[INCEPTION] Fic: I watched it for a little while (Eames/Cobb) | Part 2 of 2
I watched it for a little while (2/2)
Cobb/Eames
For the inception_kink prompt: Years after the inception job, Philippa and James are growing up. Eames becomes their very strange mother figure (he teaches Philippa about heels and makeup! he talks to James about girlfriends). And Cobb might be starting to have very confusing feelings for Eames. But I added on some stuff beyond what the prompt asked for.
PART 1. ETA: damn it's been two months since i'd posted this. i re-read it then edited stuff a bit, corrected the tenses (finally), and resolved the ending. all shiny and new. okay, okay. ulterior motive: i just like posting on cobb_eames, okay? and that comm didn't exist when i posted this way back in august. so. SO THERE. D:
Eames arrives earlier than expected. After a brief phone call from Cobb, he’s flown in from Zurich, almost immediately after he receives a hefty paycheck from a relatively easy extraction on a Geneva Convention representative.
Miles won’t be arriving for another three days, Cobb says, and Eames just nods, picks up his bag, and turns to leave.
Cobb stops him with an offer to stay until then, and Eames does.
It’s early in the afternoon and Cobb comes home from his job interview at UCLA.
James and Philippa are sitting on the living room floor, the game board Snakes and Ladders between them. This surprises him. Usually by this time, the kids are sharing an open bag of Ruffles between them, not a game board.
What surprises him even more is Eames, sitting on the floor with them, just behind Philippa with his legs folded at the knee flanking her outstretched feet.
“Of course you choose pink,” Eames comments and when he brings up his hands, Cobb sees the unmistakable bottle of nail polish. Beyond it, is Philippa’s wide grin.
“It’s a pretty color,” Philippa agrees, and holds up another bottle. “But I like this more.”
(There are several of them on the floor, he realizes. Some half-empty, some crusted with dried polish. They were Mal’s.)
“Purple,” Eames says, dryly, taking it from her. Then he shrugs, and opens it. A sharp twist of his strong fingers. “Well, you didn’t inherit your taste from your father, I’m pretty sure of that.”
Eames tentatively guides her hand as she held the polish brush in her shaky fingers and with intense concentration brushed the first stroke of paint on the small nails of her toes.
“Hey, it’s your turn,” James calls out to Philippa from across the bored, annoyed that neither Eames nor his sister is paying closer attention the game.
Philippa stretches out a hand. “Gimme the dice.”
Twin squares of red roll on the board and Cobb sees Eames’s eyes follow them until they stopped, at twin faces of three.
Then Eames shakes his head and goes back to painting Philippa’s nails.
Cobb thinks it was easy to assume that Eames is just taking a passive interest at the game but at the slight frown that creases his forehead, and the way he distractedly dipped the brush back into the bottle, Cobb knows Eames’ hadn’t seen beyond the dice at all.
His keys clang in the bureau as he drops them there and the three of them look up sharply.
His kids smile at him; Philippa waves around Eames’ outstretched arm.
“Hey, dad,” James greets him, before rushing to his feet and welcoming Cobb with not a hug, like he usually does, but a piece of paper waving in the air.
It’s a drawing painted in crayon, of a brown-skinned person holding-a stick. And something circular. “Wow, it’s-"
James frowns at him, looking almost disappointed that his dad didn’t understand the picture right away. “A warrior.”
Cobb raises an eyebrow down at him. “A warrior?”
James nods, then stands on tip toes to point at the ‘sword’, then at the ‘shield’, then at the ‘hed-ress’, then at the bare feet because warriors in Africa don’t wear boots, dad, did you know that?
Over James’ head, Cobb throws an amused look at Eames.
Eames tries to look innocent. Tries. “Well he wanted a story, so I told him one.”
“About native warriors of Africa,” Cobb replies blandly. When he tells his children stories, they’re usually annotated, and heavily substituted versions of the dreamscapes he’s visited in the years he’d been an active extractor. When that fails, he resorts to the Grimm fairytales-the Disney kind.
“They have tattoos, see?” James points again, on the crude lines of black and yellow and blue adorning the brown figure’s chest.
“I left out the cannibalism, don’t worry,” Eames reassures him, and continues painting Philippa’s nails.
James looks from Eames to his father, giving him an odd look. “What’s canni-"
“It’s a term of endearment,” Cobb rushes to answer.
He ends up tacking the portrait on the fridge later that night, anyway, after much insisting from James and no help at all from Eames.
The day Miles picks up the kids, he doesn’t see Eames. He knows the routine by now and always conveniently leaves several hours before Miles tells Cobb that he’ll be over. When he comes back later in the evening, he smells strongly of cigarette smoke.
Eames brushes his teeth, thoroughly, before they go under.
When they do, Cobb tastes mint on Mal’s tongue, but her hair smells faintly of cigarettes.
-----
Cobb doesn’t expect to slip, not when he’s reassured, time and again, by the multiple falls of the top on the marble counter of the bathroom, that this is not his dream.
And the person waiting for him is not Mal.
But he slips anyway, and when he does, Cobb wishes that he’s as good at knowing what is real and what isn’t as Eames is.
It’s the week after Mal’s second death anniversary and Eames is there, waiting for time to pass between dinner and the children’s curfew.
It’s a wrinkle in routine and Cobb had sat, almost nervously, during dinner. They never go under when the kids are around; always after Miles comes to get them so that they have days to spend asleep and dreaming and pretending.
James and Philippa are upstairs, preparing to go to bed. Eames and Cobb are in the kitchen, with Eames clearing the dishes and Cobb arranging the leftovers in the fridge that’s almost empty already anyway.
He needs to buy eggs, and milk, and one of those herbs that Mal likes to mix in the stew. James and Philippa had liked it when he tried it himself for the first time. He needs to buy less junk food, because James hardly touched his mashed potatoes. He needs to clean out the freezer, thick icicles were already starting to form underneath it.
He shifts, his head nearly inside the refrigerator, and his elbow knocks something over that splatters all over the floor.
He’s still thinking about the herbs, and Mal, and her cooking, and how she always manages to pry the Cheetos from James’ hands and gets Philippa to eat her salad, when he throws, carelessly, over his shoulder: “Mal, could you get that?”
It takes a second, or several, for Cobb to realize his mistake and when he does, he practically shoots upright as he turns to Eames.
Eames has probably heard him. The kitchen is quiet and the sound of clattering plates is replaced by a shock of silence that Cobb holds his breath.
But he doesn’t get a reply. Eames is already plucking the hand towel from its hook over the kitchen sink and making his way, carefully, around the spill. He cleans up the mess without a word. The blank look on his face tells Cobb that Eames sees something else other than the spot on the floor, but his hand steadily wipes it clean anyway with an efficient quickness he usually does everything else.
Eames doesn’t speak until much later, after they finish in the kitchen, and when Cobb lies down on the bed and Eames takes his seat in the armchair, the PAVIS thrumming quietly between them.
“You should be careful,” Eames says as he undoes his cufflinks and rolls back his sleeve. “Your kids might hear you the next time it happens.”
Cobb doesn’t get to apologize because only moments later, he’s awake on the same bed, blinking up at the same bedroom that’s suddenly bright with early morning sun and Mal is there, beside him, and Cobb forgets about Eames because Mal is there and they lie together for hours, and hours, and hours.
When he wakes up, Eames is already on his feet and the clock reads half-past ten. He’s already rolling down his sleeves, suit jacket in hand.
He lets himself out, without not so much as a nod towards Cobb’s general direction, and Cobb doesn’t see him again for months.
-----
Cobb wakes up to the faint sting of the needle in his wrist, but a quick brush of his hand against it and he feels only bare skin.
He’s lying on the wrinkled sheets of his bed, the PASIV already stowed away underneath him.
Eames is sitting in the armchair, on the other side of the room, his feet propped up on the small table in front of him. He’s smoking, the window above his head opened a fraction, and Cobb doesn’t smell the burn of ash because Eames, however much he breaks Cobb’s rules, also knows that the kids can barge in at any time and they never did like the smell of cigarettes.
“What time do you leave?” Cobb asks him as he props himself up against the headboard. The alarm clock at the bedside table reads 8:45. They were under for almost an hour.
Eames had left him first, had disappeared off to another part of the dreamscape with a gun conjured from nowhere held in his hand.
Cobb had woken up, briefly, when the time had run out, but his eyes remained closed. Dreams with Eames have always left him spent and hollow and he rarely ever musters enough strength to face him afterwards.
So he had slept, briefly, resting his mind, and pretended that the hand gently pulling out the needle from his wrist was soft and slender, not thick and calloused.
Eames always waits for him to wake up before he leaves.
“In a while,” Eames answers, checking his watch. He looks comfortable, Cobb thinks, sitting there, despite the way his shirt stretched across his chest, and his suit jacket rumpled slightly at the shoulders from where he’s pressed firmly against the armchair.
Cobb doesn’t bother to spin the top he left on the bureau by the bed, because the only times he dreams anymore is when he dreams with Eames and in those dreams, Eames is never Eames.
“You can stay, you know,” Cobb says, hesitating, meeting Eames’ eyes through the haze of smoke drifting upwards from the cigarette Eames holds up, loosely, by his face. Eames does know but never stays unless Cobb asks. “For dinner.”
Eames smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course. I’m famished.”
He must be. At the slight rumble of his belly, Cobb is reminded that however often he’d dined with Eames in his dreams, roast beef and mashed potatoes, the fullness he had felt then always hollows out to a pang of hunger, actual hunger, the moment he opens his eyes.
They house is silent over a simple dinner of Chinese take-out.
(Cobb hardly ever cooks when James and Philippa are at their grandparents’ for a visit and Eames never complains. He never offers to make something, either.)
As comfortable as Eames had been in the bedroom, he sits at the kitchen table with his elbows pressed to his side, hunching slightly over his Kung Pao chicken. Eames, in his suit, the slick of his hair, the angle of his jaw, and the rough stubble of his chin, looks out of place in the warm glow of the dim yellow light overhead.
When Eames leaves, Cobb doesn’t thank him. The door clicks closed to the sight of Eames getting into his rented car.
He’s alone in the house for the next two days and he spends all that time putting back Mal’s clothes where they belonged next to his suits in the walk-in closet of the bedroom. He replaces the pictures of her, her and Cobb, her and Cobb in Paris, her and Cobb and a newborn Philippa, her, and her, and her, on the several photo albums Eames had rifled through in the living room. He checks the PASIV, arranges the IV lines that Eames had already stowed away, in neat coils, fastens it, locks it.
Checks it again.
He doesn’t resist the urge to go under because there is no point to it, anymore, when he’s alone. His projection of Mal had gone, and his memory of her had dulled until she had become the shadow of the shade that had haunted him several months ago.
Only Eames can make her beautiful now, beautiful and radiant and alive with actual warmth and animation that Cobb has never found in any of his projections of her.
-----
Five weeks pass until Eames visits again.
Philippa lets him in this time, a ready smile on her face. It only widens to a full-blown grin when she sees that Eames is carrying a box, a very big one, wrapped in plain brown paper.
“Is that for us?” Cobb hears from behind him and James run past in a blur of blond and yellow shirt.
“Course not,” Eames answers with a scoff, but his tone is gentle and playful. He closes the door behind him with his foot. “This is for the dog, clearly.”
“But we don’t have a dog,” Philippa points out, matter-of-factly.
Eames nods, almost seriously. “That would be a problem, then.”
James and Philippa both frown, dejected, then Eames rolls his eyes and sets down the box on the floor. “Have at it then. See if your nonexistent dog will like this.”
Then Eames stands up as James and Philippa, with renewed grins on their faces, tear excitedly at the wrapper.
Cobb smiles at them, and so does Eames, but when their eyes meet, they both sober and glance away.
“Had a nice a flight?” Cobb asks, over the squeals of his children.
“British Airways,” Eames replies by way of explanation, and they both click their tongues. Eames in distaste and Cobb in sympathy.
“Dad! Dad, look!” James pulls at Cobb’s hand.
It’s a Mattel castle. One that Cobb knows is not cheap.
(And he should know. Philippa and James have eyed the exact same model from the toy shop’s display window in the local mall. Cobb had checked the price when he came back to the shop the day after. He had thought long and hard, but decided against it eventually.)
“It has a princess!” Philippa squeals.
“And knights!” James adds.
“What do you say to Eames, kids?” Cobb reminds them. That sobers them up-slightly-but they fidget where they stand, just itching to open the box and play with their new toy.
“Thank you, Eames,” they say in chorus, to which Eames just smiles.
They push the box along on the floor to the living room and almost immediately throw themselves at the box, tearing carelessly at both tape and cardboard.
“They’re going to get used to this,” Cobb tells Eames, but doesn’t look at him. He’s almost afraid of what he might see there, now that they’re alone and the distraction of James and Philippa’s wide eyes and innocent smiles are no longer there to buffer the full weight of facing each other after the disaster of their last meeting.
“Yes, well, end things with a bang, I say.”
Cobb looks at him then, confused.
Eames just shrugs, as casual as you please, but there’s a genuine worry in the way he stands that Cobb knows that the confidence he sees is another one of Eames’ most practiced and most effective.
But later that evening, Cobb kisses Mal again. It’s a tentative one, exploring rather than claiming, and Mal isn’t surprised by it at all. She melts against him and Cobb thinks that this feels right. Exactly how it should.
Eames is wrong, is Cobb’s first thought when he pushes himself off the bed. The room is once again empty, but it doesn’t feel as hollow as before, and Cobb feels as if he and Eames have come to an understanding. That they never speak of this, and never bring it up, even though when they dream, they’re both alive with spilled words and confident touches on bare skin.
Eames is wrong. This isn’t the end.
-----
They’re doing laundry. Mal is folding clothes and putting them in the plastic bin and Cobb is manning the washing machine.
They’re smiling, and laughing, and Mal is teasing him.
When the laughter tapers off, Mal looks at him with something soft, something fond, and Cobb believes that it’s love.
Without thinking about it, he pulls her to him and kisses her. Her soft lips against him. This is the first time he kisses her in almost two years and it’s a wonderful feeling of home and comfort and safety and everything that is real and normal.
He pulls back and when he looks down at her, he realizes that she has gone completely still. A confused look is written on her face.
It’s like a punch to the gut, and Cobb backs away, a thousand apologies spilling from his lips.
But Mal is still Mal, and she pulls him back in.
“You weren’t this shy on our honeymoon, Dom,” she says, and her face is so close that he feels her breath on his lips.
Then they kiss again, and the laundry room melts into the bedroom, the stark white giving way to warm brown, and Mal is naked underneath him.
She moans sweetly as his hands run over every inch of her skin. Sweat glistens on her breasts and he leans down to kiss her neck, tasting her. Feeling her. Committing every groan, every bite of her lip, and every twist of her fingers in the sheets, to memory.
And as they both come, a sudden brightness burns Cobb’s eyes, then it’s over.
He’s lying on his back and his shirt stretches over his chest. He’s hard underneath his pants but he doesn’t feel the burn of passion in his belly but the sudden cold, a heavy, ball of something freezing, of shame douse the fire in his limbs.
He presses the heels of his hands tightly against his closed eyes and doesn’t move for a long time until he hears the soft click of the door. The sudden emptiness of the room doesn’t comfort him at all.
-----
“Can I ask you something?” Cobb asks Eames as he prepares the PASIV on the floor.
Eames smirks up at him. “You ask me that now, do you?”
Cobb shrugs, sitting on the bed.
“Well, what is it?” Eames prompts him, his voice curt as he hands Cobb a line and pulls out his own, pulling and pulling until he’s sure the line is long enough to reach the armchair.
“Why are you doing this?”
Eames is surprised. Genuinely surprised, Cobb realizes. “You asked me to, didn’t you?” He answers, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Cobb knows that Eames doesn’t just do things because people ask him to. He’s a conman and a thief, one of the sneakiest and most ingenious of his field that Cobb is almost sure, almost, that Eames is the kind of person who doesn’t let circumstances force him to do anything that he doesn’t want to.
Then it clicks, an upstart of gears in his head.
That Eames is here not because he needs to be.
-----
The doorbell rings just as Cobb opens the oven, and his hand slips on the handle when he hears Philippa’s excited I’ll get it! through the noise of the television.
Cobb hurries after her, leaving the oven door open behind him, the mitt still in his hand. He never lets Philippa answer the door by herself.
He stops short when he sees Eames, looking more well-rested than he’d seen him last, standing at his doorstep.
Philippa steps back, a hand on the doorknob, and Cobb knows she’s being careful. Mal had taught her never to talk to strangers.
Eames sees Philippa first and he offers her a smile. Cobb doesn’t see if Philippa smiles back but the expression on Eames falters and he takes that as a sign that Philippa does not. Her hand on the doorknob tightens, and she inches, slowly, behind the door.
Then Eames peers inside and sees Cobb. He doesn’t smile at him but his face is unguarded. Almost friendly. “What, you weren’t expecting me?”
Cobb was, but he doesn’t say that he didn’t expect Eames to arrive so quickly when Cobb had called him only a couple of days ago.
“Philippa, it’s alright,” Cobb reassures his daughter. He takes off the oven mitt, clutches it in his hand, and opens the door further to let Eames in.
“Who’s he, dad?” Philippa asks as Eames comes in, his eyes sweeping over the room in what Cobb assumes is his routine whenever he goes somewhere he’s never been to before.
“This is-" Cobb trails off, unsure as to how to introduce Eames to his daughter.
“Eames,” he finishes for Cobb, smiling down at her. “You must be Philippa.”
“Yep,” Philippa answers, as Cobb closes the door. When her father lets someone into their home-even though it’s been a long time since he once did-she knows it’s safe. “You talk funny, like grandpa."
Then Eames grins, and it’s neither teasing nor malicious, unlike what Cobb has seen Eames use on Arthur several times before. “The curse of the English, I’m afraid.”
“Philippa, would you go upstairs and check on your brother? Tell him the food’s ready,” Cobb tells his daughter, and while his tone is gentle, Philippa recognizes it for the no-nonsense order that it is. Even if she doesn’t, the slight push of Cobb’s hand on her back expresses it plainly enough.
When she’s gone, Cobb stands at the foyer with Eames and the silence between them is awkward. Off-center.
“When are we doing it?” Eames asks.
“Tonight, after Miles picks up the kids,” Cobb answers. He goes into the kitchen and Eames follows him.
“Miles-your father in law.” It’s not a question, but Cobb nods at Eames anyway.
He puts his oven mitt back on and takes out the roast from the oven.
“Where are the photo albums?”
Cobb puts down the roast on the kitchen counter before gesturing at the living room. On the coffee table, cleared of the small potted bonsai tree and the random books, is a short stack of leather-bound albums.
“Help yourself,” Cobb tells Eames.
And Eames does. He pours over them, page for page, sometimes removing a photograph until a pile of slightly bent pictures sit beside him. He looks at them for hours.
When Miles arrives, Eames is already upstairs in the master bedroom. Cobb had shown him to the walk-in closet, where Mal’s clothes hang by his suits, where there are more pictures of her, framed and hanging on the walls, sitting on the dresser.
Eames passes his hand over Mal’s clothes, feeling the texture of fine, woven cloth. His nails catch on sequins and crystals sewn into hemlines and collars. Cobb fidgets, slightly, at the sight of this man, sharply suited and wide-shouldered, scrutinizing Mal’s wardrobe with a careful eye.
But he bites his lip and waits, patiently, for almost an hour until Eames claps his hands.
“Let’s try this, then.”
They go under for what feels like hours this time.
Mal is perfect. The slight jaunt of her hips is feminine and light, and she walks with the casual grace she’d always had, with her back straight and her chin proud. She talks to him, brings up memories in the vaguest details and Cobb remembers them all. And they laugh as they sit on the couch, watching Philippa and James from the wide windows that flank the glass door to the backyard.
Cobb doesn’t ask questions, but when he talks, about finding work, about James’ playdates from the day care center-Bernadette, remember her? Mal nods, indulgently, and her eyes don’t waver when they meet his and Cobb is convinced that she does remember-and Philippa on her first day of school, wearing that yellow dress, Mal, that yellow dress she didn’t want to try on, remember that?
They talk for hours.
When Cobb wakes up, it’s to the sound of her voice in his ear as she had pressed against him, his arm wrapped around her slender shoulders, it’s to the lightness of her laugh and the playfulness of her touch around his neck.
He opens his eyes and his stomach sinks when he sees Eames.
Eames isn’t looking at him. He’s on his feet, looking out the window, a lit cigarette between his lips.
Cobb closes his eyes, tightly, turns over on the bed and presses his cheek against the pillow.
He falls asleep and when he wakes up again, the clock reads five in the morning and Eames is nowhere to be found.
-----
Cobb stays in Coppenhagen for three days and he never stops thinking about Mal, of her breath against his neck in an image so vivid that Cobb barely sleeps in his hotel room.
He doesn’t want to dream about a dream because the way it had been, with details so sharp and so tangible, is enough to sustain him throughout the long, restless nights he spends sitting in a chair, the bed still unmade since he’d checked in.
He goes back to the pub on the third day but the man behind the bartender is someone he hasn’t seen before and when he asks about Eames, and the room downstairs with all the cots and the ports and the strange men with their heavily guarded suitcase, the bartender says that he knows no one named Eames and he knows nothing about a room with cots, strange men, and suitcases.
But he gives him a slip of paper, and on it is a hastily scribbled Losing my tail above a fifteen-digit number.
He reads it several times over, committing the number to memory, before crumpling the paper in his fist and stuffing it in his pocket next to his totem.
He takes the earliest flight back to Los Angeles and it takes him days before he finally presses fifteen numbers on his mobile and hopes that Eames answers.
-----
Within a week after Cobb first calls Arthur, he receives an email. He had expected at least a gigabyte of information, of sound bites lifted off wiretaps, or video clips pilfered from CCTV cameras from all over the seedier parts of Europe but he only gets a short of note:
Coppenhagen c/o Viktor 9:30 PM 1/19/2011 @ Nørrebro Bryghus
Attached is a printable receipt of the earliest possible flight from LAX to Coppenhagen Airport, and departure is set for tomorrow afternoon.
Shit, Arthur, Cobb curses, silently, but he’s more relieved than anything.
Cobb immediately contacts Miles, makes all the arrangements for his kids to stay with their grandparents for just three days, Miles, a week at most, I told the kids I have an important seminar I’m going to attend.
It takes more than just an outright lie to stop James from sniffling when he tells him, and for Philippa to say something. Anything.
The last time he’d told his kids he was going away for a little while, they didn’t see him for several months.
But the next day, Cobb still makes his flight and ten hours later, after depositing his bag in his hotel room at the hotel nearest to the airport, Cobb stumbles into an old brewpub that smells mostly of cigarettes and filled partly with people drunk as early as three-thirty in the afternoon.
Jetlag seeps into his bones but Cobb shrugs it off with a deliberate roll of his shoulders.
The bartender leads him to the back room, down a flight of stairs built from old stone, and the room beyond the wooden door at the end of it smells, looks, and feels even older than the rest of the city.
There are no windows, just old bricks stained heavily, darkly, and Cobb is reminded of history lessons about the Spanish Inquisition and their underground torture chambers. Cots are pushed up against the sides of the room, covered plainly in white sheets, no blankets. Thin pillows.
Mounted on the walls next to each bed are several ports, and the metal heads of what Cobb assumes are IV lines glint in the dull light.
To one corner is a small wooden table and seated around them are three men, one of whom is Eames, and they’re looking at him. Hands pause mid-air, some defensively covering the sheets and sheets of paper that cover the table’s surface. They’re looking at him, and the strangers whose faces Cobb easily forgets when he leaves later that evening, are tense and ready.
(Cobb imagines guns holstered at their hips.)
But Eames speaks, and the tension snaps.
“How in the bloody hell did you find me this time?”
Cobb shrugs, but he’s distracted by the distrust spelled in the strangers’ stance and he immediately regrets neglecting to bring some sort of weapon of his own even though the first and only gun he’s ever really fired in real life is stowed away at the very bottom drawer of his study room table.
“Arthur told me where you were,” Cobb answers.
Eames stares at him, long and hard, with a cloaked wariness that seems to have thickened since the months Cobb had last seen him in Los Angeles.
“Of course he did,” Eames replies with a humorless smirk. He stands up and he looks different, the hunch of his shoulders even more pronounced, a sharp angle to the fullness of his cheeks. His stubble darkened with the beginnings of a beard.
When Eames approaches him, Cobb sees that his eyes are red, his hair sticking out in places. His suit-blue, mute, and very much unlike what he had been wearing in Mombasa-is slightly wrinkled.
“What do you need, then?” His voice lowers and Cobb glances over his shoulder at the two men, who immediately lower their heads and busy their hands with the papers on the table, but by the slight stiffness in their necks, Cobb knows they’re listening intently.
Cobb hesitates, but Eames only looks at him expectantly. After a moment, Cobb tells him as plainly and in as few words as possible.
Even to his own ears, Cobb thinks he sounds ridiculous.
But Eames doesn’t seem to think so or if he does, the blank look on his face tells Cobb nothing. He just looks at him, in the way that Eames has looked at subjects in the past in the handful of times Cobb has called him in for a job. Eames is dissecting him, taking in every detail of his face, from the restless shifting of his hands in his pockets to the slight downward tilt of his head. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days and Cobb knows Eames sees that too, that his eyes are just as tired, and his limbs are just as worn.
Cobb is serious, dead serious, and Eames understands that quickly enough that he takes a moment to throw what sounds like a dismissal over his shoulder in curt, unaccented Danish.
The strangers leave, but not before fixing their files and neatly placing them in a suitcase. (They turn the lock at the handle and even goes as far as handcuffing it to the nearest cot.)
Soon enough, Cobb and Eames are alone in the room and Cobb, for the first time since he had first thought of the idea, suddenly feels a tightening hold of uncertainty that stills his arms and makes his palms sweat.
“To be honest, I thought you’d already resolved this,” Eames finally says, before resuming his seat at the now empty table.
Cobb joins him even though Eames doesn’t offer. “I did.”
Eames waits, but when he gets nothing from Cobb, prompts, “I’m going to need a little more persuasion than that.” If I’m going to do this for you, is what Eames doesn’t say but Cobb hears it anyway.
Cobb sighs, silently, a shaky rush of air through his lips. “I miss her.”
“Of course you do but that’s what therapy is for,” Eames counters, but his gentle ton eases the objectivity of his words. “And your children.”
Cobb shakes his head. He had expected Eames to understand.
“Alright, then,” Eames says, no, concludes, when the silence stretches on for longer than Cobb had realized it did. “Since you’ve won me over with your eloquence.”
Eames presses a button on the intercom mounted on the wall. Cobb hadn’t noticed it when he sat down. It crackles around someone speaking in Danish and Eames answers it with authority coloring the crisp, foreign syllables.
Almost shortly after, the bartender-Viktor, Cobb remembers-comes into the room bearing a wooden tray.
Two pint-sized mugs, filled to the brim with something flat and froth-less.
“Tak, Viktor,” Eames thanks the bartender, before picking up his mug and downing half of it in short gulps. He does it with a no-nonsense swiftness that looks more like an instinctive draw of breath than a disguised method of preparation.
Cobb looks down at his mug and takes a sip. The strong tang of warm beer assaults his tongue and he almost chokes, but manages a gulp-then another, when the warmth calmed the nerves that caved his belly.
Eames stands as soon as he finishes with his, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He approaches the nearest bed, the one with the suitcase cuffed to one of its legs, and pulls at one of the metal heads jutting out from the port on the wall.
“Grab a line, then,” Eames instructs Cobb as he pulls at his own line, a knee bracing his weight on the cot.
Cobb goes to a bed and pulls out the IV. The wires are yellowed, he notes, and he looks at it dubiously, at the sharp needle that protrudes from the metal head.
“’salright, we always change the needles after going under,” Eames reassures him. He’s already lain himself down, reclining slightly with his hand hovering over one of several switches on the port.
Cobb hooks himself up, positions himself on the cot. He does it, without hesitation, not because he trusts Eames but because he wants this. He needs it. And he’s flown thousands of miles to Denmark and he won’t leave without achieving at least something, however small it may be.
He hears the crisp click of a switch, and in mere moments, he’s standing in the middle of his living room.
It’s midday, he gathers from the cloudless sky, the sun at its zenith, when he looks out of the glass door that leads to his backyard.
“Here I am, Dom.” Mal’s voice startles him and Cobb whirls around to find her standing so close to him.
Cobb almost breaks, at the soft voice he hasn’t heard in a very long time. He doesn’t notice that her accent is smoother, fainter, because she’s there, wearing a shirt and sweatpants that Cobb has never seen before.
But she’s smiling, her head cocked to one side, and the fondness on her face is sharper than anything Cobb could ever manage to recreate on his own.
He chokes on something, on air, probably, or on tears that threaten to glaze over his eyes.
Then he feels rather than sees Mal’s arms coming around him, wrapping around his chest, and he’s pressed against her, against a body so warm, so solid, and there that Cobb lets go and holds her, whispering something--everything--into her ear and pressing his cheek against hair so soft and vivid and real.
Then it ends, and when Cobb opens his eyes it’s to the sight of a dark ceiling littered with cobwebs.
Eames is already on his feet, the IV line drawn back until the needle is all that Cobb sees of it. He’s at the table, downing the last of his drink and finishing off Cobb’s as well.
“That was-" Cobb chokes out, the tightness in his belly crawling upwards until his throat works around the fingers of a chokehold that quivers his voice.
His free hand is already in his pocket, grasping his totem, but he doesn’t bring it out because he knows that dreams never consist of claustrophobic, centuries-old underground rooms underneath shady establishments. Because Eames is there and not Mal.
Eames snorts as he puts down the mug. His lips are moist as he turns to Cobb. “That was crap,” he says off-handedly. Cobb disagrees, but Eames is still talking. “I have to admit that you caught me at a bad time here.”
Cobb almost apologizes, but a sudden, profound, exhaustion overcomes him as he struggles to sit upright and gather himself together.
He feels Eames’ eyes on him the entire time and when Cobb meets his eyes it’s not without great effort on his part. His hands are still shaking, and sweat glistens on his forehead. Eames is looking at him differently, a depth to his gaze that Cobb truly feels uncomfortable. His scrutiny, however, is not as objective as it had been when Cobb had entered the room. There’s a thoughtful quality to it, quietly discerning, but it doesn’t lessen the sharpness of his eyes or their intensity.
Eames’ eyes flicker and he looks away for a moment. Then Cobb breathes, not realizing that his lungs have stilled.
“You’re welcome,” Eames suddenly says, before turning away completely, moving towards the door.
Then he leaves, closing the door behind him, and Cobb is alone again. His fingers hover over the needle still inside his wrist, looks at the switch on the port, but he knows he won’t find the same Mal in his head.
He roughly tears the IV from his wrist and when he has climbed the stairs and entered the bar’s main room, he doesn’t see Eames anywhere.
-----
This is the second Christmas he spends without Mal.
On the morning of Christmas Day, he brings the kids to the cemetery, leaves flowers at her grave, and his kids, still very optimistic about everything, sends her prayers, good wishes, and tells her stories about day care and play dates and all of it goes over Cobb’s head as he stands there, head dipped slightly, his eyes focusing on nothing else but Mal’s name engraved on black marble.
He takes out the PASIV from underneath his bed, not for the first time in several months since the inception job.
He tries a regular dreamscape, designs buildings that skewer Physics and blot out the sun. Just as he expects, and just as it always has been, the streets remain empty.
He leaves the dream after only five minutes under.
The room is dark, save for the lit lamp at the bedside table. The kids have long since gone to bed, each with their favorite Christmas presents tucked against them underneath the bed sheets.
Cobb doesn’t sleep, not for hours. Instead, he paces, circuiting the room he knows by heart and even in the dark, he doesn’t stumble against the ottoman, or bump himself against a table. He closes his eyes and he paces and tries to think of nothing.
But Mal is still in his head, as if resurfacing from a fog of too much time in between their past and Cobb’s present. Her face is vague in his mind’s eye and it takes Cobb longer than expected to stare at a picture of her (and him, and the children) on the bedside table to memorize all the details of her face. The bridge of her nose, the wideness of her brown eyes, and the odd twist of her lips that never really parts to grin, or to laugh, or to speak in his dreams.
He goes under again, and this time he revisits the levels of his memories even though he knows that what greets him beyond the elevator has dulled over time.
The beach is not exactly how it should be. The waves have gone calmer, pulling farther and farther off shore. The sky is clear. The sand is hard underneath his feet.
The hotel room is bright with light that isn’t as warm as it had been. The walls are plainer, the subtle, complicated design of the hotel wallpaper evening out like a crease pressed and pressed in an attempt to erase it forever.
Mal doesn’t smile and when Cobb pulls her to him, the touch on his face is neither soft nor firm nor anything, like a wistful whisper of wind and memory.
The next morning, after days spent in dreams trying to sharpen the details, trying to recreate Mal over and over from the many pictures of her on the dresser, Cobb calls Arthur for the first time in months.
With the pleasantries out of the way, Cobb asks Arthur about Eames. He knows they’ve been together, and even though the chances are a million to one, he still hopes that Eames is wherever Arthur is but Arthur tells him that he’s in New York and Eames is in Europe and that the last he’s heard of him was half a year ago.
His voice is low over the phone when it had been light and familiar when he had answered Cobb’s call.
He hates to pry, so he doesn’t.
Instead, Cobb steels himself, ignores the flush of shame that softens his own voice, and asks Arthur if he could track Eames down for him and Arthur, still very loyal and still very reliable in spite of it all, tells him that he’ll see what he can do.
He doesn't notice that it takes a while for Arthur to think it through, or that the silence on the other end is much too full of things that Cobb hadn't even realized at that time.
But his mind is a haze of worn wedding rings, and a top that keeps spinning, and a bed that is always so empty, that Cobb hasn't noticed things in a while.
He wants to change that.
END
Cobb/Eames
For the inception_kink prompt: Years after the inception job, Philippa and James are growing up. Eames becomes their very strange mother figure (he teaches Philippa about heels and makeup! he talks to James about girlfriends). And Cobb might be starting to have very confusing feelings for Eames. But I added on some stuff beyond what the prompt asked for.
PART 1. ETA: damn it's been two months since i'd posted this. i re-read it then edited stuff a bit, corrected the tenses (finally), and resolved the ending. all shiny and new. okay, okay. ulterior motive: i just like posting on cobb_eames, okay? and that comm didn't exist when i posted this way back in august. so. SO THERE. D:
Eames arrives earlier than expected. After a brief phone call from Cobb, he’s flown in from Zurich, almost immediately after he receives a hefty paycheck from a relatively easy extraction on a Geneva Convention representative.
Miles won’t be arriving for another three days, Cobb says, and Eames just nods, picks up his bag, and turns to leave.
Cobb stops him with an offer to stay until then, and Eames does.
It’s early in the afternoon and Cobb comes home from his job interview at UCLA.
James and Philippa are sitting on the living room floor, the game board Snakes and Ladders between them. This surprises him. Usually by this time, the kids are sharing an open bag of Ruffles between them, not a game board.
What surprises him even more is Eames, sitting on the floor with them, just behind Philippa with his legs folded at the knee flanking her outstretched feet.
“Of course you choose pink,” Eames comments and when he brings up his hands, Cobb sees the unmistakable bottle of nail polish. Beyond it, is Philippa’s wide grin.
“It’s a pretty color,” Philippa agrees, and holds up another bottle. “But I like this more.”
(There are several of them on the floor, he realizes. Some half-empty, some crusted with dried polish. They were Mal’s.)
“Purple,” Eames says, dryly, taking it from her. Then he shrugs, and opens it. A sharp twist of his strong fingers. “Well, you didn’t inherit your taste from your father, I’m pretty sure of that.”
Eames tentatively guides her hand as she held the polish brush in her shaky fingers and with intense concentration brushed the first stroke of paint on the small nails of her toes.
“Hey, it’s your turn,” James calls out to Philippa from across the bored, annoyed that neither Eames nor his sister is paying closer attention the game.
Philippa stretches out a hand. “Gimme the dice.”
Twin squares of red roll on the board and Cobb sees Eames’s eyes follow them until they stopped, at twin faces of three.
Then Eames shakes his head and goes back to painting Philippa’s nails.
Cobb thinks it was easy to assume that Eames is just taking a passive interest at the game but at the slight frown that creases his forehead, and the way he distractedly dipped the brush back into the bottle, Cobb knows Eames’ hadn’t seen beyond the dice at all.
His keys clang in the bureau as he drops them there and the three of them look up sharply.
His kids smile at him; Philippa waves around Eames’ outstretched arm.
“Hey, dad,” James greets him, before rushing to his feet and welcoming Cobb with not a hug, like he usually does, but a piece of paper waving in the air.
It’s a drawing painted in crayon, of a brown-skinned person holding-a stick. And something circular. “Wow, it’s-"
James frowns at him, looking almost disappointed that his dad didn’t understand the picture right away. “A warrior.”
Cobb raises an eyebrow down at him. “A warrior?”
James nods, then stands on tip toes to point at the ‘sword’, then at the ‘shield’, then at the ‘hed-ress’, then at the bare feet because warriors in Africa don’t wear boots, dad, did you know that?
Over James’ head, Cobb throws an amused look at Eames.
Eames tries to look innocent. Tries. “Well he wanted a story, so I told him one.”
“About native warriors of Africa,” Cobb replies blandly. When he tells his children stories, they’re usually annotated, and heavily substituted versions of the dreamscapes he’s visited in the years he’d been an active extractor. When that fails, he resorts to the Grimm fairytales-the Disney kind.
“They have tattoos, see?” James points again, on the crude lines of black and yellow and blue adorning the brown figure’s chest.
“I left out the cannibalism, don’t worry,” Eames reassures him, and continues painting Philippa’s nails.
James looks from Eames to his father, giving him an odd look. “What’s canni-"
“It’s a term of endearment,” Cobb rushes to answer.
He ends up tacking the portrait on the fridge later that night, anyway, after much insisting from James and no help at all from Eames.
The day Miles picks up the kids, he doesn’t see Eames. He knows the routine by now and always conveniently leaves several hours before Miles tells Cobb that he’ll be over. When he comes back later in the evening, he smells strongly of cigarette smoke.
Eames brushes his teeth, thoroughly, before they go under.
When they do, Cobb tastes mint on Mal’s tongue, but her hair smells faintly of cigarettes.
-----
Cobb doesn’t expect to slip, not when he’s reassured, time and again, by the multiple falls of the top on the marble counter of the bathroom, that this is not his dream.
And the person waiting for him is not Mal.
But he slips anyway, and when he does, Cobb wishes that he’s as good at knowing what is real and what isn’t as Eames is.
It’s the week after Mal’s second death anniversary and Eames is there, waiting for time to pass between dinner and the children’s curfew.
It’s a wrinkle in routine and Cobb had sat, almost nervously, during dinner. They never go under when the kids are around; always after Miles comes to get them so that they have days to spend asleep and dreaming and pretending.
James and Philippa are upstairs, preparing to go to bed. Eames and Cobb are in the kitchen, with Eames clearing the dishes and Cobb arranging the leftovers in the fridge that’s almost empty already anyway.
He needs to buy eggs, and milk, and one of those herbs that Mal likes to mix in the stew. James and Philippa had liked it when he tried it himself for the first time. He needs to buy less junk food, because James hardly touched his mashed potatoes. He needs to clean out the freezer, thick icicles were already starting to form underneath it.
He shifts, his head nearly inside the refrigerator, and his elbow knocks something over that splatters all over the floor.
He’s still thinking about the herbs, and Mal, and her cooking, and how she always manages to pry the Cheetos from James’ hands and gets Philippa to eat her salad, when he throws, carelessly, over his shoulder: “Mal, could you get that?”
It takes a second, or several, for Cobb to realize his mistake and when he does, he practically shoots upright as he turns to Eames.
Eames has probably heard him. The kitchen is quiet and the sound of clattering plates is replaced by a shock of silence that Cobb holds his breath.
But he doesn’t get a reply. Eames is already plucking the hand towel from its hook over the kitchen sink and making his way, carefully, around the spill. He cleans up the mess without a word. The blank look on his face tells Cobb that Eames sees something else other than the spot on the floor, but his hand steadily wipes it clean anyway with an efficient quickness he usually does everything else.
Eames doesn’t speak until much later, after they finish in the kitchen, and when Cobb lies down on the bed and Eames takes his seat in the armchair, the PAVIS thrumming quietly between them.
“You should be careful,” Eames says as he undoes his cufflinks and rolls back his sleeve. “Your kids might hear you the next time it happens.”
Cobb doesn’t get to apologize because only moments later, he’s awake on the same bed, blinking up at the same bedroom that’s suddenly bright with early morning sun and Mal is there, beside him, and Cobb forgets about Eames because Mal is there and they lie together for hours, and hours, and hours.
When he wakes up, Eames is already on his feet and the clock reads half-past ten. He’s already rolling down his sleeves, suit jacket in hand.
He lets himself out, without not so much as a nod towards Cobb’s general direction, and Cobb doesn’t see him again for months.
-----
Cobb wakes up to the faint sting of the needle in his wrist, but a quick brush of his hand against it and he feels only bare skin.
He’s lying on the wrinkled sheets of his bed, the PASIV already stowed away underneath him.
Eames is sitting in the armchair, on the other side of the room, his feet propped up on the small table in front of him. He’s smoking, the window above his head opened a fraction, and Cobb doesn’t smell the burn of ash because Eames, however much he breaks Cobb’s rules, also knows that the kids can barge in at any time and they never did like the smell of cigarettes.
“What time do you leave?” Cobb asks him as he props himself up against the headboard. The alarm clock at the bedside table reads 8:45. They were under for almost an hour.
Eames had left him first, had disappeared off to another part of the dreamscape with a gun conjured from nowhere held in his hand.
Cobb had woken up, briefly, when the time had run out, but his eyes remained closed. Dreams with Eames have always left him spent and hollow and he rarely ever musters enough strength to face him afterwards.
So he had slept, briefly, resting his mind, and pretended that the hand gently pulling out the needle from his wrist was soft and slender, not thick and calloused.
Eames always waits for him to wake up before he leaves.
“In a while,” Eames answers, checking his watch. He looks comfortable, Cobb thinks, sitting there, despite the way his shirt stretched across his chest, and his suit jacket rumpled slightly at the shoulders from where he’s pressed firmly against the armchair.
Cobb doesn’t bother to spin the top he left on the bureau by the bed, because the only times he dreams anymore is when he dreams with Eames and in those dreams, Eames is never Eames.
“You can stay, you know,” Cobb says, hesitating, meeting Eames’ eyes through the haze of smoke drifting upwards from the cigarette Eames holds up, loosely, by his face. Eames does know but never stays unless Cobb asks. “For dinner.”
Eames smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course. I’m famished.”
He must be. At the slight rumble of his belly, Cobb is reminded that however often he’d dined with Eames in his dreams, roast beef and mashed potatoes, the fullness he had felt then always hollows out to a pang of hunger, actual hunger, the moment he opens his eyes.
They house is silent over a simple dinner of Chinese take-out.
(Cobb hardly ever cooks when James and Philippa are at their grandparents’ for a visit and Eames never complains. He never offers to make something, either.)
As comfortable as Eames had been in the bedroom, he sits at the kitchen table with his elbows pressed to his side, hunching slightly over his Kung Pao chicken. Eames, in his suit, the slick of his hair, the angle of his jaw, and the rough stubble of his chin, looks out of place in the warm glow of the dim yellow light overhead.
When Eames leaves, Cobb doesn’t thank him. The door clicks closed to the sight of Eames getting into his rented car.
He’s alone in the house for the next two days and he spends all that time putting back Mal’s clothes where they belonged next to his suits in the walk-in closet of the bedroom. He replaces the pictures of her, her and Cobb, her and Cobb in Paris, her and Cobb and a newborn Philippa, her, and her, and her, on the several photo albums Eames had rifled through in the living room. He checks the PASIV, arranges the IV lines that Eames had already stowed away, in neat coils, fastens it, locks it.
Checks it again.
He doesn’t resist the urge to go under because there is no point to it, anymore, when he’s alone. His projection of Mal had gone, and his memory of her had dulled until she had become the shadow of the shade that had haunted him several months ago.
Only Eames can make her beautiful now, beautiful and radiant and alive with actual warmth and animation that Cobb has never found in any of his projections of her.
-----
Five weeks pass until Eames visits again.
Philippa lets him in this time, a ready smile on her face. It only widens to a full-blown grin when she sees that Eames is carrying a box, a very big one, wrapped in plain brown paper.
“Is that for us?” Cobb hears from behind him and James run past in a blur of blond and yellow shirt.
“Course not,” Eames answers with a scoff, but his tone is gentle and playful. He closes the door behind him with his foot. “This is for the dog, clearly.”
“But we don’t have a dog,” Philippa points out, matter-of-factly.
Eames nods, almost seriously. “That would be a problem, then.”
James and Philippa both frown, dejected, then Eames rolls his eyes and sets down the box on the floor. “Have at it then. See if your nonexistent dog will like this.”
Then Eames stands up as James and Philippa, with renewed grins on their faces, tear excitedly at the wrapper.
Cobb smiles at them, and so does Eames, but when their eyes meet, they both sober and glance away.
“Had a nice a flight?” Cobb asks, over the squeals of his children.
“British Airways,” Eames replies by way of explanation, and they both click their tongues. Eames in distaste and Cobb in sympathy.
“Dad! Dad, look!” James pulls at Cobb’s hand.
It’s a Mattel castle. One that Cobb knows is not cheap.
(And he should know. Philippa and James have eyed the exact same model from the toy shop’s display window in the local mall. Cobb had checked the price when he came back to the shop the day after. He had thought long and hard, but decided against it eventually.)
“It has a princess!” Philippa squeals.
“And knights!” James adds.
“What do you say to Eames, kids?” Cobb reminds them. That sobers them up-slightly-but they fidget where they stand, just itching to open the box and play with their new toy.
“Thank you, Eames,” they say in chorus, to which Eames just smiles.
They push the box along on the floor to the living room and almost immediately throw themselves at the box, tearing carelessly at both tape and cardboard.
“They’re going to get used to this,” Cobb tells Eames, but doesn’t look at him. He’s almost afraid of what he might see there, now that they’re alone and the distraction of James and Philippa’s wide eyes and innocent smiles are no longer there to buffer the full weight of facing each other after the disaster of their last meeting.
“Yes, well, end things with a bang, I say.”
Cobb looks at him then, confused.
Eames just shrugs, as casual as you please, but there’s a genuine worry in the way he stands that Cobb knows that the confidence he sees is another one of Eames’ most practiced and most effective.
But later that evening, Cobb kisses Mal again. It’s a tentative one, exploring rather than claiming, and Mal isn’t surprised by it at all. She melts against him and Cobb thinks that this feels right. Exactly how it should.
Eames is wrong, is Cobb’s first thought when he pushes himself off the bed. The room is once again empty, but it doesn’t feel as hollow as before, and Cobb feels as if he and Eames have come to an understanding. That they never speak of this, and never bring it up, even though when they dream, they’re both alive with spilled words and confident touches on bare skin.
Eames is wrong. This isn’t the end.
-----
They’re doing laundry. Mal is folding clothes and putting them in the plastic bin and Cobb is manning the washing machine.
They’re smiling, and laughing, and Mal is teasing him.
When the laughter tapers off, Mal looks at him with something soft, something fond, and Cobb believes that it’s love.
Without thinking about it, he pulls her to him and kisses her. Her soft lips against him. This is the first time he kisses her in almost two years and it’s a wonderful feeling of home and comfort and safety and everything that is real and normal.
He pulls back and when he looks down at her, he realizes that she has gone completely still. A confused look is written on her face.
It’s like a punch to the gut, and Cobb backs away, a thousand apologies spilling from his lips.
But Mal is still Mal, and she pulls him back in.
“You weren’t this shy on our honeymoon, Dom,” she says, and her face is so close that he feels her breath on his lips.
Then they kiss again, and the laundry room melts into the bedroom, the stark white giving way to warm brown, and Mal is naked underneath him.
She moans sweetly as his hands run over every inch of her skin. Sweat glistens on her breasts and he leans down to kiss her neck, tasting her. Feeling her. Committing every groan, every bite of her lip, and every twist of her fingers in the sheets, to memory.
And as they both come, a sudden brightness burns Cobb’s eyes, then it’s over.
He’s lying on his back and his shirt stretches over his chest. He’s hard underneath his pants but he doesn’t feel the burn of passion in his belly but the sudden cold, a heavy, ball of something freezing, of shame douse the fire in his limbs.
He presses the heels of his hands tightly against his closed eyes and doesn’t move for a long time until he hears the soft click of the door. The sudden emptiness of the room doesn’t comfort him at all.
-----
“Can I ask you something?” Cobb asks Eames as he prepares the PASIV on the floor.
Eames smirks up at him. “You ask me that now, do you?”
Cobb shrugs, sitting on the bed.
“Well, what is it?” Eames prompts him, his voice curt as he hands Cobb a line and pulls out his own, pulling and pulling until he’s sure the line is long enough to reach the armchair.
“Why are you doing this?”
Eames is surprised. Genuinely surprised, Cobb realizes. “You asked me to, didn’t you?” He answers, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Cobb knows that Eames doesn’t just do things because people ask him to. He’s a conman and a thief, one of the sneakiest and most ingenious of his field that Cobb is almost sure, almost, that Eames is the kind of person who doesn’t let circumstances force him to do anything that he doesn’t want to.
Then it clicks, an upstart of gears in his head.
That Eames is here not because he needs to be.
-----
The doorbell rings just as Cobb opens the oven, and his hand slips on the handle when he hears Philippa’s excited I’ll get it! through the noise of the television.
Cobb hurries after her, leaving the oven door open behind him, the mitt still in his hand. He never lets Philippa answer the door by herself.
He stops short when he sees Eames, looking more well-rested than he’d seen him last, standing at his doorstep.
Philippa steps back, a hand on the doorknob, and Cobb knows she’s being careful. Mal had taught her never to talk to strangers.
Eames sees Philippa first and he offers her a smile. Cobb doesn’t see if Philippa smiles back but the expression on Eames falters and he takes that as a sign that Philippa does not. Her hand on the doorknob tightens, and she inches, slowly, behind the door.
Then Eames peers inside and sees Cobb. He doesn’t smile at him but his face is unguarded. Almost friendly. “What, you weren’t expecting me?”
Cobb was, but he doesn’t say that he didn’t expect Eames to arrive so quickly when Cobb had called him only a couple of days ago.
“Philippa, it’s alright,” Cobb reassures his daughter. He takes off the oven mitt, clutches it in his hand, and opens the door further to let Eames in.
“Who’s he, dad?” Philippa asks as Eames comes in, his eyes sweeping over the room in what Cobb assumes is his routine whenever he goes somewhere he’s never been to before.
“This is-" Cobb trails off, unsure as to how to introduce Eames to his daughter.
“Eames,” he finishes for Cobb, smiling down at her. “You must be Philippa.”
“Yep,” Philippa answers, as Cobb closes the door. When her father lets someone into their home-even though it’s been a long time since he once did-she knows it’s safe. “You talk funny, like grandpa."
Then Eames grins, and it’s neither teasing nor malicious, unlike what Cobb has seen Eames use on Arthur several times before. “The curse of the English, I’m afraid.”
“Philippa, would you go upstairs and check on your brother? Tell him the food’s ready,” Cobb tells his daughter, and while his tone is gentle, Philippa recognizes it for the no-nonsense order that it is. Even if she doesn’t, the slight push of Cobb’s hand on her back expresses it plainly enough.
When she’s gone, Cobb stands at the foyer with Eames and the silence between them is awkward. Off-center.
“When are we doing it?” Eames asks.
“Tonight, after Miles picks up the kids,” Cobb answers. He goes into the kitchen and Eames follows him.
“Miles-your father in law.” It’s not a question, but Cobb nods at Eames anyway.
He puts his oven mitt back on and takes out the roast from the oven.
“Where are the photo albums?”
Cobb puts down the roast on the kitchen counter before gesturing at the living room. On the coffee table, cleared of the small potted bonsai tree and the random books, is a short stack of leather-bound albums.
“Help yourself,” Cobb tells Eames.
And Eames does. He pours over them, page for page, sometimes removing a photograph until a pile of slightly bent pictures sit beside him. He looks at them for hours.
When Miles arrives, Eames is already upstairs in the master bedroom. Cobb had shown him to the walk-in closet, where Mal’s clothes hang by his suits, where there are more pictures of her, framed and hanging on the walls, sitting on the dresser.
Eames passes his hand over Mal’s clothes, feeling the texture of fine, woven cloth. His nails catch on sequins and crystals sewn into hemlines and collars. Cobb fidgets, slightly, at the sight of this man, sharply suited and wide-shouldered, scrutinizing Mal’s wardrobe with a careful eye.
But he bites his lip and waits, patiently, for almost an hour until Eames claps his hands.
“Let’s try this, then.”
They go under for what feels like hours this time.
Mal is perfect. The slight jaunt of her hips is feminine and light, and she walks with the casual grace she’d always had, with her back straight and her chin proud. She talks to him, brings up memories in the vaguest details and Cobb remembers them all. And they laugh as they sit on the couch, watching Philippa and James from the wide windows that flank the glass door to the backyard.
Cobb doesn’t ask questions, but when he talks, about finding work, about James’ playdates from the day care center-Bernadette, remember her? Mal nods, indulgently, and her eyes don’t waver when they meet his and Cobb is convinced that she does remember-and Philippa on her first day of school, wearing that yellow dress, Mal, that yellow dress she didn’t want to try on, remember that?
They talk for hours.
When Cobb wakes up, it’s to the sound of her voice in his ear as she had pressed against him, his arm wrapped around her slender shoulders, it’s to the lightness of her laugh and the playfulness of her touch around his neck.
He opens his eyes and his stomach sinks when he sees Eames.
Eames isn’t looking at him. He’s on his feet, looking out the window, a lit cigarette between his lips.
Cobb closes his eyes, tightly, turns over on the bed and presses his cheek against the pillow.
He falls asleep and when he wakes up again, the clock reads five in the morning and Eames is nowhere to be found.
-----
Cobb stays in Coppenhagen for three days and he never stops thinking about Mal, of her breath against his neck in an image so vivid that Cobb barely sleeps in his hotel room.
He doesn’t want to dream about a dream because the way it had been, with details so sharp and so tangible, is enough to sustain him throughout the long, restless nights he spends sitting in a chair, the bed still unmade since he’d checked in.
He goes back to the pub on the third day but the man behind the bartender is someone he hasn’t seen before and when he asks about Eames, and the room downstairs with all the cots and the ports and the strange men with their heavily guarded suitcase, the bartender says that he knows no one named Eames and he knows nothing about a room with cots, strange men, and suitcases.
But he gives him a slip of paper, and on it is a hastily scribbled Losing my tail above a fifteen-digit number.
He reads it several times over, committing the number to memory, before crumpling the paper in his fist and stuffing it in his pocket next to his totem.
He takes the earliest flight back to Los Angeles and it takes him days before he finally presses fifteen numbers on his mobile and hopes that Eames answers.
-----
Within a week after Cobb first calls Arthur, he receives an email. He had expected at least a gigabyte of information, of sound bites lifted off wiretaps, or video clips pilfered from CCTV cameras from all over the seedier parts of Europe but he only gets a short of note:
Coppenhagen c/o Viktor 9:30 PM 1/19/2011 @ Nørrebro Bryghus
Attached is a printable receipt of the earliest possible flight from LAX to Coppenhagen Airport, and departure is set for tomorrow afternoon.
Shit, Arthur, Cobb curses, silently, but he’s more relieved than anything.
Cobb immediately contacts Miles, makes all the arrangements for his kids to stay with their grandparents for just three days, Miles, a week at most, I told the kids I have an important seminar I’m going to attend.
It takes more than just an outright lie to stop James from sniffling when he tells him, and for Philippa to say something. Anything.
The last time he’d told his kids he was going away for a little while, they didn’t see him for several months.
But the next day, Cobb still makes his flight and ten hours later, after depositing his bag in his hotel room at the hotel nearest to the airport, Cobb stumbles into an old brewpub that smells mostly of cigarettes and filled partly with people drunk as early as three-thirty in the afternoon.
Jetlag seeps into his bones but Cobb shrugs it off with a deliberate roll of his shoulders.
The bartender leads him to the back room, down a flight of stairs built from old stone, and the room beyond the wooden door at the end of it smells, looks, and feels even older than the rest of the city.
There are no windows, just old bricks stained heavily, darkly, and Cobb is reminded of history lessons about the Spanish Inquisition and their underground torture chambers. Cots are pushed up against the sides of the room, covered plainly in white sheets, no blankets. Thin pillows.
Mounted on the walls next to each bed are several ports, and the metal heads of what Cobb assumes are IV lines glint in the dull light.
To one corner is a small wooden table and seated around them are three men, one of whom is Eames, and they’re looking at him. Hands pause mid-air, some defensively covering the sheets and sheets of paper that cover the table’s surface. They’re looking at him, and the strangers whose faces Cobb easily forgets when he leaves later that evening, are tense and ready.
(Cobb imagines guns holstered at their hips.)
But Eames speaks, and the tension snaps.
“How in the bloody hell did you find me this time?”
Cobb shrugs, but he’s distracted by the distrust spelled in the strangers’ stance and he immediately regrets neglecting to bring some sort of weapon of his own even though the first and only gun he’s ever really fired in real life is stowed away at the very bottom drawer of his study room table.
“Arthur told me where you were,” Cobb answers.
Eames stares at him, long and hard, with a cloaked wariness that seems to have thickened since the months Cobb had last seen him in Los Angeles.
“Of course he did,” Eames replies with a humorless smirk. He stands up and he looks different, the hunch of his shoulders even more pronounced, a sharp angle to the fullness of his cheeks. His stubble darkened with the beginnings of a beard.
When Eames approaches him, Cobb sees that his eyes are red, his hair sticking out in places. His suit-blue, mute, and very much unlike what he had been wearing in Mombasa-is slightly wrinkled.
“What do you need, then?” His voice lowers and Cobb glances over his shoulder at the two men, who immediately lower their heads and busy their hands with the papers on the table, but by the slight stiffness in their necks, Cobb knows they’re listening intently.
Cobb hesitates, but Eames only looks at him expectantly. After a moment, Cobb tells him as plainly and in as few words as possible.
Even to his own ears, Cobb thinks he sounds ridiculous.
But Eames doesn’t seem to think so or if he does, the blank look on his face tells Cobb nothing. He just looks at him, in the way that Eames has looked at subjects in the past in the handful of times Cobb has called him in for a job. Eames is dissecting him, taking in every detail of his face, from the restless shifting of his hands in his pockets to the slight downward tilt of his head. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days and Cobb knows Eames sees that too, that his eyes are just as tired, and his limbs are just as worn.
Cobb is serious, dead serious, and Eames understands that quickly enough that he takes a moment to throw what sounds like a dismissal over his shoulder in curt, unaccented Danish.
The strangers leave, but not before fixing their files and neatly placing them in a suitcase. (They turn the lock at the handle and even goes as far as handcuffing it to the nearest cot.)
Soon enough, Cobb and Eames are alone in the room and Cobb, for the first time since he had first thought of the idea, suddenly feels a tightening hold of uncertainty that stills his arms and makes his palms sweat.
“To be honest, I thought you’d already resolved this,” Eames finally says, before resuming his seat at the now empty table.
Cobb joins him even though Eames doesn’t offer. “I did.”
Eames waits, but when he gets nothing from Cobb, prompts, “I’m going to need a little more persuasion than that.” If I’m going to do this for you, is what Eames doesn’t say but Cobb hears it anyway.
Cobb sighs, silently, a shaky rush of air through his lips. “I miss her.”
“Of course you do but that’s what therapy is for,” Eames counters, but his gentle ton eases the objectivity of his words. “And your children.”
Cobb shakes his head. He had expected Eames to understand.
“Alright, then,” Eames says, no, concludes, when the silence stretches on for longer than Cobb had realized it did. “Since you’ve won me over with your eloquence.”
Eames presses a button on the intercom mounted on the wall. Cobb hadn’t noticed it when he sat down. It crackles around someone speaking in Danish and Eames answers it with authority coloring the crisp, foreign syllables.
Almost shortly after, the bartender-Viktor, Cobb remembers-comes into the room bearing a wooden tray.
Two pint-sized mugs, filled to the brim with something flat and froth-less.
“Tak, Viktor,” Eames thanks the bartender, before picking up his mug and downing half of it in short gulps. He does it with a no-nonsense swiftness that looks more like an instinctive draw of breath than a disguised method of preparation.
Cobb looks down at his mug and takes a sip. The strong tang of warm beer assaults his tongue and he almost chokes, but manages a gulp-then another, when the warmth calmed the nerves that caved his belly.
Eames stands as soon as he finishes with his, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He approaches the nearest bed, the one with the suitcase cuffed to one of its legs, and pulls at one of the metal heads jutting out from the port on the wall.
“Grab a line, then,” Eames instructs Cobb as he pulls at his own line, a knee bracing his weight on the cot.
Cobb goes to a bed and pulls out the IV. The wires are yellowed, he notes, and he looks at it dubiously, at the sharp needle that protrudes from the metal head.
“’salright, we always change the needles after going under,” Eames reassures him. He’s already lain himself down, reclining slightly with his hand hovering over one of several switches on the port.
Cobb hooks himself up, positions himself on the cot. He does it, without hesitation, not because he trusts Eames but because he wants this. He needs it. And he’s flown thousands of miles to Denmark and he won’t leave without achieving at least something, however small it may be.
He hears the crisp click of a switch, and in mere moments, he’s standing in the middle of his living room.
It’s midday, he gathers from the cloudless sky, the sun at its zenith, when he looks out of the glass door that leads to his backyard.
“Here I am, Dom.” Mal’s voice startles him and Cobb whirls around to find her standing so close to him.
Cobb almost breaks, at the soft voice he hasn’t heard in a very long time. He doesn’t notice that her accent is smoother, fainter, because she’s there, wearing a shirt and sweatpants that Cobb has never seen before.
But she’s smiling, her head cocked to one side, and the fondness on her face is sharper than anything Cobb could ever manage to recreate on his own.
He chokes on something, on air, probably, or on tears that threaten to glaze over his eyes.
Then he feels rather than sees Mal’s arms coming around him, wrapping around his chest, and he’s pressed against her, against a body so warm, so solid, and there that Cobb lets go and holds her, whispering something--everything--into her ear and pressing his cheek against hair so soft and vivid and real.
Then it ends, and when Cobb opens his eyes it’s to the sight of a dark ceiling littered with cobwebs.
Eames is already on his feet, the IV line drawn back until the needle is all that Cobb sees of it. He’s at the table, downing the last of his drink and finishing off Cobb’s as well.
“That was-" Cobb chokes out, the tightness in his belly crawling upwards until his throat works around the fingers of a chokehold that quivers his voice.
His free hand is already in his pocket, grasping his totem, but he doesn’t bring it out because he knows that dreams never consist of claustrophobic, centuries-old underground rooms underneath shady establishments. Because Eames is there and not Mal.
Eames snorts as he puts down the mug. His lips are moist as he turns to Cobb. “That was crap,” he says off-handedly. Cobb disagrees, but Eames is still talking. “I have to admit that you caught me at a bad time here.”
Cobb almost apologizes, but a sudden, profound, exhaustion overcomes him as he struggles to sit upright and gather himself together.
He feels Eames’ eyes on him the entire time and when Cobb meets his eyes it’s not without great effort on his part. His hands are still shaking, and sweat glistens on his forehead. Eames is looking at him differently, a depth to his gaze that Cobb truly feels uncomfortable. His scrutiny, however, is not as objective as it had been when Cobb had entered the room. There’s a thoughtful quality to it, quietly discerning, but it doesn’t lessen the sharpness of his eyes or their intensity.
Eames’ eyes flicker and he looks away for a moment. Then Cobb breathes, not realizing that his lungs have stilled.
“You’re welcome,” Eames suddenly says, before turning away completely, moving towards the door.
Then he leaves, closing the door behind him, and Cobb is alone again. His fingers hover over the needle still inside his wrist, looks at the switch on the port, but he knows he won’t find the same Mal in his head.
He roughly tears the IV from his wrist and when he has climbed the stairs and entered the bar’s main room, he doesn’t see Eames anywhere.
-----
This is the second Christmas he spends without Mal.
On the morning of Christmas Day, he brings the kids to the cemetery, leaves flowers at her grave, and his kids, still very optimistic about everything, sends her prayers, good wishes, and tells her stories about day care and play dates and all of it goes over Cobb’s head as he stands there, head dipped slightly, his eyes focusing on nothing else but Mal’s name engraved on black marble.
He takes out the PASIV from underneath his bed, not for the first time in several months since the inception job.
He tries a regular dreamscape, designs buildings that skewer Physics and blot out the sun. Just as he expects, and just as it always has been, the streets remain empty.
He leaves the dream after only five minutes under.
The room is dark, save for the lit lamp at the bedside table. The kids have long since gone to bed, each with their favorite Christmas presents tucked against them underneath the bed sheets.
Cobb doesn’t sleep, not for hours. Instead, he paces, circuiting the room he knows by heart and even in the dark, he doesn’t stumble against the ottoman, or bump himself against a table. He closes his eyes and he paces and tries to think of nothing.
But Mal is still in his head, as if resurfacing from a fog of too much time in between their past and Cobb’s present. Her face is vague in his mind’s eye and it takes Cobb longer than expected to stare at a picture of her (and him, and the children) on the bedside table to memorize all the details of her face. The bridge of her nose, the wideness of her brown eyes, and the odd twist of her lips that never really parts to grin, or to laugh, or to speak in his dreams.
He goes under again, and this time he revisits the levels of his memories even though he knows that what greets him beyond the elevator has dulled over time.
The beach is not exactly how it should be. The waves have gone calmer, pulling farther and farther off shore. The sky is clear. The sand is hard underneath his feet.
The hotel room is bright with light that isn’t as warm as it had been. The walls are plainer, the subtle, complicated design of the hotel wallpaper evening out like a crease pressed and pressed in an attempt to erase it forever.
Mal doesn’t smile and when Cobb pulls her to him, the touch on his face is neither soft nor firm nor anything, like a wistful whisper of wind and memory.
The next morning, after days spent in dreams trying to sharpen the details, trying to recreate Mal over and over from the many pictures of her on the dresser, Cobb calls Arthur for the first time in months.
With the pleasantries out of the way, Cobb asks Arthur about Eames. He knows they’ve been together, and even though the chances are a million to one, he still hopes that Eames is wherever Arthur is but Arthur tells him that he’s in New York and Eames is in Europe and that the last he’s heard of him was half a year ago.
His voice is low over the phone when it had been light and familiar when he had answered Cobb’s call.
He hates to pry, so he doesn’t.
Instead, Cobb steels himself, ignores the flush of shame that softens his own voice, and asks Arthur if he could track Eames down for him and Arthur, still very loyal and still very reliable in spite of it all, tells him that he’ll see what he can do.
He doesn't notice that it takes a while for Arthur to think it through, or that the silence on the other end is much too full of things that Cobb hadn't even realized at that time.
But his mind is a haze of worn wedding rings, and a top that keeps spinning, and a bed that is always so empty, that Cobb hasn't noticed things in a while.
He wants to change that.
END