Brick/Inception: Après Moi, le Deluge
Title: Après Moi, le Deluge (3/24)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Brick/Inception fusion
Word count: 3,776
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
THREE
"You don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble," was the first thing Brain said when he pulled up outside the phone booth. He was silent for a moment while he took in Brendan's appearance-hair and clothes sopping wet, his arms folded around himself as he stood there shivering. There was dried blood crusted to his forehead that no amount of rain water could just wash off. "Jesus, Brendan."
Brendan limped to the passenger side and climbed into the seat. His wounded leg was throbbing in pain after his daring escape. It was a miracle he'd managed to run on it at all.
He took his glasses off as Brain mercifully blasted the car's heater and scrubbed his face with both hands. "Drive somewhere but don't take me home or to school."
"My joint then?" Brain asked.
"Yeah, fine."
Brendan kept his eyes closed for the majority of the drive, letting the sound of the wheels on the asphalt lull him into a light slumber. Brain was thankfully quiet as well, considerate of the state he was in.
When they arrived at the house, Brendan followed him inside. It was a small and typical of the more modest San Clemente cul-de-sacs, sporting a single garage bay and Mediterranean-style design. Brendan and Brain slipped in through the garage, finding themselves in the laundry room. They continued through the kitchen, bypassing the living room where Brain's mother chuckled over the canned laughter on the television, and headed directly for Brain's bedroom at the back right end of the house.
Brain's bedroom was, for lack of a better word, cluttered. His bookcase was filled to the brim with different texts and piles of papers; brain-teaser game manuals that had probably been filled out too quickly to really entertain lay stacked. His desk was equally loaded high though with different bits and pieces of technology that Brendan couldn't identify as well as the blueprints from earlier. His bed was unmade, his clothes sticking out of his dresser drawers haphazardly, and in any empty spot on any available surface sat what had to be the kitchen's complete collection of coffee cups.
Brain left Brendan in the room for a moment, returning with an arm full of towels. "Here. Dry off. I'll get you some of my rags."
Brendan put the device down on Brain's bed (since there was quite literally no other place to put it) and stripped out of his sopping clothes. His wrists and ankles were bruised from his restraints, as was his arm where he'd ripped the needle out. The new marks were coming up in dark purples and blues on top of the canvas of fading yellow and green ones. Generally though, he seemed relatively unscathed apart from the bullet wound. He dried himself off and then pulled on a pair of Brain's boxers before sitting down on the bed and carefully lifting his leg to observe the wound. The bandages were about ruined from the water so it didn't take much to remove them. The wound underneath was a bit ghastly, but it had been tended to.
"What happened?" Brain asked, and he didn't sound terribly shocked or concerned. Brendan was pretty sure he was used to this by now. This truth was made all the more apparent by the way he dug a first aid kit out of one of his bottom drawers without even thinking and crouched down to look at the wound. Brendan recalled Brain patching him up a little after the entire thing with Jerr went down. Brendan had taken a knife to the side back then, and though it had only been a small cut, after Emily had dumped him he'd been too brokenhearted to keep tending to it and had allowed it to get infected. Brendan would trust Brain with his cuts and bruises far more than any doctor, so he'd been the only one he considered going to for help.
"Last time I did this, your face was just as wet," Brain said, peering at Brendan's leg in interest, cataloguing the shape of the hole and the extent of the damage. Brendan was sure Brain was having a ridiculously good time trying to figure out what sort of gat it was and exactly the distance there had been between Brendan and the shooter.
"There's no point in dwelling on past incidents right now," Brendan mumbled.
"So what's the wire?"
"Turns out you were right about those blueprints. You hacking into that system caused a real stir, and they want my head for it."
"Who does?"
"Not sure yet. All I know is the Pin was a supplier and dealer of this Somnacin, and now that he's cut down they want to find out who caused it. I guess they need a name to take back to their boss now that everything's flopped so they have someone to pin the blame on. My guess is that a stash of this stuff got snagged, and since you and I were poking our noses in, they think it was me."
"Why would you have nicked it? You don't even know what it is."
"Actually, I'm starting to understand it, but it's irrelevant because whether I knew what it was or not that doesn't mean I couldn't sell it. It does make me wonder who got their mitts on it."
"You know what it does?"
"Sort of, but again, it's not important right now." Brendan leaned forward at Brain's command and allowed him to clean the gash at his hairline. It stung, but Brendan had felt worse pain. "I imagine a couple of hours of you fiddling with that machine I brought will give more answers than my shots in the dark. Have you got your computer up and running again?"
"I'd be ashamed of myself if I hadn't," Brain replied, taping a bandage over the wound. "I don't think they'll be shutting me down again anytime soon either."
"Good. Let me know if any of these words bring anything up."
Brain moved to his chair and opened his laptop. Brendan flopped down on the bed. "PASIV is one. I think it's this device. Miles-he's a person, and apparently these guys want to know if I'm working for him. Extraction. Oh, and the names Monroe, Haji, and Charlie Figaro."
Brain was already hastily typing away. "Are you going to tell me what this PASIV device does?"
"It's not exactly simple to explain," Brendan sighed. "These three mugs hooked me up to it and used it to root around in my head. I was cooled before I could see how it works, but the next thing I knew I was sitting in a diner and bumping gums with the Pin."
"Drugged?"
"Dreaming," Brendan supplied. "Apparently this whatever-it-is allows access into people's dreams. That's all I could really get out of it."
"So maybe extraction means they were trying to extract information."
"Fits."
"Okay, so…" Brain was quiet for a beat. "Maybe Montgomery Miles?"
"Who?"
"English guy, lives in France with his wife and daughter. He came up on the first page of my search. There are lots of different articles here. He's got degrees out the wazoo in all sorts of things-art, architecture, psychology, physics. Says here that he's got a particular interest with working in the psychology of dreams. He might be your guy."
"It's possible," Brendan said. "Even if he isn't, maybe he'd be able to help out with this machine. Find out his contact information."
"What are you going to do in the meantime?" Brain asked.
"I don't know… Head hurts… I can't go back to my place."
"You can bunk here. I'll probably be up all night tinkering. Besides, you're supposed to rest when you have a concussion."
"I thought you were supposed to stay awake."
"Nah, that's a myth."
Brain hit a few keys on his laptop. "I'll have the computer do the work hunting down all this information. In the meantime, I definitely want to take a look at this PASIV device."
Brendan responded with a low noise in his throat.
"Hey," Brain said, "Put your rags on before you fall asleep."
Brendan let out another wordless sound but swung himself back into a sitting position. Unfortunately, it was a bit too sudden of a movement, and suddenly his head was spinning and he was falling forward. Brain somehow managed to catch him and haul him back onto the bed.
"You are just lousy with bad luck," Brain sighed and helped him into the sweatpants and t-shirt.
Brendan awoke the next morning to see Brain still sitting at his desk, tinkering. He likely hadn't slept a wink, but he didn't seem bothered by it. It wasn't that surprising-Brain wasn't called 'Brain' for no reason. He probably had a hard time turning his thoughts off at night, he imagined.
Brendan himself was tucked in, glasses on the bedside table. He felt achy and sore all over from his marathon run the day before (his leg in particular was throbbing rather badly). He didn't want to move, but he sat up anyway. At least his head wasn't hurting quite as badly.
He put his specs on and blinked sleepily. "Brain?" he questioned, voice still heavy with sleep.
"The mechanics of this device are fascinating," Brain replied as a good morning. "How's your noodle?"
Brendan ran a hand through the tangle of curls on his head. "Better. How'd the search go?"
"I pulled up some results," Brain said, "though there isn't much. These palookas who nabbed you have criminal records."
"Dope peddling?"
"More like theft. Apparently all sorts of governments have them on their most wanted lists for theft of information."
"And the PASIV?"
"You bet. If what I found is correct, it looks like this PASIV device has been used in the military, top secret stuff. This guy, Monroe, was part of one of the programs, went AWOL and took the PASIV with him. Apparently him and these other mugs have been using it on the criminal underground, but I wasn't able to find out much about that."
"So why have the blueprints online?" Brendan asked.
"I don't know," Brain shrugged. "My guess is that they've been upgrading it. It looks like they use it to go into people's dreams like you said, but I'm not completely sure of everything yet. I can only give you my best guess."
"Shoot."
"I would think they use it to steal top secret information-I mean, if you're dreaming, odds are you won't remember it much when you wake up, and this Somnacin stuff probably muddles it even more. If caught at the right time, that stuff can be pulled out of someone's brain and sold off to the right buyer without them even knowing it happened."
"I guess we can see why they're so wanted then, huh."
"These guys are small time compared to this John Wells. Seems to me like he's the high pillow in this 'mind crime' business."
"They're taking their orders from him. I guess the Pin was working for him too."
"So, what now?"
Brendan frowned, looking at his lap. "I don't know yet. I think I'm just going to lay low for a bit and then drop a dime for this Miles guy and see what he can do to help."
"You don't know the meaning of laying low. You always make everyone's troubles yours."
"Maybe so," Brendan sighed, "but I certainly don't want to go parading around town now that I've got gats trained on me."
"So, should I make coffee?"
The morning was spent digging up what little information there was on Brendan's captors, and admittedly it was far from satisfying. Apparently Monroe had lived a fairly ordinary life before his stint in the military. Haji had lived in Egypt at the beginning of his life but had settled in London when he was seventeen, initially going to school for architecture but falling into a life of crime when he owed some bad debts. He'd worked his way up through the crime circles until no one could touch him and then vanished a little over a year ago, popping up again in cahoots with the dreamshare community. Charlie had been a struggling actor with a lot of potential and had even had small parts in a few shows on the West End, but he also had a talent as a pickpocket. He was originally from Nevada, but he'd been living in California for two years now. He was also much older than Brendan initially thought, nearly in his thirties.
"So, what a surprise," Brain had said sarcastically, "they're criminals."
Information on Montgomery Miles was entirely scarcer. He had been published in a few journals but other than that was completely off the radar. Even his contact information was hard to come by. In the hours Brain spent searching, he was only able to come up with an e-mail address for Miles's daughter, Malorie.
"I guess you could always just ask her," Brain offered. After a few clicks, he pulled up a picture of her and announced, "You should definitely ask her."
Brendan had been spending his time with a French translation book and the PASIV blueprints in the attempt to turn the code to English, but Brain's words caused him to look up.
Mal was young, vibrant, and absolutely stunningly beautiful. Her hair was long and wavy and the color of chestnut and her eyes a deep blue. Brendan knew immediately that she was dangerous.
"Dangerous?" Brain had said when Brendan had told him as much. "How is she dangerous?"
"In my experience, dames that beautiful have always been dangerous," Brendan replied.
"She's not Laura, Brendan. Or Emily. Or even Kara."
"How would you know?" Brendan asked. "Can you figure someone out by a photograph?"
As much as Brain probably would have liked to have that ability, Brendan and he both knew that wasn't the case. Brain conceded, "She's the only angle we've got right now, unless you want to go hopping a plane to France."
"I might end up going to France anyway," Brendan reminded.
"Yeah, well, a little communication would be a good start. It'll give me time to scratch a passport for you."
"You do it. E-mail her but be discreet about it. Don't tell her who we are or where we are. Just tell her what we got and ask for her help. Barber a little. See if she bites."
"And you? What are you going to do?"
Brendan sat down on the bed again, pulling the PASIV device close to him. "A little experimentation."
"Wait, you… you're going to actually use that thing?"
"If I get nailed by one of these lugs again, they might put me back under. Now that I'm involved in all this, the rap is in my head, and they could steal it. Potentially that'd lead to a whole lot of bad, so I want to be able to defend myself. To do that, I need to know how to navigate my own mind so they can't get their answers. I need to at least try to be ready for what I'm up against."
"We still don't know if it's safe though," Brain said cautiously. "What about dosage? What about time?"
"That's what I'm going to find out," Brendan said, sliding the needle into his arm and setting the timer on the device for ten minutes, just as a test.
"What if you take too much of that dope and don't wake up? I'm not taking the blame for your death, Brendan."
"Then you keep your eye on me and make sure I wake up in ten minutes. Send the email."
Before Brain could interject again, Brendan depressed the plunger in the middle of the machine and instantly felt himself get swallowed up by sleep.
Brendan found himself walking down the road. The land on each side of it was flat and stretched out for eons under a cloudy, gray sky. He didn't remember why he was walking there, but he did know that he was supposed to remember something now that he was here.
Where am I? He thought. He seemed to be wandering in the middle of nowhere. From what he could tell, there weren't any buildings for miles… and that didn't make any sense. Why would he be sauntering down a road in the middle of nowhere?
Oh.
He had to think very hard, but slowly he managed to recall the device in Brain's room. The test he was performing. He was dreaming.
"Apparently my subconscious is pretty dull," Brendan said flatly as he glanced out across the vast nothingness. "Maybe I need to…"
As the idea came to him, buildings sprouted from the earth, rising up, up, up into the sky. They were simple towers at first, but as soon as a city surrounded him, the details started to fill themselves in. Windows and doors, thresholds and fire escapes and drain pipes and fireplaces… Signs and paint and flower boxes and trees… The world around him shifted and added and subtracted until he was standing in the middle of a city reminiscent of pictures he'd seen of New York and Chicago and Memphis. For several seconds all he could do was stare in absolute wonder.
He'd never experienced something quite like this before. He could definitely understand the appeal behind a machine like this.
With a turn of his head another building sprouted forth, and as he glanced out into the distance, neighborhoods started popping up. He blinked and there were people filing through the street, all faces vaguely familiar. Lots of them were kids from his school but others were people he'd seen around town. All of their faces had been buried in his mind somewhere all this time, even if he'd only seen them once or twice in passing. He was pretty sure Brain would be having a conniption fit if he was down in the dream with him right now. It was all just too fascinating.
He took to walking again, this time to explore the city he'd created. It was fairly simplistic, he supposed, all of it building up at simple intersections. It shifted at his whims, telephone booths coming together on the sidewalks and the streetlights flickering on as the sky shifted from day to night. The entire world was at his fingertips, though the people did not go as commanded. That was ensured when he mentally attempted to have one of the women on the street, a prim business type that reminded him a bit of his mother, hand over her briefcase. He was soundly ignored. He made a mental note of that.
He wondered how complicated he could make the city, so he got to work. It took him about an hour before he grew satisfied with his handiwork, street after street and alleyway after alleyway forming in the map in his mind. He wandered the streets, proud of his handiwork, nodding at passers-by strictly out of habit. For a minute or two, he completely forgot he was even dreaming. The world just seemed entirely real, and it was easy to pretend that it was until something else shifted slightly.
He did discover rather quickly that he didn't have that much say in what his subconscious filled the empty spaces with when he didn't think of anything in particular. He kept winding up mildly surprised as he came across something he hadn't expected, a street sign or a fountain that was reminiscent of San Clemente. The more un-thought of spaces he discovered, the more they were filled with the familiarity of his hometown, the only place he'd ever been. It crept in around the edges until he almost felt like he was awake and back home, and that was when he came across the tunnel.
God knows Brendan never would have put the tunnel there on purpose, but there it was, looming and dark as water trickled out from inside it. He was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, climbing down the concrete embankment and stepping carefully to the mouth. There wasn't even a hint of light inside.
Then there was the sound of footsteps echoing from inside. Clop. Clop. Clop.
Emily appeared before him, still in her white coat and plastic blue bracelets. Her nail polish was chipped, her brown heels scuffed, her waves of blonde hair dripping and matted. Even still, she was as beautiful as she ever was.
"I'm sorry, Brendan," she said, voice broken and sad just like it had been the last time he'd heard her alive.
"I could have saved you," Brendan whispered, unable to help himself. Somewhere inside he knew that this wasn't really Em, that this was just another piece of his own thoughts staring back at him, but she was so real, so exact, that it was hard to accept. The slope of her nose, her eyes clear and blue, her plush mouth with a smudge of lip gloss at the corner… All of it had been memorized so thoroughly. He wished that he could remember her in a better state than this. She deserved to be more glamorous than a walking corpse.
"You don't love me," she said.
"You're the only thing that I love."
She pulled out a brick and swung it at his face.
Brendan threw himself forward when he woke, panting and eyes wide. He could still feel the phantom pains of his skull being bashed in, but a quick touch to his hair revealed that it was still very much intact.
"Whoa-" Brain had said, jumping back when Brendan awoke. "Well, at least you're awake. Christ, Brendan, you look like you've been on a hayride with Dracula."
"I'm fine," Brendan said, running his hands over his face as he calmed down, hiding the tremor in his fingertips. "I'm… I'm fine. I must have misunderstood that timer."
Brain leaned over it, checking. "Yeah, I guess so. It still says you've got four and a half minutes."
"What?" Brendan crawled over to the PASIV to check. Sure enough, the timer was still counting down. "I was wandering around for over an hour."
"I guess time just moves more slowly in a dream."
Brendan paused for a moment as he mulled over this information and then nodded, swallowing hard.
"So, what woke you?"
"I died in the dream."
"How did you manage that?"
Brendan was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "Don't worry about it."
Brain thankfully didn't ask questions.
also available on AO3
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Brick/Inception fusion
Word count: 3,776
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
THREE
"You don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble," was the first thing Brain said when he pulled up outside the phone booth. He was silent for a moment while he took in Brendan's appearance-hair and clothes sopping wet, his arms folded around himself as he stood there shivering. There was dried blood crusted to his forehead that no amount of rain water could just wash off. "Jesus, Brendan."
Brendan limped to the passenger side and climbed into the seat. His wounded leg was throbbing in pain after his daring escape. It was a miracle he'd managed to run on it at all.
He took his glasses off as Brain mercifully blasted the car's heater and scrubbed his face with both hands. "Drive somewhere but don't take me home or to school."
"My joint then?" Brain asked.
"Yeah, fine."
Brendan kept his eyes closed for the majority of the drive, letting the sound of the wheels on the asphalt lull him into a light slumber. Brain was thankfully quiet as well, considerate of the state he was in.
When they arrived at the house, Brendan followed him inside. It was a small and typical of the more modest San Clemente cul-de-sacs, sporting a single garage bay and Mediterranean-style design. Brendan and Brain slipped in through the garage, finding themselves in the laundry room. They continued through the kitchen, bypassing the living room where Brain's mother chuckled over the canned laughter on the television, and headed directly for Brain's bedroom at the back right end of the house.
Brain's bedroom was, for lack of a better word, cluttered. His bookcase was filled to the brim with different texts and piles of papers; brain-teaser game manuals that had probably been filled out too quickly to really entertain lay stacked. His desk was equally loaded high though with different bits and pieces of technology that Brendan couldn't identify as well as the blueprints from earlier. His bed was unmade, his clothes sticking out of his dresser drawers haphazardly, and in any empty spot on any available surface sat what had to be the kitchen's complete collection of coffee cups.
Brain left Brendan in the room for a moment, returning with an arm full of towels. "Here. Dry off. I'll get you some of my rags."
Brendan put the device down on Brain's bed (since there was quite literally no other place to put it) and stripped out of his sopping clothes. His wrists and ankles were bruised from his restraints, as was his arm where he'd ripped the needle out. The new marks were coming up in dark purples and blues on top of the canvas of fading yellow and green ones. Generally though, he seemed relatively unscathed apart from the bullet wound. He dried himself off and then pulled on a pair of Brain's boxers before sitting down on the bed and carefully lifting his leg to observe the wound. The bandages were about ruined from the water so it didn't take much to remove them. The wound underneath was a bit ghastly, but it had been tended to.
"What happened?" Brain asked, and he didn't sound terribly shocked or concerned. Brendan was pretty sure he was used to this by now. This truth was made all the more apparent by the way he dug a first aid kit out of one of his bottom drawers without even thinking and crouched down to look at the wound. Brendan recalled Brain patching him up a little after the entire thing with Jerr went down. Brendan had taken a knife to the side back then, and though it had only been a small cut, after Emily had dumped him he'd been too brokenhearted to keep tending to it and had allowed it to get infected. Brendan would trust Brain with his cuts and bruises far more than any doctor, so he'd been the only one he considered going to for help.
"Last time I did this, your face was just as wet," Brain said, peering at Brendan's leg in interest, cataloguing the shape of the hole and the extent of the damage. Brendan was sure Brain was having a ridiculously good time trying to figure out what sort of gat it was and exactly the distance there had been between Brendan and the shooter.
"There's no point in dwelling on past incidents right now," Brendan mumbled.
"So what's the wire?"
"Turns out you were right about those blueprints. You hacking into that system caused a real stir, and they want my head for it."
"Who does?"
"Not sure yet. All I know is the Pin was a supplier and dealer of this Somnacin, and now that he's cut down they want to find out who caused it. I guess they need a name to take back to their boss now that everything's flopped so they have someone to pin the blame on. My guess is that a stash of this stuff got snagged, and since you and I were poking our noses in, they think it was me."
"Why would you have nicked it? You don't even know what it is."
"Actually, I'm starting to understand it, but it's irrelevant because whether I knew what it was or not that doesn't mean I couldn't sell it. It does make me wonder who got their mitts on it."
"You know what it does?"
"Sort of, but again, it's not important right now." Brendan leaned forward at Brain's command and allowed him to clean the gash at his hairline. It stung, but Brendan had felt worse pain. "I imagine a couple of hours of you fiddling with that machine I brought will give more answers than my shots in the dark. Have you got your computer up and running again?"
"I'd be ashamed of myself if I hadn't," Brain replied, taping a bandage over the wound. "I don't think they'll be shutting me down again anytime soon either."
"Good. Let me know if any of these words bring anything up."
Brain moved to his chair and opened his laptop. Brendan flopped down on the bed. "PASIV is one. I think it's this device. Miles-he's a person, and apparently these guys want to know if I'm working for him. Extraction. Oh, and the names Monroe, Haji, and Charlie Figaro."
Brain was already hastily typing away. "Are you going to tell me what this PASIV device does?"
"It's not exactly simple to explain," Brendan sighed. "These three mugs hooked me up to it and used it to root around in my head. I was cooled before I could see how it works, but the next thing I knew I was sitting in a diner and bumping gums with the Pin."
"Drugged?"
"Dreaming," Brendan supplied. "Apparently this whatever-it-is allows access into people's dreams. That's all I could really get out of it."
"So maybe extraction means they were trying to extract information."
"Fits."
"Okay, so…" Brain was quiet for a beat. "Maybe Montgomery Miles?"
"Who?"
"English guy, lives in France with his wife and daughter. He came up on the first page of my search. There are lots of different articles here. He's got degrees out the wazoo in all sorts of things-art, architecture, psychology, physics. Says here that he's got a particular interest with working in the psychology of dreams. He might be your guy."
"It's possible," Brendan said. "Even if he isn't, maybe he'd be able to help out with this machine. Find out his contact information."
"What are you going to do in the meantime?" Brain asked.
"I don't know… Head hurts… I can't go back to my place."
"You can bunk here. I'll probably be up all night tinkering. Besides, you're supposed to rest when you have a concussion."
"I thought you were supposed to stay awake."
"Nah, that's a myth."
Brain hit a few keys on his laptop. "I'll have the computer do the work hunting down all this information. In the meantime, I definitely want to take a look at this PASIV device."
Brendan responded with a low noise in his throat.
"Hey," Brain said, "Put your rags on before you fall asleep."
Brendan let out another wordless sound but swung himself back into a sitting position. Unfortunately, it was a bit too sudden of a movement, and suddenly his head was spinning and he was falling forward. Brain somehow managed to catch him and haul him back onto the bed.
"You are just lousy with bad luck," Brain sighed and helped him into the sweatpants and t-shirt.
Brendan awoke the next morning to see Brain still sitting at his desk, tinkering. He likely hadn't slept a wink, but he didn't seem bothered by it. It wasn't that surprising-Brain wasn't called 'Brain' for no reason. He probably had a hard time turning his thoughts off at night, he imagined.
Brendan himself was tucked in, glasses on the bedside table. He felt achy and sore all over from his marathon run the day before (his leg in particular was throbbing rather badly). He didn't want to move, but he sat up anyway. At least his head wasn't hurting quite as badly.
He put his specs on and blinked sleepily. "Brain?" he questioned, voice still heavy with sleep.
"The mechanics of this device are fascinating," Brain replied as a good morning. "How's your noodle?"
Brendan ran a hand through the tangle of curls on his head. "Better. How'd the search go?"
"I pulled up some results," Brain said, "though there isn't much. These palookas who nabbed you have criminal records."
"Dope peddling?"
"More like theft. Apparently all sorts of governments have them on their most wanted lists for theft of information."
"And the PASIV?"
"You bet. If what I found is correct, it looks like this PASIV device has been used in the military, top secret stuff. This guy, Monroe, was part of one of the programs, went AWOL and took the PASIV with him. Apparently him and these other mugs have been using it on the criminal underground, but I wasn't able to find out much about that."
"So why have the blueprints online?" Brendan asked.
"I don't know," Brain shrugged. "My guess is that they've been upgrading it. It looks like they use it to go into people's dreams like you said, but I'm not completely sure of everything yet. I can only give you my best guess."
"Shoot."
"I would think they use it to steal top secret information-I mean, if you're dreaming, odds are you won't remember it much when you wake up, and this Somnacin stuff probably muddles it even more. If caught at the right time, that stuff can be pulled out of someone's brain and sold off to the right buyer without them even knowing it happened."
"I guess we can see why they're so wanted then, huh."
"These guys are small time compared to this John Wells. Seems to me like he's the high pillow in this 'mind crime' business."
"They're taking their orders from him. I guess the Pin was working for him too."
"So, what now?"
Brendan frowned, looking at his lap. "I don't know yet. I think I'm just going to lay low for a bit and then drop a dime for this Miles guy and see what he can do to help."
"You don't know the meaning of laying low. You always make everyone's troubles yours."
"Maybe so," Brendan sighed, "but I certainly don't want to go parading around town now that I've got gats trained on me."
"So, should I make coffee?"
The morning was spent digging up what little information there was on Brendan's captors, and admittedly it was far from satisfying. Apparently Monroe had lived a fairly ordinary life before his stint in the military. Haji had lived in Egypt at the beginning of his life but had settled in London when he was seventeen, initially going to school for architecture but falling into a life of crime when he owed some bad debts. He'd worked his way up through the crime circles until no one could touch him and then vanished a little over a year ago, popping up again in cahoots with the dreamshare community. Charlie had been a struggling actor with a lot of potential and had even had small parts in a few shows on the West End, but he also had a talent as a pickpocket. He was originally from Nevada, but he'd been living in California for two years now. He was also much older than Brendan initially thought, nearly in his thirties.
"So, what a surprise," Brain had said sarcastically, "they're criminals."
Information on Montgomery Miles was entirely scarcer. He had been published in a few journals but other than that was completely off the radar. Even his contact information was hard to come by. In the hours Brain spent searching, he was only able to come up with an e-mail address for Miles's daughter, Malorie.
"I guess you could always just ask her," Brain offered. After a few clicks, he pulled up a picture of her and announced, "You should definitely ask her."
Brendan had been spending his time with a French translation book and the PASIV blueprints in the attempt to turn the code to English, but Brain's words caused him to look up.
Mal was young, vibrant, and absolutely stunningly beautiful. Her hair was long and wavy and the color of chestnut and her eyes a deep blue. Brendan knew immediately that she was dangerous.
"Dangerous?" Brain had said when Brendan had told him as much. "How is she dangerous?"
"In my experience, dames that beautiful have always been dangerous," Brendan replied.
"She's not Laura, Brendan. Or Emily. Or even Kara."
"How would you know?" Brendan asked. "Can you figure someone out by a photograph?"
As much as Brain probably would have liked to have that ability, Brendan and he both knew that wasn't the case. Brain conceded, "She's the only angle we've got right now, unless you want to go hopping a plane to France."
"I might end up going to France anyway," Brendan reminded.
"Yeah, well, a little communication would be a good start. It'll give me time to scratch a passport for you."
"You do it. E-mail her but be discreet about it. Don't tell her who we are or where we are. Just tell her what we got and ask for her help. Barber a little. See if she bites."
"And you? What are you going to do?"
Brendan sat down on the bed again, pulling the PASIV device close to him. "A little experimentation."
"Wait, you… you're going to actually use that thing?"
"If I get nailed by one of these lugs again, they might put me back under. Now that I'm involved in all this, the rap is in my head, and they could steal it. Potentially that'd lead to a whole lot of bad, so I want to be able to defend myself. To do that, I need to know how to navigate my own mind so they can't get their answers. I need to at least try to be ready for what I'm up against."
"We still don't know if it's safe though," Brain said cautiously. "What about dosage? What about time?"
"That's what I'm going to find out," Brendan said, sliding the needle into his arm and setting the timer on the device for ten minutes, just as a test.
"What if you take too much of that dope and don't wake up? I'm not taking the blame for your death, Brendan."
"Then you keep your eye on me and make sure I wake up in ten minutes. Send the email."
Before Brain could interject again, Brendan depressed the plunger in the middle of the machine and instantly felt himself get swallowed up by sleep.
Brendan found himself walking down the road. The land on each side of it was flat and stretched out for eons under a cloudy, gray sky. He didn't remember why he was walking there, but he did know that he was supposed to remember something now that he was here.
Where am I? He thought. He seemed to be wandering in the middle of nowhere. From what he could tell, there weren't any buildings for miles… and that didn't make any sense. Why would he be sauntering down a road in the middle of nowhere?
Oh.
He had to think very hard, but slowly he managed to recall the device in Brain's room. The test he was performing. He was dreaming.
"Apparently my subconscious is pretty dull," Brendan said flatly as he glanced out across the vast nothingness. "Maybe I need to…"
As the idea came to him, buildings sprouted from the earth, rising up, up, up into the sky. They were simple towers at first, but as soon as a city surrounded him, the details started to fill themselves in. Windows and doors, thresholds and fire escapes and drain pipes and fireplaces… Signs and paint and flower boxes and trees… The world around him shifted and added and subtracted until he was standing in the middle of a city reminiscent of pictures he'd seen of New York and Chicago and Memphis. For several seconds all he could do was stare in absolute wonder.
He'd never experienced something quite like this before. He could definitely understand the appeal behind a machine like this.
With a turn of his head another building sprouted forth, and as he glanced out into the distance, neighborhoods started popping up. He blinked and there were people filing through the street, all faces vaguely familiar. Lots of them were kids from his school but others were people he'd seen around town. All of their faces had been buried in his mind somewhere all this time, even if he'd only seen them once or twice in passing. He was pretty sure Brain would be having a conniption fit if he was down in the dream with him right now. It was all just too fascinating.
He took to walking again, this time to explore the city he'd created. It was fairly simplistic, he supposed, all of it building up at simple intersections. It shifted at his whims, telephone booths coming together on the sidewalks and the streetlights flickering on as the sky shifted from day to night. The entire world was at his fingertips, though the people did not go as commanded. That was ensured when he mentally attempted to have one of the women on the street, a prim business type that reminded him a bit of his mother, hand over her briefcase. He was soundly ignored. He made a mental note of that.
He wondered how complicated he could make the city, so he got to work. It took him about an hour before he grew satisfied with his handiwork, street after street and alleyway after alleyway forming in the map in his mind. He wandered the streets, proud of his handiwork, nodding at passers-by strictly out of habit. For a minute or two, he completely forgot he was even dreaming. The world just seemed entirely real, and it was easy to pretend that it was until something else shifted slightly.
He did discover rather quickly that he didn't have that much say in what his subconscious filled the empty spaces with when he didn't think of anything in particular. He kept winding up mildly surprised as he came across something he hadn't expected, a street sign or a fountain that was reminiscent of San Clemente. The more un-thought of spaces he discovered, the more they were filled with the familiarity of his hometown, the only place he'd ever been. It crept in around the edges until he almost felt like he was awake and back home, and that was when he came across the tunnel.
God knows Brendan never would have put the tunnel there on purpose, but there it was, looming and dark as water trickled out from inside it. He was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, climbing down the concrete embankment and stepping carefully to the mouth. There wasn't even a hint of light inside.
Then there was the sound of footsteps echoing from inside. Clop. Clop. Clop.
Emily appeared before him, still in her white coat and plastic blue bracelets. Her nail polish was chipped, her brown heels scuffed, her waves of blonde hair dripping and matted. Even still, she was as beautiful as she ever was.
"I'm sorry, Brendan," she said, voice broken and sad just like it had been the last time he'd heard her alive.
"I could have saved you," Brendan whispered, unable to help himself. Somewhere inside he knew that this wasn't really Em, that this was just another piece of his own thoughts staring back at him, but she was so real, so exact, that it was hard to accept. The slope of her nose, her eyes clear and blue, her plush mouth with a smudge of lip gloss at the corner… All of it had been memorized so thoroughly. He wished that he could remember her in a better state than this. She deserved to be more glamorous than a walking corpse.
"You don't love me," she said.
"You're the only thing that I love."
She pulled out a brick and swung it at his face.
Brendan threw himself forward when he woke, panting and eyes wide. He could still feel the phantom pains of his skull being bashed in, but a quick touch to his hair revealed that it was still very much intact.
"Whoa-" Brain had said, jumping back when Brendan awoke. "Well, at least you're awake. Christ, Brendan, you look like you've been on a hayride with Dracula."
"I'm fine," Brendan said, running his hands over his face as he calmed down, hiding the tremor in his fingertips. "I'm… I'm fine. I must have misunderstood that timer."
Brain leaned over it, checking. "Yeah, I guess so. It still says you've got four and a half minutes."
"What?" Brendan crawled over to the PASIV to check. Sure enough, the timer was still counting down. "I was wandering around for over an hour."
"I guess time just moves more slowly in a dream."
Brendan paused for a moment as he mulled over this information and then nodded, swallowing hard.
"So, what woke you?"
"I died in the dream."
"How did you manage that?"
Brendan was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "Don't worry about it."
Brain thankfully didn't ask questions.
also available on AO3