A/N; This is a random fic set after the movie. Sorry if it's kind of hard to understand.
A Dream. It was a lovely word. Word, yes, it wasn't quite a noun. It really couldn't be quantified as a person, place or thing. More specifically, it was an idea. Kyle never dreamed. He never understood why not.
When he was ten years old, his older brother, Philip, who lived overseas, came to visit. It was their first meeting. Kyle had asked his parents about the older man but was more often than not, rebutted by disaproving frowns and uncalled for admonishing. They told him Philip was a bad person. 'Don't grow up to be like him, Kyle.' they would tell him.
Meeting Philip in person was like painting over an already painted canvas. Everything his parents told him about his brother seemed wrong, or half-truths. Philip was great, he smiled a lot and was friendly. Everybody loved Philip. Philip also never talked much about his life, or his career. Kyle just shrugged the suspicions off.
And then he died. When Kyle was fourteen years old, he returned home from school to find a police car parked by the house's front door. The policeman offered his condolences. Dying in an explosion was cruel for someone so young and bright. Mother and Father never shed a tear.
A year later and Kyle has already graduated high school and was studying for an associate's degree in paralegal activities when he was approached by a man who introduces himself as Tom Grey. The man swiftly forks over a business card which Kyle takes warily. The man works for government security. Kyle rudely asks him what he want's to talk to him about, he's studying and exams are only weeks away. Tom Grey merely shrugs his shoulders at the boy's hostility and places a thaumatrope on the desk in front of him, telling him to give him a call if he wanted to meet again.
But, of course, Tom Grey knows Kyle will call him. That is Philip's precious thaumatrope. He never let anybody touch it, much less, hold it. He held it in greater value than his own life. Kyle almost expected his brother to bring the toy with him to the grave. But now it sits, motionless, in Kyle's small palm, one side showing a bird with broken wings, feathers directed to the ground, the other showing a bird in flight, wings reaching high, soaring to the sun. Kyle set the toy in motion and watched, entranced, as the bird gave the illusion that it was flying.
He would call Tom Grey as soon as he finished his homework.
The PASIV device. Kyle has heard of the technology and the concept of dream sharing from Philip but had never really understood it. Infiltrating a separate being's mind wasn't exactly the best conversation topic for a ten year old. But when he sees the piece of equipment, he feels like the very blue-prints of the device had been implanted into his brain. Now, everything that once sounded like gibberish was completely understood.
Half-an-hour of explanations from Tom Grey and Kyle is ready to be put under.
He finds himself in a marketplace where sounds and colours are vibrant. People are buzzing around, examining fruits and vegetables. The stall owners speak a strange language that Kyle makes out to be Spanish. Kyle recognizes the scenery as something he remembers seeing on television once. He listens half-heartedly as Tom Grey once again goes over the limits, or, lack of thereof in the dream.
Kyle spends several minutes, experimenting. He defies the laws of physics and bemusedly bends light reflections. But he always puts things back into place. Tom Grey mentally notes. Everything is neat and tidy, on closer inspection. Naturally, the scenery is loud and crowded but there are no messes. The vegetable stalls arn't smelly and there's not a single product that sports blemishes. There are no greasy smudges on the surface of the hotdog stall, the baby who is being fed by its mother eats clumsily but his bib is undirtied. It's all the little details with Kyle.
They wander around, Kyle asks questions about the dreamspace and Tom Grey explains everything to him with uttermost detail. Neither knows who brought the idea up, or how they ended up dashing around in a wild game of tag, but Kyle takes shelter in a stone building. He pants lightly as his jog slows to a stop. Tom Grey had once told him of his services in the military so it wasn't surprising that he was never very far behind his target.
Kyle collapses into a chair and wonders how much time he has before Tom Grey comes barreling through the door and the mad chase begins again. He looks around at his surroundings, it's the first chance he gets as they have always been walking around outside. He catches a glimpse of a safe in the corner of the room and his heart skips a beat. Is this the locked secrets of the subconsciousness that Tom Grey told him about? He falls to his knees and fiddles with the lock mechanism, seven minutes later, the safe is unlocked. He nervously opens the vault to find a single manila folder lying innocently against the dark metal. He picks it up, it is stamped with an offical-looking stamp printing 'Top Secret' on the cover. It's as good an invitation as any. He opens the envelope and dumps the contents out onto a nearby table.
What he reads shocks him. It's a file on Philip, a military file. There are details on his most recent case. Kyle reads about how criminals use PASIV devices with malicious intent. Philip was the lead extractor for a team of government extractors, charged with the mission of finding and keeping these criminals under control. He was highly successful in his missions and the rate of illegal extractions dropped quickly.
Until someone had him murdered. Philip was tracking down an extremely skilled extractor when it had happened. His team was lured into a trap and all members were ruthlessly slaughtered. Philip had survived the initial assassination attempt but had passed away on the way to the hospital. He had entrusted his totem, his thaumatrope, to Tom Grey and had told him to give it to Kyle 'when the time was right'.
Kyle frowned and reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve Philips, no, his totem and spun it absent-mindedly. It was a lot to take in at one time. He heard a creak as the front door of the building opened and Tom Grey walked in grimly. On instinct, Kyle stopped his totem's motion and slipped it back into his pocket. Neither of them spoke for a while.
Then, finally Kyle stood up and brushed past Tom Grey to walk out into the busy street again. "Time's almost up." he told the older man. "We'll wake up soon, yes?" Tom Grey nodded. "Good, because you'll have a lot to teach me about extraction."
Kyle got his associate's degree two years later and joined the military. He would train himself, train his mind and his consciousness. He would hunt down and see Dominic Cobb and his team behind bars.
He is a genius, Tom Grey says, he goes through a crash course in the military use of dream sharing and knows its protocols. He really is Philip's younger brother, Philip was also very successful. Kyle is assigned to his first team as a pointman.
The team's members were; Karrie, Smith, Freise, and Tom Grey as the architect, forger, chemist, and lead extractor. And there was Gordon, an engineer who would always drive them on trips and keep an eye on them while they were working. They didn't want to take the chance of the whole team being wiped out in their sleep like the previous team had been.
Their first mission as a team is to take down a small community of PASIV addicted persons in a rundown area of China town. "God." Karrie groans as they move around to check on the addicts' vitals. "This is even worse than the bar down the street from my place!"
"And how bad is that bar?" Freise murmurs just loud enough for the others to hear him.
"A girl can get naked and nobody would be sober enough to notice, kind of bad." Smith wags his eyebrows foolishly.
"Can I assume that you know from experience?" Tom Grey laughs at him. Then they all turn sober and get to work.
The idea of the mission is to share a dream with the addicts and make their dream life bad enough for them to want to wake up. They go under, they are cruel, they lie, cheat, steal, kill, anything goes. The mission only takes half-an-hour for Gordon before the rest of his team wakes up and they go home. Nobody talk about it, worse yet, nobody wants to dream that up again.
Then the call comes from the higher ups to tell them that they've done a good job.
Kyle is eighteen when he first meets a member of Cobb's team. It is the forger, Eames. It is a coincidence that they meet and it throws Kyle entirely off guard. They happened to meet at a cafe that Kyle visits often, it's not seven blocks from his apartment and Kyle has to wonder if it really is a coincidence. But Eames doesn't see him, and when his eyes run over the teen, he doesn't glance at him twice. It's a stroke of luck.
Or not, Kyle has to think when several armed men push their way inside the cafe and Eames takes off running. But Kyle knows the city like the back of his hand, he waits for Eames' pursuers to pass him before also giving chase. He cuts through empty buildings and jumps picket fences but he's gained ground, he's closer to the target than the other men.
He swerves off the main road in favor of a thin ally. Once he reaches the other end, all he has to do is wait for Eames to come flying by. And he comes. Kyle reaches out and grabs the other man's arm, letting his inertia swing him into a wide arc before Kyle shoves him into the ally's shadow with a sharp 'shhh'. The men thunder by them, not noticing them and disappear down the road.
The two sit on the concrete floor, panting for breath, Eames more so than Kyle. The forger just shoots a look at the pointman that says he thinks the boy's an angel sent from above. "Much appreciated." he grunts between pants.
"Glad to be of some help." Kyle replies, smiling strainedly at one of the six people responsible for his brother's death.
"Who are you?" Eames asks, seemingly gaining power over his tongue again. Kyle just shrugs his shoulders.
"A bored kid with too much time on his hands." he replies. Except, the only part about that statement that is true is that he's a kid. He is neither idle, nor bored. "You're not from around here, are you?" he continues conversationally. "I mean, nothing goes on around here! And then you show up, out of the blue, and people start chasing you!" Eames just smirks at him amusedly but doesn't say anything.
Kyle's face falls suddenly. "Oh, you probably need to be getting somewhere before those guys get back, don't you?" Eames' body language shouts it. Eames nods silently and walks away. Kyle slips a transmitter into the man's coat pocket as he brushes by him.
Kyle waits a few minutes after Eames leaves his sight before calling Tom Grey on his cellphone. He's just found a wanted illegal extractor and Hell if his team arn't the ones to make the arrest.
The transmitter stops moving at an 'abandoned' warehouse. Tom Grey and the rest of his team are there with back up. Gordon makes the signal and they move in cautiously.
The warehouse is indeed the base of a team of extractors but the team is no longer there. The warehouse is empty of any living thing, the extractors seemed to have sensed the danger approaching and dropping everything, ran. There is an elaborate layout of a dream, shelves stacked with rare chemicals and state of the art equipment. The military extraction team could only gape at the scene while the back up SWAT team just raises their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders. They don't understand why the extractors are so thunderstruck.
Tom Grey regains his composure and whistles admiringly. "Exactly my reaction." Smith murmurs, eyes still wide.
"It's no wonder why we could never get our hands on them." Gordon calls over. "They're good. And they're careful."
Kyle marches over to one of the more isolated desks as the others on his team are lured to the work spaces of their criminal counterparts. Kyle picks up a discarded file and runs his eyes over it. He'd hate to say it, but the pointman's work is impeccable. He sees a suspiciously empty square of space on the surface of the desk and guessed that the pointman had time to take his laptop with him. He frowns, it's a pity, he really wants to see more of the man's work.
Karrie is hunched over the dream's layout as Freise perches himself precariously on the edge of the table, a worn and faded notepad in hand as he mutters under his breath. Now the SWAT team is beginning to look a little peeved so Tom Grey excuses them after they secure the perimeters. They promise to clean up the scene after themselves.
"Karrie?" Tom Grey calls out, asking for the woman's opinion on the team. Karrie shakes her head grimly.
"Too good, on our best day, we can't beat them." Tom Grey nods and glances at Freise.
"This stuff is amazing! This team must've tried to dream up, er, down, three levels or so... I'll have to take this stuff back to the lab for a better evaluation." Freise doesn't even look up from the notepad.
"Kyle?" Kyle's head swivels to look from Freise to Tom Grey.
"Detailed, no unnecessary information, too much information to be gotten all legally, and understandable, bite-sized profiles for the others to study." Kyle doesn't mention anything about the way the information is catagorized, or the neatness of the desk drawers, and he skips telling the others of the gun in the jacket entirely. Because it's too militarized to be natural. He'll ask Tom Grey about it in private.
The team leaves the warehouse shaken, but with a better understanding of what they're up against.
Three days later and Kyle's living room coffee table is cluttered with files and documents on various persons. Tom Grey thought that perhaps they could find who Cobb's team's mark is. But there are just too many people, too many files. Kyle lies down on his couch as he finishes his hundredth file with a groan. He feels a headache coming up. He's been awake and studying for the last three days straight without being any wiser to who exactly the mark is.
There is also a military profile on his coffee table. A sharp-looking young man stares out at him confidently with his jaw set determinedly. This is the pointman known as Arthur.
Tom Grey should be getting to Kyle's apartment any moment now, Kyle pushes himself to his feet and staggers around his kitchen for coffee and tea. No sooner had the water on the stove boiled when Kyle's doorbell rang. He opened it for Tom Grey and directed him to the dining room. Tom Grey frowns at him and moves into the living room. "I should've known you only wanted me to stay in the dining room because this..." he waves his hands at the mess in front of him. "...Is horrifying!"
Kyle just rolls his eyes. "Like my work desk is any different."
"That's exactly my point!"
There's a knock at the door and Kyle guesses that it's Karrie or Smith because those two are the only ones who would prefer to bang the door down rather than simply press the doorbell. He opens the door. "What are you doing here, Karrie?" he demands tiredly. The architect takes Kyle into one of her playful headlocks and ruffles his ash brown hair.
"What? Can't I just come on down and visit you sometimes without reason?" She asked, then waved cheerily to Tom Grey. "Hey Tommy!" Both Tom Grey and Kyle stiffened. Nobody called Tom Grey anything but that. Then Tom Grey pulled out a gun and shot Karrie and Karrie disappeared. The two left nodded at each other and Tom Grey shot Kyle in the forehead.
Kyle jumped up from his living room couch, wide awake. He looked around his apartment wildly and slipped his gun out of his bed-side desk. Then he secured the perimeters of his apartment. Finally deciding he was alone, Kyle sank back down onto his couch. Then he noticed it. The file on Arthur that he was going to show Tom Grey was missing. He absently rubbed his ulnar artery, feeling the slight puncture wound there. He shivered when he thought of how close he had come to being killed. In fact, why hadn't he been killed?
Then he remembered the file he had read on Cobb's Cobol case. They had used two levels of dreams and Freise had told them that they might've succeeded in creating three dream levels. He reached into his pocket and fished out his totem. He spun it and sighed. He was still dreaming. He pressed the barrel of his gun to his temple and gritted his teeth. He hated this part. He squeezed the trigger.
He woke up on his couch again, he went through the moves, securing the perimeter and moved back into the living room. Then the doorbell sounded and Kyle jumped up. It was Tom Grey. "Kyle, you alright?" he asked concernedly when he saw his subordinate's pale face. Kyle hid his gun behind his back like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
"It's... I'm..." Kyle searched desperately for words to say. "I've been compromised." he sighed in defeat. He moved back to the living room and again noticed that Arthur's file was gone. He fingered his totem through the fabric of his jacket pocket.
"You've been compromised?" Tom Grey repeated worriedly. "What do you mean?" Kyle motioned to his apartment and then tapped his wrist. Tom Grey got the point."Alright, you're coming to stay with me until we can get you another apartment. Get your go-bag."
Kyle grabbed the dufflebag from under his bed and followed Tom Grey out to his car. He began to zone out as Tom Grey pulled the car out into the road. Then he remembered his totem. He slid it out of his pocket and spun it. He let out a sigh of relief. He was awake.
Half-an-hour later and Kyle had his hand on his gun under his jacket. He looked at Tom Grey pointedly. "This isn't the way to your house." Tom Grey smiled.
"A very good observation, Kyle." he hummed calmly. "I've called the team together, they should be notified that you've been compromised. They need to know that they also need to be on high alert. We're also setting up battle strategies." Kyle nodded.
"Okay." That didn't make him let go of his gun, though.
Tom Grey pulled into the warehouse that Kyle recognized to be Cobb's team's late base. Tom Grey stepped out of the vehicle. "Come on, everybody's inside." Kyle followed him inside. It took a few seconds for him to see that the two were the only ones at the scene. Tom Grey closed the doors behind them and locked it.
"I would ask for an explanation if I didn't think I wouldn't like your answer." Kyle frowned. Tom Grey pulled out his gun and pointed it at Kyle as Kyle did the same to him.
"Put the gun down, Kyle." Tom Grey ordered him.
"Why?" Kyle asked quietly. Both knew he was asking for more than a reason to put his weapon away. "Why you? Did you kill my brother too?" Tom Grey walked over to a reclining chair and set up a PASIV device without moving his gaze from Kyle.
"Philip was dangerous." Tom Grey told him simply. "He needed to be erased." Kyle narrowed his gaze at the man.
"You mean, Philip found out about you using the PASIV with malicious intent? I thought it was strange, your sudden increases of income. You're an illegal extractor, you use your information on other extractors to guide our team to arrest them when they get in your way. Am I wrong?" Tom Grey shook his head.
"But you're not right." Kyle cocked his head to the side. "Kyle, why do you think the PASIV was created in the first place?"
"For training military soldiers without having to injure them physically." Kyle replied.
"Do you really think that? Don't you think that there's a deeper reason for the military to make a machine like this?"
"You mean, to search a potential enemy's subconsciousness."
"Right, and to verify the loyalty of their own." Kyle sneered at him.
"Then, we should've put it to good use before it came down to this, don't you think?"
"Yes, we should've used it before... when your brother was still alive." Kyle stared at him in shock. "Yes, he realized that I was an illegal extractor... now, how do you think he reached that conclusion?" Tom Grey shot twice while Kyle was distracted. Pain shot up Kyle's arm and Kyle dropped his gun, clutching his injured arm. Tom Grey kicked his gun away.
"Come here." he ordered Kyle, motioning with his gun toward the PASIV. "You're going to have a little 'accident'. Don't worry, you'll fall asleep and you'll never wake up again. It will be painless, I promise you." Tom Grey hooked Kyle up to the PASIV and forced a handful of sleeping pills down his throat, every other sedative had been taken by Freise. "Maybe you'll dream before you die, who knows?"
Kyle's eyelids shivered and slid closed.
Kyle blinked. He was standing in a loud and busy marketplace in a far off country that he's never been to before. Only, he's been here before in his dream. Tom Grey is there, he's chasing him again like the first time they shared a dream. Kyle remembered the building with Tom Grey's secrets, or, the secrets he wanted Kyle to find. He shrugs his shoulders, it's better than just wandering around here, waiting for someone to come and kill him.
He finds the building easily and cracks the safe even easier. There's the manila envelope again. Kyle gives the envelope a few shakes and several papers flutter out. Kyle reads them. He reads about Tom Grey and Philip and their criminal career. They had been partners in crime until Tom Grey had accidentally killed a person in real life, not in a dream. Philip had threatened to turn him in to the authorities and had to be silenced.
There is another thaumatrope inside the bottom of the envelope.
"You touched the totem." Kyle said aloud when he senses Tom Grey enter the room behind him. "You knew how the thaumatrope would move in dream state. You imitated it. You heard of how Cobb's team had created three levels of dreams, how they fell into limbo, and how they returned. You heard about inception." Kyle shook his head. "You couldn't wait to try it out yourself, could you?" He turned around to face Tom Grey. "Tell me, are we in limbo now?" Tom Grey said nothing.
"You planted an idea into my head the first time we came under. You had me believe that my brother was killed by Cobb's team." Kyle continued. "After I found Cobb's hideout, you warned them, you told them that we were coming. Then, you stole Arthur's military file from my files, you wanted me to keeps tabs on Cobb's movements through the one with the most information. But I woke myself up so you had to sedate me again, you dreamt two levels and I woke up from one of them. The other one, you killed me before our time ran out." Kyle shook his head again. "What was it that you were trying to accomplish?"
"Inception." Was Tom Grey's calm reply. "I wanted to know if it was possible, no matter what."
"And you used anything and everything that was useful to you."
"Yes." Tom Grey didn't sound at all sorry.
"Well, it's definitely possible, congratu-fucking-lations! Are you happy now!" Kyle shouted at him angrily but he was already gone. His time was up, Kyle would stay here for eternity.
He sighed and after a few minutes, walked up to the roof of the building. "What are you doing here?" Kyle spun around at the strangely familiar voice. It was Philip. He was sitting crosslegged on the stone roof calmly watching him.
"I don't know." Was Kyle's honest reply. He sat with his older brother. Philip just smiled and whacked Kyle playfully for his strange answer.
"You know, if you have a problem, you can always talk to me." Philip told him kindly. Kyle sighed again.
"Alright, see, um... do you remember your friend Tom Grey?" A look of recognition passed over Philip's face.
"What has he done now?"
"Well... he's gone and done something incredibly crazy."
"Inception." Philip guessed correctly.
"Yes."
"To who?" Kyle says nothing. "To you?"
"Yes."
"I see." Philip seemed very calm about this, Kyle mused.
"Say," Philip said as if in after thought. "Don't you think something's strange about this whole situation?"
Kyle cocked his head. "Oh? How so?"
"I mean, don't you usually shoot yourself to wake up?" Philip asked. "You found the thaumatrope and supposed Tom Grey had tampered with your totem." Kyle began to understand what Philip was hinting at now.
"I thought I was dreaming... Cobb's men staged the first dream and stole the Arthur file. The half-baked second dream was so that they had time to get away from the scene. Then Tom Grey came to the apartment... while I was awake, and put me under at the warehouse." A look of realization came over Kyle. "I'm not in limbo, I'm only under one level." Philip smiled at him.
"Yep, you just need a kick, darling." he grinned a cheshire grin. "Don't worry, you'll be as right as rain by the time morning comes."
Kyle's eyes widened at the sudden change of voice. "Eames...!"
Eames shrugged his shoulders. "I came back to pick up my jacket, I seem to have forgotten it when he feld the warehouse. Imagine my surprise when I saw you dreaming there! I decided to sneak a peek and managed to come at a very strange time. Thanks to that, I overheard the whole conversation. Lovely fellow, that Tom Grey! I had no idea he was military!"
"You...!" Kyle sighed in exasperation. "Nevermind. Hey, how long do you think it takes to die after drinking, say, some... twenty sleeping pills?"
Eames shrugged his shoulders. "In dream time? Long enough." He made a show of checking his watch. "Well, we should get going, no?"
"You know, if I die in this dream after being put under that much sedatives, I'll be sent straight to limbo!"
"No, if you've been put under with that much sedatives, you'll die, period. So why don't you take the chance?" Kyle bit his lips as he thought about that, then shrugged his shoulders and neared the edge of the roof.
"If you say so..." And he jumped.
The first thing Kyle saw when he opened his eyes was wide, chestnut brown eyes and long locks of smooth hair. It was Cobb's architect, Ariadine. Next, he saw Arthur sighing in relief and sitting back on his heels. Kyle assumed the man had been administrating CPR just a moment ago. Lastly, he saw three elderly men looking worriedly at him. He recognized Cobb and decided the other must be their rumored sponsor, Saito. The other was the chemist, Yusuf. Then Eames moved into his line of vision.
"Hello, you alive yet?" Kyle let out a groan and bit his lip at the pain throbbing in his arm.
"'Came back for your jacket' my ass! Why are the rest of your team here?" He murmured and winced at his sore throat, his stomach was queasy. Ariadine looked apologetic.
"Sorry, we had to get the pills out of your system..." Kyle waved her off.
"I'm just... glad to still be alive."
"What do you know? Headline news 'Military Personel Arrested for Illegal use of Dreamsharing!'" Eames crooned as he folded and tossed the morning paper onto the table.
Kyle shrugged his shoulders. "What else was I supposed to do? Let him get away with it?" The two were dining at the cafe they had first met at a few days after the incident.
"So, what are you going to do now?" Eames asked around a mouthful of doughnut.
"I'm staying in the military with my team as pointman and temporary lead extractor... at least, until Gordon finishes his training."
"Oh, Gordon's that... big guy, right?"
"That's him."
"You're sure you want to continue working with the military? I mean, there might be more people like Tom Grey."
"If there is, I'll arrest them. Besides, the idea of illegal extractors being bad was planted in a dream, even though I know the origin of the idea. I don't think it's quite wrong."
"That means you'll be chasing Cobb and the rest of us down the moment I step out of this cafe?"
"Not necessarily, just when you're on jobs. Besides, today's my day off. I'm a normal teen, not a military extractor." Eames just hummed as he sipped his tea.
Then there was a beeping sound like an alarm clock. "Looks like my five minute break is over. Got to run. See you around sometime?"Kyle smiled at him. "Oh, and before I forget, you might want to check your pockets for gifts." And Kyle was gone.
Eames opened his eyes to find Arthur glaring down at him disapprovingly. "I leave the room for five minutes and you fall asleep! Would it kill you to take your job seriousy!" The pointman huffed and crossed his arms. "Why are you looking at me strangely, Eames?" Eames just blinked and shook his head as he reached into his jacket pockets. He found the transmitter.
"Forgive me, Arthur, darling, but we need to run. The military will be here soon."
The End