Requiescat, pt. five
Title: Requiescat
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Words: ~8000
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Non-con, triggers, references to suicide/self-harm, general trauma.
Summary: The death of Neil McCormick was gradual, not sudden, and not permanent by any means. In the end, Arthur goes much more quickly.
Author's Note: This is a Mysterious Skin crossover, and I GUESS it's not necessary to have seen the movie, but this part is full of SPOILERS. And I think you will soon understand why this part took me three times longer than the others to crank out. Apart from the length. Fun fact, this part could also kind of work as a stand-alone if you wanted it to.
part one, part two, part three, part four, part six, part seven, part eight.
+++
“I keep a log of all my dreams. Whatever bits and pieces I can recall, at least. I feel like it's slowly helping me remember.”
“That's a really good idea. Your subconscious is where all your memories are buried. For you and me and people like us, almost every single thing we do stems from our being abducted.”
--Mysterious Skin
Neil remembers the exact date, December 23, down to the exact hour, when he first knew he would never turn another trick.
His first encounter with an HIV-positive john had shaken him, maybe even deterred him, but it was a speedbump in the end. He got a real job because Wendy wanted him to and because he thought maybe he should, but it was like trying to quit a habit, and he was never that motivated in the first place. It was more of a game, trying to see how long he could last before he got bored or restless and went back to fucking men for money.
He wasn't bored or restless when he was picked up by his last john and taken to Brighton Beach. The truth was, Neil was a little attracted to him.
This is the first night of the rest of his life.
+
Almost right away, he knows it's going wrong.
He escapes to the bathroom for a reprieve. He doesn't know what to do. He's in over his head. It's like hurtling down a chute with only one way out and no way of climbing back up or stopping. He's already committed.
He still doesn't expect it to go the way it does.
+
At first, Neil can hear breathy, strangled, whimpering sounds; until he realizes they're coming from him, and then he makes no sound at all.
+
His head hurts from being thrown into the bathtub; upon falling in, he'd scrabbled for a hold, trying to find purchase, and his fingers slipped on the tap, causing cold water to pelt down on him.
The man is fucking him dry and it hurts like fury. It hurts worse than anything.
The man is fucking him dry and calling him slut in time with his thrusts, and it hurts so much.
Neil doesn't fight. Doesn't say a word. The man's got a knife and he doesn't even use it. When he smashes a heavy shampoo bottle over Neil's head again and again, it's not because he needs to, only because he wants to. Neil tastes his own blood and he can see it swirling down the drain; some part of him leaves with it.
Take that cock all the way up there.
Take it, slut.
He does.
He doesn't make a sound.
This is what Neil McCormick is.
+
Neil liked rough sex, which was a good thing, considering his trade. He'd never thought about the distinction between sex and rape before. He'd never thought he wouldn't want it before. Sex is exhilarating, mindless.
Rape feels like being scared for his life. Rape feels like vomit in his throat. He's never felt this way about sex.
Now he knows.
At the end of the night, the man doesn't even pay him. He fucks Neil like he's an empty receptacle and then throws him outside like so much garbage, because Neil can't stand yet.
+
Once he's in the apartment, safe, he wants to go home. Childlike, he wants his mom. He strips: his body is covered with bruises, everywhere. Everything hurts.
He finds the shirt he was wearing the day he left Hutchinson. He curls up and holds it to his face, like it can take him back there if he just wants it badly enough.
For the first time in his entire life, Neil breaks down sobbing, for a long time.
Afterward, he vomits in the toilet. Bile scalds away the taste of blood and the man's cock on his tongue.
He goes to bed and sweats through the coke in his system. It gives him a vicious headache and sends tremors through his body. It also leaves him with a lingering sense of paranoia, which he normally feels when he does cocaine; but this time it won't go away, and Neil will spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
He tries to sleep anyway, but every time he shuts his eyes, he can hear those little strangled noises he was making when the man first threw him into the bathtub, shoved his thighs apart and thrust into him. They remind him of the whimpering sounds he made the first time Coach ever kissed his eight-year-old self. He doesn't understand the connection.
+
On December 24, Neil goes home and meets Brian Lackey for the first time in ten years.
It comes back to him in a rush. Suddenly, the stories Neil has read on postcards about this awkward, UFO-obsessed boy seem less funny. Neil looks at him, and remembers what Brian looked like after he and Coach had put his clothes back on. Empty. He looked like how Neil feels now.
Brian seems scared of him, anxious for Neil's approval.
Distantly, Neil thinks: You were raped.
And then, unbidden: Like me.
“We have a lot in common, don't we?” he says to Brian.
Nervous, Brian says, “I think so.”
He takes Brian back to the blue house and tells him everything. Breaks Brian apart into pieces and then holds him fast when he shakes and shudders and curls into himself.
That night he experiences something profound, another first for him. Neil McCormick feels empathy. He wishes he could, somehow, make it better; but he can't. Not for Brian or for himself. Nobody ever can.
+++
He doesn't tell anyone about the last john. Not even Wendy. It's the first time he hasn't shared something with her. He isn't sure why he keeps it a secret, except that maybe, if he ignores it, it will all go away.
The man didn't use a condom. Neil is scared to get himself tested, so he just doesn't.
He keeps working at the sandwich place. He stops frequenting the dives where his calling card is scratched into the walls of bathroom stalls. Once or twice he gets propositioned anyway, maybe by old clients who recognize him. And it isn't that Neil wants to say no to them. He's been the same way for so long that changing now is harder than anything he's ever done. He's never wanted to change before -- partly still doesn't.
But as soon as he starts to think about it, he imagines what would happen if he were to say stop and go ignored. It's a stupid hang-up. Before Brighton Beach, Neil never had to say stop. Why should he now?
He tells them no. Fuck off, faggot, he tells them, hackling like a scared dog, and leaves, fast.
Once, having sex for money made him feel powerful and in control. Like a predator. He's romanticized what he does for his entire life. He's lost all of that now. Now, he is bitterly disillusioned.
Wendy is so happy that he's given up prostitution. She worries about him so much less, she says.
But as the weeks drag into months, Neil doesn't feel any better. He feels like a huge part of him died in Brighton Beach. He feels perpetually like he's drowning, or buried alive. He's just not there anymore.
+
He starts doing cocaine.
It brings him back to life, if only temporarily. It gives him a rush and lights fire in his veins. It gives him wild urges. Usually, it's the urge to fuck someone. He channels it into physical violence and starts fights. He gets the shit kicked out of him the first few times, and then starts learning how to play dirty, how to ply his wits and swiftness against a heavier opponent. He starts winning.
Wendy gets on his case again. He almost loses his job. He blows his money on coke. He can't stop--
Until he can, because one day gets a nosebleed, and another the day after that. He knows it's from the coke. He panics and stops and that's the last time Neil ever does drugs, because the nosebleeds remind him of Brian and Brian reminds him of--
Everything.
Without sex, without drugs, Neil's life becomes black. Wendy's the only bright spark in it. He hates New York. He hates living like this, because this isn't living at all.
Brian kills himself the next Christmas, exactly a year after confronting Neil about their shared past.
The news is sobering to Neil.
He can't help but see himself sliding down the same exact hole. Maybe it's like they've both been dying from the exact same gut wound all these years, and Brian was just the first to bleed out from it.
Brian makes him realize that he doesn't want to succumb to the same fate. And unless he does something drastic, Neil is going to die.
Really, there's only one thing left for someone like Neil to do.
He enlists with the US Army.
+
Wendy can't believe it. She's only forced to accept it after he takes the ASVAB and meets the requirements for combat operations.
“Don't get killed, fuckface,” she says, by way of goodbye just before he leaves for basic training, and shoves him. “And you better write.”
“I will,” he promises. She hugs him, and that's the last time he ever sees Wendy in person.
+++
Neil learns something interesting about himself at Basic Combat Training: He's good for something more than just sex. He can take orders.
He settles into the new routine swiftly, though it's a huge psychological adjustment for the first week or so. Neil has never had need of self-discipline in his life. In spite of this, he finds it surprisingly easy to switch off his brain and focus on training.
The army's official policy regarding homosexuality serves him well: Nobody asks, and Neil doesn't tell. It's strange, though, because never in his life has he felt uncomfortable about his sexuality, or needed to be secretive about it. He doesn't pretend to be straight; he just doesn't do anything -- gay. But it's not easy. Virtually every man in Neil's life has played a sexual role. To be surrounded by male recruits now and have sex not be a factor at all is unfamiliar for him.
Not sure how to cope with this, he becomes brooding and introverted, wary of making friends. He doesn't know how to interact with men in a non-sexual way, so he just tries not to when he doesn't have to for the sake of teamwork.
Apart from that, though, he does well. He passes the final physical training test and excels in Field Training Exercises. He's already proficient with an M16A2 assault rifle. He graduates from BCT in nine weeks and moves on to Advanced Individual Training, which takes another sixteen weeks.
He sinks into his new role determinedly. The army doesn't make him happy, but it's better than the suffocating pit of New York. Besides, he has a natural aptitude for things like marksmanship and tactics that surprises and pleases him. Neil isn't imaginative: he's cold hard reality and a crystal-clear focus, and with nothing to distract him from his training, he excels.
There's a hitch when he encounters one of the drill sergeants he's less familiar with. The man is so his type, Neil burns for it. He hasn't felt like that about a man for awhile.
He tries to jerk off in the shower, later, thinking nothing of it -- tries. Almost at once, he has to stop. He feels sick. He can't hold a mental image of that drill sergeant because as soon as he closes his eyes, he's crumpled in the bottom of a bathtub, and the water streaming from the showerhead becomes ghostly freezing and unpleasant. Slut.
Neil grips himself tight. Digs his thumbnail viciously into the slit of his cock. Does whatever he can think of to make it hurt, until the throbbing has left him and he's not hard anymore.
It's a ritual he'll go over for the next couple of years, any time he gets aroused or wakes up with a hard-on. He leaves marks and bruises on himself, till he's almost managed to condition himself to believe that arousal inevitably leads to pain, and he's long stopped looking at the men around him in that way.
In less than a year since training started, Neil is sent overseas, and he doesn't look back.
+
Neil is young-looking enough to be disarming, and ruthless enough to take the military by storm. He takes his first life when he's twenty-one, and doesn't even blink. He's a good soldier because he doesn't allow himself to feel: he listens, and learns. The only thing that prevents anyone from seeing him rising through the ranks is the way he makes his fellow soldiers and officers feel when he's around them. It's like they can tell he's not all there. Part of Neil is still in mourning for himself.
It's fate, perhaps, then; that when the lieutenant in charge of Neil's platoon is asked to recommend one of his best, he picks Neil; Neil who is a good soldier but ultimately won't be missed because his strange, cold nature makes people uncomfortable.
Neil's promptly taken to another base and led into a big tent, divided into small spaces by thin screens. He's told to take a seat on what looks like a cushioned deck chair, something you'd find on someone's patio someplace sunny. It makes him think of a psychiatrist's couch. He sits, wary. He can't see through the screens but he can hear: the same soft hiss, wheeze all around him, like a mechanical set of lungs at work. Somewhere at the other end of the tent a man screams and starts laughing hysterically.
“Nervous?” a man asks, bustling in. He doesn't look much like army personnel: he's wearing glasses and there's stubble on his face, a file gripped in one hand and a shiny suitcase in the other. Neil's response is automatic anyway.
“No, sir.”
“It's all been explained to you that this is an experimental procedure and you've given your consent? You understand the risks involved?”
“Yes,” says Neil.
“Alright.” The man with the glasses takes a seat in a chair at his side and opens up the suitcase. “Let's get started, then.”
There's a machine inside the suitcase. Neil's never seen it before. He watches, his wariness growing, as the man swabs his wrist with alcohol and pulls an IV line out of the suitcase. The needle at the end goes into Neil's wrist. The man guides a second line into his own arm.
“Just relax, that's it,” he says carelessly, and presses the button in the middle of the suitcase. The machine gives a soft hiss, and numbness immediately settles over Neil's entire body.
Then he's blinking his eyes open, feeling uncommonly hazy. The man with the glasses is removing both needles and packing the machine in the suitcase away.
“Congratulations,” he says, flipping open the file folder in his lap, and starts scribbling something rapidly. “You passed.”
“But--” Neil's confused. “I don't even know what I just did.”
“It doesn't matter.” The man scrawls something with flourish, flips the folder shut and looks at him for the first time, eyebrows raised. “You passed.”
Neil doesn't even know what the criteria is that he apparently fits. He doesn't push the issue. The man hands him a sealed letter and tells him to give it to his CO, and Neil leaves.
One week later, he's on a plane back to the States.
+
It's called Project Somnacin. About two dozen other men are selected alongside Neil to start this new form of training. They look about as bewildered as Neil feels when they arrive at the new base, which is a little reassuring.
All is soon explained to them.
Neil doesn't understand what makes him a good candidate for this. Paranoia tells him it's because he has no connections or attachments, just a mother he never writes to, and he's certain that the secretive nature of Project Somnacin means that failure will equal a swift, hushed-up execution. He can't help but think it, especially since he is by far the youngest one there.
What else about him is ideal for this?
They don't start dreaming right away. Instead, they do regular physical training interspersed with lessons, where they sit around a classroom like children and learn the theoreticals of dreamsharing. Then they learn the PASIV. They need to know the device inside and out before they get to use it. After several weeks, Neil knows the PASIV intimately, every part from the synchronization monitoring chip to the IV output coupling. They learn how to run diagnostics on each device, how to clean and maintain it, how to double-check the conversion of Somnacin flow rate to practical time using the LED display.
When they can do all of this in their sleep, they're ready to start dreaming.
The first runs are extremely simple, almost childishly simple. They're told to find a certain object in the dream before going under, and see if their unconscious mind can remember to look for it. Or they have to go under, learn a certain phrase from an instructor, and see if they can repeat it when they wake up. Or they have to draw a sketch of their dreamscape upon waking.
The former Neil is decent at doing; the latter two he's terrible at. His mind can make the conversion from reality to dreamspace well enough after a short while, but once he's awake, he can only ever remember shades of things from the dream at best. It's extremely frustrating, especially when the others start to make significant progress.
“It's normal not to remember,” the instructor tells him one day, asking Neil what clothes he'd been wearing in the dream and being met with a blank stare in response. “Some people just have more trouble than others remembering their dreams after they wake up. Look, McCormick,” he sighs in response to Neil's expression, “you're on form when you're actually in the dream. In fact, you're better than half the people in this place. Just relax and don't stress about it.”
Neil stresses. He doesn't like sharing his dreams when he can't remember what goes on in them. He feels like every person he shares his mind with can automatically see all the things he's done, and is just keeping the information to themselves, waiting to use it against him at a later date. But he cannot fail at this. Failure means death or discharge from the army, and what would he do then? Go back to prostituting himself, fucking himself up on drugs, no doubt.
So he tries harder. He improves in what must be the smallest degrees physically possible.
The missions get gradually more challenging, and Neil is allowed to advance because he doesn't have trouble with the dreaming itself. He just doesn't remember that, apparently, he's pretty good at building a dreamscape. He doesn't remember that when they're standing on the top of a hundred-story skyscraper and must jump off it to stimulate a kick, where two men become nearly hysterical, Neil is the only one to step calmly onto the ledge, spread his arms and free-fall without a word of protest.
After two months, they graduate to dreaming on their own.
It's an adjustment, after so much time following orders: now they're encouraged to experiment, play around, learn the boundaries of their dreams. They're given activities or tasks to perform, but are usually allowed to complete them in any fashion they choose.
And Neil hates sharing his dreams, but he hates dreaming alone even more.
He doesn't know what happens when he goes under by himself, but every time, he wakes up feeling horribly nauseous. He goes under and then he's stirring, awake, and someone nearby snickers and another snaps, “Pull it together, McCormick,” because there are tears on his cheeks that he hastily wipes away. Soon enough, when it keeps happening, the others are willing to accept it as a weird side effect of the Somnacin, but Neil doesn't think it is.
He hates dreaming. He's pretty sure the others do, too, they just don't ever say anything about it, each pretending that this dreamsharing thing comes easy to them. Neil hates it so much. Hates waking up crying, hates the nausea and the headaches. He hates that he's the only one still struggling to remember his dreams. His instructors are less sympathetic now and Neil's stress levels respond accordingly.
“Goddamnit, McCormick!” One of the instructors, an older, grizzled man, tears the IV line out of his arm and glares. “The fuck's wrong with your projections? It's fucking manic in there.”
“Sorry.” It's the only thing Neil can think of to say.
“Can't remember your own dreams, now your projections are attacking anyone who tries to share them,” the man growls, throwing the IV down and getting up. “I'll be surprised if you get a career out of this, really surprised.”
More than anything, Neil hates feeling this loss of control. It makes him miss the days when he could make a man do anything he wanted just by taking off his clothes. He misses being a soldier. He's reaching the end of his tether, about to hit rock bottom.
In the end, rock bottom hits him.
+
The man's a psychologist, but they don't call him that, even though he's there to perform psych evaluations on them all. Apparently, he is what's called an extractor.
Neil panics. He doesn't want anyone extracting anything from his mind. His secrets are too terrible. They tell Neil and the others that he isn't there to dig through their secrets, only to check that everything is as it should be so that no surprises will affect their work in the dreamscape, no more invasive than a lie-detector test, but Neil doesn't believe them.
The extractor, Forbes, is impersonal and brisk.
“Let's get started,” he says, and Neil forces himself to put an IV in his arm.
He wakes seconds later. Forbes is fiddling with Neil's line impatiently, making sure the Somnacin is flowing without obstruction.
“Let's try that again,” he says. “And this time, let's try actually getting into the dream. Relax your mind.”
Neil tries to relax. He lies back and Forbes pushes the trigger again.
Then Neil's awake again, inexplicable guilt making his stomach turn.
Forbes slams the PD shut. The motion is violent.
“You're a faggot, McCormick.”
Neil stares straight ahead at the wall. He breathes normally. He knew this would happen eventually.
“You know what'll happen if I put that in my report?” Forbes says. “They'll discharge you. You'll be kicked off of Project Somnacin.”
And executed, Neil thinks distantly. He's going to be terminated. Because he's a fag.
Forbes paces the empty room up and down, angry.
“What do you think I should do, McCormick?” he demands finally. “Huh?”
Neil feels nothing. He's numb.
This is why, when Forbes stops in front of him, and he understands what he's supposed to do, he slides to the floor on his knees without protest.
Forbes unzips his pants and grips his cock in one hand.
“Suck it.”
Neil does.
His one vague thought is that this isn't like how he remembers. There's nothing remotely enjoyable or attractive about it. Forbes' cock tastes like sweat and salt, unpleasant. The weight on Neil's tongue, the pressure against his throat makes him want to gag.
He doesn't, though. He works his tongue expertly, breathes steadily through his nose and takes him down again, and again, in a quick rhythm. Forbes' hand rests on the back of his head and starts forcing him down further, harder, and still Neil doesn't gag. He relaxes his throat and lets the man fuck his mouth. It's been a few years, but his body remembers this too well.
In the moment before release, Forbes pulls Neil off his cock and pumps himself quickly and he's coming, coming on Neil's face. Neil flinches and shuts his eyes, waiting for this to be over.
For a minute all he can hear is Forbes' harsh breathing. He bows his head and feels some of the wetness drip off.
Finally, Forbes mutters something that sounds like fucking faggot and moves away, zipping up his pants and packing up the PASIV. He leaves the room.
Neil stays there, on the floor. Numbly, he wipes his face off with his sleeve.
He doesn't cry. He doesn't throw up. He doesn't do anything, really.
Another part of him dies without a sound.
Neil is done.
+
This is when a miracle happens.
+++
The last thing he remembers is Forbes. He doesn't remember getting here, which is how he knows it's a dream. The room is unfamiliar, sunlit and cosy. He's lying in a bed.
Sitting next to him: an angel.
She smiles at him.
“Hello, Neil.”
She's beautiful. Neil thinks for sure if he weren't queer he would be in love with her.
“They tell me you don't talk very much,” she says. Her accent is strong and French. “That's okay. You don't need to talk right now. My name is Mal.”
He licks his lips and manages, weakly: “Like Molly?”
Her smiles widens. “Like Mallorie,” she says, and her accent curls around the word prettily. Neil knows he can't say that without his own accent mangling it, so he doesn't try.
“I'm dreaming,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Are you real?”
“Yes,” she says. “I'm a specialist in dreaming. I've been brought here to help you. Would you like to see where you are right now?”
Neil nods.
The room changes seamlessly, starting with the bedcovers, which turn white and crisp. The walls slowly fall through the floor and are replaced by hanging curtains which shield them on three sides. The sunlight becomes fluorescent light shining dully from the ceiling. The carpet turns to institutional grey tile. The frame of Neil's bed becomes metal.
He recognizes the infirmary. He takes it in dazedly. The transformation was quick and smooth.
He tries to move his hand, and it catches with a sharp click.
“Why am I handcuffed to the bed?” he asks, panic rising in his chest.
Mal's smile fades.
“Because you tried to hurt yourself, Neil,” she says softly, and, taking his hand, she turns it so that his palm is facing up. There's a row of bristling sutures from his wrist almost up to his elbow.
Neil immediately feels dizzy. He can see the same row of sutures on his other arm. His breathing becomes faster.
Mal smooths a hand over his forehead and the infirmary falls away. The walls of the other room rise back up. The sunlight returns. There's a hush, no buzz of distant background noise. The bed is soft and warm again.
Instantly, Neil is calmed.
“I didn't mean to,” he says. “Hurt myself. I didn't mean to.”
“That doesn't matter,” says Mal. “I'm here to help you now.”
He looks up at the ceiling and breathes. Wonders, vaguely, if he really is dead.
“I'm told you have difficulty remembering your dreams,” says Mal. “There are chemists who experiment with different drugs using Somnacin as a template. I've given you something I think will help your memory when you wake up.”
He nods.
“In a few moments, we'll wake. I want you to tell me what my name is. See if you can remember.”
“Okay,” he says.
When he wakes up, he studies the woman sitting next to his bed.
“Mal,” he manages to say, after a moment. “Not like Molly.”
She smiles. Beautiful.
“Hello, Neil,” she says gently.
+
Mal comes to visit Neil twice a week. For the first time, Neil stops feeling a sick knot of dread in his stomach every time he hooks himself up to the PASIV. Amazingly, he starts to look forward to dreaming.
“My projections,” he warns Mal, the second time they meet. “They're kinda crazy sometimes. They don't like other people in my brain.”
She laughs lightly, a musical, tinkling sound.
“These are my projections, Neil. We don't need to worry about yours.”
She explains to him something the military failed to illuminate: the distinctive roles of the subject and the dreamer. Now Neil understands that projections aren't an unpredictable factor; left alone, they are peaceful, right now walking past them and murmuring things in fluent French.
“I am the subject; I fill this dream with my subconscious,” she says. They're in a verdant green park. A weeping willow overhangs a pond where swans paddle back and forth leisurely. “You are my guest here.”
“Are you in the military?” Neil blurts out, wondering just what makes her a specialist. Mal shakes her head.
“My father was involved with the creation of the dreamshare technology. He taught me to dream. I've been doing this for a long time.” She pauses. “This is one of the few ways for me to make money with my abilities right now. I don't agree with using dreaming for military applications. My father taught me that dreaming should always be for creation's sake.”
“Then why help the military?” Neil asks.
“I'm not helping the military, Neil,” she says, smiling affectionately. “I'm helping you.”
+
Mal trains him to remember his dreams while he recovers. She does better than any of his instructors thus far. Before long he can sketch pictures of the dreamscapes she shows him with precision, albeit awkwardly, because of his wrists.
They encounter a snag when a doctor decides that Neil's suicide attempt was a result of Somnacin side effects. It's Mal who saves him. She assesses him herself and has his dosage and compound changed officially. Neil suspects there's a lot of paperwork and a lot of arguing behind closed doors, but in the end he's deemed fit to return to active dreaming -- he suspects partly because it would be too much of a hassle to let him go; but mostly because of Mal.
He learns that she's there to teach them about architecture, building in the dreamscape, but Neil is the only one who receives private tutelage. She teaches him to build, but other things, too, and before long he feels compelled to share with her.
“Sometimes when I wake up from dreams, I'm crying,” he says. “Is that normal?”
“No, it's not normal,” she says, gentle and honest as always. Her touch on his forehead is feather-light and her gaze is searching. She nods. “Something is hurting you inside here. I know.”
“Will I get better?” he asks.
“Yes, if you want to,” she says, and because she's honest, Neil believes her.
He would be content to ever follow her in her own dreamscape, but she soon asks if he thinks he's ready to bare his own mind to her.
“I don't want you prying,” he says, guarded. “I've got secrets I don't share with anybody. I don't want you looking at those. Ever.”
“I promise you,” says Mal, “I will never look at anything in your mind that you don't want me to see.”
And she doesn't.
They struggle to navigate his dreamscape together. It's full of locked doors, and his projections glare at Mal like they know what she is. A lot of it looks like a more grim version of New York: oily puddles on the ground, tall, dark buildings, rusting fire escapes. The streets are narrow and twisting. It's ugly compared to her dreams. Neil dislikes it.
Mal's bright smile, when they reach the rooftop of a high office building and she turns to him, takes him entirely by surprise.
“You've built a maze,” she says, amazement in her voice.
“I did?”
“Yes. Look.” She takes his hand and points. “Look at the streets. It's all circular, like a labyrinth. The buildings form walls. You've turned your dreamscape into a maze.”
“Why?” says Neil, not understanding. “How'd I do that?”
“You did it to protect your mind, so that nobody else can navigate it.”
“Sorry,” he says, but she is shaking her head.
“Non, non, non. Neil,” she says, touching his cheek with her hand. “You are a brilliant, brilliant boy. Did you know that?”
He shakes his head wordlessly. If Mal really knew his secrets, she wouldn't think so.
“Yes,” she says, nodding firmly, like she's read his mind. Her thumb brushes his cheekbone reassuringly. She sounds so sure when she says, “I think you were born to do this.”
+
Neil rejoins regular training. He wears long sleeves, always.
Now that they're all ready, they move on to the next, and final, stage of the dreamshare project: Combat training.
They get to use weapons they've never even seen in reality. They learn a more brutal form of hand-to-hand combat than they would ever be allowed to practise in the real world. They learn to kill men with their bare hands by practising on each other. They form teams and engage in firefights, and a couple men end up in the infirmary to grapple with psychological trauma afterward.
Neil feels like a kid in an amusement park. Finally, dreaming has a real purpose.
Mal is at the base once a week. She continues to tutor him privately. He learns more with her in a short time than the army was able to teach him after all these weeks.
“Is this Paris?” he asks, when they visit her dreams again.
“This is an impression of Paris,” she says. “You should never build exactly from memory. You'll lose track of dreams and reality that way.”
He absorbs all of this. He's a keen, intent student. Mal sometimes uses their time together just to force him to take a break. It makes Neil restless when she makes him sit, asks him questions. She finds more success when she talks to him about herself.
“You're married?” he asks one day, when they're sitting in a café in what she tells him is a drizzly replica of London. He gestures to her wedding ring. She smiles and nods, twisting it absently around her finger.
“Yes. My husband was a student of my father's. He's an architect.”
“Is he good to you?”
Mal laughs gently at his mistrust. “Yes. He's very good to me.” There's so much love, so much happiness in her eyes. “I am very lucky to have him.”
“Do you have kids?” Neil asks, thinking that she must surely be a mother, to be this nurturing, to have this much love to share; but she shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
“But you will?”
She nods, looking secretive and excited. “We're going to start trying, soon. When we have the money for a house.”
She tells him she wants a boy and a girl. One of each. She likes French names, Madeleine or Phillipa or Marie, for a girl; for a boy, she prefers names such as James, Peter or Arthur. These names are, she confesses, from stories that are close to her heart.
“My father used to read me English stories when I was a little girl,” she says wistfully, in response to his expression at the latter. “I always found something romantic in King Arthur -- virtuous men triumphing over cruelty.”
“Well, don't name your kid Neil,” he says.
“You don't like your name?”
He shakes his head. He hates being Neil McCormick, since he began associating his name with the types of things Neil McCormick would do. He wants to be somebody else.
He meets Mal's husband, one time. He's not sure what the man is doing on the base, maybe something to do with the Project; but he knows at once that it's Mal's husband, even before she introduces them, because of the way he looks at her. The man is handsome, with rich brown eyes. He shakes Neil's hand; his hand is much bigger. Neil retreats because the couple seem distracted. Distracted by each other. Her smile is radiant. They are so in love.
Watching them, he experiences a powerful jealousy, like he's never known. It almost bowls him off his feet. Not because he's jealous of Mal's husband -- he is jealous of them both. He wants what they have. Neil would die for a taste of that. He watches them together until they leave.
+
Neil is under no illusions: he was brought here to be a guinea pig. Some of the other men have failed at some point over the training, unable to handle it, and vanished overnight. Regardless of this, Neil takes dreaming and begins to use it. He wields it like it's a weapon. He is now the best dreamer the army has got.
In Mal's dreams they go to exotic cities. Her mind unconsciously outfits him in crisp, clean clothing, suit jackets and pinstripe shirts, and he surprises himself by liking how it looks. He loves her accent, and feels self-conscious about his own. He tries to make his vowels less broad, forces his speech into less of a drawl when he's with her.
But when he's training, Neil is as single-minded and ruthless as a wolfhound. He detaches perfectly. He has a keen knack for determining the goal and setting out to achieve it regardless of what's in his way. He's become hyper-observant. Mal has taught him to take in all details, and it serves him in good stead when he's training. He notices everything. He improvises. He's like a machine in the dreamscape. He no longer needs Mal's special compound: now that he's trained his mind to remember every crisp detail upon waking, regular Somnacin works fine.
New recruits arrive, and Neil starts schooling them in dream-combat.
“I wonder,” says Mal, when he meets her one afternoon, “what you are using my lessons to do.”
“I'm just doing what you taught me,” he says.
“Who taught you to close your arm around a man's neck until he stops breathing? Not me.”
Neil's a little stung, despite himself. “This is the only thing I'm good at, Mal. It's the only thing I can do. Nobody's getting hurt. That's why we're using the PASIV -- so no one gets hurt.”
She touches his face. Her stare is intense. Then her hand slips down his arm, to his wrist, which she turns over gently. Her thumb is resting atop a still-fading scar, covered from sight by his sleeve.
“You, Neil,” she says softly. “You are getting hurt.”
He pulls his arm away and looks down at the floor. “I'm good at this, Mal.”
“You build beautifully. You can create mazes and paradoxes like nobody else here can. Your talents are wasted on violence. And something is still paining you inside. Something is holding you back, isn't it?”
Neil's throat tightens. He has to swallow with an effort.
“Can I show you something I've never shown anyone before?”
“Of course.”
He sets up the PASIV, himself designated to be the dreamer. He and Mal go under.
They're standing in a bathroom.
Mal looks at it, takes each detail in, and looks at him expectantly.
“I ...” Neil trails off. It's hard to detach when he's standing right here, in his own mind, confronting this. He rallies himself and leaves the bathroom, into the attached bedroom. He feels like a ghost here.
He tries to detach, anyway.
“I let a man bring me here. He's gonna pay me to have sex with him. At least -- he says he is, in the car.” He stares fixedly at the door, refusing to turn around and see the look on Mal's face. “So I go with him, because ... because I kind of need the money, but mostly 'cause I just want to.
“So we get in here and ...” He turns and walks measuredly, retracing his path. “He makes me snort some coke. And I swear to God, it's like I got the worst high and I never came down from it again, ever. Even now. So -- so I take my clothes off and he does too, and he gets me on the bed and he tells me to suck his dick, and I do, but he's going kind of fast and I'm getting this bad feeling and I try to stop -- he hits me -- then he spits on me. He calls me a slut.” The word feels like barbed wire catching in his throat. He still can't look at Mal.
“He gets on the bed with me and I start to panic. Tell him to wait. There's some things I don't do. I tell him I have to go to the bathroom, and I go in here ...”
He turns. She's still standing in the doorway of the bathroom. There is infinite concern in her face.
“Should I stop?” he asks, nervous. This is not the kind of thing people share with each other, he knows. He doesn't want to screw this up with Mal. But she shakes her head.
“Go ahead.”
He enters the bathroom and shuts the door.
“Okay,” he says, dragging in another lungful of air. “So I lock it.” He does. “And then I don't really know what to do. I want to leave but I can't. Then I hear this noise and -- he's opening the door with a knife--”
The lock pops free of its own accord and the door swings violently open. Mal moves away, but no one is there; it's just a phantom memory.
“He hits me. Really hard. I lose my balance and fall in the bathtub. I try to find something to grab onto, but there's only the tap--”
The water creaks on and starts pattering onto the floor of the bathtub. Neil's eyes are watering, staring at it.
“Then he fucks me,” he says. “I don't have time to do anything, he's just -- on me -- and I can't fight back. I just -- lie there and let him. Every time he fucks into me he calls me a slut. And he starts hitting me with something and I'm bleeding--”
The water swirls red around the drain. He has to force his lungs to work.
“--and it hurts so much, it really hurts, and all I can think is -- Oh my God, I'm gonna die here. And I don't want to. I want to see my mom again.”
His voice breaks. Mal holds his hand, shushes him when he starts to breathe hard and fast and shakily, kisses him on the forehead. She takes control of the dream.
He sinks to the floor when he finds himself in that bedroom she first met him in. Mal follows him down to the carpet. She doesn't say anything. She cradles his head in her lap, holds him the same way he held Brian years before, and she sings him a lullaby in French, until the tremors leave his body and he finally stops shaking and just lies there in her arms for awhile; just breathing.
+
The last time Mal visits the base is two weeks before the death of Neil McCormick.
She's only visited twice in as many months. They don't need her as much. Neil doesn't let himself miss her. He's busy. He's got dreaming. He has new trainees to manage, men ten years his senior who look like fools when they try to take him down a notch in the dreamspace.
He's only been at the base for less than a year, but it feels like much longer due to the difference between real time and dream time. In the dream, he can cover almost two weeks in twenty-four hours. So it's been a month, but it feels like longer when he meets with Mal.
He reaches for the PASIV, automatic, but a hand on his arm stops him. Mal's smiling, as usual, beautiful as always, but there is a slightly sad quality to her expression today.
“I can't dream with you anymore,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks, but he already knows.
“Dom and I have started trying to have a baby.”
“Oh.” Neil withdraws his hand. “Congratulations.”
She hugs him. Neil finds it in himself to hug her back, softening slightly.
“You have learned so much,” she says, searching his eyes. “Do good things with this, Neil. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“If you ever leave the military, you come and find me. It doesn't matter when.”
“Okay.”
“And Neil,” she says, taking both his hands. She looks worried. “Don't let dreaming change you. Remember what's real.”
“I will,” he says.
She kisses his forehead, and leaves. It's raining outside. Neil doesn't watch her go.
+
He's not under any illusions. He's still a guinea pig.
He knows the risks when he agrees to test new compounds for the chemist they've hired.
The scars on his arms have faded, but Neil is still on a set course to self-destruction.
Limbo swallows him whole.
+
He goes back to the summer when he was eight years old. Little League. Coach. Everything else is forgotten, but only temporarily.
It snarls like an animal in the back of his mind, a swelling chorus of white noise, until his own budding sexuality makes him snap.
Neil tears down his subconscious. He lashes out. He destroys. If he can't kill his body, he will start with his mind.
Everything he hates about himself, he shutters away in the heart of limbo. He abandons every person who knows something intimate about him. It's not planned or calculated. He attacks all of it, raging, hurting, until only bare bones are left, not hardly enough. He strips and flays his mind to the very core until he kills Neil McCormick from Kansas.
Then he's alone with the silence.
When he's woken, he's mute for two weeks. He barely eats. His brain is still white noise.
His mind knits itself back together like a broken ribcage, filling in blanks for him, reaching for reasons behind the way he is. The one thing that sticks with him more strongly than anything is all his military training. He has a quiet certainty about the two things he knows he's good at: killing, and dreaming.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to remain with the military, taking orders, so he just leaves. He's off the base before they even know he's missing.
+++
He takes a year or so to wander, establish himself, make some money -- sometimes by legitimate means, sometimes by hustling pool. He stays alert, keeps his eyes and ears open. One day he hears of a professor in Paris, involved in dreamsharing.
He stakes everything he's worth on this because it seems suddenly, immensely important. He's confident. He spends most of his money on a one-way flight to Paris and a nice suit, and the last of it to have the suit tailored. First impressions are everything. He tames his messy strands of hair with pomade.
He finds the professor easily enough. He lounges quietly in the back of the classroom and watches the old man as he converses in French with a dark-haired young woman. She's beautiful. Like an angel.
She kisses the professor on the cheek before he disappears into a back office. She starts walking up the steps past the rows of seats, and stops dead when she sees him sitting there. Like she's seen a ghost.
He raises an eyebrow.
“I'm looking for a job,” he says quietly. “My name's Arthur. I'm in dreaming.”
She just stares for a long moment. Slowly, she ascends the steps until she's at his side. He stands up.
“Hello, Arthur.” Her accent is strong, and French. She studies him intently. “I think I may be able to find something for you.”
She extends a hand. Arthur shakes it. She smiles.
next part
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Words: ~8000
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Non-con, triggers, references to suicide/self-harm, general trauma.
Summary: The death of Neil McCormick was gradual, not sudden, and not permanent by any means. In the end, Arthur goes much more quickly.
Author's Note: This is a Mysterious Skin crossover, and I GUESS it's not necessary to have seen the movie, but this part is full of SPOILERS. And I think you will soon understand why this part took me three times longer than the others to crank out. Apart from the length. Fun fact, this part could also kind of work as a stand-alone if you wanted it to.
part one, part two, part three, part four, part six, part seven, part eight.
+++
“I keep a log of all my dreams. Whatever bits and pieces I can recall, at least. I feel like it's slowly helping me remember.”
“That's a really good idea. Your subconscious is where all your memories are buried. For you and me and people like us, almost every single thing we do stems from our being abducted.”
--Mysterious Skin
Neil remembers the exact date, December 23, down to the exact hour, when he first knew he would never turn another trick.
His first encounter with an HIV-positive john had shaken him, maybe even deterred him, but it was a speedbump in the end. He got a real job because Wendy wanted him to and because he thought maybe he should, but it was like trying to quit a habit, and he was never that motivated in the first place. It was more of a game, trying to see how long he could last before he got bored or restless and went back to fucking men for money.
He wasn't bored or restless when he was picked up by his last john and taken to Brighton Beach. The truth was, Neil was a little attracted to him.
This is the first night of the rest of his life.
+
Almost right away, he knows it's going wrong.
He escapes to the bathroom for a reprieve. He doesn't know what to do. He's in over his head. It's like hurtling down a chute with only one way out and no way of climbing back up or stopping. He's already committed.
He still doesn't expect it to go the way it does.
+
At first, Neil can hear breathy, strangled, whimpering sounds; until he realizes they're coming from him, and then he makes no sound at all.
+
His head hurts from being thrown into the bathtub; upon falling in, he'd scrabbled for a hold, trying to find purchase, and his fingers slipped on the tap, causing cold water to pelt down on him.
The man is fucking him dry and it hurts like fury. It hurts worse than anything.
The man is fucking him dry and calling him slut in time with his thrusts, and it hurts so much.
Neil doesn't fight. Doesn't say a word. The man's got a knife and he doesn't even use it. When he smashes a heavy shampoo bottle over Neil's head again and again, it's not because he needs to, only because he wants to. Neil tastes his own blood and he can see it swirling down the drain; some part of him leaves with it.
Take that cock all the way up there.
Take it, slut.
He does.
He doesn't make a sound.
This is what Neil McCormick is.
+
Neil liked rough sex, which was a good thing, considering his trade. He'd never thought about the distinction between sex and rape before. He'd never thought he wouldn't want it before. Sex is exhilarating, mindless.
Rape feels like being scared for his life. Rape feels like vomit in his throat. He's never felt this way about sex.
Now he knows.
At the end of the night, the man doesn't even pay him. He fucks Neil like he's an empty receptacle and then throws him outside like so much garbage, because Neil can't stand yet.
+
Once he's in the apartment, safe, he wants to go home. Childlike, he wants his mom. He strips: his body is covered with bruises, everywhere. Everything hurts.
He finds the shirt he was wearing the day he left Hutchinson. He curls up and holds it to his face, like it can take him back there if he just wants it badly enough.
For the first time in his entire life, Neil breaks down sobbing, for a long time.
Afterward, he vomits in the toilet. Bile scalds away the taste of blood and the man's cock on his tongue.
He goes to bed and sweats through the coke in his system. It gives him a vicious headache and sends tremors through his body. It also leaves him with a lingering sense of paranoia, which he normally feels when he does cocaine; but this time it won't go away, and Neil will spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
He tries to sleep anyway, but every time he shuts his eyes, he can hear those little strangled noises he was making when the man first threw him into the bathtub, shoved his thighs apart and thrust into him. They remind him of the whimpering sounds he made the first time Coach ever kissed his eight-year-old self. He doesn't understand the connection.
+
On December 24, Neil goes home and meets Brian Lackey for the first time in ten years.
It comes back to him in a rush. Suddenly, the stories Neil has read on postcards about this awkward, UFO-obsessed boy seem less funny. Neil looks at him, and remembers what Brian looked like after he and Coach had put his clothes back on. Empty. He looked like how Neil feels now.
Brian seems scared of him, anxious for Neil's approval.
Distantly, Neil thinks: You were raped.
And then, unbidden: Like me.
“We have a lot in common, don't we?” he says to Brian.
Nervous, Brian says, “I think so.”
He takes Brian back to the blue house and tells him everything. Breaks Brian apart into pieces and then holds him fast when he shakes and shudders and curls into himself.
That night he experiences something profound, another first for him. Neil McCormick feels empathy. He wishes he could, somehow, make it better; but he can't. Not for Brian or for himself. Nobody ever can.
+++
He doesn't tell anyone about the last john. Not even Wendy. It's the first time he hasn't shared something with her. He isn't sure why he keeps it a secret, except that maybe, if he ignores it, it will all go away.
The man didn't use a condom. Neil is scared to get himself tested, so he just doesn't.
He keeps working at the sandwich place. He stops frequenting the dives where his calling card is scratched into the walls of bathroom stalls. Once or twice he gets propositioned anyway, maybe by old clients who recognize him. And it isn't that Neil wants to say no to them. He's been the same way for so long that changing now is harder than anything he's ever done. He's never wanted to change before -- partly still doesn't.
But as soon as he starts to think about it, he imagines what would happen if he were to say stop and go ignored. It's a stupid hang-up. Before Brighton Beach, Neil never had to say stop. Why should he now?
He tells them no. Fuck off, faggot, he tells them, hackling like a scared dog, and leaves, fast.
Once, having sex for money made him feel powerful and in control. Like a predator. He's romanticized what he does for his entire life. He's lost all of that now. Now, he is bitterly disillusioned.
Wendy is so happy that he's given up prostitution. She worries about him so much less, she says.
But as the weeks drag into months, Neil doesn't feel any better. He feels like a huge part of him died in Brighton Beach. He feels perpetually like he's drowning, or buried alive. He's just not there anymore.
+
He starts doing cocaine.
It brings him back to life, if only temporarily. It gives him a rush and lights fire in his veins. It gives him wild urges. Usually, it's the urge to fuck someone. He channels it into physical violence and starts fights. He gets the shit kicked out of him the first few times, and then starts learning how to play dirty, how to ply his wits and swiftness against a heavier opponent. He starts winning.
Wendy gets on his case again. He almost loses his job. He blows his money on coke. He can't stop--
Until he can, because one day gets a nosebleed, and another the day after that. He knows it's from the coke. He panics and stops and that's the last time Neil ever does drugs, because the nosebleeds remind him of Brian and Brian reminds him of--
Everything.
Without sex, without drugs, Neil's life becomes black. Wendy's the only bright spark in it. He hates New York. He hates living like this, because this isn't living at all.
Brian kills himself the next Christmas, exactly a year after confronting Neil about their shared past.
The news is sobering to Neil.
He can't help but see himself sliding down the same exact hole. Maybe it's like they've both been dying from the exact same gut wound all these years, and Brian was just the first to bleed out from it.
Brian makes him realize that he doesn't want to succumb to the same fate. And unless he does something drastic, Neil is going to die.
Really, there's only one thing left for someone like Neil to do.
He enlists with the US Army.
+
Wendy can't believe it. She's only forced to accept it after he takes the ASVAB and meets the requirements for combat operations.
“Don't get killed, fuckface,” she says, by way of goodbye just before he leaves for basic training, and shoves him. “And you better write.”
“I will,” he promises. She hugs him, and that's the last time he ever sees Wendy in person.
+++
Neil learns something interesting about himself at Basic Combat Training: He's good for something more than just sex. He can take orders.
He settles into the new routine swiftly, though it's a huge psychological adjustment for the first week or so. Neil has never had need of self-discipline in his life. In spite of this, he finds it surprisingly easy to switch off his brain and focus on training.
The army's official policy regarding homosexuality serves him well: Nobody asks, and Neil doesn't tell. It's strange, though, because never in his life has he felt uncomfortable about his sexuality, or needed to be secretive about it. He doesn't pretend to be straight; he just doesn't do anything -- gay. But it's not easy. Virtually every man in Neil's life has played a sexual role. To be surrounded by male recruits now and have sex not be a factor at all is unfamiliar for him.
Not sure how to cope with this, he becomes brooding and introverted, wary of making friends. He doesn't know how to interact with men in a non-sexual way, so he just tries not to when he doesn't have to for the sake of teamwork.
Apart from that, though, he does well. He passes the final physical training test and excels in Field Training Exercises. He's already proficient with an M16A2 assault rifle. He graduates from BCT in nine weeks and moves on to Advanced Individual Training, which takes another sixteen weeks.
He sinks into his new role determinedly. The army doesn't make him happy, but it's better than the suffocating pit of New York. Besides, he has a natural aptitude for things like marksmanship and tactics that surprises and pleases him. Neil isn't imaginative: he's cold hard reality and a crystal-clear focus, and with nothing to distract him from his training, he excels.
There's a hitch when he encounters one of the drill sergeants he's less familiar with. The man is so his type, Neil burns for it. He hasn't felt like that about a man for awhile.
He tries to jerk off in the shower, later, thinking nothing of it -- tries. Almost at once, he has to stop. He feels sick. He can't hold a mental image of that drill sergeant because as soon as he closes his eyes, he's crumpled in the bottom of a bathtub, and the water streaming from the showerhead becomes ghostly freezing and unpleasant. Slut.
Neil grips himself tight. Digs his thumbnail viciously into the slit of his cock. Does whatever he can think of to make it hurt, until the throbbing has left him and he's not hard anymore.
It's a ritual he'll go over for the next couple of years, any time he gets aroused or wakes up with a hard-on. He leaves marks and bruises on himself, till he's almost managed to condition himself to believe that arousal inevitably leads to pain, and he's long stopped looking at the men around him in that way.
In less than a year since training started, Neil is sent overseas, and he doesn't look back.
+
Neil is young-looking enough to be disarming, and ruthless enough to take the military by storm. He takes his first life when he's twenty-one, and doesn't even blink. He's a good soldier because he doesn't allow himself to feel: he listens, and learns. The only thing that prevents anyone from seeing him rising through the ranks is the way he makes his fellow soldiers and officers feel when he's around them. It's like they can tell he's not all there. Part of Neil is still in mourning for himself.
It's fate, perhaps, then; that when the lieutenant in charge of Neil's platoon is asked to recommend one of his best, he picks Neil; Neil who is a good soldier but ultimately won't be missed because his strange, cold nature makes people uncomfortable.
Neil's promptly taken to another base and led into a big tent, divided into small spaces by thin screens. He's told to take a seat on what looks like a cushioned deck chair, something you'd find on someone's patio someplace sunny. It makes him think of a psychiatrist's couch. He sits, wary. He can't see through the screens but he can hear: the same soft hiss, wheeze all around him, like a mechanical set of lungs at work. Somewhere at the other end of the tent a man screams and starts laughing hysterically.
“Nervous?” a man asks, bustling in. He doesn't look much like army personnel: he's wearing glasses and there's stubble on his face, a file gripped in one hand and a shiny suitcase in the other. Neil's response is automatic anyway.
“No, sir.”
“It's all been explained to you that this is an experimental procedure and you've given your consent? You understand the risks involved?”
“Yes,” says Neil.
“Alright.” The man with the glasses takes a seat in a chair at his side and opens up the suitcase. “Let's get started, then.”
There's a machine inside the suitcase. Neil's never seen it before. He watches, his wariness growing, as the man swabs his wrist with alcohol and pulls an IV line out of the suitcase. The needle at the end goes into Neil's wrist. The man guides a second line into his own arm.
“Just relax, that's it,” he says carelessly, and presses the button in the middle of the suitcase. The machine gives a soft hiss, and numbness immediately settles over Neil's entire body.
Then he's blinking his eyes open, feeling uncommonly hazy. The man with the glasses is removing both needles and packing the machine in the suitcase away.
“Congratulations,” he says, flipping open the file folder in his lap, and starts scribbling something rapidly. “You passed.”
“But--” Neil's confused. “I don't even know what I just did.”
“It doesn't matter.” The man scrawls something with flourish, flips the folder shut and looks at him for the first time, eyebrows raised. “You passed.”
Neil doesn't even know what the criteria is that he apparently fits. He doesn't push the issue. The man hands him a sealed letter and tells him to give it to his CO, and Neil leaves.
One week later, he's on a plane back to the States.
+
It's called Project Somnacin. About two dozen other men are selected alongside Neil to start this new form of training. They look about as bewildered as Neil feels when they arrive at the new base, which is a little reassuring.
All is soon explained to them.
Neil doesn't understand what makes him a good candidate for this. Paranoia tells him it's because he has no connections or attachments, just a mother he never writes to, and he's certain that the secretive nature of Project Somnacin means that failure will equal a swift, hushed-up execution. He can't help but think it, especially since he is by far the youngest one there.
What else about him is ideal for this?
They don't start dreaming right away. Instead, they do regular physical training interspersed with lessons, where they sit around a classroom like children and learn the theoreticals of dreamsharing. Then they learn the PASIV. They need to know the device inside and out before they get to use it. After several weeks, Neil knows the PASIV intimately, every part from the synchronization monitoring chip to the IV output coupling. They learn how to run diagnostics on each device, how to clean and maintain it, how to double-check the conversion of Somnacin flow rate to practical time using the LED display.
When they can do all of this in their sleep, they're ready to start dreaming.
The first runs are extremely simple, almost childishly simple. They're told to find a certain object in the dream before going under, and see if their unconscious mind can remember to look for it. Or they have to go under, learn a certain phrase from an instructor, and see if they can repeat it when they wake up. Or they have to draw a sketch of their dreamscape upon waking.
The former Neil is decent at doing; the latter two he's terrible at. His mind can make the conversion from reality to dreamspace well enough after a short while, but once he's awake, he can only ever remember shades of things from the dream at best. It's extremely frustrating, especially when the others start to make significant progress.
“It's normal not to remember,” the instructor tells him one day, asking Neil what clothes he'd been wearing in the dream and being met with a blank stare in response. “Some people just have more trouble than others remembering their dreams after they wake up. Look, McCormick,” he sighs in response to Neil's expression, “you're on form when you're actually in the dream. In fact, you're better than half the people in this place. Just relax and don't stress about it.”
Neil stresses. He doesn't like sharing his dreams when he can't remember what goes on in them. He feels like every person he shares his mind with can automatically see all the things he's done, and is just keeping the information to themselves, waiting to use it against him at a later date. But he cannot fail at this. Failure means death or discharge from the army, and what would he do then? Go back to prostituting himself, fucking himself up on drugs, no doubt.
So he tries harder. He improves in what must be the smallest degrees physically possible.
The missions get gradually more challenging, and Neil is allowed to advance because he doesn't have trouble with the dreaming itself. He just doesn't remember that, apparently, he's pretty good at building a dreamscape. He doesn't remember that when they're standing on the top of a hundred-story skyscraper and must jump off it to stimulate a kick, where two men become nearly hysterical, Neil is the only one to step calmly onto the ledge, spread his arms and free-fall without a word of protest.
After two months, they graduate to dreaming on their own.
It's an adjustment, after so much time following orders: now they're encouraged to experiment, play around, learn the boundaries of their dreams. They're given activities or tasks to perform, but are usually allowed to complete them in any fashion they choose.
And Neil hates sharing his dreams, but he hates dreaming alone even more.
He doesn't know what happens when he goes under by himself, but every time, he wakes up feeling horribly nauseous. He goes under and then he's stirring, awake, and someone nearby snickers and another snaps, “Pull it together, McCormick,” because there are tears on his cheeks that he hastily wipes away. Soon enough, when it keeps happening, the others are willing to accept it as a weird side effect of the Somnacin, but Neil doesn't think it is.
He hates dreaming. He's pretty sure the others do, too, they just don't ever say anything about it, each pretending that this dreamsharing thing comes easy to them. Neil hates it so much. Hates waking up crying, hates the nausea and the headaches. He hates that he's the only one still struggling to remember his dreams. His instructors are less sympathetic now and Neil's stress levels respond accordingly.
“Goddamnit, McCormick!” One of the instructors, an older, grizzled man, tears the IV line out of his arm and glares. “The fuck's wrong with your projections? It's fucking manic in there.”
“Sorry.” It's the only thing Neil can think of to say.
“Can't remember your own dreams, now your projections are attacking anyone who tries to share them,” the man growls, throwing the IV down and getting up. “I'll be surprised if you get a career out of this, really surprised.”
More than anything, Neil hates feeling this loss of control. It makes him miss the days when he could make a man do anything he wanted just by taking off his clothes. He misses being a soldier. He's reaching the end of his tether, about to hit rock bottom.
In the end, rock bottom hits him.
+
The man's a psychologist, but they don't call him that, even though he's there to perform psych evaluations on them all. Apparently, he is what's called an extractor.
Neil panics. He doesn't want anyone extracting anything from his mind. His secrets are too terrible. They tell Neil and the others that he isn't there to dig through their secrets, only to check that everything is as it should be so that no surprises will affect their work in the dreamscape, no more invasive than a lie-detector test, but Neil doesn't believe them.
The extractor, Forbes, is impersonal and brisk.
“Let's get started,” he says, and Neil forces himself to put an IV in his arm.
He wakes seconds later. Forbes is fiddling with Neil's line impatiently, making sure the Somnacin is flowing without obstruction.
“Let's try that again,” he says. “And this time, let's try actually getting into the dream. Relax your mind.”
Neil tries to relax. He lies back and Forbes pushes the trigger again.
Then Neil's awake again, inexplicable guilt making his stomach turn.
Forbes slams the PD shut. The motion is violent.
“You're a faggot, McCormick.”
Neil stares straight ahead at the wall. He breathes normally. He knew this would happen eventually.
“You know what'll happen if I put that in my report?” Forbes says. “They'll discharge you. You'll be kicked off of Project Somnacin.”
And executed, Neil thinks distantly. He's going to be terminated. Because he's a fag.
Forbes paces the empty room up and down, angry.
“What do you think I should do, McCormick?” he demands finally. “Huh?”
Neil feels nothing. He's numb.
This is why, when Forbes stops in front of him, and he understands what he's supposed to do, he slides to the floor on his knees without protest.
Forbes unzips his pants and grips his cock in one hand.
“Suck it.”
Neil does.
His one vague thought is that this isn't like how he remembers. There's nothing remotely enjoyable or attractive about it. Forbes' cock tastes like sweat and salt, unpleasant. The weight on Neil's tongue, the pressure against his throat makes him want to gag.
He doesn't, though. He works his tongue expertly, breathes steadily through his nose and takes him down again, and again, in a quick rhythm. Forbes' hand rests on the back of his head and starts forcing him down further, harder, and still Neil doesn't gag. He relaxes his throat and lets the man fuck his mouth. It's been a few years, but his body remembers this too well.
In the moment before release, Forbes pulls Neil off his cock and pumps himself quickly and he's coming, coming on Neil's face. Neil flinches and shuts his eyes, waiting for this to be over.
For a minute all he can hear is Forbes' harsh breathing. He bows his head and feels some of the wetness drip off.
Finally, Forbes mutters something that sounds like fucking faggot and moves away, zipping up his pants and packing up the PASIV. He leaves the room.
Neil stays there, on the floor. Numbly, he wipes his face off with his sleeve.
He doesn't cry. He doesn't throw up. He doesn't do anything, really.
Another part of him dies without a sound.
Neil is done.
+
This is when a miracle happens.
+++
The last thing he remembers is Forbes. He doesn't remember getting here, which is how he knows it's a dream. The room is unfamiliar, sunlit and cosy. He's lying in a bed.
Sitting next to him: an angel.
She smiles at him.
“Hello, Neil.”
She's beautiful. Neil thinks for sure if he weren't queer he would be in love with her.
“They tell me you don't talk very much,” she says. Her accent is strong and French. “That's okay. You don't need to talk right now. My name is Mal.”
He licks his lips and manages, weakly: “Like Molly?”
Her smiles widens. “Like Mallorie,” she says, and her accent curls around the word prettily. Neil knows he can't say that without his own accent mangling it, so he doesn't try.
“I'm dreaming,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Are you real?”
“Yes,” she says. “I'm a specialist in dreaming. I've been brought here to help you. Would you like to see where you are right now?”
Neil nods.
The room changes seamlessly, starting with the bedcovers, which turn white and crisp. The walls slowly fall through the floor and are replaced by hanging curtains which shield them on three sides. The sunlight becomes fluorescent light shining dully from the ceiling. The carpet turns to institutional grey tile. The frame of Neil's bed becomes metal.
He recognizes the infirmary. He takes it in dazedly. The transformation was quick and smooth.
He tries to move his hand, and it catches with a sharp click.
“Why am I handcuffed to the bed?” he asks, panic rising in his chest.
Mal's smile fades.
“Because you tried to hurt yourself, Neil,” she says softly, and, taking his hand, she turns it so that his palm is facing up. There's a row of bristling sutures from his wrist almost up to his elbow.
Neil immediately feels dizzy. He can see the same row of sutures on his other arm. His breathing becomes faster.
Mal smooths a hand over his forehead and the infirmary falls away. The walls of the other room rise back up. The sunlight returns. There's a hush, no buzz of distant background noise. The bed is soft and warm again.
Instantly, Neil is calmed.
“I didn't mean to,” he says. “Hurt myself. I didn't mean to.”
“That doesn't matter,” says Mal. “I'm here to help you now.”
He looks up at the ceiling and breathes. Wonders, vaguely, if he really is dead.
“I'm told you have difficulty remembering your dreams,” says Mal. “There are chemists who experiment with different drugs using Somnacin as a template. I've given you something I think will help your memory when you wake up.”
He nods.
“In a few moments, we'll wake. I want you to tell me what my name is. See if you can remember.”
“Okay,” he says.
When he wakes up, he studies the woman sitting next to his bed.
“Mal,” he manages to say, after a moment. “Not like Molly.”
She smiles. Beautiful.
“Hello, Neil,” she says gently.
+
Mal comes to visit Neil twice a week. For the first time, Neil stops feeling a sick knot of dread in his stomach every time he hooks himself up to the PASIV. Amazingly, he starts to look forward to dreaming.
“My projections,” he warns Mal, the second time they meet. “They're kinda crazy sometimes. They don't like other people in my brain.”
She laughs lightly, a musical, tinkling sound.
“These are my projections, Neil. We don't need to worry about yours.”
She explains to him something the military failed to illuminate: the distinctive roles of the subject and the dreamer. Now Neil understands that projections aren't an unpredictable factor; left alone, they are peaceful, right now walking past them and murmuring things in fluent French.
“I am the subject; I fill this dream with my subconscious,” she says. They're in a verdant green park. A weeping willow overhangs a pond where swans paddle back and forth leisurely. “You are my guest here.”
“Are you in the military?” Neil blurts out, wondering just what makes her a specialist. Mal shakes her head.
“My father was involved with the creation of the dreamshare technology. He taught me to dream. I've been doing this for a long time.” She pauses. “This is one of the few ways for me to make money with my abilities right now. I don't agree with using dreaming for military applications. My father taught me that dreaming should always be for creation's sake.”
“Then why help the military?” Neil asks.
“I'm not helping the military, Neil,” she says, smiling affectionately. “I'm helping you.”
+
Mal trains him to remember his dreams while he recovers. She does better than any of his instructors thus far. Before long he can sketch pictures of the dreamscapes she shows him with precision, albeit awkwardly, because of his wrists.
They encounter a snag when a doctor decides that Neil's suicide attempt was a result of Somnacin side effects. It's Mal who saves him. She assesses him herself and has his dosage and compound changed officially. Neil suspects there's a lot of paperwork and a lot of arguing behind closed doors, but in the end he's deemed fit to return to active dreaming -- he suspects partly because it would be too much of a hassle to let him go; but mostly because of Mal.
He learns that she's there to teach them about architecture, building in the dreamscape, but Neil is the only one who receives private tutelage. She teaches him to build, but other things, too, and before long he feels compelled to share with her.
“Sometimes when I wake up from dreams, I'm crying,” he says. “Is that normal?”
“No, it's not normal,” she says, gentle and honest as always. Her touch on his forehead is feather-light and her gaze is searching. She nods. “Something is hurting you inside here. I know.”
“Will I get better?” he asks.
“Yes, if you want to,” she says, and because she's honest, Neil believes her.
He would be content to ever follow her in her own dreamscape, but she soon asks if he thinks he's ready to bare his own mind to her.
“I don't want you prying,” he says, guarded. “I've got secrets I don't share with anybody. I don't want you looking at those. Ever.”
“I promise you,” says Mal, “I will never look at anything in your mind that you don't want me to see.”
And she doesn't.
They struggle to navigate his dreamscape together. It's full of locked doors, and his projections glare at Mal like they know what she is. A lot of it looks like a more grim version of New York: oily puddles on the ground, tall, dark buildings, rusting fire escapes. The streets are narrow and twisting. It's ugly compared to her dreams. Neil dislikes it.
Mal's bright smile, when they reach the rooftop of a high office building and she turns to him, takes him entirely by surprise.
“You've built a maze,” she says, amazement in her voice.
“I did?”
“Yes. Look.” She takes his hand and points. “Look at the streets. It's all circular, like a labyrinth. The buildings form walls. You've turned your dreamscape into a maze.”
“Why?” says Neil, not understanding. “How'd I do that?”
“You did it to protect your mind, so that nobody else can navigate it.”
“Sorry,” he says, but she is shaking her head.
“Non, non, non. Neil,” she says, touching his cheek with her hand. “You are a brilliant, brilliant boy. Did you know that?”
He shakes his head wordlessly. If Mal really knew his secrets, she wouldn't think so.
“Yes,” she says, nodding firmly, like she's read his mind. Her thumb brushes his cheekbone reassuringly. She sounds so sure when she says, “I think you were born to do this.”
+
Neil rejoins regular training. He wears long sleeves, always.
Now that they're all ready, they move on to the next, and final, stage of the dreamshare project: Combat training.
They get to use weapons they've never even seen in reality. They learn a more brutal form of hand-to-hand combat than they would ever be allowed to practise in the real world. They learn to kill men with their bare hands by practising on each other. They form teams and engage in firefights, and a couple men end up in the infirmary to grapple with psychological trauma afterward.
Neil feels like a kid in an amusement park. Finally, dreaming has a real purpose.
Mal is at the base once a week. She continues to tutor him privately. He learns more with her in a short time than the army was able to teach him after all these weeks.
“Is this Paris?” he asks, when they visit her dreams again.
“This is an impression of Paris,” she says. “You should never build exactly from memory. You'll lose track of dreams and reality that way.”
He absorbs all of this. He's a keen, intent student. Mal sometimes uses their time together just to force him to take a break. It makes Neil restless when she makes him sit, asks him questions. She finds more success when she talks to him about herself.
“You're married?” he asks one day, when they're sitting in a café in what she tells him is a drizzly replica of London. He gestures to her wedding ring. She smiles and nods, twisting it absently around her finger.
“Yes. My husband was a student of my father's. He's an architect.”
“Is he good to you?”
Mal laughs gently at his mistrust. “Yes. He's very good to me.” There's so much love, so much happiness in her eyes. “I am very lucky to have him.”
“Do you have kids?” Neil asks, thinking that she must surely be a mother, to be this nurturing, to have this much love to share; but she shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
“But you will?”
She nods, looking secretive and excited. “We're going to start trying, soon. When we have the money for a house.”
She tells him she wants a boy and a girl. One of each. She likes French names, Madeleine or Phillipa or Marie, for a girl; for a boy, she prefers names such as James, Peter or Arthur. These names are, she confesses, from stories that are close to her heart.
“My father used to read me English stories when I was a little girl,” she says wistfully, in response to his expression at the latter. “I always found something romantic in King Arthur -- virtuous men triumphing over cruelty.”
“Well, don't name your kid Neil,” he says.
“You don't like your name?”
He shakes his head. He hates being Neil McCormick, since he began associating his name with the types of things Neil McCormick would do. He wants to be somebody else.
He meets Mal's husband, one time. He's not sure what the man is doing on the base, maybe something to do with the Project; but he knows at once that it's Mal's husband, even before she introduces them, because of the way he looks at her. The man is handsome, with rich brown eyes. He shakes Neil's hand; his hand is much bigger. Neil retreats because the couple seem distracted. Distracted by each other. Her smile is radiant. They are so in love.
Watching them, he experiences a powerful jealousy, like he's never known. It almost bowls him off his feet. Not because he's jealous of Mal's husband -- he is jealous of them both. He wants what they have. Neil would die for a taste of that. He watches them together until they leave.
+
Neil is under no illusions: he was brought here to be a guinea pig. Some of the other men have failed at some point over the training, unable to handle it, and vanished overnight. Regardless of this, Neil takes dreaming and begins to use it. He wields it like it's a weapon. He is now the best dreamer the army has got.
In Mal's dreams they go to exotic cities. Her mind unconsciously outfits him in crisp, clean clothing, suit jackets and pinstripe shirts, and he surprises himself by liking how it looks. He loves her accent, and feels self-conscious about his own. He tries to make his vowels less broad, forces his speech into less of a drawl when he's with her.
But when he's training, Neil is as single-minded and ruthless as a wolfhound. He detaches perfectly. He has a keen knack for determining the goal and setting out to achieve it regardless of what's in his way. He's become hyper-observant. Mal has taught him to take in all details, and it serves him in good stead when he's training. He notices everything. He improvises. He's like a machine in the dreamscape. He no longer needs Mal's special compound: now that he's trained his mind to remember every crisp detail upon waking, regular Somnacin works fine.
New recruits arrive, and Neil starts schooling them in dream-combat.
“I wonder,” says Mal, when he meets her one afternoon, “what you are using my lessons to do.”
“I'm just doing what you taught me,” he says.
“Who taught you to close your arm around a man's neck until he stops breathing? Not me.”
Neil's a little stung, despite himself. “This is the only thing I'm good at, Mal. It's the only thing I can do. Nobody's getting hurt. That's why we're using the PASIV -- so no one gets hurt.”
She touches his face. Her stare is intense. Then her hand slips down his arm, to his wrist, which she turns over gently. Her thumb is resting atop a still-fading scar, covered from sight by his sleeve.
“You, Neil,” she says softly. “You are getting hurt.”
He pulls his arm away and looks down at the floor. “I'm good at this, Mal.”
“You build beautifully. You can create mazes and paradoxes like nobody else here can. Your talents are wasted on violence. And something is still paining you inside. Something is holding you back, isn't it?”
Neil's throat tightens. He has to swallow with an effort.
“Can I show you something I've never shown anyone before?”
“Of course.”
He sets up the PASIV, himself designated to be the dreamer. He and Mal go under.
They're standing in a bathroom.
Mal looks at it, takes each detail in, and looks at him expectantly.
“I ...” Neil trails off. It's hard to detach when he's standing right here, in his own mind, confronting this. He rallies himself and leaves the bathroom, into the attached bedroom. He feels like a ghost here.
He tries to detach, anyway.
“I let a man bring me here. He's gonna pay me to have sex with him. At least -- he says he is, in the car.” He stares fixedly at the door, refusing to turn around and see the look on Mal's face. “So I go with him, because ... because I kind of need the money, but mostly 'cause I just want to.
“So we get in here and ...” He turns and walks measuredly, retracing his path. “He makes me snort some coke. And I swear to God, it's like I got the worst high and I never came down from it again, ever. Even now. So -- so I take my clothes off and he does too, and he gets me on the bed and he tells me to suck his dick, and I do, but he's going kind of fast and I'm getting this bad feeling and I try to stop -- he hits me -- then he spits on me. He calls me a slut.” The word feels like barbed wire catching in his throat. He still can't look at Mal.
“He gets on the bed with me and I start to panic. Tell him to wait. There's some things I don't do. I tell him I have to go to the bathroom, and I go in here ...”
He turns. She's still standing in the doorway of the bathroom. There is infinite concern in her face.
“Should I stop?” he asks, nervous. This is not the kind of thing people share with each other, he knows. He doesn't want to screw this up with Mal. But she shakes her head.
“Go ahead.”
He enters the bathroom and shuts the door.
“Okay,” he says, dragging in another lungful of air. “So I lock it.” He does. “And then I don't really know what to do. I want to leave but I can't. Then I hear this noise and -- he's opening the door with a knife--”
The lock pops free of its own accord and the door swings violently open. Mal moves away, but no one is there; it's just a phantom memory.
“He hits me. Really hard. I lose my balance and fall in the bathtub. I try to find something to grab onto, but there's only the tap--”
The water creaks on and starts pattering onto the floor of the bathtub. Neil's eyes are watering, staring at it.
“Then he fucks me,” he says. “I don't have time to do anything, he's just -- on me -- and I can't fight back. I just -- lie there and let him. Every time he fucks into me he calls me a slut. And he starts hitting me with something and I'm bleeding--”
The water swirls red around the drain. He has to force his lungs to work.
“--and it hurts so much, it really hurts, and all I can think is -- Oh my God, I'm gonna die here. And I don't want to. I want to see my mom again.”
His voice breaks. Mal holds his hand, shushes him when he starts to breathe hard and fast and shakily, kisses him on the forehead. She takes control of the dream.
He sinks to the floor when he finds himself in that bedroom she first met him in. Mal follows him down to the carpet. She doesn't say anything. She cradles his head in her lap, holds him the same way he held Brian years before, and she sings him a lullaby in French, until the tremors leave his body and he finally stops shaking and just lies there in her arms for awhile; just breathing.
+
The last time Mal visits the base is two weeks before the death of Neil McCormick.
She's only visited twice in as many months. They don't need her as much. Neil doesn't let himself miss her. He's busy. He's got dreaming. He has new trainees to manage, men ten years his senior who look like fools when they try to take him down a notch in the dreamspace.
He's only been at the base for less than a year, but it feels like much longer due to the difference between real time and dream time. In the dream, he can cover almost two weeks in twenty-four hours. So it's been a month, but it feels like longer when he meets with Mal.
He reaches for the PASIV, automatic, but a hand on his arm stops him. Mal's smiling, as usual, beautiful as always, but there is a slightly sad quality to her expression today.
“I can't dream with you anymore,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks, but he already knows.
“Dom and I have started trying to have a baby.”
“Oh.” Neil withdraws his hand. “Congratulations.”
She hugs him. Neil finds it in himself to hug her back, softening slightly.
“You have learned so much,” she says, searching his eyes. “Do good things with this, Neil. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“If you ever leave the military, you come and find me. It doesn't matter when.”
“Okay.”
“And Neil,” she says, taking both his hands. She looks worried. “Don't let dreaming change you. Remember what's real.”
“I will,” he says.
She kisses his forehead, and leaves. It's raining outside. Neil doesn't watch her go.
+
He's not under any illusions. He's still a guinea pig.
He knows the risks when he agrees to test new compounds for the chemist they've hired.
The scars on his arms have faded, but Neil is still on a set course to self-destruction.
Limbo swallows him whole.
+
He goes back to the summer when he was eight years old. Little League. Coach. Everything else is forgotten, but only temporarily.
It snarls like an animal in the back of his mind, a swelling chorus of white noise, until his own budding sexuality makes him snap.
Neil tears down his subconscious. He lashes out. He destroys. If he can't kill his body, he will start with his mind.
Everything he hates about himself, he shutters away in the heart of limbo. He abandons every person who knows something intimate about him. It's not planned or calculated. He attacks all of it, raging, hurting, until only bare bones are left, not hardly enough. He strips and flays his mind to the very core until he kills Neil McCormick from Kansas.
Then he's alone with the silence.
When he's woken, he's mute for two weeks. He barely eats. His brain is still white noise.
His mind knits itself back together like a broken ribcage, filling in blanks for him, reaching for reasons behind the way he is. The one thing that sticks with him more strongly than anything is all his military training. He has a quiet certainty about the two things he knows he's good at: killing, and dreaming.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to remain with the military, taking orders, so he just leaves. He's off the base before they even know he's missing.
+++
He takes a year or so to wander, establish himself, make some money -- sometimes by legitimate means, sometimes by hustling pool. He stays alert, keeps his eyes and ears open. One day he hears of a professor in Paris, involved in dreamsharing.
He stakes everything he's worth on this because it seems suddenly, immensely important. He's confident. He spends most of his money on a one-way flight to Paris and a nice suit, and the last of it to have the suit tailored. First impressions are everything. He tames his messy strands of hair with pomade.
He finds the professor easily enough. He lounges quietly in the back of the classroom and watches the old man as he converses in French with a dark-haired young woman. She's beautiful. Like an angel.
She kisses the professor on the cheek before he disappears into a back office. She starts walking up the steps past the rows of seats, and stops dead when she sees him sitting there. Like she's seen a ghost.
He raises an eyebrow.
“I'm looking for a job,” he says quietly. “My name's Arthur. I'm in dreaming.”
She just stares for a long moment. Slowly, she ascends the steps until she's at his side. He stands up.
“Hello, Arthur.” Her accent is strong, and French. She studies him intently. “I think I may be able to find something for you.”
She extends a hand. Arthur shakes it. She smiles.
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