Fic: Oneiromancy, Part 2
The season change comes when they’re asleep. Eames wakes up to Arthur’s heavy body on top of him, in what looks like a hotel room in a place like Tokyo. The walls are dusky red. It’s already cozier than Arthur’s cabin.
“Hey,” he says softly into Arthur’s ear, and Arthur jerks awake, eyes wide and dark.
“The season changed,” Eames says, trying to soothe, and he runs a hand down Arthur’s back. He’s still tired.
“Yeah,” Arthur says, and Eames can feel his heart hammering in his chest. He sits up slowly, and runs his fingers through Eames’ hair.
-
The days here run together worse than in Arthur’s cabin. They’re in a high building, but the elevator only stops at their floor and the lobby. Outside, the sky is either dark or stormy.
There’s people there, at least. Projections. They don’t have faces but are friendly enough when Eames goes to buy food to bring up and cook in their hotel’s kitchenette.
The monotony gets to him. Eames starts running, and in Arthur’s dreams he can run for hours. At night the city lights up, and every night the neon is different.
Eames learns to poach eggs and Arthur stares at him in the mornings. He doesn’t know what Arthur does during the day, but he’s not gaining or losing weight. His hair isn’t growing. There’s no change in him at all except sometimes now when Eames comes home Arthur tries to kiss him on the mouth.
He let Arthur do it once, and the heat of his mouth, the slick feel of his tongue is overwhelming. He’s hard instantly and Arthur groans, hands touching him everywhere until Eames pushing him away.
“We can’t,” he says and Arthur whines. “It’s not real here.”
“It’s not...what the fuck, Eames?” Arthur asks, leaning in close. Eames watches his hands spasm, closing on nothing.
“I don’t know what you see when you go outside,” and Eames doesn’t know that he goes outside at all, “but you have to know it’s not right.”
Arthur drags his hands through his hair and looks wild eyed in nothing but soft pajama bottoms.
Eames goes running.
-
Arthur looks out at the city.
The bay window is really the only redeeming quality their room has. The view is gorgeous when Arthur bothers to pull it together, which is normally only when Eames is outside.
That’s why the window is currently showing him an endless abyss of gray fog.
Eames is sleeping and his breathing fills the room like a physical thing, and it’s both comforting and unsettling to Arthur.
He stares, furrowing his brow, and lights pop up in the clouds, buildings growing from the top down like paint drips. Neon slides around like snakes, words in different languages growing.
Eames shifts and yawns and Arthur pushes off the window to look at him.
“What’re you doing?” he asks, sleepy. The window is cold against Arthur’s naked shoulder blades when he turns to face him.
“Building,” Arthur says. “I figured you’d go on another run today. Wanted it to be nice.”
Eames walks over to the window and looks out. “You do this?”
Arthur shrugs. “Every morning.”
“How come I never see you doing this?”
“Because,” Arthur spits, “you never want to be here with me.” He feels exhausted.
Eames stares at him, wary. “Why else would I be here?”
Arthur’s skinny and lean and framed by the constant dawn light filtering in. Eames stares at him, the tight fit of his boxer-briefs to the tattoos he’s never understood to the scar of a bullet wound in his left thigh.
“I’m here to find you, to be with you, to make you remember,” Eames says, but he sounds uncertain.
“Then why don’t you fuck me?” Arthur says it like it’s been punched out of him, and he’s breathing heavier than before, like their altitude is growing.
“What do you do all day when I’m out?” Eames asks instead of answering and Arthur wants to scream.
“Why don’t you try looking in my pillow?” Arthur says.
When it’s clear there won’t be more instructions coming, Eames he unzips the side and sticks his hand in.
Arthur stares at Eames’ open palm, full of molars with long roots and small down feathers.
“I don’t need to explain myself to you again and again and again. You’re going to keep breaking in and trying to steal it anyway,” Arthur says, and Eames is staring at his palm and then up at Arthur and then outside, where the clouds are making buildings but also thunderstorms.
Arthur shoots himself in the head.
--
Eames stares because Arthur’s body doesn’t bother to linger much longer than it takes for it to hit the floor. The ground starts rumbling immediately, maybe the aftershocks of Arthur’s death-fall, and the window clatters. The gun is still there, and still loaded, but Eames just tucks his knees against his chest. He decides he’ll take the minute of so he has left in the collapsing dream to brood.
Thunder booms outside.
--
Present: Mombasa, Kenya
When Eames wakes up it’s to an eye-achingly bright light and a clattering commotion to his left. Yusuf and Arthur are trapped in a half-dance, both torn between calm and panic. Arthur’s eyes are wide and his nostrils are flared, and Yusuf has his hands up to either shield himself or pin Arthur down on the bed. One of Arthur’s hands is wrapped tightly around the tube that leads down his throat, and he looks torn between punching Yusuf, jumping off the bed, and yanking the tube out of his mouth.
When Arthur notices Eames, the vulnerability there makes Eames want to run, to sit up and scramble away from the scene as quickly as he can. His palms itch and he squeezes the cot mattress at his sides as he sits up.
“Arthur, love, calm down. You’re safe here for now.” Eames swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands up next to Arthur, putting pressure on his shoulder.
“Let Yusuf take your intubation out. Do you want any kind of painkiller spray --” and Arthur shakes his head emphatically. Eames can feel the tension and anxiety coming off him -- it’s manifested in the tight cords of Arthur’s muscles.
It’s awful to watch and worse to hear, but Arthur doesn’t look angry.
--
Example F:
“Honorable discharge?” Eames says, running his hands over the small box Arthur’s Purple Heart sits in. Arthur’s loft in New York doesn’t have much else to look at.
Arthur feels suspicious, but nods. “I came away about 70% disabled; hearing loss, vision loss, brain damage. Well, the vision loss was mostly the eye.”
“Wait, that eye is fake then? You owe me from our last shooting match then, you cheat.”
Arthur smiles, likes that Eames had almost figured it out on his own. “I could outshoot you with a blindfold on, Eames. The implant is good but I don’t miss.”
“What hubris,” Eames scolds, smiling and running his thumb over the zygomatic arch under Arthur’s left eye.
“I can see the future,” Arthur says, and his eyes slide shut. He smiles though, and Eames cradles his face, pulls him into a kiss.
“What do you see?” Eames breathes hot into Arthur’s neck.
“I meant, it processes images a tenth of a second faster than the natural eye, because the brain processes the input immediately.”
Eames laughs. “So romantic. You know how to keep the mystery alive.”
Arthur kisses him.
--
Present: Mombasa, Kenya
They hold a team meeting in Yusuf’s kitchen the next morning. Arthur hadn’t slept in Eames’ room, and from the look of him, hadn’t slept at all.
“I didn’t hack your accounts last month,” Arthur says after they’re all settled in with drinks and toast.
“But you did hack my bank account after we’d performed inception,” Yusuf says. “You can see how I would come to that conclusion.” The tea Eames is holding is hot and bitter.
Arthur shrugs, unapologetic. “You got the money back.”
“I think it was a little uncalled for.”
“It was a warning shot,” Arthur says, “I wanted to make sure you knew that I don’t appreciate having information withheld from me.” He pauses to take a sip from his mug. “I sent you good business after that.”
Yusuf’s head tilts, considering. “You did,” he concedes, “Always people with fair prices.”
“I did that because I knew you weren’t stupid -- you’d know what I meant and not push your luck.”
“Well, this was a sloppy job anyway,” Yusuf says. “Nothing like your elegant handiwork.” There’s a hint of a smirk when Yusuf says that, and Arthur raises his cup to acknowledge it.
“And that should have been your first clue.”
Arthur’s voice is deeper and rougher than usual and it worries Eames, because it means his throat is still scraped raw from being intubated.
“I wanted you to understand that I don’t like having information withheld from me.”
“Then you should be talking to Cobb -- did you freeze his accounts too?”
“My business with Cobb is none of your concern,” Arthur says, and his eyes are dark, angry.
“”That’s all well and good until his business gets you killed,” Yusuf says. “Maybe withholding information isn’t his biggest problem any more.”
“Anyway,” Ariadne cuts in, “what’re we going to do? Obviously Ramirez and her team are a threat -- Ayo, her chemist, and she’s working with an architect, Jet.”
“We could just kill them,” Eames says, and he’s surprised that he’s letting Ariadne make this into a group problem.
“That seems rather inelegant, “ Yusuf says.
“No, I agree,” Ariadne says, “it’s the most efficient solution."
“She wasn’t trying to kill me,” says Arthur slowly. “Leaving me with Yusuf was like a 50/50 deal -- either he’d kill me or he wouldn’t, but she wouldn't be the murderer either way."
“She could have killed you,” Eames insists.
“But she didn’t. Killing her team would be -- too easy.”
Eames looks at Arthur and worries. Arthur’s eyes are rimmed with dark circles, and he has the haunted look Eames remembers seeing in Mal, in Cobb, the brief glimpse of Saito waking up. The years that Arthur spent, awake and alone and then not alone, are invisible except in those bruises. He hopes they fade.
--
Present: London
There’s a plan.
With Arthur, it’s elegant and ruthless, and it’s a long game. They have time, because Ramirez knows better than to go on the offense before they show their hand.
But Eames doesn’t mind the waiting as much as he thought he would -- it means they get to go home, to the flat Arthur purchased in London and filled with Eames.
Their first morning there is sunny -- it feels unusual and auspicious.
Eames lets Arthur shave, freshen up, and by the time they’re both done with ablutions it’s time for lunch.
“There’s nothing in the fridge,” Arthur says. He’s wearing a shirt to walk around the house and Eames knows that means he’s feeling vulnerable.
“I ordered curry,” Eames says, because it’s Arthur’s favorite.
When lunch arrives, Arthur sits on the couch and stares at Eames as he eats.
“When were you gonna tell me that you were taking leisure strolls through my brain?”
Eames chokes even though he was expecting it. “I figured...I figured you’d figure it out.”
The bruises under Arthur’s eyes haven’t faded, even though the rest of his wounds have mostly healed over. “Sometimes you need to say it Eames. Like how I need to say thank you.”
That he wasn’t expecting. “For what?”
“For waking me up. For coming down for me.”
Eames stares down at his bowl. “Oh. I mean. You’d have done it for me.”
He shrugs. “I know. But it’s nice to know that you’re there.”
“I put my name on the lease,” he says and then he shoves a forkful of food into his mouth.
Arthur smiles, dimples and laugh lines creasing his face. “When did you do that?”
“Three months ago. You were on the Carmine job and I was. Well, I was hiding from you.” It’s a rush to admit it and know it won’t happen again.
Arthur’s still smiling. “I didn’t know you liked this place that much.”
“I’ve learned to love it,” he says. “It grows on you.”