As you can read from the category, this is a crossover of SGA and Inception. Furthermore this is not just regular SGA but is Vegas-verse SGA. Like you know, that one episode in the last season that is an AU. That Vegas. No beta as usual because I am a hack and not a real writer. Also this is all Soka's fault, I don't remember why anymore but it is, and I love her for it, and also for capslock in MSN urging me to continue. Originally this came from a LJ Prompt but I was like NO VEGAS IS MOAR BETTAH. idek anymore. Also I probably got so much wrong and fff- :c Trend of naming things after songs continues going strong.


After it all he'd turned them down, he probably shouldn't have, they had saved his life and all that, hadn't managed to drop bombs right on top of him. McKay had come through, dragging a rescue crew out into the baking desert sun to pull him back from the edge of death. But John had been all about spitting in the face of convention ever since they'd kicked him and taken the sky from him. He wasn't about to get back under the heel of the Air Force that readily.

They'd made it impossible for him to go back to work after that, being truthful, he had to admit, he'd made it pretty damn impossible too, Vegas was a dead-zone unless he wanted to go into private work, and the government would have made that hell. So he went to Mexico, took the cash that somehow got overlooked, and drove to fucking nowhere.

He would probably be dead by now if it were not for Arthur, being truthful, which didn't happen very often for John, he owed a lot of loyalty to Arthur. He had no fucking idea what the kid's last name was, only that sometimes he gave the name "Loveless" or "Goulding" when paying for hotels, and that there was no way in hell that either of those names were really Arthur's last name. If it weren't for the kid though, John would be in a ditch dead, or out of a duffel-bag full of cash. As it was Arthur had kept him from gambling all his money away. He still wasn't sure how Arthur found him, or why, only that about a week into an endless drunken night of boozing and cards he'd found himself unhappily sober in a bathtub full of ice with a suture wound where a bullet had been not but a few hours prior.

Arthur had nursed him through the infection, fed him, clothed him, and stolen every last fucking cent from him and put it in a bank account John couldn't actually touch. John may have really wanted to fuck Arthur up against a wall by the time the fevers had faded, but by then he was also aware enough that Arthur could and would kill him with the spoon he'd been feeding John soup with. So he owed a lot to Arthur, and when the kid offered him a job, he accepted without asking the details. He probably should have though.

John found he was actually pretty good at extraction work, his early youth spent being groomed for business gave him a nice edge, an insider's view on the way that world worked. His years on the VPD had opened up a whole language of tells and lies and he had the best poker face around. Well almost best, fuck if he could read Arthur, or even tried to. After the first time Arthur smirked at him and then shot him between the eyes, he just stopped trying, he didn't want to know really, and he had the opinion that anyone who did want to know was fucking crazy.

Arthur introduced him to the life of Extraction, made him a jet-setter, and above all gave him something to do with himself. After the first year John started taking jobs on his own, and Arthur finally gave him back his money, let the bird fly from the roost. By then John didn't want to fuck Arthur anymore, he'd seen what that body was capable of, and John liked living. But whenever Arthur called, John stopped what he was doing and listened, and Arthur could be depended on to give information on who in the industry John should stay away from.

He liked the work, liked getting into other people's heads and learning them from the inside out, he was good at it, and even though five years ago he would have rather took a bullet then do this kind of immoral work, he just didn't care anymore. They took secrets, cut through lies, sometimes once he was working on his own he even built lies on purpose. Did pleasure-sector work, building fantasy realities for people, sometimes he slummed enough to be the main attraction for certain high paying clientele. Arthur was not particularly happy when he found out, but Arthur was off the map by then, calling him from throw-away phones to frown at him vocally. He hadn't signed up for a mother though, and tended to hang up on the kid when he got too righteous.

Arthur had taught him, but John still lived his own life, and if he was currently slumming as a dream-whore, it was none of the kid's business anyway, and Arthur was a kid to John. Young and baby-faced, and maybe deadlier than most of the people John had met in his rather bumpy life-journey. Arthur who was a world away didn't have any power to make John stop, and even though he owed the kid everything, after that first call, he maybe did it just to spite him. Arthur who was off in New York studying Design, because Arthur was a fucking genius, and somehow trusted John enough to tell him where to reach him if everything went to shit and he needed someone to hide him.

By the time he'd been freelancing on his own for awhile, he'd compiled enough information to know that Arthur had probably been doing this since the beginning and that he was the best Point in the business. Somehow after everything, Lady Luck had smiled on him and dealt him a winning hand. Which meant everything would have to come crashing down sometime. He really didn't want to have to come crawling to Arthur after all this, but when you get on that self-destructive track, it gets hard to pull yourself off again apparently. He had stopped drinking though, that was something at least right?