[fic] Caveat lector: as usual this is not beta'd.

[apiphile]

Title: Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Lying
Fandom: Inception
Word Count: 10,039
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Warnings: Author is white, able-bodied, cisgender, and European.
Content Advisory: Slightly creepy?
Disclaimer: B'long Christopher Nolan not me.
Summary: I am writing about Eames. Basically. There is no point.

The grass on the verge is dry and pale yellow, a crisp champagne of stalks which spray back from the gritty groove the car tires have torn through it. Eames throws open the metallic blue door and sets his foot into the few wildflowers with no care for their wellbeing; the road is blissfully deserted and the sky is the colour of his eyes, a late-summer sky that comes down to stroke the hedgerows and soften the bristles of standing field stubble.

He nods to the car's other occupants. "Somewhere around here. 'Twelve paces from the five-bar gate'."

"I don't suppose you feel like digging," Nash says, passing him a shovel from the back seat.

"I don't suppose Arthur feels like doing some work for a change?" Eames counters, leaning the shovel against the side of the door. "I don't think manual labour is in my contract."

"It's not in mine either," Arthur objects, picking up the shovel all the same. He doesn't rise to the taunt, any more than he has risen to anything Eames has said over the course of this job. As new acquaintances go, Eames would be tempted to categorise him as "boring", but he's never been so foolish as to assume anyone is that simple. There are doubtless layers to this uptight little ex-Airforce onion (unless he's missed his mark and the man just breathes military competence through pure genetics; Eames rarely misses his mark) to which Eames is not yet privy. The question is whether it's worth peeling them away to see what neuroses fuel the engine of his indifference.

Curiosity proverbially did some unpleasant things to cats.

"These are the hands of an artist, my friend," he says, as they file to the gate. "It would be a shame to sully them with splinters, and hard work makes me sweat."

"Everything makes you sweat," Nash observes, opening the gate.

The sun makes them all perspire unreasonably; Arthur digs with short, efficient strokes, his hand gripping close to the blade. It is like watching a machine in action, and as a collection of movements the enterprise is delightful to observe; Eames leans on the gate and chews on the arm of his sunglasses like a farmer on a stalk.

"This takes me back," he says, looking from the skyline, free of contrails, to Nash's sweating face, to Arthur's shoulders bunching and dipping as he lifted sharp-sided mounds of sod out of the hole. "Grew up somewhere like this."

"Yeah?" Nash asks with not much interest, his hands on his hips. It's probably no great shock to him; his only experience of the joys of the English countryside must be the films and photos he used for reference on this job, but Eames smiles all the same as the architect blunders briefly into the path of a bramble.

"No," Eames corrects, putting his sunglasses on. "Peckham."

"Is that right," Nash says with disinterest, leaning out over the hole.

"Do you think I look like I come from Peckham?" Eames asks in mock-offense. Nash probably has no more idea of what Peckham is like than he does about Svalbard, but goading him is easier than baiting Arthur, and now that his own role in the extraction is largely over Eames is bored.

And he fucking hates the countryside.

"You look like you're not pulling your weight," Arthur says shortly, from the hole.

Eames leans over the hole as another spade-load of soil pours into the corn stubble, revealing the contents, the treasure whose spot had been marked less by X and more by ex - the former partner of their mark. "Alas, poor Yorrick," he grimaces.

"That's disgusting," Nash says, peering down at the blue-tined and apparently petrified head with an expression of revulsion etched into his face in deep lines.

Arthur seems unflustered, just lifts the head in one hand and pries the mouth open with his other. "Two sheets of screwed-up paper."

"What kind of fuck-up keeps their secrets inside a dead person's mouth?" Nash demands, stepping back from head with his hand over his mouth, as if there is any scent inside this dream, as if there is nausea.

"One with a sense of humour," Eames says, his hands in his pockets, as Arthur drops the head pointedly back in its hole and brushes his own hands on a handkerchief. Who the hell has a handkerchief in a dream? "Dead men tell no tales."

"Very funny," Arthur says, giving no indication that he finds it anything of the sort, or indeed that he has any kind of emotional reaction to anything. Eames feels sure he could take a punch to the face without so much a cracking a frown, but he's in no hurry to test the theory; hand-to-hand fighting was never his strong suit. "Now to call Dom."

"Actually," he says, putting his elbow a little closer to hers on the dry, brushed-steel bar-top, "I'm a … well, not a doctor exactly. Not the life-saving variety, I'm afraid." Eames proffers his finest blend of rakish and self-deprecating in a smile that has been stitched together from television and expedience. He draws himself nearer and lets the smile drop along with the timbre of his voice. "Military psychologist. It's my job to put together the shattered minds of combatants when they return home."

Eames would like to say that he doesn't remember her name, but he's always been excellent with names; her name is Miranda Deverue, she is four years older than him and works in business-to-business marketing at a company which manufactures hospital equipment. She has a small dog of which she is overly-fond - even if she hadn't told him about the bloody animal at great length the terrier hairs on her tights would have been a heads-up, the fact that they're there at all says she's been home to cosset the little blighter before coming here.

"That's just as good as saving lives," she assures him, putting her hand on the cuff of his shirt with a serious look in her eyes. "You're bringing people back to life, really, aren't you?" She crosses her legs on the bar stool and pushes her hair behind her ear, a half-calculated effort in drawing his attention to her cheek. "Is it very hard on you? You must hear some awful things in that line of work."

"Some," Eames demurs, fiddles with his drink for a moment and gazes into the middle-distance. He wonders if he's over-egging it, but she seems genuinely sympathetic. "I usually come in here to forget about that sort of thing."

"Of course," she says, as his head fills up with lurid stories of woe to feed her should she press him further. "Are you from around here, originally?" And she turns her shoes, her pointy pink shoes, to match the way his are turned to the left, and smiles with her eyes, her hand back on his forearm.

He shakes his head. "Newcastle."

Eames thinks (as the music rises with the nine o'clock surge of customers) that if she were any more receptive he'd have her tail in the air. Either that or her vagina would actually jump off her body and run over and start sucking on bits of him like some sort of terrible parasite - he kills the train of thought before it can smash a hole through his composure, damns his vivid and wild imagination, and orders them both another drink.

Back at her house he drops a capsule in her wine while she's locking the yappy little dog in the bathroom; the décor is stylish and contemporary and clearly for show. It's the dog toy and the half-hidden pile of historical romance novels behind the black ash-framed futon that speak of the real soul of Miranda Deverue.

He leafs through one - Faro's Daughter - until she returns, and holds it up to her swiftly-swallowed look of horror. "Compelling stuff."

"It's just a silly - I know it's not high literature or anything but -"

"Everyone has their comfort reads," he assures her. He hasn't picked up a book since he graduated, sick to the back teeth of their black-on-white and lazy landscapes when his mind gives him so much bigger and better scenarios, all the joy stripped from them by learning every word for re-enactment. "And this isn't half bad, you know. A little historical good manners wouldn't hurt some people."

She smiles an almost sickly smile while finishing the rest of her wine, and he reads a few choice passages at random with an increasingly sly one on his own lips, careful not to make it sound too much like he has ever rehearsed or read, not to make it sound too good, too like he could slipped on the character of any one of the names on the page as easily as she wants to slip out of her 10 denier tights.

Miranda slumps onto the floor a minute or two after his third extract, and after checking her pulse and stretching her out along the futon he gets down to business: bank statements, credit card details, spare cash from her bedside table, a receipt for payment of a cable bill, and after a little deliberation, two or three completed tax returns from her files.

The flat is that curious thing, a fastidiously tidy place spotted with dog hair, the clash of demonstrative house-keeping and soppy pet-owning; Eames returns things to their places, examines her shoe collection with the eye of a professional, and is amused to find that at least one pair of Jimmy Choos and one of Louboutin are well-concealed fakes. Evidently she is no great shakes at spotting a fraud when it is waved in front of her.

Eames pushes Faro's Daughter into Miranda's hands as she drools on the futon, lets the dog out of the bathroom, and leaves with a pocket full of fraudulent goodies and a song shaping itself into a whistled melody on his lips.

He is half-way down the street outside when he realises he's left his suit jacket in the bar; his phone is up to his ear in a flash, slipping past the carefully-folded creases of Miranda Deverue's financial self.

"Joe, did I -"

"A military psychologist?" Joseph says with scathing incredulity. "Fuck's sake, why not just say you rescue orphans from burning buildings, you audacious ham." He clanked a glass. "Go back to the production assistant, I liked the production assistant. It suited your greasy hair and your sweaty pits."

"Your artistic direction has been noted in the log, Mr Craig," Eames says with delicate patience, his breath forming tiny explosions in the cold air before him as he kept up a brisk pace away from Miranda's flat. "Did I leave my jacket in your fine watering hole, or have I mislaid it in some other, less friendly-to-my-clothes locale?"

"Well, Mr Eames, your cheap and nasty suit jacket is picking up cigarette smoke in the backroom, but you're not having it back until you promise never to call yourself a military psychologist in my bar again." Joe does that horrible thing he's so found of, the one where he sucks saliva around his half-molar at the back and it sounds like he was going to spit and then he doesn't.

"I solemnly swear that I will henceforth limit my pretence to professions preapproved by the management," Eames says, holding his hand over his heart even though there is no one there to see his pantomime of sincerity, even though his beautifully-modulated apologia will register only as the facetiousness it so definitely is. "I'll be back in half an hour, she lives in the arse of nowhere."

"You have the papers for Barry?"

"No, I left with her shoes and her little dog. Of course I have the fucking papers."

Joe tuts. "Chicken, don't you take that tone. You still owe me twenty grand." He taps something - probably the security panel on the backroom wall - and adds in more solicitous tones, "So you'll be taking a few more … complicated jobs for me, right?"

Eames jerks back suddenly as a fox bounds out of a nearby garden and into his path, its springing gait like a warning siren for anything small and fluffy in the area; it looks pasty, ugly brown under the street light. "Sounds good. I could use a challenge."

The workshop is cold, the early morning light spluttering through the half-covered windows no substitute for a heating system of any sort, and Eames wraps himself around his take-away coffee like a cat around someone's ankles. It will be too hot by midday, but with dreamless sleep still weighing heavily on his head it's a chilly nuisance, and he hasn't the energy yet to so much as try to trip Arthur.

Ariadne has a pencil in her hair when she takes the second coffee from the table behind him. "Thank you."

"… I didn't buy that for you," Eames says, making no move to take it back.

"Eames is a two-coffee man," Arthur says, his own held gingerly by the plastic lid and the base.

Eames nearly bridles at this familiarity. It's not so much the being noticed, for the second coffee is as much an affectation as the suit, but the fact that he hadn't noticed Arthur noticing it; it speaks volumes about distrust, though that's no surprise in itself. After all, the No-Point man usually only pays attention to relevant detail, and if what Eames does constitutes "relevant" now, he's as good as under surveillance.

Ariadne stops with her borrowed coffee half-way to her lips. "Why is he 'Eames' and the rest of us get a first name?"

Eames nearly chokes on his own coffee. Not that it's entirely unexpected for her to leap to his defence; Ariadne reeks of warrior goodness, the desire to shout and push at the world until it is functioning in a way she thinks is fair (the folly of the young), but he'd not have expected it so soon. Much as Arthur's discomfort would be a glorious thing, it's too early in the morning for arguments.

He hastens to pour oil on troubled water. "It's a matter of respect; everyone knows I am the most competent and brilliant of us all, so no one addresses me as anything other than Mr Eames. Am I not right, Arthur?"

There is no response from Arthur, who remains uninterested in raising to Eames' admittedly weak bait as ever, and sips his coffee with an absence of expression on his smooth, calm face. He seems to be waiting out the discussion as a minor diversion from the day's thrilling business of talking about what everyone knows about Robert Fischer's childhood (not a damn lot).

But Ariadne isn't interested in being palmed off with flippant remarks, which Eames believes will make her a dangerous and powerful hydra at some point in the future. She drinks his superfluous coffee and frowns. "Everyone has a first name here but you. We might not use Saito's, but we know it. Don't you think that's a little alienating?"

"Not for me." Eames blasts her with a sly smile. He could be contrite, he could just feed her something to keep her quiet, but it's early, and Arthur is watching the exchange.

"If I'm going to work with you …" she shakes her head, impervious to the smirk. "Is it something deeply embarrassing? What is your name?"

"Matthew."

"Matthew Eames?" she swills the name around in her mouth like wine, tasting it out.

"No."

She frowns again, and over her shoulder Eames can see Arthur quietly inhaling the rest of his own coffee. "Your name isn't Matthew?"

"It might not be." Eames resists the urge to put the table between her questions and himself; it would be admission of a weakness he's sure he's excised.

"Is it or isn't it?"

"It's like Matthew," he offers, gamely, hiding the genuine snigger behind the edge of his cup, at how pathetic the link between the proffered and the truth actually is. Yusuf greets them with a raised hand as if they are a normal selection of normal colleagues in a normal office instead of a selection of not-strictly-moral bastards with an unorthodox approach to personal boundaries and a stolen PASIV device; Arthur nods his recognition, but Ariadne is too absorbed to be polite.

He finds that excessively charming.

"Matthias Eames?" she says, staring at him as if she's trying to read his name from the inside of his skull. "Mattieu Eames?"

He feels like telling her he has his name embroidered on the waistband of his underpants, if only to see if Arthur has read him as accurately as Arthur no doubt thinks he has.

Arthur steps in, already on his way over to the architectural models. "Let me put you out of your misery; his name isn't Eames."

"That's not strictly true," says Eames, because it isn't, at the moment.

"There is no such person as Matthew Eames," Arthur says without turning.

"You see now," Eames says, addressing Ariadne, who has very clearly lost interest in the game, "that is true."

"I will break up my father's empire," Eames says, pointing at the flipchart. He's never been an especially brilliant tutor - the urge to misinform is always too great - but this is countered by a strong desire to be an insufferable show-off; he acknowledges this in the same way that he acknowledges the colour of his eyes and his sexual preferences (that is, when someone notices them, and not by volunteering the information). "On the first level this is seeded with the notion that his father, though distant, has something to give him. Something hidden from the rest of the world that only he can access."

"Why do we have to kidnap him?" Ariadne asks, making a note. The rest of Eames's temporary audience sit very still, apart from Arthur, who is swinging back on the back legs of his chair again, but paying just as much attention. "Can't you introduce Browning to him in a slightly less fraught environment?"

Eames shakes his head. "Too subtle. Distress opens his mind to the possibility of change as he starts casting about for escape routes from the threatening situation. Fear is a powerful motivator."

"So much for doing something positive," Ariadne mutters, her hair obscuring her face as she writes. The continued function of her moral conscience is, Eames thinks, evidence that she hasn't been in an actual job before. It's admirable, but unlikely to survive much of this work.

"The idea is positive," he taps the board impatiently, "I will build for myself - I'm sure you and especially you can relate to why that is a gift to this man." He undoes his top button; the workshop is once again edging toward the uncomfortable. "But he needs to be open to the idea of there being something he's missed, and this will hammer that home."

"Eames isn't a big fan of subtlety," Arthur points out, leaning back on his chair. He is just out of reach of Eames's shoe, and the urge to just stretch over and tip him onto his back is an itch on the back of Eames's skull. "You may have noticed."

Yusuf and Saito laugh; Cobb, of course, does not so much as raise a smile. Eames has heard tell that once upon a time Dom Cobb was a great one for smiles and joie de vivre, but one can hardly expect that sort of thing to survive the death of a beloved partner. After all, he's also heard that love can be quite the force of change.

"Your condescension is noted," Eames says with a polite smile to match Arthur's, "and now the person who is actually capable of performing an extraction without Cobb holding his hand will continue explaining this plan. If you have no further objections?"

Arthur waves him on.

"In the second level we aim to put into his head the idea that what his father gives to him is going to be an important part of his identity, perhaps to his survival as an individual," Eames continues, and Ariadne honest-to-God raises her hand.

"Does that mean engineering a further sense of threat?"

"What do you think?"

At school five, Mark Charles stops telling the truth about why he had to move. He tells everyone who asks that it's secret - plundering his pulp novels, he says it's a matter of national security and he's not allowed to talk about it - and that his name isn't really Mark Charles.

He hints at adoption, at a tragic, Bruce Wayne past. He invites people to look at his 'birth mark' in the shape of a crown, carefully drawn on in red permanent pen.

At school five, Mark is the most popular boy in his class for the first time, and none of his new friends are ever allowed to visit his house. "It's too dangerous," he says, serious as the grave, and "They're not my real parents."

At school six he is fully prepared for solving the thorny issue of being the new boy; he talks about jungle escapades in India with language gleaned from books written before his parents were born. He watches films with classmates and makes sage noises about accuracies and inaccuracies in Indiana Jones, and steals all their popcorn.

Mark Charles may not be able to spell "compulsive liar" by the time he is thirteen (or indeed ever after); but he damn well knows that when he tells his new friends at school ten that he lost his virginity with "the younger sister of a film star - I can't say which one, her brother's agent called a lawyer on me", he can't help himself at all.

"Could you lend me five quid?" he says, his eyebrows lifting in perfect pleading synchronicity, a sadness stealing into his voice as he leans on Katie Shelton's arm and toes the gravel into awkward patterns. "I wouldn't ask, but they've stopped my trust payments so that no one can trace us."

School nine had been in Leicester, but the accent he drapes over Katie's ears is something else entirely.

"Are they going to attack us?" Ariadne whispers, standing behind the concrete pillar with her breath hanging in misty swathes around her face.

It's truly freezing, and Eames has to hand it to her - the level of detail is breath-taking and awe-inspiring. It's just too bad the damn thing is hosted in his mind, meaning that they're reduced to cringing against cold, stark walls rather than exploring the layout as they’re supposed to.

"I mean, me?" she corrects herself. "They're not -" Ariadne leans out into the empty hospital floor. "- They're not coming any closer."

"We may have to continue this in another session," Eames says brightly, watching the shadows on the opposite wall. "And."

There is a blast of hot air and a sound like a very angry car-horn.

"And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention this to anyone else," he finishes, rocking back and forth on his feet. Their presence is sending additional chills down his spine, and Ariadne keeps giving him accusing and unfairly penetrating looks; Eames wishes they had brought anyone else with them, but Saito is busy, Cobb can't know the layout, and it's not relevant to Yusuf or Arthur.

He wishes he'd thought to include some sort of heavy weaponry in the dream; a rocket launcher would have been the perfect deterrent, although if he remembers correctly from the days when he still dreamed under his own steam, it wouldn't be particularly effective for long.

"What the hell are they?" She still sounds rattled, and perhaps rightly so. The hospital is not big enough for such presences.

Eames says, "Well I think one of them is a tyrannosaurus rex, and two of the others look like little velociraptors, don't they?" he feels his legs twitch as if they want to run away without him.

"…Are they projections?"

He sighs. "What else are they likely to be?"

She stares at him with the intensity and accusation that he's come to expect from dear Ariadne; not that he objects at all to this attention, coming as it does from a font of passionate integrity which he is sure he never had himself, but it is so very distracting. "Everyone else has human projections. People from their past."

"Yes? Well?" he breathes in slowly and tries to remember where the exits are. "I have dinosaurs from my past instead. Occasionally pirates. Nothing to worry about."

"Nothing to worry about," Ariadne echoes incredulously.

"Well, get out there and distract them, then," Eames says with a weak smile, pressing his back against the concrete pillar and his hands into his armpits. "Shoo."

She just stares at him even more intensely, and Eames is forced to look away in case she actually burns through his skull. "Me, go out there and distract them?" Ariadne hisses, "They'll attack me!"

"No they won't," Eames assures her.

"That's how it works!" her whispers have such an edge of stridency that they're barely whispers any more. "Eames. Get out there." She shoves his shoulder, trying to peel thirteen stone of be-suited lump away from sanctuary with her bare hands; the force of her frustration and indignation could probably move mountains by now.

He gets up and brushes masonry dust from his trousers, and steps around the pillar with his head up; five scaly reptilian heads with flat golden eyes gleaming in them all jerk violently around to look at him. Eames coughs. He feels absurd, facing a volley of predatory lizards in his wool suit and his pink shirt, no gun in sight and no cavalry charge waiting for his command. "Shoo," he says, making a vague flapping motion with his hands. "Off, go away. You are disturbing the lady."

They follow the movement of his hands with unblinking eyes. One of them opens its mouth, and he sees the red-black worm of a tongue lift and fall in some sort of excitement.

"Fuck off," he suggests, taking a step toward them with the most menacing posture he has in his mental artillery, the kind he used to use for backing down armed bastards when all he was packing was a lack of concern for their safety and the desire to get out alive. "Leave."

The five cock their heads in chilling unison, and Eames swears internally. He wonders if he can start an avalanche outside to distract them; the snow-covered slope they've trekked down before looks as susceptible to ordinary physics as one would hope, but there's every chance these scaly buggers will just stare him out while the snow smashes them to pieces, and there's Ariadne to think of, and they're not done with this level yet.

"Eames," Ariadne whispers from behind the pillar. Her voice carries, but the dinosaurs may as well be deaf for all the notice they take of it; their attention is focussed solely on him.

"Come on then," he mutters, turning his hands and beckoning them forward instead, a gesture he recalls vividly from another life and another accent, before the construction of Mr Eames began from leftover manners and other people's expectations.

Two leap at once.

He can feint neither left nor right, and so he tumbles backward without grace or agility, urgency lending no inspiration to his feet; the remaining three simply duck their heads and move closer, their steps stolen from a strange amalgam of stop-motion and CGI films, their voice a conjoined blast of mechanics and out-of-work-actors. If dreams had scent, he could say he smells on them the aroma of fakery, of fiction.

"Eames!" Ariadne shouts, "Are you -"

The first of the five kicks him in the stomach so hard that it ruptures, and Eames stops trying to scramble away.

The second of the five stands on his arm, fracturing something important, and rakes its claws across his face. The pain is like skidding on barbed wire, a familiar sensation, and he holds his breath as the first bends to tear at his knee-caps.

This pain is deeper, stronger; drawn from no life events, merely scraped over his synapses, smashing through his brain without his waking body participating. It's all in the mind, all agony, all suffering. Neuralgia is the only pain.

Eames winces but cannot curl up when the second takes a moment to start biting off the fingers of his left hand.

When he thinks the pain can't get any worse, it does; his jawbone comes away from his face with the wet squelch of flesh and the harsh crinkle of Velcro, and the larger of the two nearest remaining dinosaurs shakes and hurls it. The smaller dives in and fastens its serrated teeth to his exposed tongue bed and yanks backward, unravelling him a piece at a time.

He barely registers Ariadne's look of revulsion and horror, but he sees the gun as clearly as a beacon in the night, tries to communicate with his eyes while he still has them; pull the trigger.

"Tell me," Ariadne says, as she sits up and claws the cannula out of her wrist, already shooting angry looks at him from her lounge chair, "that's not going to happen when you're down there for real."

Eames brushes away her concern with a gesture, and converts the tail end into the removal of his own cannula. "Shouldn't be a problem, it'll be Fischer's mind hosting, not mine; I'm just building it, he's peopling it." He rubs the bridge of his nose and wonders if the headache will go away on its own or if he's going to need to find something to ingest to chase it out of his system. "So it's just his angry subconscious we have to deal with."

Arthur, reeling the cables back into the PASIV's case with his typical bloody neatness and caution, says, "Was there a problem?" as if he hasn't seen Ariadne's heaving chest and Eames squeezing parts of his own face.

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Eames says, massaging his jaw to assure himself it is still attached. The sound of his truth echoes off the walls and strikes him back across the ears, distorted into mockery.

"Jurassic Park," Arthur says, closing the PASIV's case and sitting down on the chair opposite Ariadne's, damnably smooth movements and economy of energy. Eames scratches the cannula's imprint upon his wrist and makes a face at Arthur the moment his attention is diverted.

"What?" Ariadne stretches her legs out and treats Eames to another filthy look. "You knew about that?"

Arthur says, "Our last architect, Nash … he didn't take very well to being chased around by dinosaurs," but he's smiling a little as he says it, as if the very notion of Eames having a skull infested with dinosaurs, pirates, mutant snow leopards, spies, and deformed villains rather than simple faces of the people he has known is an amusing quirk rather than a possible symptom of madness.

"They didn't chase me," Ariadne says, not returning his smile. She looks angry, as if the breech in the rules of the universe, the new rules she has learned, is an affront to basic decency. "They chased him." She makes a face. "They tore him apart."

Eames wriggles his fingers at her to demonstrate their presence and attachment to his body (as much for himself as for her); he swiftly submerges somewhere in another part of his mind the acute memory of what it feels like to be ripped to pieces while still breathing. He waits for Arthur to make a smart remark from his perch with his hands cradled around each other, long fingers overlapping, but all Arthur says is, "Huh."

"And I see your ten and raise you ten," Eames says with a blankly affable smile, pushing chips across the green baize with the tips of his fingers. Sweat suffuses his slightly unshaven face, but he makes no move to brush it away lest it be interpreted as a sign of weakness of hand he is currently truly afflicted with. A little air conditioning in this greasy hole of a hotel would not go amiss, but it seems they've spent their money on neon and strippers instead. While not fundamentally opposed to either of these investments, Eames would also like to not drown in his own perspiration.

Across the table from him, Carl nods his recognition and shuffles his cards without looking at them. Although it is hot, he hasn't removed his dark green leather duster. "As you were saying…"

"Of course," Eames barely listens to the next raise. "Forgive me. As I was saying." He lowers his eyelids to blot out the neon. "In order for a lie to be truly convincing, the first person who must believe it is the liar himself."

The next person around the table - a woman in a green feather boa with so much powder on her eyelids that she seemed barely able to open them - raises her stake.

"If he himself believes his lie to be a truth, then he is much better able to sell the rest of the world on his deception," Eames continues, tapping his cards on the table in perfect mirror to Carl's apparently aimless twitching.

The dealer nods at the table but does not interrupt him.

"He reinforces the lie and denies the truth by repetition and picturing events in his mind the way his story says they must be," Eames holds Carl's gaze, "and slowly the imprint of reality on his conscious thoughts is wiped away and replaced with a powerful fiction." He reaches for a cigarette. Eames has never smoked, but Carl apparently believes that he does. "Which then becomes reality."

The dealer passes a card to Carl.

"The thing about the subconscious mind," Eames says, as a card is passed to the (frankly gorgeous) black man with a thin moustache sitting between Carl and Eames's neighbour, "is that what the memories it keeps are not always carbon copies of what the conscious mind retains; the subconscious deals in emotions."

The dealer passes a card to the thin old man sitting beside him.

Smoke hangs above their heads like a tarpaulin for keeping out the rain, and the colours of the hotel's ill-advised neon lights bleed into it: ink into water, blood into towels.

"Some things leave enormous emotional imprints, like meteorite craters," Eames says, off-handed and inhaling unwanted cigarette smoke. "Love, for example, is very hard to deny. Witnessing a death is a knife-wound on the skin of the subconscious which scars for the rest of your natural life."

The dealer slides a card across the baize to lie just before his tapping fingertips. Eames ignores it; it is the queen of clubs.

"So," Carl says, as the dealer slides a card to the woman with the green boa, "you think you can ferret out the truth from Wan Lee's head even though he claims to be telling it already?"

"Something like that," Eames agrees, fingering the edge of his cards idly. The gun weighs heavy on his lap. "Sometimes, you see, what's important is not the purpose of a scene but the things that people say to fill the silence." He reaches into the warm spot between his thighs and withdraws what is a far larger weapon than it was when he extracted it from his hip pocket. "Show your hand, Carl."

Carl stares at him down the barrel of the gun and coolly unfolds his cards across the baize, forming a map of the parish. "You haven't won."

"No, I rather think you'll find I have," Eames says, scanning the map as quickly as he can, rubbing the rim of his poker chip with his finger, safe in his pocket. The grid references are pointless, he's never been any good at remembering numbers, but the landmarks are so clear they look like tiny photographs, taken at different times of day. "Thank you."

He presses the gun barrel to his forehead and pulls the trigger without hesitation.

"Wan Lee is alive," he tells Cooper's expectant face as he rubs the sore spot on his wrist. "Basement building near the old church. He's under an assumed name, something to do with green." He rubs the bridge of his nose. "It's not even a very good disappearing act."

"Well," Cooper says, writing this down, "you'd know, wouldn't you?"

It's late afternoon and Eames has every intention of pouring over the hospital model as soon as he returns from relieving himself, but Arthur stops him with a raised hand before he can make it all the way across the workshop floor. "Do you have a moment?"

"For you, I have hours, darling," Eames purrs, butting his eyelashes, but Arthur seems unfazed.

"I need to borrow you for a minute to go over the hotel layout."

The PASIV is at his feet, sealed and innocuous-looking to anyone who has no conception of what might be inside. Eames thinks he probably needs to do no such thing, but he knows the allure of time spent in dreamspace, and he doesn't resist. "Not resisting" is, after all, a favoured tactic of his.

"And it doesn't bother you to be alone with me." Eames smiles and lifts his eyebrows.

"I used to have a superior officer who'd threaten us with rape by guard dogs if we screwed up," Arthur says evenly, opening up the PASIV's case, "a little creepy flirting is hardly in the same league. You don't bother me, Mr Eames."

"Shame," Eames says, settling onto his favoured chair and rolling up his sleeve with brisk, businesslike movements that clashes horribly with the lasciviousness of his voice. The frisson is, he hopes, noted by his one-man audience. "I was beginning to think I'd merely imagined the way you look when you're unnerved."

Arthur says, "I'm creating, you're hosting. Try not to throw any dinosaurs at me."

"They won't come after you, they'll come after me," Eames says, watching the shadows on the ceiling as the puff and hiss of the device flow through his straining ears like familiar music.

When he turns to look at the immaculate hotel bar Arthur is ordering a drink.

Bright sun streaks the windows and draws sharp-sided shadows on the floor beyond, giving warmth to the cubic leather armchairs and rendering pointless the hanging lights. There are no people anywhere to be seen, and Arthur frowns back over his shoulder, "You're supposed to people this."

"I'll probably dinosaur it," Eames observes.

The bartender is a robot, a soviet-looking robot in rust and red stars, clanking behind the bar like a brilliant special effect. The bartender is a robot, a cartoonish robot, with a cream finish and unnecessary plastic mounds serving bewilderingly as breasts. The bartender is a robot, a blocky lump with clumsy fingers rendered in a metallic finish, tiny blue eyes glowing. It continues to shift appearance.

Arthur takes a glowing blue drink from the robot's grasper and peers through it, examining the liquid without wrinkling his nose. "What is this?"

Eames says, "I have no idea," and wills the robot bartender to shut up. It looks very much like liquid copper sulphate.

The robot immediately passes a heavy, thick cocktail menu to Arthur. It has one drink listed, and the words printed on it in shimmering, rainbow ink read Romulan Ale.

"I don't think I want this," Arthur says, putting the drink in front of Eames.

"A wise choice, Persephone." Eames declines the drink himself, and peers around the hotel bar. It remains deserted barring the robot bartender, who seems to have settled on doing an impression of Rosie the Robot housemaid from some half-remembered cartoon. "So, where is everything?"

"Toilets," Arthur points, "lobby, elevators," he points again, "I can show you one room, and according to Ariadne the rest are identical. It saves time."

"Very efficient," Eames agrees. "Did you actually bring me down here to show me the layout?" He is amused by his adoption of the directional language of dreaming; to be in a dream is to go under. The waking world is up top. "Or did you have something else mind?"

Arthur touches his elbow to direct him toward the lobby and the elevators. It's noteworthy precisely because Arthur does not not touch people, a quirk Eames has long since filed for future imitation; when taking off Arthur, never enter another person's space. "Mr Eames, do you remember when I told you that your creepy flirting doesn't bother me?"

"Perfectly." The carpets are exact. Ariadne's design is smooth, tasteful, and stylish, and Arthur's replication of it has no hallmarks of imagination, just the sense of polished wood overlaying everything including the glass, the way it always does when Arthur is called upon to provide the décor. "Are you about to tell me that you were lying about that?"

"Not at all," Arthur stands back to let him enter the elevator first. "Just to clarify for you; I don't find it attractive, either."

Despite this, Eames's heart half-beats and his stomach flutters with what he's always termed the thrill of the chase, although perhaps the thrill of manipulation is closer to the mark. "So what do you find attractive? Besides buttoning your waistcoat improperly and Ariadne, I mean."

Arthur looks straight ahead, his hands in his pocket. He is the very picture of marble stillness, not a statue but a tree, ready to sway and bend when moved to, but unlikely to make sudden movements from fancy or caprice.

There is a long pause.

"Honesty," he says, at last.

Eames doesn't stop laughing until they get to the hotel room door.

When they arrive, Arthur puts his ear to the wood and directs his attention beyond the door so fully that Eames can almost see his point of focus. "What exactly are you expecting in there?"

Arthur says, "Projections," and manages to do it without implying that Eames is unbearably stupid for having asked.

He seems to have satisfied his suspicions for the time being, and sidles into the room with his gun - of course he has a gun - raised rather than levelled. Eames follows and snaps the door shut behind him through the tuggings of habit.

"Nice," he says, shaving off the withering contempt that might otherwise accompany such a bland word. It's stylish, carefully constructed to leave no easy hiding places for projections - human ones, at any rate - but you'd have to know that's part of the intention before noticing that. Subtle. Eames rocks on his heels for a moment, enjoying the work. There's no question that Ariadne is far beyond Nash's league.

There is a squeak from one of the wood panels on the wall, and Arthur flows into immediate action.

"Wardrobe?" Eames asks, as Arthur very slowly reaches for a small depression in the lacquered wood panelling, his gun sitting as perfectly in his other hand as if it has grown there from his own flesh. Arthur shushes him.

The door swings open, and Eames sees before Arthur precisely what is inside.

"Fucking hell," he snaps, jumping backward.

The projection hiding in there spills out with such speed that there's little to be done to stop it; Eames flattens himself against the wall and swats wildly - why didn't he think to bring a gun? - at it as it launches itself at his face with clawed fingers.

Even beyond this assault he can see Arthur frozen to the spot for a second, taking in the scene with a refreshingly expressive face; his features composed into a radiantly clear this is not actually fucking happening. Except the horrible gouging white fingers are definitely in danger of drawing blood from his face, as two-dimensional as they are, and the fury and violence with which the bulbous white gloves scrabble at his face is definitely going to result in parts of it coming off soon.

"ARTHUR," Eames shouts, grappling with the physics-defying cartoon mouse, "If you wouldn't mind -"

Arthur clubs Mickey Mouse over the back of his two-dimensional head with the butt of his gun, and the Mouse folds up in brief pain.

"You couldn't just shoot him?" Eames pleads, but Arthur just bundles the Mouse back inside the wardrobe and slams the door shut, locking it. "… well, thank you, I suppose," Eames says, making a face, "for shoving me back in the closet so manfully."



by crotalus_atrox

Arthur holds his gaze for so long that Eames feels a certain desire to either punch him in the liver or grab his face and kiss him - anything to break the tension. "Why aren't your projections human?"

"Don't know," Eames lies, stepping away from him to peer around the en suite.

"Why do they attack you and not the dreamer?" Arthur persists. He's doing something to the wall of the room, but Eames remains in the en suite, staring at the mirror and idly shovelling his features around until he's wearing Arthur like a suit.

"Don't know," he lies again. He steps back into the room. "Voila."

"Impressive," Arthur says. His tone is so flat that Eames can't get a single fingernail into truth, can't tell at all if that's sarcasm or grudging admiration or just boredom. "Is this you?"

He holds up a torn, worn, and faded school exercise book in his hand. It has been touched so many times by so many hands that it is clearly as soft as velvet, and there are faded washable ink blue letters on the front spelling out a name.

"It's got a name on it, hasn't it?" Eames says, flinging himself down onto the bed. "Where was it?"

"In the wall safe," Arthur says, watching his face. Eames mirrors Arthur's face back at him; the same cool composure, the same carefully elided tells. "Since this is your mind I assume it's yours." There is a pause during which the wardrobe shakes and swears.

"Language, Mickey," Eames chides, under his breath. Arthur does not so much as crack a smile.

"May I?" he asks instead.

Eames spreads his hands-disguised-as-Arthur's-hands and says, "How am I going to stop you?"

"I'm sure if you wanted to you'd find a way," Arthur says, baldly. He opens the exercise book and reads, "Property of Mark Charles."

Eames doesn't need to look to know that the word property has been spelled with three Ps and an IE. Instead he concentrates on Ariadne in his mind; the way she walks, the way she breathes, the way she savages her lower lip when she's thinking, but only on one side; the weight of her hair, the sound of her voice, the freckles on her eyelids, the smell of her lip-gloss and the ambient Parisian cigarette smoke caught in the tassels of her keffiyeh, even though she doesn't smoke.

"You're Mark Charles?" Arthur adds, not looking up.

"Maybe," Eames says, thinking about the shape of Ariadne's breasts, the lie of her jeans, the way she holds her head and the way she shapes her lips.

A good eight inches shorter, he slips back off the bed and pulls the book out of Arthur's hands, jerking it toward the floor. With any luck the pages are as blank as they were last time someone rooted around inside his subconscious, but that doesn't mean he wants anyone seeing them; Eames-in-Ariadne's-skin knocks the book to the floor and stands on it, looking up.

"If you didn't want -" Arthur begins.

"Shut up and kiss me," Eames says, discovering as he does that it's a little harder to yank someone's mouth to yours when you're significantly shorter than them. He reaches up to grab Arthur by his conveniently handle-like ears and plant one on him, to drag his attention away from the possibility of dinosaur attack and the potential content of Eames's long-ago storybook, but Arthur jerks his head away.

"No." Arthur half-frowns at him. "I don't think this is appropriate."

"The kissing? Maybe you shouldn't go poking around in my mind." Eames thinks maybe Ariadne's face is far better suited to righteous ire than his own, for Arthur looks almost contrite; then again, anyone's face is better-suited to a sense of the moral high ground than his, since large portions of the rest of the world have at least visited that hallowed ethical locale.

Arthur shakes his head minutely. "Taking off your co-workers without their knowledge or consent," he says, putting his hand up, palm-out, between them like a barrier.

"But the kissing is fine?" Eames persists, shaking Ariadne's head back to his own, the hair melting away and the floor receding beneath him. He dislikes the transition while standing; sitting or lying down normal prevents dizziness more effectively, but he's an experienced forger - it doesn't knock him over.

Arthur doesn't answer him.

Eames checks his watch. "We have forty-five minutes left," he says. It has nothing to do with the watch, which demonstrates no time other than "now" in deference to Eames's own beliefs, but the sense of passing time in the hotel, and Arthur's small twitch of agreement, tell him that his guess is correct.

"We'll discuss it after the job," Arthur says, and with a fraction of a smile he adds, "Somewhere there isn't a cartoon character eavesdropping from the wardrobe."

Cooper is a grooved and lined like an ancient cutting-board, though he's only ten years older than Eames; he defines "grizzled" the way Eames has come to view himself as defining "slippery". Before they have even exchanged a word Eames is outlining in his mind the buddy cop drama that will see them reluctantly accept each other and work to take down a cartel of something-or-other, with explosions and spies and women in bikinis.

But Cooper is a former mercenary, and Eames is a con-man, and they are not taking down cartels.

"PASIV," Cooper tells him, "is the Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device."

"Good, that makes approximately nothing any clearer," Eames says, taking a seat on the absurdly comfortable and expensive-looking armchair in Cooper's office. Everything else in there has the air of being inherited, and Cooper has the hair tone and accent remnants that suggest Sandhurst-as-a-matter-of-course. The armchair is new and soft and has blocks in place to support parts of the body he's never learned the names for.

Cooper lays the silver briefcase onto the sage leather desk and opens it up. The insides - Eames cranes his neck - look like a cheap Doctor Who prop. He feels he is very, very qualified to comment on this comparison.

"What size batteries does it take, then?"

"If you could refrain from being an unnecessarily facetious bastard for a minute," Cooper says warningly, pulling plastic tubing from a spool.

"That may be difficult," Eames admits.

"Roll up your sleeve, Mr Sweet-talk," instructs Cooper's partner. She has dull red hair and a tattoo of a peacock on her left shoulder revealed by her sleeveless blouse; Eames never learns her name.

He takes off his cufflink and pares the French Cuff with deliberately slow fingers, showing his wrist to them both. "Satisfactory?"

"Listen, Eames, don't talk," Cooper says, showing him the guts of the machine. "These vials are Somnacin. The button in the middle starts the infusion. The LED counter there tells your supervising body - and you always have someone around to do this, Eames, always, never use PASIV without a supervisor - how much time you have left." He shows Eames a small needle attached to the end of the thin plastic tubing. "Cannula. Goes in your vein. If you wouldn't mind."

Eames nods slowly and extends his hand, open, over the arm of the chair.

"I'll give you a proper tour of the insides of this after the demonstration," Cooper says, his pale blue eyes drilling into Eames's with unflinching seriousness. Eames desperately wants to crack a joke, but he bites the end of his tongue and waits, instead. "You'll understand why it's important to know how it works once you've seen what it does."

Cooper sticks the cannula in Eames's wrist. And then he slumps into the adjacent chair and nods to his red-headed partner, who slides a second tube into Cooper's wrist with the blunt precision of a lifelong nurse.

Eames, mad with curiosity, fidgets in his seat and chews his tongue.

Cooper nods to his partner, who goes to stand by the briefcase on the desk, a finger poised over the button. "The possibilities inherent in this should be immediately apparent to you, so I won't insult your intelligence by outlining the use I intend to put this to," Cooper says, settling back in his seat, "Alright. We're ready."

The red-head with the peacock tattoo pushes the central button.

What feels like an hour of experience later, Eames finds he is still in the armchair and that his toes haven't gone numb yet. He also finds that Cooper is staring at him over the arm of his own chair with an expression he is perfectly capable of reading and somewhat hesitant to assess. "That was … interesting."

"For future reference," Cooper says, apparently trying to stare through Eames's head, "projections usually attack the dreamer, not the subject."

Across the room Cooper's tattooed partner gives a small start and joins Cooper in staring at Eames like a zoological specimen. Eames takes the cannula out of his wrist himself and says, "And my projections won't show up in someone else's mind?"

"So far that's never happened," Cooper's partner says, slowly, "but then again, so far no one's projections have attacked them as well as the dreamer…"

"Not as well as," Cooper interjects. "Instead of." He doesn't seem especially fazed, although Eames already has the suspicion that Cooper does not get fazed by things so much as he forces them to stop being weird through sheer willpower.

"Someone has certainly made an enemy of his subconscious." Cooper's partner knocks a switch, and the plastic tubes retreat back onto their reel like charmed snakes.

"Is that going to be a problem?" Eames asks, tucking his sudden flare of anxiety behind the desire to ask every question imaginable about Somnacin and the PASIV device, and shoving both under the mask of genial, sleazy flippancy.

"Not for us," Cooper says, shooting a look to his partner. "Although, so you're prepared for the dry run, you may want to be aware that normal people have projections in the form of people they know, or have known. Maybe people they've seen on TV a lot, sometimes."

Eames stretches his toes and tries to look unconcerned. "Not cartoon characters, pirates, dinosaurs, and Asterix the Gaul, then?" he says, pulling disappointed down over scared like a balaclava over his features. "How dull."

At this Cooper's partner let out a hoarse bark of laughter and brushed her hair away from her eyes. "We can't all be fantasists, Mr Eames."

The bar he comes to rest in is almost inside the airport itself, but not quite. It is also the tackiest, gaudiest, most American bar he has been to in years of globe-trotting, gambling, and extracting. The carpet smells of beer and the atmosphere is that of a singles party at a sci-fi convention; Eames looks wildly out of place in his flight-rumpled suit and his absence of leopard-print clothing.

There are enormous lava lamps stretching between the colour-vomit of the bar tops and there's a beer tap in the shape of something reminiscent of H. R. Giger and therefore probably Alien; perhaps it's the fact that his mind has survived an alarming jaunt through someone else's subconscious, perhaps it's Cobb's bewildered joy as he walked through immigration without a hitch rubbing off on him, perhaps it's the fact that he is now quite rich, but Eames feels frankly buoyant.

He orders a vodka and it's in his hand before he realises that he should have ordered champagne for a real celebration, and maybe he will when he's gathered up a little energy and dragged himself onto a plane to Vegas in accordance with his fine and noble plan to piss away a vast sum of money in a very short space of time.

Someone outside of his line of sight orders a "Blue Moon Margarita"; he doesn't hear the order, only the beautiful-if-tired-looking woman behind the bar repeating it back dutifully, and after a glance at the menu Eames is compelled to watch the production of the thing, just to see if someone really has decided that mid-afternoon is a splendid time of day for imbibing a bright blue cocktail full of tequila.

When the drink - which is every bit as insane as the recipe on the cocktail menu promises it will be - is done, he watches the barmaid pass it over the psychotropic bar-top to Arthur, and only just succeeds in swallowing his mouthful of vodka rather than spitting it on himself.

"You're not going to drink that," he says once the barmaid has busied herself extracting orders from further along; the tables are as yet deserted, and the afternoon sun diminishes the no doubt entirely tasteful effects of the lava lamps and omnipresent blacklights.

Arthur leaves the margarita on its napkin and lifts his eyebrows. He's already turned in his seat, facing Eames; the acknowledgement of his presence is entire, and Eames finds himself struck by the familiarity of it, the odd intimacy. Well, intimate for Arthur, anyway.

He finishes his vodka in one.

Arthur rests his hand beside the bombastically colourful cocktail and says, "Yes, it's fine," without providing so much as a sliver of context. From his face it is once again impossible for even Eames, who prides himself so much on being able to read people, to tell whether he expects him to understand.

He makes a confused face and tries to flag down the barmaid.

Without a fraction of a change in aspect, Arthur says, "I told you we'd discuss it after the job." He smile very slightly. "That's my contribution to the discussion."

Eames waves his fingers for the barmaid again, and tries to maintain some semblance of a straight face, rather than just screwing it up into a ball of bewilderment at Arthur's apparent descent into either madness or undercover FBI work. "You're going to have to help me out here, darling, I have less than no idea what you're talking about."

Across the bar someone who has, perhaps, made the mistake of drinking one of the tacky blue monstrosities, or several, starts up an off-key chorus of House of the Rising Sun. Over the racket Eames can just about hear the song being sung properly by someone not The Animals on a tinny portable radio. It is a distraction so abrupt that he's moved to dive into his pocket and feel along the edge of the poker chip. Mangled and dented, the plastic reassures him - this is real life, and any weirdness he can't handle here is his own bloody problem.

Unperturbed by the sudden musical accompaniment, Arthur pushes his drink very carefully out of the way of his arm, without spilling a single drop of the murky blue liquid. He extends that arm, and without a single warning holds Eames by the underside of his chin with the first knuckle of his finger and his thumb, and kisses him very, very lightly on the lips.

At which Eames sits in silence for a moment, contemplating the infinite variety of possible response and discarding "knock him off the bar stool and fuck him on the floor" as being uncouth and likely to get him arrested.

He says as cavalierly as he can, "Oh that. Good to know. " He cocks his head toward the general direction of the nearest hotel, as he remembers it - the grotty-looking Hotel Inn by the airport. "Shall I presume you've booked a room?"

"Patience, Mr Eames," says Arthur, indicating with his eyes the grotesque cocktail that now stands between them like some sort of magical elixir in a trial-of-the-hero story. Eames shakes his head, a smile sneaking over his mouth unbidden.

"Matthew," he corrects. "Matthew will do."

A/N: Stuff I wanted to put in but couldn't include; Eames double-majored in Theatre and Philosophy [not psychology] but dropped the philosophy, and his rationale for choosing a poker chip is not his gambling tendency but, "It's an imperfect token which can be exchanged for wealth but is worth nothing itself."