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The thing is a cage.
The metal is shiny and new; it’s an object of tidiness, of organized lines, something Arthur would normally like, but when he sits in it for the first time, his only words are “It’s too stiff.”
Eames had come not because Arthur had asked him to, but because he had no one else. Cobb is done with dreamshare, supposedly; Yusuf is busy inventing some new miraculous form of Somnacin; Ariadne is working on some crazy project in Cape Town; Mal is dead. That leaves Eames, who had been the only one within reasonable flying distance on such short notice. That was all Eames had thought when he took off from Beijing that morning, and all he thought when he arrived at the hospital in Moscow later that day.
Alright, so maybe there had been a little more to it than that: in truth, Eames had felt guilty, because it’s his fault Arthur had taken the job in the first place. He had suggested it and set up the necessary arrangements for it. It was good pay, but not his style—so he’d offered it to Arthur, and Arthur had accepted.
And now here he is, leaning noncommittally against the hospital-issue dresser, as if he still hasn’t decided whether to stay or to go. Which is, really, more or less the truth.
“I still can’t believe it took you two weeks to tell me,” he says, his expression carefully blank. He’s not particularly hurt by Arthur’s delay, just amused. It’s so like him that it’s painful.
Arthur’s fingers trace along the metal of the wheel at his side delicately, as if it might crumple beneath his touch.
“I had to be sure.” His voice is barely a murmur.
It is then that Eames realizes how truly damaged Arthur is by the whole thing, though his subconscious had known ever since he got the call. Arthur, dark and dangerous Arthur, a man of unrivaled physicality, can no longer walk. This thing, this wheelchair, is a prison in its own horribly final, heavy way, in that it is now the only means by which Arthur can get around.
Eames remembers one night in Cairo when he and Arthur were running from a job gone wrong: Arthur’s face, his grin devilish and his eyes sparkling, as they ran through some stinking back alley, fleeing the harsh sound of gunfire ringing through the dank night air. He’s sure his own expression was similar. That night and its dangers were marked by pure and unbridled joy at their predicament, of the constant, looming possibility of death, and the thrill of fleeing from it with everything they had. And now Arthur is confined to a chair, and…
Nothing on Arthur’s face gives it away, but Eames knows that inside he’s screaming.
“What are you going to do?” he asks eventually, lighting up a cigarette though he knows he’s not supposed to smoke in a hospital. Hell, that’s never stopped him before.
“I’m going to work, same as it ever was. I can’t run point like I used to, but it won’t affect my research. In-dream I should be able to walk.”
Eames laughs at that and offers the cigarette to Arthur after taking a few drags. He’s never seen Arthur with a cigarette before, but he takes it gladly, inhaling the smoke without missing a beat.
“You think they’ll hire you, like that?”
“I think they’ll hire me like anything. I am very good at what I do.”
That much is true. Eames isn’t confident that Arthur will be alright in this contraption, his legs newly paralyzed and his world turned on its head, but who is he to argue? He’s just a coworker, a man with no say in Arthur’s life.
“Are you going to be okay?”
Arthur’s gaze is hard.
“I’ll be fine.” Pause. “I didn’t ask you to come here, Eames. You’ve checked up on me, so don’t feel obligated to look after me. You don’t need to stay.”
Seeing the look in his eyes, the dangerous glint of determination that always ends in minor flesh wounds, makes Eames want to, but he goes instead, heading to Mombasa to stop in on Yusuf and see how his new compound is going. Two months pass and he feels he’d almost be able to forget that the whole thing happened, too, except that he hasn’t heard about any new accomplishment of Arthur’s since he saw the man last and that’s never a good sign. Either Arthur’s not working, or…
He gets the call on a balmy summer night while he’s tending to Yusuf’s fledgling “herb” garden as repayment for crashing on his couch. The voice on the other hand is familiar but more ragged than the last time he heard it, and from the first breath Eames knows he’s going to be uprooting himself again soon.
“I can’t walk in-dream,” Arthur says, and Eames almost drops his spade.
…
“Bloody hell,” Eames says when he enters Arthur’s London apartment three days later, a small, dingy place that’s all sharp colors and harsh angles. “How do you get about in this hole in the wall?”
“I manage,” Arthur replies, maneuvering his wheelchair with a finesse that had been absent two months ago.
“You live here by yourself?”
“Me, myself, and I. Tea?”
“Please.” Then, “I thought you hated London.”
“Had to get away from some people. Where better to go than a place I couldn’t stand?”
Eames sits down on the couch and realizes simultaneously that he’s sitting there letting a handicapped man make him tea and that Arthur would murder him if he even thought about helping. So he sits and he waits and he murmurs “Ta” when Arthur sets the tea in front of him, taking a sip. It’s a nice blend, soft and rich. He wonders what it is.
“So what’s this about getting away?”
Arthur sighs.
“About seven weeks ago I decided to try a job in Belarus for a man I’d worked with before. Like I told you over the phone, when we went under I was still in the chair and I couldn’t stand like I thought I’d be able to. It was… disconcerting.”
He pauses, running his tongue over his bottom lip.
“I thought it was a fluke. I backed out of the job, but about a month ago I decided to try again on another job, thinking that perhaps I had just been preoccupied with getting used to the chair and this time it would be better. Long story short, it wasn’t, the people I was working with were significantly less hospitable, and I had to run.” He grimaces at his word choice but makes no effort to revise it.
There are a number of things about this that tell Eames just how out of it Arthur is, primarily that he just rushed into a job when he could have tested his hypothesis in a neutral situation where money wasn’t at stake, and secondarily because he really can’t walk in-dream. Eames is no expert in the effects of handicaps on dreams, but he is an expert in perception, and he recognizes what’s going on here from a mile away: if he’s right, Arthur is trying to prove that he’s still the same man, that his new handicap has not changed him, but the truth of the matter is that the violence and action of Arthur’s everyday life had been who he was, and not being able to walk now has branded him with the perception that he is lesser, incapable. He could walk in-dream if he wanted to, but the impact of his disability has changed how he thinks of himself so severely that his paralysis is now factored into his subconscious’ manifestation of himself. It’s probably stubborn pride that kept him from calling Eames for so long—he was determined to get over it himself, and Eames is naught but a last resort.
“I can’t believe I didn’t hear about all this before now,” Eames says, finishing off his tea.
“I’m good at cover-up.” Arthur laughs mirthlessly. “It’ll get out eventually, though. I’ll be a pariah. Nobody will want to go into a dream with me for fear that I’ll just slow them down.” Which I will, his eyes say.
“I could take you under,” Eames muses, scratching at his stubble. “I’ll stay a few weeks and we’ll see if we can’t figure this thing out. Just some experimental stuff, no jobs.”
Arthur’s lips quirk up in a ghost of a smile. “I knew there was a reason I called you, Mr. Eames.”
“Yeah, we’ll, ‘s not like I’ve got anything better to do now anyway. Dreamshare has lost its charms for me as of late. Bit repetitive, innit?”
“I suppose.” He doesn’t seem convinced, but then, Arthur’s always been satisfied by the creation bit. He likes making mazes and running through them, dodging bullets and bombs and wily projections. Eames, well, he needs a bit more than that. He needs the beauty of it, the aesthetic; they share a thirst for life, but the lives they crave have their differences.
“When can we start?” he finally says, eying his empty cup of tea.
“Now, if you’ve got nothing better to do. I want to get this under control as soon as possible.”
Of course Arthur would say that. He never was one to dawdle on such pleasantries as, oh, giving someone time to check into a hotel.
“I have a couch,” Arthur says when Eames tells him as much.
“You want me to sleep on your couch? That lumpy thing?” he says incredulously, though it’s not like they hadn’t done similar things in the past—in fact, he’d slept on the very same couch several times before. Arthur was rather attached to it and it had made it through the last few moves. That wasn’t to say he wouldn’t leave the thing behind at a moment’s notice, but Eames understood: he had things he liked to keep too, as sort of a running joke with himself. He’d see how long he could keep any one piece of furniture, feel accomplished when he hit a certain number of months or apartments.
“I’m sure it would be hurt to hear you talk about it that way after your history together.”
Eames just rolls his eyes.
The dream is simple, an empty, smoothly-paved street with skyscrapers lining either side. There are no projections in sight. Though the presence of Arthur’s chair should be unsurprising, Eames still finds himself blinking to make sure it’s actually there anyway, and when it does not, in fact, go away, he and Arthur begin.
“The weight is the same as it is up above. Moves the same, too.”
“Have you tried standing up? Actually tried?”
“Who do you think I am?”
Eames raises his hands defensively.
“Hey, there’s a difference between feeling like you can’t get up and actually being physically incapable of doing so.”
So Arthur tries again, to no avail. Eames even tries picking him up and putting him on his feet, but that ends disastrously. After dozens of experiments, Eames sighs.
“I’m going to have to think about this, Arthur. I’m sure it can be fixed, but it needs time. I’ll—”
The next moment he’s awake, blinking against the sunlight streaming through the small window in front of him. Arthur’s face is grave from his spot beside the coffee table.
They talk about the dream for the next hour, Eames taking notes on what had happened. He thinks he can fix it, but he’ll have to say some things Arthur probably won’t want to hear.
C’est la vie, he thinks, anticipating the sour looks he’ll get if he doesn’t explain himself correctly. Well, every day is an adventure, right? It just seems that the focus of his adventures in the coming days will be trying not to get stared at to death and/or gunned down by a feisty man in a wheelchair.
“I’m going to order Indian. What do you—”
“Chicken tikka would be nice. I’m going to step out and make a phone call; be back in a minute,” Eames says hurriedly as he gets an idea. He thinks he might know how to solve Arthur’s problem.
…
“Do you even remember how you learned?” Yusuf asks sometime later, his voice tinny over the phone. He’d already been filled in on Arthur’s paralysis issue when Eames had up and left abruptly, leaving the garden untended.
“Yes—no—sort of,” Eames admits, running a hand through his hair. “Look, I’m a forger. I forge myself into different people all the time, doesn’t matter how different they are. The principle can’t be all that different. I just need to teach Arthur the basics of forging, get him to forge a version of himself that isn’t paralyzed.”
“Sounds like a plan to me. So what’s the hangup?”
Eames sighs with exasperation.
“Arthur’s changed since you saw him, Yusuf.”
“Well yeah, he’s in a bloody chair now.”
“No, I mean… he’s different. Fundamentally. I think he’s really suffering, being confined to a chair all the time. I feel like if I tell him all this stuff, that he’s the one causing the dream paralysis, that it will shred the last bits of sanity he has. Usually when it comes to Arthur telling it like it is is best, but I feel like this time it’ll just make him hate himself more than he already does.”
Yusuf is silent for a moment, lost in thought.
“Why are you doing this, Eames?”
It’s Eames’ turn to be silent, turning the question over in his mind, trying to piece together his reasoning.
“He’s a friend,” he finally decides on, though it’s not the whole truth. Yusuf doesn’t need to know about the guilt burning a hole in his gut, eating away at him savagely. Nobody needs to know but himself, and sometimes he wished even he were spared that knowledge. “I know I’m not the best mate to have around, but I do try to help when I can. And if there’s any way I can help Arthur in this mess, it’s by doing this.” He laughs. “Besides, I’m doing the world a favor. Imagine what he’d do if he couldn’t dreamshare anymore?”
“I can see it now: Arthur the homicidal crochet sweater enthusiast. Don’t ever give him my address; I don’t want to find any hideous Christmas sweaters on my doorstep.”
“It’s Arthur. It’d take him about two point three seconds to figure out where you live.”
“Then tell him my size is a small. Then when I can’t wear it he’ll blame you.”
“Why does everyone always think to blame me for everything? You wound me, Yusuf, you really do.”
“Please, you’re naturally dastardly. When blame finds you, you deserve it.”
Eames huffs, but doesn’t argue.
“Listen, I’ve got to go. I was working on fine-tuning the new compound when you called. I wish I could help you with this more, I really do, but I’ve really only one bit of advice to give: it’s a mental thing, Eames. You know bodies like no one else, everyone knows it, but you’ve got to forget about them a little and think about his mind. Figure out where the mind and the body cross over and work from there.” He pauses, then, “Let me know how it goes, alright? I’m invested in this now, so you better not let me down.”
The man from the Indian restaurant has just arrived, speeding Eames’ response.
“Thanks, Yusuf. Really. I’ll let you know what I figure out.” With that he hangs up, intercepting the delivery before it arrives at the door and paying with his own card, though Arthur will probably gripe about it.
His thoughts have consumed his conversational skills, he finds when he and Arthur are eating, because they’re making smalltalk and Eames simply cannot find anything interesting to say. Mind and body, mind and body, his brain screams, and anything else becomes trivial.
A question strikes him, however, when Arthur mentions a job in Morocco they did together a few years back, and he voices it in the form of a statement:
“You never told me what happened.” It’s simple and, more importantly, it doesn’t reveal how invested he is in the topic.
Arthur studies him for what seems like forever, lowering the piece of potato that had been on its way to his mouth.
“You never asked.”
“Then consider this me asking.”
Arthur gets this distant look, and it’s then that Eames really notices the physical change Arthur has gone through: though his forearms look sturdier, more sinuous, the muscles in his calves no longer seem to ripple quite so much through his well-tailored slacks and the fire is gone from his eyes. He seems tired, and judging by the dark circles under his eyes, he is. Eames wonders how often he gets a good night’s sleep and suspects that he simply doesn’t.
“It was stupid, really. The man running the extraction—Carlisle, I think it was—had pissed off another extractor, the man who was originally supposed to do the job, and he came gunning for us. I ran, of course. It was typical, just another job gone sideways, but I ran out onto a street that was busier than expected and got hit by a car.”
He rubs his face languidly then, looking exhausted. “It was so ridiculous. I always expected to go out in a blaze of glory, you know? Instead I got hit by a car and landed myself in this thing.” His fist bumps against the hard metal of the chair and Eames thinks he detects some malice there, dulled and spent by too many nights mourning the past.
Eames knows what Arthur’s on about, of course. They’re similar that way, always moving, always throwing themselves into crazy situations, because the prospect of dying in a crazy car chase or gun fight was thrilling, and every time they survived, it was like they were cheating death. In those moments right after the uncertainty ended, when they knew one had gotten away, they felt like gods.
“I’m sorry.”
Arthur gives him a funny look.
“There’s no need to apologize. It’s not your fault.”
Eames wants to say something to alleviate his guilt somehow, to make it better, but everything he can think of is cheesy and ridiculous. Instead he says nothing, only broods, body and mind a constant echo.
“I’m going to bed, Eames,” Arthur finally says, wheeling toward his bedroom. “Feel free to get a drink or whatever. Ma maison est ta maison.”
He snorts at Arthur’s French usage. Arthur has always been fond of the language, replacing expressions typically said in other languages with the French equivalent when he can. Eames has always suspected it has something to do with Mal, though he's never asked.
“Arthur,” he calls when Arthur’s nearly at the door, “we’re going to figure this out.”
Arthur just nods.
“I know.”
…
Eames ends up doing the dishes before he actually falls asleep, mostly because his mind won’t settle. He knows that there’s a solution he can reach somehow, he just needs to find it.
Cleaning potatoes and chicken off their dishes does not miraculously illuminate the answer, but he does feel a bit better. It’s less the cleanliness and more the not-encroaching-on-Arthur’s-life-so-much that does the trick. At least he has a clean thinkspace, right?
The next morning he untangles himself from the voluminous afghan Arthur had supplied and brews himself some coffee, thankful that Arthur keeps the good stuff on hand rather than something cheap or instant. Arthur is up soon after, his brow stormy when he finds out the dishes are already done.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says when he rounds the counter and enters the kitchen, opening the fridge with a careful maneuver of his chair.
“Had some extra time, darling. Coffee?”
“Please.”
It’s odd, making coffee for the owner of the house, but Eames doesn’t really notice. He’s too preoccupied with how Arthur gets a mug from the cabinet above the counter without anyone else around.
“How do you get plates and such, anyway? I missed it yesterday.”
At that Arthur looks ridiculously pleased with himself.
“Ah, see,” he starts, letting his hand find a small lever on the side of the chair, “I have a friend who’s into robotics who modified the chair for me.” When he nudges the lever up, the chair rises, a small whirring noise betraying its mechanical nature. The wheels remain on the ground but the entire seat of it rises up, up, taking Arthur with it until he can reach the top cabinets with ease. “It comes in handy quite a bit.”
Eames’ eyebrows only start lowering when Arthur’s taken his coffee and stirs in the milk and sugar, leaving them on the counter for Eames and returning the chair to its original position.
“You would,” he finally says as he prepares his own coffee, adding just milk and returning the items to their rightful places.
“I do what I can,” Arthur replies, placing a small tray from the counter in his lap so he can take his coffee to the living room without spilling it.
They drink their coffee in silence, Arthur brooding over the paper and Eames turning ideas over in his head. He’s still unsure of exactly what he’ll do, but he has a feeling he won’t be sure of anything until he just does something.
“I was thinking we might go back into the dream soon,” Eames says tentatively when his coffee’s done, prompting Arthur to lower the paper. There’s a pinched look to his eyes and Eames wonders what it’s about.
They dream. The street is similar, but scattered projections dot it here and there, buying their groceries or walking to work or laughing with friends. Eames raises an eyebrow.
“Don’t want to get rusty,” Arthur supplies, and that’s the end of it.
They head toward a small cafe a little way down the road and are seated at a table, one chair pulled away to accommodate Arthur. Eames can actually feel the annoyance radiating off him at that.
“I’d like to conduct some tests,” Eames says, sipping the limonade the waitress sets down in front of him though he’s not actually thirsty. The taste is hollow, wrong in some minute way, and it makes Eames think of that pinched look again.
He doesn’t think about it long, though, because then Arthur’s asking “What kind of tests?” and his expression is expectant.
“I’d like us both to go into a series of dreams concerning different scenarios to see just how this problem is affecting you.” To see how deeply your mind believes that you are useless.
“And they’d be your dreams?”
“Correct. I’d create each one to fit a specific situation. You won’t know the situation before we go into the dream.”
“So why are we here?”
Eames chews on his lower lip, though he refuses to admit to himself that it’s nerves.
“I don’t want to talk to you about this next part in a place where you can potentially blow my face off permanently.”
Arthur’s eyebrows raise.
“Oh, do continue.”
“Look, Arthur… I think it’s a mental thing that’s keeping you back here. It’s like—like when someone who’s seen war crimes goes blind without eye damage. Like somatoform paralysis, except in your mind. You believe you are paralyzed all the time, even in dreams, and that belief turns into a legitimate paralysis. If we can uproot that belief, I’m sure you’ll be back to walking again at the dream level in no time.”
He studies Arthur’s face as he speaks and finds what he’d sort of been expecting there: Arthur knew this already. Of course he did, he’s brilliant—still, hearing it said brings a sharp pain into his eyes, one Eames wishes wasn’t there. But really, what else is he supposed to say? With Arthur, honesty has always been the best policy. If he held anything back, he’s sure Arthur would stab him in the dead of night if he found out. It’s the rest of it that’s going to be the really tricky part… how does he mess with Arthur’s head enough to get him to think differently about himself?
“I think what I want to do is teach you some basic forging techniques, but I need to see how far I need to go first.”
“So in effect I’ll forge a version of myself that isn’t paralyzed.”
Eames grins, pleased to hear his own words come from Arthur’s mouth and knowing it means they’re on the same page.
“Precisely.”
With that said, he takes out his gun and shoots them both.
…
“Do you have the stuff to handle three-level dreams?” he asks when they wake up, hoping he won’t have to bother one of his local contacts for Somnacin.
“Of course,” Arthur says, like it’s a no-brainer. “Some of Yusuf’s new formula. Have you tried it?”
Since the Fischer job, Yusuf’s perfected his three-layer compound, partly out of guilt and partly out of the desire to remind everyone that he’s still way smarter than they are. It no longer sends the user to limbo when killed, although it sacrifices some stability. Eames isn’t worried about that, though, because each dream will be quick.
After some hasty planning they go under again, still using Arthur’s mind for the dream. Eames wastes no time picking up the PASIV in the small, windowless hotel room and hook them both up, the new dream revealing a quiet, too-green park.
Arthur’s still in the chair.
Eames frowns, then gestures for Arthur to follow him. They approach a picnic table and he fishes the third PASIV out from under it unceremoniously, eyes meeting Arthur’s before they go down yet another level.
The room is dark, the air stale. For a moment Eames is disoriented; this isn’t the house in the country they’d had planned. As his eyes adjust, he can just make out the dim lines of light reflecting off metal bars, dirty and rusted.
It’s a cage.
It stretches up around him, massive and all-encompassing, the bars firm and imposing. Eames feels tiny and insignificant.
That’s when he sees Arthur.
He’s still in the chair, but his posture is tightly coiled and tense. His right-hand grip is white-knuckled over the armrest; his left holds a gun.
“Oh, Arthur—” Eames starts to say, but then the bullet buries itself in his skull.
…
Arthur doesn’t say anything, just wheels himself toward his room, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Arthur.”
He looks back, and that’s all it takes to silence Eames. One look. Then he’s gone, the door shut behind him, and Eames is left with more questions than answers.
Eames ends up going for a walk, his mind whirring and his lips perpetually enclosed around the filter of a cigarette, one after the other. It’s been, what five days since he found out about Arthur’s problem, and he’s already obsessed with it?
He eats lunch at a shitty cafe a few blocks from Arthur’s flat, buying a hastily-made sandwich that only further sours his mood. He’s irritated with himself for getting so invested so quickly. It had been about guilt before, but now—now the look in Arthur’s eyes in the final level of the dream is burned into his retinas and he simply can’t walk away, not with what he knows.
They had never been friends—on a good day they were merely rivals—but they had always trusted eachother. They’d had to; it was vital that they knew eachother well to pull off so many difficult jobs in such quick succession, to travel the globe enough for a lifetime in the span of a week. Arthur had always been a being of great power, ethereal, desperate in his lust for violence. If he couldn’t walk in his dreams, it would destroy him. If he couldn’t stand tall and fire a gun, couldn’t run breathlessly from alley to alley, couldn’t rule the worlds he created like a king, he would whither away into nothingness, crushed by the weight of his own unfair judgment of himself. Eames knew because he was the same, in a way: they both took vodka in their cocktails; it was the juice that differed.
It’s nothing but trouble, he tells himself as he gulps down his second cup of coffee that day savagely, making up his mind to tip the waiter extra to compensate for his sour behavior. He thinks of Arthur’s expression again, of the thinly-veiled defeat beneath his fury, and knows it’s no use arguing himself. He’s wasting brainpower on an issue he already knows he won’t put down until it’s solved.
And after that, well, he’s fucking off to Vegas to gamble away everything he’s got.
…
They don’t use the PASIV again that day, or the next. Neither of them even mentions it, just sidesteps around the subject artfully, talking about anything but what they actually needed to say. It’s weird for Eames, knowing that there exists a side of Arthur somewhere deep down that’s raw and vulnerable, but those thoughts are brushed aside in favor of not looking brooding in front of the very man he’s thinking about.
“You should get a hobby,” Eames murmurs over breakfast that third morning, a scanty toast and orange juice affair.
“Like what?” Arthur is amused, but he doesn’t seem to oppose the idea.
“Painting.” Eames thinks on that for a moment. “Or writing. Despite your astonishing lack of imagination, I think you’d be quite good at it. Something very dry, factual… the mating cycle of the sea turtle, perhaps.”
“That’s it,” Arthur deadpans, “you’ve discovered my true calling. I’m off to research turtle sex, don’t wait up.”
And then they’re laughing. It’s not much, but it’s something, and Eames feels glad he can take the tightness out of Arthur’s shoulders even a little, even for so asinine a reason as a stupid joke.
“I used to draw a lot,” Arthur admits when his laughter quells, his gaze fixed on something far away. “When I was in architecture I would draw floor plans just for the heck of it. I drew my professor once when I was bored and never looked back.”
He pauses, then gestures to a medium-sized picture on the wall to Eames’ right. “That’s mine.”
Eames had glanced at the picture before, but he’d never really looked at it. He stands up now, walking toward the frame until he’s close enough to touch, his fingers twitching with the desire to wipe off the sparse layer of dust on the glass.
The paper is coarsely textured, the medium charcoal. It’s of a man of slim build, his shoulders narrow and bony, his face smudged and shadowed. He’s propped against a window sill looking smug, a wicked tooth revealed by his grin, a cigarette in hand. Beyond the pane of the window sprawls a city thriving with life, the details fuzzy but the whole crystal-clear.
Paris, Eames thinks. Of course it’s Paris.
“Who is it?” he asks, turning back to Arthur.
“I don’t know. Someone. No one. Anyone.” Arthur sighs. “I always hated that piece. So many things just grated on me about it.” He hesitates, licking his lower lip. “But I thought that if I put it up in constant view, where I’d have to face it all the time, it would drive me to get better. It would keep me from giving up or getting frustrated because I knew that the person who created that picture wasn’t the person I wanted to be.”
Looking at the drawing, a contemplative look takes over his features. “And I did, you know. I did get better. So I keep it up to remind myself that I’ll always be better than I was before if I just keep trying.”
Eames doesn’t miss the metaphor.
…
They’d kissed, once.
It wasn’t something they particularly meant to do. They weren’t pissed off their minds, nor were they particularly rushed… it was an experiment that lasted exactly one trial and yielded no conclusive results.
They’d been in New York City, sky-high in a dinky hotel room on top of the world. The scents of smog and disease were far-reaching, filtering through the open window. Arthur and Eames had shared a bottle of wine before sort of collapsing messily on the small couch in the room, Arthur sighing and Eames throwing his head back against the cushions.
“Do you ever get tired of it?” Eames had asked, though he knew the answer.
“I couldn’t if I tried.”
“Me either.” They looked at eachother, and then Arthur placed a kiss, quick and chaste, against his lips.
“Hmm,” Eames had said, and life went on.
…
“I was thinking,” Eames says sometime later that day, “that we ought to try a dream again.”
Arthur doesn’t visibly stiffen, but Eames can tell he wants to.
“Before I was just testing how deep the paralysis went. Now we can use my dreams, so the layouts should be pretty stable.”
The not-stiff Arthur relaxes.
“Sounds good,” he replies nonchalantly, his face stoic.
“Some of the dreams may, ah—surprise you. You might—”
“Christ, Eames, I’m not a child. Let’s get on with it.”
So he does. They pull out the PASIV again and make another go of it, setting the timer for a mere two minutes and letting the Somnacin take them into sleep.
…
The world screams back to life in a cacophony of shouts and beeps, the fluorescent lighting bluish and unflattering. They’re in a hospital, running a gurney frantically down a hallway, and—Arthur’s not there.
Eames stops abruptly, looking back to find him having fallen behind in his wheelchair. He curses under his breath.
Arthur’s mouth opens in question, but by then the dream has already changed.
They’re in the sea now, waves crashing over them, the sky stormy. Eames looks, but finds Arthur is nowhere to be seen and curses.
A lobby greets them next. Arthur’s chair is intact but he’s dripping wet, sputtering and gasping for air.
“Jesus—”
That’s when the building splits open. With a savage screech a hole opens up at consumes the waiting room, jarring Arthur’s chair. He starts to roll toward it slowly, but then with growing speed, his expression panicked as he realizes what’s happening.
“Run!” Eames cries, but Arthur can do no more than slide out of the chair, clawing for purchase on the smooth tile floor that’s slowly vanishing to the gaping hole. An Earth-shattering rumble ripples through the floor, the building begins to crumble at the walls, and—
…
“What the fuck was that?” Arthur sputters as soon as he’s able, clawing at the armrests on his chair.
“I tried to warn you,” Eames says matter-of-factly, casting Arthur a look. “You just didn’t want to hear it.”
Arthur huffs.
“Fine. Now are you going to explain why you just tried to kill me three times?”
Eames pauses, then: “I was testing your survival instinct. You know, seeing if you’d forget to be paralyzed when lives were in danger, yours included.”
The realization dawns on Arthur like a heavy weight.
“And I failed.”
“This is good,” Eames counters. “It’s progress.”
He sees the way Arthur’s jaw tightens, how his fingers grip the sides of his chair for the umpteenth time. Eames finds himself wanting to know what Arthur’s thinking, but he thinks he might already know.
“We know more about it now. This’ll make it easier for me to figure out how to help.”
Arthur looks like he wants to say something, to protest, but clamps his mouth shut instead.
“So what’s step two?”
Eames looks up at the drawing on the wall, thinking.
“You still have any charcoal laying around?”
…
Some half hour later they’re seated around the coffee table again, charcoal and watercolor paper in hand. Arthur has employed the use of a larger tray this time, more of a flat board, to set across his armrests and place the paper on. He looks at Eames expectantly, his gaze sharp and focused.
“When I learned to forge,” Eames begins, looking at the paper, “I first learned by drawing. You have to envision the person you’re trying to forge in the dream, see. So what we did first was we sketched people, and then we used the sketches to help memorize the person, to bring them into the dream. It doesn’t help with body language, but you don’t need to worry about that yet.”
“Who should I draw?” Arthur asks, looking uncertainly at the paper. He seems uncomfortable at the prospect of drawing, like he hasn’t done it in too long.
It’s probably been months, knowing Arthur, Eames thinks, mentally shaking his head. Arthur did love to get wrapped up in his job. Eames is sure if Arthur could walk in-dream, if this had all worked out the way he’d said it would, that he’d be doing jobs as frequently as he had been before the accident.
“Anyone. It doesn’t have to be a real person. Right now you want to concentrate on getting your appearance to change, that’s all.”
Arthur thinks for a moment, then roughly sketches a man, mid-forties, with a strong, triangular build and salt-and-pepper hair. As he refines the sketch Eames does a sketch of his own, a woman no older than twenty-four with curly brown hair down past her shoulders. Mousy, he decides, with a broad taste in music.
“Now what?” Arthur asks when he’s done. Eames finds a drawing that’s much more refined that he’d been expecting waiting on Arthur’s paper, the man’s jaw chiseled and a goatee carefully smudged around his mouth.
“What’s his name?”
Arthur thinks for a moment.
“Alfonso,” he says, tasting the name like it’s a sweet. “Alfonso Giordano.”
“Ah, an Italian!” Eames wonders if Arthur knows an Italian accent. He speaks Italian, sure, but doing just the accent is different.
“The rest I’ll explain when you’re under. While I’m setting up the dosages, memorize his face. Fill in the things you’ve left out: his wrinkles, his laughter, the way he looks when he frowns. I know he’s not a real person, but trust me, that makes it easier. Pretend he’s real and he’ll come to life in no time.”
Arthur seems a little puzzled by this, but obliges easily enough. A few minutes later he’s ready to go.
“Aren’t you going to memorize yours?” he asks, which elicits a laugh from Eames.
“It’s all up here,” Eames replies, tapping his temple as he presses down on the plunger.
…
The room is wall-to-wall mirrors, brightly lit, with costumes strewn over chairs and rolling carts haphazardly. To the far left is a counter with a stool and at this Eames sits, waiting for Arthur to roll up beside him.
“Chicago,” Arthur says quietly, the word surprising Eames.
“I told you about this place?”
“Not exactly. You told me bits and pieces; I guessed the rest.”
Eames had been in a production of Chicago once—for shits and giggles, of course. He’s modeled this room after the dressing room there, though it’s not entirely correct. In real life it was dirtier, for one, and more dimly lit. Many of the mirrors had been cracked.
“I was pressed for time,” Eames explains simply. Perhaps it’s a bit of a comfort to him, going back to this place, one of the few places he’d been truly, ridiculously happy, but he doesn’t say that. He wouldn’t dare, although he kind of wants to. This place is sacred, but it’s also the perfect environment in which to teach Arthur to forge.
Of course it is. After all, he himself had learned to forge here, too.
Shaking his head, he pulls over the neatly-stacked paper and charcoal sticks on the counter and hands the appropriate materials to Arthur.
“Redraw Alfonso,” he says simply, looking into the mirror. It’s time to create his mousy, brown-haired music enthusiast.
Sasha, he thinks, but he knows he can’t use that name. There are some lines he loves to cross and some lines he respects diligently, and this one is of the latter camp. He never forges people from his past, people who are long gone, if he doesn’t have to.
“How’s this?”
The drawing is similar, but there are differences. He’s taller now, and his jaw is rounder; he tells Arthur as much.
Arthur puzzles over it for a while, redrawing some of the lines to try and recreate the original.
“Harder to remember than you thought it would be, isn’t it?”
He can tell Arthur is annoyed at being a novice, but the man humors him and nods.
“Even with years of training in remembering dreams and the real world and all the spaces in between, it’s hard. That’s why you start with drawings. They’re tangible, something you can take with you and memorize. Actual living people, well—that’s a bit more difficult. It takes practice. You’ll get it.”
Arthur stares at the paper in his hand, his brow lowered but not angry. “So I’ve drawn Alfonso again, more or less. Now what?”
“Now you need to think about him—I mean it, really think about him. Where does he work? Is he married? Which day of the week does he loathe most? What’s his favorite ice cream flavor?” He pauses, standing in front of the mirror. As Arthur watches his body begins to change shape somewhat grotesquely, his face becoming rounder, and then evens out into a more pleasing silhouette. His hair grows longer and becomes black, jet black—
No.
The chocolate curls replace it in the blind of an eye, becoming the woman he’d created up above. She’s mousey, just like he’d thought, and his fingers curl around the MP3 player in his newly-acquired skirt pocket.
Elliot, he tells himself firmly, but the name feels wrong.
“What’s her favorite ice cream flavor?” Arthur asks, his voice somewhat breathless.
Eames adorns his best shit-eating grin and turns to Arthur.
“Strawberry.” He sounds prouder of himself than he probably should be, but just as salacious as he’d intended.
Arthur just rolls his eyes, looking back at second-rendition Alfonso.
“So how do I make that happen?”
“Like I said, you need to know who the person is, fundamentally, to get a good grasp on them. Once that’s done, you—” He tries to think of how to explain it but finds himself failing miserably. An epiphany hits him soon after, though, and he continues: “It’s like building a bridge. I’ve seen you do it before, in dreams. You just… you think about it, and it happens. You have to really picture the person in your mind, and your mind does the rest.”
He looks over at Arthur and barely restrains a guffaw. Arthur is now sporting a ridiculous goatee, one meant for tall, triangular Italian men, not him. Arthur’s lips quirk up as he examines it in the mirror, pulling at the stubble.
“It feels so real.”
“It is real, down here.” More softly he adds, “Your legs will be real too.”
Arthur doesn’t hear, or if he does, doesn’t say anything about it. He just marvels at the goatee, grins as his hair grows darker and gets that silver-streaked look so many women die for.
“Not too shabby for a first try, right?” he asks, his voice lighter in tone with his amusement at his pseudo-forgery.
“Not too shabby indeed. Now let’s see if we can’t get a face to match that hair…”
…
Point-six Alfonso Giordanos later they’re back in Arthur’s living room. Arthur had nearly gotten it: the body was taking shape, but the face was still a bit off, and any hopes of walking were still well out of reach. It’s more than Eames expected, though, and he can’t help but feel energized at their combined success.
“We should celebrate,” he says, before he really thinks it through, but Arthur’s nodding before he can retract or modify it.
“Where to then, darling?”
“Anywhere but here. I’ve seen far too much of this room over the last few days.” The weeks is implied.
They end up going to another of the corner places, this one a little higher-end than the place Eames had stalked off to before. It’s nice enough and Arthur seems relaxed there, waving to one of the waitresses as she walks bye.
“Do you come here a lot?” Eames asks, genuinely curious.
“Not really. I’ve been a few times. They remember me because of the chair.” His expression goes a little sour at this, but he quickly smooths the emotion away.
“It’s nice.”
“Yeah, well. I wouldn’t have come here otherwise, would I?”
Eames just snorts. He vaguely remembers his crusade to be indefinitely combative with Arthur in the recent past, but when they’re away from the workplace it’s hard to remember why they’d been so at-odds all the time in the first place.
You insufferable prick, he thinks as Arthur laughs at a joke. Why can’t you just be an asshole?
They make small talk until their entrees arrive, Eames’ a nicely done rump steak and Arthur’s an alfredo-smothered pasta.
“I’m indulging,” Arthur says of his meal, deflecting Eames’ accusatory looks. Arthur had always been, as a general rule, a rabbit food enthusiast, so this is a refreshing change.
The first few minutes are spent quietly settling into their meals, but then Arthur gets this look in his eye and Eames knows he’s going to be asked something that he’s probably not going to want to answer.
“Who was she?” he says, and Eames is both pleased with and annoyed by his superior observational skills.
“Who?” Eames replies, playing dumb. Arthur knows him too well, though, and just glares.
“The one from the dream, with the black hair.” He pauses. “There was a picture of her on the counter, and then you started to forge her, and—and it made me curious.”
Eames presses his lips together. He’d always been good at compartmentalizing, bringing none of himself into a dream, but with Arthur… the whole issue is so inherently personal that Eames must bring himself into it if he hopes to help to any degree. Now he is suffering the consequences of that. Figures.
“Her name was Sasha,” he finally says, setting down his fork. “She taught me to forge.”
Arthur frowns for a moment, putting two and two together.
“And that room…”
“She taught me there, yes. I thought I was so smart when I went and did that musical, you know—I’d forged paintings countless times and made millions already without ever having been caught. I was on top of the world.” He laughs dryly. “I took up dreamshare like, well, a dream. I was great at it. That’s when she stepped in and took me down a few notches.
“I don’t know how she knew that I was into dreams. ‘It’s in your eyes,’ she’d said, but I always suspected it was more than that. She took what was supposed to be a long con with a bit of fun mixed in and turned it into something life-changing.”
He sighs, looking down at his steak.
“She was a good teacher. At night after the show she’d bring out her PASIV and we’d dream together. She first taught me to forge with a replica of that dressing room, using the mirrors to help me get the hang of it. I loved it, I really did, and I absolutely adored her. I felt—I felt young again, like just a boy, like all the jaded opinions towards life I’d managed to crop up were being filed down.” He laughs wryly. “And then she disappeared.
“I always knew somewhere in the back of my mind that she’d leave suddenly, like that. That I never really meant anything—I was an experiment. Under normal circumstances, I would have been okay with that, even delighted at having been used, but—”
“But you were in love with her,” Arthur says softly.
Eames shakes his head, but not at Arthur’s conclusion—mostly at himself, the young, naïve self he’d been when he knew her.
“Maybe. At the time, I really didn’t know any better.”
“Falling in love with a dreamer’s never a good thing,” Arthur agrees. “Dangerous, volatile. Never in one place.”
Eames thinks of the great Cobb tragedy and can’t help but agree.
“To remaining lonely bastards for the rest of our days!” he says jovially, raising his wine glass. Arthur laughs and toasts with him.
“What about you, then? Any heartbreaking stories for me? I’ve got my hankie ready.”
Arthur gives him a withered look but appears to be considering the question.
“Not particularly. I always kept my distance from people. I fucked a few coworkers, but I never wanted it to go anywhere.” He thinks for a moment, taking a sip of his wine. “I had kind of a crush on a guy I worked with once. It didn’t go anywhere, so I dropped it.”
“C’est la vie.”
“Indeed.” Suddenly, Arthur’s face looks immensely more troubled. “I was always more concerned with—with my family, than with falling in love. My mother was a bad person, to put it lightly. Not right in the head. I was always obsessed with getting away from her, with being a better person than her. I guess I got so wrapped up in it that I forgot who I was being a better person for.
“I am like her, you know. She loved guns, like I do. She liked to play around with them when I was near, point them at me and make me guess whether or not they were loaded. Then she’d shoot and, well, I was always alive afterward, so I guess it must not have been loaded. I’d seen her load it before, though, countless times, so I was always terrified I was going to die right then and there, bleed out on her lavender shag carpet.” The look in his eye grows sharper, angrier. “I couldn’t stop myself from loving guns, but I could stop myself from being like her, as much as humanly possible. Anyone I shoot in the real world is always of age, facing me, and without a doubt in their minds that they’re going to eat a bullet. I would never make someone guess.”
And suddenly Eames realizes that Arthur’s so angry, all-over angry, and it frightens him a little. He doesn’t even know what to say, but he asks something anyway: “Why are you telling me this?”
Arthur’s shoulders relax, but only minutely.
“Someone’s gotta know sometime.”
It feels… unfair. Like Arthur has given Eames so much more information than he’s taken. He feels unjust, knowing this about Arthur, and wants to say something else, but he isn’t sure what. He’s saved from his dilemma narrowly by the arrival of the bill—which he pays, much to Arthur’s chagrin.
Later, however, when they’re back at Arthur’s place sketching—just random things, anything and everything they can think of—the issue is still bothering Eames somewhat unexpectedly. He’s preoccupied by it and Arthur, being Arthur, notices. He doesn’t say anything, but just the fact that he’s picked up on it means Eames has to say something.
“My mother was an artist,” he says. There’s no introduction, no real context, but Arthur looks attentive so he continues, “and my father was a banker. Looking back on it, it was a pretty perfect combination. My parents were always off somewhere or other, whether it be painting mountains in America or attending a gala in central London. Both my parents were successful, see, in their respective circles, and thus they were always in demand everywhere. I was with a nanny when I was younger, and perpetually alone when I was older. I was always a troublemaker, but within my house no trouble could find me. Eventually, I went out found it instead.
“I started going out a lot—it’s not like there was anyone to notice or miss me. I hung out at a lot of bars, got into a few fights. I liked the adrenaline. I’d been in football all my life as a way to get me out of the house for my parents, so I was already somewhat strong. I just got stronger, too, and tougher, and when I was nineteen and still living with my parents a man showed me exactly how the world worked.
“He’d heard of my parents, see. He knew who I was, knew I was just a rich boy looking for some kicks. ‘How’d you like to do something interesting, instead of pounding these thugs into the ground?’ he’d asked and, well, I was already sold.
“He took advantage of my parents’ jobs to show me how to forge bonds. I’d already known a thing or two about art from my mother, and I’d seen enough bonds in my life. I picked it up quickly and, well, I bloody loved it. It was a better thrill than I’d ever got from bashing some poor sod’s face in. That man turned out to be not so nice, you know, but he taught me a lot. Enough to get by, at least. Enough to sustain my—my addiction.”
Arthur knew what that meant, Eames could see it in his eyes. People like them, they always wanted more: more money, more action, more sex, whatever. Eames needed the thrill of risking your life, of conning someone under their very nose; the uncertainty was what made it so exhilarating. Without danger there was no point to living.
“But it wasn’t enough for long,” Arthur says, looking down at the drawing in front of him: a woman on a payphone, her fingers wound nervously through the cord, her hair sticking to her face from sweat or rainfall, it wasn’t clear. “Real life is never enough.”
Eames chuckles.
“No, it wasn’t. There I was, forging like a pro, and dreamshare happened, then Sasha. There I was, but here I am.”
“It’s not the dying bit, exactly,” Arthur continues, more on his own words than Eames’.
“Oh, no. I never wanted to die. I just wanted to—”
“To remember that you had lived.”
The silence stretches between them, taut like a rubber band. Eames has a feeling that if he breaks it it’ll snap back in his face.
“And it was never enough because I always realized that I hadn’t lived, not really. My life would flash before my eyes, and it wouldn’t mean anything,” he says anyway, against his better judgment.
“It was just some other guy, going through the motions. It didn’t matter that the man’s life was enviable, that he was king of his field, because it was all just a random sequence of shit that worked out well, working and working and working until he was the best, until he felt just as empty as he had before, just on a different rung on the ladder.”
“He could change the world and still not be satisfied, still feel like a shell.”
Arthur barks a laugh. “They do say king means lonely.” He thinks for a moment, then: “I think I’m going to go to bed.”
“It’s eight-thirty.”
“I’m tired,” Arthur says, but his cadence betrays the lie. Eames doesn’t argue against it. “Feel free to use the TV or whatever.”
“Ta maison est ma maison?”
Arthur doesn’t respond, just wheels his way back toward his bedroom, leaving Eames alone with his thoughts.
…
The next morning is considerably less existential. Eames makes omelets because he can, whistling the tune of a song whose words he’s long forgotten. Arthur gripes about the mess of dirty dishes cooking creates but relishes the omelet, which both of them wordlessly recognize as his defeat. Arthur sketches a bird thoughtfully after that, his lines growing steadier. He’s improved from yesterday; the rust has started coming off. Eames feels pleased to have brought that on.
They dream again of the same room, and this time the picture of Sasha is visible, taped to one of the mirrors. Arthur smiles faintly when he sees it. Then he’s all sharp focus and determination, ready to teach himself to walk again, and Eames follows suit, as serious about the issue as Arthur is. By this point he’s just so irrevocably invested in Arthur’s success that it’s silly to pretend otherwise. He dives into Arthur’s lesson with aplomb, using Alfonso again for continuity. Arthur remembers quite a bit more than he had the first time and catches up to his previous progress quickly, making little adjustments to his jaw and body shape as he goes.
“Much better,” Eames says as he appraises Arthur/Alfonso, surveying everything from his shoes to his hair. He’s still in the chair, though, and that’s a problem. He had blindly hoped that Arthur would pick forging up well enough that he’d naturally regain his leg function out of desire to maintain integrity to the character he was creating, but of course that isn’t the case. Arthur is as paralyzed as ever, he just looks different.
“Well, you’ve got the appearance bit down, mostly,” Eames says when the transformation is complete, his own voice feminine to match Elliot’s appearance. Arthur has no such luck, his voice just as much himself as it ever was, sounding supremely odd coming from the mouth of a big Italian man.
“Now I’ve just got to get the rest.”
“Exactly. This next part, it’s like putting on an accent. Do you know any accents?”
“I’ve never really tried to learn them, just languages.”
Eames frowns, then changes his voice back to his own mentally, not wanting to confuse Arthur with the next bit.
“Try—try imitating an English accent. You should at least be pretty familiar with it, considering we’ve been pestering eachother for several years now. Listen to me talk. Listen to the vowels, the consonants, the cadence. How do I ask a question? And what is it like when I shout?” He yells the last word, trying to go over the range of an accent, basics for Arthur to pay attention to.
“I—” Arthur starts haltingly, “I love tea.” It’s so stereotypical that they both burst out laughing, Arthur’s hulking frame still moving like the body of a smaller, slighter man.
“And crumpets. I went to the loo the other day.” His voice is gradually getting more and more English in cadence, and Eames can’t help but grin. “I was watching the telly the other day and I saw a man who’d dropped his brolly off a building and killed someone.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve got it.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve got it,” Arthur mimics, and suddenly he sounds like Eames.He looks stricken by the change, but Eames just keeps laughing.
“Bloody quick learner, you are.” He waits for Arthur to say something, to imitate him, but he doesn’t open his mouth. Probably too freaked out by the voice that would come out of it. “You felt it, then? Isn’t it like an accent? It’s just… you adjust your vocal range with your phrasing.”
Arthur looks like he wants to agree, but he’s too preoccupied with what had just happened.
“Alright, next step: you want to take that feeling and use it to create Alfonso’s voice. Look at his body, think about his personality. How would he sound? Don’t worry about the actual accent; he can be American if you want. He can be whatever you want at all. Now how would he sound?”
“Like—” The voice isn’t Eames anymore, not quite. It’s more pinched. “Like this.” His eyebrows shoot downward, then he says, “Ey, Luciano, what’re ya doin’?”
Eames is tickled.
“Just like that, Arthur. You’re a natural,” he says through his laughter, and Arthur seems more at ease, too, now that he doesn’t sound like anyone he knows.
“Do you ever just—create people? Just because you can?”
“Oh, all the time. If a job’s really easy I’ll forge for the heck of it. Keeps me occupied, see. I like making up their stories, figuring out who they are at the deepest levels. You have to really know someone, see, to forge them believably; it’s not enough to imitate their body language. You have to know what drives them, why they get up in the morning, why they don’t kill themselves before their head hits the pillow at night. Only then can you convince the client of who you are, that you’re anyone at all. Otherwise you’re just a criminal intruding under someone else’s skin.”
Arthur’s quiet for a long, long time.
“Could you forge me?”
“Oh, darling, that’s not fair.”
“Could you?”
Eames sighs, but the forgery’s already done. He doesn’t need to think about it, it just happens. He doesn’t need to look in the mirror to know who he looks like right now.
Arthur’s forgery melts away as he looks at himself, returning to his natural form. His mouth goes a little slack as his eyes run from head to toe, taking it all in.
“This is the end goal,” Eames says in Arthur’s voice. He feels like an intruder, like he doesn’t have the right to wear this skin. There’s so much more to Arthur than he’d ever allowed himself to think before, and his forgery feels shallow. “You want to be able to forge yourself in such a way that you can walk, as I am now. You won’t have to worry about imitating your own body language, of course, because you know yourself better than anybody. The legs are the most important part.”
“Your shoulders are wrong.”
Eames looks in the mirror now, his skin prickling at the way Arthur’s face stares back at him.
“You’re right, they’re not tense enough. Guess I’ve not got so large a stick up my ass, eh? Better work on that.”
He looks back to find his own eyes taking shape, golden stubble along what was once Arthur’s sharp, angular jaw. In fact, if he didn’t know forging so well he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Arthur’s forgery and his own reflection.
“Ambitious,” he says, to which Arthur replies, “I learned from the best.”
“The clothes are all wonky though.” Eames eyes the dove gray dress shirt and black slacks the forge of himself is wearing.
“Yeah, I couldn’t bring myself to forge what you normally wear, probably because I’m not colorblind.”
“I am not colorblind!”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
They argue about the flaws in eachother’s forgeries until the time runs up and they’re back in the living room, drawings still strewn everywhere, the PASIV laid haphazardly on the coffee table. Unlike when Eames came here, almost a week ago, the place looks lived in.
“At this rate, I could be out of here in a few days,” Eames says later, when they’re talking about their progress. It takes effort to ignore the pang he feels in his stomach.
…
As it turns out, he ends up staying for much longer than expected.
Arthur just—he just can’t get that last part, forging out the damaged spine for a whole one. He can forge many people, anyone he looks at, but he can’t leave enough of himself out of the equation to fix the paralysis. It’s frustrated, and a week after Eames mentioned leaving they’re still stuck in the same spot.
They take to people watching to pass the time, sitting in a corner cafe a little ways from Arthur’s apartment, a place Eames has not yet been—that’s one of the nice things about London, that one could go to a different place every day and never see the same room twice.
They sit outside in the breeze and draw the passers-by, trying to discern their lives by the way they walk and carry themselves.
“A lawyer,” Arthur says of a man walking by. “You can tell by his shoulders and his spine. He spends too much time doing paperwork.”
“What about his voice?”
“Confident. He has to speak in front of a court, so it has to be. Probably kind of shrill. Look at how thin he is; if it were deep he’d sound ridiculous. Your turn.”
“That bird over there,” Eames starts, gesturing to a woman sitting two tables away. She’s blonde and petite and straight-backed, her nails well-manicured and wrists delicate. “Accountant, maybe. Pregnant.”
“Pregnant?”
“Look at the way she’s rubbing her ring finger and avoiding her boyfriend’s eyes. Combine that with her loose blouse. Are you seeing it?”
“It could just be her style. Maybe she’s rebounding after a divorce.”
“Improbable. Look at how young she is. She’s looking at the ring with apprehension, not longing.”
“So it’s improbable, but not impossible. What do you do for that uncertainty? What if you’re wrong?”
“Good question. Well, we’re not in a very good position to get an in-depth read on her right now. Normally I’d infiltrate the workplace of the target of the forge or I’d sit right beside them in a restaurant so I could listen to their conversations. Speech is a great way to evaluate someone and usually eliminates the largest uncertainties. After shadowing someone for a few weeks, you get a pretty good read on them. The rest you can assume from official documents and the like.”
Arthur mulls over this as he drinks his cappuccino—they’d purchased drinks on principal of hanging around the outside of the cafe, but as it turned out the place was quality and the refreshments were good. Eames is already on his second coffee. It feels so natural, sitting here with Arthur drinking overpriced beverages; Eames wonders who’s changed more to bring on this newfound comfort between them, himself or Arthur.
Maybe neither of us has changed and the potential to get along was always there, he muses, brushing his fingers over his stubble. Maybe we were just going about it all wrong. He finds himself regretting taking so long to get it right.
…
The days stretch into weeks without progress and Eames is reminded, unfortunately, of why he found Arthur insufferable in the first place.. Arthur is one of those people who must always be improving, progressing, and the longer he stalls, the more irritable he gets. It’s nice in public when he’s practicing his observational skills, but when they’re back at his apartment or in a dream, he is snappish and petulant, his nerves raw and easily chafed. It’s during these times that Eames wonders why he doesn’t just leave, doesn’t let the ungrateful bastard languish into nothing, but then he sees the lost look buried deep in Arthur’s eyes and he remembers.
It becomes a constant presence there, the loss, the helplessness; it’s almost intangible, only seen from the very periphery of his vision. If Eames looks straight-on at Arthur under a normal circumstance, he sees nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s the little moments in between where the cracks show through and betray how he’s really feeling.
It’s eating him alive.
Eames is absolutely terrified. He’s only seen that look, that hollowness, in one other person, and that’s Mal. He remembers the first time he saw it, how it concerned him but didn’t quite alarm him. A few weeks later she threw herself off a building. He can’t let that happen to Arthur, too, not like this, not because of something he’s at fault for, not when Arthur is so brilliant and driven and bloody interesting.
He’ll figure this out, he knows it. He just needs more time…
…
Time is decidedly not on his side.
Arthur has started to avoid the subject of dreaming, his jaw tensing when the PASIV is even mentioned. Before they’d at least been trying, testing method after method, from mediation to reactive experiments to a pair of bionic legs; the latter had been used in the hopes that abandoning the concept of repairing the spine would cause Arthur’s mental block to go away. It had been to no avail, though, because Arthur remained handicapped just the same, and they had gotten no further than they were before.
Eames is frustrated. Arthur is frustrated. It makes for a toxic environment, causing the air between them to fester and curdle. It’s a wonder Arthur hasn’t mentioned kicking him out yet.
The tension finally breaks one night after Eames and Arthur had had a particularly biting argument about the PASIV, Eames trying to get Arthur to dream again and Arthur staunchly against it. It had ended in Arthur wheeling off toward his room angrily, his path sloppier than usual. Eames was perfectly content to remain seated and seethe, until he heard a crash and a subsequent yelp that brought him running.
Arthur’s chair is laying on its side, the left wheel still spinning, and in front of it sprawls Arthur himself. It looks like in his haste he caught the edge of the doorframe where the wood juts out unevenly—such imperfections are commonplace in flats like his, Eames has found—and overturned the chair.
“Arthur—” Eames starts, moving to help him up, but he’s interrupted almost immediately.
“Don’t you dare, Eames,” Arthur spits, struggling lamely onto his elbows and trying to flip himself over. “I don’t need your help.”
“Please, just—”
“Fuck off!” Arthur shouts, his voice raw and shaky. He eventually gets himself turned around and, with some difficulty, scoots backwards to lean against his bedframe, his face stormy and his eyes threatening to send lightning bolts into Eames’ brain. Eames moves to pick up the chair but is stopped by Arthur’s gaze boring into him, furious and exasperated.
“I’ll figure it out,” he says, but his voice is without its previous fire. All that’s left is weariness, a complete lack of hope, and it breaks Eames’ heart.
“Why do you have to figure it out alone?” The words come out before he can stop them, hurried and mumbly, and… and Arthur’s crying.
One minute his face was perfectly dry; the next, tears stream down it steadily, messy and impromptu and utterly childish. Eames stands there for a moment, frozen, until Arthur locks eyes with his, seemingly staring into his soul.
It hits Eames like a ton of bricks, just then, and he could swear he actually feels his shoulders grow heavier with the weight of his realization.
Oh, it says simply, I’m in love with you.
Eames doesn’t think about it again, just picks the chair up and sets it to the side. He hesitates for a moment, then slides down next to Arthur and lets their shoulders press together, as if the contact will somehow make the sobs less intense.
“This is the first time I’ve cried about it,” Arthur says plainly, staring down at the useless legs stretched in front of him. “When I found out at the hospital I just felt… numb. As numb as my legs did. I knew it would change everything, but I didn’t get emotional about it. I guess I felt like if I let myself be upset, if I mourned the loss, it would make me weak. I thought maybe if I could handle it all on my own, keep being who I always was, then I could prove something to—to myself? To the world? I don’t know. All I knew was that I couldn’t break down and I couldn’t get help. That would be a sign of inadequacy.”
“You’re not weak. You’re the bravest person I know,” Eames murmurs, and he means it.
Arthur smiles ruefully.
“I kept telling myself that I should get help, but it took me forever to finally do it. You were the only one who I told about it in person, so you were the one I called.”
Eames is appalled. “No one else came to see you?”
“Well, I don’t make myself easy to find.”
The weight of that loneliness feels crushing.
They do say king means lonely, Arthur’s voice says in his mind, and Eames thinks that perhaps it’s the loneliness people like him are always trying to sate, not the thirst for money or power or fame. Maybe that’s what they’ve been missing all along: people to depend on, to love, not just nameless faces to use and throw away. It’s not like Eames has ever really let himself love someone before, not since Sasha, and even that was more awe than anything. Maybe he’s been chasing after the wrong thing all along.
“It’s still weird,” Arthur continues, jarring him from his thoughts, “not being able to feel them. I poke them sometimes, just to see if the feeling’s miraculously returned.” Suddenly, his expression goes sheepish. “I stabbed myself in the thigh once when I was feeling frustrated. Couldn’t feel a thing.”
Eames feels like he should be shocked, but it’s so like Arthur to do something so ridiculous that he’s not actually surprised at all.
They sit in silence for a while, and Eames’ hand finds Arthur’s back to rub as Arthur lets himself finish crying. Eames wonders if it means something, that Arthur won’t cry by himself, but will in front of him. He thinks it might.
“I’m sorry for being a dick.”
“Darling,” Eames replies, “you have every right in this world to be a dick. You’re doing very well, you know. You haven’t lost the ability to scare me shitless, that’s for sure.”
Arthur cheers up at that.
“You think?”
“Oh yes. I quake in fear, most days. It’s become part of my routine.”
Arthur laughs, which lifts Eames’ spirits considerably. He starts to get up, but he feels Arthur’s hand on his wrist, catching his attention.
“Don’t go,” Arthur near-whispers, his eyes wide as saucers. He looks like a child, and again Eames is stricken by the juvenility he’s openly displaying, the way he admitted to being afraid to depend on someone else. Eames wants to package it up and put it in a little box and save it as something he’ll take with him forever.
“Stay here until I fall asleep. Tell me stories about—about adventures, about you. About gallivanting around London, causing trouble wherever you go. Tell me about Sasha and about dreamshare and about forging; tell me about your best jobs and your worst jobs. Tell me how you got that little scar in your eyebrow. Tell me everything.”
And completely and utterly against his better judgment, Eames does.
…
He wakes up sometime that night feeling disoriented. His back aches and he’s cold and it’s only after a quick scan of the darkened room that he realizes where he is: still on the floor of Arthur’s room where he was telling Arthur most of his life story. Arthur’s still next to him, too, his head fallen lightly on Eames’ shoulder, his breathing slow and even. Eames wonders how long they’ve been out.
Rising gingerly, he quietly turns down the covers of Arthur’s bed, strategizing how to most easily get Arthur into it without waking him up. He opts for picking him up very slowly and carefully, sliding him beneath the covers and trying to create minimal disruption. When Arthur’s all settled in Eames lays a feather-light kiss on his temple, smiling a little at the feeling of the cool skin against his lips.
“Mm, Eames?” Arthur says sleepily, his eyes fluttering half-open.
“I’m right here,” Eames replies quietly, crouching beside him. “Go back to sleep, love.”
“Don’t…” he starts haltingly, his voice gravelly with sleep, “Don’t go. Stay here. I don’t want to…”
“Okay, darling, okay. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“I want—” Arthur’s arm flops to the side, denoting the right side of the bed. “The couch is uncomfortable. Just, just for tonight.”
The words are jumbled, but Eames eventually figures it out, swallowing hard when he realizes what’s going on.
“Alright,” he whispers, rising and walking over to the other side of the bed. It feels strange, sliding in next to Arthur, but not unpleasant. Arthur’s rhythmic breathing is soothing, his warmth comforting. Eames almost feels like he belongs there.
He wonders how much of it Arthur will deny happened in the morning.
...
Eames dreams of Sasha.
It's been a long time since he's dreamed naturally, but this night he dreams in technicolor, all bright purples and reds and oranges, all intense. Sasha is sitting against a counter, her eyelids lowered, her lips slightly parted.
His mouth goes dry.
"Sasha?" he says weakly, taking a tentative step toward her. She smirks. She's beautiful even when she's condescending, her beauty overwhelming his senses, reminding him of why he loved her so much. He remembers everything in a flood: her long, well-manicured nails, her sharp wit... she's perfect, and though he's well aware of the effect dreams have on memories of people, on the magnitudes of their good and bad qualities, he can't shake the feeling that she legitimately posesses no flaws.
"Long time no see, Will."
Eames wrinkles his nose.
"I don't use that name anymore."
"You never did like it when people called you that."
Eames pauses, taking a moment to really take her in.
"I liked it when you called me that."
Her eyes soften, but she says nothing.
"Sasha," Eames starts tentatively, walking toward her until they're almost touching. "Why did you leave? Why didn't you say something? I was so alone, so hurt, so—"
"You fell in love with a dreamer. That was your mistake," she says simply, shrugging.
"I didn't know any better." He draws close, close enough to touch, and lets his fingers rest lightly on her hip. She doesn't recoil, which he takes as a sign.
"Yeah, well. It's a hard knock life, isn't it?"
Eames laughs hoarsely. Then, making up his mind that he's not going to waste time, he pulls her close, letting their noses almost touch.
"Tell me," he asks, "did you ever love me back? Was it a work obligation that you left for or something else entirely?"
"What do you think?"
"You don't care what I think."
She looks away abruptly, her eyes downcast, but she's laughing.
"No, you're right. I don't."
"Then what's the point of asking?"
"We don't always get what we want, Will," she says abruptly, leaning in close until their lips are almost touching. "But if you have the opportunity to, you should grab onto it with both hands."
"What do you mean?"
She laughs against his lips, then pulls back, revealing her left hand. It now contains a small, fuzzy-looking picture, and when he takes it he recognizes the face instantly: it's Arthur.
"I don't understand—" he starts to say, but she's already gone.
…
The next morning dawns bright and early, and with it comes grumpiness.
Eames is up first, as per usual. He again experiences some disorientation when he wakes, but his memories flood back quickly, making him close his eyes and grit his teeth. There are too many things that happened the night before, too much to process, so he doesn’t even try, just gets up and heads toward the kitchen.
He thinks about making pancakes, but realizes that won’t be a great distraction. All it will do is give his thoughts free reign of his head and he fears the mental anarchy that will cause. Instead he peruses the volumes on one of Arthur’s many bookshelves, his fingers tracing along the spines, eyes sweeping across pages and pages of words, but none of them are interesting.
That is, until he stumbles upon a small, unmarked notebook wedged between two dusty tomes.
It slides out from its place easily, its covers well-worn. It’s a moleskine, one of the many he’s seen Arthur use over the years. He’s never bothered to look inside one, but this time his fingers slip between the pages, opening the cover with a rustle.
The pages are filled haphazardly with drawings, each dated in a corner. Drawings of anything and everything appear: people, places, objects, all of it. There’s a small bird on a branch, a rose bush, an SUV. And then suddenly there’s Mal, her hair a halo around her face, her smile bright and radiant. Her eyes are focused on the viewer but her gaze is somewhere far away, a world more beautiful and colorful than his own. It’s startlingly realistic.
As he flips, the pages are filled more and more with drawings of people, from the Cobbs to men he remembers working with once or twice to complete strangers. He appears a few times, too, and he studies himself intently, wanting to know what Arthur’s thinking.
He becomes more and more unsettled as he turns the pages, his image appearing more and more as he goes along. There he is, drinking coffee; and again, mid-speech. Mal and Cobb appear too, but they’re sporadic; toward the end it’s all him, him, him, lifelike and practically breathing off the page.
And then it stops.
Eames frowns, flipping through the rest of the book. Nothing. After December, there’s—
December.
December in New York, several years before. A bottle of wine. A kiss.
“Oh, god,” Eames says aloud, snapping the notebook shut.
“That was a long time ago.”
He looks to find Arthur in the hallway, his face stony. Eames feels his stricken, deer-in-the-headlights expression, knows it’s as plain as the nose on his face, but he can’t manage to hide it. For once he has no witty comment or retort; he can think of nothing to do but stand there, caught.
“Are you done?”
Arthur had said his house was Eames’, but he still feels like he’s betrayed his trust, breached some line he hadn’t even realized existed.
“Yeah, I was just—I was just bored, sorry,” Eames says lamely, sliding the notebook back into place between Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture andAnthropology Alive.
“I said you could look around,” Arthur replies, and then it’s over. Eames is himself again and Arthur’s rolling past, heading toward the kitchen without looking back.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Eames thinks. It has been a long time since he’d acted so uncouth. The last person who’d made him feel like that was—
He’s not going to finish that thought.
And suddenly he’s angry, just angry; angry at Sasha for leaving, angry at Arthur for letting him go so easily, angry at himself for not figuring out how he felt for so long. He’d been so preoccupied with his stupid rivalry that he hadn’t realized how that he knew Arthur like the back of his hand, that life was better with him around, that Arthur had figured it out a long time ago. Maybe, maybe if he hadn’t been so obsessed with competing, he would have noticed it sooner, have let Arthur love him, have been there on that one life-changing job to prevent Arthur from getting paralyzed. It’s all his fucking fault, all of it, and he absolutely despises himself for it.
Funny how the man supposedly so obsessed with his work is the one who recognizes his feelings.
I’m in love with you, Eames thinks again, but this time it’s as far from pleasant a thought as he can get. It just makes him more upset with himself and with Arthur, with the whole damn situation. He wishes he were somewhere in South America right now, sipping something fruity and alcoholic and getting a ridiculous sunburn. He wishes none of this had ever happened.
“About last night—” Arthur starts, but Eames doesn’t want to hear it. He knows the excuses Arthur will make already.
“Arthur, don’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Don’t.”
Arthur’s jaw tightens.
“Fine.”
Eames looks away, trying to calm himself down.
“I just—”
“Christ almighty, Arthur, I don’t need your excuses! You just love running away from everything, don’t you?” He doesn’t know where the words come from, they just happen, and he wishes he could stop them, wishes he could swallow them as if they’d never come out of his mouth. “You’re fucking great at it, too, let me tell you.”
“Oh, like you’re any better!” Arthur snaps, his nerves clearly as frayed as Eames’ own. “I’ve never seen anybody so obsessed with their work, and that’s even with me in the picture. God, it’s like you’re nobody outside of your job, like you have no personality. I don’t even know what’s real with you—it all feels like an act, every minute of every day, and it drives me fucking nuts!”
Eames huffs, his jaw trembling.
“If you wanted me to leave, you could have just said so.” Fuck, fuck, what is hedoing—
“If you wanted to go, you should have just left.”
He doesn’t want to leave, he doesn’t, but he’s so annoyed, so angry, and it screws up his judgment, makes him head for the door. He’s still in his clothes from the night before, his hair’s a mess, and his stuff is still at Arthur’s, but he leaves anyway, taking only enough time to slip on his shoes. He leaves, and Arthur doesn’t stop him.
…
He smokes about thirty cigarettes.
It doesn’t make it any better, so he decides to just walk—somewhere, anywhere. He ends up in a wax museum somewhere far from Arthur’s flat, his mood foul and the figures around him really not making it any better. He stalks around until he’s asked to leave by the employees, accused of being a disruption, and ends up beside an ice cream shop. He’s not sure why he goes in, knowing he’ll just spread his foul mood there, too.
The worst part about what Arthur said is that it’s true. He can’t believe he never realized it before; on the surface Arthur seems like the more work-obsessed one, but it’s not true, not really. Eames has always worked, even when he’s not on a job, even on islands in the middle of the Atlantic where the houses are few and far between and the populations are in the double digits. He’s always analyzing people, figuring out their motives, dissecting them… he only looks like he’s taking a break. What he said about Arthur is what he really fears in himself, how he just avoids his problems, blocks them out, and moves on. And now here he is and the world is crashing down around him and it’s all his fault and fuck, it hurts.
“What flavor?” asks the girl behind the counter, a peppy sort with her hair tied up in pigtails and a bright smile on her face.
“Strawberry,” Eames replies, and in that moment he thinks he might actuallywant himself to suffer.
He takes the little bowl of pink ice cream back to a far table and sits down, taking just one bite before brooding for a while. It’s not until someone sits across from him that he looks up, surprised that someone would approach him when he’s pretty sure the storm cloud around him can be seen from space.
It’s the girl from behind the counter, her grin less synthetic and more subdued than before.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, which makes Eames raise his eyebrows.
“Nothing, I—”
“Your ice cream.” They both look down at the little bowl, now a pathetic puddle of pink. “You only took one bite. Nobody takes one bite around here. I mean, we’re not called best in the city for nothing.”
“Shouldn’t you be working?”
The girl sighs.
“I’m on break. It looked like you could use someone to lend an ear, so I decided I ought to offer mine. Got nothing better to do, anyway.”
Eames looks from his ice cream and back to her, feeling conflicted, unsure of what to say.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Your accent. It’s… too clean. Do you travel a lot?”
Eames laughs at that. “You don’t know that half of it.”
“So, what, did you miss a flight or something?” The girl is persistent, he’ll give her that.
“A man who is very dear to me doesn’t feel very good about himself right now,” Eames finally says, throwing her a bone. “I tried to prove to him that he’s wonderful, but he wouldn’t believe it, and after a while I lost patience with him and left. I hurt him and I’m worried I won’t be able to put it right.”
She’s silent for a while, her eyes flicking to and fro as she studies his face. He thinks perhaps she thinks him a bad person, but then she speaks again:
“Sometimes it’s not enough to tell someone that they’re great,” she says simply, her eyes sparkling with something he can’t identify. “They have to believe it in here,” she points to her head, “and here,” and to her heart. “Otherwise it’s like knocking on a brick wall and politely asking it to move. It’s not going anywhere.”
Eames wonders how he could possibly have stumbled into a random shop and bumped into a fucking genius.
“Go back,” she continues, her face open and earnest. “Go back and convince him. Make his heart sing.”
He looks at her for a moment, his eyes wide and stricken, and then he stands.
“You want another ice cream? On the house,” she says as he starts walking away.
“No, I—I have somewhere to go,” he says hurriedly, opening the door. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Her smile is contagious.
…
Mind and body, mind and body, Eames thinks as he runs, remembering the mantra he’d chanted to himself so many weeks before. It’s not quite right, though, it’s just to the left of correct, and, and—and suddenly he has it correct:
Mind and body and heart.
There it is. Eames thinks like he’s never thought before, devising some way to save Arthur from himself, to pull him up out of his rut. Right now he can’t think of anything, but that’s okay. It’s just a matter of time and thought and he knows he’ll—
Oh.
One minute he’s scrambling for ideas, the next one is there, monstrous and heavy, screaming here I am! And truly, there it is. It makes Eames’ stomach turn over on itself, but the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that there’s really nothing else he can do, not with Arthur angry and hopeless and alone.
He thinks about inception, then, about the ideas shared there. One could not just plant an idea and expect it to work. It had to be generated spontaneously from the person’s own mind, so that they believed it was their own; Eames thinks about that, he thinks and thinks and thinks, and then he runs faster.
He knows exactly what he has to do.
…
He finds that the door is unlocked when he turns the handle, slipping into Arthur’s flat quietly. He half expects Arthur to be within sight, waiting for him, but both the living room and kitchen are empty. His lips part to call Arthur’s name softly, but the silence is oppressive and he feels strangely obligated not to disturb it. Instead he pads through the flat quietly, looking for his goal.
When Eames finds Arthur, it’s strange. The position they’re in is familiar, but given the circumstances it’s so—so wrong, and it sends Eames’ gut roiling in panic.
“Arthur,” he finally says, breaking the silence. Arthur’s at the window, still in his chair, a pistol in hand. But the way he grips it is different, more strained. His fingers fiddle with the safety, the gun clacking against the side table it rests on as he turns it over fretfully. Eames doesn’t have to ask to know what’s going on.
“Arthur.”
This time Arthur looks, but only over his shoulder. He doesn’t turn, doesn’t really move, just picks at the safety: on, off, on, off.
“I thought you were leaving,” Arthur says flatly. The safety clicks again.
“I came back.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
Eames laughs, his voice raw and broken from running for so long, his breathing still hitching a little. He’d managed to catch a cab for part of his journey, but he’d still run a long way before that. He’s in shape, but he’s no marathon runner.
“I thought you always wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, Arthur.”
Arthur doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t do much of anything, really, just keeps playing with the pistol, hearing it click.
“Arthur,” Eames snaps for the third time, and Arthur responds with a pinched“What?”
“Look at me.”
“Why?”
“For chrissake, you prat—” He moves to spin Arthur and his chair around, but the other man is quicker, whipping around and presenting the muzzle of his gun to Eames’ face. Eames is able to appreciate his expression in full then: it’s impossibly strained and somewhat angry, his mouth pressed in a thin line, lips trembling slightly with the force of keeping his expression straight. As always, it’s his eyes that betray him, like they do most other people. His gaze is as sharp and focused as ever, but there’s this fundamental fear there that pains Eames somewhere deep in his chest. Arthur wants to be saved, he does, but he doesn’t know how to save himself.
It’s a good thing Eames knows how to do it for him.
“Please, Arthur,” Eames croaks, his hands slowly rising. When Arthur doesn’t blow his brains out he continues, reaching up and curling his fingers around Arthur’s outstretched hand, moving the gun to the side. Arthur’s fingers are cold and calloused; Eames pries at them gently until the gun comes loose, setting it down on the table. He doesn’t let go of Arthur’s fingers, though, only massages the warmth into them with his hands, temporarily letting go with one to turn Arthur’s chair fully toward him.
He crouches down then, bringing Arthur’s hand with him.
“Look,” he says, searching to meet Arthur’s eyes but finds his gaze is wandering here, there, anywhere but at Eames’ face. Eames tightens his grasp on the hand, bringing it up in front of him like he’s at prayer, clasping the cold fingers between his warm ones.
“Just dream with me one more time.” He brings the fingers up to his mouth, kisses them once, feather-light. “I’ll leave permanently afterward if you want, but just try this one last dream with me. Please, Arthur. I’m begging you, just—” He stops then because he’s got no words left, nothing to say, no way to communicate but by openly begging, getting down on his knees and pleading.
And Arthur looks at him, eyes wide and terrified, and his expression crumples.
“Okay,” he says, his voice shaky, “okay.”
…
Arthur’s mind fills the house in for him. It’s quite an American affair, all bright green grass and straight white picket fence and evenly-shingled roofing. Eames is in the kitchen, as he’d shakily planned on the way back to Arthur, forging a figure Arthur knows very well.
He knows how very wrong he is, doing this. He feels dirty beneath the woman’s skin, unnecessary and unwanted, the whole forge just fundamentally off.
The idea had been simmering in his mind for a while, but it had taken a conversation with a stranger to make him realize that he just needed to get off his ass, stop being so afraid of how Arthur would react, and do it. He knows full well that Arthur might never speak to him again after this, but he thinks he might be okay with that—if it gets Arthur on his feet, then it’s worth it. The realization that Arthur has become so essential to his life is a frightening one, although someplace deep down he suspects that there had always been a great sacrifice in losing Arthur and he just hadn’t figured that out yet.
Sometimes it’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission, he thinks, and knows he’ll be begging soon. Oh, does he know it.
He taps his well-manicured red fingernails against the marble counter as he waits, a pistol just out of reach. From the corner of his eye he glimpses the glint of a mirror peeking out just so from the hallway.
When he sees his reflection, he winces.
It’s pretty spot-on. Brown hair, soft and flowing, alights upon his shoulders in loose waves, arranged in a hairstyle of a different time. Lipstick, bright red, stains his plush lips; they match his fingernails perfectly. The dress is a dusty yellow in color, the apron cinched at the waist to reveal a striking figure.
She’s the perfect picture of a domestic mother, and yet she’s so, so awful.
Arthur had told him about her. At first he’d just revealed a few minute details, the things that made her the mother he loved, the things that reminded him of a more pleasant home: the affinity for red, the soft hair, the lavender perfume. Gradually, though, he’d spun a darker picture, revealing her flaws one by one until Eames felt like he, too, had suffered at her hand.
“She was mercurial,” Arthur had said one night over dinner, when Eames had stumbled upon a sketch of her tucked into a physics book. “She liked to jerk me around like a toy, play with my feelings.” He’d laughed then, shaking his head. “She’d done a lot of shit to me, but I was like any typical son: I loved my mother. Tried not to, but it never worked. She’d use it against me, exploit my weakness. One moment she’d be laughing along with me, the next she’d throw herself into a fit of tears, inconsolable. I always felt horrible, like it was my fault. That was one of her favorite tricks on me, to pretend she was upset. I don’t know why she did it. Maybe she liked the attention—but really, I would have followed her to the ends of the Earth if she asked me to. Fucking hate her, now, but back then she was a goddess to me. I guess I just didn’t know any better.”
He’d left the subject alone for a while after that, letting it simmer in the back of Eames’ mind until he had to ask: “What happened to her?”
Arthur hadn’t seemed particularly annoyed by the question.
“Nothing,” he’d said, frowning over some statistics for a job he kept swearing he could do better than the point man a team he’d been affiliated with in the past had been forced to hire in his place. “Nothing at all. She’s still out there, I think, being the same horrible bitch she always was. You know, I make it a policy never to regret anything, but I do regret never standing up to her. If there’s anything I resent, it’s that. I just… I wish that twelve-year-old kid had said something, made her think twice about waving a gun around. I wish he’d made her feel guilty for what she was doing. Instead he grew up and went to college and never looked back.”
He’d sighed, then, a deep, all-encompassing sigh.
“I still wonder how she is. God, I was so fucking stupid—maybe if I’d admitted to myself that what she was doing was wrong, she wouldn’t still plague my mind all the time. Instead here I am, and here she is too, carried with me every second of the day. I could be using that space for something else, but she left her brand there a long time ago. Now I can never be rid of her.”
Eames hadn’t planned on doing anything with that information at the time, but he had mulled over it a lot, thinking. Arthur kept adding stories to his knowledge, all the different ways she liked to mess with him, all the ways she was reprehensible. She especially liked telling him how he’d never be a great man, that he wouldn’t go anywhere in life.
Those stories always reminded him of what Arthur had said about the picture on his wall. I knew that the person who created that picture wasn’t the person I wanted to be, he’d said. I keep it up to remind myself that I’ll always be better than I was before if I just keep trying.
It makes sense now, in hindsight: Arthur has been trying to prove his mother wrong his whole life. She can’t see him now, but she still has her clutches around him anyway, squeezing his heart, constricting his lungs. Arthur’s childhood is the root of his obsession with incapability, and until that is resolved, he’ll always think himself as inadequate, and thus never be able to walk, even in his dreams.
There it is, all laid out before him, plain as day. It’s so obvious now, but until a few hours ago he had nothing but a pocketful of change and some lint to go on. Perhaps it was his own mental block against betraying Arthur this way that kept him from drawing these conclusions; now that he’s not afraid to lose the man, he’s not afraid to try everything in his power to get him back up on his feet.
His eyes are torn from the mirror when he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. The door opens and closes, and with it lurches Eames’ stomach.
It’s Arthur.
He doesn’t know why he’s nervous. Forges like these are often easier than others: they’re so deeply personal, so ingrained into the mark—he hates calling Arthur that, but that’s what he is, isn’t he?—that he doesn’t actually have to get a lot of the details right. Like the house, Arthur’s brain will fill in all the gaps. All Eames has to do is talk the talk, and the walk part will fill itself in. Still, if this doesn’t work, he’s really, truly got nothing left. This is the end of the road; this is the last stand. That’s what terrifies him most.
He’s shaken from his thoughts by a voice, timid and shaky:
“Mom?”
Eames turns… and there he is, wheelchair intact, his eyes wide. This is an Arthur Eames is entirely unfamiliar with, one he’s never witnessed before: he’s seen fear, he’s seen anger, but this, this is something different. It pains Eames to see it, to know this expression is his fault, but he has to press on or it won’t have been worth it.
“I thought you were at work,” Arthur says, voice still small. It unnerves Eames to see Arthur like this, acting like he’s never been trained to dream, to recognize a forge, to check his totem. It is this that tells Eames how deeply he has truly been affected.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Eames replies quietly, his voice a smooth velvet. It adjusts itself slightly to Arthur’s expectations, throwing him off a little, but he presses on. “It’s about your report card.”
Fear shoots through Arthur’s posture, electric, and Eames feels dirtier than he had before, if that’s possible. This is a memory, too, something Arthur had told him in passing: he’d gotten a B on his report card once when he was thirteen, and his mother had been furious.
It hadn’t happened again.
“It was—I didn’t mean for it to happen. I’m sorry,” Arthur stammers, his fingers gripping tight on the armrests of the chair the way they do when he’s stressed.
“You know I don’t like it when people don’t mean what they say, Arthur,” Eames says, the words like acid in his mouth. His fingers curl around the pistol slowly, drawing it away from the counter, and slinks toward Arthur, his head tilted slightly to the side. “You said you’d get perfect grades this semester. You said you’d get perfect grades every semester. How am I supposed to take your word now?”
“I—”
“You what?!” Eames suddenly screams, voice raw and screechy. One moment the anger rises, boiling and fiery; the next he’s calm again, his expression once more serene. He’s close to Arthur now, can see the way he’s quivering, knows it’s all his fault. It aches in his soul.
“I’m sorry.” It’s barely a whisper, a symbol of his defeat.
Come on, Arthur, Eames thinks desperately, don’t give up.
Instead of voicing this though he keeps going, circling around Arthur until he’s behind him.
“You’re such a burden,” Eames laments, tapping the gun lightly against Arthur’s shoulder.”How’s a boy who can’t even get good grades supposed to go anywhere in life.” He leans down, then, lips nearly touching Arthur’s ear. “What a failure.”
“No,” Arthur whispers, shaking his head minutely.
“Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just not have a son,” Eames continues, circling around to the front again. “It’s not too late, you know. I could still get my life back.” The gun clicks in his hand as he cocks it, pointing it up at Arthur. “What do you think?”
“I said I’m sorry, I—”
“I don’t care what you said, I care what you do, Arthur. And right now, well, I just don’t see what’s the point in keeping you around if you’re just going to grow up to be a big fat pile of disappointment.”
“I’m not a disappointment.” Arthur voice is still shaky, but it’s something.
“Oh, please. You can’t even walk. You seem pretty useless to me. What kind of life can you even lead in a thing like that?” He looks at the pistol, turns it over in his hand. “I wonder, did I unload it this time? Sometimes I do forget to take a bullet out of the chamber…”
“I’m not a disappointment,” he says again, his voice growing in strength, and Eames’ heart sings.
That’s it, Arthur, he thinks as his finger gets tighter on the trigger, you can do this.
“Are you in the mood for a game, Arthur? It’s called Let’s Guess if Arthur’s Going to Die Today—”
He erupts like a volcano. One moment he’s sitting there, shaking like a leaf, the next he’s got Eames’ gun-wielding hand pinned against the wall, his mouth twisted into a furious scowl.
“I am not a disappointment,” he snarls savagely, “and I’m not your toy. I’ve taken my life and I’ve made something fucking amazing out of it, and you arenot welcome in it. You don’t get a say anymore.”
It hits them both at the same time, stinging like a slap to the face. Eames is pressed against the wall, and Arthur, he’s—he’s standing, brilliant and tall and powerful, and no signs of any sort of impending collapse are evident. He’s just there, like he’d never been paralyzed in the first place, and Eames thinks he might actually cry.
“Oh, darling,” he says softly, and his eyes actually do water a little, his voice wavering with emotion.
“Eames?” Arthur’s voice is hollow, shocked.
“You did it, you—”
“No,” he says, stumbling back, Eames’ pistol in hand. The forge melts away from Eames’ skin fluidly, like paint, and Arthur just stares at him, mouth agape. “No, no, no, you were—you were her, and she was…”
Eames sees the cogs in his mind turning, spinning relentlessly, knows each individual thought by heart because he’s had them all before: How did I get here? What was I doing before this? Where is my totem?
Arthur’s fingers fumble for his totem, find it; his face twists when he knows it’s all wrong.
“I trusted you,” he finally says, his expression carefully blank, “ I actually thought—god, Eames, I trusted you, and you did this.”
Eames can only watch as he raises his arm, pistol in hand, and pulls the trigger.
…
The gun’s already in his face when he wakes.
“Don’t say a word,” Arthur murmurs when Eames’ eyes open, his face pale and drawn, his lower lip trembling slightly.
Eames doesn’t. He waits, listening to the breathing between them, legitimately unsure of whether or not he’ll live to see the next day. The deep hurt in Arthur’s eyes makes him think maybe he deserves the bullet.
“I can’t believe you,” Arthur finally says, his voice shaking minutely. “Life really is a fucking job for you—you just, you just file everything away, dissect it all like a fucking lab specimen, use what you hear for your own gain. Tell me, Eames, what did you stand to gain from this? What could you possibly get from hurting me? Does it get you off, or what?”
“Oh, Arthur, it’s not like that—”
“Don’t.” Arthur’s voice is as serious as the grave, his eyes intense and brow stormy. “Don’t you fucking dare. I don’t want to hear another word from that silver tongue of yours, Eames. I don’t want you poisoning me with your lies.” He laughs, then, the noise jerky and wrong. “I’d buried my past, you know. It was fine, all of it, until you decided to rip the stitches open like some fucking sadist. I’d gotten over it, and you—”
“No, you hadn’t!” Eames interrupts, his tone manic and desperate. “God, Arthur, don’t you see? You weren’t over it—Christ, she still had her claws in you so deep that you couldn’t even see them anymore. I just—” He pauses, his throat going tight. “You know, when I first got here, I thought I was just assisting a colleague. I felt guilty about what had happened, you know, because I was the one who got you the job, so I wanted to help. But over the past few weeks I’ve gotten to know you and I…”
His voice fades out, and for a moment he thinks he can’t go on. His mouth is dry, his hands are sweating; the muzzle of Arthur’s gun is still pressed to his forehead, cold and unyielding. He finds courage again, though, when he looks in Arthur’s eyes: there’s some glimmer of understanding there, and he thinks he still might have a chance to right his wrongs.
“You’re just so special, Arthur, and I knew how little you thought of yourself, how you wanted to die, and it just killed me, and I—” His voice breaks and he can feel tears prickle at the corners of his eyes again. He feels so ridiculous, getting so emotional, but he can’t help it, doesn’t want to help it. All he wants is for Arthur to be happy, somehow, and if shooting him is how Arthur gets there, that’s absolutely fine with him.
It’s weird, being so ready to sacrifice himself for a man he cared about for nothing more than a job well done naught but a few months ago. He doesn’t understand it, but he’s not sure he wants to. He has a feeling this is the kind of thing that can’t be thought out, can’t be rationalized.
“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he half-whispers, “and all I want is for you to see in yourself what I see in you, for you to realize how incredible you are. And if it takes shooting me to do it, then go ahead. I won’t stop you. Just promise me that you’ll be happy.”
The silence stretches on for what seems like years. Eames waits for the shot, his eyes shut tightly, the beads of sweat tickling slightly as it trickles down his neck.
It never comes. One moment he’s waiting for a bullet through his brain, the next minute Arthur’s dropping the gun on the side table with a loud clunk, his hands cupping Eames’ face feverishly.
“Oh, Eames, I’m not going to shoot you,” he says, drawing Eames up to look him in the eye. “Christ, I could never—oh, god, I’ve been so—”
“Hush, darling,” Eames replies, shushing Arthur with one, two, three kisses, their lips finding eachother like magnets. “It’s alright. It’s all going to be alright.”
Arthur kisses him again then, deep and full of feeling, and when he pulls back there’s this incredible life in his eyes.
“Don’t go, Eames. Stay with me. Until tomorrow, until forever, I don’t care—just stay.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise,” Eames replies without hesitation, and Christ, he just can’t stop smiling.
EPILOGUE
“Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Arthur says, wrinkling his nose, “and you sing terribly.”
“And I seem to find the happiness I seek,” Eames sings loudly, “when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”
Eames has currently got his arms thoroughly wrapped around Arthur, tugging him along in a dance to the Bing Crosby version of Cheek to Cheek. They’re in an office-like room, their suits old-fashioned and crisp, and Eames is, frankly, having the time of his life.
“Eames—” Arthur gripes, trying to wiggle out of Eames’ grasp, but he’s grinning from ear to ear.
“Dance with meeeeeeeeee, I want my aaaaaaaaaarms around you,” Eames interrupts gleefully. “The chaaaaaaaarm about you, will carry me through!”
“That’s not even how it goes, you missed a whole verse!” The record player in the corner confirms this, continuing along with the proper section.
“Then why don’t you sing it right, darling?” Eames says into Arthur’s hair, pulling him down into the small couch near him and seating Arthur on his lap. He nuzzles his nose against Arthur’s jaw, causing him to squirm and paw at Eames’ chest.
“God, you’re impossible,” Arthur breathes, and then Eames is kissing him, pulling him close by the collar, shushing his words with a plush mouth. Arthur groans into it, then pulls away, his mouth quirked into an involuntary smile. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“My sense of style, obviously,” Eames says, gesturing to the room around him.
“Please, I’m the one who designed the dream.”
“But I’m the one who suggested a forties theme. Clearly this is all my fault. Admit it, you love me.”
Arthur considers that for a moment, trying hard not to let his dimples show.
“I don’t hate you,” he allows, yelping when Eames pinches his ass.
“Sure, sure,” Eames purrs in Arthur’s ear, “but that’s not what you said last night.”
“I wanted to, but screaming ‘I don’t hate you’ during sex isn’t exactly romantic.”
“You’re so gracious, sparing me like that. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Languish away in a prison somewhere, probably.”
“I have absolutely no doubts about that.”
This time Arthur leans in, eyelashes casting shadows against his cheeks, his grin mischievous.
“So I was thinking…”
“Yeah?” Eames says against his lips, his grin irrepressible.
“I’ve always wanted to spend a night in Tahiti. Maybe for tomorrow, we could arrange a visit. And didn’t you say you always wanted to skinny dip in the Nile?”
“So many places, so little time.”
“We’ve got all the time in the world down here,” Arthur replies, his expression betraying his earnestness. Eames can’t help but remember how lonely he’d been, once upon a time; where there had once been an unquenchable thirst for danger, there is now only an endless well of love. Eames has never been happier in his life.
“And I will relish every minute,” he says with all of his heart, and he absolutely means it.