Fic: We Used to Wait [1/3]
2015 AD
The first time Dominick Cobb meets Arthur, just Arthur, he is 22 and the boy is 14.
Dom is studying under Dr. Stephen Miles, a man who only picks one student every five years for his combined Masters/PhD program in the dream sciences and architecture. Dr. Miles is a professor with an ornery reputation who demands excellence, and who has caused many an undergraduate to leave his office in tears.
Dom Cobb knows that he has absolutely earned his place at Miles’ side. He’s the only student who has ever completed the entire set of tests, all 25 levels, Miles had developed to weed out the weakest applicants. While Miles never seems to like him, he’s compelled to take him on as a student. Cobb supposes that will have to be enough, resolves to make him proud.
A few months into his degree program, Miles lets him know they’re traveling together to the United States, where they’ll be meeting Miles’ daughter and helping with her research at UCLA. Cobb’s noticed the only time Miles sounds tender is when talking about Mal.
They end up making a stop in Boston. “It’s like a mind-crimes “Scared Straight” program,” Miles explains on the way, distaste filling the car as he drives them to a juvenile detention in Massachusetts. “But it keeps the grant money flowing. Plus, if I must continue with this whole charade, you must as well.”
Inside, they wait, watching as a boy fights with a guard. The boy is short and chubby, but looks like he’s due for a growth spurt soon. He loses, of course, and the guard manages to shoot his neck full of sedative, which drops him to the floor.
“I do so hate prodigies.” Miles says, staring at him pointedly. “Present company excluded, I suppose.”
Miles continues, “The boy’s name is Arthur, and his father is an MIT professor, not very watchful, very important research. Arthur got caught hacking those dream-sim games with some more powerful drug, quite dreadful, but very run-of-the-mill, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll find anything special here.”
Dom isn’t sure what they’re supposed to be looking for, but doesn’t ask. Instead, they set up the machine, hook in, and get to work. The task at hand is simple - take the boy into a dream interrogation room, threaten to take him into the dream world and torture him, and then, if he doesn’t seem contrite, kill him, waking him up. Miles says the encounters almost always end with the boys and girls in sobbing messes, and the program has a very low re-entry rate.
The dream is the jail. It is a perfect replica, one Miles has honed after years of doing this tedious job. Dom is wearing someone else’s face, due to some security precaution that might have made sense a few years into a war, but doesn’t make sense decades into it, but the boy doesn’t notice, has no idea what Dom is supposed to look like.
Arthur sits in an orange jumpsuit expectantly when Dom sits down in front of him, a metal table between them. He places the briefcase holding the PASIV unit between them, and Miles simply stands behind him.
“What do you have to say for yourself, Mister…Arthur.” Miles raises an eyebrow as he looks down at the kid. Dom thinks the face Miles has chosen is quite intimidating, very drill sergeant, but the boy simply stares up at him with wonder.
“That I’m glad to meet you!” The boy is giddy with adolescent excitement and Dom feels incredibly old.
“Oh?”
“Well, I wanted to meet the great Stephen Miles, of course!” Arthur smiles widely, which then quickly vanishes. “Not that you’re him, right? You don’t look it. But maybe you use fake photos. One of the boys said that Stephen Miles sometimes came to tell us off and that we’d get to use the PASIV device!”
“And…that’s why you did it?” Dom asks, a little incredulous.
Arthur laughs, his eyes crinkling. “No, of course not. That’s why I got caught.” The boy’s long fingers drum on the metal table incessantly and Cobb realizes that his hands are moving closer and closer to the PASIV machine.
“Well, we wouldn’t want to reward your lawbreaking with a trip to dreamworld, would we?” Miles asks and Dom notes the boredom and irritation that are constantly present in his voice have gone missing.
Arthur stops fidgeting and then blinks up at Miles. “How did we get here?” He asks suddenly.
“What?” Dom says before he can stop himself and he can see the tiny pang of irritation tighten between Miles’ shoulder blades.
“How’d we get here?” Arthur repeats but realization is breaking all over his face and ends in a giant, teenaged smile. “We’re in a dream right now, aren’t we?”
Miles’ eyebrows raise, just a millimeter. “What makes you think that, Arthur?”
“No beginning. No getting here. And your face doesn’t quite move right.” The last comment is directed at Cobb, who grimaces.
“So that means that I can change stuff, right? I read your papers, Mr. Miles.” Arthur is walking around the room, inspecting the walls. “They were filled with pretty interesting stuff, but not stuff I could ever get working with those shit dream-sims.” Then Arthur grabs a brick and pulls, and the whole wall ripples. His eyes grow wide, and he looks impossibly young (was I ever that young? Dom thinks). Arthur darts out of the holding room before Dom can stand up and Miles doesn’t look mad. He might, Dom thinks, even look a little impressed.
Arthur is making the hallway stretch on forever, and he’s running until he suddenly hurls himself into a metal door at the end. It makes a cartoonish sound and bounces him up into the air and then sends him tumbling to the floor, which appears to be a giant pool of feathers. Miles might be smiling. Dom has never seen it before. Arthur is laughing and laughing, and then the dream ends.
Dom Cobb doesn’t see his face again for six years, and in that time, begins to forget.
Arthur, it turns out, never leaves.
---
2015-05-01
Re: Project Gargoyle
While the recent breakthrough in the utilization of Somnacin in concert with PASIV devices to explore the sub consciousness is remarkable, Project Gargoyle wishes to look for a more direct solution for training and information absorption and extraction.
Dr. M---------- from Japan has recently been loaned to us to begin the surgical work needed to start this research. He comes highly recommended in both the fields of neurosurgery and cybernetics.
I believe I have found a suitable candidate for the 15th slot. Though he has a criminal record, his skills with subconscious manipulation make him a far better choice than the other two considered candidates. I feel that his young age is a boon rather than a drawback, as he might take better to the invasive procedure.
Best of all, it is doubtful he will be missed. Please see attached documents and send me your responses as swiftly as you are able.
Best -
Stephen Miles
---
2019 AD
Miles doesn’t often bring him to see projects that are even more secretive than dream-sharing, so Dom knows that whatever he is about to see is going to be extraordinary.
“I just thought this might be something you’d like to see,” Miles says quietly. "Somebody should see it, at any rate." There’s a softness in his eyes that Dom has previously associated with talk of his beautiful, brilliant daughter.
They’re in the bowels of the UCLA building that Cobb and Miles do most of their research in, but Cobb has never traveled below the ground floor. His keycard doesn’t grant him access, and he can feel the security guards scrutinizing him as he shuffles through long dim hallways behind Miles.
They finally come to whatever mysterious place Miles has been leading him to, and that’s when Dom begins to think that maybe he’s dreaming.
The hallway is lined with one-way windows, and seems to stretch longer than the building above ground does. He counts sixteen at a glance, but it’s the inside of the rooms that’s really startling. Miles continues to move toward the end of the hall and Cobb only gets glimpses of castles and weapons and oceans shimmering on each of them.
The room at the very end is where Miles stops. “This one,” he breathes, almost reverently.
The screen inside is swirling with bright primary colors, sometimes stopping to build shapes, as though someone has animated a Kandinsky painting. Beneath the plasma screen, Cobb can make out the outline of a man in a lab coat, and a chair inside. It’s big, like a dentist’s chair, and covered in complex looking wiring.
Miles presses a button by the door. “Have him run through training exercise Delta,” he says into a metal grate. The man inside nods and leans over the chair.
Cobb finally gets a good look. There are straps, holding down what appears to be a teenager. There are cords attached to him at all parts, but especially around his head, where something looks to be plugged in. The screen is the only light inside, and that combined with the haze of the glass makes it hard to discern any features.
“He’s connected directly,” Miles says, as though that’s a clue, and the screen begins to shift.
It’s a field that’s slowly becoming a forest, and Cobb catches his breath. It’s like watching time lapse photography, but the trees look different than any forest he’s ever seen. The greens are rich and lush even through the glass, and the leaves unfurl with a regal grace into heart and spade shapes.
Stone walls appear and then are choked by vines, crumbling as the plants overpower the structure. Morning glories open and close, wither and die.
“Breathtaking, isn’t he?” Miles says, and Cobb doesn’t understand but knows better than to ask. “It’s like a little window into the subconscious mind. He’s going through 100 years of a place at once.”
Cobb nods uncertainly and then Miles sighs. “And I suppose there are the more practical applications.”
He presses the button again. “Run data protocol 18b for subject ‘Dominick Cobb.’”
“What are you asking him to do?” The use of his full name makes him nervous.
Figure 01
The screen flickers and the woods disappear, and Cobb is filled with a regret he can’t name. His own face then pops onto the screen, an old photograph. He sees documents fly by next to it on screen and can make out things like his undergraduate thesis, old building models, his high school report cards, and it stutters to a stop on a page of his high school senior yearbook, the superlatives. He’s voted most likely to succeed, and his younger self looks stern in an oversized sports coat.
Miles chuckles. “Number 0015 has quite the sense of humor. I’ll miss that.”
“Oh?”
Miles shakes his head. “Project Gargoyle is set to be terminated in two days, meaning its test subjects will have to be dealt with accordingly. A pity, really, but the American government often gets wasteful.”
“So what’s your involvement here?”
“There’s quite a bit of overlap in the brain scanning technology here and the work I’ve been involved with concerning the PASIV. I’m sure you can see how this would be useful to us.”
Cobb nods. Miles presses the button. “Dr. M, if you would be so kind as to take a moment.”
The shadow in the room leans over the figure in the chair for a moment, and then emerges. He locks the door but leaves the key and its accompanying lanyard there and he and Miles talk as they start walking back toward the exit.
Cobb freezes, and he knows the key is there because they’re only afraid of the boy inside getting out, not anyone walking in. Then again, the note of finality in Miles’ voice suggests that won’t be a problem for very long. He moves out of adrenaline, the idea forming at the same speed as his limbs moving.
Cobb turns the key softly and carefully eases the door open, peering in.
“Can you get those straps off?” he hisses.
“What?” the voice is young, and raspy, and disoriented.
“The straps? Can you get them off? I don’t have much time.”
“I…yeah, yeah I can,” is the response, and the body starts to move. Cobb can see one thin wrist break free.
“Good,” Cobb says and his heart is beating so loudly he thinks that Miles should be able to hear it. “I’m leaving this door open. You need to run.”
“What do you mean-“
“Run.”
Cobb spins around, the door not clicking behind him as he catches up with Miles in the corridor.
He doesn’t hear a word about Project Gargoyle from Miles after that.
---
[March 16, 2026
If you’re reading this, it probably means I’ve started to forget things. Try not to worry too much, though I know that’ll be hard. The memories, they mostly come back now.
I can already see your face though.
I wouldn’t believe me, either.
But they do. They will.]
---
2021 AD
When Dom Cobb goes looking for a point man, he doesn’t expect to be given a twenty year old kid. He’s been looking for a while, and most of the ones with university training have no idea how to be criminals, how to bend the rules, especially the dreamers with corporate sponsors. But most of the lowlifes he’s tried out can’t take more than one job. The trouble with most thieves, he’s noticed, is that they have very little imagination. The information is always solid, but never quite thorough enough, and the jobs have been messy.
“Hello, Tony,” Cobb says, not bothering to hide his distaste. Tony’s in import/export, a nice name for high class larceny, and had contacted him. It was a light and rather distressing phone call where Tony had named an absurdly high price and had laughed a little too much. Still, Cobb is sick of looking, and Tony’s merchandise has always been high quality.
In the bar, Tony has a gangly youth with him, tousled dark hair and glittering eyes and bad posture.
Cobb looks skeptical, and Tony notices. “Oh, he’s the best,” the man says with a leer, pushing the kid forward so he stumbles a little. “MIT dropout. He’s a little research computer.”
The boy has the slimness of a teenager, and doesn’t meet his eyes. Instead he fidgets, pulling on his earlobe and eyes darting around the room. He’s wearing jeans that are too long, frayed around his feet, and the white t-shirt he’s wearing looks a little worse for wear. He’s got a backpack in one hand and with a startling movement, he shoves the other at Cobb.
“I’m Arthur,” he says, his eyes sliding right over Cobb’s face.
The handshake is surprisingly confident and Cobb smiles. “Dom Cobb. Arthur what?”
The kid jerks his hand back. “Just Arthur,” he mumbles, looking at the floor. His face is entirely inexpressive and it’s deeply unsettling, and a tad familiar.
“Like what you see?” Tony asks with a smile that makes Cobb want to punch him in the mouth.
“I guess you’ll have to wait until I get a test drive. You’ll get the rest of the money after the first job.”
Tony laughs. “Be seeing you, kid.” Arthur sharply shakes his head and follows Dom out.
The kid is quiet on the ride to the hotel room. Cobb is glad he only booked one hotel room, two beds, for the evening. The boy is all angles and seems sharp, and Cobb wants to keep a close eye on him.
“Is that all you have?” Cobb asks and the boy carefully lowers his backpack onto the bed nearest the large window.
“Do…Do you mind if I smoke?” Arthur asks in reply, already holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Dom does, but just nods and the boy gives him a tiny smile.
“So,” Dom starts, but he is abruptly interrupted.
“I’m the best at what I do,” Arthur says, his brows knitting together, looking troubled. His hair is longer than seems stylish, and it’s messy. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s just that Tony paid the best money. The rest doesn’t really matter.” He waves the hand holding the cigarette, painting a veil of smoke in front of his face. “Tony does what he wants to do with anybody, but he got the best jobs. The most challenging.” He closes his eyes on every inhale of the cigarette.
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” Cobb lies, keeping his voice light.
“Tony just wants you to give me back, but I think you’ve got the most interesting jobs now, don’t you?”
“Do you have a suit?” Cobb wants this line of conversation to end. Tony has a reputation but Cobb doesn’t want to think of anyone touching this strange boy.
“I’d kill him, you know, if he tried that,” the boy says with a barking laugh, but his expression doesn’t change. Cobb wonders for a brief moment if Tony had somehow found a psychic. “And no. All I really got is that laptop,” he says, gesturing to the backpack.
“S’all I really need and I like traveling light.”
“We’re going shopping tomorrow.”
-
The boy’s demeanor is entirely changed the next morning, and he is sitting perfectly still while eating a continental breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant. He does not make a single unnecessary movement while neatly devouring scrambled eggs. Cobb watches, slightly amused. This kid could be the one he’s been looking for.
“So why do I need a suit?” he asks suddenly. “Tony only ever wanted intel, but you want me to meet clients, right?”
Cobb nods. “That’s right.”
The boy looks thoughtful. “It’s gonna have to be a real nice suit. Yours looks pretty suave.”
Cobb’s eyebrows rise on their own accord.
“I ain’t really ever worn a suit.”
“You’ll need to get used to it for the dreams. You’ll need to blend in, and we normally do corporate hits.”
The boy nods solemnly, processing the information. “So you really are the dreams guy. Tony wasn’t sure if you were full of shit or not, right? But I figure, who would make that up. Plus, you know. Your wife is head of a research team on that.”
“My wife.”
Arthur nods. “Right, she’s really pretty. And she seems really smart. Her paper on chemically enhanced dreamscaping was real interesting; I think she’s got some really fun ideas. I’ll get to go under, right?”
“You read her thesis?”
“Yeah well, you think I’m just going to take a job with no background research?”
Cobb supposes he shouldn’t really be surprised.
The kid puts a black folder on the table and talks around a mouthful of toast. “So here’s the info on your client - guy isn’t that great with security but took at least one class in how to fight against Mind Crimes, right? I don’t know if it stuck, but you know, can’t be too cautious with guys that seem dumb but climb up the corporate ladder like that.”
Dom feels his eyebrows try their best to climb into his hairline.
He gets a small smile from the kid. “Well, you’re Dom the Dreamer, right?” More toast is pushed into his mouth. “So I figured you’d want to know all that kind of shit.” Hands are waving. “I mean anybody could tell you some of the stuff in there, but you probably want to know like, who broke his heart in high school - and it was a girl named Lacy White, I shit you not - and his psych profile and stuff.”
“When…when did you do this?”
Arthur shrugs. “I don’t sleep that much.”
Dom nods, slowly paging through the report. It’s thorough, better looking than anything he’d received from his past assistants.
“Good work,” he says and the boy smiles shyly.
-
Arthur goes straight to the most expensive area of the store, where an older English gentleman is willing to dress you piece by piece. His hands are roaming over all kinds of expensive fabrics and Dom wants to groan with frustration. He promised the kid a suit, but he wasn’t sure he had the cash on hand for whatever three-piece monstrosity Arthur is surely going to pick out. Mal is going to kill him, he can feel it already. Buying a suit for a street kid, to do his stupid job, why doesn’t Cobb just ask for an expense account for this, and what’s wrong with Mal’s work anyway? Cobb doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he needs someone he can both trust and not love.
He’s the best, Dom tells himself, it’ll be worth it.
It would be worth any price, he decides firmly as the kid walks - no, saunters - out of the dressing room in a burgundy dress shirt, skinny black tie, black vest, and suspenders with little gold snaps. His pants fit his slim hips, and he has the jacket slung jauntily over his shoulder. And he’s changed, again, somehow. He is exuding confidence as he steps onto a platform in front of a three paneled mirror.
“What do you think? I think I’m good at being a suave motherfucker.” Arthur twirls, and the employee looks somewhat amused. He slips the jacket on and the twitchy kid looks like an attractive man, the clothes fit him like a second skin.
Dom shuts his mouth. “I think that’ll do.”
His blank face breaks into a wide smile at Dom from the mirror. “Cool.”
“You’re going to need to use a little less slang. Be a little more polished. Intimidating,” Dom says, and watches as Arthur straightens his shoulders and runs a hand through his hair, smoothing it out.
Dom Cobb does not know it, but the moment the kid steps off the dais, his partner is being born.
Figure 2
-
Mal meets Arthur and is skeptical. She is cordial because she is always unerringly polite, even though when Dom brings Arthur to the lab he touches everything. The kid turns out to be so frighteningly knowledgeable that no one chases him off.
“You don’t know what he’s been up to!” she hisses in the back of the lab as Arthur explains to her partner that his sedation compound is too strong, like ‘using a mallet when a ball peen will do.’ Arthur illustrates with bird-like hand gestures.
“He’s not like a stray dog, Mal,” Cobb replies, frowning, but for all his observation, Dom doesn’t understand her wariness. Cobb missed the careful arch of Arthur’s neck and the delicate splay of his fingers.
Mal doesn’t miss these things. Her eyes are sharp because she might love him, but they haven’t fallen in love yet. She thinks they both know this, and they’re trying, arcing closer, lines approaching zero.
What Mal loves is her research. Cobb loves the dreaming as much as she does, she knows, but he still wants more from her and from the world, a commitment to something else, maybe to them. Together, though, they are explorers, conspirators. They have years and years and years of secrets between them.
There is a lot they haven’t learned, though. She doesn’t know if she wants a family, and the deeper into the dreamscape they go, the less she wants to be tethered, to be grounded to anything that could keep her from there. And Cobb, she thinks he doesn’t know that they are both too stubborn to give up hope that the other will change. He doesn’t know how Mal watches. How she notices all the delicate places in Arthur because she thinks that Cobb might have finally found someone willing to do anything for him. To change for him.
The boy shifts his weight and doesn’t smile when she shakes his hand.
She relents, though, the first time Arthur goes out with the two of them. Cobb has dressed him up and the suit seems to restrain some of his abject otherness. He acts polished, holding open doors and pulling out chairs, and speaks without hopping from topic to topic. Arthur in a suit gets linear, streamlined.
Mal makes Arthur laugh and Cobb feels strange for a second.
-
The early days of dreamsharing are crude. The drugs alone are guaranteed to make the dreamer sick, but beyond those, every dreamscape holds an edge of the fantastical.
Only the most skilled dreamers are able to obscure reality and a dream - Miles, for one, held this power longer than almost anyone else in the business.
“It’s a difficult skill to teach,” Cobb warns the first time he takes Arthur under. “You might not get it for a while.”
“The first step is to create a strong conceptualization of yourself,” Cobb says, and turns around to face Arthur. He’s had partners arrive in the dreamscape naked, or impossibly handsome, or thirty pounds heavier than their actual form.
Arthur, however, appears to know exactly who he is. His dream form is wearing the same suit his corporeal form, his hair is the same slightly unruly length. He smiles, and it has the same wary blankness it does topside.
“It’s not my first time, if you’re wondering,” he says, and then he builds a skyscraper.
Cobb is suddenly drenched in shadow, standing in the blank concrete expanse he uses as a base landscape, staring into a suddenly blue sky, marred with fluffy clouds and 27 stories of steel and glass. Arthur’s left hand is raised toward the sky, palm tilted up, and he smiles.
“You sure didn’t learn that at MIT,” Cobb says dryly.
Arthur shakes his head and lifts his other hand, holding them both up, then pulling them wide apart, conducting a symphony of buildings. Brother and sister towers explode out of the ground, creating a full city block.
“No, not at MIT.”
“So…where?” Cobb asks and follows Arthur as he moves toward a door.
Arthur shrugs at him and props the door open, motioning Cobb inside.
He’d been expecting an empty skeleton, but the inside is a dizzying crosshatch of staircases.
“So where are the projections?” Arthur asks as he starts climbing, running up stairs like they’re nothing. Cobb feels out of shape, and tries to keep up.
“I don’t,” Cobb fumbles as he sucks in air, “We’re not under deep enough. I like to save that for a later lesson.” He is out of breath as he follows Arthur higher and higher up the steps.
Arthur pauses at the fifteenth floor and levels a critical gaze at Cobb, who hunches over wheezing.
“I’m a little sad you don’t recognize me yet, Cobb.”
He almost snaps and tells him not to forget the Mr., but he doesn’t really know how to respond. He watches as Arthur runs his thumb behind his left ear reflexively. His eyes are constantly darting.
“What’re you watching for?” Cobb finally asks when inhalation becomes less of a chore. Arthur made the stairs steep.
Arthur immediately stills. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Cobb says, gesturing out with his hands, “you look like someone’s going to jump out at any moment.”
Arthur looks away. “Maybe I’m just cautious.”
Later, when they start to train with projections, Dom realizes he’s already an excellent shot.
---
2017-06-19
Memo: Side Effects
Side effects of Project Gargoyle appear to be non-fatal at this point in the experiment.
However, they are quite potent, and the longer the subject remains in an “active” state, or plugged into the computer directly, the more the brain increases serotonin production to a worrying and possibly addictive degree.
This is creating a withdrawal state for many of the subjects, and several are experiencing bouts of depression, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, and paranoid delusions. These episodes seem to be few and far between, but we will continue monitoring.
The most troubling side effects of active use is that of depersonalization, where the subject becomes disassociated with itself and then believes it is trapped in a dream. This is the effect that was seen in the early tests of Somnacin in relation to the Dreamshare project with prolonged PASIV use, along with chronic insomnia, and this is the effect that we were hoping to avoid in Gargoyle.
Thankfully, REM sleep does not appear to be affected at this time, like the subjects in the first Dreamshare tests, so we are hopeful that with a new round of subjects, that the addictive factor could be mitigated with use of more traditional pharmaceuticals.
---
2021 AD
The research in dream architecture and dream compounds that Mal and Dom embark on isn’t simply done in the vacuum of the PASIV lab buried in the halls of the UCLA campus, but Cobb often wishes that were the case.
Instead, he has to fight for grants, to convince men in suits that cost more than what they earn on each job that they need more money.
Mal hates going, hates begging for money.
“They’ll think I’m just there because of my father,” she hisses at Cobb for the thousandth time, only now Arthur is sitting there at the table in Cobb’s apartment.
“I wish your dad would show up; probably be a lot easier to get the cash we need for your new Somnacin study.”
Arthur’s eyes are bright and interested that morning,
“Who’s your father?” he asks, but it is barely a question.
Mal laughs, and it sounds bitter. “Stephen Miles, the great grandpapa of dream technology.”
Arthur stills instantly, like something’s just been confirmed.
“Oh,” he says quietly, and stares down at his hands.
Cobb won’t, can’t look at him for an hour, and won’t let himself think about why that is.
-
Miles taught Cobb a light touch, how to enter someone’s mind without destroying everything in it. Cobb thinks Arthur might benefit from that, but anytime training with him is brought up, Arthur gets skittish. Gets younger, somehow, as if all the polish to his speech and movements has been rubbed away.
“I don’t want to meet him, Cobb,” Arthur finally says while they’re under, working on a landscape that Dom plans to sell as a training exercise to the Navy.
Arthur’s holding a semiautomatic in his hand and shoots a projection in the chest as he says it.
“And I don’t know why you don’t already know that,” he says, looking away from their antagonists for a moment. His eyes are dark, a little angry.
He’s killed a second later.
-
They work for governments, mostly. Cobb tries his best to keep Mal out of the field, in the lab, tweaking Somnacin formulas. He also doesn’t take Arthur out in the field with him, but that’s harder to explain. She misses dreaming, but she loves creating any way she can. She thinks that’s why her and Dom work well together - they fill up empty spaces immediately.
And that’s why Arthur clings to them, she thinks. Arthur will lock himself in studies for hours, not coming out and not making noises other than the slight hum of his laptop. So diligent, she thinks. Trying to fill up all the blank space he seems to have inside.
-
Out in the waking world, Cobb is only a passable shot, has a lousy punch, and cannot escape from handcuffs. His strong will is the only thing that gives him certain skills in the dreamworld. So when the jobs get more dangerous, when he hears gunshots in reality for the first time, Cobb decides they must be prepared for anything.
Arthur takes to this training eagerly, to the point where he surprises Cobb with his resourcefulness, his willingness to push.
“If he told you to jump off a bridge, then, would you do it?” Mal asks sharply the day she enters the room to see Cobb tenderly blindfolding his point man.
Arthur’s left shoulder lifts and falls - most other movement is restricted with rope. “Is it a dream? Is there a tactical advantage to jumping off the bridge?”
Mal sighs, a huge heave of exasperation and she throws up her hands even though he can’t see them. “That’s insane.”
“I trust him not to ask me to jump unless I need to.”
Cobb hears Mal storm out, hears the front door slam open and then closed, and hears her car pull away. And then suddenly all he hears is Arthur’s steady breathing. Cobb realizes his hand is still cradling the back of Arthur’s head.
“Maybe you trust me too much,” Cobb says softly, his face too close to Arthur’s. He feels Arthur’s muscles stiffen below him, rigid in the chair he’s tied to. Arthur is silent, so Cobb kisses him.
Figure 3
Arthur reacts immediately, whole body tensing and straining up up up against the ropes and toward Cobb’s mouth. He blossoms, cheeks reddening.
Arthur’s mouth is wet when Cobb pulls back.
“Is this…is this a test?” Arthur is rarely hesitant, so the hitch is a signal. Cobb ignores it and kisses him again, leaving his hands on Arthur’s bound shoulders.
“What do you think?”
Arthur shakes his head. “You love Mal.” Arthur is logic, pure and simple. A processor - data in, data out.
So it’s a test, Cobb thinks, and hits the stopwatch. It takes Arthur two minutes to escape the chair, and another three to leave the building for a long stretch of time. Cobb would ask him where he went, when he disappeared every so often, but Cobb knows that he’ll get an answer.
-
He tells himself it’s that Arthur is simply a lovely creature, that it’s perfectly natural to be attracted, but he knows this isn’t what is happening.
Maybe it is that Arthur is unlike anything Cobb knows, and when he speaks there’s a tug at the back of Cobb’s brain like a memory of a dream. It slips from him each time he tries to find it, and maybe the tactile hit of skin to skin will bring it back.
And Arthur comes back a few hours later, bearing ice cream as an apology. Cobb’s a little drunk, feeling reckless when left alone in his apartment.
They eat, Arthur seated in an armchair, Cobb on the couch, quietly.
“Thanks,” Cobb says finally. “For coming back.”
“It’s just ice cream,” Arthur says, eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
And Cobb gets up, walks until he’s hovering over Arthur, and he leans down.
Cobb’s tongue presses into his mouth, cold and sweet, and he can feel Arthur’s breathing hitch through his nose, the twinge of muscle from the effort of not jerking away.
He pulls back first but doesn’t move away, crowding Arthur in his chair.
“I don’t understand, though,” Arthur says softly, running two fingers along his bottom lip. “You. You’ve got Mal.”
“Yeah,” Cobb says.
“I don’t think you want me,” Arthur says, but Cobb stares at him until he starts to believe otherwise. He can see the shift in the line of Arthur’s mouth, the slant of his shoulders.
Part of it, he thinks as he grasps the sides of Arthur’s jaw and kisses him, kisses him deep, is the thrill of something no one’s ever taken. Arthur makes noises into his mouth, and Cobb doesn’t know how Arthur came to be his, but he knows with a gut certainty that no one’s ever loved him quite enough before.
It’s different, too, than what he feels with Mal. She can still inspire a curl of fear in his stomach, she makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Arthur is alien in a different way, something calming. Something steady.
It takes Cobb a moment to notice that Arthur’s pushing at him, shoving against his chest. Not hard - Arthur could topple him, knows how to unbalance him. He draws back and Arthur’s cheeks are stained with a flush, his mouth open, eyes worried.
“Cobb, I don’t even think you’re gay.”
At that, Cobb realizes that he’s not hard. He’s not even turned on, even though his blood is pumping like he’s run a few miles, roaring a bit in his ears.
“I just,” he starts, running a hand through the soft hair on Arthur’s neck. “Sometimes I just want to touch you.”
Arthur hums contentedly and he runs his fingers through his scalp. “Okay,” he says simply.
“I need to, sometimes you’re -“ Cobb stops.
Arthur nods, and Cobb just breathes out and thinks about wires, machines, and memories he refuses to examine. “We probably shouldn’t tell anyone.”
A smile curls along Arthur’s face, and Cobb’s not sure if it’s devious or naive. “Oh, like a secret.”
He surges up and leans up into Cobb’s ear, words hot. “I’m good at those.”
-
Mal is a scientist, and has always been a scientist. She analyzes and then re-analyzes, categorizes and collects.
Arthur’s swollen lips in the morning, Cobb’s distracted glances. Long lunches. The knock of ankles against each other under her kitchen table. She tries to shove all of these observations under the title of ‘nothing to worry about,’ but she can’t stop calculating. Each brush of hands, the way they lean into each other while they sleep.
Every result must be replicable, though, for a true experiment.
So Mal finds herself staring at Arthur’s hands as he draws, smudges of graphite on the edge of his wrist. She watches as he pushes his hair back behind his ears. The movement of his slim hips.
And he is too much for her, sometimes. He pushes her in the lab not for himself or his dreams, but because he knows she loves the challenge. He works on his French because he knows she loves secrets. He carries with him the heavy feeling of loss and she wonders where he keeps everything else. Arthur is being filled with life with Cobb and Mal.
Dom has already begun being less to her. His buildings, his dreams, his plans, become more paper to clutter her house. Nothing about him excites her, because he is full of hesitance, resistance, only willing to push himself (and Arthur) but unwilling to let her push at all. She knows it is a stage, that it might not be permanent, and that his sharp eyed focus will be turned onto her soon enough, and she will find that grating after a time as well. It is how they love each other, she has decided - too much and too strong and then by loving around each other.
Mal knows that once Arthur surpasses Dom in skill it will break both their hearts.
She watches him stir stew on her stove and thinks maybe it is time to experiment. His cuffs are rolled to his elbows and she shifts up against him in the kitchen, and kisses his cheek. It is light, a question.
“Mal,” he says, more of a sigh, and she moves behind him.
“What is it, Arthur?” she purrs into his ear, and slides her hands down his arms, notching her fingers between his. The spoon he was using sinks forgotten into the stew.
Figure 4
“Mal,” he says again, insistently.
“Dom’s out for the next few days.”
He shivers and pauses. “I know that.”
“So what,” she asks and presses the pads of her fingers into his palm, “are you doing here?”
His hands stay lax. “He…he asked me to take care of you.”
She smiles into the back of his neck.
-
Arthur is still dreaming at the age of 20, and Mal watches the slow rise and fall of his chest. He is in the throes of REM, and twitching slightly, and Mal cannot help but feel sad because, soon, this will be nothing but a memory.
But that night she dreams for the first time in five years, her body curled up against Arthur’s, and she dreams of Dom.
She wakes heavy with the guilt that comes with the knowledge of love.
-
She is a dreamer, a chemist, and until recently, a pointman.
Mal Miles knows how to plan, so she invites Dom, and only Dom, over to dinner and makes up a pan of lasagna and buys three bottles of wine.
Half way through the salad and their first bottle, she fixes Cobb with a serious look. “I think we should move in together.”
Cobb stops, comically, with his fork poised to enter his mouth, eyes wide. “You what?”
She can’t hold his gaze long, so she wraps a hand around his wrist. “I think we should move in together.”
He puts down his fork very carefully and looks at her as though she’s something precious or something fragile. And then he shifts - he’s the one holding her hand in both of his.
“Mallorie Miles, will you marry me?”
She knows when she’s been outmaneuvered.
“I,” she says, and stops, because she knows she loves him, she will love him until her heart stops, even if that love is not always easy. Even if she doesn’t know how to make her love kind. “I’m no good for you, Dominick Cobb.”
He smiles and when she smiles back she feels like her face is cracking into a thousand pieces.
He resumes eating his salad, as though they haven’t suddenly side-stepped an important life decision.
“Did you ask my father for permission?” she asks, a sly slant to her lips, and he stiffens again.
“Your father…no. I didn’t ask him.”
She laughs. “Good. Arthur is afraid of him, you know.”
And Dom looks away guiltily. “I’m sorry about him.”
Mal keeps smiling. “Oh Dom. He is entrancing.”
He shrugs, looks sheepish. “Yes. But.”
“But?” she asks, laying down her fork. His tone is serious, even more so than the proposal was.
“But he wasn’t you. It’s always you, in the end.”
A week later, she brings him oleander, yellow tulips, mulberry. A week later, she says yes.
-
After they move in together, Mal finds a job that needs a forger, so she can bring in Eames. They’d met, all over the country, until they both recognized what it was they did. It had been a thrill, her first time in Eames’ mind. He put her at ease, and always ruffled Cobb a bit. She liked that, had liked him for a brief moment in time. He did some Special Forces work, she knew, but other than that he was simply a handsome mystery. It seemed fitting.
They’ve rented out a small townhouse in Santiago del Chile, and Arthur is a little wide-eyed because she’s bullied Cobb into taking them both along. He speaks much better Spanish than either of them, even though it’s a skill she doesn’t remember him possessing when he first became Cobb’s stray pet.
Regardless, they take the master bedroom and let Arthur do what Arthur does best, and when Eames arrives, Arthur is professional, straight tie and brushed curls and dossiers in hand.
Eames flips through it, eyebrows arching in appreciation of good work. “This is thorough.”
They’re sitting around the kitchen table, eating empanadas Arthur’s bargained for at the market.
Arthur blinks, midbite. “Obviously.”
Mal can see the instant that Eames decides he likes Arthur, can see it in his crooked grin. “Oh? I’ve worked with plenty of points who couldn’t dredge up this much information by the last week of a job.”
Arthur seems ill at ease with the compliment, but he takes it with a shrug.
“I think,” Eames continues as he flips through the photos, “this could be rather fun.”
-
They have some time, but Eames spends his first week there tailing the mark, an oil executive who has been stalling on a contract with the U.S. government for imports.
In that time, Cobb and Mal make models. He’d missed this part of the job, working with her instead of talking to her each night on the phone. Having a team is easier than he expected, though he’s still worried that gunmen will arrive at any moment and kill all the things he’s worked so hard to know and protect.
The mazes Mal builds are beautiful, too perfect. It’s his job to randomize them, to knock down walls and put in secret doors.
They reconvene at a restaurant where Eames orders bistec a lo pobre and talks with a mouthful of runny eggs.
“I think I’ve found the key. The mark seems to have a mistress.”
Cobb and Mal look at each other and grin.
“It always seems to be that way for these subjects, doesn’t it?” she says.
“She seems to be a good forging target. I think if Arthur could get me a decent portfolio on her, I’d be able to track her down fairly quickly.”
Arthur looks up from his ceviche. “I’d rather not waste my time.”
Eames frowns, his expression sliding from amiable to hard and combative almost instantly. “And why the hell not?”
“Well, for one thing, the mark is gay,” Arthur says, not looking at any of them and moving food around on his plate. “So I don’t think he’s going to go for a woman you think is his mistress.”
“Excuse me?” Eames says. “I think I would have bloody well spotted the difference between a man and a woman he was spending a little extra time with during the work day.”
“She’s his sister. It’s on page 45 of the updated dossier I emailed you three days ago.” Arthur pops some fish into his mouth and looks steadily across the table at Eames.
Dom isn’t sure when he’s supposed to intervene, and he doesn’t know how to break the steady increase in tension.
Mal just laughs. “Oh, Arthur, were we supposed to read all that?”
“Why else would I send it?” Arthur frowns.
Eames’ eyes stay narrowed, and the light feeling Cobb had been holding on to disappears.
-
However, the next morning, Eames’ temper has cooled. He’s arrived at their town house with pastries for breakfast as some kind of apology. Dom is sitting at the table drinking coffee, and Mal wakes Arthur up and steers him to the kitchen.
Arthur immediately dives into the brown paper bag and pulls up an empanada full of sweet cheese and smiles at Eames as he sits down. His hair is still sleep mussed and he’s wearing soft looking flannel pants.
“So, how does a brat like you know so much?” Eames asks.
Dom watches them look at each other, and he’s surprised that Arthur’s making eye contact this early in the morning. Then he watches as Arthur’s gaze slips over to his face, and he notices the small curve of a smirk at the corner of his mouth. Arthur points to a spot behind his left ear, un-phased by Eames’ unkind language. Dom thinks that Eames just hasn’t learned how to get under Arthur’s skin yet, and he knows that Eames will try until he finds the right barbs.
“It’s gargoyle programming.” A pause. “And a degree from MIT.”
Gargoyle programming. The words hit Cobb like a freight train and synapses start firing all at once. Something he did once, three years ago and then told himself to never think of again lest Miles, roaming through his brain, find it. Extract it. Find the boy he’d help escape. He’s known, of course, but he’s never let himself really dwell on it, believe that knowledge.
Eames shakes his head and looks suspicious. “Arthur, darling, you can’t possibly be a Gargoyle. That program never existed. Rumors. Myths.”
“Obfuscation, all of it,” Arthur says neatly, but Cobb’s distracted momentarily by the way Eames purrs the word darling and the way Arthur seems to lean into it, ever so slightly. He thinks he and Eames are going to have a talk about keeping his hands off his pointman.
A strange little smile is playing across Arthur’s mouth. “It made me forget some stuff, but it was really fucking cool. I mean, uh, it was really.” Arthur fumbles for a second. “I could think so much faster. It was amazing.” He flashes teeth in a victorious grin at selecting an appropriate term.
“Was?” Eames is almost gaping now, thinks Cobb sullenly. Mal seems entranced, smiling around a pastry.
“It didn’t work permanently. Big failure.” Arthur shrugs and shoves food into his mouth. “But I’m pretty sure you’re quite familiar with all of it, Mr. Eames, or I wouldn’t have told you at all.”
“What does he mean by that, Eames?” Cobb asks, butting himself in before Eames continued, picking up on the dropped thread of conversation.
“I know it was supposed to give these kids a permanent stream of information that could be controlled or let loose or what have you. They’d be able to access information solely with their brains.”
Arthur has tapped out of the conversation and is very concerned with chewing methodically and looking around the room.
“They’d be able to anticipate, to know. Their brain becomes part machine, a little faster, a lot better than our naturally puny processing power.”
Cobb stares in disbelief. “I see.”
Eames shrugs. “It didn’t work very well, from what I saw. The candidates were all very promising, but most of them were pushed too hard. Met a few in the Special Forces.”
Cobb makes a sound of agreement in his throat as Eames mimes a head exploding. Eames has no fucking idea.
“But, it’s not like they were really human at that point.” Eames is staring at Arthur with something like fondness and awe, but Arthur doesn’t see.
He’s doing the crossword.
-
Cobb isn’t wonderful at research. It was, after all, what Arthur had entered his life to do. But that doesn’t stop him from taking time on the job to dig through the University’s protected electronic files, trying to see if there was any scrap of record left of the 15 children that he once saw, of the last one that he’s sure he set free and is almost positive is currently in Chile with him. He just wants to know for sure, something he’s carefully avoided until now.
He calls Miles, carefully, just to see if he will acknowledge or deny. “Oh, my boy,” Miles starts and Cobb steels himself for the familiar feel of that program doesn’t exist but instead hears, “the subjects involved in that project were disposed of, you know that. If I were to hear of any survivors, I would be forced to order their termination.” Miles hangs up politely.
-
Cobb watches Eames carefully learn about Arthur. Eames, Cobb remembers, is tactile. He likes to learn with his hands, to force out little tics and jumps and quirks from people. While they normally need doppelgangers, Cobb has seen him make up forgeries out of thin air, wholly unique creations built out of bits and pieces he's stolen over the years.
Mal wants to help, he can see that. She tells Eames what sort of sweets he likes, steers the conversation to music. Cobb's spent a lot more time unraveling him, though, but he keeps his secrets to himself.
Just little things, like how Arthur hates being touched by strangers.
Working in close quarters sets everyone on edge regardless of the locale and the difficulty of the job, but Eames was normally agreeable enough. And once he discovered Arthur's not quite normal, Cobb was doubly sure Eames would give up learning all of his little tics.
Instead, Eames keeps grabbing Arthur's shoulder, brushing over his fingers, tracing his wrist. Arthur stiffens or bristles each time, and Cobb thinks that means maybe Mal has failed in her quest to foist him off on someone new.
Until he walks into their makeshift office kitchen to moans.
“I've finally found something that doesn't make him flinch,” Eames says cheerfully over his shoulder to Cobb, totally unabashed.
Arthur's head is resting on his crossed arms and Eames wide hands are digging into his neck. It looks predatory from where Cobb’s standing.
“Almost punched him,” Arthur mumbles, but his voice is honey-slurred in pleasure. His eyes are barely visibly when he glances over at Cobb, and he smiles.
“The boy has never had a massage before,” Eames says, a little incredulous but also a little fond.
Cobb hums in agreement. “Product of an unconventional childhood.”
Eames looks at him again, weighing something, still rubbing his thumbs into the taut muscles of Arthur's shoulders.
Mal comes downstairs and just smiles at them, sparkling, until Cobb coughs.
“I think the massage party is over, you two. We’re still here on a job.”
-
Arthur takes the four of them under to test out the dream. Mal grabs Cobb by the wrist when they arrive on a street in Rome, gray stones and people surrounding them.
“Let’s just watch,” she says to him and pulls him to where they can see Arthur and Eames sitting outside a café. Cobb feels like he’s been watching this whole trip, everything happening just beyond his reach.
“This is amazing, Arthur,” Eames says with a smile. “But when’s the last time you’ve been here?”
“Um,” Arthur says, a faint blush tinting his cheeks. “I haven’t ever. I mean, I don’t travel very much.”
Eames peers at him suspiciously. “Everyone in this business travels.”
Arthur shrugs. “I haven’t been in the field very long.”
“Well, you missed a Macca’s on the corner there, is all.”
“Oh.”
Mal squeezes Dom’s hand and smiles at him, and he wants to feel as happy as she seems.
“It is very impressive, though. I know how fantastical Mal and Cobb can be, so seeing a good recreation. Well, being a forger, I can appreciate it,” Eames says with a smile. Maybe a leer, in Cobb’s opinion.
Arthur’s smile is shy, but it’s there.
Mal and Dom walk through the projections, some of whom look to be young amorous lovers themselves, perhaps courtesy of Eames.
“Oh, sorry. Dom left a burner on, we had to take care of it before coming under.”
Arthur frowns. “No he didn’t.”
She laughs and pats his hand and he doesn’t protest again.
-
They’re working late in the kitchen, the table covered with a maze, and Eames offers Arthur a beer.
“He’s twenty,” Cobb snaps, to which Eames shrugs his shoulders.
“Cobb, this isn’t really a great career to pick up if you’re going to be a stickler for laws of all things,” Eames says and then laughs dismissively. “Plus, we’re in Chile.”
“He’s never even been drunk!”
And at this, Eames’ eyes light up considerably. “Oh really now?”
Cobb scowls. Arthur’s cheeks tinge pink and he stutters. “I. I guess not?” He looks everywhere but Cobb’s face.
“I didn’t really tell him that so you could find out,” he whispers and Eames’ face softens just a shade before he thwacks Arthur on the back with his large hand and laughs again.
“Not to worry, I’ll take you out.”
Arthur’s smiles are getting bigger every day, Cobb thinks.
---
[09-14-2025
Fieldbook rule number 16 is the hardest one out here, but you’ll have to remember it. It could save your life too, someday, you know.
Don’t give me that face. Just make sure I sleep. Really sleep.
I know they warn about Somnacin addiction, but believe me, the alternative is worse.]
( 01) | ( 02) | ( 03)
The first time Dominick Cobb meets Arthur, just Arthur, he is 22 and the boy is 14.
Dom is studying under Dr. Stephen Miles, a man who only picks one student every five years for his combined Masters/PhD program in the dream sciences and architecture. Dr. Miles is a professor with an ornery reputation who demands excellence, and who has caused many an undergraduate to leave his office in tears.
Dom Cobb knows that he has absolutely earned his place at Miles’ side. He’s the only student who has ever completed the entire set of tests, all 25 levels, Miles had developed to weed out the weakest applicants. While Miles never seems to like him, he’s compelled to take him on as a student. Cobb supposes that will have to be enough, resolves to make him proud.
A few months into his degree program, Miles lets him know they’re traveling together to the United States, where they’ll be meeting Miles’ daughter and helping with her research at UCLA. Cobb’s noticed the only time Miles sounds tender is when talking about Mal.
They end up making a stop in Boston. “It’s like a mind-crimes “Scared Straight” program,” Miles explains on the way, distaste filling the car as he drives them to a juvenile detention in Massachusetts. “But it keeps the grant money flowing. Plus, if I must continue with this whole charade, you must as well.”
Inside, they wait, watching as a boy fights with a guard. The boy is short and chubby, but looks like he’s due for a growth spurt soon. He loses, of course, and the guard manages to shoot his neck full of sedative, which drops him to the floor.
“I do so hate prodigies.” Miles says, staring at him pointedly. “Present company excluded, I suppose.”
Miles continues, “The boy’s name is Arthur, and his father is an MIT professor, not very watchful, very important research. Arthur got caught hacking those dream-sim games with some more powerful drug, quite dreadful, but very run-of-the-mill, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll find anything special here.”
Dom isn’t sure what they’re supposed to be looking for, but doesn’t ask. Instead, they set up the machine, hook in, and get to work. The task at hand is simple - take the boy into a dream interrogation room, threaten to take him into the dream world and torture him, and then, if he doesn’t seem contrite, kill him, waking him up. Miles says the encounters almost always end with the boys and girls in sobbing messes, and the program has a very low re-entry rate.
The dream is the jail. It is a perfect replica, one Miles has honed after years of doing this tedious job. Dom is wearing someone else’s face, due to some security precaution that might have made sense a few years into a war, but doesn’t make sense decades into it, but the boy doesn’t notice, has no idea what Dom is supposed to look like.
Arthur sits in an orange jumpsuit expectantly when Dom sits down in front of him, a metal table between them. He places the briefcase holding the PASIV unit between them, and Miles simply stands behind him.
“What do you have to say for yourself, Mister…Arthur.” Miles raises an eyebrow as he looks down at the kid. Dom thinks the face Miles has chosen is quite intimidating, very drill sergeant, but the boy simply stares up at him with wonder.
“That I’m glad to meet you!” The boy is giddy with adolescent excitement and Dom feels incredibly old.
“Oh?”
“Well, I wanted to meet the great Stephen Miles, of course!” Arthur smiles widely, which then quickly vanishes. “Not that you’re him, right? You don’t look it. But maybe you use fake photos. One of the boys said that Stephen Miles sometimes came to tell us off and that we’d get to use the PASIV device!”
“And…that’s why you did it?” Dom asks, a little incredulous.
Arthur laughs, his eyes crinkling. “No, of course not. That’s why I got caught.” The boy’s long fingers drum on the metal table incessantly and Cobb realizes that his hands are moving closer and closer to the PASIV machine.
“Well, we wouldn’t want to reward your lawbreaking with a trip to dreamworld, would we?” Miles asks and Dom notes the boredom and irritation that are constantly present in his voice have gone missing.
Arthur stops fidgeting and then blinks up at Miles. “How did we get here?” He asks suddenly.
“What?” Dom says before he can stop himself and he can see the tiny pang of irritation tighten between Miles’ shoulder blades.
“How’d we get here?” Arthur repeats but realization is breaking all over his face and ends in a giant, teenaged smile. “We’re in a dream right now, aren’t we?”
Miles’ eyebrows raise, just a millimeter. “What makes you think that, Arthur?”
“No beginning. No getting here. And your face doesn’t quite move right.” The last comment is directed at Cobb, who grimaces.
“So that means that I can change stuff, right? I read your papers, Mr. Miles.” Arthur is walking around the room, inspecting the walls. “They were filled with pretty interesting stuff, but not stuff I could ever get working with those shit dream-sims.” Then Arthur grabs a brick and pulls, and the whole wall ripples. His eyes grow wide, and he looks impossibly young (was I ever that young? Dom thinks). Arthur darts out of the holding room before Dom can stand up and Miles doesn’t look mad. He might, Dom thinks, even look a little impressed.
Arthur is making the hallway stretch on forever, and he’s running until he suddenly hurls himself into a metal door at the end. It makes a cartoonish sound and bounces him up into the air and then sends him tumbling to the floor, which appears to be a giant pool of feathers. Miles might be smiling. Dom has never seen it before. Arthur is laughing and laughing, and then the dream ends.
Dom Cobb doesn’t see his face again for six years, and in that time, begins to forget.
Arthur, it turns out, never leaves.
---
2015-05-01
Re: Project Gargoyle
While the recent breakthrough in the utilization of Somnacin in concert with PASIV devices to explore the sub consciousness is remarkable, Project Gargoyle wishes to look for a more direct solution for training and information absorption and extraction.
Dr. M---------- from Japan has recently been loaned to us to begin the surgical work needed to start this research. He comes highly recommended in both the fields of neurosurgery and cybernetics.
I believe I have found a suitable candidate for the 15th slot. Though he has a criminal record, his skills with subconscious manipulation make him a far better choice than the other two considered candidates. I feel that his young age is a boon rather than a drawback, as he might take better to the invasive procedure.
Best of all, it is doubtful he will be missed. Please see attached documents and send me your responses as swiftly as you are able.
Best -
Stephen Miles
---
2019 AD
Miles doesn’t often bring him to see projects that are even more secretive than dream-sharing, so Dom knows that whatever he is about to see is going to be extraordinary.
“I just thought this might be something you’d like to see,” Miles says quietly. "Somebody should see it, at any rate." There’s a softness in his eyes that Dom has previously associated with talk of his beautiful, brilliant daughter.
They’re in the bowels of the UCLA building that Cobb and Miles do most of their research in, but Cobb has never traveled below the ground floor. His keycard doesn’t grant him access, and he can feel the security guards scrutinizing him as he shuffles through long dim hallways behind Miles.
They finally come to whatever mysterious place Miles has been leading him to, and that’s when Dom begins to think that maybe he’s dreaming.
The hallway is lined with one-way windows, and seems to stretch longer than the building above ground does. He counts sixteen at a glance, but it’s the inside of the rooms that’s really startling. Miles continues to move toward the end of the hall and Cobb only gets glimpses of castles and weapons and oceans shimmering on each of them.
The room at the very end is where Miles stops. “This one,” he breathes, almost reverently.
The screen inside is swirling with bright primary colors, sometimes stopping to build shapes, as though someone has animated a Kandinsky painting. Beneath the plasma screen, Cobb can make out the outline of a man in a lab coat, and a chair inside. It’s big, like a dentist’s chair, and covered in complex looking wiring.
Miles presses a button by the door. “Have him run through training exercise Delta,” he says into a metal grate. The man inside nods and leans over the chair.
Cobb finally gets a good look. There are straps, holding down what appears to be a teenager. There are cords attached to him at all parts, but especially around his head, where something looks to be plugged in. The screen is the only light inside, and that combined with the haze of the glass makes it hard to discern any features.
“He’s connected directly,” Miles says, as though that’s a clue, and the screen begins to shift.
It’s a field that’s slowly becoming a forest, and Cobb catches his breath. It’s like watching time lapse photography, but the trees look different than any forest he’s ever seen. The greens are rich and lush even through the glass, and the leaves unfurl with a regal grace into heart and spade shapes.
Stone walls appear and then are choked by vines, crumbling as the plants overpower the structure. Morning glories open and close, wither and die.
“Breathtaking, isn’t he?” Miles says, and Cobb doesn’t understand but knows better than to ask. “It’s like a little window into the subconscious mind. He’s going through 100 years of a place at once.”
Cobb nods uncertainly and then Miles sighs. “And I suppose there are the more practical applications.”
He presses the button again. “Run data protocol 18b for subject ‘Dominick Cobb.’”
“What are you asking him to do?” The use of his full name makes him nervous.
Figure 01
The screen flickers and the woods disappear, and Cobb is filled with a regret he can’t name. His own face then pops onto the screen, an old photograph. He sees documents fly by next to it on screen and can make out things like his undergraduate thesis, old building models, his high school report cards, and it stutters to a stop on a page of his high school senior yearbook, the superlatives. He’s voted most likely to succeed, and his younger self looks stern in an oversized sports coat.
Miles chuckles. “Number 0015 has quite the sense of humor. I’ll miss that.”
“Oh?”
Miles shakes his head. “Project Gargoyle is set to be terminated in two days, meaning its test subjects will have to be dealt with accordingly. A pity, really, but the American government often gets wasteful.”
“So what’s your involvement here?”
“There’s quite a bit of overlap in the brain scanning technology here and the work I’ve been involved with concerning the PASIV. I’m sure you can see how this would be useful to us.”
Cobb nods. Miles presses the button. “Dr. M, if you would be so kind as to take a moment.”
The shadow in the room leans over the figure in the chair for a moment, and then emerges. He locks the door but leaves the key and its accompanying lanyard there and he and Miles talk as they start walking back toward the exit.
Cobb freezes, and he knows the key is there because they’re only afraid of the boy inside getting out, not anyone walking in. Then again, the note of finality in Miles’ voice suggests that won’t be a problem for very long. He moves out of adrenaline, the idea forming at the same speed as his limbs moving.
Cobb turns the key softly and carefully eases the door open, peering in.
“Can you get those straps off?” he hisses.
“What?” the voice is young, and raspy, and disoriented.
“The straps? Can you get them off? I don’t have much time.”
“I…yeah, yeah I can,” is the response, and the body starts to move. Cobb can see one thin wrist break free.
“Good,” Cobb says and his heart is beating so loudly he thinks that Miles should be able to hear it. “I’m leaving this door open. You need to run.”
“What do you mean-“
“Run.”
Cobb spins around, the door not clicking behind him as he catches up with Miles in the corridor.
He doesn’t hear a word about Project Gargoyle from Miles after that.
---
[March 16, 2026
If you’re reading this, it probably means I’ve started to forget things. Try not to worry too much, though I know that’ll be hard. The memories, they mostly come back now.
I can already see your face though.
I wouldn’t believe me, either.
But they do. They will.]
---
2021 AD
When Dom Cobb goes looking for a point man, he doesn’t expect to be given a twenty year old kid. He’s been looking for a while, and most of the ones with university training have no idea how to be criminals, how to bend the rules, especially the dreamers with corporate sponsors. But most of the lowlifes he’s tried out can’t take more than one job. The trouble with most thieves, he’s noticed, is that they have very little imagination. The information is always solid, but never quite thorough enough, and the jobs have been messy.
“Hello, Tony,” Cobb says, not bothering to hide his distaste. Tony’s in import/export, a nice name for high class larceny, and had contacted him. It was a light and rather distressing phone call where Tony had named an absurdly high price and had laughed a little too much. Still, Cobb is sick of looking, and Tony’s merchandise has always been high quality.
In the bar, Tony has a gangly youth with him, tousled dark hair and glittering eyes and bad posture.
Cobb looks skeptical, and Tony notices. “Oh, he’s the best,” the man says with a leer, pushing the kid forward so he stumbles a little. “MIT dropout. He’s a little research computer.”
The boy has the slimness of a teenager, and doesn’t meet his eyes. Instead he fidgets, pulling on his earlobe and eyes darting around the room. He’s wearing jeans that are too long, frayed around his feet, and the white t-shirt he’s wearing looks a little worse for wear. He’s got a backpack in one hand and with a startling movement, he shoves the other at Cobb.
“I’m Arthur,” he says, his eyes sliding right over Cobb’s face.
The handshake is surprisingly confident and Cobb smiles. “Dom Cobb. Arthur what?”
The kid jerks his hand back. “Just Arthur,” he mumbles, looking at the floor. His face is entirely inexpressive and it’s deeply unsettling, and a tad familiar.
“Like what you see?” Tony asks with a smile that makes Cobb want to punch him in the mouth.
“I guess you’ll have to wait until I get a test drive. You’ll get the rest of the money after the first job.”
Tony laughs. “Be seeing you, kid.” Arthur sharply shakes his head and follows Dom out.
The kid is quiet on the ride to the hotel room. Cobb is glad he only booked one hotel room, two beds, for the evening. The boy is all angles and seems sharp, and Cobb wants to keep a close eye on him.
“Is that all you have?” Cobb asks and the boy carefully lowers his backpack onto the bed nearest the large window.
“Do…Do you mind if I smoke?” Arthur asks in reply, already holding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Dom does, but just nods and the boy gives him a tiny smile.
“So,” Dom starts, but he is abruptly interrupted.
“I’m the best at what I do,” Arthur says, his brows knitting together, looking troubled. His hair is longer than seems stylish, and it’s messy. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s just that Tony paid the best money. The rest doesn’t really matter.” He waves the hand holding the cigarette, painting a veil of smoke in front of his face. “Tony does what he wants to do with anybody, but he got the best jobs. The most challenging.” He closes his eyes on every inhale of the cigarette.
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” Cobb lies, keeping his voice light.
“Tony just wants you to give me back, but I think you’ve got the most interesting jobs now, don’t you?”
“Do you have a suit?” Cobb wants this line of conversation to end. Tony has a reputation but Cobb doesn’t want to think of anyone touching this strange boy.
“I’d kill him, you know, if he tried that,” the boy says with a barking laugh, but his expression doesn’t change. Cobb wonders for a brief moment if Tony had somehow found a psychic. “And no. All I really got is that laptop,” he says, gesturing to the backpack.
“S’all I really need and I like traveling light.”
“We’re going shopping tomorrow.”
-
The boy’s demeanor is entirely changed the next morning, and he is sitting perfectly still while eating a continental breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant. He does not make a single unnecessary movement while neatly devouring scrambled eggs. Cobb watches, slightly amused. This kid could be the one he’s been looking for.
“So why do I need a suit?” he asks suddenly. “Tony only ever wanted intel, but you want me to meet clients, right?”
Cobb nods. “That’s right.”
The boy looks thoughtful. “It’s gonna have to be a real nice suit. Yours looks pretty suave.”
Cobb’s eyebrows rise on their own accord.
“I ain’t really ever worn a suit.”
“You’ll need to get used to it for the dreams. You’ll need to blend in, and we normally do corporate hits.”
The boy nods solemnly, processing the information. “So you really are the dreams guy. Tony wasn’t sure if you were full of shit or not, right? But I figure, who would make that up. Plus, you know. Your wife is head of a research team on that.”
“My wife.”
Arthur nods. “Right, she’s really pretty. And she seems really smart. Her paper on chemically enhanced dreamscaping was real interesting; I think she’s got some really fun ideas. I’ll get to go under, right?”
“You read her thesis?”
“Yeah well, you think I’m just going to take a job with no background research?”
Cobb supposes he shouldn’t really be surprised.
The kid puts a black folder on the table and talks around a mouthful of toast. “So here’s the info on your client - guy isn’t that great with security but took at least one class in how to fight against Mind Crimes, right? I don’t know if it stuck, but you know, can’t be too cautious with guys that seem dumb but climb up the corporate ladder like that.”
Dom feels his eyebrows try their best to climb into his hairline.
He gets a small smile from the kid. “Well, you’re Dom the Dreamer, right?” More toast is pushed into his mouth. “So I figured you’d want to know all that kind of shit.” Hands are waving. “I mean anybody could tell you some of the stuff in there, but you probably want to know like, who broke his heart in high school - and it was a girl named Lacy White, I shit you not - and his psych profile and stuff.”
“When…when did you do this?”
Arthur shrugs. “I don’t sleep that much.”
Dom nods, slowly paging through the report. It’s thorough, better looking than anything he’d received from his past assistants.
“Good work,” he says and the boy smiles shyly.
-
Arthur goes straight to the most expensive area of the store, where an older English gentleman is willing to dress you piece by piece. His hands are roaming over all kinds of expensive fabrics and Dom wants to groan with frustration. He promised the kid a suit, but he wasn’t sure he had the cash on hand for whatever three-piece monstrosity Arthur is surely going to pick out. Mal is going to kill him, he can feel it already. Buying a suit for a street kid, to do his stupid job, why doesn’t Cobb just ask for an expense account for this, and what’s wrong with Mal’s work anyway? Cobb doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he needs someone he can both trust and not love.
He’s the best, Dom tells himself, it’ll be worth it.
It would be worth any price, he decides firmly as the kid walks - no, saunters - out of the dressing room in a burgundy dress shirt, skinny black tie, black vest, and suspenders with little gold snaps. His pants fit his slim hips, and he has the jacket slung jauntily over his shoulder. And he’s changed, again, somehow. He is exuding confidence as he steps onto a platform in front of a three paneled mirror.
“What do you think? I think I’m good at being a suave motherfucker.” Arthur twirls, and the employee looks somewhat amused. He slips the jacket on and the twitchy kid looks like an attractive man, the clothes fit him like a second skin.
Dom shuts his mouth. “I think that’ll do.”
His blank face breaks into a wide smile at Dom from the mirror. “Cool.”
“You’re going to need to use a little less slang. Be a little more polished. Intimidating,” Dom says, and watches as Arthur straightens his shoulders and runs a hand through his hair, smoothing it out.
Dom Cobb does not know it, but the moment the kid steps off the dais, his partner is being born.
Figure 2
-
Mal meets Arthur and is skeptical. She is cordial because she is always unerringly polite, even though when Dom brings Arthur to the lab he touches everything. The kid turns out to be so frighteningly knowledgeable that no one chases him off.
“You don’t know what he’s been up to!” she hisses in the back of the lab as Arthur explains to her partner that his sedation compound is too strong, like ‘using a mallet when a ball peen will do.’ Arthur illustrates with bird-like hand gestures.
“He’s not like a stray dog, Mal,” Cobb replies, frowning, but for all his observation, Dom doesn’t understand her wariness. Cobb missed the careful arch of Arthur’s neck and the delicate splay of his fingers.
Mal doesn’t miss these things. Her eyes are sharp because she might love him, but they haven’t fallen in love yet. She thinks they both know this, and they’re trying, arcing closer, lines approaching zero.
What Mal loves is her research. Cobb loves the dreaming as much as she does, she knows, but he still wants more from her and from the world, a commitment to something else, maybe to them. Together, though, they are explorers, conspirators. They have years and years and years of secrets between them.
There is a lot they haven’t learned, though. She doesn’t know if she wants a family, and the deeper into the dreamscape they go, the less she wants to be tethered, to be grounded to anything that could keep her from there. And Cobb, she thinks he doesn’t know that they are both too stubborn to give up hope that the other will change. He doesn’t know how Mal watches. How she notices all the delicate places in Arthur because she thinks that Cobb might have finally found someone willing to do anything for him. To change for him.
The boy shifts his weight and doesn’t smile when she shakes his hand.
She relents, though, the first time Arthur goes out with the two of them. Cobb has dressed him up and the suit seems to restrain some of his abject otherness. He acts polished, holding open doors and pulling out chairs, and speaks without hopping from topic to topic. Arthur in a suit gets linear, streamlined.
Mal makes Arthur laugh and Cobb feels strange for a second.
-
The early days of dreamsharing are crude. The drugs alone are guaranteed to make the dreamer sick, but beyond those, every dreamscape holds an edge of the fantastical.
Only the most skilled dreamers are able to obscure reality and a dream - Miles, for one, held this power longer than almost anyone else in the business.
“It’s a difficult skill to teach,” Cobb warns the first time he takes Arthur under. “You might not get it for a while.”
“The first step is to create a strong conceptualization of yourself,” Cobb says, and turns around to face Arthur. He’s had partners arrive in the dreamscape naked, or impossibly handsome, or thirty pounds heavier than their actual form.
Arthur, however, appears to know exactly who he is. His dream form is wearing the same suit his corporeal form, his hair is the same slightly unruly length. He smiles, and it has the same wary blankness it does topside.
“It’s not my first time, if you’re wondering,” he says, and then he builds a skyscraper.
Cobb is suddenly drenched in shadow, standing in the blank concrete expanse he uses as a base landscape, staring into a suddenly blue sky, marred with fluffy clouds and 27 stories of steel and glass. Arthur’s left hand is raised toward the sky, palm tilted up, and he smiles.
“You sure didn’t learn that at MIT,” Cobb says dryly.
Arthur shakes his head and lifts his other hand, holding them both up, then pulling them wide apart, conducting a symphony of buildings. Brother and sister towers explode out of the ground, creating a full city block.
“No, not at MIT.”
“So…where?” Cobb asks and follows Arthur as he moves toward a door.
Arthur shrugs at him and props the door open, motioning Cobb inside.
He’d been expecting an empty skeleton, but the inside is a dizzying crosshatch of staircases.
“So where are the projections?” Arthur asks as he starts climbing, running up stairs like they’re nothing. Cobb feels out of shape, and tries to keep up.
“I don’t,” Cobb fumbles as he sucks in air, “We’re not under deep enough. I like to save that for a later lesson.” He is out of breath as he follows Arthur higher and higher up the steps.
Arthur pauses at the fifteenth floor and levels a critical gaze at Cobb, who hunches over wheezing.
“I’m a little sad you don’t recognize me yet, Cobb.”
He almost snaps and tells him not to forget the Mr., but he doesn’t really know how to respond. He watches as Arthur runs his thumb behind his left ear reflexively. His eyes are constantly darting.
“What’re you watching for?” Cobb finally asks when inhalation becomes less of a chore. Arthur made the stairs steep.
Arthur immediately stills. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Cobb says, gesturing out with his hands, “you look like someone’s going to jump out at any moment.”
Arthur looks away. “Maybe I’m just cautious.”
Later, when they start to train with projections, Dom realizes he’s already an excellent shot.
---
2017-06-19
Memo: Side Effects
Side effects of Project Gargoyle appear to be non-fatal at this point in the experiment.
However, they are quite potent, and the longer the subject remains in an “active” state, or plugged into the computer directly, the more the brain increases serotonin production to a worrying and possibly addictive degree.
This is creating a withdrawal state for many of the subjects, and several are experiencing bouts of depression, panic attacks, extreme anxiety, and paranoid delusions. These episodes seem to be few and far between, but we will continue monitoring.
The most troubling side effects of active use is that of depersonalization, where the subject becomes disassociated with itself and then believes it is trapped in a dream. This is the effect that was seen in the early tests of Somnacin in relation to the Dreamshare project with prolonged PASIV use, along with chronic insomnia, and this is the effect that we were hoping to avoid in Gargoyle.
Thankfully, REM sleep does not appear to be affected at this time, like the subjects in the first Dreamshare tests, so we are hopeful that with a new round of subjects, that the addictive factor could be mitigated with use of more traditional pharmaceuticals.
---
2021 AD
The research in dream architecture and dream compounds that Mal and Dom embark on isn’t simply done in the vacuum of the PASIV lab buried in the halls of the UCLA campus, but Cobb often wishes that were the case.
Instead, he has to fight for grants, to convince men in suits that cost more than what they earn on each job that they need more money.
Mal hates going, hates begging for money.
“They’ll think I’m just there because of my father,” she hisses at Cobb for the thousandth time, only now Arthur is sitting there at the table in Cobb’s apartment.
“I wish your dad would show up; probably be a lot easier to get the cash we need for your new Somnacin study.”
Arthur’s eyes are bright and interested that morning,
“Who’s your father?” he asks, but it is barely a question.
Mal laughs, and it sounds bitter. “Stephen Miles, the great grandpapa of dream technology.”
Arthur stills instantly, like something’s just been confirmed.
“Oh,” he says quietly, and stares down at his hands.
Cobb won’t, can’t look at him for an hour, and won’t let himself think about why that is.
-
Miles taught Cobb a light touch, how to enter someone’s mind without destroying everything in it. Cobb thinks Arthur might benefit from that, but anytime training with him is brought up, Arthur gets skittish. Gets younger, somehow, as if all the polish to his speech and movements has been rubbed away.
“I don’t want to meet him, Cobb,” Arthur finally says while they’re under, working on a landscape that Dom plans to sell as a training exercise to the Navy.
Arthur’s holding a semiautomatic in his hand and shoots a projection in the chest as he says it.
“And I don’t know why you don’t already know that,” he says, looking away from their antagonists for a moment. His eyes are dark, a little angry.
He’s killed a second later.
-
They work for governments, mostly. Cobb tries his best to keep Mal out of the field, in the lab, tweaking Somnacin formulas. He also doesn’t take Arthur out in the field with him, but that’s harder to explain. She misses dreaming, but she loves creating any way she can. She thinks that’s why her and Dom work well together - they fill up empty spaces immediately.
And that’s why Arthur clings to them, she thinks. Arthur will lock himself in studies for hours, not coming out and not making noises other than the slight hum of his laptop. So diligent, she thinks. Trying to fill up all the blank space he seems to have inside.
-
Out in the waking world, Cobb is only a passable shot, has a lousy punch, and cannot escape from handcuffs. His strong will is the only thing that gives him certain skills in the dreamworld. So when the jobs get more dangerous, when he hears gunshots in reality for the first time, Cobb decides they must be prepared for anything.
Arthur takes to this training eagerly, to the point where he surprises Cobb with his resourcefulness, his willingness to push.
“If he told you to jump off a bridge, then, would you do it?” Mal asks sharply the day she enters the room to see Cobb tenderly blindfolding his point man.
Arthur’s left shoulder lifts and falls - most other movement is restricted with rope. “Is it a dream? Is there a tactical advantage to jumping off the bridge?”
Mal sighs, a huge heave of exasperation and she throws up her hands even though he can’t see them. “That’s insane.”
“I trust him not to ask me to jump unless I need to.”
Cobb hears Mal storm out, hears the front door slam open and then closed, and hears her car pull away. And then suddenly all he hears is Arthur’s steady breathing. Cobb realizes his hand is still cradling the back of Arthur’s head.
“Maybe you trust me too much,” Cobb says softly, his face too close to Arthur’s. He feels Arthur’s muscles stiffen below him, rigid in the chair he’s tied to. Arthur is silent, so Cobb kisses him.
Figure 3
Arthur reacts immediately, whole body tensing and straining up up up against the ropes and toward Cobb’s mouth. He blossoms, cheeks reddening.
Arthur’s mouth is wet when Cobb pulls back.
“Is this…is this a test?” Arthur is rarely hesitant, so the hitch is a signal. Cobb ignores it and kisses him again, leaving his hands on Arthur’s bound shoulders.
“What do you think?”
Arthur shakes his head. “You love Mal.” Arthur is logic, pure and simple. A processor - data in, data out.
So it’s a test, Cobb thinks, and hits the stopwatch. It takes Arthur two minutes to escape the chair, and another three to leave the building for a long stretch of time. Cobb would ask him where he went, when he disappeared every so often, but Cobb knows that he’ll get an answer.
-
He tells himself it’s that Arthur is simply a lovely creature, that it’s perfectly natural to be attracted, but he knows this isn’t what is happening.
Maybe it is that Arthur is unlike anything Cobb knows, and when he speaks there’s a tug at the back of Cobb’s brain like a memory of a dream. It slips from him each time he tries to find it, and maybe the tactile hit of skin to skin will bring it back.
And Arthur comes back a few hours later, bearing ice cream as an apology. Cobb’s a little drunk, feeling reckless when left alone in his apartment.
They eat, Arthur seated in an armchair, Cobb on the couch, quietly.
“Thanks,” Cobb says finally. “For coming back.”
“It’s just ice cream,” Arthur says, eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
And Cobb gets up, walks until he’s hovering over Arthur, and he leans down.
Cobb’s tongue presses into his mouth, cold and sweet, and he can feel Arthur’s breathing hitch through his nose, the twinge of muscle from the effort of not jerking away.
He pulls back first but doesn’t move away, crowding Arthur in his chair.
“I don’t understand, though,” Arthur says softly, running two fingers along his bottom lip. “You. You’ve got Mal.”
“Yeah,” Cobb says.
“I don’t think you want me,” Arthur says, but Cobb stares at him until he starts to believe otherwise. He can see the shift in the line of Arthur’s mouth, the slant of his shoulders.
Part of it, he thinks as he grasps the sides of Arthur’s jaw and kisses him, kisses him deep, is the thrill of something no one’s ever taken. Arthur makes noises into his mouth, and Cobb doesn’t know how Arthur came to be his, but he knows with a gut certainty that no one’s ever loved him quite enough before.
It’s different, too, than what he feels with Mal. She can still inspire a curl of fear in his stomach, she makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Arthur is alien in a different way, something calming. Something steady.
It takes Cobb a moment to notice that Arthur’s pushing at him, shoving against his chest. Not hard - Arthur could topple him, knows how to unbalance him. He draws back and Arthur’s cheeks are stained with a flush, his mouth open, eyes worried.
“Cobb, I don’t even think you’re gay.”
At that, Cobb realizes that he’s not hard. He’s not even turned on, even though his blood is pumping like he’s run a few miles, roaring a bit in his ears.
“I just,” he starts, running a hand through the soft hair on Arthur’s neck. “Sometimes I just want to touch you.”
Arthur hums contentedly and he runs his fingers through his scalp. “Okay,” he says simply.
“I need to, sometimes you’re -“ Cobb stops.
Arthur nods, and Cobb just breathes out and thinks about wires, machines, and memories he refuses to examine. “We probably shouldn’t tell anyone.”
A smile curls along Arthur’s face, and Cobb’s not sure if it’s devious or naive. “Oh, like a secret.”
He surges up and leans up into Cobb’s ear, words hot. “I’m good at those.”
-
Mal is a scientist, and has always been a scientist. She analyzes and then re-analyzes, categorizes and collects.
Arthur’s swollen lips in the morning, Cobb’s distracted glances. Long lunches. The knock of ankles against each other under her kitchen table. She tries to shove all of these observations under the title of ‘nothing to worry about,’ but she can’t stop calculating. Each brush of hands, the way they lean into each other while they sleep.
Every result must be replicable, though, for a true experiment.
So Mal finds herself staring at Arthur’s hands as he draws, smudges of graphite on the edge of his wrist. She watches as he pushes his hair back behind his ears. The movement of his slim hips.
And he is too much for her, sometimes. He pushes her in the lab not for himself or his dreams, but because he knows she loves the challenge. He works on his French because he knows she loves secrets. He carries with him the heavy feeling of loss and she wonders where he keeps everything else. Arthur is being filled with life with Cobb and Mal.
Dom has already begun being less to her. His buildings, his dreams, his plans, become more paper to clutter her house. Nothing about him excites her, because he is full of hesitance, resistance, only willing to push himself (and Arthur) but unwilling to let her push at all. She knows it is a stage, that it might not be permanent, and that his sharp eyed focus will be turned onto her soon enough, and she will find that grating after a time as well. It is how they love each other, she has decided - too much and too strong and then by loving around each other.
Mal knows that once Arthur surpasses Dom in skill it will break both their hearts.
She watches him stir stew on her stove and thinks maybe it is time to experiment. His cuffs are rolled to his elbows and she shifts up against him in the kitchen, and kisses his cheek. It is light, a question.
“Mal,” he says, more of a sigh, and she moves behind him.
“What is it, Arthur?” she purrs into his ear, and slides her hands down his arms, notching her fingers between his. The spoon he was using sinks forgotten into the stew.
Figure 4
“Mal,” he says again, insistently.
“Dom’s out for the next few days.”
He shivers and pauses. “I know that.”
“So what,” she asks and presses the pads of her fingers into his palm, “are you doing here?”
His hands stay lax. “He…he asked me to take care of you.”
She smiles into the back of his neck.
-
Arthur is still dreaming at the age of 20, and Mal watches the slow rise and fall of his chest. He is in the throes of REM, and twitching slightly, and Mal cannot help but feel sad because, soon, this will be nothing but a memory.
But that night she dreams for the first time in five years, her body curled up against Arthur’s, and she dreams of Dom.
She wakes heavy with the guilt that comes with the knowledge of love.
-
She is a dreamer, a chemist, and until recently, a pointman.
Mal Miles knows how to plan, so she invites Dom, and only Dom, over to dinner and makes up a pan of lasagna and buys three bottles of wine.
Half way through the salad and their first bottle, she fixes Cobb with a serious look. “I think we should move in together.”
Cobb stops, comically, with his fork poised to enter his mouth, eyes wide. “You what?”
She can’t hold his gaze long, so she wraps a hand around his wrist. “I think we should move in together.”
He puts down his fork very carefully and looks at her as though she’s something precious or something fragile. And then he shifts - he’s the one holding her hand in both of his.
“Mallorie Miles, will you marry me?”
She knows when she’s been outmaneuvered.
“I,” she says, and stops, because she knows she loves him, she will love him until her heart stops, even if that love is not always easy. Even if she doesn’t know how to make her love kind. “I’m no good for you, Dominick Cobb.”
He smiles and when she smiles back she feels like her face is cracking into a thousand pieces.
He resumes eating his salad, as though they haven’t suddenly side-stepped an important life decision.
“Did you ask my father for permission?” she asks, a sly slant to her lips, and he stiffens again.
“Your father…no. I didn’t ask him.”
She laughs. “Good. Arthur is afraid of him, you know.”
And Dom looks away guiltily. “I’m sorry about him.”
Mal keeps smiling. “Oh Dom. He is entrancing.”
He shrugs, looks sheepish. “Yes. But.”
“But?” she asks, laying down her fork. His tone is serious, even more so than the proposal was.
“But he wasn’t you. It’s always you, in the end.”
A week later, she brings him oleander, yellow tulips, mulberry. A week later, she says yes.
-
After they move in together, Mal finds a job that needs a forger, so she can bring in Eames. They’d met, all over the country, until they both recognized what it was they did. It had been a thrill, her first time in Eames’ mind. He put her at ease, and always ruffled Cobb a bit. She liked that, had liked him for a brief moment in time. He did some Special Forces work, she knew, but other than that he was simply a handsome mystery. It seemed fitting.
They’ve rented out a small townhouse in Santiago del Chile, and Arthur is a little wide-eyed because she’s bullied Cobb into taking them both along. He speaks much better Spanish than either of them, even though it’s a skill she doesn’t remember him possessing when he first became Cobb’s stray pet.
Regardless, they take the master bedroom and let Arthur do what Arthur does best, and when Eames arrives, Arthur is professional, straight tie and brushed curls and dossiers in hand.
Eames flips through it, eyebrows arching in appreciation of good work. “This is thorough.”
They’re sitting around the kitchen table, eating empanadas Arthur’s bargained for at the market.
Arthur blinks, midbite. “Obviously.”
Mal can see the instant that Eames decides he likes Arthur, can see it in his crooked grin. “Oh? I’ve worked with plenty of points who couldn’t dredge up this much information by the last week of a job.”
Arthur seems ill at ease with the compliment, but he takes it with a shrug.
“I think,” Eames continues as he flips through the photos, “this could be rather fun.”
-
They have some time, but Eames spends his first week there tailing the mark, an oil executive who has been stalling on a contract with the U.S. government for imports.
In that time, Cobb and Mal make models. He’d missed this part of the job, working with her instead of talking to her each night on the phone. Having a team is easier than he expected, though he’s still worried that gunmen will arrive at any moment and kill all the things he’s worked so hard to know and protect.
The mazes Mal builds are beautiful, too perfect. It’s his job to randomize them, to knock down walls and put in secret doors.
They reconvene at a restaurant where Eames orders bistec a lo pobre and talks with a mouthful of runny eggs.
“I think I’ve found the key. The mark seems to have a mistress.”
Cobb and Mal look at each other and grin.
“It always seems to be that way for these subjects, doesn’t it?” she says.
“She seems to be a good forging target. I think if Arthur could get me a decent portfolio on her, I’d be able to track her down fairly quickly.”
Arthur looks up from his ceviche. “I’d rather not waste my time.”
Eames frowns, his expression sliding from amiable to hard and combative almost instantly. “And why the hell not?”
“Well, for one thing, the mark is gay,” Arthur says, not looking at any of them and moving food around on his plate. “So I don’t think he’s going to go for a woman you think is his mistress.”
“Excuse me?” Eames says. “I think I would have bloody well spotted the difference between a man and a woman he was spending a little extra time with during the work day.”
“She’s his sister. It’s on page 45 of the updated dossier I emailed you three days ago.” Arthur pops some fish into his mouth and looks steadily across the table at Eames.
Dom isn’t sure when he’s supposed to intervene, and he doesn’t know how to break the steady increase in tension.
Mal just laughs. “Oh, Arthur, were we supposed to read all that?”
“Why else would I send it?” Arthur frowns.
Eames’ eyes stay narrowed, and the light feeling Cobb had been holding on to disappears.
-
However, the next morning, Eames’ temper has cooled. He’s arrived at their town house with pastries for breakfast as some kind of apology. Dom is sitting at the table drinking coffee, and Mal wakes Arthur up and steers him to the kitchen.
Arthur immediately dives into the brown paper bag and pulls up an empanada full of sweet cheese and smiles at Eames as he sits down. His hair is still sleep mussed and he’s wearing soft looking flannel pants.
“So, how does a brat like you know so much?” Eames asks.
Dom watches them look at each other, and he’s surprised that Arthur’s making eye contact this early in the morning. Then he watches as Arthur’s gaze slips over to his face, and he notices the small curve of a smirk at the corner of his mouth. Arthur points to a spot behind his left ear, un-phased by Eames’ unkind language. Dom thinks that Eames just hasn’t learned how to get under Arthur’s skin yet, and he knows that Eames will try until he finds the right barbs.
“It’s gargoyle programming.” A pause. “And a degree from MIT.”
Gargoyle programming. The words hit Cobb like a freight train and synapses start firing all at once. Something he did once, three years ago and then told himself to never think of again lest Miles, roaming through his brain, find it. Extract it. Find the boy he’d help escape. He’s known, of course, but he’s never let himself really dwell on it, believe that knowledge.
Eames shakes his head and looks suspicious. “Arthur, darling, you can’t possibly be a Gargoyle. That program never existed. Rumors. Myths.”
“Obfuscation, all of it,” Arthur says neatly, but Cobb’s distracted momentarily by the way Eames purrs the word darling and the way Arthur seems to lean into it, ever so slightly. He thinks he and Eames are going to have a talk about keeping his hands off his pointman.
A strange little smile is playing across Arthur’s mouth. “It made me forget some stuff, but it was really fucking cool. I mean, uh, it was really.” Arthur fumbles for a second. “I could think so much faster. It was amazing.” He flashes teeth in a victorious grin at selecting an appropriate term.
“Was?” Eames is almost gaping now, thinks Cobb sullenly. Mal seems entranced, smiling around a pastry.
“It didn’t work permanently. Big failure.” Arthur shrugs and shoves food into his mouth. “But I’m pretty sure you’re quite familiar with all of it, Mr. Eames, or I wouldn’t have told you at all.”
“What does he mean by that, Eames?” Cobb asks, butting himself in before Eames continued, picking up on the dropped thread of conversation.
“I know it was supposed to give these kids a permanent stream of information that could be controlled or let loose or what have you. They’d be able to access information solely with their brains.”
Arthur has tapped out of the conversation and is very concerned with chewing methodically and looking around the room.
“They’d be able to anticipate, to know. Their brain becomes part machine, a little faster, a lot better than our naturally puny processing power.”
Cobb stares in disbelief. “I see.”
Eames shrugs. “It didn’t work very well, from what I saw. The candidates were all very promising, but most of them were pushed too hard. Met a few in the Special Forces.”
Cobb makes a sound of agreement in his throat as Eames mimes a head exploding. Eames has no fucking idea.
“But, it’s not like they were really human at that point.” Eames is staring at Arthur with something like fondness and awe, but Arthur doesn’t see.
He’s doing the crossword.
-
Cobb isn’t wonderful at research. It was, after all, what Arthur had entered his life to do. But that doesn’t stop him from taking time on the job to dig through the University’s protected electronic files, trying to see if there was any scrap of record left of the 15 children that he once saw, of the last one that he’s sure he set free and is almost positive is currently in Chile with him. He just wants to know for sure, something he’s carefully avoided until now.
He calls Miles, carefully, just to see if he will acknowledge or deny. “Oh, my boy,” Miles starts and Cobb steels himself for the familiar feel of that program doesn’t exist but instead hears, “the subjects involved in that project were disposed of, you know that. If I were to hear of any survivors, I would be forced to order their termination.” Miles hangs up politely.
-
Cobb watches Eames carefully learn about Arthur. Eames, Cobb remembers, is tactile. He likes to learn with his hands, to force out little tics and jumps and quirks from people. While they normally need doppelgangers, Cobb has seen him make up forgeries out of thin air, wholly unique creations built out of bits and pieces he's stolen over the years.
Mal wants to help, he can see that. She tells Eames what sort of sweets he likes, steers the conversation to music. Cobb's spent a lot more time unraveling him, though, but he keeps his secrets to himself.
Just little things, like how Arthur hates being touched by strangers.
Working in close quarters sets everyone on edge regardless of the locale and the difficulty of the job, but Eames was normally agreeable enough. And once he discovered Arthur's not quite normal, Cobb was doubly sure Eames would give up learning all of his little tics.
Instead, Eames keeps grabbing Arthur's shoulder, brushing over his fingers, tracing his wrist. Arthur stiffens or bristles each time, and Cobb thinks that means maybe Mal has failed in her quest to foist him off on someone new.
Until he walks into their makeshift office kitchen to moans.
“I've finally found something that doesn't make him flinch,” Eames says cheerfully over his shoulder to Cobb, totally unabashed.
Arthur's head is resting on his crossed arms and Eames wide hands are digging into his neck. It looks predatory from where Cobb’s standing.
“Almost punched him,” Arthur mumbles, but his voice is honey-slurred in pleasure. His eyes are barely visibly when he glances over at Cobb, and he smiles.
“The boy has never had a massage before,” Eames says, a little incredulous but also a little fond.
Cobb hums in agreement. “Product of an unconventional childhood.”
Eames looks at him again, weighing something, still rubbing his thumbs into the taut muscles of Arthur's shoulders.
Mal comes downstairs and just smiles at them, sparkling, until Cobb coughs.
“I think the massage party is over, you two. We’re still here on a job.”
-
Arthur takes the four of them under to test out the dream. Mal grabs Cobb by the wrist when they arrive on a street in Rome, gray stones and people surrounding them.
“Let’s just watch,” she says to him and pulls him to where they can see Arthur and Eames sitting outside a café. Cobb feels like he’s been watching this whole trip, everything happening just beyond his reach.
“This is amazing, Arthur,” Eames says with a smile. “But when’s the last time you’ve been here?”
“Um,” Arthur says, a faint blush tinting his cheeks. “I haven’t ever. I mean, I don’t travel very much.”
Eames peers at him suspiciously. “Everyone in this business travels.”
Arthur shrugs. “I haven’t been in the field very long.”
“Well, you missed a Macca’s on the corner there, is all.”
“Oh.”
Mal squeezes Dom’s hand and smiles at him, and he wants to feel as happy as she seems.
“It is very impressive, though. I know how fantastical Mal and Cobb can be, so seeing a good recreation. Well, being a forger, I can appreciate it,” Eames says with a smile. Maybe a leer, in Cobb’s opinion.
Arthur’s smile is shy, but it’s there.
Mal and Dom walk through the projections, some of whom look to be young amorous lovers themselves, perhaps courtesy of Eames.
“Oh, sorry. Dom left a burner on, we had to take care of it before coming under.”
Arthur frowns. “No he didn’t.”
She laughs and pats his hand and he doesn’t protest again.
-
They’re working late in the kitchen, the table covered with a maze, and Eames offers Arthur a beer.
“He’s twenty,” Cobb snaps, to which Eames shrugs his shoulders.
“Cobb, this isn’t really a great career to pick up if you’re going to be a stickler for laws of all things,” Eames says and then laughs dismissively. “Plus, we’re in Chile.”
“He’s never even been drunk!”
And at this, Eames’ eyes light up considerably. “Oh really now?”
Cobb scowls. Arthur’s cheeks tinge pink and he stutters. “I. I guess not?” He looks everywhere but Cobb’s face.
“I didn’t really tell him that so you could find out,” he whispers and Eames’ face softens just a shade before he thwacks Arthur on the back with his large hand and laughs again.
“Not to worry, I’ll take you out.”
Arthur’s smiles are getting bigger every day, Cobb thinks.
---
[09-14-2025
Fieldbook rule number 16 is the hardest one out here, but you’ll have to remember it. It could save your life too, someday, you know.
Don’t give me that face. Just make sure I sleep. Really sleep.
I know they warn about Somnacin addiction, but believe me, the alternative is worse.]
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