Author's Note: The line 'She smells like angels ought to smell' comes from Frank Miller's Sin City, I take no credit. This is a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy/Inception crossover. I know there's lots of 'Eames is Ricki' but I thought it'd be interesting if Eames was Ricki's son. I haven't (As of yet) read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, only seen the rather excellent movie, so that's what this is based off of. However, the book is sitting next to my bed waiting to be read.
Disclaimer: I will own Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and/or Inception when pigs fly.
*Author's Legal Representation would like to say that the Author makes this statement under the assumption that porcine flight is an impossibility and is not responsible in the case of actual flying swine.
When Christopher Tarr was six months old his mother left he and his father alone in the tiny flat above the grocer's in Covent Garden. He was and still is angry at her for leaving, he doesn't blame her though, not really, but he's still angry. She left him with a father who was distant at best and simply absent at worst. His father was a spy, something which sounded exciting but was really rather awful for the young child. Most of the time, when his father was gone and Christopher wasn't at boarding school, he was minded by one of his father's colleagues. His favourite was Uncle George and Lady Anne (She was never Aunt, a distinction his childish mind had made simply because she 'didn't feel right'. He's sure all the adults noticed but they never said anything.), who took care of him most of the time, though sometimes he would stay with Uncle Peter. Peter was interesting but seemed completely unsure of what to do with the young boy so mostly Christopher sat and read books and occasionally Peter would teach him interesting things like lock picking or Morse code.
His childhood was dominated by a woman who he'd never met and knew nothing about. Her name was Irina and his father had had an affair with her almost twenty years before he was born. She was the most important factor in his father's life. When Ricki had vacations he'd go off to Bucharest or Istanbul or Belgrade or some other slightly depressing location and try to look for her. There was a picture of her on his father's bedside table that's only move was from the closet to the bedside when Mrs Tarr left. It was a blonde woman framed in an apartment window, caught in profile as she glanced over her shoulder. Sometimes when Ricki was particularly drunk he'd tell his young son some random fact about her, like that she smelled like angels ought to smell or that her hair felt softer than silk.
Whenever he asked his father's co-workers about her they would never respond satisfactorily. Uncle Peter would say he'd never met her, Uncle Jim would tense up and start talking about something completely unrelated in a way that Christopher forgot he'd even asked a question, Uncle George's response was always the most unsettling, he's smile sadly and ruffle Christopher's hair. When he was older, fifteen or so, and Uncle George had retired (Again), he'd asked about Irina, as he customarily did every Christmas, and George didn't brush it off as he normally did but stared in the teen's eyes and say the most bone-chilling words he'd ever heard.
'She's dead, has been for several decades. Jim saw her executed.' Not shot, not killed, executed, a word that holds so much more ambiguity then any other way of putting it. He'd rather expected it for a while but he wasn't sure if he was happy or not that someone had finally said it.
'Why- why does Dad keep looking for her?'
'I don't know. Because it's easier to pretend she's still alive then come to terms with the fact she's dead I suppose.'
He joined SIS, just like his father, straight out on uni. The other recruits looked at him with envy, not many could claim to call the current 'C' Uncle. Christopher gained the reputation of someone who can hold a cover perfectly, becoming the cover. He was dissatisfied though and ended up getting shipped off to work with the 'Cousins' on a high-risk neuropsychology project called 'Morpheus'. He met several people who stick in his mind above all others who he met on the project; A dark haired man they call Arthur who Christopher thinks would fit in perfectly among his father's co-workers but who's completely uninteresting to Christopher, a blond man named Dominic Cobb and his dark haired, French wife Mallorie, whom he finds strangely uplifting yet incredibly depressing to look at whenever they do something 'couple-y', and an older man with salt and pepper hair named Professor Miles who reminds him of Uncle George. They know him only as 'Eames', a nickname he'd earned as a teenager on the streets of London for some reason that now escapes him, to them he's a perfectly blended combination of his father and himself, impetuous, wild, promiscuous, gauche, suave, garish, unflappable. As a team they discovered worlds upon worlds, honing their skills until perfect. The universe is open to him and suddenly the government, with its program and rigidly defined rules is stifling, and he learned that many others on the project echo his sentiments. They slowly trickle out, each week he noticed a few less faces in the corridors until he too leaves. Arthur's gone almost two months before him and the Cobbs a few months after. He takes this new technology and does what he's been taught to do since he was a little boy, he looks after himself.
He ran into some of the 'old crowd' from time to time, Miles in Paris, Arthur in Prague, the Cobbs in Moscow. He tends to avoid London except when doing his annual check-in on his 'Uncles', something that is taking less and less time each year. His father was shot in Zagreb a month after Christopher was sent off to the Yanks, Lady Anne died of liver failure this past November, and Uncle Jim hanged himself two years ago. Really the only ones left are Uncle George and Uncle Peter. Uncle George is still living in the dreary London home he'd shared with Lady Anne for so many years, his mobility almost completely gone but his mind still as sharp as ever. Peter is in his late seventies, single, and had recently been made 'C'. Christopher's life is both static and dynamic. Nothing was changing but everything was.
When Christopher moves to Mombassa he immediately falls in love with the country, it's hot, and he finds himself blending in easily with the tourists, corrupt officials, criminals, and people fighting tooth and nail just to get by. He meets Yusuf, a jovial chemist who is the very antithesis of all he loves about this country yet a perfect embodiment, who is a complete stranger yet reminds him inexplicably of home. So he stays, stays in the heat of Kenya with the balding chemist and his cat waiting for something to happen. He takes jobs to fill the hours of boredom and he builds on a reputation as the best forger in the business. He can be anyone and he often wonders if he's really anyone at all.
Then Dominic Cobb comes back into his life and turns it all on its head with his ridiculous ideas about performing inception. But Christopher is curious. If there's anything he learned from the spooks he'd been raised by it's an insatiable curiosity. So he and Yusuf go off to Paris and Christopher meets wily Saito and innocent Ariadne and he sees amazing things but most of all he sees her. Not in real life, (That would be mad and Christopher may be many things but he's not mad, not yet) in a dream.
It's a practice run and they're walking their way through Arthur's hotel level and standing by the bar in a white hospital smock is the woman from the photograph. She smiles and she's all the things his father described and more. Then a man, an odd blend of the spies he'd see in his uncles' papers slides out of the crowd and calmly shoots her in the head, scarlet blood spraying across Ariadne's pristine marble floors and unseeing projections. He screams and runs forward, clutching her limp body in his arms. Cobb, Saito, and Arthur jog over and Ariadne cowers behind Arthur. Splashes of red decorate the white of her hospital gown and the alabaster of her skin, turning her light blonde hair a rusty red. But the most disturbing thing, beyond the fact that the love of his father's life just died in his arms, is that she's smiling.
Yusuf gently lifts the body out of his arms and lays her on the floor, rubbing soothing circles on his back. His shoulders convulse and he sobs like the child he hasn't been for such a long time.
Then the PASIV times out and he wakes up gasping. The others wake up slower and before they're fully cognitive he's out the door. He doesn't stop running until he can't breath, until he's gasping for air that can only come in short spurts that barely reach his lungs before being exhaled. He doesn't come back to the warehouse for the rest of the day.
They walk on eggshells around him for weeks after that incident, treating him as if he's made of glass (And he is, but only in the way we all are). He sees her occasionally after that, but only ever at a distance and she never dies, only observes with that enigmatic little smile on her face.
'Was she important?'
'Hmm?' He notices the various noises that make up the soundtrack of life in the warehouse have stopped.
'The woman who, you know...' Cobb trails off, uncertain how to continue.
'Enormously.'
'Oh, well, I'm sorry. I'm sure she was lovely and had a wonderful life.'
'That's very nice of you to say. She didn't though, spent most of it with an abusive, cheating husband. Got executed by the Russians. They never found the body. Or so I've been told. I never met her.' The until now is unspoken.
'Then why's she important?'
'She just was.' Christopher closes the topic firmly and slowly the noise resumes.