Anabasis: Part I: 2
Title: Anabasis
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
A hotel room, Cobb thought, was probably one of the easiest things to build in a dream. Sooner or later, all hotel rooms started to look the same: utilitarian, mostly-empty, sometimes small, sometimes filthy, and cold unless the air-conditioning broke down. There was something, an impression that hotel rooms always evoked: they were a place to crash for the night, maybe the day after, and nothing more. After a while, even the view from the large windows started to look the same. The nightscape in Tokyo was almost the same as that in Hong Kong, in Malaysia, in Interlaken; all buildings and lights. Sometimes there were more of them, sometimes less, but there was one thing for certain: they were all distant. None of them were home.
After enough time on the run, it wasn’t just the hotel rooms. Everything began to take on some aspect of monotony. One job became almost like another: the only things that changed were the faces. Cobb glanced at his watch, and then out of the window. It was maybe four in the morning, and the sky was still dark. His ride out of Tokyo would be along in about an hour. He’d spent most of the time lying low, knowing that Cobol was going to realise something was up the moment none of them send the pre-arranged message to their representative in Tokyo - and their suspicions would be realised when neither of them showed up. Nash was presumably doing the same; Cobb didn’t particularly care, except that Nash hadn’t shown, and there wasn’t much more time left for him to make an appearance.
He sat back in the armchair and checked to make sure the gun was loaded and flicked the safety off. Then, and only then, he reached into his pockets, felt around for it, and then rolled the scarlet die onto the low table with a practiced flick of his wrist. It took him several nights, and a few hints from Arthur to figure how the die worked; even now, Cobb wasn’t entirely sure if he’d managed to work out the secret of the die. Maybe he was using the totem wrong. It wasn’t so much about what the die said as what it didn’t say. Four. Cobb glanced at it, and then rolled it again. Six. He scooped it up a few more times, quickly tossing it onto the table surface, watching it bounce and come to a halt. He didn’t realise he’d been holding his breath until maybe the fourth time he rolled it. Four and six. Always four and six.
He made sure the safety was back on. His fingers didn’t tremble. Reality, Cobb thought. It was reality if he’d read the die right, if he’d sussed out its secrets correctly, and if he wasn’t still in one of his own dreams. He ignored the creeping doubt, and rubbed the die between his fingers, thoughtfully. It was loaded, of course. That he knew. But as Arthur had once mentioned, between drinks, his totem didn’t deal in definites. It dealt in probability - rigged, but it was still imprecise. What was important, Arthur had mentioned, was what the die didn’t show. He’d said it casually, off-handedly, as if in a moment of carelessness, except they both knew it was deliberate. Arthur didn’t do carelessness, especially not when it came to something as important as their totems. Cobb hadn’t known how to respond, not quite. They were a team - the team. It went without saying. He trusted Arthur to cover his back, he trusted Arthur with his life, and to leave secrets untouched. That was how dreamsharing eventually worked. It was a matter of trust, because it was too easy for someone to rifle around in your head, but Arthur never did.
But totems - talking about them went a few steps beyond trust, into a category Cobb wasn’t prepared to deal with. So he said nothing, and the conversation had eventually turned to other things; reminiscing on Miles’ classes, previous jobs, and some speculation on what the next job would involve, with healthy amounts of silence at intervals.
Prime numbers, Cobb thought, peering at the die. He’d rolled it again and again and it was always a four or a six. Arthur’s die never showed prime numbers. He pocketed the die again, letting out a breath in relief. It was hard, sometimes, to separate the dreams from reality, and jobs like the one they’d just pulled with Saito that used dreams within dreams made the line even finer. And yet in a way, it wasn’t about reality. It was a different kind of doubt, and a different kind of ritual.
The hotel phone rang, and Cobb startled before reaching over for it. That was right, he remembered - he’d arranged to contact Mal after the job was done.
“Hi, Daddy! Hi, Dad!”
Cobb closed his eyes, trying to figure out which was James and which was Philippa. The first was James, he thought, with a pang of guilt. He gripped the phone tightly, wondering how they were now. Surely James must have grown tall enough to reach the living room table by now…and maybe Philippa had outgrown her stuffed pony phase. He couldn’t remember, so he’d gotten one or two just to be safe.
“Hey, guys,” he said, with a light-heartedness he didn’t entirely feel, “How are you?”
He listened to their chorus of “Good,” and “Okay, I guess,” with a kind of longing. Sometimes, the details blurred in his memory, or maybe it was over the phone, that was the problem, and it was hard to make out the differences in the sweet, childish voices. Would he ever come back? Ever see James triumphantly learn to tie his shoelaces? Or Philippa outgrowing the newest pencil marking on the wall where she took her height?
One day, they wouldn’t be children any longer. He’d have missed the better part of their growing up.
“Okay? Who’s that okay? Is that you, James?” he asked.
“Yeah. When are you coming home, Daddy?”
Cobb felt his chest clench. He exhaled sharply, leaning forward in his armchair. “James, we’ve talked about this, remember? I can’t. Not for a while. Daddy has to work.”
He caught a new voice over the phone. “Alright, that’s enough now, James. I have to talk to your Daddy, okay?” There were one or two sounds of complaint, but then he heard some static and muffled sounds, before Mal picked up.
“So, how did your job go?” she asked, without preamble.
His acute sense of guilt was only slowly beginning to dissipate. With Mal, it was less of guilt, and more of clear blue eyes that saw much more than Cobb wanted to talk about, and she had no qualms about pushing him. With Mal, it was about the totem that felt like it was burning a hole in his pocket, and guilt and a kind of resignation.
“Not so good,” he said, after a while. “The info was good, but Saito was ready for us. I’ll need to lie low for a while.”
“You are running away again, then?” she asked, lightly. But there was a bitter edge to her words, and Cobb flinched. She hadn’t let go of their last conversation.
“Sorry. My employers take exception to failure. Very violent exception.”
He heard her make a sound of exasperation, and didn’t need to see her to know that she must be staring out into space, maybe watching their children, eyebrows knit together in a frown, phone held to her left ear.
“And why did you take that job, to begin with?”
“We’ve been through this,” Cobb said, wearily, pressing the heel of his hand against his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood for maybe another fight tonight, or Mal trying to psychoanalyse him again. He wondered when it had begun to be so difficult to go one phone conversation without some kind of argument. The answer was obvious, really. Since the Algol job. One single job had changed everything. “Look, I don’t have that many options - “
“And so you chose to leave? To run away and to pull dangerous extractions all across the world, working for employers who would just as soon kill you?”
“You heard Adams,” Cobb snapped, more sharply than he intended to. “It was a likely conviction, Mal. The evidence was all against me, and the only people who could have testified to anything were dead!”
She said, silkily, her voice knowing and dark, “And that leads to illegal extraction jobs, how?”
“Mal - “
“Please, Dom. Don’t patronise me. I’m not stupid. You didn’t just run away because of a likely conviction. You’re pulling these jobs because you can’t let him go. Is that it? They told you, didn’t they? That they had the information you wanted - but only if you did so-and-so for them.”
“If I can find the right people - powerful people -” Cobb said, ignoring her words, “They could get me back home. But I need to build a reputation first. There’s no way to get it without any risk. I need to take those dangerous and risky jobs so that I can make a name for myself. I just need catch their attention, to do a job for one of them - and then I’ll be back home again.”
“And there is no such thing as moving to somewhere, maybe France, with your family?”
“Algol, Mal,” Cobb reminded her. It was the first thing that came to mind, after the instinctive and illogical denial. “It isn’t just murder charges. There’s espionage. It’s too high profile.” It was possible, he knew. They could do that. Mal knew it too, but she didn’t call him on it. Not yet.
“How did the job go wrong, Dom?” she asked instead, changing tack. She was probably still frowning, he thought, but her eyes would be narrowed in suspicion. Maybe she would be biting her lower lip lightly the way she always did when she was in deep thought, or tapping her fingers restlessly against the dining table, or both.
Once, Cobb would have told her exactly what happened. Once. It was always once. It was always before Algol, and after Algol, as if his life could be split into two neat halves and with the job that changed everything right in the middle. Now, he found himself hesitating. “Saito was ready for us,” he said. It was true.
She caught his pause. “He was there, wasn’t he? It’s getting worse.”
“I have it under control,” Cobb retorted, testily.
“You intended to fail at your job?”
Cobb’s breath hissed out through clenched teeth. “Look,” he said, after a hefty pause. Mal’s questions had struck far closer to home than he liked. That was the problem. She always knew when something was wrong, even if she couldn’t pinpoint why. Even if Cobb could never really give voice to it - or never did. He ran a hand absently through his hair. “Mal. Please. Can we just…not talk about it? I just wanted to say…I miss you. And the kids.”
Her sigh over the phone was resigned. “All right, Dom,” she said, wearily, “I miss you too. I wish you would come back.”
“I know,” Cobb said, “Believe me, I wish I could too.”
There was silence over the phone. Cobb wasn’t quite sure what to say; he wondered if she’d hung up on him, until Mal said, then, “The children miss you,” It was a tentative truce, of sorts. Philippa and James were the neutral ground - the one thing they never disagreed about, that they never fought about. That, Cobb thought tiredly, was at least one thing that hadn’t gone wrong, against the long list of things that had. They talked a bit more about the children, and for a while, Cobb could relax and pretend that nothing had changed. That everything was okay, just as it had been when they’d first married. He wondered if any of them had ever seen things getting so bad when it all first begun.
Never. That was always the point.
He didn’t wonder since when everything started to go wrong. He knew.
“Tell them - “ Cobb hesitated, as he was about to say, I’ll be back soon. He didn’t know that, not for sure. Instead, he said, “Tell them to be good. That…I love them. I’ll be sending them some presents through Miles.”
“I will,” Mal said. There was a bit of a pause, and then she said, “Please take care of yourself, Dom. I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, right before she hung up, and he was left with silence on the phone. Cobb held the phone a little longer, looking out through the windows at the dark city beyond, and the many tiny pinpricks of light. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, closing them until the lights became clear and distinct again, until the blurred edges faded, and until the surge of guilt receded and he didn’t feel quite so emotionally raw. Just…tired.
Time was when talking to Arthur had been…simple. Talking to Mal had been completely different. Nothing between them - no distance that was more than just physical, and none of the fighting and the way she always managed to have him feel so much guilt about what he was doing by the end of the conversation.
He glanced at his watch, and decided Nash wasn’t going to show up any time soon. There wasn’t any point in waiting for him. Cobb stood up, put away the phone, pulled on his jacket, kept away the handgun, and slung his black canvas carry-on over a shoulder. It was time to move. Their ride was going to be on the roof by now.
-
This is Dominic Cobb, extractor, after the Algol job:
He’s still one of the best. No one can deny that. But that’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. He’s wearier. Sharper, more prone to anger. The Algol job killed any remaining traces of the artist, and broke something inside the man. Something that can’t quite be fixed as easily as a broken watch, for instance. Or a broken PASIV.
If the Algol job was a crucible, then this is the man that emerged: lacking, damaged in some way, and changed. There is less vision now, less daring, less of his brash willingness to push the boundaries and to just keep pushing. There is only white-hot resolve left, and a sharp, cutting focus, with no more soft edges.
He doesn’t build any more. He can’t trust himself. He never works with a point man again.
He also can’t remember when he last smiled.
And here’s a secret:
Dominic Cobb is haunted.
In the deepest recesses of his mind, in the layer that Mal only caught a glimpse of before she pulled both of them from the insidious Lethean bonds of Limbo, there is a shade that walks the familiar hallways of the labyrinth of corridors that Cobb’s mind has become. This is the secret: the beginnings of the truth that runs fingers along his lips, that clenches a fist about his heart so he can’t breathe, can’t begin to even speak, can’t begin to explain it to Mal.
In the end, he doesn’t even want to.
There is a labyrinth in Cobb’s heart, and inside the labyrinth, there is a ghost.
Dominic Cobb is haunted by the ghost of a man he once trusted, a man he still trusts, and a man he knows he shouldn’t trust.
There is a ghoul in the labyrinth.
This is why he runs away, and keeps running. Why he desperately needs to know the truth about what happened that night. Because even after all the time in dreams, going deeper and deeper until he reached Limbo, trying to piece together - something - from his fragmented memories, Cobb is afraid. Afraid because he can’t quite trust himself. He can’t quite trust what he remembers.
Afraid that he already knows the truth - but won’t let himself see it. He’s afraid of the truth, locked in the heart of the labyrinth, guarded by a ghoul, guarded by a ghost -
- guarded by a friend and a brother.
Don’t you want to know? Arthur whispers.
A part of him does. A part of him needs to know.
So this is Dominic Cobb: a man on the run. He’s on the run from the labyrinth, from the ghost, and from a home that feels like a cage, plaster walls closing in on him slowly so he can’t breathe, so he can’t begin to try to find how to fix the broken pieces the Algol job has left in him.
He can’t trust himself, and is too afraid to plunge into the depths of the labyrinth for the truth hidden in its core. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other paths to the truth.
There are always other paths to the heart of the labyrinth. He is (was) an architect once. He knows about labyrinths, and how to navigate them. The dead can still bear witness. The evidence can’t lie. He can trust the evidence. He just needs access to it.
It will be ugly, part of Cobb knows, with the visceral sureness of instinct. The truth will be ugly. It will destroy him.
But he has to know, even if the truth will destroy him.
Because maybe, just maybe - the truth will set him free.
-
By the time Cobb emerged from the access stairway onto the helipad at the roof of the building, the sky was just beginning to lighten. He tugged his coat shut against the chill as he made his way across the roof to where the helicopter waited, and then hesitated, coming to a stop right in front of the helicopter the moment he was able to make out the two figures sitting inside.
One of them was Nash, slumped against the window. The faint sheen on his forehead was sweat; his eyes were wild and wide with terror and his hands were securely bound up with thick straps. He was breathing heavily, his hair tangled and dishevelled. He’d been handled roughly, if not beaten.
The other figure was Saito.
Saito glanced away from the window of the helicopter, and at Cobb. The sharp, edged expression on his face could have been a smile if his eyes weren’t utterly impassive. “He sold you out,” he said, nodding towards Nash. “Thought to come to me and bargain for his life.”
Nash met Cobb’s eyes - pleading, desperate.
Cobb looked away.
“So I offer you the satisfaction,” Saito said, and at his words, the man at the door of the helicopter silently offered Cobb a gun. Almost instinctively, Cobb recoiled from it. It had been a small motion, nothing obvious, but Saito’s eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly, almost as if he was confirming something.
“That’s not the way I deal with things,” he said steadily. The bodyguard glanced at Saito for confirmation, and at the nod, he holstered his gun. Saito rapped his knuckles against the window of the helicopter. It was a signal. One of his men bodily hauled Nash out of the helicopter and threw him to the ground. Cobb swallowed. For a moment, he thought Saito was going to have Nash killed on the spot, but then the guard who’d offered Cobb his gun walked around to the other side of the helicopter to join his comrade.
“Mr Cobb,” Saito called out. Cobb glanced back at Saito, who beckoned. The gesture was obvious. Still, Cobb wasn’t entirely sure if being in a helicopter with a mark he’d just failed an extraction on was wise - except there was no other option. Lingering in Tokyo any longer would be unwise. And Saito didn’t seem interested in harming him. This was a long lead-up to…something. A job, perhaps. Cobb nodded shortly, and climbed into the helicopter, sliding the door shut behind him.
Saito said something in Japanese, and then the helicopter began to rise. Through the window, Cobb saw the two men dragging a weakly struggling Nash - towards the access stairway on the other side of the building. “What will you do with him?” he asked, forcing himself to sound calm and unconcerned. He tore his eyes away from the window, and towards Saito.
Saito’s expression betrayed nothing of his thoughts as he replied, “Nothing. But I can’t speak for Cobol Engineering.”
In other words, Cobb thought, Nash was going to be beaten up and then killed. He said nothing, glancing at the receding figures through the window. For a moment, he wasn’t in a helicopter in Tokyo. He was in the flaming hulk of an apartment, yelling -
Godamn you Cobb, move!
Arthur -
Get the hell out of here. I’ll see to Jake.
Jesus Christ, Arthur, what the hell do you take me for? What the hell was all that? You -
“Mr Cobb?”
Cobb blinked, forcing himself to take in a deep breath. Calm. Even. He wasn’t in the apartment. This wasn’t the States. This was a helicopter. This was Tokyo, Japan. He took one breath, and then another, regulating his breathing. Saito watched him, saying nothing until Cobb regained some measure of control.
“What they say of you is true, then,” Saito said, neutrally. He studied the view from the window with great interest. “I understand it is not common for those in your profession to work with one another regularly.”
“What do they say?”
“Many things,” Saito said, with an expansive shrug. “But let me ask you a question, Mr Cobb: why did you spare him?”
Cobb licked his dry lips. “It’s not the way I work,” he said, at last, “I don’t believe in buying loyalty through fear.”
“And yet he is not the first of your colleagues to turn on you,” Saito mused. He turned away from the window, glancing at Cobb. “I must confess I am rather…puzzled. I do not endorse the heavy-handed methods of Cobol Engineering…and yet the actions of your colleagues suggest that some…displeasure…would not be remiss.”
“How did you know?” Cobb demanded, frowning. Except that what had happened with Arthur was common knowledge now, in the proper channels. He was known as the extractor who never worked with a point man, no matter how good the point man was. Saito could easily have gotten the information from Nash, or just about anyone.
“I have my sources.”
Cobb decided he didn’t care for Saito’s scrutiny, or any analysis of his working methods. He spoke up, to move the entire conversation along. “What do you want with me?” he wanted to know.
“Inception,” Saito finally said. He leaned forward a little, watching Cobb carefully. “Is it possible?”
Cobb hesitated. “Some extractors think it’s possible,” he allowed.
“And you? Can you do it?”
“Are you offering me a choice?” Cobb wanted to know, “Because I can find my own way to square things with Cobol.”
“Then you do have a choice.”
“And I choose to leave, sir,” He replied, as the helicopter approached and then set down outside the small airport. The private jet was already there, waiting. Saito made no further comment in reply to that, glancing out of the window as the helicopter descended.
“Tell the crew where you want to go,” Saito said, when the helicopter finally came to a halt. Cobb nodded, slid the door open and climbed out, walking across the airfield towards the plane - before Saito called out.
“Mr Cobb!”
Cobb paused, turning back.
“How would you like to go home? To America? To your wife and children?”
Cobb didn’t ask how Saito knew. “You can’t fix that!” he yelled, “No one can!”
He turned to go when Saito said, “Just like inception?”
He hesitated. He could all but feel Saito’s eyes on him, watching. Waiting.
“I can offer you more than that,” Saito said, eventually, “I have the information you have been looking for. The files you cannot access. Algol. Does the name sound familiar?”
Cobb turned back to look at Saito, transfixed. “You can’t,” he managed. “It’s been classified. The eyewitnesses…they’re all dead. No one knows what happened.”
“How is a different matter,” Saito said, unfazed. He leaned back, confident, now that he had Cobb’s undivided attention. “These are two things I can do for you, Mr Cobb. I only require one thing in return: inception.”
Algol.
He could have the information. He could learn what had happened, that night that he couldn’t quite remember except in fractured flashes, bits that his mind kept throwing at him.
He could know the truth.
Cobb’s mouth firmed. “How complex is the idea?” he wanted to know.
“Simple enough.”
“No idea is simple when you need to plant it in somebody else’s mind.”
“My main competitor is an old man in poor health. His son will soon inherit control of the corporation. I need him to decide to break up his father’s empire.”
And there it was. Corporate sabotage and corporate espionage were often two sides of the same coin. Except that no one had been able to pull off the sabotage. Extraction was one thing. Inception was another - a thousand times trickier, and more painful. And yet, Cobb thought, weighing it up - he believed (knew) it could be done.
“If I were to do this,” he said, slowly, “If - If I even could do it. I need a guarantee. How do I know you can deliver?”
“You don’t,” Saito conceded, easily. “But I can. So, do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?”
Cobb considered, one last time. He made his decision. It was far easier than he expected. The moment Saito had said he had the information about the Algol case, there was no contest. He nodded, just once.
“Assemble your team, Mr Cobb,” Saito said. The helicopter started to rise. “And choose your people more wisely.”
Cobb didn’t ask for more details, or for how he was going to be contacted. If Saito had managed to track him down, even when he was lying low in Tokyo, Saito was definitely going to be able to find him this time. He just needed to ask his pilot where Cobb had flown to.
And he knew Cobb wasn’t going to run.
Algol, Cobb thought. It wasn’t possible. And yet, Saito had said he had the information. It couldn’t be the case files. They thought him guilty. (Unless that was the truth.) Except there were no eye-witnesses. He was the only one to walk away from the case alive. Arthur had died in there, with Edwin.
He shivered a little as the wind blew across the airfield and tugged his coat a little tighter, realising he’d been standing out in the open for a long time, just thinking. Cobb trudged towards the waiting jet, planning his next step. (Once, it would have been Arthur who’d been trudging alongside him. It’d have been Arthur who’d have been dealing with all the small banal details.)
He took a deep breath, and let it out again. A forger. He’d definitely need a forger for this job. Eames it was, then. Eames, who was in Mombasa, Cobol’s backyard. He was heading right back into the lion’s den, but it was a necessary risk. Inception was going to be more difficult than any other job Cobb had attempted, and he wouldn’t do it with anything short of the best.
-
Tracking down Eames was as challenging as Cobb had expected. Eames took a certain amount of pleasure in making sure trying to get hold of him wasn’t an easy task - probably because it was one of his little games. Still, Cobb kept a low profile and made some discreet inquiries. He found Eames at the fifth gambling den he dropped in on, bent forward over the table, intent on his game of poker.
“Rub them together all you want,” he said, “They’re not going to breed.” It was one of the sentences they ended up using in places that weren’t entirely safe to talk business. Cobb didn’t think anyone could quite pick up on it in the crowd and the noise of the gambling den, but he didn’t see the sense in being stupid. In this case, he meant he needed some of Eames’ illegal skills.
Eames looked up, slightly startled, and then smiled as he read the message implicit in Cobb’s words. “You never know,” he replied with a slight shrug.
“Let me get you a drink,” Cobb offered.
Eames lost his last two chips, and then turned around. He nodded briefly. “You’re buying,” he warned, as he led the way towards the cashier and then produced two stacks of poker chips out of nothing. They’d probably come from his pockets, but Eames excelled at sleight-of-hand. Cobb absently picked up the first chip and studied it.
“Your spelling hasn’t improved,” he said, deceptively casual.
Eames glanced at him, and plucked the chip from his fingers, handing it over to the cashier. “Piss off,” he grumbled. But he was waiting for the second phrase.
“How’s your handwriting?”
Eames made the money disappear with the same abruptness with which he’d made the poker chips appear. “Versatile,” he said, easily. He gave away nothing of the other conversation that they’d just had. “Now, what about that drink you’re buying?”
Cobb shrugged, casually. “Know of a good place?”
Eames smiled briefly. It didn’t quite reach his grey eyes. “Oh, yes.”
-
The ‘good place’ that Eames had in mind was one of the many coffee houses along Mombasa’s streets. They went up to the second level and ordered their drinks, picking one of the tables next to the balcony to decrease the chances of their conversation being overheard. It wasn’t until Eames was at least halfway through his drink before Cobb brought up the job.
“Inception,” Cobb finally said, watching Eames carefully. Eames hesitated, for a moment, in the middle of refilling his glass from the opened bottle, and then he gave a small chuckle and set the bottle aside. “Before you bother telling me it’s impossible…”
“No, it’s perfectly possible,” Eames cut in, “It’s just bloody difficult.”
“Interesting,” Cobb said, dryly, “Because I kept getting told it can’t be done.”
“Who?” Eames asked, curious.
Cobb just shrugged, and refused to say anything more. Mal hadn’t liked the idea, and the phone call had been brief and terse. When he thought about it, Arthur would have said it was impossible. That inception couldn’t be done.
But Arthur was dead. Cobb watched his fist unclench. Eames’ eyes were on him, but he said nothing about that.
“Well,” Eames said easily, taking the hint and moving on, “Listen, if you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”
“Like you,” Cobb said. Eames accepted that with a nod, and a small smile. He raised his glass to his lips when Cobb spoke up again. “Let me ask you something,” he said, frowning thoughtfully, “Have you done it before?”
“We tried it. We got the idea in place, but it didn’t take,” Eames said, vaguely.
“You didn’t plant it deep enough?”
“No, it’s not just about depth,” Eames said, shaking his head. He set his glass down, untouched. “You need the simplest version of the idea in order for it to grow naturally in the subject’s mind. It’s a very subtle art.”
Cobb gave up and drank the beer straight from his opened bottle.
“So what is this idea you need to plant?”
Eames’ expression betrayed nothing more than mild amusement, but the question was more than enough to indicate his interest. It was probably as much of a yes as he was going to get from Eames at this point, and maybe just a bit more of a commitment than Cobb had been prepared to expect.
“We need the heir of a major corporation to dissolve his father’s empire.”
Eames frowned. “You see, right there, you have various political motivations and anti-monopolistic sentiments etcetera, but all that stuff is, uh…” he shook his head, “It’s really at the mercy of your subject’s prejudice, you see. What you have to do is to start at the absolute basic.”
“Which is what?”
Eames thought for a moment. “The relationship with the father,” he determined. He hesitated for a while before asking, “Still not working with a point man?”
“Mal helps,” Cobb said, flatly.
“But she isn’t a point man, is she?” Eames wanted to know. “I thought she was a chemist, or something of that sort.”
“No,” Cobb was forced to concede. “Chemist. Hell of an extractor too.”
“You’re going to need a point man, you know,” Eames said, matter-of-factly. “It’s a big job. We need someone decent. Maybe Ramirez - have you heard from him?”
“I know,” Cobb said. He shrugged. He had no intention of talking to Ramirez any time soon, and he didn’t want to work with second-raters like Liu. “I’ll see what I can do.” It wasn’t much of a concession, and more of a non-statement but Eames accepted it, content not to press the issue for now.
“So your wife is a chemist. Is she working with you on this?”
“No,” Cobb said sharply, and then regretted it. “No,” he said again, more evenly, “I don’t have a chemist.”
“Well, alright then,” Eames said, “I do. There’s a man here. Yusuf. He formulates his own versions of the compounds.”
Cobb considered it a moment, and then shrugged. “Why don’t you take me there?”
“Once you’ve lost your tail,” Eames said, nodding to the bar where a man sat and tried to be unobtrusive. Cobb swore quietly. He was getting careless. He’d seen the man a few blocks back when he had been looking for Eames but had thought nothing of it then. “Man at the bar. Came in about two minutes after we did.”
“Cobol Engineering,” Cobb whispered. It was a guess, but it was the only option that made any sense. It was a dark certainty, lodged in the pit of his stomach. Cobol knew he was here, after all. It was only a matter of time.
Eames shrugged. “They pretty much own Mombasa, don’t they?”
Cobb acknowledged that with a nod. He brought the bottle to his lips, took a drink, and forced himself to sound deceptively casual. On the list of things he’d pretended to be unruffled by, this hardly made any kind of dent. It was almost too easy. He was going to be in a bit of danger there. Well, great. A darker part of his mind almost thought he’d relish some…action. Something clean and simple.
“That price on my head,” he said, slowly, “Was it dead or alive?”
“Don’t remember,” Eames said dismissively. His eyes flicked towards the tail once more. “See if he starts shooting.” Cobb’s lips quirked, for a moment, in a small smile. It faded as he considered his options.
“Run interference,” Cobb said, thinking quickly. “I’ll meet you downstairs in the bar in say…half an hour?”
“Back here?” Eames asked, raising an eyebrow.
Cobb shrugged, considering the balcony. It was only two storeys, he decided, and far less than that, really. The second level wasn’t really that high. Not much of a drop from the balcony to the ground and it was his best hope.
“It’s the last place they’d suspect,” he said, and Eames gave a low chuckle of agreement. He nodded, downed the last of his drink and went over to the bar.
“Freddy!” he called out, “Freddy Simmonds! My god, it’s you isn’t it?”
Before he had the time to think the better of it, Cobb climbed over the edge of the balcony and let himself drop. He hit some straw matting, feeling the jolt of impact through his arms and legs. The stall owner made a loud noise of protest and reached over to grab him and haul him to his feet. Cobb didn’t recognise the language but suspected a lot of it really translated to fuck you. He slammed his head into the man’s chin, hearing the crack of impact that flung the man’s head backwards, and took advantage of the instant to break free of the hold, all but throwing himself down the street.
The Cobol employee must have all but realised he had vanished by now. Eames wouldn’t do much more than that. Cobb wouldn’t have expected him to.
He pushed and shoved his way down the crowded street. He needed a larger headstart than what he had now. He turned back his head for a moment and caught sight of two different men following him, both of them starting to run. Godamnit. He’d assumed there was only that one tail. He should have known better. He reached out and grabbed a ceramic plate from a nearby stall and whirled and smashed it at the closest pursuer.
It broke with a satisfying clink and the man was downed. Cobb hoped the hell the other guy would stop for his partner and continued to shove his way through the crowd. Brown-jacket was persistent, and followed him. Cobb seized on a wrapped fabric object that looked like a cricket bat from one of the stalls, ignored the vendor’s protests and swung it - hard. His momentum drove the bat with a crack of impact, but Cobb didn’t stick around for the follow-through. Brown-jacket staggered backwards, stumbling into a stall, and from the vendor’s exclamations, he could only hope that the distraction was going to be enough.
Cobb kept on running. He wasn’t familiar with Mombasa. His only hope was to keep on the run and lose them in the crowd that filled Mombasa’s narrow, tangled streets.
-
Stupid, Cobb thought, annoyed. That was unforgivably stupid and careless of him. For every tail you saw, there was bound to be two you didn’t, and now all three of them were after him, armed and it looked like the price was for a dead extractor after all.
He ducked beneath an awning, yanked a stool from a protesting vendor and kicked it behind him, hoping the obstacle would slow the pursuit down, although what he really needed wasn’t a delay but a godamned miracle. Some of the passers-by tried to grab him, roughly; he shouldered his way free of their grasp, stomping on one or two insteps, and then staggered, recovered his balance and kept running. So long as he kept on the move, the only thing Cobol’s hirelings could do was spray and pray and that wasn’t going to cut it in a crowded street.
Except the crowds were thinning, and Cobb bit back a curse as he realised he didn’t know exactly where he was going - and that it was far more likely for his pursuers to know where he was going than he did.
He was screwed.
There were less people around now as he ran, breath coming in quick gasps, and Cobb realised they were boxing him in, driving him right where they wanted him. Towards a cul-de-sac. He reached the end of the alley first, cursed and turned back. There weren’t many options left, and Cobb was desperate. So as the first of the Cobol thugs appeared around the corner, Cobb hurled himself at him, staying low and praying his luck would hold. There was the sound of a handgun being discharged, and Cobb thought he hadn’t been shot but there was no time to worry. Both of them hit the ground, rolling, and the gun skittered away across the surface of the road.
Cobb scrabbled desperately for the gun, fingers grazing the asphalt with a flash of pain, and then he had the gun - fingers closing around it - and then the man gave up and headbutted him. Christ, Cobb thought savagely, driving his knee forward until he heard a yelp that told him he’d hit something hard enough. He tried again but his fingers grazed the gun. Cobb was all but about to yell in frustration. There was a sharp line of pain along his stomach as he struggled to get his forearm around the man’s throat and then applied pressure - hard.
Pain exploded - in his side, this time, and Cobb reflexively relaxed his grip. The gun, he thought, as he was grabbed by the scuff of his neck, manhandled to his feet, and slammed into a wall so hard that the world blurred before resolving into unsteady, moving shapes before his eyes. There was a ringing in his ears, Cobb thought muzzily.
He was thrown back against the wall, again and again, until he felt himself dropping limply to the ground. He frowned - Brown-jacket had been joined by a double - but then they resolved back into a single figure again. Oh. It was just Brown-jacket and the whole lot of them. Cobb was yanked roughly to his feet by a bruising grip on his throat again, and then Brown-jacket pulled his gun on him. He tried to break free but his body wasn’t obeying his commands, and his starving lungs were demanding air.
Then there was the gunshot, loud and sharp and clear, and Cobb wondered vaguely why dying in the real world didn’t actually hurt as much as in a dream - and then he realised that the blood soaking his shirt was from a laceration, and not anything that could be attributed to a bullet. Brown-jacket collapsed, taking Cobb down with him, and Cobb tried and finally managed to pry Brown-jacket’s fingers from his throat, wheezing as he sucked in one trembling breath of air and just lay down and enjoyed being alive and watching the world blur at the edges.
It took his disoriented mind a few moments to realise what he was seeing.
Who he was seeing.
“No,” Cobb breathed then, in disbelief. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
Arthur squeezed off another shot, and the last of Cobol’s men dropped with a sodden thud. One of them moaned and tried to rise. Stepping down the alley, towards him, Arthur coolly shot him again, and then all sound was cut off. He holstered his Glock and approached him. “Cobb,” he said urgently, kneeling next to him and shaking him. Cobb blinked, trying to focus on Arthur’s face and failing. Arthur blurred in and out of focus, his eyebrows knitted together in a worried frown. “Jesus. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“You’re not real,” Cobb slurred, glancing up at the figure in a charcoal-grey windbreaker and a white shirt, collar unbuttoned. Funny, he thought vaguely. He hadn’t seen Arthur in that jacket…in a while. His subconscious chose the oddest of times to tweak his projection. He wasn’t even under. Was he?
“Shit,” Arthur swore as he carefully examined the blood-soaked shirt, and then he grunted as he lifted Cobb. Cobb’s stomach protested the movement and so did his side. He blinked, trying to force himself to focus. His head ached terribly, and he wanted nothing more to just close his eyes and sleep. It didn’t matter when his projection turned on him. (He always did.) Or the hallucination. Or the flashback. Or…whatever he was. Cobb was just too tired to care right now.
And then the world tilted on its axis and spun and then Cobb was rather certain that blurred vision or not, the dark object he was staring at was Arthur’s butt. Well, it was likely to be Arthur’s pants, anyway, but there was no real way to be sure. He’d never gotten the opportunity to inspect Arthur’s butt at an uncomfortably close range before and it wasn’t as if he’d been particularly interested in getting the chance to do so.
He winced and closed his eyes against the dizzying headache that threatened to intensify. He was being carried upside down, then. Probably explained everything. Especially the pain that came and went in sharp throbs that made Cobb gasp. It only seemed to get worse with each movement Arthur made, and at the same time, more distant, as if it wasn’t quite his body, but someone else’s that was hurting so badly. “Relax,” Arthur called out, and Cobb did just that. This was what he’d missed, he realised. Arthur’s presence - warm, solid, and reassuring.
He didn’t quite realise exactly when his abused body gave in, and when darkness gave way to true unconsciousness.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
A hotel room, Cobb thought, was probably one of the easiest things to build in a dream. Sooner or later, all hotel rooms started to look the same: utilitarian, mostly-empty, sometimes small, sometimes filthy, and cold unless the air-conditioning broke down. There was something, an impression that hotel rooms always evoked: they were a place to crash for the night, maybe the day after, and nothing more. After a while, even the view from the large windows started to look the same. The nightscape in Tokyo was almost the same as that in Hong Kong, in Malaysia, in Interlaken; all buildings and lights. Sometimes there were more of them, sometimes less, but there was one thing for certain: they were all distant. None of them were home.
After enough time on the run, it wasn’t just the hotel rooms. Everything began to take on some aspect of monotony. One job became almost like another: the only things that changed were the faces. Cobb glanced at his watch, and then out of the window. It was maybe four in the morning, and the sky was still dark. His ride out of Tokyo would be along in about an hour. He’d spent most of the time lying low, knowing that Cobol was going to realise something was up the moment none of them send the pre-arranged message to their representative in Tokyo - and their suspicions would be realised when neither of them showed up. Nash was presumably doing the same; Cobb didn’t particularly care, except that Nash hadn’t shown, and there wasn’t much more time left for him to make an appearance.
He sat back in the armchair and checked to make sure the gun was loaded and flicked the safety off. Then, and only then, he reached into his pockets, felt around for it, and then rolled the scarlet die onto the low table with a practiced flick of his wrist. It took him several nights, and a few hints from Arthur to figure how the die worked; even now, Cobb wasn’t entirely sure if he’d managed to work out the secret of the die. Maybe he was using the totem wrong. It wasn’t so much about what the die said as what it didn’t say. Four. Cobb glanced at it, and then rolled it again. Six. He scooped it up a few more times, quickly tossing it onto the table surface, watching it bounce and come to a halt. He didn’t realise he’d been holding his breath until maybe the fourth time he rolled it. Four and six. Always four and six.
He made sure the safety was back on. His fingers didn’t tremble. Reality, Cobb thought. It was reality if he’d read the die right, if he’d sussed out its secrets correctly, and if he wasn’t still in one of his own dreams. He ignored the creeping doubt, and rubbed the die between his fingers, thoughtfully. It was loaded, of course. That he knew. But as Arthur had once mentioned, between drinks, his totem didn’t deal in definites. It dealt in probability - rigged, but it was still imprecise. What was important, Arthur had mentioned, was what the die didn’t show. He’d said it casually, off-handedly, as if in a moment of carelessness, except they both knew it was deliberate. Arthur didn’t do carelessness, especially not when it came to something as important as their totems. Cobb hadn’t known how to respond, not quite. They were a team - the team. It went without saying. He trusted Arthur to cover his back, he trusted Arthur with his life, and to leave secrets untouched. That was how dreamsharing eventually worked. It was a matter of trust, because it was too easy for someone to rifle around in your head, but Arthur never did.
But totems - talking about them went a few steps beyond trust, into a category Cobb wasn’t prepared to deal with. So he said nothing, and the conversation had eventually turned to other things; reminiscing on Miles’ classes, previous jobs, and some speculation on what the next job would involve, with healthy amounts of silence at intervals.
Prime numbers, Cobb thought, peering at the die. He’d rolled it again and again and it was always a four or a six. Arthur’s die never showed prime numbers. He pocketed the die again, letting out a breath in relief. It was hard, sometimes, to separate the dreams from reality, and jobs like the one they’d just pulled with Saito that used dreams within dreams made the line even finer. And yet in a way, it wasn’t about reality. It was a different kind of doubt, and a different kind of ritual.
The hotel phone rang, and Cobb startled before reaching over for it. That was right, he remembered - he’d arranged to contact Mal after the job was done.
“Hi, Daddy! Hi, Dad!”
Cobb closed his eyes, trying to figure out which was James and which was Philippa. The first was James, he thought, with a pang of guilt. He gripped the phone tightly, wondering how they were now. Surely James must have grown tall enough to reach the living room table by now…and maybe Philippa had outgrown her stuffed pony phase. He couldn’t remember, so he’d gotten one or two just to be safe.
“Hey, guys,” he said, with a light-heartedness he didn’t entirely feel, “How are you?”
He listened to their chorus of “Good,” and “Okay, I guess,” with a kind of longing. Sometimes, the details blurred in his memory, or maybe it was over the phone, that was the problem, and it was hard to make out the differences in the sweet, childish voices. Would he ever come back? Ever see James triumphantly learn to tie his shoelaces? Or Philippa outgrowing the newest pencil marking on the wall where she took her height?
One day, they wouldn’t be children any longer. He’d have missed the better part of their growing up.
“Okay? Who’s that okay? Is that you, James?” he asked.
“Yeah. When are you coming home, Daddy?”
Cobb felt his chest clench. He exhaled sharply, leaning forward in his armchair. “James, we’ve talked about this, remember? I can’t. Not for a while. Daddy has to work.”
He caught a new voice over the phone. “Alright, that’s enough now, James. I have to talk to your Daddy, okay?” There were one or two sounds of complaint, but then he heard some static and muffled sounds, before Mal picked up.
“So, how did your job go?” she asked, without preamble.
His acute sense of guilt was only slowly beginning to dissipate. With Mal, it was less of guilt, and more of clear blue eyes that saw much more than Cobb wanted to talk about, and she had no qualms about pushing him. With Mal, it was about the totem that felt like it was burning a hole in his pocket, and guilt and a kind of resignation.
“Not so good,” he said, after a while. “The info was good, but Saito was ready for us. I’ll need to lie low for a while.”
“You are running away again, then?” she asked, lightly. But there was a bitter edge to her words, and Cobb flinched. She hadn’t let go of their last conversation.
“Sorry. My employers take exception to failure. Very violent exception.”
He heard her make a sound of exasperation, and didn’t need to see her to know that she must be staring out into space, maybe watching their children, eyebrows knit together in a frown, phone held to her left ear.
“And why did you take that job, to begin with?”
“We’ve been through this,” Cobb said, wearily, pressing the heel of his hand against his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood for maybe another fight tonight, or Mal trying to psychoanalyse him again. He wondered when it had begun to be so difficult to go one phone conversation without some kind of argument. The answer was obvious, really. Since the Algol job. One single job had changed everything. “Look, I don’t have that many options - “
“And so you chose to leave? To run away and to pull dangerous extractions all across the world, working for employers who would just as soon kill you?”
“You heard Adams,” Cobb snapped, more sharply than he intended to. “It was a likely conviction, Mal. The evidence was all against me, and the only people who could have testified to anything were dead!”
She said, silkily, her voice knowing and dark, “And that leads to illegal extraction jobs, how?”
“Mal - “
“Please, Dom. Don’t patronise me. I’m not stupid. You didn’t just run away because of a likely conviction. You’re pulling these jobs because you can’t let him go. Is that it? They told you, didn’t they? That they had the information you wanted - but only if you did so-and-so for them.”
“If I can find the right people - powerful people -” Cobb said, ignoring her words, “They could get me back home. But I need to build a reputation first. There’s no way to get it without any risk. I need to take those dangerous and risky jobs so that I can make a name for myself. I just need catch their attention, to do a job for one of them - and then I’ll be back home again.”
“And there is no such thing as moving to somewhere, maybe France, with your family?”
“Algol, Mal,” Cobb reminded her. It was the first thing that came to mind, after the instinctive and illogical denial. “It isn’t just murder charges. There’s espionage. It’s too high profile.” It was possible, he knew. They could do that. Mal knew it too, but she didn’t call him on it. Not yet.
“How did the job go wrong, Dom?” she asked instead, changing tack. She was probably still frowning, he thought, but her eyes would be narrowed in suspicion. Maybe she would be biting her lower lip lightly the way she always did when she was in deep thought, or tapping her fingers restlessly against the dining table, or both.
Once, Cobb would have told her exactly what happened. Once. It was always once. It was always before Algol, and after Algol, as if his life could be split into two neat halves and with the job that changed everything right in the middle. Now, he found himself hesitating. “Saito was ready for us,” he said. It was true.
She caught his pause. “He was there, wasn’t he? It’s getting worse.”
“I have it under control,” Cobb retorted, testily.
“You intended to fail at your job?”
Cobb’s breath hissed out through clenched teeth. “Look,” he said, after a hefty pause. Mal’s questions had struck far closer to home than he liked. That was the problem. She always knew when something was wrong, even if she couldn’t pinpoint why. Even if Cobb could never really give voice to it - or never did. He ran a hand absently through his hair. “Mal. Please. Can we just…not talk about it? I just wanted to say…I miss you. And the kids.”
Her sigh over the phone was resigned. “All right, Dom,” she said, wearily, “I miss you too. I wish you would come back.”
“I know,” Cobb said, “Believe me, I wish I could too.”
There was silence over the phone. Cobb wasn’t quite sure what to say; he wondered if she’d hung up on him, until Mal said, then, “The children miss you,” It was a tentative truce, of sorts. Philippa and James were the neutral ground - the one thing they never disagreed about, that they never fought about. That, Cobb thought tiredly, was at least one thing that hadn’t gone wrong, against the long list of things that had. They talked a bit more about the children, and for a while, Cobb could relax and pretend that nothing had changed. That everything was okay, just as it had been when they’d first married. He wondered if any of them had ever seen things getting so bad when it all first begun.
Never. That was always the point.
He didn’t wonder since when everything started to go wrong. He knew.
“Tell them - “ Cobb hesitated, as he was about to say, I’ll be back soon. He didn’t know that, not for sure. Instead, he said, “Tell them to be good. That…I love them. I’ll be sending them some presents through Miles.”
“I will,” Mal said. There was a bit of a pause, and then she said, “Please take care of yourself, Dom. I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, right before she hung up, and he was left with silence on the phone. Cobb held the phone a little longer, looking out through the windows at the dark city beyond, and the many tiny pinpricks of light. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, closing them until the lights became clear and distinct again, until the blurred edges faded, and until the surge of guilt receded and he didn’t feel quite so emotionally raw. Just…tired.
Time was when talking to Arthur had been…simple. Talking to Mal had been completely different. Nothing between them - no distance that was more than just physical, and none of the fighting and the way she always managed to have him feel so much guilt about what he was doing by the end of the conversation.
He glanced at his watch, and decided Nash wasn’t going to show up any time soon. There wasn’t any point in waiting for him. Cobb stood up, put away the phone, pulled on his jacket, kept away the handgun, and slung his black canvas carry-on over a shoulder. It was time to move. Their ride was going to be on the roof by now.
-
This is Dominic Cobb, extractor, after the Algol job:
He’s still one of the best. No one can deny that. But that’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. He’s wearier. Sharper, more prone to anger. The Algol job killed any remaining traces of the artist, and broke something inside the man. Something that can’t quite be fixed as easily as a broken watch, for instance. Or a broken PASIV.
If the Algol job was a crucible, then this is the man that emerged: lacking, damaged in some way, and changed. There is less vision now, less daring, less of his brash willingness to push the boundaries and to just keep pushing. There is only white-hot resolve left, and a sharp, cutting focus, with no more soft edges.
He doesn’t build any more. He can’t trust himself. He never works with a point man again.
He also can’t remember when he last smiled.
And here’s a secret:
Dominic Cobb is haunted.
In the deepest recesses of his mind, in the layer that Mal only caught a glimpse of before she pulled both of them from the insidious Lethean bonds of Limbo, there is a shade that walks the familiar hallways of the labyrinth of corridors that Cobb’s mind has become. This is the secret: the beginnings of the truth that runs fingers along his lips, that clenches a fist about his heart so he can’t breathe, can’t begin to even speak, can’t begin to explain it to Mal.
In the end, he doesn’t even want to.
There is a labyrinth in Cobb’s heart, and inside the labyrinth, there is a ghost.
Dominic Cobb is haunted by the ghost of a man he once trusted, a man he still trusts, and a man he knows he shouldn’t trust.
There is a ghoul in the labyrinth.
This is why he runs away, and keeps running. Why he desperately needs to know the truth about what happened that night. Because even after all the time in dreams, going deeper and deeper until he reached Limbo, trying to piece together - something - from his fragmented memories, Cobb is afraid. Afraid because he can’t quite trust himself. He can’t quite trust what he remembers.
Afraid that he already knows the truth - but won’t let himself see it. He’s afraid of the truth, locked in the heart of the labyrinth, guarded by a ghoul, guarded by a ghost -
- guarded by a friend and a brother.
Don’t you want to know? Arthur whispers.
A part of him does. A part of him needs to know.
So this is Dominic Cobb: a man on the run. He’s on the run from the labyrinth, from the ghost, and from a home that feels like a cage, plaster walls closing in on him slowly so he can’t breathe, so he can’t begin to try to find how to fix the broken pieces the Algol job has left in him.
He can’t trust himself, and is too afraid to plunge into the depths of the labyrinth for the truth hidden in its core. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other paths to the truth.
There are always other paths to the heart of the labyrinth. He is (was) an architect once. He knows about labyrinths, and how to navigate them. The dead can still bear witness. The evidence can’t lie. He can trust the evidence. He just needs access to it.
It will be ugly, part of Cobb knows, with the visceral sureness of instinct. The truth will be ugly. It will destroy him.
But he has to know, even if the truth will destroy him.
Because maybe, just maybe - the truth will set him free.
-
By the time Cobb emerged from the access stairway onto the helipad at the roof of the building, the sky was just beginning to lighten. He tugged his coat shut against the chill as he made his way across the roof to where the helicopter waited, and then hesitated, coming to a stop right in front of the helicopter the moment he was able to make out the two figures sitting inside.
One of them was Nash, slumped against the window. The faint sheen on his forehead was sweat; his eyes were wild and wide with terror and his hands were securely bound up with thick straps. He was breathing heavily, his hair tangled and dishevelled. He’d been handled roughly, if not beaten.
The other figure was Saito.
Saito glanced away from the window of the helicopter, and at Cobb. The sharp, edged expression on his face could have been a smile if his eyes weren’t utterly impassive. “He sold you out,” he said, nodding towards Nash. “Thought to come to me and bargain for his life.”
Nash met Cobb’s eyes - pleading, desperate.
Cobb looked away.
“So I offer you the satisfaction,” Saito said, and at his words, the man at the door of the helicopter silently offered Cobb a gun. Almost instinctively, Cobb recoiled from it. It had been a small motion, nothing obvious, but Saito’s eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly, almost as if he was confirming something.
“That’s not the way I deal with things,” he said steadily. The bodyguard glanced at Saito for confirmation, and at the nod, he holstered his gun. Saito rapped his knuckles against the window of the helicopter. It was a signal. One of his men bodily hauled Nash out of the helicopter and threw him to the ground. Cobb swallowed. For a moment, he thought Saito was going to have Nash killed on the spot, but then the guard who’d offered Cobb his gun walked around to the other side of the helicopter to join his comrade.
“Mr Cobb,” Saito called out. Cobb glanced back at Saito, who beckoned. The gesture was obvious. Still, Cobb wasn’t entirely sure if being in a helicopter with a mark he’d just failed an extraction on was wise - except there was no other option. Lingering in Tokyo any longer would be unwise. And Saito didn’t seem interested in harming him. This was a long lead-up to…something. A job, perhaps. Cobb nodded shortly, and climbed into the helicopter, sliding the door shut behind him.
Saito said something in Japanese, and then the helicopter began to rise. Through the window, Cobb saw the two men dragging a weakly struggling Nash - towards the access stairway on the other side of the building. “What will you do with him?” he asked, forcing himself to sound calm and unconcerned. He tore his eyes away from the window, and towards Saito.
Saito’s expression betrayed nothing of his thoughts as he replied, “Nothing. But I can’t speak for Cobol Engineering.”
In other words, Cobb thought, Nash was going to be beaten up and then killed. He said nothing, glancing at the receding figures through the window. For a moment, he wasn’t in a helicopter in Tokyo. He was in the flaming hulk of an apartment, yelling -
Godamn you Cobb, move!
Arthur -
Get the hell out of here. I’ll see to Jake.
Jesus Christ, Arthur, what the hell do you take me for? What the hell was all that? You -
“Mr Cobb?”
Cobb blinked, forcing himself to take in a deep breath. Calm. Even. He wasn’t in the apartment. This wasn’t the States. This was a helicopter. This was Tokyo, Japan. He took one breath, and then another, regulating his breathing. Saito watched him, saying nothing until Cobb regained some measure of control.
“What they say of you is true, then,” Saito said, neutrally. He studied the view from the window with great interest. “I understand it is not common for those in your profession to work with one another regularly.”
“What do they say?”
“Many things,” Saito said, with an expansive shrug. “But let me ask you a question, Mr Cobb: why did you spare him?”
Cobb licked his dry lips. “It’s not the way I work,” he said, at last, “I don’t believe in buying loyalty through fear.”
“And yet he is not the first of your colleagues to turn on you,” Saito mused. He turned away from the window, glancing at Cobb. “I must confess I am rather…puzzled. I do not endorse the heavy-handed methods of Cobol Engineering…and yet the actions of your colleagues suggest that some…displeasure…would not be remiss.”
“How did you know?” Cobb demanded, frowning. Except that what had happened with Arthur was common knowledge now, in the proper channels. He was known as the extractor who never worked with a point man, no matter how good the point man was. Saito could easily have gotten the information from Nash, or just about anyone.
“I have my sources.”
Cobb decided he didn’t care for Saito’s scrutiny, or any analysis of his working methods. He spoke up, to move the entire conversation along. “What do you want with me?” he wanted to know.
“Inception,” Saito finally said. He leaned forward a little, watching Cobb carefully. “Is it possible?”
Cobb hesitated. “Some extractors think it’s possible,” he allowed.
“And you? Can you do it?”
“Are you offering me a choice?” Cobb wanted to know, “Because I can find my own way to square things with Cobol.”
“Then you do have a choice.”
“And I choose to leave, sir,” He replied, as the helicopter approached and then set down outside the small airport. The private jet was already there, waiting. Saito made no further comment in reply to that, glancing out of the window as the helicopter descended.
“Tell the crew where you want to go,” Saito said, when the helicopter finally came to a halt. Cobb nodded, slid the door open and climbed out, walking across the airfield towards the plane - before Saito called out.
“Mr Cobb!”
Cobb paused, turning back.
“How would you like to go home? To America? To your wife and children?”
Cobb didn’t ask how Saito knew. “You can’t fix that!” he yelled, “No one can!”
He turned to go when Saito said, “Just like inception?”
He hesitated. He could all but feel Saito’s eyes on him, watching. Waiting.
“I can offer you more than that,” Saito said, eventually, “I have the information you have been looking for. The files you cannot access. Algol. Does the name sound familiar?”
Cobb turned back to look at Saito, transfixed. “You can’t,” he managed. “It’s been classified. The eyewitnesses…they’re all dead. No one knows what happened.”
“How is a different matter,” Saito said, unfazed. He leaned back, confident, now that he had Cobb’s undivided attention. “These are two things I can do for you, Mr Cobb. I only require one thing in return: inception.”
Algol.
He could have the information. He could learn what had happened, that night that he couldn’t quite remember except in fractured flashes, bits that his mind kept throwing at him.
He could know the truth.
Cobb’s mouth firmed. “How complex is the idea?” he wanted to know.
“Simple enough.”
“No idea is simple when you need to plant it in somebody else’s mind.”
“My main competitor is an old man in poor health. His son will soon inherit control of the corporation. I need him to decide to break up his father’s empire.”
And there it was. Corporate sabotage and corporate espionage were often two sides of the same coin. Except that no one had been able to pull off the sabotage. Extraction was one thing. Inception was another - a thousand times trickier, and more painful. And yet, Cobb thought, weighing it up - he believed (knew) it could be done.
“If I were to do this,” he said, slowly, “If - If I even could do it. I need a guarantee. How do I know you can deliver?”
“You don’t,” Saito conceded, easily. “But I can. So, do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?”
Cobb considered, one last time. He made his decision. It was far easier than he expected. The moment Saito had said he had the information about the Algol case, there was no contest. He nodded, just once.
“Assemble your team, Mr Cobb,” Saito said. The helicopter started to rise. “And choose your people more wisely.”
Cobb didn’t ask for more details, or for how he was going to be contacted. If Saito had managed to track him down, even when he was lying low in Tokyo, Saito was definitely going to be able to find him this time. He just needed to ask his pilot where Cobb had flown to.
And he knew Cobb wasn’t going to run.
Algol, Cobb thought. It wasn’t possible. And yet, Saito had said he had the information. It couldn’t be the case files. They thought him guilty. (Unless that was the truth.) Except there were no eye-witnesses. He was the only one to walk away from the case alive. Arthur had died in there, with Edwin.
He shivered a little as the wind blew across the airfield and tugged his coat a little tighter, realising he’d been standing out in the open for a long time, just thinking. Cobb trudged towards the waiting jet, planning his next step. (Once, it would have been Arthur who’d been trudging alongside him. It’d have been Arthur who’d have been dealing with all the small banal details.)
He took a deep breath, and let it out again. A forger. He’d definitely need a forger for this job. Eames it was, then. Eames, who was in Mombasa, Cobol’s backyard. He was heading right back into the lion’s den, but it was a necessary risk. Inception was going to be more difficult than any other job Cobb had attempted, and he wouldn’t do it with anything short of the best.
-
Tracking down Eames was as challenging as Cobb had expected. Eames took a certain amount of pleasure in making sure trying to get hold of him wasn’t an easy task - probably because it was one of his little games. Still, Cobb kept a low profile and made some discreet inquiries. He found Eames at the fifth gambling den he dropped in on, bent forward over the table, intent on his game of poker.
“Rub them together all you want,” he said, “They’re not going to breed.” It was one of the sentences they ended up using in places that weren’t entirely safe to talk business. Cobb didn’t think anyone could quite pick up on it in the crowd and the noise of the gambling den, but he didn’t see the sense in being stupid. In this case, he meant he needed some of Eames’ illegal skills.
Eames looked up, slightly startled, and then smiled as he read the message implicit in Cobb’s words. “You never know,” he replied with a slight shrug.
“Let me get you a drink,” Cobb offered.
Eames lost his last two chips, and then turned around. He nodded briefly. “You’re buying,” he warned, as he led the way towards the cashier and then produced two stacks of poker chips out of nothing. They’d probably come from his pockets, but Eames excelled at sleight-of-hand. Cobb absently picked up the first chip and studied it.
“Your spelling hasn’t improved,” he said, deceptively casual.
Eames glanced at him, and plucked the chip from his fingers, handing it over to the cashier. “Piss off,” he grumbled. But he was waiting for the second phrase.
“How’s your handwriting?”
Eames made the money disappear with the same abruptness with which he’d made the poker chips appear. “Versatile,” he said, easily. He gave away nothing of the other conversation that they’d just had. “Now, what about that drink you’re buying?”
Cobb shrugged, casually. “Know of a good place?”
Eames smiled briefly. It didn’t quite reach his grey eyes. “Oh, yes.”
-
The ‘good place’ that Eames had in mind was one of the many coffee houses along Mombasa’s streets. They went up to the second level and ordered their drinks, picking one of the tables next to the balcony to decrease the chances of their conversation being overheard. It wasn’t until Eames was at least halfway through his drink before Cobb brought up the job.
“Inception,” Cobb finally said, watching Eames carefully. Eames hesitated, for a moment, in the middle of refilling his glass from the opened bottle, and then he gave a small chuckle and set the bottle aside. “Before you bother telling me it’s impossible…”
“No, it’s perfectly possible,” Eames cut in, “It’s just bloody difficult.”
“Interesting,” Cobb said, dryly, “Because I kept getting told it can’t be done.”
“Who?” Eames asked, curious.
Cobb just shrugged, and refused to say anything more. Mal hadn’t liked the idea, and the phone call had been brief and terse. When he thought about it, Arthur would have said it was impossible. That inception couldn’t be done.
But Arthur was dead. Cobb watched his fist unclench. Eames’ eyes were on him, but he said nothing about that.
“Well,” Eames said easily, taking the hint and moving on, “Listen, if you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”
“Like you,” Cobb said. Eames accepted that with a nod, and a small smile. He raised his glass to his lips when Cobb spoke up again. “Let me ask you something,” he said, frowning thoughtfully, “Have you done it before?”
“We tried it. We got the idea in place, but it didn’t take,” Eames said, vaguely.
“You didn’t plant it deep enough?”
“No, it’s not just about depth,” Eames said, shaking his head. He set his glass down, untouched. “You need the simplest version of the idea in order for it to grow naturally in the subject’s mind. It’s a very subtle art.”
Cobb gave up and drank the beer straight from his opened bottle.
“So what is this idea you need to plant?”
Eames’ expression betrayed nothing more than mild amusement, but the question was more than enough to indicate his interest. It was probably as much of a yes as he was going to get from Eames at this point, and maybe just a bit more of a commitment than Cobb had been prepared to expect.
“We need the heir of a major corporation to dissolve his father’s empire.”
Eames frowned. “You see, right there, you have various political motivations and anti-monopolistic sentiments etcetera, but all that stuff is, uh…” he shook his head, “It’s really at the mercy of your subject’s prejudice, you see. What you have to do is to start at the absolute basic.”
“Which is what?”
Eames thought for a moment. “The relationship with the father,” he determined. He hesitated for a while before asking, “Still not working with a point man?”
“Mal helps,” Cobb said, flatly.
“But she isn’t a point man, is she?” Eames wanted to know. “I thought she was a chemist, or something of that sort.”
“No,” Cobb was forced to concede. “Chemist. Hell of an extractor too.”
“You’re going to need a point man, you know,” Eames said, matter-of-factly. “It’s a big job. We need someone decent. Maybe Ramirez - have you heard from him?”
“I know,” Cobb said. He shrugged. He had no intention of talking to Ramirez any time soon, and he didn’t want to work with second-raters like Liu. “I’ll see what I can do.” It wasn’t much of a concession, and more of a non-statement but Eames accepted it, content not to press the issue for now.
“So your wife is a chemist. Is she working with you on this?”
“No,” Cobb said sharply, and then regretted it. “No,” he said again, more evenly, “I don’t have a chemist.”
“Well, alright then,” Eames said, “I do. There’s a man here. Yusuf. He formulates his own versions of the compounds.”
Cobb considered it a moment, and then shrugged. “Why don’t you take me there?”
“Once you’ve lost your tail,” Eames said, nodding to the bar where a man sat and tried to be unobtrusive. Cobb swore quietly. He was getting careless. He’d seen the man a few blocks back when he had been looking for Eames but had thought nothing of it then. “Man at the bar. Came in about two minutes after we did.”
“Cobol Engineering,” Cobb whispered. It was a guess, but it was the only option that made any sense. It was a dark certainty, lodged in the pit of his stomach. Cobol knew he was here, after all. It was only a matter of time.
Eames shrugged. “They pretty much own Mombasa, don’t they?”
Cobb acknowledged that with a nod. He brought the bottle to his lips, took a drink, and forced himself to sound deceptively casual. On the list of things he’d pretended to be unruffled by, this hardly made any kind of dent. It was almost too easy. He was going to be in a bit of danger there. Well, great. A darker part of his mind almost thought he’d relish some…action. Something clean and simple.
“That price on my head,” he said, slowly, “Was it dead or alive?”
“Don’t remember,” Eames said dismissively. His eyes flicked towards the tail once more. “See if he starts shooting.” Cobb’s lips quirked, for a moment, in a small smile. It faded as he considered his options.
“Run interference,” Cobb said, thinking quickly. “I’ll meet you downstairs in the bar in say…half an hour?”
“Back here?” Eames asked, raising an eyebrow.
Cobb shrugged, considering the balcony. It was only two storeys, he decided, and far less than that, really. The second level wasn’t really that high. Not much of a drop from the balcony to the ground and it was his best hope.
“It’s the last place they’d suspect,” he said, and Eames gave a low chuckle of agreement. He nodded, downed the last of his drink and went over to the bar.
“Freddy!” he called out, “Freddy Simmonds! My god, it’s you isn’t it?”
Before he had the time to think the better of it, Cobb climbed over the edge of the balcony and let himself drop. He hit some straw matting, feeling the jolt of impact through his arms and legs. The stall owner made a loud noise of protest and reached over to grab him and haul him to his feet. Cobb didn’t recognise the language but suspected a lot of it really translated to fuck you. He slammed his head into the man’s chin, hearing the crack of impact that flung the man’s head backwards, and took advantage of the instant to break free of the hold, all but throwing himself down the street.
The Cobol employee must have all but realised he had vanished by now. Eames wouldn’t do much more than that. Cobb wouldn’t have expected him to.
He pushed and shoved his way down the crowded street. He needed a larger headstart than what he had now. He turned back his head for a moment and caught sight of two different men following him, both of them starting to run. Godamnit. He’d assumed there was only that one tail. He should have known better. He reached out and grabbed a ceramic plate from a nearby stall and whirled and smashed it at the closest pursuer.
It broke with a satisfying clink and the man was downed. Cobb hoped the hell the other guy would stop for his partner and continued to shove his way through the crowd. Brown-jacket was persistent, and followed him. Cobb seized on a wrapped fabric object that looked like a cricket bat from one of the stalls, ignored the vendor’s protests and swung it - hard. His momentum drove the bat with a crack of impact, but Cobb didn’t stick around for the follow-through. Brown-jacket staggered backwards, stumbling into a stall, and from the vendor’s exclamations, he could only hope that the distraction was going to be enough.
Cobb kept on running. He wasn’t familiar with Mombasa. His only hope was to keep on the run and lose them in the crowd that filled Mombasa’s narrow, tangled streets.
-
Stupid, Cobb thought, annoyed. That was unforgivably stupid and careless of him. For every tail you saw, there was bound to be two you didn’t, and now all three of them were after him, armed and it looked like the price was for a dead extractor after all.
He ducked beneath an awning, yanked a stool from a protesting vendor and kicked it behind him, hoping the obstacle would slow the pursuit down, although what he really needed wasn’t a delay but a godamned miracle. Some of the passers-by tried to grab him, roughly; he shouldered his way free of their grasp, stomping on one or two insteps, and then staggered, recovered his balance and kept running. So long as he kept on the move, the only thing Cobol’s hirelings could do was spray and pray and that wasn’t going to cut it in a crowded street.
Except the crowds were thinning, and Cobb bit back a curse as he realised he didn’t know exactly where he was going - and that it was far more likely for his pursuers to know where he was going than he did.
He was screwed.
There were less people around now as he ran, breath coming in quick gasps, and Cobb realised they were boxing him in, driving him right where they wanted him. Towards a cul-de-sac. He reached the end of the alley first, cursed and turned back. There weren’t many options left, and Cobb was desperate. So as the first of the Cobol thugs appeared around the corner, Cobb hurled himself at him, staying low and praying his luck would hold. There was the sound of a handgun being discharged, and Cobb thought he hadn’t been shot but there was no time to worry. Both of them hit the ground, rolling, and the gun skittered away across the surface of the road.
Cobb scrabbled desperately for the gun, fingers grazing the asphalt with a flash of pain, and then he had the gun - fingers closing around it - and then the man gave up and headbutted him. Christ, Cobb thought savagely, driving his knee forward until he heard a yelp that told him he’d hit something hard enough. He tried again but his fingers grazed the gun. Cobb was all but about to yell in frustration. There was a sharp line of pain along his stomach as he struggled to get his forearm around the man’s throat and then applied pressure - hard.
Pain exploded - in his side, this time, and Cobb reflexively relaxed his grip. The gun, he thought, as he was grabbed by the scuff of his neck, manhandled to his feet, and slammed into a wall so hard that the world blurred before resolving into unsteady, moving shapes before his eyes. There was a ringing in his ears, Cobb thought muzzily.
He was thrown back against the wall, again and again, until he felt himself dropping limply to the ground. He frowned - Brown-jacket had been joined by a double - but then they resolved back into a single figure again. Oh. It was just Brown-jacket and the whole lot of them. Cobb was yanked roughly to his feet by a bruising grip on his throat again, and then Brown-jacket pulled his gun on him. He tried to break free but his body wasn’t obeying his commands, and his starving lungs were demanding air.
Then there was the gunshot, loud and sharp and clear, and Cobb wondered vaguely why dying in the real world didn’t actually hurt as much as in a dream - and then he realised that the blood soaking his shirt was from a laceration, and not anything that could be attributed to a bullet. Brown-jacket collapsed, taking Cobb down with him, and Cobb tried and finally managed to pry Brown-jacket’s fingers from his throat, wheezing as he sucked in one trembling breath of air and just lay down and enjoyed being alive and watching the world blur at the edges.
It took his disoriented mind a few moments to realise what he was seeing.
Who he was seeing.
“No,” Cobb breathed then, in disbelief. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
Arthur squeezed off another shot, and the last of Cobol’s men dropped with a sodden thud. One of them moaned and tried to rise. Stepping down the alley, towards him, Arthur coolly shot him again, and then all sound was cut off. He holstered his Glock and approached him. “Cobb,” he said urgently, kneeling next to him and shaking him. Cobb blinked, trying to focus on Arthur’s face and failing. Arthur blurred in and out of focus, his eyebrows knitted together in a worried frown. “Jesus. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“You’re not real,” Cobb slurred, glancing up at the figure in a charcoal-grey windbreaker and a white shirt, collar unbuttoned. Funny, he thought vaguely. He hadn’t seen Arthur in that jacket…in a while. His subconscious chose the oddest of times to tweak his projection. He wasn’t even under. Was he?
“Shit,” Arthur swore as he carefully examined the blood-soaked shirt, and then he grunted as he lifted Cobb. Cobb’s stomach protested the movement and so did his side. He blinked, trying to force himself to focus. His head ached terribly, and he wanted nothing more to just close his eyes and sleep. It didn’t matter when his projection turned on him. (He always did.) Or the hallucination. Or the flashback. Or…whatever he was. Cobb was just too tired to care right now.
And then the world tilted on its axis and spun and then Cobb was rather certain that blurred vision or not, the dark object he was staring at was Arthur’s butt. Well, it was likely to be Arthur’s pants, anyway, but there was no real way to be sure. He’d never gotten the opportunity to inspect Arthur’s butt at an uncomfortably close range before and it wasn’t as if he’d been particularly interested in getting the chance to do so.
He winced and closed his eyes against the dizzying headache that threatened to intensify. He was being carried upside down, then. Probably explained everything. Especially the pain that came and went in sharp throbs that made Cobb gasp. It only seemed to get worse with each movement Arthur made, and at the same time, more distant, as if it wasn’t quite his body, but someone else’s that was hurting so badly. “Relax,” Arthur called out, and Cobb did just that. This was what he’d missed, he realised. Arthur’s presence - warm, solid, and reassuring.
He didn’t quite realise exactly when his abused body gave in, and when darkness gave way to true unconsciousness.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3