[INCEPTION] Fic: All your theories turn to dust (Eames/Cobb) G, sort of pre-slash
All your theories turn to dust
Eames/Cobb
For the inception_kink prompt: C: Why didn't you sell me out, Eames? - E: Money wasn't good enough. - C: What happens when it is? - E: *sly smile* Well now, that'll be an interesting day.
BIG-ASS THANK YOU TO BOTH FERMINE AND CALLMEBOMBSHELL FOR THE BETAS. even though i sorta noncon-ed fermine into reading it for me. :3
Arthur doesn’t know where Eames is.
“He’s not in Mombasa. I checked in on Yusuf,” Arthur explains, running a hand through his hair as he rifles through a considerable stack of thick folders on the table. “Hasn’t seen him in weeks.”
Cobb frowns thoughtfully, making sure to not spill coffee where he’s pouring them both a cup each. “Have you tried Cobol?”
“Of course I’ve tried Cobol,” Arthur snaps at him, then immediately shoots him an apologetic look that doesn’t even bother to be more obvious than a distracted frown on his brow and the slightest downward curl of his lips. “The man I’ve got in there doesn’t know where he is, either. They don’t have him on for a job or anything.”
“That can’t be right,” Cobb shakes his head, handing Arthur his coffee before taking a sip of his own. It scalds the tip of his tongue.
Cobb opens his mouth but Arthur beats him to it with an impatient click of his tongue. “Nothing, Cobb. When Eames doesn’t want to be found, he can’t be found.”
But you found him last time, he wants to point out. But that had been easy for Arthur because When Eames wants to be found, he’s suddenly everywhere for those who know where to look and Arthur always knows where to look.
“We’ll just have to find someone else,” Arthur says with a sigh. Almost three weeks of looking for Eames and they’re both tired of doing nothing else but that. They’ve put off the job for too long that their window of opportunity is starting to get smaller. “I’ll track down Davies.”
“Yeah,” Cobb finally relents. Davies is an aging man with old school methodologies and he and Cobb never get along well. “Come get me when you do.”
***
He finally gets a call three months later.
The phone rings sharply, pulling Cobb from his sleep, at three in the morning. “Yeah?” He mumbles sleepily into the receiver.
“Cobb?” It’s Eames.
Cobb blinks himself awake, flipping the switch at the headboard for the warm lights above his head. The clock at his bedside table makes him frown, both in confusion and in surprise. “What are you-“
“Are the kids with you?” Eames interrupts. He sounds breathless, like he’s been running for miles and still has a very long way to go.
“Y-yes, they’re here.” Cobb suddenly feels dread that pushes him off the bed and onto his feet, stumbling from the tangle of his limbs and the bed sheets. “The hell is going on, Eames?”
Eames chuckles, and the sound is a rapidfire burst of just ragged exhalation that it crackles the line and hurts Cobb’s ears. “How fast can you get to your car?”
Cobb considers his state of undress, his bare chest and the faded pajama bottoms; the keys at the bureau in the foyer; the several feet between his bedroom door and his children’s room.
“Cobb,” Eames snaps his attention back, urgency pitching his voice a notch higher than Cobb remembers it.
“Ten minutes.”
“Try five.”
Cobb is already pulling on a shirt, balancing the phone pressed against his ear and the tugging of his arms through the proper holes. “What did you do?”
Eames snorts. “Nothing.”
Cobb knows differently, and Eames knows this too, from the knowing silence Cobb gives him.
Eames takes it in stride, doesn’t even miss a beat. “Fischer.”
Cobb pauses, he’s already at the door, his feet rushing to squeeze themselves inside his loafers. His hand clenches the doorknob. “What happened?”
“Just get out fast,” Eames urges him and Cobb does.
He ends the call and tosses the wireless receiver back on his bed before he goes to collect his children.
They’re sleepy, rubbing their eyes and clutching at their stuffed toys, but he carries James and pulls Philippa by the hand. They whine as Cobb leads them out of the house and into his car.
Five minutes and thirty seconds, Cobb counts in his head as he glances at the digital clock on the dashboard.
***
Arthur’s not as lucky.
Eames calls Cobb first, and the thirty minutes he’d spent jumping from phone booth to phone booth in the darker streets of East End in London had been enough for the men to get to Arthur before Arthur had had the chance to load his gun.
Eames is silent on the other end as Cobb digests the news. It’s a boiling pit he’s trying to force down his throat, a mixture of betrayal and dread and the desolation that comes with panic and paranoia.
He shouldn’t even be using the phone, not when his kids are just in the next room and he didn’t even have the time to buy ammo for the gun he keeps in his glove compartment.
He’s staring down at now. A Glock that doesn’t feel as heavy in dreams as it does in reality. He’s cleaned it, twice, and just as he locked in the magazine and turned off the safety, Eames had called.
“Where is he?”
He can almost hear Eames shake his head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Cobb bites out, not even bothering to rein anything in. Eames got them in this mess; he better do something about it.
“I said I don’t fucking know, Cobb,” Eames thunders right back, and the roar of utter helplessness that worms through the wires and into Cobb’s ears is enough to calm Cobb down. He never hears Eames out of control. That’s usually him and it’s usually Arthur’s job to calm his nerves.
But Arthur’s not here right now, is he.
“I’ll find him,” Eames says after a second, his voice strained.
The call ends and Cobb slams down the corded phone with a heaviness that hurts his palm and drives the nail even further in.
He sinks into his bed, staring at the gun at the bedside drawer, and hopes very much that he doesn’t have to use it.
***
“What is it, Dom?” Miles greets him once Cobb ushers him into the sparse hotel suite.
He looks terribly out of his place, in his tweed and his square shoulders, among the walls of bare space and straight-edged furniture. The children are in the sitting area, plopped down on their bellies on the carpet, ignorantly watching their usual afternoon cartoons.
Cobb sighs, as he glances at them, before bolting the door shut. “Something’s come up. I need you to do something for me, Miles.”
Miles throws him a look that Cobb is immediately sobered by. He crosses his arms and tilts his head, his eyes scrutinizing Cobb in that silent way that makes Cobb fidget even more.
“The Inception, it backfired.”
Miles frowns. “I thought you’d finished-“
“I did,” Cobb bites out. He’s tired of defending himself. He’s been doing it for the past couple of years, first from the authorities, then from Arthur. But he doesn’t know what else to say, and Miles spares him from further digging himself into a hole that he himself has been gradually filling, in increments, in the months since Mal’s death.
He’s greeting the kids with a hearty laugh, spreading his arms wide open for his grandchildren to rush up to him.
Cobb looks on worriedly, because this has happened before. He never thought he’d have to go through it all over again.
***
Miles leaves with the kids an hour later and the room bears no proof of his children even being there in the first place. They took all of their stuff from Cobb’s car, down to the Spongebob sticker plastered on the backseat, from where James had gone too trigger-happy with his sticker album.
Cobb gets the call just as he checks out from the hotel the day after.
“Where are you?”
“Is this a safe line, Eames?”
Eames hesitates, and it’s all that Cobb needs.
He sighs into the receiver just as he pulls up at a gun shop just outside of town. “You’re going to have to make it up to me after this,” Cobb says, trying to lighten the mood.
It falls flat, because Eames doesn’t laugh like he usually does. “I know,” and he sounds somber enough for Cobb to believe that he really is sorry. “I have him.”
Cobb’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “That was fast.”
“Yeah, well,” Eames begins, sounding sheepish, but that too falters quickly enough. “Meet us here. He says you’ll know where it is. Where,” he trails off, and Cobb assumes it’s because the slight muttering in the background is Arthur, as Arthur usually does, trying to control the situation. “-bloody-“
Cobb almost laughs, if Eames hadn’t sounded so damn harried and the moan in the background didn’t sound so achingly familiar.
“The apartment, where you made him choose the red pill over the blue,” Eames rushes out and Cobb can imagine him rolling his eyes, pushing out the words with an expression that almost pains him.
“The Matrix,” Cobb snorts at the half-remembered memory from some ten years ago, then sighs as he opens the door and locks it behind him. “How is he?”
Eames pauses, Cobb hears the rustle of cloth into the earpiece. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed. “He’ll stand to point another day,” he answers with forced humor.
Cobb appreciates the effort, but not the underlying truth. It bothers him, that he hadn’t had the capacity to rescue Arthur when Arthur would’ve moved mountains for him. It bothers him even more that Eames had caused all this.
The conflict rips him apart, that he’s both thankful and angry.
“That,” he pushes out, around a lump in his throat, “That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah,” Eames breathes, and Cobb imagines his head nodding solemnly in agreement. “It’s the worst fucking thing, really.”
***
The ‘apartment’ is actually a very small room on the third floor of a student residential building in New Hampshire, in between a plateau of bright countryside and the busy streets of the university town filled with very few else but students clustered in groups.
If Cobb stood out, weaving through the pedestrians along the streets, he could’ve easily passed off as some harried professor trying a hand at a social life outside of his workplace.
He remembers this place well enough. He’d visited it several times in the hopes of fishing out a very promising young man from a sea of average dullards aiming for equally dull white collar jobs.
It took him a while. A whole year, to be exact, and it was enough for Cobb to have committed the whole town’s streets and alleys to memory that when he crept up the apartment building, he was confident that he hadn’t been followed.
Someone else opens the door, someone big and quite clearly African, with a head shaved bald and eyes dark with suspicion. He has a gun in his hand.
Cobb almost thinks that he had the wrong room-but no, this is 301A, he remembers the number well enough-but then Eames is there, nudging the man aside.
He looks tired, with dark circles under his eyes, and his suit looking very much like it needed a long, thorough wash. His stubble is thick, crowding his cheeks, and Cobb can barely distinguish the alertness in Eames eyes from the shakiness of pure exhaustion.
“That bad?”
Eames smiles tiredly, waving him in. Cobb pushes his way through, between Eames’ bulk, which he doesn’t remember to be so un-bulky as before, and the stranger’s.
Inside is Arthur, in the bed that used to be his now worn thin by disuse. His head is bandaged, and the rest of him looks as beaten down as he had expected. He’s sleeping.
“He’s fine,” Eames tells him from behind and Cobb turns to face him.
The stranger’s already gone, the door closed behind him. Cobb assumes it’s so he can guard the apartment building well.
“Who’s he?”
Eames shrugs, running a hand down the back of his neck. He approaches Cobb, until he’s just there, where Cobb can touch him, but it’s only to sit down on a chair that doesn’t look comfortable at all. There’s only one bed and Arthur’s occupying most of it.
Eames sits in the chair like he’s been sitting there for hours, and will stay there for several more if he needs to.
“I trust him,” is Eames’ only explanation, and Cobb doesn’t venture much further than that. He doesn’t, because he trusts Eames.
Then it all comes back to him in a rush; he’s almost guilty that he’d forgotten in the first place. “Care to tell me what happened?”
Eames tells him.
***
It turns out that Fischer has a security detail that can rival a state politician’s, and that this security detail has a hierarchy down from the head to the peons that make coffee in between bouts of interrogation and shock treatment.
Someone leaked the information, or someone buried its nose right into it.
Either way, some loan shark or other weak-willed man that Eames had worked with before had ratted him out in exchange for an easy way out of a very long prison sentence.
He spent a few weeks in the middle of nowhere, all desert and no air in the morning, all darkness and cold in the evening.
***
“How did you get out?” Cobb interrupts, just as Eames pulls his gun from his holster and drops it on the table at his elbow. His eyes are on Arthur the whole time, Cobb realizes, and what he sees there is something he hasn’t before.
For all of Eames’ bravado, Cobb knows that he doesn’t like failure, especially when failure ends in unnecessary casualty.
“I told them where you were.”
Cobb grits his teeth. He’d feared that, and wanted so desperately not to believe it. He’s not a stupid man, he knows that Eames will have to risk a lot of things in his line of work because God knows he’s risked enough lives on his. But a part of him wanted otherwise, and he’s surprised that he feels this way.
“San Diego, California.”
Then his teeth ease, and he looks up slowly with a confused frown. “I don’t live there.” His chest loosens, and he thinks it may be relief that he feels, thawing at his sides.
Eames smirks humorlessly, dropping his head to his hand and rubs at eyes with his fingers. “My mistake, then.”
Cobb sucks in a breath. “You made me think-"
“Piss off,” Eames says, but there’s no venom in his voice. Just a startling weariness that sounds heavier than Eames looks, draped all over the chair with his arm hanging down one side, and his legs splayed out in front of him.
Cobb has to shift where he’s sat on the edge of Arthur’s bed to make sure he doesn’t jostle Eames’ feet. He tries, but he doesn’t succeed. His shin ends up touching Eames’ calf and neither of them bother to pull away.
“Worked though, didn’t it?” Eames huffs out, indignantly. His eyes are red when he rests his head in his palm. “I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“What happened with Arthur, then?”
Eames grimaces. That was a mistake, he says, a very stupid move that he’d had to do out of sheer desperation, when he pilfered a mobile phone from someone and hadn’t bothered to check if he was being followed.
“It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Eames denies with a subtle shake of his head.
No, Cobb agrees. No, it doesn’t. Eames elevates his work to an art, as careful and meticulous about his work as Cobb is, and they both know the repercussions of loose ends and even looser lips. They take all the precautions necessary.
But they buckle every now and then, when moments of weakness seize them at the most unfortunate time. Cobb thinks it ironic that the casualty of his was Nash and Eames’ is Arthur.
It reminds him of the very thin line they walk, and how easy it is to tip over to one side or the other.
“They’ll be looking for you,” Cobb says, almost mechanically. He leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and stares intently at Eames as the realization dawns on him like a punch to the gut. “When they find out that-"
“They already have.”
“Then-"
Eames shakes his head, then rises to his feet with a painful creak of his back. Cobb winces on his behalf, but Eames, as he usually does, takes it in stride. He picks up his gun and puts it back in the holster at his hip. “I’ll take care of it.”
Cobb stands up as well, the sudden movement jerking Arthur in his sleep. Arthur moans softly but Cobb doesn’t have the time to check up on him. “Where are you going?”
Eames raises an eyebrow, then jerks his head at the bed. “Stay with him. I’m going to rest for a while.”
Cobb doesn’t believe this, and Eames knows that Cobb doesn’t. But Eames doesn’t say anything at the knowledge that darkens Cobb’s eyes.
“I’ll be back later.”
No, he won’t be. Cobb knows this too. But he lets him go anyway, because if he doesn’t, Fischer will find Eames with them and Arthur doesn’t look like he’ll be able to put up much of a fight.
Cobb stills at the realization that he’d rather risk one than lose both. It seizes him, a cold rush that stills time and air, that he’s not bothered by this as much as he would like.
He looks away from Eames to find Arthur still asleep, his head turned into the pillow.
He wants to keep Arthur safe, but the thought of Eames on the run with no one else at his side but a stranger that Cobb doesn’t trust caves out his chest. His breath rushes out from his nose, and his lungs are hollowed out by a dense ball of dread that presses against his sternum.
But Eames makes the choice for him, with a soft click of the door when he leaves.
***
The morning after, Cobb dials Eames’ number.
He hears the answering ring echo in the room.
***
He goes back home and so do his kids. Arthur finds another apartment in Washington State.
“Where I’m less likely to be found,” he says ironically.
Eames is taking care of Fischer’s men; Cobb takes care of the rest.
He calls Saito.
“How can I help you, Mr Cobb?” Saito answers him after the third ring.
Cobb tells him and it takes a while for Saito to respond. That can’t be good, he thinks to himself, but he knows that this is something that he has to do. If he doesn’t want to run for the rest of his life and leave his children again.
(If he doesn’t want Eames to be running his entire life, either. But this thought is buried much deeper than the rest, only to be realizes later on, when the relief eases more than just the tightness around his neck, or the clench of his fist around his Glock.)
“Even I am under investigation as of this moment, Mr Cobb,” Saito says, then he hesitates. If there’s anything that Cobb knows of Saito, it’s his sense of honor. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
***
What Saito does is ban Fischer or any of the people under his employ from American soil.
How poetic, Cobb thinks, when he hears about it through Arthur, that he’d spent months trying to buy his way back into the States.
Now he can’t leave it.
***
When he’s sure that most of the danger’s passed, he calls Ariadne.
She’s still in Paris.
“What’s wrong, Cobb?” She’s worried; she’s always seen right through him, in that uncanny way that she does.
“Fischer’s honed in on us,” Cobb confesses, not even bothering to lie anymore. “I just called to check in on you.”
Ariadne makes a thoughtful sound.
“What is it?”
“So that’s why Arthur called in.” She pauses, “Eames did too.”
Cobb blinks in surprise. “When did Eames call you?”
“A few weeks ago, maybe.” Cobb can practically hear the cogs turn in her head. “Why?”
Cobb doesn’t know what he was expecting. Probably some sign of life from Eames, the smallest bit of promise that Eames had made it out alive. Now that he knows Arthur is here, and Ariadne is safe, and that Saito’s clout still holds some influence over some things, Cobb wants to know.
Because that’s what a leader does, he tells himself. But he knows that the apprehension that fogs over his mind and numbs his ear to the phone pressed against it, is not his sense of obligation kicking in.
He’s concerned, he realizes.
“Cobb?”
He clears his throat. “Yeah. Just stay safe, okay? Stick with Miles.”
They say their goodbyes, Ariadne with a thousand held-back questions and Cobb with half-a-mind set elsewhere.
He sits on his bed, holding the wireless phone in his hand, for a long time afterwards.
***
Five months pass, and no word from Eames.
In between jobs, Cobb has Arthur picking out trails on the grid that don’t exist, that lead to dead ends that had been dead beginnings in the first place because when Eames disappears, he blots out his tracks as he goes.
***
He gets a call when he least expects it, and barely hears the ring of the kitchen phone over the loud sizzle of lunch on the pan.
He turns off the flame and wipes his hand on his shirt before he picks up the call.
“Yeah?” He answers distractedly, keeping an eye out on the pan and how it’s teetering almost dangerously off the stove’s metal frame.
“Busy, are you?” Eames.
And just like that, he doesn’t even mind that the pan clatters noisily on the kitchen floor, spilling their lunch everywhere.
“What was that?” Eames chuckles into his ear.
It’s a welcome sound; that’s what it is, he realizes, relief, that stutters his breath as he regains his hold on things. “What the fuck, Eames,” he breathes into the receiver.
Eames answers him with a hearty laugh that reassures Cobb more than anything else.
A shaky smile tapers off Cobb’s frayed nerves as he shakes his head at himself. He braces a hand against the wall. He doesn’t realize that he’s closed his eyes, clenched them tightly, until he discovers that what he’s looking at is the kitchen floor.
Eames clears his throat, but Cobb hears the answering smile in his voice. “I’m calling collect, by the way.”
“It’s about damn time.”
“Piss off,” Eames snorts, “Kept you in suspense, didn’t I? That’s good for the heart, I think. Avoids arterial blockage and all that nonsense.”
Cobb doesn’t take the bait, because he has questions and he’s waited too damn long to talk to Eames again. “Where are you?”
“Somewhere.”
That’s not good enough, but Cobb understands the risks too. “Are you safe?”
It surprises him that he asks this, and it probably surprises Eames too. He’s answered by a ringing silence that makes it much too discomfiting to breathe so loudly so he stops breathing altogether.
“Of course I am,” Eames grunts, saving both their faces with his casual ease. “I have friends too, you know.”
Cobb recovers himself. “You must be digging so low into the ground, then.”
Eames’ answering laugh is one that he’ll never forget. It trails on until Eames is chuckling and both of them are smiling on the phone, at no one in particular.
“Eames,” Cobb clears his throat. “Why didn’t you sell me out?”
“I didn’t need the money Fischer offered.”
Cobb doubts that very much. “Imagine how many trips to Macau that would’ve gotten you.”
“Eh,” Eames dismisses with a sniff. “I never do things for money anyway.”
Cobb nods. He knows how that goes, when the job blurs into a passion for skill and getting better and better and better until he becomes the best.
Cobb did become the best, and so did Eames.
“What happens when you do?”
Eames hums, and Cobb imagines the slight tremor of his throat, and the thoughtful glaze to his eyes as he does. “That’ll be one for the books, wouldn’t it? That’ll be an interesting day.”
They both know that that day may come, when Eames is backed up against the wall, torn between saving himself and saving Cobb and Cobb knows that Eames will choose himself above anyone else because in their line of business, there aren’t any heroes.
But they both take comfort in the fact that they’re both safe wherever they are. That as far as today is concerned they have an understanding of an unspoken loyalty twisted into something else entirely that doesn’t fit them together.
END
Eames/Cobb
For the inception_kink prompt: C: Why didn't you sell me out, Eames? - E: Money wasn't good enough. - C: What happens when it is? - E: *sly smile* Well now, that'll be an interesting day.
BIG-ASS THANK YOU TO BOTH FERMINE AND CALLMEBOMBSHELL FOR THE BETAS. even though i sorta noncon-ed fermine into reading it for me. :3
Arthur doesn’t know where Eames is.
“He’s not in Mombasa. I checked in on Yusuf,” Arthur explains, running a hand through his hair as he rifles through a considerable stack of thick folders on the table. “Hasn’t seen him in weeks.”
Cobb frowns thoughtfully, making sure to not spill coffee where he’s pouring them both a cup each. “Have you tried Cobol?”
“Of course I’ve tried Cobol,” Arthur snaps at him, then immediately shoots him an apologetic look that doesn’t even bother to be more obvious than a distracted frown on his brow and the slightest downward curl of his lips. “The man I’ve got in there doesn’t know where he is, either. They don’t have him on for a job or anything.”
“That can’t be right,” Cobb shakes his head, handing Arthur his coffee before taking a sip of his own. It scalds the tip of his tongue.
Cobb opens his mouth but Arthur beats him to it with an impatient click of his tongue. “Nothing, Cobb. When Eames doesn’t want to be found, he can’t be found.”
But you found him last time, he wants to point out. But that had been easy for Arthur because When Eames wants to be found, he’s suddenly everywhere for those who know where to look and Arthur always knows where to look.
“We’ll just have to find someone else,” Arthur says with a sigh. Almost three weeks of looking for Eames and they’re both tired of doing nothing else but that. They’ve put off the job for too long that their window of opportunity is starting to get smaller. “I’ll track down Davies.”
“Yeah,” Cobb finally relents. Davies is an aging man with old school methodologies and he and Cobb never get along well. “Come get me when you do.”
***
He finally gets a call three months later.
The phone rings sharply, pulling Cobb from his sleep, at three in the morning. “Yeah?” He mumbles sleepily into the receiver.
“Cobb?” It’s Eames.
Cobb blinks himself awake, flipping the switch at the headboard for the warm lights above his head. The clock at his bedside table makes him frown, both in confusion and in surprise. “What are you-“
“Are the kids with you?” Eames interrupts. He sounds breathless, like he’s been running for miles and still has a very long way to go.
“Y-yes, they’re here.” Cobb suddenly feels dread that pushes him off the bed and onto his feet, stumbling from the tangle of his limbs and the bed sheets. “The hell is going on, Eames?”
Eames chuckles, and the sound is a rapidfire burst of just ragged exhalation that it crackles the line and hurts Cobb’s ears. “How fast can you get to your car?”
Cobb considers his state of undress, his bare chest and the faded pajama bottoms; the keys at the bureau in the foyer; the several feet between his bedroom door and his children’s room.
“Cobb,” Eames snaps his attention back, urgency pitching his voice a notch higher than Cobb remembers it.
“Ten minutes.”
“Try five.”
Cobb is already pulling on a shirt, balancing the phone pressed against his ear and the tugging of his arms through the proper holes. “What did you do?”
Eames snorts. “Nothing.”
Cobb knows differently, and Eames knows this too, from the knowing silence Cobb gives him.
Eames takes it in stride, doesn’t even miss a beat. “Fischer.”
Cobb pauses, he’s already at the door, his feet rushing to squeeze themselves inside his loafers. His hand clenches the doorknob. “What happened?”
“Just get out fast,” Eames urges him and Cobb does.
He ends the call and tosses the wireless receiver back on his bed before he goes to collect his children.
They’re sleepy, rubbing their eyes and clutching at their stuffed toys, but he carries James and pulls Philippa by the hand. They whine as Cobb leads them out of the house and into his car.
Five minutes and thirty seconds, Cobb counts in his head as he glances at the digital clock on the dashboard.
***
Arthur’s not as lucky.
Eames calls Cobb first, and the thirty minutes he’d spent jumping from phone booth to phone booth in the darker streets of East End in London had been enough for the men to get to Arthur before Arthur had had the chance to load his gun.
Eames is silent on the other end as Cobb digests the news. It’s a boiling pit he’s trying to force down his throat, a mixture of betrayal and dread and the desolation that comes with panic and paranoia.
He shouldn’t even be using the phone, not when his kids are just in the next room and he didn’t even have the time to buy ammo for the gun he keeps in his glove compartment.
He’s staring down at now. A Glock that doesn’t feel as heavy in dreams as it does in reality. He’s cleaned it, twice, and just as he locked in the magazine and turned off the safety, Eames had called.
“Where is he?”
He can almost hear Eames shake his head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Cobb bites out, not even bothering to rein anything in. Eames got them in this mess; he better do something about it.
“I said I don’t fucking know, Cobb,” Eames thunders right back, and the roar of utter helplessness that worms through the wires and into Cobb’s ears is enough to calm Cobb down. He never hears Eames out of control. That’s usually him and it’s usually Arthur’s job to calm his nerves.
But Arthur’s not here right now, is he.
“I’ll find him,” Eames says after a second, his voice strained.
The call ends and Cobb slams down the corded phone with a heaviness that hurts his palm and drives the nail even further in.
He sinks into his bed, staring at the gun at the bedside drawer, and hopes very much that he doesn’t have to use it.
***
“What is it, Dom?” Miles greets him once Cobb ushers him into the sparse hotel suite.
He looks terribly out of his place, in his tweed and his square shoulders, among the walls of bare space and straight-edged furniture. The children are in the sitting area, plopped down on their bellies on the carpet, ignorantly watching their usual afternoon cartoons.
Cobb sighs, as he glances at them, before bolting the door shut. “Something’s come up. I need you to do something for me, Miles.”
Miles throws him a look that Cobb is immediately sobered by. He crosses his arms and tilts his head, his eyes scrutinizing Cobb in that silent way that makes Cobb fidget even more.
“The Inception, it backfired.”
Miles frowns. “I thought you’d finished-“
“I did,” Cobb bites out. He’s tired of defending himself. He’s been doing it for the past couple of years, first from the authorities, then from Arthur. But he doesn’t know what else to say, and Miles spares him from further digging himself into a hole that he himself has been gradually filling, in increments, in the months since Mal’s death.
He’s greeting the kids with a hearty laugh, spreading his arms wide open for his grandchildren to rush up to him.
Cobb looks on worriedly, because this has happened before. He never thought he’d have to go through it all over again.
***
Miles leaves with the kids an hour later and the room bears no proof of his children even being there in the first place. They took all of their stuff from Cobb’s car, down to the Spongebob sticker plastered on the backseat, from where James had gone too trigger-happy with his sticker album.
Cobb gets the call just as he checks out from the hotel the day after.
“Where are you?”
“Is this a safe line, Eames?”
Eames hesitates, and it’s all that Cobb needs.
He sighs into the receiver just as he pulls up at a gun shop just outside of town. “You’re going to have to make it up to me after this,” Cobb says, trying to lighten the mood.
It falls flat, because Eames doesn’t laugh like he usually does. “I know,” and he sounds somber enough for Cobb to believe that he really is sorry. “I have him.”
Cobb’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “That was fast.”
“Yeah, well,” Eames begins, sounding sheepish, but that too falters quickly enough. “Meet us here. He says you’ll know where it is. Where,” he trails off, and Cobb assumes it’s because the slight muttering in the background is Arthur, as Arthur usually does, trying to control the situation. “-bloody-“
Cobb almost laughs, if Eames hadn’t sounded so damn harried and the moan in the background didn’t sound so achingly familiar.
“The apartment, where you made him choose the red pill over the blue,” Eames rushes out and Cobb can imagine him rolling his eyes, pushing out the words with an expression that almost pains him.
“The Matrix,” Cobb snorts at the half-remembered memory from some ten years ago, then sighs as he opens the door and locks it behind him. “How is he?”
Eames pauses, Cobb hears the rustle of cloth into the earpiece. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed. “He’ll stand to point another day,” he answers with forced humor.
Cobb appreciates the effort, but not the underlying truth. It bothers him, that he hadn’t had the capacity to rescue Arthur when Arthur would’ve moved mountains for him. It bothers him even more that Eames had caused all this.
The conflict rips him apart, that he’s both thankful and angry.
“That,” he pushes out, around a lump in his throat, “That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah,” Eames breathes, and Cobb imagines his head nodding solemnly in agreement. “It’s the worst fucking thing, really.”
***
The ‘apartment’ is actually a very small room on the third floor of a student residential building in New Hampshire, in between a plateau of bright countryside and the busy streets of the university town filled with very few else but students clustered in groups.
If Cobb stood out, weaving through the pedestrians along the streets, he could’ve easily passed off as some harried professor trying a hand at a social life outside of his workplace.
He remembers this place well enough. He’d visited it several times in the hopes of fishing out a very promising young man from a sea of average dullards aiming for equally dull white collar jobs.
It took him a while. A whole year, to be exact, and it was enough for Cobb to have committed the whole town’s streets and alleys to memory that when he crept up the apartment building, he was confident that he hadn’t been followed.
Someone else opens the door, someone big and quite clearly African, with a head shaved bald and eyes dark with suspicion. He has a gun in his hand.
Cobb almost thinks that he had the wrong room-but no, this is 301A, he remembers the number well enough-but then Eames is there, nudging the man aside.
He looks tired, with dark circles under his eyes, and his suit looking very much like it needed a long, thorough wash. His stubble is thick, crowding his cheeks, and Cobb can barely distinguish the alertness in Eames eyes from the shakiness of pure exhaustion.
“That bad?”
Eames smiles tiredly, waving him in. Cobb pushes his way through, between Eames’ bulk, which he doesn’t remember to be so un-bulky as before, and the stranger’s.
Inside is Arthur, in the bed that used to be his now worn thin by disuse. His head is bandaged, and the rest of him looks as beaten down as he had expected. He’s sleeping.
“He’s fine,” Eames tells him from behind and Cobb turns to face him.
The stranger’s already gone, the door closed behind him. Cobb assumes it’s so he can guard the apartment building well.
“Who’s he?”
Eames shrugs, running a hand down the back of his neck. He approaches Cobb, until he’s just there, where Cobb can touch him, but it’s only to sit down on a chair that doesn’t look comfortable at all. There’s only one bed and Arthur’s occupying most of it.
Eames sits in the chair like he’s been sitting there for hours, and will stay there for several more if he needs to.
“I trust him,” is Eames’ only explanation, and Cobb doesn’t venture much further than that. He doesn’t, because he trusts Eames.
Then it all comes back to him in a rush; he’s almost guilty that he’d forgotten in the first place. “Care to tell me what happened?”
Eames tells him.
***
It turns out that Fischer has a security detail that can rival a state politician’s, and that this security detail has a hierarchy down from the head to the peons that make coffee in between bouts of interrogation and shock treatment.
Someone leaked the information, or someone buried its nose right into it.
Either way, some loan shark or other weak-willed man that Eames had worked with before had ratted him out in exchange for an easy way out of a very long prison sentence.
He spent a few weeks in the middle of nowhere, all desert and no air in the morning, all darkness and cold in the evening.
***
“How did you get out?” Cobb interrupts, just as Eames pulls his gun from his holster and drops it on the table at his elbow. His eyes are on Arthur the whole time, Cobb realizes, and what he sees there is something he hasn’t before.
For all of Eames’ bravado, Cobb knows that he doesn’t like failure, especially when failure ends in unnecessary casualty.
“I told them where you were.”
Cobb grits his teeth. He’d feared that, and wanted so desperately not to believe it. He’s not a stupid man, he knows that Eames will have to risk a lot of things in his line of work because God knows he’s risked enough lives on his. But a part of him wanted otherwise, and he’s surprised that he feels this way.
“San Diego, California.”
Then his teeth ease, and he looks up slowly with a confused frown. “I don’t live there.” His chest loosens, and he thinks it may be relief that he feels, thawing at his sides.
Eames smirks humorlessly, dropping his head to his hand and rubs at eyes with his fingers. “My mistake, then.”
Cobb sucks in a breath. “You made me think-"
“Piss off,” Eames says, but there’s no venom in his voice. Just a startling weariness that sounds heavier than Eames looks, draped all over the chair with his arm hanging down one side, and his legs splayed out in front of him.
Cobb has to shift where he’s sat on the edge of Arthur’s bed to make sure he doesn’t jostle Eames’ feet. He tries, but he doesn’t succeed. His shin ends up touching Eames’ calf and neither of them bother to pull away.
“Worked though, didn’t it?” Eames huffs out, indignantly. His eyes are red when he rests his head in his palm. “I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“What happened with Arthur, then?”
Eames grimaces. That was a mistake, he says, a very stupid move that he’d had to do out of sheer desperation, when he pilfered a mobile phone from someone and hadn’t bothered to check if he was being followed.
“It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Eames denies with a subtle shake of his head.
No, Cobb agrees. No, it doesn’t. Eames elevates his work to an art, as careful and meticulous about his work as Cobb is, and they both know the repercussions of loose ends and even looser lips. They take all the precautions necessary.
But they buckle every now and then, when moments of weakness seize them at the most unfortunate time. Cobb thinks it ironic that the casualty of his was Nash and Eames’ is Arthur.
It reminds him of the very thin line they walk, and how easy it is to tip over to one side or the other.
“They’ll be looking for you,” Cobb says, almost mechanically. He leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and stares intently at Eames as the realization dawns on him like a punch to the gut. “When they find out that-"
“They already have.”
“Then-"
Eames shakes his head, then rises to his feet with a painful creak of his back. Cobb winces on his behalf, but Eames, as he usually does, takes it in stride. He picks up his gun and puts it back in the holster at his hip. “I’ll take care of it.”
Cobb stands up as well, the sudden movement jerking Arthur in his sleep. Arthur moans softly but Cobb doesn’t have the time to check up on him. “Where are you going?”
Eames raises an eyebrow, then jerks his head at the bed. “Stay with him. I’m going to rest for a while.”
Cobb doesn’t believe this, and Eames knows that Cobb doesn’t. But Eames doesn’t say anything at the knowledge that darkens Cobb’s eyes.
“I’ll be back later.”
No, he won’t be. Cobb knows this too. But he lets him go anyway, because if he doesn’t, Fischer will find Eames with them and Arthur doesn’t look like he’ll be able to put up much of a fight.
Cobb stills at the realization that he’d rather risk one than lose both. It seizes him, a cold rush that stills time and air, that he’s not bothered by this as much as he would like.
He looks away from Eames to find Arthur still asleep, his head turned into the pillow.
He wants to keep Arthur safe, but the thought of Eames on the run with no one else at his side but a stranger that Cobb doesn’t trust caves out his chest. His breath rushes out from his nose, and his lungs are hollowed out by a dense ball of dread that presses against his sternum.
But Eames makes the choice for him, with a soft click of the door when he leaves.
***
The morning after, Cobb dials Eames’ number.
He hears the answering ring echo in the room.
***
He goes back home and so do his kids. Arthur finds another apartment in Washington State.
“Where I’m less likely to be found,” he says ironically.
Eames is taking care of Fischer’s men; Cobb takes care of the rest.
He calls Saito.
“How can I help you, Mr Cobb?” Saito answers him after the third ring.
Cobb tells him and it takes a while for Saito to respond. That can’t be good, he thinks to himself, but he knows that this is something that he has to do. If he doesn’t want to run for the rest of his life and leave his children again.
(If he doesn’t want Eames to be running his entire life, either. But this thought is buried much deeper than the rest, only to be realizes later on, when the relief eases more than just the tightness around his neck, or the clench of his fist around his Glock.)
“Even I am under investigation as of this moment, Mr Cobb,” Saito says, then he hesitates. If there’s anything that Cobb knows of Saito, it’s his sense of honor. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
***
What Saito does is ban Fischer or any of the people under his employ from American soil.
How poetic, Cobb thinks, when he hears about it through Arthur, that he’d spent months trying to buy his way back into the States.
Now he can’t leave it.
***
When he’s sure that most of the danger’s passed, he calls Ariadne.
She’s still in Paris.
“What’s wrong, Cobb?” She’s worried; she’s always seen right through him, in that uncanny way that she does.
“Fischer’s honed in on us,” Cobb confesses, not even bothering to lie anymore. “I just called to check in on you.”
Ariadne makes a thoughtful sound.
“What is it?”
“So that’s why Arthur called in.” She pauses, “Eames did too.”
Cobb blinks in surprise. “When did Eames call you?”
“A few weeks ago, maybe.” Cobb can practically hear the cogs turn in her head. “Why?”
Cobb doesn’t know what he was expecting. Probably some sign of life from Eames, the smallest bit of promise that Eames had made it out alive. Now that he knows Arthur is here, and Ariadne is safe, and that Saito’s clout still holds some influence over some things, Cobb wants to know.
Because that’s what a leader does, he tells himself. But he knows that the apprehension that fogs over his mind and numbs his ear to the phone pressed against it, is not his sense of obligation kicking in.
He’s concerned, he realizes.
“Cobb?”
He clears his throat. “Yeah. Just stay safe, okay? Stick with Miles.”
They say their goodbyes, Ariadne with a thousand held-back questions and Cobb with half-a-mind set elsewhere.
He sits on his bed, holding the wireless phone in his hand, for a long time afterwards.
***
Five months pass, and no word from Eames.
In between jobs, Cobb has Arthur picking out trails on the grid that don’t exist, that lead to dead ends that had been dead beginnings in the first place because when Eames disappears, he blots out his tracks as he goes.
***
He gets a call when he least expects it, and barely hears the ring of the kitchen phone over the loud sizzle of lunch on the pan.
He turns off the flame and wipes his hand on his shirt before he picks up the call.
“Yeah?” He answers distractedly, keeping an eye out on the pan and how it’s teetering almost dangerously off the stove’s metal frame.
“Busy, are you?” Eames.
And just like that, he doesn’t even mind that the pan clatters noisily on the kitchen floor, spilling their lunch everywhere.
“What was that?” Eames chuckles into his ear.
It’s a welcome sound; that’s what it is, he realizes, relief, that stutters his breath as he regains his hold on things. “What the fuck, Eames,” he breathes into the receiver.
Eames answers him with a hearty laugh that reassures Cobb more than anything else.
A shaky smile tapers off Cobb’s frayed nerves as he shakes his head at himself. He braces a hand against the wall. He doesn’t realize that he’s closed his eyes, clenched them tightly, until he discovers that what he’s looking at is the kitchen floor.
Eames clears his throat, but Cobb hears the answering smile in his voice. “I’m calling collect, by the way.”
“It’s about damn time.”
“Piss off,” Eames snorts, “Kept you in suspense, didn’t I? That’s good for the heart, I think. Avoids arterial blockage and all that nonsense.”
Cobb doesn’t take the bait, because he has questions and he’s waited too damn long to talk to Eames again. “Where are you?”
“Somewhere.”
That’s not good enough, but Cobb understands the risks too. “Are you safe?”
It surprises him that he asks this, and it probably surprises Eames too. He’s answered by a ringing silence that makes it much too discomfiting to breathe so loudly so he stops breathing altogether.
“Of course I am,” Eames grunts, saving both their faces with his casual ease. “I have friends too, you know.”
Cobb recovers himself. “You must be digging so low into the ground, then.”
Eames’ answering laugh is one that he’ll never forget. It trails on until Eames is chuckling and both of them are smiling on the phone, at no one in particular.
“Eames,” Cobb clears his throat. “Why didn’t you sell me out?”
“I didn’t need the money Fischer offered.”
Cobb doubts that very much. “Imagine how many trips to Macau that would’ve gotten you.”
“Eh,” Eames dismisses with a sniff. “I never do things for money anyway.”
Cobb nods. He knows how that goes, when the job blurs into a passion for skill and getting better and better and better until he becomes the best.
Cobb did become the best, and so did Eames.
“What happens when you do?”
Eames hums, and Cobb imagines the slight tremor of his throat, and the thoughtful glaze to his eyes as he does. “That’ll be one for the books, wouldn’t it? That’ll be an interesting day.”
They both know that that day may come, when Eames is backed up against the wall, torn between saving himself and saving Cobb and Cobb knows that Eames will choose himself above anyone else because in their line of business, there aren’t any heroes.
But they both take comfort in the fact that they’re both safe wherever they are. That as far as today is concerned they have an understanding of an unspoken loyalty twisted into something else entirely that doesn’t fit them together.
END