schmevil: (deb)
schmevil ([personal profile] schmevil) wrote2011-05-09 11:07 pm

Inception fic, I guess

So this is an unbetaed draft and about half of a fic. Tell me what you think.

She's long gone (1/2)
Inception/Supernatural crossover
Arthur, Eames, Mal/Dom ~2500
He was a hunter before he was an extractor.


Mal is a shade. His research doesn’t turn up who coined the phrase or when, but there’s reams of theory: 70% Jung, Freud and other dream enthusiasts; 30% military psych records, both observation and speculation.

In the early days, dream tech was buried under layers of alphabet soup bureaucracy and shell companies, secret enough that there was no one to call the things they did criminal. The records are accurate, dryly explicit like only military records can be. The first ‘shade’ is found in a five times deployed GI, name, rank and serial number redacted, and ‘he’ is a buddy from Iraq who’d woke up on the wrong side of an IED. They didn’t kill ‘him’ until they’d done a thorough study.

Mal is psychological noise, a complex bundle of ideas, memories, feelings, who only lives when Dom is dreaming. She is guilt, need - an unsatisfied, nagging emotional something. Arthur doesn’t know the details. Dom misses her - obviously - is torn up over her death, and having to leave the children. And so, Mal: a manifestation of his grief. Mal is a shade, which is a word for all of these things.

The first time she kills him, he recognizes her for what she is, and yet--

Dom isn’t the first to do this, put a face on his trauma, but he’s the first to do it so vividly. This, Arthur considers while Mal whispers into his ear, the gun just touching his hair.

“You don’t belong here,” she says.

Maybe it’s because Dom is an architect, the first to dream up his own haunting; maybe that’s what makes her so much more real.

“Mon petit chou,” she says, like Mal sometimes did. “You don’t belong here.” The temperature drops, Arthur’s body wants to curl in on itself - fear, cold, the muzzle kissing his hair - but instinct and training say: the lighter in your pocket (which he doesn’t carry in dreams, but in waking life is never without). She pulls the trigger before he can move.

He wakes up to the hotel room. The mark on one bed, with Sherri (their chemist, guard and gofer for this supposedly simple extraction) hovering over her. Dom is still asleep beside him. Arthur forces his breathing to slow, his heart to steady. He allows himself to tear the line from his arm; doesn’t allow himself to shove Dom off the bed and demand answers.

***

The extraction is a success after all.

Once the cut is divvied up, Arthur retires to a different hotel room, in a different city. He wakes at five in the morning to a silent room; not even a feeling of presence. He checks the gun on the side table anyway, and rolls his die. It’s not enough, so he reaches for his lighter - a different kind of totem - and flicks it open. January in London, with the sun just starting to show through the gloom. Even with the curtains open, the flame is startling.

Arthur recognizes Mal for what she is. And yet-- he wonders if somewhere in Dom’s subconscious are her bones. Arthur is a journeyman extractor at best: his value is his research, his tactical problem solving, and his gun arm. He’s not paid to be imaginative, and yet--

After Mal, he dreams himself armed in two ways, guns and a knife, his lighter and a pouch of salt. Just in case.

***

They can work around Mal. She makes it hard to keep team members, which would be an issue if Dom and Arthur didn’t prefer a rotating cast of chemists, forgers and muscle. And soon, architects.

Mal doesn’t show every time they dream, but it quickly becomes clear that Dom can no longer take lead on building their dreams. They’re lucky to find Nash, who’s self-interested enough, and greedy enough, to stick around despite the things that go bump in Dom’s subconscious. And of course, Dom and Arthur continue to bear the brunt of it.

Arthur takes it in stride, because that is what he does.

He doesn’t consider leaving, at least not seriously. He would be lying if he said the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. Extraction is risky and there is now an additional risk in the form of Mal. She’s an invisible factor in all their plans, now, requiring: more guns, more traps, and an architect. Leaving Dom and going back to freelance is the smart thing to do, but no one ever accused Arthur of being smart about relationships.

He spends the time between jobs researching shades, and the causes thereof. Eventually they’d killed that unknown GI’s shade - the records are clear about that. But that same military clarity manages to conceal how they did it, without even having to resort to an additional layer of clearances - as only military records can.

He makes the rounds of sources obvious and unusual, and is no closer to an answer. Arthur keeps coming back to the original records.

[A109: He came after me, he--

Doctor J: Take it easy, soldier. From the start.

A109: It was... *heavy breathing* a pretty standard setup: survival run with three team members. I was point. We spent a month in the dream. I’ve done plenty of short runs, but this was the longest I’d been under. After a couple of weeks you start to, I don’t know, you start to itch.

Doctor J: Itch?

A109: It’s a phantom thing. You know the dream isn’t real. You know it, but there are so few signs of it and it gets easy to forget. *pause* I heard about the guy in Bravo.

Doctor J: Please-

A109: Stick to my story, I know. We were in the desert. The dream was modelled after the Syrian desert, Anbar Governorate. It was easy to recognize. They don’t tell us this stuff, but Alpha 567 and I had both been there. We were three weeks in. Alpha 201 was KIAed a few days back. Alpha 567 and I were hiding under a tarp at that point.

Doctor J: A tarp?

A109: Yeah. We’d pulled it off an insurgent vehicle to give us some shade, early on. By that point our camp was compromised. We buried ourselves in the desert, with sand over the tarp, waiting to be killed or to wake up. We were running low on food and water, so I guess we weren’t thinking straight, and there was that fucking itch. It’s like... you’re waiting for the dream to blink. It doesn’t do that anymore.

Doctor J: The technology is much more stable.

A109: Yeah.

Doctor J: What happened next?

A109: He came out of the desert, not even trying for cover. Just walks up to us, casual as anything. Alpha 567... he knew the guy. Except he wasn’t a guy at first.

Doctor J: What was he?

A109: I don’t know. He just... it was like a mirage, there and not, and then Alpha 567 says that he knows the guy. Suddenly there’s a guy, not just a shimmer on the horizon, but a guy walking toward us. Alpha 567 got up. I told him, not to, but--

Doctor J: Are you alright?

A109: Yeah. Yeah.

Doctor J: What happened next?

A109: He cut me. He came at me with a knife and he, he... *heavy breathing*]


***

A month later, Arthur is ready to move on from unusual sources, to unorthodox. It’s perhaps inadvisable, and anything he learns is very likely to be inapplicable, more suited to the family business than extraction, and yet--

The table is papered what few hard copy notes he’s made, fanned around his waiting laptop so that they’re all comfortably in reach. He puts his coffee down and gives the project his back, perches on the clean edge of the table, legs stretched out so he can put his hands in his pockets. The die is in one pocket, the lighter in the other.

It’s sunset and the view from his LA condo is spectacular. He’s furnished it just enough to be livable, habit of a lifetime of traveling light. The view is spectacular, and he figured out quickly that windows - the bigger the better - were more important to him than furniture.

The problem is this: Every time Mal gets close to him, whether she kills him or he gets away, the temperature drops.

He snapped her arm once, breaking her hold on him. He could have done it gentler, he knows. Dom wasn’t there to see it, but she smiled and smiled, whispering, “You don’t belong here,” while his breath turned to ice.

He doesn’t know if he’s doing it - loading his own memories onto Dom’s shade - or if it’s an intrinsic part of Mal. The research is so maddeningly thin, and Nash is useless as a control, his recall so scattered that he can’t give Arthur anything worth listening to. Nash remembers the maze, the traps, the furniture; in more detail than Arthur gives a damn about. But he can’t remember the look on Mal’s face, the kind of gun she used, the ambient temperature when she put a bullet between his eyes.

Mal is a problem that only Dom can solve - unless she’s more than a reflection of Dom’s wrecked emotional state. She’s none of Arthur’s business, except insofar as how she gets in the way of his work, unless-- Unless she is that something more; something that can be found out and killed. And if that is the case, he has no choice in this.

With the sun set, the room takes on a different cast, lit now by the windows of surrounding buildings, and Arthur’s laptop. He turns back to his work, considers and rejects the idea of drinking his now cold coffee. To the list of Things To Research Through Means Legal And Otherwise, he adds: dream walking, (and as an afterthought) ghosts, women in white - a refresher.

It’s been a while.

***

Dom dies, belted into a submerged minivan, with a multi billionaire tourist bled out and just as drowned beside him. Arthur waits by the side of the river thinking, it's Dom, if anyone could make it for the kick-- He waits a minute, a minute that would become five, ten, fifteen and more, if not for the kick.

Arthur wakes up and Dom doesn't. There are contingencies.

***

It works.

Three weeks later Arthur is halfway around the world again, nursing his third beer in the kind of bar that doesn't look twice at anything but your currency. Two TVs have quiz games going but the one closest has been tuned to BBC World since he sat down and isn't budging.

For three weeks it's been, among other things, Saito's situation, and speculation about his connection with Dominic Cobb. But now Robert Fisher is holding a press conference.

He nods at the bartender. "Hey, turn that up."

Fisher steps up to transparent podium and declares to the world that inception works, and the energy sector is in for more chaos, more than it can probably handle.

"Good for business," he says into the mouth of his bottle.

"You in oil?" the bartender asks, giving Arthur a skeptical once over.

"Nah." The bartender's curiosity doesn't extend far at all, and he leaves Arthur to his beer and the news that Fisher's taken to heart his father's wish for him to be his own man. It's the impossible, what he's waited for these three weeks, and Arthur has no one to share it with. He gave up smoking a decade ago, but he tastes ash.

He and Dom had a ritual and he's stuck to his part of it, even if Dom is in a coma that he's never coming back from. It's a useful exercise. After his escape from the airport, after he'd thoroughly scrubbed his tracks clean, after he'd set up shop a comfortable ocean away, he'd settled into looking back.

He orders another beer and starts integrating the news into the rest of it, all the data from the job that he's been relentlessly combing over. This was part of what made Dom and Arthur a success: everything else aside, they were serious about expanding their skill set, and getting shit right. And hell, coma aside, decimation of the energy industry as we know it aside, inception was a success.

He'd shredded and burned the original paper files before leaving Paris, and he'd cleaned out his condo before leaving LA. In his head though, and in the growing collection he's building up in his new place, the files from the Saito-Fisher job blur with what he thinks of as the Mal job. The one that got away. The Fisher job, the Mal job--inception was a success, but he's left with too many unanswered questions and the memory of her voice, her breath, her fingernails plucking at his sleeve.

He doesn't dream naturally and he stays away from the PASIV, but when he hits the jagged edge of sleep deprivation, those memories ("Mon petit chou, you don't belong here") are all too close.

Dom is in a coma, in an unspecified military hospital, somewhere in the continental US. Mal is, whatever she is, locked in the recesses of his now permanently unconscious mind. The job is over, ergo, so is the rest of it, and yet-- his instincts say otherwise.

[Doctor J: How are you today? *pauses* I asked you a question.

A567: *clears throat* Fine, sir.

Doctor J: Better than last week?

A567: Much better, sir.

Doctor J: You've been following your regimen. *papers shuffling* The orderlies have good things to say. You've been cooperating.

A567: Yeah, I...

Doctor J: Soldier?

A567: I'm sorry for... I'm sorry.

Doctor J: You were experiencing post traumatic stress, and inappropriately medicated. Hallucinations were always a possibility.

A567: Yeah. Yeah, I... is he ok?

Doctor J: Doctor X is fine.

A567: Good. Good. I didn't mean to.

Doctor J: I know soldier. Now, tell me about the nightmares.

A567: They're better.

Doctor J: Are they?

A567: Yeah, I don't remember anything.

Doctor J: You've been sleeping through the night.

A567: I don't remember anything.

Doctor J: I want to take you under again. Face your demons. *pauses* It will help your recovery.

A567: I... if you think...

Doctor J: Soldier?

A567: *clears throat* Uh, sure doc. If you think that's best.

Doctor J: You'll be completely safe.]

***

Dom isn't actually dead, which makes it one of the less morbid jobs he's planned. That he's locked up in a military facility, under constant guard and study makes it one of the most dangerous, by any measure. Job as crazy as this--as recklessly Mal and Dom Cobb as this--requires a special breed of extractor.

"Mr. Perry."

"How did you get this number, Mr. Green?" Eames asks cheerily.

"Turns out water boarding does work."

"Messrs Cheney and Bush will be heartened by your success."

"I have a proposition for you."

"A profitable one, I hope."

"A challenge."

"Oh this does sound interesting." Amusement and calculation are equally obvious in his tone.

"The Belize Cafe, at three."

"See you there," Eames says, disconnecting immediately.

Eames is ideal because as annoying as he is, and as steadfastly self-interested as he is, he's very good at what he does, and very easy to satisfy. Profit, his life, and the potential for health and happiness. The impossibility of Arthur's proposition is just spice.

Infiltrating a military research facility, dreaming with a coma patient, and fighting a ghost--oh, Arthur knows he can sell Eames on it. They pulled off inception, he reminds himself. What's one more impossible thing?

He's going to get Dom back. He's going to get him back, and he's going to give Mal release.
jackandahat: A brown otter, no text. (Default)

Popping in from /network

[personal profile] jackandahat 2011-05-10 06:52 am (UTC)(link)
This is interesting - I like Arthur's voice in this, it shows a lot about him. And I like that someone's using the "shade" idea, I haven't seen all that much discussion of Mal-as-ghost.