Fanfiction | Fandom: Inception/Iron Man movies | Title: Projecting
Title: Projecting
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, Cobb, and a projection
Warning: crossover, AU, bombs, guns, dream suicide
Disclaimer: Inception and Marvel are owned by people much cooler than me.
Word Count: ~2000
Summary: Tony Stark is Arthur’s Mal.
Notes: Daddy Dearest 'verse. This would be the one that I got stuck on when I ended up writing “ Keeping in Touch”. Like always, it will make much more sense if you read the others in the verse first.
~
After the phone call and the series of postcards, it seems so logical for Tony Stark to actually follow Arthur on a job that he momentarily forgets that they’re dreaming.
A moment later he remembers-it’s not practice, it’s not the US, they’re on a job, they’re in a dream, and Stark can’t follow him here. Just to be sure, Arthur takes his die out of his pocket and looks at it, checking the weight of it and measuring in his mind how it would fall. He could roll it, but there’s no point-it’s wrong. This is a dream. He slips the die back in his pocket and tries not to look at his father sitting across the aisle of the plane.
Consciously, he knows that Tony Stark isn’t here, and if he were he wouldn’t be a problem. Consciously, he’s aware that his father isn’t interested in causing trouble for him, just in pretending he doesn’t exist, which while annoying isn’t problematic for a job like this. Consciously, he remembers that the last time they met in person the end result was that his father bailed the team out of jail.
But a projection comes from the subconscious. And subconsciously, Arthur doesn’t trust his father. Subconsciously, he has issues surrounding his father, and subconsciously, he expects that any time his father shows up, something very bad isn’t far behind.
~
A plane can’t be turned into a maze, so Ariadne’s imagination had had to run wild. Sliding doors would divide the cabin of the plane into five compartments, which connected in ways they shouldn’t but could in a dream. She suggested making it into a double-decker plane so she could make more connections, but Eames came up with the idea to have the door lead to a different compartment of the plane depending which side you opened it from, and Cobb said that was enough, they didn’t need any more. The plane, instead of a maze, became a puzzle.
The mark was the pilot. The dreamer and leader of the operation was Cobb, back for “one last job” for the third time so far. Arthur suspected he would always come back for “one last job”-there was too much of his life tied up in the job, too much he loved and far, far too much he was essentially addicted to. They would extract information from the projections, from the pilot’s and projections’ suitcases, and from a safe that Ariadne installed in the wall behind the pilot. But the most important part would happen about midway through the flight.
~
Arthur checks to make sure he has his gun. Showing up in the middle of the action means none of them had to go through security, which means they have their weapons. He could shoot the projection of his father if he needed to.
He needs to. He should.
He can’t.
They can’t draw attention to themselves at this stage of the game. They have to keep the projections-the mark’s projections-calm and trusting. They need to ask them questions, and they need to get answers to those questions.
His father-the projection of Tony Stark turns to him and winks. Arthur flinches, and realizes he’s staring wide-eyed, like he’s afraid of his father-of a projection of his father. He turns and faces forward, deliberately relaxing.
The projection has a suitcase in his lap.
Arthur’s eyes flick back, and he sees his father messing with something inside. He can’t see, but he can guess. Because if they didn’t have to go through security, that means the projections didn’t either.
He can see a light flashing in the corner of the suitcase, reflecting off the metal top of the case. He looks away again, out the window. He should tell someone. No-he should deal with this himself. No need to tell the others he’s got his own Mal now. But either way, he can’t let his father-the projection-set off a bomb. That would ruin the plan.
~
The mark will believe it is a company flight. It is a company jet, of the size and model only used for flying many higher-ups to conferences. He will fill it with his company’s CEOs, and the team will be able to see what he believes they know.
The company is dirty, in a way the mark would never be okay with. If they ask the right questions of the right projections, they’ll know whether the mark knows. If he does… they didn’t ask what will happen.
Ariadne was uncomfortable with this job. The mark is an innocent, and his life may be at stake. She didn’t like the idea of sneaking around his head to find out if he knew about this. She was offered the simple choice of participating in this job, and not in what came later, or not. She couldn’t pass up the challenge of constructing a maze from a straight line. She never could pass up a challenge. It was why she was so good, even from the beginning. Why she was becoming the best.
The rest of them have become desensitized. Innocent and guilty mean nothing to them. Their job is simpler than that.
Halfway through the flight is the mark’s final test. The plane will start to fall. If the mark wants to, he will be able to save the plane. If he believes the plane should fall, if he hesitates more than a moment, the plane will crash.
The subconscious speaks louder than words.
~
Arthur asks questions of the projections. He gathers information as instructed. All the while he keeps an eye on the projection of his father, who is still right across the aisle, and has now taken to watching him with an expression on his face that Arthur can only describe as disappointed.
Arthur doesn’t want to see that expression. Tony Stark has no right to be disappointed in him. He has no right to think of Arthur as his son or a mistake or anything. Arthur owes him nothing.
Ten minutes of dream-time before the plane starts to fall, the projection of Tony Stark puts the bomb in the middle of the aisle and winks at Arthur. “Thirty seconds,” he says, and sits back. “Make me proud.”
“Cobb!” Arthur yells, already crouched beside the bomb, already looking over the device. He’s done things like this before, in dreams-in his dreams, where he could control the space, rig the odds. Here, he’s bound by the way the bomb works, and though he’s not as creative as his father when it comes to weapons-it’s exactly what bombs look like in movies, with wires everywhere and one of them to cut to shut it off and one to spring it instantly-the wires are all red, because Arthur always wondered why you would make something so obvious as to color-code it.
Twenty-five seconds.
He takes a breath. Cobb is at the back of the plane, which means he has to find his way through the puzzle before he can get here. Arthur doesn’t know the puzzle, doesn’t know how long that might take. He looks over the bomb. It’s his projection carrying a bomb that works how he expects it to. It should work according to the laws of reality, because his mind is logical and he imposes that on his parts of the shared dreams, and it should be something he can figure out, because it’s his.
Twenty seconds.
He doesn’t have time to open the casing and look over the inner workings. He could just shut it off-it’s small and it is his piece of the dream-but that would draw attention and it’s still too early for that.
Eighteen seconds.
He couldn’t draw much more attention shutting it off by changing the dream than he would by staring at a bomb in the middle of a plane. They’re at the back of the compartment, but his shout drew attention, and the projections in the compartment are starting to mutter uneasily.
Sixteen seconds.
One of the wires is slightly thicker than the others. He guesses that will either shut it off or trigger it-the standard thickness is probably mostly dummies.
Fifteen seconds.
Cobb is behind him. What does he expect Cobb to do? There’s nothing to be done.
“Where did that come from?” Cobb asks.
“I don’t know,” he lies.
“Can you shut it off?”
“Manually? No.”
Cobb curses. Arthur can almost see him running his hand over his hair.
Ten seconds.
“We can’t just shut it off,” Cobb says.
“I know that!” Arthur doesn’t mean to shout, but it’s almost that loud.
He’s still looking, but he knows it’s useless. There’s no way to shut it off in time.
Five seconds.
Screw the rules. He puts a hand on the bomb and shuts it off.
He can see without looking Cobb’s horrified face, Stark’s disappointed headshake, and all the projections turning to face him.
They don’t have time to finish. Cobb mutters something to himself about never pulling a job like this again-which part he’s never pulling again Arthur doesn’t have time to ask-and Arthur can feel the shift in the dream as Cobb bumps up the schedule.
The plane starts to fall.
Up ahead, the stewardess-Eames in disguise-grabs a handhold and pulls herself into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Arthur is thrown to the ceiling, where he pulls out his gun and aims at the first projection that starts to unbuckle its seatbelt to follow him. He fires, and the projection collapses, a bullet through its head.
Cobb is right beside him. They hadn’t realized how fast the plane would fall, or how much it would affect them. Arthur has to dodge the bomb as it flies up toward his face.
Tony Stark is still just sitting in his seat, pretending he doesn’t notice the way his skin and hair and arms and clothes are all being pulled straight up.
Arthur shoots as many projections as he can, but more are finding their way to them through the puzzle. How they fight the force that should be pinning them to the ceiling is a mystery to him.
At some point, a bullet goes through Stark’s head-Cobb’s, Arthur thinks.
They’ve already shown their hand; there’s no point in running out of bullets, so they keep letting their guns have more. Distantly, Arthur realizes that the plane should have pulled up by now, and if it hasn’t…
Well. Looks like there was no point in disabling the bomb.
The plane crashes.
Arthur falls to the floor. He has just enough time to realize it hurts more than it should-something broke during the crash, something that then pierced his ribs, he thinks-before Cobb yells “That’s it, we’re out!”
Arthur doesn’t wait for Cobb to shoot him. He puts the gun to his own head and pulls the trigger. There’s the horribly familiar split-second burst of blinding pain before he wakes up in the hospital, where the mark is on an operating table having a kidney replaced. Ariadne’s hands are on his shoulders keeping him from jerking too violently and startling the doctors or disturbing the PASIV and Arthur can’t help thinking how pointless the mark’s operation is about to become.
He disconnects himself; Cobb and Eames are awake as well within moments. Before anyone can ask questions, he’s out the door.
He’s not Cobb. He’s not going back under with a homicidal projection bleeding through. He’s done. He hates it-hates thinking, So Stark wins. But he has to.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, Cobb, and a projection
Warning: crossover, AU, bombs, guns, dream suicide
Disclaimer: Inception and Marvel are owned by people much cooler than me.
Word Count: ~2000
Summary: Tony Stark is Arthur’s Mal.
Notes: Daddy Dearest 'verse. This would be the one that I got stuck on when I ended up writing “ Keeping in Touch”. Like always, it will make much more sense if you read the others in the verse first.
~
After the phone call and the series of postcards, it seems so logical for Tony Stark to actually follow Arthur on a job that he momentarily forgets that they’re dreaming.
A moment later he remembers-it’s not practice, it’s not the US, they’re on a job, they’re in a dream, and Stark can’t follow him here. Just to be sure, Arthur takes his die out of his pocket and looks at it, checking the weight of it and measuring in his mind how it would fall. He could roll it, but there’s no point-it’s wrong. This is a dream. He slips the die back in his pocket and tries not to look at his father sitting across the aisle of the plane.
Consciously, he knows that Tony Stark isn’t here, and if he were he wouldn’t be a problem. Consciously, he’s aware that his father isn’t interested in causing trouble for him, just in pretending he doesn’t exist, which while annoying isn’t problematic for a job like this. Consciously, he remembers that the last time they met in person the end result was that his father bailed the team out of jail.
But a projection comes from the subconscious. And subconsciously, Arthur doesn’t trust his father. Subconsciously, he has issues surrounding his father, and subconsciously, he expects that any time his father shows up, something very bad isn’t far behind.
~
A plane can’t be turned into a maze, so Ariadne’s imagination had had to run wild. Sliding doors would divide the cabin of the plane into five compartments, which connected in ways they shouldn’t but could in a dream. She suggested making it into a double-decker plane so she could make more connections, but Eames came up with the idea to have the door lead to a different compartment of the plane depending which side you opened it from, and Cobb said that was enough, they didn’t need any more. The plane, instead of a maze, became a puzzle.
The mark was the pilot. The dreamer and leader of the operation was Cobb, back for “one last job” for the third time so far. Arthur suspected he would always come back for “one last job”-there was too much of his life tied up in the job, too much he loved and far, far too much he was essentially addicted to. They would extract information from the projections, from the pilot’s and projections’ suitcases, and from a safe that Ariadne installed in the wall behind the pilot. But the most important part would happen about midway through the flight.
~
Arthur checks to make sure he has his gun. Showing up in the middle of the action means none of them had to go through security, which means they have their weapons. He could shoot the projection of his father if he needed to.
He needs to. He should.
He can’t.
They can’t draw attention to themselves at this stage of the game. They have to keep the projections-the mark’s projections-calm and trusting. They need to ask them questions, and they need to get answers to those questions.
His father-the projection of Tony Stark turns to him and winks. Arthur flinches, and realizes he’s staring wide-eyed, like he’s afraid of his father-of a projection of his father. He turns and faces forward, deliberately relaxing.
The projection has a suitcase in his lap.
Arthur’s eyes flick back, and he sees his father messing with something inside. He can’t see, but he can guess. Because if they didn’t have to go through security, that means the projections didn’t either.
He can see a light flashing in the corner of the suitcase, reflecting off the metal top of the case. He looks away again, out the window. He should tell someone. No-he should deal with this himself. No need to tell the others he’s got his own Mal now. But either way, he can’t let his father-the projection-set off a bomb. That would ruin the plan.
~
The mark will believe it is a company flight. It is a company jet, of the size and model only used for flying many higher-ups to conferences. He will fill it with his company’s CEOs, and the team will be able to see what he believes they know.
The company is dirty, in a way the mark would never be okay with. If they ask the right questions of the right projections, they’ll know whether the mark knows. If he does… they didn’t ask what will happen.
Ariadne was uncomfortable with this job. The mark is an innocent, and his life may be at stake. She didn’t like the idea of sneaking around his head to find out if he knew about this. She was offered the simple choice of participating in this job, and not in what came later, or not. She couldn’t pass up the challenge of constructing a maze from a straight line. She never could pass up a challenge. It was why she was so good, even from the beginning. Why she was becoming the best.
The rest of them have become desensitized. Innocent and guilty mean nothing to them. Their job is simpler than that.
Halfway through the flight is the mark’s final test. The plane will start to fall. If the mark wants to, he will be able to save the plane. If he believes the plane should fall, if he hesitates more than a moment, the plane will crash.
The subconscious speaks louder than words.
~
Arthur asks questions of the projections. He gathers information as instructed. All the while he keeps an eye on the projection of his father, who is still right across the aisle, and has now taken to watching him with an expression on his face that Arthur can only describe as disappointed.
Arthur doesn’t want to see that expression. Tony Stark has no right to be disappointed in him. He has no right to think of Arthur as his son or a mistake or anything. Arthur owes him nothing.
Ten minutes of dream-time before the plane starts to fall, the projection of Tony Stark puts the bomb in the middle of the aisle and winks at Arthur. “Thirty seconds,” he says, and sits back. “Make me proud.”
“Cobb!” Arthur yells, already crouched beside the bomb, already looking over the device. He’s done things like this before, in dreams-in his dreams, where he could control the space, rig the odds. Here, he’s bound by the way the bomb works, and though he’s not as creative as his father when it comes to weapons-it’s exactly what bombs look like in movies, with wires everywhere and one of them to cut to shut it off and one to spring it instantly-the wires are all red, because Arthur always wondered why you would make something so obvious as to color-code it.
Twenty-five seconds.
He takes a breath. Cobb is at the back of the plane, which means he has to find his way through the puzzle before he can get here. Arthur doesn’t know the puzzle, doesn’t know how long that might take. He looks over the bomb. It’s his projection carrying a bomb that works how he expects it to. It should work according to the laws of reality, because his mind is logical and he imposes that on his parts of the shared dreams, and it should be something he can figure out, because it’s his.
Twenty seconds.
He doesn’t have time to open the casing and look over the inner workings. He could just shut it off-it’s small and it is his piece of the dream-but that would draw attention and it’s still too early for that.
Eighteen seconds.
He couldn’t draw much more attention shutting it off by changing the dream than he would by staring at a bomb in the middle of a plane. They’re at the back of the compartment, but his shout drew attention, and the projections in the compartment are starting to mutter uneasily.
Sixteen seconds.
One of the wires is slightly thicker than the others. He guesses that will either shut it off or trigger it-the standard thickness is probably mostly dummies.
Fifteen seconds.
Cobb is behind him. What does he expect Cobb to do? There’s nothing to be done.
“Where did that come from?” Cobb asks.
“I don’t know,” he lies.
“Can you shut it off?”
“Manually? No.”
Cobb curses. Arthur can almost see him running his hand over his hair.
Ten seconds.
“We can’t just shut it off,” Cobb says.
“I know that!” Arthur doesn’t mean to shout, but it’s almost that loud.
He’s still looking, but he knows it’s useless. There’s no way to shut it off in time.
Five seconds.
Screw the rules. He puts a hand on the bomb and shuts it off.
He can see without looking Cobb’s horrified face, Stark’s disappointed headshake, and all the projections turning to face him.
They don’t have time to finish. Cobb mutters something to himself about never pulling a job like this again-which part he’s never pulling again Arthur doesn’t have time to ask-and Arthur can feel the shift in the dream as Cobb bumps up the schedule.
The plane starts to fall.
Up ahead, the stewardess-Eames in disguise-grabs a handhold and pulls herself into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Arthur is thrown to the ceiling, where he pulls out his gun and aims at the first projection that starts to unbuckle its seatbelt to follow him. He fires, and the projection collapses, a bullet through its head.
Cobb is right beside him. They hadn’t realized how fast the plane would fall, or how much it would affect them. Arthur has to dodge the bomb as it flies up toward his face.
Tony Stark is still just sitting in his seat, pretending he doesn’t notice the way his skin and hair and arms and clothes are all being pulled straight up.
Arthur shoots as many projections as he can, but more are finding their way to them through the puzzle. How they fight the force that should be pinning them to the ceiling is a mystery to him.
At some point, a bullet goes through Stark’s head-Cobb’s, Arthur thinks.
They’ve already shown their hand; there’s no point in running out of bullets, so they keep letting their guns have more. Distantly, Arthur realizes that the plane should have pulled up by now, and if it hasn’t…
Well. Looks like there was no point in disabling the bomb.
The plane crashes.
Arthur falls to the floor. He has just enough time to realize it hurts more than it should-something broke during the crash, something that then pierced his ribs, he thinks-before Cobb yells “That’s it, we’re out!”
Arthur doesn’t wait for Cobb to shoot him. He puts the gun to his own head and pulls the trigger. There’s the horribly familiar split-second burst of blinding pain before he wakes up in the hospital, where the mark is on an operating table having a kidney replaced. Ariadne’s hands are on his shoulders keeping him from jerking too violently and startling the doctors or disturbing the PASIV and Arthur can’t help thinking how pointless the mark’s operation is about to become.
He disconnects himself; Cobb and Eames are awake as well within moments. Before anyone can ask questions, he’s out the door.
He’s not Cobb. He’s not going back under with a homicidal projection bleeding through. He’s done. He hates it-hates thinking, So Stark wins. But he has to.