the air in a pattern which has little to do with their ordinal value. It's the same design as the security locks on the estate he grew up in, the ones which required a certain genetic defect to identify the correct combination, which ran in the family (along with a slew of others; the beauty of centuries upon centuries of inbreeding and quick fixes by less-than-perfect doctors). Locks which required the right blood and the right mind.
John's heart, his patchwork of transplants and artificial tubing, the true legacy of the Pogril-Copenbil Cousinry's restrictive marriage traditions, beats too fast as he wiggles his fingers through the pattern that only he can see.
The tiny locker takes an obscenely long time to swing open, so long that John is tempted to stick his fingers in the widening gap and just yank the door open, but something about the way Eames is standing makes him hesitate in case it results in losing the tip of his fingers.
Inside the tiny locker, coiled into a brown manilla tube, is a long envelope. With slightly shaky hands, John reaches into the darkness and pulls it out, the texture of paper against his fingers missing, the weight in his hand negligible.
He tears it open.
The envelope contains nothing but a handful of printed sheets of paper of the sort that seems to be acceptable to hand around still back here in the dead prehistory of human space travel; they're stamped, however, with the Time Agency logo. John scans them eagerly, and finds nothing but a list of protocols, codes, and maintenance information about his Vortex Manipulator which he memorised years ago and hardly even thinks about any more.
"May I?" Eames suggests, holding out his hand with an expression of polite indifference. "That doesn't look a lot like money."
"It isn't." John passes the papers to Eames with a sense of profound disappointment. The very least his subconscious could have shoved in the vault was some sex scenes and a pile of cash large enough to make the lords of avarice weep, not some poxy envelope full of typed-out crap about Time Agency protocols.
John blinks away the remnants of the bank vault to find himself sitting upright in the backroom of the casino with a needle and a tube sticking out of his arm, a buzzing sensation somewhere in the back of his brain, and a thin rope of drool snaking out of his mouth and down the side of his face; without pausing to wipe away his sleep-saliva, he yanks the cannula out of his wrist, jerks out of the chair, and in the same movement begins to bind the still-sleeping body of Eames to his own seat with the tubes.
They're not thick enough to hold someone for long, but then John doesn't need to keep him there for any longer than it takes for him to leave. He can always attach new tubes to the damn device later. It's not like the planet has a shortage of rubber and plastic.
As he expected, it's when he slashes through the tubes connected Eames's bound body to the PASIV device that Eames's eyes open abruptly and nail him to the wall with an admirable five-thousand-mile-stare.
"Thanks," John says, snapping the briefcase closed and holding it up like a trophy. "Couldn't have done it without you. Well, that's a lie, but it's certainly been easier for you being gullible." He reaches into one of the several concealed pockets in his jacket and removes a small fragmentation grenade from it.
"I'm baffled," Eames says, holding his gaze with infinitely clear, unblinking eyes, "how anyone could possibly be put off by the terrible things you do."
John has learnt, in his dealings with the British - especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - that if he couldn't work out if they were being sarcastic, they probably were, and that acting accordingly is probably going to result in causing either real or manufactured offence. He just smiles and places the grenade in Eames's lap gently.
"Much as I enjoy hearing about how endlessly attractive I am, I have a PASIV to steal." John pats him on the thigh and for a long moment lets the tips of his fingers drag along the too-tight fabric of his clearly polyester pants. "So long, Mr Eames, it's been a delight. Maybe even for me, too."
"You're not going to detonate it?" Eames asks, sounding strangely disappointed for a man with a live grenade resting on his family jewels. "This isn't the John Hart I have files on."
"I may have decided I liked you," John says, backing away from him, his hands raised, the remote's button a fraction of an inch removed from the pad of his thumb. "I do that sometimes."
"Oh, I'm quite aware," Eames says with a smirk that is somehow pleasant as well as infuriatingly knowing, his hands raised as high as he can lift them with his wrists bound to the arms of his chair. "I'm also quite aware that it never stops you from killing them."
"Good point," John says, and he presses the button.
The sound of a man reduced to his component atoms never ceases to be a beautiful (if damaging) song to his ears; and the body of Mr Eames taking to the air in a fine red mist and shower of bone shards is no exception.
"I did like you," John says to the red smear on a large part of the floor, walls, and ceiling. He wipes blood from his nose and examines it critically, but the rumbling from above distracts him.
John looks up at the sound of an earthquake in the ceiling, and yelps, leaping backward.
The ceiling curls in on itself like a plastic cup to a flame. John flings his arms over his head as several floors of casino rain down on him like the spiteful hail of an architect god, and tries to dodge out of the room's door; it is locked.
A brick-lump the size of a large dog hits him in the leg, and John hears the bone break before he feels it; his lower leg bent the wrong way, the way legs are not supposed to bend. The white light of pain engulfs his brain for a second, but the opiate implants are worth what he paid for them - a second later he can't feel a thing and he's got the door open, and the casino's upper floors keep coming like the sky is falling and the world is disintegrating around him.
There are no people out on the main floor of the casino; the debris pins down slot machines and tables, but not a single body, not a drop of blood. Perhaps they ran at the sound of the grenade, already sure that the place would come down. Funny. It doesn't look that structurally-unsound from outside.
John considers hurling himself under one of the intact tables, but that's false cover when the whole building is coming down like rain.
A roof tile shatters on the ground beside him, and he gets another good look at his leg. The angle it rests at as he stands, unhampered by the agony he ought to be feeling thanks to those glorious expensive little babies in his grey matter, is hideous and strange; it looks like the leg of a - one of those -
"Nrghk," John says, trying to sit up.
He is hand-cuffed by the wrists and ankles to the frame of a cheap-feeling metal bedstead, the angry springs of an ill-used mattress jabbing him in the spine. His Vortex Manipulator is missing. His mouth is sticky and dry, and he feels briefly disoriented, convinced that he should be dead and uncertain if what looks like a grotty twenty-first century motel room is in fact the afterlife. If it's Hell, it's not a very good one.
Because captivity implies a captor - and because he can hear people breathing - John looks up and around him as quickly as he can, already devoting most of his mind to how the fuck he is going to get out of these handcuffs without detaching his hand. There are two men in the room, looking down at him with calculating expressions: one is a dead ringer for the Mr Eames of his dream, and the other, darker but of roughly similar build, with curly hair and a brown cardigan, is an unfamiliar quantity.
They are both looking at him as if they're trying to decide how to dispose of his body, which is a very, very familiar situation.
"I've got an itch," John says, baring his teeth in what may or may not be a smile. "One of you want to scratch it?"
Fandom: Inception/Torchwood
Word Count: 5,842
Rating: PG/PG-13
Pairing: None
Warnings: Author is white, able-bodied, cisgender, and European.
Content Advisory: I wrote it. ME. Muaha.
Disclaimer: This shit is the property of Chris Nolan and Rusty, some film folken, and the BBC. Not me! Also; an unreliable narrator is talking about a liar. Believe nothing.
Summary No gimmicks this time; just banging two characters off each other. Eames has something John wants, and vice versa.
As soon as the door shuts behind him, the late afternoon light is sliced off and replaced by the eerie glow of blue-white stripes in the ceiling; offsetting the stripes on the carpet like some strange, rotated mirror of the patterns beneath his feet.
John Hart skips past the slot machines and through to the more grown-up section of this American-style casino in a European city, as if the distinctions of land-masses mean a thing to a man who's seen every corner of the galaxy and had sex with most of it. He stretches his shoulders and loosens his step, strolling through like he owns the place.
His mark is easy enough to find; the craps tables may well be heaving with badly-dressed tourists and people who've clearly had their style bought for them by subordinates, but among their self-satisfied heads, the fake breasts, the real diamonds, and three or four people who will go on to become his ancestors after they are arrested for massive fraud, there is a man who looks as if he is uncomfortable and overheating in the air-conditioned room, but entirely at ease with his own discomfort.
This mass of contradictions in a staggeringly ugly shirt (it is peach with dark pink palm trees printed on it; John knows because he has heard the staff complaining about it) and too much hair product is gazing along the green baize at the shooter with an unwavering intensity of focus.
It's hard not to swagger as he approaches the table; his bloodstains are hidden by the jacket, but he still has his pants tucked into his riding boots and there is little to no chance of John being mistaken for a member of civilised society - and he's never much liked pretending to be someone less than he is for long. It made Jack the better con.
John only just resists the urge to spit at the thought of his former partner's name.
People turn to stare at him, of course, but as he expected they turn away when the security guards do nothing, muttering to each other about his clothes and his peculiar stink the way people always did; give it five minutes and they'd be swooning and suggestible, because John Hart didn't pay that much money for pheromone implants for them not to work.
"Move over," John says, shoving his bony hip in between a woman in a very good fake ocelot summer cape and a woman in a bad real snakeskin dress. "I said move over, I'm very important."
Both women glare at him; he roots around in his pocket for a minute and finds that, in the grand tradition of ever trip he has ever taken to a casino on this planet, he has absolutely nothing resembling enough money. It doesn't matter. He knocks over Ocelot Woman's drink on purpose and turns his attention to the point of his visit; easy money.
"Evening," he says, leaning around Snakeskin Woman to incline his head at the craps-player in the astoundingly ugly shirt.
"Hello," says the gambler, half-perplexed, half-flirtatious. "Nice jacket."
It's a good thing John is the most compulsively mendacious man in the history of history, or he'd balk at returning the compliment; his mark's jacket is anything but nice. "Same to you."
The shooter is taking her sweet time.
"I hear you have something that doesn't belong to you," John says, stifling the urge to just pin him to the table with a gun in his nostrils. Things usually went messily when he did things like that; then again, they often went more quickly.
"Unless you're talking about this uncharacteristic streak of luck," his mark says, smirking over the top of his stack of chips, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Protected government property," John says, mouthing the words more than he speaks them; his lips are clearly no match for the outrageous beestings on the mark's face (they can't possibly natural - where and when John comes from, people do obscene things to the structure of their genes to ensure their children will have faces like his), but he shapes the words just as clearly, "In your possession. People will be coming after you soon."
"Could I trouble you to either blow on my dice or piss off?" says the mark, with a close-lipped smile. "Only I have every intention of cleaning out this table."
"I can make you a much better offer," John says, knocking over Ocelot Lady's chips. "Much better than the men who'll come after me will."
"Heard that before," the mark mutters, almost too quietly for John to hear.
"Now," John says, leaning over the craps table until his jacket touches the green baize, "it really is very important that you take me to where you're keeping that thing." He produces a sheet of psychic paper and waves it under the man's nose. "All kinds of terrible things could potentially happen to you, and it's my job to protect you from them, do you understand me, Mr Eames?"
"Of course," says the chubby idiot in the bad suit, and, "You're in the way of my game."
"There are bigger things at stake here," John says, leaning in to whisper against the side of the man's head. He disabled his olfactory implants before he got in - no 21st century casino ever smelled anything but nauseating - but he gets the impression that this man would smell of Brylcreem and mutton if he hadn't stuck a laser screwdriver up his own nose twenty minutes ago.
Eames looks up at him with an expression of barely-concealed irritation. "What will it take to stop you bothering me all evening?"
John cranks up the charm and the sincerity as high as he can. "Your cooperation would be beneficial not only for me and the agency I represent, but for you - the people who are coming after me aren't going to be this polite, Mr Eames, and they will be a lot more armed."
"Should I take it from that that you aren't carrying a gun?" says Eames out of the side of his mouth, apparently wholly diverted by the impossibly coy craps-shooter and her stupid luck ritual. "Because I am quite armed myself."
John runs a brief mental tally of all the weapons he has concealed about his person, but he keeps his face as straight as possible. "I think it best if we avoid shooting innocent civilians, don't you?"
Eames pushes all the chips onto two, and tells Snakeskin Lady, "Your bet now," with an extravagant wink. Rather than taking this act of generosity with the gratitude appropriate to suddenly receiving a sum of money that large, she glares at him as if he's just offered to stick an eel up her arse.
"This way," John says, ushering the sweaty Englishman away from the craps tables and toward the backrooms; he stands so that his hip juts out like a rock from the sands of a beach not because he wants to show that off right now, but to carefully outline the most deliberately visible of his guns with the fabric of his jacket. Maybe casino security will see it, and maybe they won't; maybe John doesn't care. He knows he's timed this just right. They're treating him with a surprising amount of respect.
"I'm not sure what I've got is what you want," says Eames, sucking his teeth. "You know you could just have taken the chips."
John just about avoids laughing in the man's face. "I'm trying to save your life and all you have to offer is pocket change? Charming."
"Do you even know what this device does?" Eames smiles, as the door clicks shut behind them, and John hears in it the swoosh of airlocks, the slam of prison doors, and even the clang of a portcullis. "This device that everyone is so keen to get their hands on?"
The taunt hangs in the air like the echoes of a gunshot, but John shoulders it away and watches Eames extract a silver briefcase from the back-room's safe as delicately as someone carrying a glass bauble. "I'm being paid to recover it and remove the threat of death from your head," John says severely, "I don't need to know what it does."
"But you want to know," Eames says, catching his eye.
Of course he fucking wants to know. He'd been considering taking it back to base and putting a gun in someone's face until they told him, but this sneaky fucker clearly wants to show off - it's written on his face like bad graffiti. "Maybe it's better that I do," John says, pursing his lips and trying to pull off that hands-on-hips authority that bloody Jack suddenly acquired.
"I thought you might say that." Eames smirks at him and opens the catch on the briefcase. There isn’t so much as a basic combination lock on the thing; the laxest security possible for what is apparently so valuable that John could buy an entire solar system for the reward for this anachronistic technology.
The contents are, for all this internal fanfare and the hum of transferring funds in his imagination, unimpressive. There is a flat rubber button which looks faintly hydraulic, a number of what look like spools and ports, and a conspicuous red LED counter of the kind favoured by the 21st century like they favoured herpes and tiresome sexual binary. For a fleeting moment it flashes through his brain that this might very well be a bomb.
But John knows bombs like he knows his own pubic hair, and he knows bombers a sight better than he does the various genitals that have banged up against his; this man is no bomber, and this strange, light, phial-filled contraption is no bomb.
"You'll need to take off your wristband … thing," Eames says, brandishing what looks like a Freudian nightmare tool, a thin phallic tube topped with a sharp - needle.
John removes the Vortex-Manipulator and thrusts it pointedly into his hip pocket, rolling up his jacket sleeve into a bulky mountain of red. There are few things in the twenty-first century which he hasn't been immunised against, few things that the application of a little tender loving medication from his home time won't put a stop to - of course, slashing his arteries will leave him just as exsanguinated. He fishes out one of his smaller guns with his free hand and holds it up. "Don't try anything … excitable."
"I promise you I am as calm as the leafy glade," Eames says levelly, showing him the needle. "Sit down, this won't take two seconds and it's quicker than explaining."
John gives him a look he knows is as boggle-eyed as it is suspicious and which is not at all attractive, and half-sits on the edge of the desk next to the contraption.
"Suit yourself," says Eames, swiping John's wrist with something white and alcohol-smelling, leaving a cold tingle over his veins. "You're going to get one hell of a crick in your neck, mind."
The needle barely registers - so many punctures in John's skin over the course of his chronologically impertinent lifespan that one more cannot perturb him - and he can feel it retract on its own as the tiny tube settles in place, which is surely an illegal anachronism of the sort that would, once, have brought at least a small team of Time Agents tumbling down on a place to remove the device and anyone's memories of it ever having existed.
But they're not here, which means that this little pin-prick and the associated tomfuckery are his and his alone, and that no one ever tells his former employers; John catches Eames's eye as the man slips a similar tube into his own wrist, sprawling over one of the office chairs. He sees the chubby Englishman's surprisingly inscrutable smile march over his lips again, and before he's marshalled his thoughts the big puffy button in the middle of the case goes down.
His eyelids follow it a millisecond or two later.
John Hart has been deprived of consciousness against his will enough times to know well the abrupt transition from one moment in time to another, and how different it is to travel with the Vortex Manipulator; he knows, too, the dislocation in space - the lack of shock in waking up in a different place, surrounded by different people, and quite frequently in some form of restraints with a weapon pointed at an important part of his anatomy.
Here the buildings rise like beautiful glittering teeth from a litterless pavement, their bases shining with pale blue windows and the bobbing green heads of palm trees rustling in a breeze that doesn't make it down to where he stands. The road is empty of cars, with only an occasional cyclist disappearing around the many corners of the roads.
"Welcome to the scientific miracle of shared dreaming," says Eames, from behind him.
John executes a very graceful whirl on the heel of his boots; Eames has his hands in his pockets and looks as infernally smug as he did before, but there's something different about his clothes. He looks thinner, and it's only after a bit of staring that John realises he actually is a little slimmer, not just being catered to well by somewhat better tailoring.
"Don't ask me about the specifics because I have absolutely no idea how it works," Eames continues, as fat and murky clouds the colour of sickness roil across the sky like a warning, "but the basics are that I stick my pre-constructed dream rudely into your mind, where your own set piece would otherwise be, and you fill it with your subconscious. With your secrets, most pertinently."
"Bullshit," John says, and he taps his Vortex Manipulator. He's sure he took it off, but he's also sure that he wouldn't be that fucking stupid. Anyway, it's on his wrist now, and the screen blurs as he tries to read it.
"Getting a good reading?" Eames asks, closer and quieter than before. "Or is it proving impossible to see anything?"
"I'm inside my own head?" John asks, looking around at the glittering buildings. "I don't think so, sunshine. Not enough stuff on fire, no corpses, and no one is screaming."
"We've only been here a minute," Eames says, his hands still in his pockets as he surveys the heights of some glass-walled skyscraper. "Give it time."
"A minute is normally enough," John says, as glibly as he always does. There are palm trees. He had no idea that his was the kind of subconscious that had palm trees in it, but here they are. Clearly those visits to threaten people on Ursa Minor Beta have stuck in his psyche more than he first realised. Well. They did have such fantastic parties there. "Also, no one is trying to kill me."
"That's because they're projections of your subconscious," Eames says, putting a cigar in his mouth. He didn't smoke when John wasn't dreaming, but he smokes now, blowing rings that are as fat and sumptuous as his lips. "The only person they're likely to attack is me."
"Oh, normally the projections of my subconscious are quite keen on murdering me in a variety of … inventive and familiar ways," John says carelessly, plucking the cigar out of Eames's mouth. Normally his dreams like to diminish the golden light that habitually surges through his veins when he's battering someone to death, and slay him often and with ease.
"No," Eames says, raising his eyebrows. "Those are memories."
"No they're not," John persists, as clouds begin to form overhead and the street fills up with cars, chugging slowly in from all directions. "None of those things have really happened." Which is almost true. Some of them have never really happened. Some of them he just wishes never had.
Eames sighs, and gestures to the wide glass doors of the nearest building. "Let's go inside before it starts raining, and I will explain things for you."
"What's this building?" John asks, peering up at it as Eames holds the door open for him.
"A bank?" Eames suggests. "The main thing is it's not raining in there."
A bank. John makes a performance of entering the building and is amused when not a single head turns to stare at him; the clock on the wall seems frozen at ten past four, and there is an elegant water feature in the middle of the smooth, seamless stone floor. As ever, it just makes him want to piss in the thing and maybe dunk someone's face in it.
There are several impressively-coiffed women working behind the main counter, and John thinks he recognises at least a few of their faces - one is clearly not human and that should really be a dead give-away; after all, he's never encountered aliens working openly on 21st century Earth - and they studiously ignore him with the measured cool of professionals who are not expecting to be, say, robbed at gunpoint in a minute or two.
Eames catches his eye and says, "I have to wonder," in a tone of voice that suggests that he's not wondering because he already knows, "if you're thinking what I'm thinking."
"Unless it involves fucking her, killing … her, and stealing everything in this place, probably not," John says, pointing them out one by one. It's the opposite way around to the events as he remembers them; Nai was the one he'd tried and not quite succeeded in killing, and Vee-Ji was the one he'd fucked, but there was nothing like a little variety to spice up an otherwise pedestrian bank robbery.
"That sounds like an excellent plan," Eames says, as if they're talking about going for dinner. "Although I might skip the first two parts in order to save time."
John shrugs. "Alright, kill both of them, then. Or all of them. Whichever's quickest." The idea strikes him as an excellent one; there might well be anything inside a bank vault in his own mind, but as he usually ends up captured and killed before he gets this far it'll be interesting to have an accomplice. And that's if dreaming this way works the way it does when he's really, truly under.
"After you," says Eames, and there is a dare in his voice.
John pulls his gun out of his armpit and spatters Nai's head across the opposite wall; to his disappointment there is the same diminished return on the violence as when the head he is shooting is alive, awake, and real. Guns are very convenient and very pretty and, when occasion commits, a quite satisfactory form of currency or indeed sex toy, but for the surge of golden light through his veins and the thumping, chaotic chant of I am alive, I am alive, he needs to thump something heavy into the just-yielding-enough tension of someone's body. He needs the burn of his shoulder muscles and the wild counterweight against his swing.
Eames responds by smiling; the rest of the bank staff - who all look faintly familiar, now John thinks about it - just mill around as if there hasn't been a bloody and loud murder in their midst. They get straight back to work, shuffling paper and poking computers with looks of well-groomed boredom.
He stares, but the bank staff just carry on regardless.
"I did just blow her head off?" John mutters, squinting at the spray of blood over the wall.
"You're dreaming," Eames says pleasantly. "Now, if I shot someone they'd be down on me like a tonne of bastards, but you could shoot all of them and nothing would happen."
John considers this. "I can't work out if that's the most fun it's possible to have with your clothes on or disappointingly boring." He's visited a few places where shooting someone in the head didn't cause a single person to turn around, but those were more "oppressive military regimes" than they were shared dreams.
"Depends on who you're shooting," Eames nods, and John brings the barrel of his gun to bear on the security guard standing by the door to the vault. This is the most ridiculous bank he's ever seen; the vault is a vast round door with an airlock dial on the front of it, and it's just there in the middle of the foyer with one security guard in front of it. Pitiful. "I find shooting exes a highly therapeutic activity."
John snorts. The security guard isn't an ex - Kittin isn't anyone's ex because of some crazed religious foible; he had millions of them - but considering the other attachment and loyalties Kittin's had in the past shooting him in the face would be 'therapeutic'. Or at least funny. And they're robbing the place.
He shoots Kittin in the face.
"Were you intending to shoot his ear off, or -?"
"Shut up," John mutters, bringing the gun to bear on a bewildered-looking Kittin and focussing a little more intently on the man's big bald tattooed head. "If you think you can do any better -"
"Ah, but I can't. If I kill anyone this whole place will come down on me."
"The bank?"
"The projections. Stop being a coward and shoot the man. He's not real."
"Well that takes all the fun out of it," John murmurs, shooting Kittin; the man's head explodes in a shower of skull and blood, and John beams at the destruction with a faint twinge of pride.
"Much better," Eames says, apparently impressed. John can't work out if he means it or if this is some sort of handling behaviour of the kind he could never be bothered to learn; the vault is unprotected now, and that's what matters.
"Isn't going in via the front a bit … obvious?" John asks. No one is rushing over to see why he's just shot Kittin in the head so thoroughly that he has no head left, and though Kittin's body is lying there like a punctured blood bag, leaking all over the shiny floor rather than fading away like the simulations from his long-ago training days, no one is even looking at him. They're just ignoring John standing there in with a gun in his hands, which has never been a recipe for continued survival.
He trains on a face which is slightly familiar but to which he can put no name, a sallow green face with exceptionally beautiful multi-faceted eyes, and pulls the trigger to a satisfactorily loud bang and resultant shower of ichor.
When John looks back at Eames both of the man's eyebrows are raised. "And here I thought you liked making an unnecessary entrance."
"Only when it's interesting. This is dull and predictable."
"Suit yourself," Eames sighs. "Shall we find a side door?"
"A side door to a vault?" John points his gun at the floor. No point in holstering it when there are people everywhere apparently begging to have their heads blown off, but also no point in waving it in Eames's face right at this moment.
"This is a dream," Eames explains, as if he's talking to an extremely backward child or a door-to-door canvasser, "and it's one I made. Come on."
The bank was, like one or two other things John had encountered in his travels, clearly significantly bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside. The staircases Eames led him up, down, around, and occasionally upside-down seemed to stretch onward through infinity. They might faze someone from this time period, but as John had seen exploding stars sucked backward through time loops, given blowjobs in chronoanomalies, and set fire to a space-ship just as it entered its own timeline from behind, it was going to take a little more than a few bendy staircases to impress him.
"Where is the fucking mythical side-door, Mister Eames?" he asked, as they hit another landing somewhere in the belly of the building, and drew a bead on the man's knees - people were uncooperative with answers when missing a head, but in his experience they were very talkative when faced with the prospect of going through life with a patella missing.
"You're the one who wasn't happy with going in through the front of the bloody thing," Eames mutters, ignoring the gun.
"Get us into the vault or stop having knees," John advises, waggling the barrel of the gun.
"Fine," Eames says in a very put-upon voice, still ignoring the gun - John's tempted to pop him one in the shin just to make him understand the gravity of having it pointed at his legs. "Here we … go."
A door opens next to John, almost crumbling away out of the sheer marble wall.
"Dreams," Eames reminds him, although John hasn't said a fucking word.
The darkness beyond the sharp-edged hole in the marble wall is illuminated only by a low red light hidden somewhere in the roof, but with it John can see the vault is enormous; it's like a spacecraft hangar, one of those interior areas that's so impossibly huge that it has its own microclimate, like the meeting halls back home which were generally used to intimidate anyone stupid enough to try and negotiate with the Cousinry.
"After you," Eames says, with what is definitely a smirk.
"No," John says, pointing his gun at him. "After you."
Eames shrugs and hops down two steps into the red-lit darkness, and John follows him, gun drawn and ready.
In the centre of the vast, empty room, on a plinth with nothing near it, is a locker-box with a number pad lock. There is nothing else in the entire vault.
"Oh this had better be good," John grunts, lowering his gun with a groan. Important shit occasionally came in small packages - he'd smuggled plenty in various body cavities - but a vault this size usually implied something a lot bigger.
"You want to have a crack at it?" Eames asks, extending his arm. "I'm shit at locks."
The number pad is more familiar - one of the kind that requires only a delicate movement of the fingers in the general direction of each number - laid out in hovering shapes in the air in a pattern which has little to do with their ordinal value. It's the same design as the security locks on the estate he grew up in, the ones which required a certain genetic defect to identify the correct combination, which ran in the family (along with a slew of others; the beauty of centuries upon centuries of inbreeding and quick fixes by less-than-perfect doctors). Locks which required the right blood and the right mind.
John's heart, his patchwork of transplants and artificial tubing, the true legacy of the Pogril-Copenbil Cousinry's restrictive marriage traditions, beats too fast as he wiggles his fingers through the pattern that only he can see.
The tiny locker takes an obscenely long time to swing open, so long that John is tempted to stick his fingers in the widening gap and just yank the door open, but something about the way Eames is standing makes him hesitate in case it results in losing the tip of his fingers.
Inside the tiny locker, coiled into a brown manilla tube, is a long envelope. With slightly shaky hands, John reaches into the darkness and pulls it out, the texture of paper against his fingers missing, the weight in his hand negligible.
He tears it open.
The envelope contains nothing but a handful of printed sheets of paper of the sort that seems to be acceptable to hand around still back here in the dead prehistory of human space travel; they're stamped, however, with the Time Agency logo. John scans them eagerly, and finds nothing but a list of protocols, codes, and maintenance information about his Vortex Manipulator which he memorised years ago and hardly even thinks about any more.
"May I?" Eames suggests, holding out his hand with an expression of polite indifference. "That doesn't look a lot like money."
"It isn't." John passes the papers to Eames with a sense of profound disappointment. The very least his subconscious could have shoved in the vault was some sex scenes and a pile of cash large enough to make the lords of avarice weep, not some poxy envelope full of typed-out crap about Time Agency protocols.
John blinks away the remnants of the bank vault to find himself sitting upright in the backroom of the casino with a needle and a tube sticking out of his arm, a buzzing sensation somewhere in the back of his brain, and a thin rope of drool snaking out of his mouth and down the side of his face; without pausing to wipe away his sleep-saliva, he yanks the cannula out of his wrist, jerks out of the chair, and in the same movement begins to bind the still-sleeping body of Eames to his own seat with the tubes.
They're not thick enough to hold someone for long, but then John doesn't need to keep him there for any longer than it takes for him to leave. He can always attach new tubes to the damn device later. It's not like the planet has a shortage of rubber and plastic.
As he expected, it's when he slashes through the tubes connected Eames's bound body to the PASIV device that Eames's eyes open abruptly and nail him to the wall with an admirable five-thousand-mile-stare.
"Thanks," John says, snapping the briefcase closed and holding it up like a trophy. "Couldn't have done it without you. Well, that's a lie, but it's certainly been easier for you being gullible." He reaches into one of the several concealed pockets in his jacket and removes a small fragmentation grenade from it.
"I'm baffled," Eames says, holding his gaze with infinitely clear, unblinking eyes, "how anyone could possibly be put off by the terrible things you do."
John has learnt, in his dealings with the British - especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - that if he couldn't work out if they were being sarcastic, they probably were, and that acting accordingly is probably going to result in causing either real or manufactured offence. He just smiles and places the grenade in Eames's lap gently.
"Much as I enjoy hearing about how endlessly attractive I am, I have a PASIV to steal." John pats him on the thigh and for a long moment lets the tips of his fingers drag along the too-tight fabric of his clearly polyester pants. "So long, Mr Eames, it's been a delight. Maybe even for me, too."
"You're not going to detonate it?" Eames asks, sounding strangely disappointed for a man with a live grenade resting on his family jewels. "This isn't the John Hart I have files on."
"I may have decided I liked you," John says, backing away from him, his hands raised, the remote's button a fraction of an inch removed from the pad of his thumb. "I do that sometimes."
"Oh, I'm quite aware," Eames says with a smirk that is somehow pleasant as well as infuriatingly knowing, his hands raised as high as he can lift them with his wrists bound to the arms of his chair. "I'm also quite aware that it never stops you from killing them."
"Good point," John says, and he presses the button.
The sound of a man reduced to his component atoms never ceases to be a beautiful (if damaging) song to his ears; and the body of Mr Eames taking to the air in a fine red mist and shower of bone shards is no exception.
"I did like you," John says to the red smear on a large part of the floor, walls, and ceiling. He wipes blood from his nose and examines it critically, but the rumbling from above distracts him.
John looks up at the sound of an earthquake in the ceiling, and yelps, leaping backward.
The ceiling curls in on itself like a plastic cup to a flame. John flings his arms over his head as several floors of casino rain down on him like the spiteful hail of an architect god, and tries to dodge out of the room's door; it is locked.
A brick-lump the size of a large dog hits him in the leg, and John hears the bone break before he feels it; his lower leg bent the wrong way, the way legs are not supposed to bend. The white light of pain engulfs his brain for a second, but the opiate implants are worth what he paid for them - a second later he can't feel a thing and he's got the door open, and the casino's upper floors keep coming like the sky is falling and the world is disintegrating around him.
There are no people out on the main floor of the casino; the debris pins down slot machines and tables, but not a single body, not a drop of blood. Perhaps they ran at the sound of the grenade, already sure that the place would come down. Funny. It doesn't look that structurally-unsound from outside.
John considers hurling himself under one of the intact tables, but that's false cover when the whole building is coming down like rain.
A roof tile shatters on the ground beside him, and he gets another good look at his leg. The angle it rests at as he stands, unhampered by the agony he ought to be feeling thanks to those glorious expensive little babies in his grey matter, is hideous and strange; it looks like the leg of a - one of those -
"Nrghk," John says, trying to sit up.
He is hand-cuffed by the wrists and ankles to the frame of a cheap-feeling metal bedstead, the angry springs of an ill-used mattress jabbing him in the spine. His Vortex Manipulator is missing. His mouth is sticky and dry, and he feels briefly disoriented, convinced that he should be dead and uncertain if what looks like a grotty twenty-first century motel room is in fact the afterlife. If it's Hell, it's not a very good one.
Because captivity implies a captor - and because he can hear people breathing - John looks up and around him as quickly as he can, already devoting most of his mind to how the fuck he is going to get out of these handcuffs without detaching his hand. There are two men in the room, looking down at him with calculating expressions: one is a dead ringer for the Mr Eames of his dream, and the other, darker but of roughly similar build, with curly hair and a brown cardigan, is an unfamiliar quantity.
They are both looking at him as if they're trying to decide how to dispose of his body, which is a very, very familiar situation.
"I've got an itch," John says, baring his teeth in what may or may not be a smile. "One of you want to scratch it?"