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Language:
English
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Published:
2019-11-21
Completed:
2019-12-15
Words:
12,875
Chapters:
8/8
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239
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284
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as we're drifting off to sleep, all those dirty thoughts of me (they were never yours to keep)

Summary:

Can you incept someone into falling in love?

Notes:

This has been A Semester, let me tell you. So here, have a fic.

Q and whirling won me in the Inceptiversary auction and requested a Fall Out Boy / Inception crossover, with a side order of feeling-poorly Eames. I think they got more than they bargained for (haha see what I did there).

At any rate, thank you so much to them for the incredibly inspiring prompt and for being so supportive as this spiraled into more and more plot lol. It was fun to revisit dreamsharing again!

(title from American Beauty / American Psycho)

Chapter Text

When Arthur heard from Cobb these days, it was ordinarily to ask some random thing about kids that, for some reason, Cobb thought Arthur might know. How should I handle a dead goldfish? And What are the symptoms of an ear infection? Arthur had possibly spent a little too long as Cobb’s personal Google. He was always tempted to text back, GOOGLE THIS.

But he didn’t. Old habits died hard.

Anyway, it was always nice to have a reason to ignore Eames.

“I know you want me to think you’re furiously sexting,” remarks Eames now, “but I know you’re always talking to Cobb.”

Arthur ignores him.

Not that that ever shuts Eames up.

“Cobb’s basically your only contact. Is he the only contact in your phone? Your phone contacts are Dom Cobb and a tailor,” muses Eames.

“I know everyone in dreamshare,” Arthur says automatically, without looking up from the text Cobb just sent him.

“‘Course you do, darling,” Eames agrees negligently. “You know, I bet you would sext furiously. You’d be the only person in the world who sexts furiously.”

“I know everyone in dreamshare,” Arthur repeats, dismissing Eames’s nonsense, “but I don’t know this Pete Wentz. Do you?” Arthur shows Eames his phone, where Cobb’s text reads just Do you know who Pete Wentz is?

Eames’s mouth quirks. “Well,” he says, and doesn’t say anything else, just sits there looking like a fucking cat eating a canary.

“Well, what?” Arthur demands sourly. “Alright, fine, you know someone in dreamshare I don’t know, whatever, he’s probably not very good, I know everyone who’s good.”

“Arthur,” Eames says, sounding so endlessly amused, because Eames always sounds so fucking amused. “Calm down. I don’t know anyone in dreamsharing you don’t know. I pay attention to celebrity dick pics more than you do.” Eames pulls his phone out.

Arthur knits his eyebrows together. “What?”

“When there’s a dick pic around,” Eames says, fingers tapping on his phone, “I pay attention to it.”

“Okay, I’m talking about Pete Wentz, this is not an excuse for you to show me a dick pic, Eames.”

“Darling, I’d never show you a dick pic when you could so easily see the real thing,” Eames retorts smoothly, holding his phone out.

Arthur winces at Eames’s comment and then again when he sees Eames’s phone screen.

“Not my dick pic, kitten,” says Eames, pulling his phone back in. “Pete Wentz’s. Not a bad dick. I mean, what you can see of it there. It’s not the best dick pic in the world. But it’s not bad ink, at least.”

“Why do you have a picture of Pete Wentz’s dick?” Arthur asks. He feels like this is all a lot and he can hardly be expected to process it while thinking of dick pics on Eames’s phone.

“Who doesn’t, pet?” purrs Eames.

Arthur glares at him.

“Well, I mean, aside from you, and only because you always miss everything fun. He’s in a band, Arthur. He had a dick pic get leaked. That’s the only way I know him.” Eames shrugs and tips his chair back. “Don’t worry, I don’t have secret dreamsharing knowledge you don’t.”

In a band? Arthur frowns and looks at Cobb’s text. What could Cobb possibly want to know about a band for? Surely Philippa’s not old enough yet to be developing crushes on bands already? Arthur tries to do the math on having crushes on inappropriate musicians with dick pics floating around the internet, decides there’s never a good age for that, and looks at Eames suspiciously.

Eames is being conspicuously interested in a single thread dangling from the cuff of his shirt.

Pablo, who’s theoretically the architect for this job they’re on although Arthur thinks he’s terrible and has been making Eames work late at night to fix everything he does wrong, says, “Do you think you two could join the rest of the class?” and lifts his eyebrows at them.

“Sure,” says Eames jovially.

Arthur contemplates kicking his chair over, decides instead to text Cobb back. Why?

The reply reads, He wants to hire us to try an inception. Do you think you can loop in Eames?

Arthur almost laughs. He glances at Eames and thinks of the dick pic on his phone and texts back, Probably.

***

Pete Wentz was in the middle of a bad month or, like, year, or maybe decade, when he heard about Somnacin.

Okay, the truth was, not everything about the past decade had been bad. For every moment of soul-crushing faith in his own self-destructive stupidity, there had generally been a moment of Patrick, literally tying his shoes for him, or zipping up his hoodie, and saying, It’s okay, you’re okay, we’re okay, here we go. Patrick balancing out the darkness, Patrick tugging hard to keep inching him out of the muck that sucked at him constantly, and Pete totally understood why Patrick had finally had enough. Who wouldn’t eventually have enough of that? Who wouldn’t eventually be exhausted by Pete? Patrick had lasted so much longer than Pete would ever have thought. It was a good run, nothing to be ashamed of, lots to be proud of.

It was Pete Wentz’s entire life ending, much more thoroughly than he’d achieved thus far, because always before there’d been a phone call and a Patrick on the other end.

Patrick, his true blue. The night Pete Wentz learned about Somnacin, he had a notebook open on a dingy hotel room bed and he was trying to write, write out some of the choking oily blackness that was leaking steadily into the hole created inside when Patrick left, and he was getting fucking nowhere, and he was never going to get anywhere, he was always going to be just like this.

Dear future self, Pete wrote in his notebook, I hope it’s going well! He stared at the stained ceiling over his head as the room shook slightly with a nearby airplane taking off or landing. He added to the notebook, I’m drunk on cheap whiskey in an airport hotel.

And then he thought, Fuck the whiskey, I need something stronger.

Pete found himself regarding his army of prescription pill bottles, and thinking of a night when he’d done something similar, and that night there’d been voices on the end of the phone willing to help him, teary-eyed people to be there when he woke up and yell at him not to be so stupid ever again (this was Patrick’s particular brand of comforting). There would be no one willing to take his call if he did it this time, he knew.

“No,” he said out loud, and stepped away from the inviting tableau on the tabletop. That wasn’t what he wanted. He looked at the lines written to his future self and thought, Yeah, you just wrote a letter to your future self, let’s have there be one.

Pete looked at the empty whiskey bottle and thought that was probably his best bet.

So he pulled himself together enough to stagger outside, and then stood on the sidewalk blinking, disoriented. He didn’t know where he was, exactly, and it was nighttime, and he was in the middle of fucking suburbia, what the fuck, he’d forgotten, and, like, he couldn’t drive, he wasn’t in any fit state, and he didn’t want to figure out where any of the fucking entourage was, he’d been avoiding the entourage.

He chose a direction and he started walking.

A liquor store appeared like a mirage, and it was while he was in it, plucking himself a fresh bottle of whiskey, that the guy sidled up to him.

“You look like someone who could use some sleep,” the guy said.

Pete thought of the bottle of the sleeping pills he was decidedly not taking. He said, “Not really, no,” and picked up a bottle of whiskey instead.

“No, no, I mean, to sleep to dream.” The guy seemed to think this was meaningful.

Pete didn’t have the energy for this. “Look, man, I just want to—”

“Come on,” he said, and suddenly he was holding out a vial, “it’s totally better than whiskey, you get to live whatever dream you want, who wouldn’t want that.”

And Pete stared at the vial and said numbly, “Hang on, I get to live whatever dream I want?”

It started like that, so, Pete thinks now, innocent. A dream where Patrick didn’t leave, where Patrick stayed. A dream where Patrick smiled at him, laughed with him. A dream where Patrick kissed him, soft and sweet and fond, kissed his lips and his temple and that secret spot behind his ear. They were gentle dreams, gauzy with affection, Pete could drown in the feeling of being loved, it was nice.

It wasn’t nearly enough. Patrick was always a pale imitation of his Patrick, a projection of what Pete wanted him to be but that was wrong, it was wrong, Patrick should be challenging and difficult, Patrick should frown at him and shout at him, the point was that Patrick always made him feel loved by the force of his constant attention, the furious depths of emotion Patrick directed at him. Pete hated this Patrick who wasn’t that, hated the simplicity of what the dreams offered him.

He heard about forging after that, but the forgers never got Patrick right, ever, they were always copying some public version of him that wasn’t right.

Pete, frustrated, decided to quit Somnacin, cold turkey, it was stupid and pointless.

His dealer, of course, wasn’t thrilled with his decision, and called him up to wheedle at him.

Pete, past caring about anything, said, “What is the fucking point? I don’t even get the point of this drug. The dreams aren’t that good.”

And his dealer said, “Well, the dream-criminals disagree with you there,” with a little laugh.

And that’s how Pete learned about extraction.

And then Pete learned about inception.

And then Pete got this idea.