Chapter Text
The young man delicately scooped the tip of his raspberry cheesecake in his fork and brought it to his lips slowly, savoring the bite and rather ignoring the man across the table from him.
“Mm!” he moaned, eyes rolling up. “Fantastic. You sure you don’t want any, Mr. Doe?”
Mr. Doe shook his head. Their table was small and ornate, on the patio of a deceptively expensive cafe, in a side street canopied by well-tailored trees. A murmur of conversation quietly underscored the scene from the packed tables around them… one table nearby seemed to be speaking French, and another Russian. This didn’t seem to bother the young man with the cheesecake—who had introduced himself as Adamska Kot at the beginning of this lunch. He also wasn’t bothered to be the only one eating at his table. He’d gone through three courses while Mr. Doe sat with nothing but a picked-at roll on his napkin.
Mr. Doe was older, a gruff-looking man for the lightness of his surroundings, with a barely-trimmed beard and leather jacket. His expression was constantly stolid, and his rare polite smiles made his cheek bunch up against the eyepatch over his right eye.
“Have you come to a decision?” he asked, a quiet rumble of a voice.
Adamska wagged a finger. “Nobody makes business decisions in the middle of dessert,” he said, bringing another bite of cheesecake between his teeth. His hair was cut short, very recently military, but his red scarf and expensive coat suggested an attention to fashion.
Mr. Doe sighed and leaned back in his chair, his face still blank but obviously growing impatient.
It was then that the waiter arrived. He was an older gentleman in glasses with combed back hair, wordlessly offering the bill. Mr. Doe glanced across at Adamska.
Adamska grinned quickly, wickedly, around a cheekful of cake.
Mr. Doe sighed again. “I’ll be paying,” he said, and accepted the receipt, staring at it for a long time as the waiter left just as quietly.
“You’re too kind,” Adamska said. He finished his cake and daubed at his mouth with his napkin, exaggeratedly dainty. “Who’d have thought a business proposal could inspire such good will?”
“I’m still waiting on that answer, Mr. Kot.” Mr. Doe leaned forward, elbows on the table. “My company can guarantee your protection and comfort.”
“And what is it you need from me, then?”
“The bank account number. For the Philosopher’s Legacy.”
Adamska scoffed. “You think I have that? Well now I feel bad for eating your food.”
“You don’t have the full Legacy, of course I know that,” Mr. Doe pressed, his good eye unblinking. “But you know where a piece of it is. You know the number for the account in Portugal.”
Adamska watched him for a long time. Then he threw his head back and laughed. Loudly. Some of the other café patrons turned in their chairs to watch.
“Alright… Now that dessert’s over, there’s not much reason to keep up this charade,” Adamska said. He held up his hands expansively like a shrug, fingers long and languid. “Your technique is terrible. Here you are trying to get top secret information out of me and your strategy is to just feed me and ask me upfront? What kind of extractor are you? And I can’t believe you actually told me your name’s John Doe… That’s the tackiest cliché I’ve ever heard.”
He snapped a finger, and abruptly every well-dressed café-goer surrounding them transformed into a man in army fatigues with a black mask and a red beret. With subtle clicks, they all rose rifles and pointed them at Mr. Doe and Adamska’s table. The leaves of the trees overhead shifted but there was no wind. Physics was gently bending in this tension…
“No wait, wait, the best part is you thought I wouldn’t be able to tell this was a dream,” Adamska continued. “I might be young but I’ve probably been in this dream espionage business longer than you. You thought I’d be duped by this pretty café scene? God, your accent is terrible. You’re as American as they come, and it shows. You wouldn’t know an actual quaint European café if it bit you in the ass. I bet you got this illusion out of a movie.”
He leaned back in his chair and propped his boots up on the table, clattering the cheesecake plate. Spurs glinted and spun absently at his heels.
“I don’t know how you managed to get into my brain in the real world, so I guess you get some points for that. But the jig’s up. I know this is a dream and I can manipulate what we see just as well as you can. Or better! It’s my mind, so these people are all projections of my subconscious… Meaning they’re on my side.”
Mr. Doe remained carefully facing Adamska, but his good eye shifted around the surrounding soldiers. Adamska had clearly been well-trained in dream security to be able to turn his subconscious projections into an army at the drop of a hat. Their guns were pointed right at Mr. Doe’s head.
Adamska made a hand motion as if miming pistols, ending in a flourishing flick of his wrist. “Maybe you didn’t know who I am. In the dream business, they call me Ocelot. You’d best remember it.”
“Ocelot?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Otherwise known as the best extractor in the world. I’ve never failed a job, and you can bet I’d never let some amateur like you steal information from my head.”
“Maybe we can talk this over,” said Mr. Doe, smiling thinly.
“No thanks. I’m done with my monologue.” Ocelot’s grin widened and he gave a signal to his team of gunmen.
They all fired in unison and Mr. Doe’s blood splattered the tablecloth.
x
John Doe woke up. He would never get used to dying violently in a dream, that gut-wrenching lurch back into awakeness in the real world. All at once he was aware of a gentle motion, a distant rumbling underneath his head… He was in a passenger compartment on a train, stretched out on his back on a bench. “Adamska Kot” lay across from him, still asleep, and their wrists were both connected via IV to a metal briefcase set on the floor between them. John’s PASIV.
John sat quickly, tearing his IV out, and dropped to his knees to close up the PASIV in brisk, practiced motions. They were expensive devices, highly illegal and rare which was not a combination to take lightly. They allowed multiple minds to drop into one person’s head, one person’s dream, and this facilitated the sort of underground information extraction that John specialized in.
He was an extractor, a man who pulled secrets out of people’s dreams.
He had managed to track Ocelot—his current mark--onto this train, even to slip him a sleeping drug and get into his dream, but apparently this cat had bite, just like his reputation foretold. John’s head was throbbing, the start of a migraine, a phantom of the pain his dream self experienced that split moment before death. It was all an illusion, but his body hated tricks.
He wound up all the PASIV’s chords and auxiliary batteries and stuffed them into the briefcase, until all that remained was the IV still stuck in Ocelot’s arm.
The drugs seemed to still be in effect, but John was nevertheless careful in approaching the sleeping man. You wouldn’t expect Ocelot to be a world-class spy to look at him. He was youthful, carefully tailored and handsome. He smelled nice, some sort of aftershave. When he slept his face was almost grim, nowhere near the cocky exuberance he’d exhibited in the dream.
That arrogance was something interesting… If Ocelot had known it was a dream, he must have also known that in reality he was this vulnerable, asleep under the hand of a skilled stranger. It would be very easy for John to simply kill him right now. Ocelot must have known that, and yet he chose to indulge in a fake three-course meal and flamboyantly make John out to be a fool.
Very interesting.
John took Ocelot’s hand with surprising gentleness and removed the IV, daubing the pinprick of blood that arose with the cuff of Ocelot’s own sleeve. Assassination wasn’t in the job description this time.
He set Ocelot’s hand back on his chest… and suddenly the fingers wrapped around John’s wrist tightly. Ocelot’s free hand whipped out from his side with a knife pressing close to John’s throat.
Slowly, Ocelot opened his eyes, fully alert and with a catlike smile.
Looked like the drugs had worn off after all.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t gut you,” Ocelot demanded boastfully.
John’s free hand whipped a gun out of his back holster.
Ocelot’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t look terribly worried. “That’s a good reason… If we’re going to play like that, where’s my revolver?”
“That gaudy thing? It’s in the overhead cabinet, with the rest of your junk.”
Ocelot snorted. “If you were a real man, you’d let me keep it. Let us have a standoff, like cowboys.”
“It wouldn’t do you much good. For an expert, you’ve got a pretty useless gun.”
“Don’t like my taste?”
“It’s not about taste. Pretty decorations won’t do you any good in combat.”
“Whatever.” Ocelot pressed his knife closer, close enough that when John swallowed, his skin cut itself on the razor-sharp edge and welled drops of blood.
“I have the advantage here,” John reminded him, tilting the gun in his hand.
“I don’t think so,” said Ocelot. “You still need that account in Portugal, right? As long as that’s your mission, you can’t hurt a hair on my head. I’m the only one who knows those numbers.”
“Nope,” said John.
The manic glee in Ocelot’s blue eyes finally faltered, a barely recognizable flicker although his smile remained carefully in place. “What?”
“I extracted the numbers from you just now, in that dream.”
“That’s impossible. You were a great idiot and asked me for them yourself. I refused. I was with you the whole time, there’s no way you could have poked around where I didn’t want you.”
John smiled, and this uncharacteristic show of reciprocal cockiness made Ocelot’s grin turn sour. “I have my methods,” said John. He recited the numbers.
Ocelot’s jaw went hard, his fair face whitening further. “How the hell did you extract that?” he hissed.
“I have my methods.”
“Bullshit! I’m the best in the business.”
John shrugged. “You’re right. And you’re right that you’ve probably been in it longer than me. But I still won this one.”
Ocelot stared at him, then very slowly his grip loosened on John’s wrist and he pulled the knife away, no doubt realizing exactly what his position was. Even a prideful cat doesn’t choose a losing fight.
John stepped back, stuffing the last thread of IV into the PASIV and closing it up. He stood with the briefcase in his hand, gun still pointing at Ocelot but somewhat listlessly. He’d won already.
“The waiter,” he said.
“What?” Ocelot spat.
“In the dream. A waiter approached our table, and he handed me the receipt. That was part of my plan. The numbers of the account were written there on the receipt.” John wasn’t sure why he was explaining the trick, except that the youth had returned to Ocelot’s face, a certain relatability, a certain charm.
And perhaps, just perhaps, John was having fun for the first time in a long time.
“That waiter was a projection of my subconscious,” Ocelot said, scowling. “Why on earth would he help you like that? Just hand you a damn secret?”
John smiled again and shrugged his shoulder. “That’s something to ask your subconscious, not me.”
“No! There’s some trick to it--!”
But John was already elbowing open the compartment door. “Looks like this is my stop, Adamska.”
He was just about to exit into the hall but had to lurch out of the way of Ocelot’s thrown knife.
“Who are you?” Ocelot demanded. “What’s your name?”
“I already told you. It’s John.”
And then John was gone, with an amusing image in his head of the absolute disbelief on Ocelot’s face.
x