Fic: Breath and Shadows [Inception]
Title: Breath and Shadows
Character/Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Mal/Cobb, Ariadne
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Mr. Nolan owns it all
Warnings: Um...much rambling.
Summary: Out of all things, breathing has never really come easy for Arthur.
Author's Notes: Written for the square "asphyxiation" for hc_bingo
asphyxia (n) : the extreme condition caused by lack of oxygen and excess of carbon dioxide in the blood, produced by interference with respiration or insufficient oxygen in the air; suffocation.
If severe enough and prolonged, it causes death.
I.
Arthur is eighteen years old when he dies for the first time.
It's his first job with the Cobbs, and normally Dom would hesitate to bring such an unfamiliar associate on board. He likes working with those he knows, likes the confidence of having a partner who will watch his back and stand by his side even when the air is thick with bullets, even as the dreamscape around them crumbles. But Mal swears by the unnamed individual from whom she hears of this new but extremely valuable player (Dom tries hard not to think about the shadiness of his wife's connections because, well, they are criminals, in a vague sense of the word) and after all, they do need a point man. He's expecting a well-seasoned man, ex-military perhaps, with fast reflexes and obviously, a sharp mind.
He gets the fast reflexes and the sharp mind, and a keen sense of perception thrown in as a bonus. But when he's staring into the dark, intelligent eyes of a fresh-faced boy, Dom knows deep in his gut that this isn't going to work.
This is not to say that Arthur isn't capable. He's punctual and efficient, thorough and orderly, ruthless when he's hunting down a piece of vital intel or keeping projections off of Dom's back in all of their training sessions together. The kid is part machine and part straight-backed soldier with a scarily sharp mind and killer instincts. The problem is...Arthur is so young, and nearly impossibly so to be this good at what he does.
Dom finds that he has to keep reminding himself that Arthur is barely legal, and when he flicks a glance at this college-aged kid with long fingers that fly over keyboards and polite charm that makes Mal smile indulgently and ruffle his floppy hair, he feels something strangely akin to guilt weighing down like a brick in his chest. He can't help but think that Arthur is supposed to be pulling all nighters in coffee shops and libraries, studying for his next exam or heading out to the movies, his arm wrapped around a pretty girl's waist instead of poring over dossiers on their next mark.
He's old enough to smoke and fuck if he damn well pleases, but not even old enough to drink. What the hell is he doing, Dom thinks, pulling Arthur into this world? If the kid is old enough to fight for his country and possibly die on foreign soil for the sake of an American flag draped over his casket, does that mean it's okay for him to die again and again in a world of dreams, too?
The first time Dom kills Arthur in a training session, he's...well, impressed. Most people don't deal too well with a bullet to the brain, even if it is relatively painless and in a dream, but Arthur proves to be different than most people, calmly removing the line from his wrist when he wakes and thanking Dom for another informative lesson. No shakes, no hyperventilation, no breakdown.
No tears.
It's comforting, and yet at the same time, incredibly saddening.
Mal sidles up to him and Dom slips an arm around her waist as they watch Arthur methodically pack his things, apparently unperturbed by the fact that moments ago, in his mind, he'd been flat on his back with his brains splattered all over the pavement.
"It doesn't even faze him, does it?" Mal asks quietly, curiously, her soft accent curving up and over consonants and vowels.
"What?"
"Death."
Dom kisses his wife's temple and doesn't reply. Their answer comes in the form of Arthur's first job less than a week later.
- * - * -
"Dom!" Arthur yells at the top of his voice, sounding panicked, and immediately, Dom knows something is terribly, horribly wrong. Ever since Arthur started working alongside him, it's always been "Mr. Cobb" this, and "Mr. Cobb" that, no matter how many times Dom insists that Arthur address him by his first name. He whirls around, tearing his eyes from the scrapbook of secrets stolen from their mark's mental safe, looking across the way - just in time to see Arthur getting his head pushed underwater.
And held there.
Oh, fuck.
Time is fluid in dreams, and it's barely two minutes, but feels like forever as Dom stands there, frozen, watching Arthur's arms flailing and shoving weakly against the projection two times his size who's gleefully ( gleefully! God, their mark is one messed up lady) holding him under, to no avail.
The moment Arthur's arms slide limply from trying to push the man's hands away and fall with a dull slap to the surface of the water, Dom numbly draws his gun and puts a bullet in his skull.
He wakes to the sound of frantic gasping, and opens his eyes to see Arthur jackknifing up off the hotel bed, eyes wide and frenzied, fingers scrabbling at his throat and chest heaving as he tries to draw in deep gulps of oxygen. Mal rushes over from where she's been sitting guard and watching over the two of them, immediately reaching out for Arthur and drawing him into her arms, murmuring soothingly in French as she rubs small circles on his back.
To this day (aside from the image of his wife stepping off the ledge of a window and into the nothingness below), the sight of his point man clinging to Mal like a terrified child would his mother and just trying to breathe is the one memory that haunts Dominic Cobb the most.
II.
To Ariadne, Arthur is a mythical hero, greater than men and only a little lesser than the gods, the stuff of legends. He's Hercules without the craziness oh so wonderfully bestowed by a jealous and wrathful Hera (although Cobb's guilty projection of Mal can sure give the spurned goddess a run for her money in regards to sheer vindictiveness), Perseus sans the winged horse (Arthur does happen to have a Mustang though, and that's not too terribly shabby), Achilles minus all that crippling hubris and of course, that damn heel. (However, if Arthur were to have an Achilles heel, one fatal weakness, Ariadne has a very good idea of what - or whom - it might be. And if that heel happens to tease the point man like a grade school boy with a crush and have a poker chip as a totem, well, Ariadne is gracious enough to keep her thoughts to herself.)
While Cobb may be the team leader and the world's best extractor, there is no doubt in Ariadne's mind that Arthur is the glue that holds the team together, just like he was the only one to help hold Cobb together for so long after Mal's death. She's seen him switch from defender and protector to aggressor and assassin in a heartbeat, and although that should bother her it really doesn't, because if Eames is a forger of the mind, Arthur is a chameleon in the flesh. Simultaneously doting elder brother and steadfast second in command, human encyclopedia and an endless well of resources, Ariadne sometimes has to quite consciously remind herself that Arthur is very much flesh-and-blood, one hundred percent human.
Sometimes though, she forgets.
Then he's a hellhound who doesn't relent until he's found his prey, a soldier in sleekly tailored three-piece suits in place of camouflage, a fighter to the very last breath-
-that is, when he still has breath.
"Arthur-!" Ariadne gasps, jerking awake and floundering like a fish out of water; her shirt is sticking to her back with sweat, and it has nothing to do with the mugginess of their resident warehouse, yet another room of gray walls and wide empty spaces, waiting to be filled with endless days of dreaming. She tumbles gracelessly from her chair and Cobb is by her side in an instant.
"What happened?" he demands, crouching down and taking a steady hold of her elbow. Ariadne's eyes are wide, the color high on her cheeks, trembling lips parting to explain, because there should be no good reason why she's waking up from a routine exercise like she's been dreaming of getting chased down by the devil. No good reason except that the subconscious they've been in is Arthur's, and that alone can provide a million different reasons for the naked, stark fear on Ariadne's features. While Cobb is the one whose guilt happened to project itself in his subconscious as a manifestation of his dead wife, there are things in Arthur's mind that can create an entirely new genre of horror and give new meaning to the word 'terror.'
"Nothing." They both turn at the voice to see Arthur sitting up, features as calm and impassive as ever. But Cobb stands slowly, attention fixed on his point man because he can hear the slight shortness of breath in the other man's speech, and then Arthur's fingers are latching onto the perfect Windsor knot at his throat and both Cobb and Ariadne can see that the digits are trembling, trembling.
"Arthur," Cobb says, and there's a definite warning note in his tone this time, the kind that fathers take with their children when there's a hole in the window and little Johnny is the one holding a baseball bat. Except this time around, the metaphorical baseball bat is the way Arthur swiftly whips the necktie away from his throat and pops open the button at his collar, letting bare a sliver of bruised, swollen skin. "What happened?"
"My subconscious turned on Ariadne, and I tried to intervene." Arthur replies flatly and he turns away, shoulders stiff and tie still clenched tightly in one fist, obviously signaling an end to the conversation. His colleagues watch him go, the frown on Cobb's face deepening and the remanents of fear still evident on Ariadne's features, and suddenly, she sees the point man in a new and not entirely pleasant light.
Mythical heroes always have a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to meet head on and face down: the Hydra, a Chimera, Grendel, a minotaur. None of these though, can hold a candle to the foe that one's own subcionscious presents. Freud calls it the id, the dark, inaccessible part of our personality; a construction of neurotic negative symptoms, ruled by pleasure and only approachable through analogies, through vast and abstract concepts like chaos and havoc, anarchy of the mind and the senses. (Of course, Freud thinks everything in the world is ruled by daddy issues or pleasure of some kind, but on some very few occasions, he's correct.)
And even the stuff of legends falter and fall when their own subconscious slips a noose around their necks.
- * - * -
Arthur thinks she didn't see what happened after he pushed her over the edge of a cliff as his subconscious closed in around them like a pack of starved dogs, but Ariadne saw. And she doesn't get the image of Arthur swinging from the gallows out of her mind for a very, very long time.
III.
He's running.
The frigid winter air drags in his chest, burning against his lungs; he can taste the copper of blood in his mouth, but Arthur doesn't slow down and he doesn't dare look behind him. His muscles protest angrily, his head spins with nausea and he can barely breathe, but still, he continues to run.
"Cobb, his pulse is skyrocketing through the roof. We have to pull him out, now!"
"We can't, Ariadne. If we give him the kick now, he's going to go into cardiac arrest."
"At this rate, he's going to have a heart attack anyways!"
The voices whip all around him, carried on by the wind and Arthur can hear the shrill note that always creeps into Ariadne's tone when she gets frightened or angry, and Cobb's worried rumble, like a roll of thunder overhead.
A small part of him somewhere tucked within his mind knows that this is just a dream, a training course for soldiers, an imitation of reality and that he will wake up. But the larger part of him, the part that's standing in the middle of a barren wasteland, running from everything that he's ever been afraid of, every little half-forgotten memory and twisted nightmare from back when he still could dream, is fucking terrified. The larger part of him is telling him to get the hell away from the monsters of his mind that are tearing up the landscape and reaching out to grab and take and swallow him whole, to run, run, run, although the sheer terror is nearly petrifying.
His pulse is hammering double time, triple time, skeletal muscles contracting as his body's endocrine system unleashes a flood of hormones demanding a fight or flight response. And so he runs. Heart hammering in his throat, spitting blood, lungs craving the air they can no longer intake, he runs.
Suddenly, his foot catches on a loose rock and he stumbles, pitches forward, goes down face first into the dirt - and then they're on him.
"Cobb!"
"Bloody hell, do something!" A hand lands on his forehead, wiping the sweat from his brow, and the action is so amazingly gentle that he will probably feel stunned if he has the presence of mind to think of anything but of the desperate need for air, air, air.
"Your point man is almost through the final course; if he can stay in there just for a little while longer-"
There's a plastic bag being jammed over his head and fastening tight around his neck, and when Arthur opens his mouth to scream, his tongue meets plastic film and it billows in his mouth, sucking all the air out of his chest. His eyes are rolling wildly in their sockets as he scrabbles desperately at thin air, fingers scratching at nothing; he's writhing and fighting as best he can, but it's no use.
He's pinned down, with a fucking pipe skewering his torso, and he's begging Eames, please, Eames, folding the forger's fingers down over his own throat.
He's drowning, water seeping into his lungs and filling up all the availiable space.
He's suffocating, rope rough againt his neck as he clutches at the noose helplessly, uselessly, choking to death.
"Wake him up! Wake him up!" Ariadne's screaming, her voice mingling with the wind shrieking in his ears. Arthur thinks he can feel invisible fingers are encircling his wrist, hands pressing down on his shoulders as he convulses and jerks, muscles spasming uncontrollaby.
"But the test run is nearly complete-" Grey spots dance in his vision. He's fading, sinking toward the void of the endless black of nightmarish shadows and he bucks wildly, because he doesn't want to go there, not again.
"No." Cobb is furious, he's beyond furious. Arthur can hear it in his voice. "Wake him up, NOW."
- * - * -
Air, oh god, air and light and space and freedom but...but-
Ariadne's voice sounds from somewhere to his left, her words garbled and unintelligent because Arthur can't see or hear her; his eyes are fixed on the ceiling's white tiles, lungs still spasming, his ears filled with his own rasping as he gulps and wheezes but gets nothing, nothing at all.
"Arthur. Arthur!"
Warm hands grasp either side of his face, the palms large and square, the fingers brushing gently against his cheekbones. A familiar pair of grey eyes dance in his vision and Eames speaks softly then, softly and with such tenderness that Arthur can scarcely believe it. "Look at me, darling. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe with me."
He wants to, can't they see he's trying?! Eames's eyes narrow and then he's bending closer, his lips barely an inch away from Arthur's and he's blowing softly, breathing out and into Arthur's lungs, breathing for Arthur. "Breathe," he instructs in a barely audible murmur, lips soft against Arthur's.
Arthur's lungs expand, his throat opens, and he inhales.
Out of all things, breathing has never really come easy for Arthur. But...
"Breathe," whispers (orders-pleads-begs) Eames.
And Arthur does.
Character/Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Mal/Cobb, Ariadne
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Mr. Nolan owns it all
Warnings: Um...much rambling.
Summary: Out of all things, breathing has never really come easy for Arthur.
Author's Notes: Written for the square "asphyxiation" for hc_bingo
asphyxia (n) : the extreme condition caused by lack of oxygen and excess of carbon dioxide in the blood, produced by interference with respiration or insufficient oxygen in the air; suffocation.
If severe enough and prolonged, it causes death.
I.
Arthur is eighteen years old when he dies for the first time.
It's his first job with the Cobbs, and normally Dom would hesitate to bring such an unfamiliar associate on board. He likes working with those he knows, likes the confidence of having a partner who will watch his back and stand by his side even when the air is thick with bullets, even as the dreamscape around them crumbles. But Mal swears by the unnamed individual from whom she hears of this new but extremely valuable player (Dom tries hard not to think about the shadiness of his wife's connections because, well, they are criminals, in a vague sense of the word) and after all, they do need a point man. He's expecting a well-seasoned man, ex-military perhaps, with fast reflexes and obviously, a sharp mind.
He gets the fast reflexes and the sharp mind, and a keen sense of perception thrown in as a bonus. But when he's staring into the dark, intelligent eyes of a fresh-faced boy, Dom knows deep in his gut that this isn't going to work.
This is not to say that Arthur isn't capable. He's punctual and efficient, thorough and orderly, ruthless when he's hunting down a piece of vital intel or keeping projections off of Dom's back in all of their training sessions together. The kid is part machine and part straight-backed soldier with a scarily sharp mind and killer instincts. The problem is...Arthur is so young, and nearly impossibly so to be this good at what he does.
Dom finds that he has to keep reminding himself that Arthur is barely legal, and when he flicks a glance at this college-aged kid with long fingers that fly over keyboards and polite charm that makes Mal smile indulgently and ruffle his floppy hair, he feels something strangely akin to guilt weighing down like a brick in his chest. He can't help but think that Arthur is supposed to be pulling all nighters in coffee shops and libraries, studying for his next exam or heading out to the movies, his arm wrapped around a pretty girl's waist instead of poring over dossiers on their next mark.
He's old enough to smoke and fuck if he damn well pleases, but not even old enough to drink. What the hell is he doing, Dom thinks, pulling Arthur into this world? If the kid is old enough to fight for his country and possibly die on foreign soil for the sake of an American flag draped over his casket, does that mean it's okay for him to die again and again in a world of dreams, too?
The first time Dom kills Arthur in a training session, he's...well, impressed. Most people don't deal too well with a bullet to the brain, even if it is relatively painless and in a dream, but Arthur proves to be different than most people, calmly removing the line from his wrist when he wakes and thanking Dom for another informative lesson. No shakes, no hyperventilation, no breakdown.
No tears.
It's comforting, and yet at the same time, incredibly saddening.
Mal sidles up to him and Dom slips an arm around her waist as they watch Arthur methodically pack his things, apparently unperturbed by the fact that moments ago, in his mind, he'd been flat on his back with his brains splattered all over the pavement.
"It doesn't even faze him, does it?" Mal asks quietly, curiously, her soft accent curving up and over consonants and vowels.
"What?"
"Death."
Dom kisses his wife's temple and doesn't reply. Their answer comes in the form of Arthur's first job less than a week later.
- * - * -
"Dom!" Arthur yells at the top of his voice, sounding panicked, and immediately, Dom knows something is terribly, horribly wrong. Ever since Arthur started working alongside him, it's always been "Mr. Cobb" this, and "Mr. Cobb" that, no matter how many times Dom insists that Arthur address him by his first name. He whirls around, tearing his eyes from the scrapbook of secrets stolen from their mark's mental safe, looking across the way - just in time to see Arthur getting his head pushed underwater.
And held there.
Oh, fuck.
Time is fluid in dreams, and it's barely two minutes, but feels like forever as Dom stands there, frozen, watching Arthur's arms flailing and shoving weakly against the projection two times his size who's gleefully ( gleefully! God, their mark is one messed up lady) holding him under, to no avail.
The moment Arthur's arms slide limply from trying to push the man's hands away and fall with a dull slap to the surface of the water, Dom numbly draws his gun and puts a bullet in his skull.
He wakes to the sound of frantic gasping, and opens his eyes to see Arthur jackknifing up off the hotel bed, eyes wide and frenzied, fingers scrabbling at his throat and chest heaving as he tries to draw in deep gulps of oxygen. Mal rushes over from where she's been sitting guard and watching over the two of them, immediately reaching out for Arthur and drawing him into her arms, murmuring soothingly in French as she rubs small circles on his back.
To this day (aside from the image of his wife stepping off the ledge of a window and into the nothingness below), the sight of his point man clinging to Mal like a terrified child would his mother and just trying to breathe is the one memory that haunts Dominic Cobb the most.
II.
To Ariadne, Arthur is a mythical hero, greater than men and only a little lesser than the gods, the stuff of legends. He's Hercules without the craziness oh so wonderfully bestowed by a jealous and wrathful Hera (although Cobb's guilty projection of Mal can sure give the spurned goddess a run for her money in regards to sheer vindictiveness), Perseus sans the winged horse (Arthur does happen to have a Mustang though, and that's not too terribly shabby), Achilles minus all that crippling hubris and of course, that damn heel. (However, if Arthur were to have an Achilles heel, one fatal weakness, Ariadne has a very good idea of what - or whom - it might be. And if that heel happens to tease the point man like a grade school boy with a crush and have a poker chip as a totem, well, Ariadne is gracious enough to keep her thoughts to herself.)
While Cobb may be the team leader and the world's best extractor, there is no doubt in Ariadne's mind that Arthur is the glue that holds the team together, just like he was the only one to help hold Cobb together for so long after Mal's death. She's seen him switch from defender and protector to aggressor and assassin in a heartbeat, and although that should bother her it really doesn't, because if Eames is a forger of the mind, Arthur is a chameleon in the flesh. Simultaneously doting elder brother and steadfast second in command, human encyclopedia and an endless well of resources, Ariadne sometimes has to quite consciously remind herself that Arthur is very much flesh-and-blood, one hundred percent human.
Sometimes though, she forgets.
Then he's a hellhound who doesn't relent until he's found his prey, a soldier in sleekly tailored three-piece suits in place of camouflage, a fighter to the very last breath-
-that is, when he still has breath.
"Arthur-!" Ariadne gasps, jerking awake and floundering like a fish out of water; her shirt is sticking to her back with sweat, and it has nothing to do with the mugginess of their resident warehouse, yet another room of gray walls and wide empty spaces, waiting to be filled with endless days of dreaming. She tumbles gracelessly from her chair and Cobb is by her side in an instant.
"What happened?" he demands, crouching down and taking a steady hold of her elbow. Ariadne's eyes are wide, the color high on her cheeks, trembling lips parting to explain, because there should be no good reason why she's waking up from a routine exercise like she's been dreaming of getting chased down by the devil. No good reason except that the subconscious they've been in is Arthur's, and that alone can provide a million different reasons for the naked, stark fear on Ariadne's features. While Cobb is the one whose guilt happened to project itself in his subconscious as a manifestation of his dead wife, there are things in Arthur's mind that can create an entirely new genre of horror and give new meaning to the word 'terror.'
"Nothing." They both turn at the voice to see Arthur sitting up, features as calm and impassive as ever. But Cobb stands slowly, attention fixed on his point man because he can hear the slight shortness of breath in the other man's speech, and then Arthur's fingers are latching onto the perfect Windsor knot at his throat and both Cobb and Ariadne can see that the digits are trembling, trembling.
"Arthur," Cobb says, and there's a definite warning note in his tone this time, the kind that fathers take with their children when there's a hole in the window and little Johnny is the one holding a baseball bat. Except this time around, the metaphorical baseball bat is the way Arthur swiftly whips the necktie away from his throat and pops open the button at his collar, letting bare a sliver of bruised, swollen skin. "What happened?"
"My subconscious turned on Ariadne, and I tried to intervene." Arthur replies flatly and he turns away, shoulders stiff and tie still clenched tightly in one fist, obviously signaling an end to the conversation. His colleagues watch him go, the frown on Cobb's face deepening and the remanents of fear still evident on Ariadne's features, and suddenly, she sees the point man in a new and not entirely pleasant light.
Mythical heroes always have a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to meet head on and face down: the Hydra, a Chimera, Grendel, a minotaur. None of these though, can hold a candle to the foe that one's own subcionscious presents. Freud calls it the id, the dark, inaccessible part of our personality; a construction of neurotic negative symptoms, ruled by pleasure and only approachable through analogies, through vast and abstract concepts like chaos and havoc, anarchy of the mind and the senses. (Of course, Freud thinks everything in the world is ruled by daddy issues or pleasure of some kind, but on some very few occasions, he's correct.)
And even the stuff of legends falter and fall when their own subconscious slips a noose around their necks.
- * - * -
Arthur thinks she didn't see what happened after he pushed her over the edge of a cliff as his subconscious closed in around them like a pack of starved dogs, but Ariadne saw. And she doesn't get the image of Arthur swinging from the gallows out of her mind for a very, very long time.
III.
He's running.
The frigid winter air drags in his chest, burning against his lungs; he can taste the copper of blood in his mouth, but Arthur doesn't slow down and he doesn't dare look behind him. His muscles protest angrily, his head spins with nausea and he can barely breathe, but still, he continues to run.
"Cobb, his pulse is skyrocketing through the roof. We have to pull him out, now!"
"We can't, Ariadne. If we give him the kick now, he's going to go into cardiac arrest."
"At this rate, he's going to have a heart attack anyways!"
The voices whip all around him, carried on by the wind and Arthur can hear the shrill note that always creeps into Ariadne's tone when she gets frightened or angry, and Cobb's worried rumble, like a roll of thunder overhead.
A small part of him somewhere tucked within his mind knows that this is just a dream, a training course for soldiers, an imitation of reality and that he will wake up. But the larger part of him, the part that's standing in the middle of a barren wasteland, running from everything that he's ever been afraid of, every little half-forgotten memory and twisted nightmare from back when he still could dream, is fucking terrified. The larger part of him is telling him to get the hell away from the monsters of his mind that are tearing up the landscape and reaching out to grab and take and swallow him whole, to run, run, run, although the sheer terror is nearly petrifying.
His pulse is hammering double time, triple time, skeletal muscles contracting as his body's endocrine system unleashes a flood of hormones demanding a fight or flight response. And so he runs. Heart hammering in his throat, spitting blood, lungs craving the air they can no longer intake, he runs.
Suddenly, his foot catches on a loose rock and he stumbles, pitches forward, goes down face first into the dirt - and then they're on him.
"Cobb!"
"Bloody hell, do something!" A hand lands on his forehead, wiping the sweat from his brow, and the action is so amazingly gentle that he will probably feel stunned if he has the presence of mind to think of anything but of the desperate need for air, air, air.
"Your point man is almost through the final course; if he can stay in there just for a little while longer-"
There's a plastic bag being jammed over his head and fastening tight around his neck, and when Arthur opens his mouth to scream, his tongue meets plastic film and it billows in his mouth, sucking all the air out of his chest. His eyes are rolling wildly in their sockets as he scrabbles desperately at thin air, fingers scratching at nothing; he's writhing and fighting as best he can, but it's no use.
He's pinned down, with a fucking pipe skewering his torso, and he's begging Eames, please, Eames, folding the forger's fingers down over his own throat.
He's drowning, water seeping into his lungs and filling up all the availiable space.
He's suffocating, rope rough againt his neck as he clutches at the noose helplessly, uselessly, choking to death.
"Wake him up! Wake him up!" Ariadne's screaming, her voice mingling with the wind shrieking in his ears. Arthur thinks he can feel invisible fingers are encircling his wrist, hands pressing down on his shoulders as he convulses and jerks, muscles spasming uncontrollaby.
"But the test run is nearly complete-" Grey spots dance in his vision. He's fading, sinking toward the void of the endless black of nightmarish shadows and he bucks wildly, because he doesn't want to go there, not again.
"No." Cobb is furious, he's beyond furious. Arthur can hear it in his voice. "Wake him up, NOW."
- * - * -
Air, oh god, air and light and space and freedom but...but-
Ariadne's voice sounds from somewhere to his left, her words garbled and unintelligent because Arthur can't see or hear her; his eyes are fixed on the ceiling's white tiles, lungs still spasming, his ears filled with his own rasping as he gulps and wheezes but gets nothing, nothing at all.
"Arthur. Arthur!"
Warm hands grasp either side of his face, the palms large and square, the fingers brushing gently against his cheekbones. A familiar pair of grey eyes dance in his vision and Eames speaks softly then, softly and with such tenderness that Arthur can scarcely believe it. "Look at me, darling. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe with me."
He wants to, can't they see he's trying?! Eames's eyes narrow and then he's bending closer, his lips barely an inch away from Arthur's and he's blowing softly, breathing out and into Arthur's lungs, breathing for Arthur. "Breathe," he instructs in a barely audible murmur, lips soft against Arthur's.
Arthur's lungs expand, his throat opens, and he inhales.
Out of all things, breathing has never really come easy for Arthur. But...
"Breathe," whispers (orders-pleads-begs) Eames.
And Arthur does.