Brick/Inception: Après Moi, le Deluge

[osaki_nana_707]

Title: Après Moi, le Deluge (2/24)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Brick/Inception fusion
Word count: 3,492
Pairing: later Brendan(Arthur)xEames, mentions of BrendanxEmily and BrendanxLaura
Rating: R
Warnings: currently violence, language, mentions of character death
Summary: Brendan should have known better than to tug on loose threads. He should have known that one loose thread was all it took to make everything unravel, but he’d been tired and just wanted things to be done. He should have known well enough that things were never done.

Special thanks to wadebramwilson for betaing! <3



TWO

When Brendan came to, he felt like his head been split wide open. He cracked his eyes open to searing brightness that sent pain lancing through his nerves, blinding him. He winced, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to survey his situation using his other senses.

It was uncomfortably quiet, and his body was stiff against a cold, metal chair. His feet were tied to the legs, and his hands were tied behind his back. Goosebumps had risen on the skin of his arms from the chill in the air, magnified by the fact that his sweatshirt was now missing and his t-shirt and jeans were still slightly damp from the rain.

If his clothes were still damp, he figured he hadn't been here long. He couldn't be all that far outside of San Clemente if outside of it at all.

After a few deep breaths in the attempt to will the pain away, he ventured to slowly open his eyes again. The room slowly faded into focus. Metal table. Empty chair on the other side. Light bulb hanging naked from the ceiling. The floor was linoleum and the walls were brick, and there was a mirror built into the wall opposite him that he would put money on being a two-way. The thick door to the side of it was painted a rusted red color.

"Hey," Brendan croaked towards the mirror, "does somebody want to tell me why I'm here?" The walls of the small room seemed to swallow his voice, the silence creeping over it to squash it back down until the door creaked open.

In entered the man from before-the man who had shot him, Brendan remembered. He looked down at his leg and found his pants leg had been rolled up to the knee and the bullet wound bandaged up.

"I didn't want to shoot you," the man said lightly. "You didn't exactly give me a choice."

"What made you think I was just going to go with you?" Brendan asked. "You give me the buzz, threaten to fill me with daylight, and you don't expect me to blow?"

The man sighed, sitting down at the table, placing the pistol on top of it. "I merely wanted you to know I meant business. Look, we don't want to rub you out, all right? If we'd wanted you six feet under, you'd already be there. You know that, right? You're a smart kid."

Brendan only responded with a sniff.

"Okay," the man grumbled, running his hands over his hair. "Look. I've got you behind the eight ball here, kid, so can you try and cooperate? If you don't at least attempt to give us what we want, you're just as good dead to us as alive."

"What is it that you want then?" Brendan asked.

The man sat back in his chair, digging a gasper out of his breast pocket and lighting it. He took a long drag off of it before focusing his gaze on Brendan again. "You were involved in the war with the Pin. We both know that, so there's no need to be denying it here."

"I don't recall denying anything."

The man worked his jaw. Brendan really wished he had a name to put to this guy's face. "What we don't know," he continued, "is why. Why did you choose to get involved? Now, I need you to tell me what your angle is in all of this."

"Why? What do you think I'm trying to do?"

"We know someone in San Clemente hacked into our servers last night. We know you've got an inside guy doing the job, and while we don't know who that is, we do know what information he stole. We want to know what you expect to do with the PASIV."

For a minute Brendan thought that he'd cut off his sentence too early. Perhaps he was referring to Brendan's passive-aggressive behavior? That didn't make sense. All he could do was stare back at him blankly.

"We know you know about it," the man said.

"I know from nothing," Brendan replied simply.

"Don't play dumb," the man growled. "You working for Miles?"

"Who's Miles?"

"No one just goes looking for this information without plans to do something with it. Did the Pin tell you about it? Was he planning on using you in our circle? Did you sell him out to the bulls so that you could stake your own claim in the market? Spill."

"Listen," Brendan said, exhaling, "you can give me the third degree all you want, but I'm not lying to you when I tell you I don't know anything. I'm not your meat. You've got the wrong guy. Yeah, I was running in the Pin's circle for a bit, but he's dead, so that's over now. We can sit here jawing, and you can grill me all day, but my answer's going to be the same. I know from nothing. That's the crop."

The man looked frustrated, his anger simmering just below the surface. Brendan never faltered.

"We'll see." The man stood and left the room, twirling his gat around his finger as the heavy door shut behind him. The smell of cigarette smoke was still pungent even after he was gone.

Brendan had to think up some sort of escape plan, and he didn't know how much time he had to do it. He had no idea where he was (bad), was currently quite literally tied up (bad), and the contact his skull had made with the street was making it hard to concentrate for long periods of time (really bad). This mystery man really wasn't kidding when he said he had Brendan behind the eight ball. He knew that it didn't matter what he told them-they were going to believe whatever they wanted, and unless he played along they were probably going to throw him in a ditch somewhere and put a hole in him to make sure the trip to the big sleep would be as unpleasant as possible.

If he snitched about what he did know, he knew that it would be Brain in that ditch instead, and he wasn't about to put another body on his name in the attempt to come away clean.

Someone had to have noticed he was missing by now at least. He'd been at school earlier but hadn't showed up for class after lunch. Everyone probably thought he just cut out, went home to sleep. He was pretty sure even the VP wouldn't blame him too harshly considering the ragged state he'd ended up in by the end of the war. He'd gotten him answers by any means and helped take down the biggest drug ring in town-a little truancy was well-deserved.

It wasn't helping him now, however, since he knew no one would be asking questions just yet. He was always off somewhere else these days, so even his mother probably wouldn't realize something was wrong until a few days from now, and by then he'd probably already be bumped off. Brain would know something was hinky though, and that was who he could count on. The Brain had been wary about this information he'd dug up from the beginning, and if Brendan disappeared off the map, he knew Brain was smart enough to connect the dots.

He just hoped he connected them soon enough because escaping didn't really look like much of an option at the moment.

The door opened again, and Brendan turned to see the same man from before with two other men and a bulky silver suitcase. It took him a moment to place where he'd seen it before.

The blueprints.

"What's that?" Brendan asked, nodding his head to the case as it was set on the table.

"You know what it is," one of the guys, a dark-skinned man with a goatee and a tattoo of a four-leafed clover on his neck mumbled. He was some form of Middle Eastern, though Brendan couldn't identify exactly where. Egypt, perhaps.

The maybe-Egyptian man pulled out a syringe and pressed the needle to Brendan's jugular. "Hold still," he commanded, and Brendan wasn't about to disobey even if he didn't know what was in it.

"Are you going to tell me what this is all about?" Brendan asked as the needle pressed inside the vein. After a couple of seconds he found himself growing rapidly woozy. A sedative.

The third guy, pale and rail thin with messy light brown hair and eyes of the same color, was watching the scene unfold from the other side of the table. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a cardigan, and a bowler hat with a feather in the brim, and he was quite possibly the least threatening man Brendan had ever seen. He couldn't have been much older than Brendan even, maybe in his early twenties. Brendan noted before his brain turned completely to mush that he might be his ticket out of here if he could convince him.

The last thing he heard was the smoking man's voice, "Haji, is he out?"

Brendan turned to look at the radio sitting on the counter. It was playing music softly, an older song, unfamiliar. "Are you true, I wish I knew, I'm in the middle of a riddle 'cause I'm so in love with you."

He took in the décor of the diner he was sitting in, the white tables and red booths, the cat-clock hanging over the bar. There were ketchup and mustard bottles on either side of the napkin dispensers on each table. Outside the window was a bustling street lined with shops.

"Though I show I love you so, I've got the feeling you're concealing something that I ought to know," the woman's voice on the radio crooned.

"Brendan."

Brendan jerked and then turned to look across the table. The Pin was sitting there, mallard-headed cane laid out across the tabletop, expression as unreadable as always. Brendan was pretty sure there was something he knew about the Pin that applied here, but he couldn't recall what it was.

He was about to ask the Pin what the hell they were doing in this place when a waitress came by and set a cup of coffee down in front of him. "Do you take sugar? Cream?" she asked.

"N-no, this… this is fine, thanks," Brendan said, nodding awkwardly. He turned back to the Pin to watch him accept a glass of orange juice.

The Pin took a sip from his glass before saying, "I'm in a bit of a jam here. As you probably already know, Laura's flown the coop, some of my boys have been planted, and a whole lot of others have been put under glass. I can't even go back to my joint because of the bulls. That's why I called you here."

"Oh," Brendan said, though he didn't remember being called. It made sense though, he supposed. Why else would he be here? "Um."

"I need your help. You know the drill."

Brendan didn't. "You need me to do something?" he asked.

"I've got a shipment of Somnacin," the Pin replied. "You're the only person I've got to run it. Think you can handle it?"

"I… what? I've never run drugs for you in the past."

"Yes, well… I'm a little understaffed, and you know how important this is."

"No… actually I don't," Brendan admitted. "What's… Somnacin? I… I feel like I've heard that before, but…" He winced, a headache suddenly sparking in his head. "Something… something is screwy here." He lifted his coffee cup to his mouth, hoping the strength of it would help him focus.

…but the coffee was tasteless, as if he wasn't drinking a thing. "No, this doesn't make any sense. What's the grift? What's… No."

The Pin's expression was vaguely confused. "You don't know what I'm chinning."

The radio sang, "I've got a feeling you're concealing something that I ought to know."

Brendan set his mug down, finding his hands were shaking a little. "You… Tug… Dode… Em… You're dead, so you can't be real. This… all of this isn't real."

The entire diner fell silent except for the song on the radio, and he turned to see the staff all staring at them. A quick glance out the window showed that all of the people on the street had stopped to look in at them too.

Brendan felt a shiver run through him, but he didn't let his discomfort show on his face. He looked back at the Pin, or at least the person who was pretending to be him. "Who are you really?"

With a blink, Brendan was no longer looking at the Pin but at the skinny, pale boy in the bowler hat from… wait.

"You need to stay calm," the boy said. "Just take a deep breath."

"What the fuck is going on here?" Brendan asked.

He remembered now. He had been in that cold interrogation room, tied up. Three ginks had come into the room with that suitcase from the blueprints, and then he'd been injected with a sedative. That was all he remembered.

The cups on the table started to tremble as though an earthquake was rumbling beneath them.

"Brendan, I need you to stay calm. Seriously," the bowler hat boy said nervously.

The bell over the door jingled as it swung open, but both of them ignored it.

"Tell me what's going on!" Brendan demanded.

"L-look, my name Charlie, Charlie Figaro, and I'm a forger. My partners, Haji and Monroe-we're just trying to keep our heads above water, you know? This was the only way to be sure you were square when it came to what you knew."

"This? What exactly is this?" Brendan asked, but as soon as the question was out of his mouth, he immediately forgot about it. Someone was standing next to their table.

No. Not someone.

Emily.

"Uh… friend of yours?" Charlie asked, voice a little shaky.

"Am I dreaming?" Brendan asked.

"Actually-" Charlie started, but Emily leaped at Brendan, pulling a brick out of nowhere and smashing it into his face. The first thing Brendan registered was absolutely blinding pain. It would take a stronger man than him not to cry out, but he wasn't really sure what he was doing for a moment. He brought his hands up to his face, purely on instinct and found that they came back dripping with blood. He turned his eyes up to the offending figure only to find the brick crashing into his face again, shattering his jaw and causing him to spit teeth.

"You said you'd keep me safe!" she shouted, and Brendan couldn't even respond before the brick connected with his neck and snapped it. His body went numb and Brendan could practically feel his body stop functioning. He was dying. Then building was collapsing around them as Brendan's vision faded.

Brendan's eyes snapped open to the familiar white brick of the interrogation room. His arms had been untied so that Monroe and the other men could have access to his veins. That much was clear because his arms were on the table, and there was a long wiry tube connected to his arm via needle from the machine they'd brought in. The others in the room had them connected to their arms as well.

It was a dream.

It was really all just a dream.

…and they had been inside of that dream. It didn't take two seconds for Brendan to put it together.

He yanked the needle out of his arm, flecking drops of blood across the floor but found he was still moving sluggishly because of the sedative. The others were already waking up, and he was still tied to the chair by the legs. He needed to move faster. Brendan moved to untie the binds on his legs, but he only managed to get one leg free before he heard a click.

Brendan felt before he looked up to find that Monroe had pressed his pistol to Brendan's forehead. "So. You want to say that you don't know anything now? Your subconscious ripped us apart when we tried to extract from you. You'd better spill right now."

"Monroe. Stop-stop!" Charlie interrupted, appearing in Brendan's view as he grabbed hold of Monroe's arm. "He knows nil. I was forged as the Pin and he still didn't sing."

"His projections are psychopaths," Haji complained. "You're going to tell me he isn't militarized?"

"The weapons were crude at best," Charlie replied. "That's not the mind of someone trained to fight off extractors-that's a mind of someone who's seen a lot of violence. He didn't even know he was dreaming. I can read people. I know it's the truth."

Brendan managed to tear his eyes away from the gun and look at the two. Monroe's face creased in conflict, anger threatening to spill out. "Well, Charles, what do you suggest we do with him then?"

"I-I don't know, Monroe," Charlie stammered. "I mean, yeah, he knows too much now, but isn't that sort of our fault? Haji even said we shouldn't jump to conclusions-"

"He's the only one who could have," Monroe argued. "He's the only one with connections to the Pin that made a clean sweep of the joint when the war broke out. He's gum-shoeing for the bulls or maybe just for his own interests, but everyone else is in stir so it had to be him who sold out our supplier. He's the only one still free as a fucking bird! Wells is going to send his button men after us for fucking this up. It was our job to find the rat!"

"We haven't failed yet," Haji reminded. "It's just a minor setback."

Brendan cut his eyes towards Haji momentarily. He could tell what he meant by that immediately.

They would just have to off the boy who knew too much and keep on moving.

Then, Brendan remembered he'd managed to untie one of his legs.

With one swift movement, he kicked Monroe in-between the legs, and when he howled in pain, Brendan used the distraction to grab his gun. He threw himself to his feet and aimed the gun at the others while his free hand scrambled to get his other leg untied. The group was understandably a little caught off guard, and Brendan for one was grateful for that.

Haji moved for his own pistol, but Brendan got his leg free at that moment and surprised him by pitching the metal chair in his direction. The clang it made as it hit the wall mere inches from his head was a bit deafening. Brendan kept the pistol trained on the group as he backed up against the door. Monroe made a step and Brendan fired, the bullet burying into the wall. For a moment all they could do was stand there, waiting for the other to make a move.

Eventually, Haji snorted. "You don't even know if there are any bullets left in that pea-shooter."

In one swift movement, Brendan fired again, and this time the bullet slammed into Haji's shoulder. Brendan grabbed the handle of the device on the table, fired off two more bullets, and bolted out the door.

He tore through the warehouse he'd apparently been stashed in, pushing through the pain in his injured leg. He turned back to fire the last of his bullets without slowing his gait. They were firing at him too now, and he couldn't risk slowing down.

By some miracle, he made it outside, but he didn't stop. Rain was pelting him in the face, dripping into his eyes and sticking curls across his forehead, but even through the drops on his glasses he knew he was in the industrial district. He tucked the gun into the back of his jeans and covered it with his shirt before hurrying across the street. He knew these goons wouldn't fire at him in a public area like this. There were people who could see and call the bulls (and odds were good that they'd already been called strictly because of the sound of gunfire). He heard a truck's horn blare as the others tried to give chase, and he used that moment to cut down an alleyway and then another. He took only a moment to remove his shoes and shove them under his arm.

Eventually, he made it out of the industrial district. He climbed a tree and sat in it, the device against his chest. He stayed there for hours, soaked through and exhausted, and only climbed down when he was positive he'd lost his pursuers. He put his shoes back on and trudged with squelching footsteps to a nearby payphone.

"Brain," he said after dialing. "Can you get your mom's car? Come and pick me up."

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