Step 2: Infiltrate Johnny Quid (continue not to die)

[featherfish]

First things first: I'm sure everyone's been getting a lot of this on their various flists, but just to complete the general consensus against the ongoing misguided privacy terrorism in this and other social networking sites, which they seem to think we LIKE for some reason, there will be no reposting of any material I put down here to the world outside LJ, be it a public post or not. Thank you all for respecting my privacy like decent people, as opposed to members of the aggregate hive mind. Righteous Strathairn/Murrow icon is righteous.

On with business: Eames the Liar Part 6 is now here. Rated R for general abuse of pronouns and the English language, yet another Ritchie quota of profanity, completely obvious and unwarranted references to the outer-Ritchieverse, and excessive liberties taken with the ins and outs of Nolan-science. Hang onto your hats kiddos.

New readers start here.



Tomorrow at five starts now.

Okay, so, the plan is this: Johnny and I go under first, with Kent initiating the sequence. Archy will be hanging around to let Eames in discreetly and to oversee the business from there; Kent puts Eames under a few seconds after us. I take Johnny through the ropes of dream-sharing with as much bullshit as I can muster while Eames roams his subconscious in disguise. He and Kent have evidently put a lot of work into making it look very much like Johnny’s real London neighborhood, which is a place I guess Eames knows pretty well, well enough to get at where Johnny might be hiding something. I’ll be doing my best to ply Johnny for information on my end, which no one is very confident will get us anything. Eames and I wake up before Johnny, and Kent administers an extra sedative, provided conveniently by Yusuf, which promises to keep Johnny under even after we take him off the machine. We get the fuck out, Archy cleans up.

No one says much of anything on the way to the estate. Yusuf’s hanging around in the extremely incongruous Samoan pub up the road, drinking and thinking to himself that we’re all about to die.

What-the-fuck-ever.

The London Eames knows is squalid, is what I learn immediately. The thing I can’t get over about this technology, even after using it for so long, is the heightened sensory experience it gives you. I never smelled anything in my dreams before I started dicking around in subconscious crime; now I wish that were still the case. This place is fucking rank.

It’s a few minutes before I spot Eames-I can see we’ve successfully impressed upon Archy the great importance of having Eames positioned literal seconds away from being hooked up, to avoid too much of a ridiculous time lapse-and I recognize him right away. Eames used to be able to pull one over on me, got a lot of mileage out of being someone I don’t know, but I’ve gotten better at it with time. And this is Eames, this dark, beautiful girl in a little black dress balancing perfectly in a pair of red-soled Louboutins.

I think this is about where you came in.

We make eye contact, and it’s dangerous for me to talk to him, but I have to-because the job’s barely even started yet and already we have an enormous problem.

“I can’t find him,” I whisper, not looking at him/her directly, furiously scanning the teeming crowd of East Enders for our man.

“What the fuck do you mean you can’t find him?” she says, doing the same thing, nimbly lifting a cigarette from the pack that has suddenly appeared in my pocket. More audibly, she says, “Got a light?”

“Stop that,” I say even as I discover the lighter in my pocket and fulfill the request. She takes a long drag, I think just to torture me, and blows some of it in my face. “I mean I can’t find him. I mean he is not here, all right?”

“For Christ’s sake, Arthur,” she says through her teeth, risking a sharp glance at me. “How does that happen? Does that happen?”

There is no precedent, that I know of, for actually losing the mark. Not that we’ve lost him-“lost” implies that I had him in the first place. The moment I became aware of being here Johnny was already gone, had already disappeared somewhere in the crowd.

“What do we do?” I ask, and this is uncharacteristic of me, asking Eames for directions, but this is a situation where I think he might actually know better than me.

She takes another drag, another puff of smoke flutters, unfurling, past my head. “Don’t do anything,” she says, gazing beyond me. We’re starting to get looks, those horrible, paralytic, probing looks. “Knowing him, he’ll want to do this on his own. He probably doesn’t trust you and he wants to play around for himself. He doesn’t like listening to lectures or taking orders.” She drops the cigarette, but doesn’t stamp it out, not with those shoes. “This may turn out to be a good thing. If I can find him, so much the better. But you keep looking, all right?” She looks at me again, and offers the flicker of a familiar smile, a strange little glimpse of Eames. “Don’t panic yet, darling.”

I give her a withering look, and I leave, aborting the conversation-like clockwork, the projections go back about their business, leaving us in the clear to do ours. I wander hopelessly, wondering how the hell this happened while at the same time finding myself not all that surprised. I already felt on edge, like we were walking into a trap, and now here we are: Johnny doesn’t even know the terrain and he somehow managed to get the upper hand anyway. I think about Yusuf, sitting in that pub thinking about how fucked we are, and I wish he’d shut up about it, because we aren’t fucked, ladies and gentlemen; not yet.

Eames knows where he’s going: Eames doesn’t expect it’s the same place Johnny would have gone, but it’s where he wants to go, right now, right here in this fucked-up living, breathing monster of a flashback.

When she walks into The Speeler some heads turn-not the radar-sharp stares of projections in revolt, just the wandering eyes of some ostensibly sex-starved men in a bar.

She looks around and is completely unsurprised to see some familiar faces. She doesn’t see himself, though, Handsome Bob. He doesn’t seem to be in this one, and it’s just as well. She doesn’t see One Two, either, and all the better for that, too.

What she does see, not right away, but once he’s in her sight she can’t take her eyes anywhere else, is Bachelor Number Three, the man she knew as Mumbles.

Mumbles stands alone in the corner by the window, staring out it. It catches her not just because it’s Mumbles, but because it’s something she doesn’t expect from him, or from this carbon copy of him.

She shouldn’t, but what the hell. She’s here, and isn’t this why she came? She approaches.

“Mumbles,” she says, and he gives an enormous and surprising start and stares at her with a slack-faced expression of pure shock. She doesn’t know what to do, so she smiles, she hopes a little flirtatiously, because what other reason could she as this girl have for talking to him, even though the whole idea makes her a little uncomfortable.

His response, however, is just as bizarre as his initial reaction.

“What the hell did you just call me?” he says in a hushed voice, like he can’t believe it.

She hesitates. Is Johnny’s impression of Mumbles this skewed? “Aren’t you Mumbles?” she says cautiously.

He frowns and glances around in agitation, like someone might be listening in. The projections mind their business.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

“No,” says Eames, taken aback. “I just-”

“You’re not-” He looks at her hard, looks into her eyes. “You’re not like them. You’re not a projection, are you?” His eyes narrow. “Who are you?”

For several long moments, Eames is completely frozen. All he can think at first is What?

After that all he can think, and he hates himself a little for this, is Oh my god, please, no.

He will never forgive himself for this reaction, this horrible, awful reflex fed by the part of him that is still, stupidly, unforgivably attracted to One Two-that would wish the death upon one of the best friends he has ever had if only it meant he got to see One Two again, for one more stupid awkward unfulfilling conversation about nothing.

When finally she can speak again, she finds the power to say, “Mumbles? It… it’s really you?”

“Cut it out with that Mumbles shit, will you?” he says, looking around again. “Nobody calls me Mumbles anymore.”

And this is where the relief happens: grief is pushed aside and Eames realizes he misses Mumbles more than he could have guessed.

“You-you’re alive!” She has to resist the urge to throw her arms around him then, but her smile unnerves him just as much.

“Never felt better,” he says dubiously. “And who are you, exactly?”

“It’s me!” she says, stupidly, because what the hell is that going to mean? “It’s-” She lowers her voice to a surreptitious register. “…Handsome Bob.”

Mumbles isn’t sure how to respond to this, as he looks her up and down in resolute disbelief. “…Handsome… No way.” He peers at her closely, unabashedly. It’s not just that he doesn’t believe it; he doesn’t want to believe it. “Bob?” He looks her up and down, ranging from incredulity to mild disgust. “My god, you-you, uh-” His hand fills in the words that aren’t coming, gesturing ineffectually at what he takes to be the new and improved Handsome Bobette.

Eames/Bob realizes the misunderstanding and blurts, “Wh-no!” The situation would be funny if it wasn’t so typical of the friendship he’d had with both of them. Skirting around the complications he plunges in for a quick explanation: “No, no. I’m a forger, I-”

This, at long last, about three minutes after it would have hit anyone else, is where it occurs to him that wait a minute, what the fuck is going on?

“Wait, what the hell are you doing here?” she says.

Mumbles has already latched onto the salient piece of revealed information. “A forger? You mean you got into extraction too?”

Eames feels that this is slightly unfair, that a person should only be subjected to so many enormously shocking pieces of information in one go without being allowed a sit-down. “You’re-” she says blankly. Devoid of anything else to say, she finally leaves it at “What?”

Mumbles shrugs. “I’m an extractor now, Bobby-boy. First business I could get myself into after we all went our own ways. You too, eh? Handsome Bob the Handsome Forger? What are the odds of that?”

“I-” says Eames, still feeling miles behind the game. “Sort of. I go by the family name now.”

“Get out!” says Mumbles, and Eames wonders how he can keep getting more and more pleased by the situation that is really just disrupting his sense of natural order. “You’re that Eames, aren’t you!”

Even in his flustered state, Eames can’t help but take a little pride in that, and especially in the satisfaction of one of his old friends, friends from the days of stupid clumsy uncomplicated Bob, knowing him as the vastly superior being he is now. “Suppose I am.”

Mumbles is delighted, and it’s unspeakably confusing seeing him like this. It feels unfamiliar and familiar all at once. “I never would have guessed it!” he says. And finally the million dollar question, which Eames should have asked five minutes ago: “So what’re you doing in young Johnny?”

Eames feels this is in rather bad taste, Mumbles taking this so lightly, when it goes beyond coincidence, them meeting here in the mind of Johnny Quid, Johnny who isn’t young anymore and arguably never was. “Archy hired me,” she says cautiously.

“Me too,” says Mumbles. “Said he had some other chaps on the job and we’d be working autonomously, just to make sure. Said I didn’t know ‘em, but he’s still a big liar, in’t he?” The way he grins puts Eames off, reeling as everything starts to unravel.

“You don’t think he knew?” she asks.

“Knew what, mate?”

Eames feels her voice rising, feels the eyes of the people who aren’t people at all. “Knew everything!” she says impatiently. “Knew where to find us, knew what business we’d got ourselves into. Brought us all together and got us into Johnny’s head. You reckon?”

She’s turning Cockney again. Turning back into Handsome Bob. Disguise within a disguise, all coming apart with the truest form dragged out into the open. Focus, girl.

“Can’t say,” says Mumbles, infuriatingly unconcerned. Where distance from the Wild Bunch has only increased some of Eames’s neuroses, it appears to have calmed Mumbles down. “Who else is with you?” he asks.

“No one Johnny knows,” says Eames. “If anyone’s being targeted here, it’s us.” And this is where he cannot go any further without asking. “What about you? Is… I heard One Two was-”

And it is Mumbles who kills One Two, puts the final nail in his terrible coffin, when his face changes and he shakes his head grimly. “Sorry, mate,” he says. “Didn’t realize you didn’t know… you have been pretty cut off, haven’t you?” Eames can’t speak, so Mumbles continues, shifting his weight. “One Two never made it out of London. When Johnny’s little bomb of a job went off, it took him with. We were the lucky ones.” He hesitates, then, “Sorry,” as gently as he can. “I know what he meant to you.”

Eames doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. Suddenly he finds himself back on track, gunning more than ever to take Johnny the fuck down.

“It’s… I’m all right,” she says. “I’m not alone these days anyway.”

Mumbles is quick to brighten. “Oh no? So who are you with then?”

“No one you know,” says Eames evasively; for some reason she doesn’t want to talk about me. “Least I don’t think so.”

“Wouldn’t be the same no-one-Johnny-knows, would it?”

Eames looks at him. “Yeah,” she says. “Look. Let’s stop fucking about here. We both came here on business and I’m about ninety percent certain this is a huge fuck-off trap. We need to decide what to do, and we need to take this prick down, once and for all.”

One Two is dead. She can’t really deal with this information. Fucking hell, she can’t.

“Right, all right,” he says, a little surprised, a little excited. “Let’s get on that, for certain. Somewhere else, though-projections are getting suspicious. Gives me the willies.”

Eames can only nod and follow Mumbles out into the street they used to walk together, follow him to a different building, an empty room. What used to be Bob’s flat.

“Why here?” she murmurs.

“Closest,” he says, picking the lock. “Come on.”

That’s all well and good for Eames. Eames feels like he’s getting somewhere, at the high cost of learning which of his friends is dead; at least he thinks he knows something about what’s going on. Good for Eames.

I, on the other hand, am getting increasingly frustrated and increasingly lost. Our clock is ticking down and we don’t even know where the fuck our mark is. At this point it’s just embarrassing.

And this is when I spot Eames again. Not Eames the girl, but Eames.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I say urgently as I get near him. “Why’d you drop character? What if he sees you?”

And he looks at me, and I realize, belatedly, this guy is way younger, this guy has different hair, this guy isn’t dressed anything like Eames dresses. This guy is a wanderer of the streets, he makes his living through petty criminal endeavors, dresses like a regular person, bears no lovely, cultivated affectations, is barebones and all-natural; most of all, he’s not real. He blinks at me, unfamiliar, unassuming-I haven’t raised any alarm bells, but dangerously, terrifyingly all the same, I am talking to Johnny Quid’s subconscious.

“Sorry, I’m not sure we’ve met,” he says. “I’m Bob.” And he holds out a hand.

Oh my god.

“Bob,” I say. I stare at his hand. “Your name is Robert.”

He snorts. “Well fuck, if you’re my mum, maybe,” he says. “Everybody calls me Bob. Or Handsome Bob. Maybe you know me better that way?”

Handsome-fuck.

Handsome fucking Wild Bunch Bob.

Arthur, you complete idiot.

“Robert Eames,” is all I can say, because it actually tastes good, somehow, saying it makes him like a real person even though he’s off somewhere else pretending to be a fake person who doesn’t look anything like a Robert or an Eames, and this handsome lovely disturbingly-same person in front of me, frowning at me with that same mouth, is actually nothing at all.

“Was there something you wanted?” he says.

I stare at him. He’s always been beautiful. Handsome Bob suits him.

“Sorry,” I say quietly. Finally I take his hand, which is still hanging there, limp and confused. “I’m Arthur.”

Bob’s flat looks like he left it, as it ought to.

Mumbles goes again to the window.

“So what’re you thinking?” he says. “You’re saying he’s run off somewhere… and Archy’s in on the whole game, right?”

“We don’t know that, I suppose,” says Eames, and he drops character because what’s the point, now? Mumbles catches sight of him and looks at him in amazement.

“That’s insane,” he says. “I’ve never worked with a forger before, only heard about it. Brilliant stuff, mate. You’re looking well, by the way.”

Eames can’t hear any of this. “If Archy is in on this,” he says slowly, “why get us inside Johnny’s head? Why not just spring this on us up above?”

Maybe it’s saying up above that clicks something else into place here-whatever it is, Eames suddenly lifts his head and says, “Wait a minute. How’d they even hook you up? You would have had to see us all asleep there-wouldn’t you have known-”

Mumbles isn’t listening, looking out the window. “Say, is that your mate down there? Pretty, Oxford-lookin’ bloke, talkin’ you up?”

This description, Eames knows, is almost certainly me; impatiently, Eames says, “Talking me-wait, what?”

Mumbles glances back at him and points out the window. “Your projection’s down there, charming the pants off some kid.” He looks back out. “Looks like he’s just as good at it as you were, too.”

“What?!” Eames rushes to the window, every other discrepancy forgotten. And there I am, talking to Bob. Bob is obviously flirting; I look completely disoriented. Eames didn’t even think about the possibility of this. How could he not have thought of this? “Shit. Shit fucking shit. I can’t believe I didn’t-” He stops short because Bob is reaching forward to whisper something in my ear, and for reasons I don’t entirely understand at this moment in time, I turn my head and I kiss him.

For several seconds Eames stands there watching us and gives himself a fair chance to react to this. There is, however, no immediately suitable reaction that volunteers itself. So he turns to leave. “Mumbles, I have to-”

Eames isn’t quite sure what has happened until he gathers that he is pinned against the wall, an arm across his throat, a surprisingly strong body pressed against his.

“Like I said, mate,” says Mumbles, sneering, an expression Eames has never ever seen on him. “No one calls me Mumbles.”

And that is probably, Eames realizes, because he isn’t Mumbles at all.

Johnny grins at him. “Handsome Bob,” he says proudly, like he’s talking to a protégé.

Once again, making this probably a record number of instances Eames has been caught off guard in so small an amount of time, Eames is completely without a coherent response. He settles, pretty understandably, for outright panic. “What the f-”

“You really thought I’d gone stupid, didn’t you?” says Johnny coldly, pressing his arm harder against Eames’s throat, cutting him off. “Did you actually think I wouldn’t know about this business? Think you’re the only forger in town?” He smirks, a scary, all-too-familiar face, and loosens his grip a little and gives Eames a condescending pat on the cheek. “Well, you’ve got another think coming, Bobby-boy.”

And this, for those of you not following this in a tactically-minded manner, is where we are officially, old-school, Real-RocknRolla proper-fucked.

The End! kidding. I'm kidding. It continues here.