Fic: Infectious Ideas [Inception, teen]
Jul. 25th, 2010 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trillianastraTitle: Infectious Ideas
Fandom: Inception
Pairing/Characters: Cobb/Fischer, Ariadne, Eames
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: for the movie
Disclaimer: all belongs to Chris Nolan, just playing in his sandbox.
Summary: after the job, Fischer can't stop thinking about the mysterious 'Mr Charles', and even though Cobb is back with his family, he can't stop worrying about the effect that the inception might have on Fischer.
A/N: written for a prompt on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
inception_kink, which is possibly the most awesome place ever.
~~
Robert Fischer arrives at LAX with two ideas in his mind.
The first is: my father didn't want me to be him
This is a world-shattering idea for him. He has lived his life in emulation of his father, trying to make the old man proud. Instead he made him disappointed.
The first idea will prove relatively easy to act upon. He will attend his father's funeral, and then he will go to the company (his company, now), and he will call in the lawyers, and he will begin the lengthy process of breaking up the Fischer empire. He will hand each of his father's acquisitions back to the original owners, keeping only his father's own company for himself.
He places this one, small company under the directorship of Peter Browning, who looks at him and asks why he's doing all this. Robert smiles and says, “I had the strangest dream, Uncle Peter. And I realised that my father didn't want me to carry on in his footsteps. He wanted me to be my own man.”
Browning does not know what to say to that.
The second idea is not so easily defined, or so easily acted upon. It exists in his mind only as a name – Mr Charles – and as a vague idea about subconscious security and a half-remembered face.
Years ago, he spent some time with an extraction expert, who trained him to resist any attempts to access his subconscious through his dreams. He traces the expert, finds a name and an address, and goes straight there.
He asks the expert straight out, “Who is Mr Charles?”
The expert stares at him blankly. Robert explains, tells what little he remembers from that strangest of dreams. The expert shakes his head, tells Robert that the techniques he teaches do not manifest that way, that he doesn't know who this Mr Charles was.
Perhaps he was just part of the dream, the expert suggests.
Disappointed, Robert excuses himself and leaves in a hurry. He drives around the city aimlessly for a while. All he can think about is that face.
Mr Charles was not a dream. He knew that much.
~
Dom Cobb arrives in LAX with just one idea in his mind: I'm free.
Miles meets him at the airport, and Dom finally, after so long, gets to go home. James and Philippa greet him with squeals of joy. He hugs them tightly and listens to their chatter about what they've been doing that day.
The spinning top comes to a stop, toppling over unseen onto the kitchen table.
It takes a while for Dom to get used to the idea of being home, of being free. At first he spends every moment he can with the children, as if in some desperate attempt to make up for the time he was away.
It was the middle of summer when he went home. They spent a few blissful weeks together, then summer ended and Philippa, who was five now, started school and James had his grandma to look after him, and Dom knew he needed to go out and find a job if he was really going to have a normal life again.
(Vivienne, Mal's mother, who had spent so long caring for the children in his place, was starting to glare at him more than usual and make pointed comments about not being able to support his own family. He thought that if he didn't get out of the house and find a job soon, she might snap.)
So each morning he would put on a suit and drive into the city, where he would scour the newspapers for job ads and visit every recruitment office he could find. He was hoping to find work in an architect's office somewhere – that was, after all, the area he'd trained in, before he found the dream-world and his talent for extraction.
He was sitting in a café one morning, with a newspaper open in front of him, when he glimpsed a headline, and rubbed his eyes in disbelief, thinking that he'd imagined it.
FISCHER HEIR TO DISSOLVE EMPIRE, the headline read. He scanned the article below quickly, then read it again, more slowly.
When he finished, there was just one thought in his mind. It worked. This thought was soon lost in a flood of concern, as thoughts of Mal returned. Inception had worked with her, too, and look where that had ended up....
He couldn't let that happen again. He'd successfully managed to get Fischer to dissolve his father's company, that was fine. But he had no idea where the idea he'd planted in Fischer's mind would take him, or what that idea would lead him to do.
He had failed Mal, by not realising what he had done until it was too late. He wouldn't fail Fischer in the same way.
Finding Fischer's office was the easy part. Dom sat in his car, which was parked on the opposite side of the road, and tried to think of a way to get closer.
He had been sitting there for hours when he saw Fischer walk out of the building.
~
Robert left his office, intending to find a cab and go straight back to his apartment, when he glanced across the road and saw a man watching him from a parked car.
His eyes widened instantly as he recognised the man.
Mr Charles, he thought. He crossed the road, dodging the traffic, but by the time he got to the spot the car was gone.
Robert cursed under his breath and started walking in the direction of his apartment.
He hadn't been walking long when he heard a car horn behind him. Turning, he saw the same car driving alongside him, and frowned.
The window was rolled down, and the driver called out to him.
“Hey, are you all right, there?”
Robert nodded wordlessly.
“It's just... walking in LA? Where were you going?”
“My apartment. It's.. not far from here.”
“How about I give you a lift?”
Robert hesitated for a moment. But then he realised that this might be his only chance to find out who Mr Charles was, and he nodded. “Fine.”
The driver introduced himself as Dom Cobb, and said that he'd been in the city trying to find a job. He'd been out of the country – travelling, he said – for some time, and he was trying to get back on his feet.
Robert nodded, only half-listening, and heard himself say, “I could probably get you a job, if you wanted.”
~
Back at the house that night, long after the kids were asleep, Dom stood on the porch and thinking about what had happened that day. Not only had he found Fischer, he had – out of some crazy impulse – given the man a ride, and Fischer had offered to help him get a job. His business card, with his personal cellphone number scribbled on the back, was in Dom's wallet right now.
He's jolted out of his thoughts by the phone ringing, and blinks, confused, for a moment before he sees the caller ID. He grabs the phone and says, “Hello?”
“Cobb?” Ariadne says. “Did I wake you?”
“Wha- uh, no, you didn't. What did you want, Ariadne?”
“I saw something in the newspaper. About Fischer. I wanted to make sure you were okay, that you weren't going to do anything...”
She lets the sentence trail off. He can almost hear her wince.
“I'm fine, Ariadne. Don't worry about me.”
“Well, okay...” she sounds wary, as if she doesn't quite trust him to tell her the truth. “If you say so. Just look after yourself, okay?”
“I promise,” he says with a weak laugh. “What are you up to? Are you back at school?”
“Uh... no, I'm taking a break from school. I'm in Marseilles at the moment... with Arthur.”
“That sounds nice,” he says, before the end of the sentence fully sinks in. “Wait, with Arthur?”
“Er, yeah... actually, he's calling me, we're going to meet Eames for dinner, so I'll talk to you later, okay?”
“OK. Have a good night.”
He hung up, and took a moment to digest that. Ariadne, Arthur and Eames, on holiday together in Marseilles... he hadn't seen that coming at all.
Dom went to bed, and tried to sleep. If he dreamt of anything, he didn't remember it.
~
Robert was more confused than ever. He'd found Mr Charles, or at least someone who looked a hell of a lot like him, but the man's name was Cobb, and he didn't seem to even recognise him.
He frowned. This was LA, and the news of his father's death and his own subsequent actions had been all over the news. He got recognised almost everywhere he went... and there had been something about the way Cobb had looked at him, something that suggested he might know more than he was saying.
Frustrated, Robert left his apartment and walked to a nearby bar he knew, where he drank far too much and ended up going home with a blue-eyed, dark-blond man whose name he wasn't entirely sure he remembered.
The next morning, he showed the man out and realised with a jolt that, though he'd never met the man before, he reminded him strongly of someone – Cobb.
~
Dom had stopped seeing Mal everywhere. But, and he found this concerning, it was as if the ghost of Mal had been replaced by someone else, and that someone was Fischer. Dom was seeing him everywhere – not only in the papers or on the news, but everywhere. He would go to the supermarket and think he saw Fischer, or he'd take the kids to the park and think he saw Fischer.
The business card is still in his wallet, silently taunting him every time he sees it.
He's in a job agency looking through the ads posted on the walls, when his cellphone starts ringing. Puzzled, he pulls it out and steps outside to answer.
“Hello?”
“Cobb, darling, it's me.” He recognises the voice, even without the 'darling'. But why would Eames be calling him? Unless... an idea occurs to him, as he remembers something about Ariadne and Marseilles, and he sighs.
“Yes, Eames, what is it?”
“How is everything in the city of angels? No problems? Everything just the way you imagined?”
“Ye-es,” he says warily. “Why exactly are you calling, Eames? Did Ariadne put you up to this?”
He hears a whispered, urgent conversation in the background. Eventually Eames says, “She's worried about you, mate. We heard the news about Fischer. You're not going to do anything stupid, are you?”
“I... how is this any of your business? I'm fine. Tell Ariadne that, and tell her to stop worrying. If I need your help, I'll call you... it seems like you're all in the same place anyway...”
Irritably, he hung up without waiting for a reply.
~
Robert was beginning to give up hope of ever finding out what was going on. He'd met Cobb, given the man his cellphone number, but he hadn't called.
He tried to tell himself it meant nothing.
Browning was still trying to get him to change his mind about breaking up the company. He was glad of that, in a strange way, because it gave him something to focus on that wasn't Dom Cobb.
Then the phone rang, and it was Cobb, saying that yes, he was interested in that job offer if he was still offering. They arranged to meet at a restaurant near Robert's office.
Cobb seemed awkward when he showed up, and again Robert got the feeling that he knew more than he was saying. But no – more than that – he got the feeling that he'd met Cobb before, somewhere else... he just couldn't think of where.
But despite that, the meeting went well, and they talked about jobs. The only part of the company Robert was keeping was the construction firm his father had started out with, and it transpired that Cobb had trained as an architect.
Robert Fischer would not have described himself as someone who was particularly superstitious, but that seemed like too much of a coincidence.
They worked out a deal over that long lunch. Robert would finish the dissolution of the Fischer empire, and once that was done Cobb (“Dom,” he said, “call me Dom”) would come to work for him.
To tell the truth, Dom was happy with the idea. He was actually looking forward to having a real job, creating real buildings again.
Things worked out pretty much as they had planned, at least where business was concerned. Dom had a few more weeks of holiday with his children, and Robert was busy breaking up his father's empire, so he had little time to think about anything else.
~
At the end of Dom's first day (which had been a confusing whirl of new offices and new staff and paperwork), Robert had tapped on the door of his office and invited him out for a drink.
By this point, Dom was severely in need of a drink, so he agreed quickly. They started in a restaurant – the same one where they'd had the meeting, in fact – with dinner and an expensive bottle of wine, then moved on to a bar.
It was in the bar, much later that night, when they were sitting in a corner booth with a table covered in empty bottles in front of them, when Robert drunkenly slid closer to Dom, leant in, and murmured,
“I can't think about anyone but you,” into his ear. Then he reached out and touched Dom's cheek, and kissed him gently.
Dom pushed away. “What...”
“I thought...”
“I'm not...” he isn't sure how to finish that sentence.
“You're all I ever think about,” Robert says, and he kisses him again, and this time Dom doesn't push away.
~
Fandom: Inception
Pairing/Characters: Cobb/Fischer, Ariadne, Eames
Rating: Teen
Spoilers: for the movie
Disclaimer: all belongs to Chris Nolan, just playing in his sandbox.
Summary: after the job, Fischer can't stop thinking about the mysterious 'Mr Charles', and even though Cobb is back with his family, he can't stop worrying about the effect that the inception might have on Fischer.
A/N: written for a prompt on
inception_kink, which is possibly the most awesome place ever.~~
Robert Fischer arrives at LAX with two ideas in his mind.
The first is: my father didn't want me to be him
This is a world-shattering idea for him. He has lived his life in emulation of his father, trying to make the old man proud. Instead he made him disappointed.
The first idea will prove relatively easy to act upon. He will attend his father's funeral, and then he will go to the company (his company, now), and he will call in the lawyers, and he will begin the lengthy process of breaking up the Fischer empire. He will hand each of his father's acquisitions back to the original owners, keeping only his father's own company for himself.
He places this one, small company under the directorship of Peter Browning, who looks at him and asks why he's doing all this. Robert smiles and says, “I had the strangest dream, Uncle Peter. And I realised that my father didn't want me to carry on in his footsteps. He wanted me to be my own man.”
Browning does not know what to say to that.
The second idea is not so easily defined, or so easily acted upon. It exists in his mind only as a name – Mr Charles – and as a vague idea about subconscious security and a half-remembered face.
Years ago, he spent some time with an extraction expert, who trained him to resist any attempts to access his subconscious through his dreams. He traces the expert, finds a name and an address, and goes straight there.
He asks the expert straight out, “Who is Mr Charles?”
The expert stares at him blankly. Robert explains, tells what little he remembers from that strangest of dreams. The expert shakes his head, tells Robert that the techniques he teaches do not manifest that way, that he doesn't know who this Mr Charles was.
Perhaps he was just part of the dream, the expert suggests.
Disappointed, Robert excuses himself and leaves in a hurry. He drives around the city aimlessly for a while. All he can think about is that face.
Mr Charles was not a dream. He knew that much.
~
Dom Cobb arrives in LAX with just one idea in his mind: I'm free.
Miles meets him at the airport, and Dom finally, after so long, gets to go home. James and Philippa greet him with squeals of joy. He hugs them tightly and listens to their chatter about what they've been doing that day.
The spinning top comes to a stop, toppling over unseen onto the kitchen table.
It takes a while for Dom to get used to the idea of being home, of being free. At first he spends every moment he can with the children, as if in some desperate attempt to make up for the time he was away.
It was the middle of summer when he went home. They spent a few blissful weeks together, then summer ended and Philippa, who was five now, started school and James had his grandma to look after him, and Dom knew he needed to go out and find a job if he was really going to have a normal life again.
(Vivienne, Mal's mother, who had spent so long caring for the children in his place, was starting to glare at him more than usual and make pointed comments about not being able to support his own family. He thought that if he didn't get out of the house and find a job soon, she might snap.)
So each morning he would put on a suit and drive into the city, where he would scour the newspapers for job ads and visit every recruitment office he could find. He was hoping to find work in an architect's office somewhere – that was, after all, the area he'd trained in, before he found the dream-world and his talent for extraction.
He was sitting in a café one morning, with a newspaper open in front of him, when he glimpsed a headline, and rubbed his eyes in disbelief, thinking that he'd imagined it.
FISCHER HEIR TO DISSOLVE EMPIRE, the headline read. He scanned the article below quickly, then read it again, more slowly.
When he finished, there was just one thought in his mind. It worked. This thought was soon lost in a flood of concern, as thoughts of Mal returned. Inception had worked with her, too, and look where that had ended up....
He couldn't let that happen again. He'd successfully managed to get Fischer to dissolve his father's company, that was fine. But he had no idea where the idea he'd planted in Fischer's mind would take him, or what that idea would lead him to do.
He had failed Mal, by not realising what he had done until it was too late. He wouldn't fail Fischer in the same way.
Finding Fischer's office was the easy part. Dom sat in his car, which was parked on the opposite side of the road, and tried to think of a way to get closer.
He had been sitting there for hours when he saw Fischer walk out of the building.
~
Robert left his office, intending to find a cab and go straight back to his apartment, when he glanced across the road and saw a man watching him from a parked car.
His eyes widened instantly as he recognised the man.
Mr Charles, he thought. He crossed the road, dodging the traffic, but by the time he got to the spot the car was gone.
Robert cursed under his breath and started walking in the direction of his apartment.
He hadn't been walking long when he heard a car horn behind him. Turning, he saw the same car driving alongside him, and frowned.
The window was rolled down, and the driver called out to him.
“Hey, are you all right, there?”
Robert nodded wordlessly.
“It's just... walking in LA? Where were you going?”
“My apartment. It's.. not far from here.”
“How about I give you a lift?”
Robert hesitated for a moment. But then he realised that this might be his only chance to find out who Mr Charles was, and he nodded. “Fine.”
The driver introduced himself as Dom Cobb, and said that he'd been in the city trying to find a job. He'd been out of the country – travelling, he said – for some time, and he was trying to get back on his feet.
Robert nodded, only half-listening, and heard himself say, “I could probably get you a job, if you wanted.”
~
Back at the house that night, long after the kids were asleep, Dom stood on the porch and thinking about what had happened that day. Not only had he found Fischer, he had – out of some crazy impulse – given the man a ride, and Fischer had offered to help him get a job. His business card, with his personal cellphone number scribbled on the back, was in Dom's wallet right now.
He's jolted out of his thoughts by the phone ringing, and blinks, confused, for a moment before he sees the caller ID. He grabs the phone and says, “Hello?”
“Cobb?” Ariadne says. “Did I wake you?”
“Wha- uh, no, you didn't. What did you want, Ariadne?”
“I saw something in the newspaper. About Fischer. I wanted to make sure you were okay, that you weren't going to do anything...”
She lets the sentence trail off. He can almost hear her wince.
“I'm fine, Ariadne. Don't worry about me.”
“Well, okay...” she sounds wary, as if she doesn't quite trust him to tell her the truth. “If you say so. Just look after yourself, okay?”
“I promise,” he says with a weak laugh. “What are you up to? Are you back at school?”
“Uh... no, I'm taking a break from school. I'm in Marseilles at the moment... with Arthur.”
“That sounds nice,” he says, before the end of the sentence fully sinks in. “Wait, with Arthur?”
“Er, yeah... actually, he's calling me, we're going to meet Eames for dinner, so I'll talk to you later, okay?”
“OK. Have a good night.”
He hung up, and took a moment to digest that. Ariadne, Arthur and Eames, on holiday together in Marseilles... he hadn't seen that coming at all.
Dom went to bed, and tried to sleep. If he dreamt of anything, he didn't remember it.
~
Robert was more confused than ever. He'd found Mr Charles, or at least someone who looked a hell of a lot like him, but the man's name was Cobb, and he didn't seem to even recognise him.
He frowned. This was LA, and the news of his father's death and his own subsequent actions had been all over the news. He got recognised almost everywhere he went... and there had been something about the way Cobb had looked at him, something that suggested he might know more than he was saying.
Frustrated, Robert left his apartment and walked to a nearby bar he knew, where he drank far too much and ended up going home with a blue-eyed, dark-blond man whose name he wasn't entirely sure he remembered.
The next morning, he showed the man out and realised with a jolt that, though he'd never met the man before, he reminded him strongly of someone – Cobb.
~
Dom had stopped seeing Mal everywhere. But, and he found this concerning, it was as if the ghost of Mal had been replaced by someone else, and that someone was Fischer. Dom was seeing him everywhere – not only in the papers or on the news, but everywhere. He would go to the supermarket and think he saw Fischer, or he'd take the kids to the park and think he saw Fischer.
The business card is still in his wallet, silently taunting him every time he sees it.
He's in a job agency looking through the ads posted on the walls, when his cellphone starts ringing. Puzzled, he pulls it out and steps outside to answer.
“Hello?”
“Cobb, darling, it's me.” He recognises the voice, even without the 'darling'. But why would Eames be calling him? Unless... an idea occurs to him, as he remembers something about Ariadne and Marseilles, and he sighs.
“Yes, Eames, what is it?”
“How is everything in the city of angels? No problems? Everything just the way you imagined?”
“Ye-es,” he says warily. “Why exactly are you calling, Eames? Did Ariadne put you up to this?”
He hears a whispered, urgent conversation in the background. Eventually Eames says, “She's worried about you, mate. We heard the news about Fischer. You're not going to do anything stupid, are you?”
“I... how is this any of your business? I'm fine. Tell Ariadne that, and tell her to stop worrying. If I need your help, I'll call you... it seems like you're all in the same place anyway...”
Irritably, he hung up without waiting for a reply.
~
Robert was beginning to give up hope of ever finding out what was going on. He'd met Cobb, given the man his cellphone number, but he hadn't called.
He tried to tell himself it meant nothing.
Browning was still trying to get him to change his mind about breaking up the company. He was glad of that, in a strange way, because it gave him something to focus on that wasn't Dom Cobb.
Then the phone rang, and it was Cobb, saying that yes, he was interested in that job offer if he was still offering. They arranged to meet at a restaurant near Robert's office.
Cobb seemed awkward when he showed up, and again Robert got the feeling that he knew more than he was saying. But no – more than that – he got the feeling that he'd met Cobb before, somewhere else... he just couldn't think of where.
But despite that, the meeting went well, and they talked about jobs. The only part of the company Robert was keeping was the construction firm his father had started out with, and it transpired that Cobb had trained as an architect.
Robert Fischer would not have described himself as someone who was particularly superstitious, but that seemed like too much of a coincidence.
They worked out a deal over that long lunch. Robert would finish the dissolution of the Fischer empire, and once that was done Cobb (“Dom,” he said, “call me Dom”) would come to work for him.
To tell the truth, Dom was happy with the idea. He was actually looking forward to having a real job, creating real buildings again.
Things worked out pretty much as they had planned, at least where business was concerned. Dom had a few more weeks of holiday with his children, and Robert was busy breaking up his father's empire, so he had little time to think about anything else.
~
At the end of Dom's first day (which had been a confusing whirl of new offices and new staff and paperwork), Robert had tapped on the door of his office and invited him out for a drink.
By this point, Dom was severely in need of a drink, so he agreed quickly. They started in a restaurant – the same one where they'd had the meeting, in fact – with dinner and an expensive bottle of wine, then moved on to a bar.
It was in the bar, much later that night, when they were sitting in a corner booth with a table covered in empty bottles in front of them, when Robert drunkenly slid closer to Dom, leant in, and murmured,
“I can't think about anyone but you,” into his ear. Then he reached out and touched Dom's cheek, and kissed him gently.
Dom pushed away. “What...”
“I thought...”
“I'm not...” he isn't sure how to finish that sentence.
“You're all I ever think about,” Robert says, and he kisses him again, and this time Dom doesn't push away.
~
