Bohemian Rhapsody, Part II
Title: Bohemian Rhapsody, Part II
Fandom: Inception
Rating: NC-17, just to be safe.
Characters: Arthur, Cobb, Mal
Summary: Done for inception_kink prompt. Inception x Kurohitsuji. Cobb is the best extractor in the world. Arthur is the best at what he does, working for Cobb as his demonic point man and bound to devour Cobb’s soul by a contract. Mild A/C.
-
Arthur’s first steps in the wider world of extraction were almost entirely unexpected. He didn’t have an issue with killing projections. He just killed them, cleanly and emotionlessly. Professionally. There was something to be said for that, and it shouldn’t disturb Cobb, and yet it did. (A little.) There was no hesitation - none at all, not even on the first time. Just motion - swift, explosive, and merciless. No guilt.
(Cobb’s never worked with ex-military before, not even in his line.)
Arthur doesn’t have an issue with killing himself. It is the dying that cut him to the quick, laid him right open to the bone in such a uniquely vulnerable and revealing way. Each time he died in a dream, his eyes snapped open, searching, frantic, before they focused; he would gasp involuntarily before quickly reasserting control over himself. “You get used to it, after a while,” Cobb had said, but Arthur took much longer than Cobb did to get used to dying in dreams.
(Perhaps because dying brings with it a desperate instinct; frantic mortality and choked-back panic, raw emotions that Cobb can read in his point man’s eyes which are all too human.)
To this, Cobb applied Miles’ favourite technique: distaction. It didn’t harm pride, only gave Arthur something else to set his mind to instead of the dying, in unforgettable detail. Miles did it with samples of architecture.
-
Two successful jobs bring just about enough rewards with them to get Arthur out of cohabitation and into an apartment. Cobb insisted on splitting the payment, and treating Arthur exactly like a point man - only they’re working together on a semi-permanent basis.
Arthur moving out came as a bit of a relief; while Arthur was along every day for work, it became far easier to think of him as a colleague, or even (just perhaps), an acquaintance. Cobb and Arthur are becoming well-known among extractors (just like Cobb and Cobb) and in some ways, they work together well, perhaps even better than Cobb did with Mal, if only because Arthur is a far better support to Cobb’s extactor than Cobb is to Mal.
(He gets a little miffed about that, at times.)
What is certain - Arthur is definitely better than Josh. Things would be even better if Arthur could get over his continued refusal to demonstrate any initiative. That forms the crux of most of their conflicts, where Cobb yells at Arthur for being so goddamned rigid about orders that he doesn’t act on the realisation that something is wrong with the projections. (He was supposed to tie the projections down; somewhere in transition, it resulted in the projections tying Arthur down, while Cobb was ambushed.)
In between jobs, Cobb finds various things he never knew about Arthur, in the process of formulating various distractions. Cobb finds out that Arthur has a fascination for paradoxes (he spends hours staring at the Penrose stairs) and will spend free evenings feeding the neighbourhood sparrows and cats. He takes his coffee sweetened and with milk. His fingers are deft on a violin but clumsy on a piano; he doesn’t like pianos. He frowns, marginally, when focused or preoccupied. He has an excellent mind for details and an (almost) eidetic memory. Like Mal, he has a strange fascination with Edith Piaf and Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien. Sometimes, in the middle of a challenge (holding off ten projections), he wears a fierce and wild smile on his face, all bared teeth.
(In some ways, he is like a wildcat.) He doesn’t know what to do when it comes to human contact, and carefully shies away from it.
These little things, bit by bit, piece by piece, make up the person Arthur. Perhaps against his own better judgement, Cobb ignores everything else, including sinister contracts, except for these. These little snippets that somehow fit together to paint a more complex picture, of a demon-who-is-a-man or perhaps, just a man - Cobb’s point man.
Arthur.
-
The second reversal for Cobb, and the first turning point for the two of them came when Phillipa was born. Even if Cobb had decided he didn’t really want Arthur near (on which he was ambiguous), Mal overruled him with a stare, and “Dom.” He surrendered.
When Cobb went to get a coffee, Arthur followed him out of the single-occupant ward. That was when upon his return, Cobb walked directly into a glaring contest between Arthur and a doctor, a man taller than Arthur, with wire-rimmed spectacles, and light brown hair. It was almost funny, comparing them side by side - except that Cobb knew how Arthur’s lithe, slender frame could explode into motion at almost any moment, and that happening was a distinct possibility. Arthur was (surprisingly) visibly on edge, and Cobb could feel the tension humming in the air, like static.
“Are you trying to antagonise the doctor?” Cobb demanded, trying to be discreet, and trying to make sure neither cup of coffee spilled.
Arthur glanced at him, mouth tight with displeasure. For once, Cobb could read more than just worry, but traces of anger, perhaps even just a bit of fear - funny, he’d never placed Arthur as one to be terribly afraid. “This,” Arthur said, words clipped and tight, “Is not a doctor.” He took a deep breath, exhaling, composing himself and his agitation mostly vanished.
“This room is off-limits.” He informed the doctor, who gave a slow, condescending, and frightening smile.
“Another one of those…?” The doctor asked, pausing. “Or is it a different name now?”
“Arthur,” Arthur said, stuffing his hands in his pockets with a bit more force than was required. “I remember the last time, Blake. Not in this room.” He nodded to the ward from which they had come.
“Sentiment… from you, Arthur?” Blake smirked, and it was obvious from the way he said Arthur that he knew it was just another assumed name, just another label. He studied Arthur, all but smiling in delight - the kind used when studying a specimen that had performed contrary to expectations. “How…unexpected. I don’t think she noticed when you…” He took a step closer to Arthur, and whispered, harsh and cruel “Devoured her.”
Cobb didn’t see Arthur throw that first punch. In one quick motion, Arthur’s fist snapped up and out, slamming into the doctor’s chin with brutal force - Blake staggered backward, a line of blood trickling from his mouth and it wasn’t clear whose blood it was (Arthur bled red). He smirked still, with annoying satisfaction, nodding as he gingerly rubbed his face, sneering at Arthur’s anger. It burned, chillingly cold, icy, clinical, and intense. Arthur stalked towards Blayce, barely rubbing his bleeding knuckles. That, Cobb knew, was going to leave a bad bruise - he took one step forward to restrain Arthur, but paused; there was something here that was some enmity far deeper between Arthur and Blake, and Cobb hated prying.
“Don’t talk about her.” Arthur hissed. “You don’t deserve to. You know nothing.”
“Of her pleas? Of how painful her death was? How excruciating, when you crushed her against you?” Blake laughed, mocking and weary and sardonic, all at once. “Being sanctimonious doesn’t suit you, Arthur.” In one fluid motion, he stood, seized Arthur’s left hand, flipped it over, looked at the underside of Arthur’s wrist. “Oh, ho.” He said, chuckling, glancing down the corridor until his gaze flicked to Cobb, and the slipped sleeve, just revealing the tip of the pentacle. “That was foolish,” Blake said, almost conversationally. “You have no idea what you did, when you bound yourself to - Arthur.”
“Don’t make me speak to Will.” Arthur said, coldly. One, two drops of blood trickled down his knuckles and dripped onto the sterile floor. He ignored the droplets, folding his arms across his chest. “He owes me, and he doesn’t like what you do. No entering this room, Blake.”
Any trace of sadistic delight was gone from Blake’s features. “Fine,” He hissed. “But you know it will happen. Eventually. If not me, then another.” He stalked down the corridor, with the bad grace of someone who had just lost an argument. “Everything comes to an end, Arthur. Everything.”
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, in a surprisingly human gesture.
“Your knuckles.” Cobb told him. “That doctor - Blake? He must have a jaw of steel.”
“Oh, he does.” Arthur said, grimly, producing a handkerchief and wiping the blood off. “He’s not really a doctor. He’s the last person you want to see in this place. A Reaper.”
Cobb handed him one of the styrofoam cups. “And?”
Arthur accepted it. “Thanks.” He frowned slightly, studying it, and stuffed the bloodied handkerchief back into his pocket. “Reapers decide if a dying soul should be allowed to continue living - or if it should be sent on. Blake…has unsavory habits, for a Reaper. He takes too much pleasure in sending dying souls on - and in making them die in the first place. This hospital isn’t safe.”
“I take it you both have a history.”
“Of sorts.”
They drank their coffee in silence, after that, Cobb trying to give Arthur some space before they went back in. But one question remained, teasing the edges of his mind, and Cobb knew he had to ask it, in any case.
“Arthur?”
Arthur glanced up from his contemplation of the coffee cup.
“Who was she?”
In that moment, Cobb read startled vulnerability and anger before Arthur closed his eyes, and opened them again, and the anger and vulnerability vanished.
“Someone I once knew.” Arthur said shortly.
And that was the end of it. As if this was a turning point, however, and a significant one, Cobb found Arthur took more initiative on jobs, was more willing to follow his instincts and his reason on what was the best course of action.
When Cobb got shot in the foot by a projection-sniper, Arthur shot him in the head, almost immediately (between the eyes.) He also went on to complete the job, and to confirm that the subject’s mind had been successfully militarised.
-
Uncle Arthur turned out to be surprisingly gentle (perhaps not surprising, given how he treated animals) with Phillipa, and later, James, and a regular Doctor Doolittle, splinting broken wings, saving the neighbourhood cats from getting run over, and showing them how to find worms to feed the backyard birds.
The pace of things changed after James was born - Mal slowly started to go back to the job, and working patterns changed entirely when a two-man team became a two-man-and-one-woman team. Cobb was back to being the architect, Arthur was still point man, but had to get used to covering someone else, and Mal was the extractor.
She was far better at it than Cobb was. Mal had a special kind of instinct for the job, a special way of telling how far to push a person, and just how to get the information she needed out of a person. It took quite a while for most clients to learn how to deflect Mal - she knew just what approach to take that was the hardest for them to reject.
Perhaps that was the reason why even Arthur, at his most closed-off and contrary, could never completely shut off Mal in the way he refused to let Cobb know anything more about him.
-
The other turning point came, weeks after a morning when Cobb tried to explain to Arthur that he was, in reality, fifty years older than he had been the previous day. Arthur wasn’t too skeptical - there was something about Cobb that was different. Far older, far wearier. What disturbed Arthur was how Cobb had gone deep into his subconscious, without a worry, without a care.
“That was dangerous,” He told Cobb, furiously. “You could have died.”
“No.” Cobb said, slowly. “It’s - limbo.” He finally said, eyes the dark blue of a distant sea. “Raw, infinite subconscious - an entire ocean of it. You create everything; there isn’t a dreamer. And time passes so slowly you could live there, forever - in a world that isn’t real.” His voice turned harsh and bitter. “None of it is real.”
Forever is nothing, Arthur wanted to say. Forever is just another way of saying it never ends. He had told her that, when she asked him. What was it to live, and to keep living after everyone else had died? (After he had devoured their souls, each and every one of them.)
“But Mal?”
Cobb exhaled. “She got pulled in.” He said, quietly, glancing around to make sure they were quite alone. “She - stopped remembering it was a dream. I did at first. We both did. We built places we remembered, and places we didn’t, just added them to each other until they made a twisted kind of sense, as if this was all we’d ever known.”
“And you remembered?” There was something Cobb wasn’t saying. That much was obvious. It didn’t matter; Cobb’s secrets were his to keep. But when it came to Mal - things were fair game. He didn’t say, You said never to build from memory, it’s dangerous.
“Eventually.” Cobb admitted, rubbing his left wrist for a moment, and Arthur felt his fingers automatically shift to the burn scar on his own wrist. “She didn’t. I had to…” He hesitated. “Convince her.”
How? He wanted to ask. How did she change her mind? “Her totem?”
“Locked it away.” Cobb replied. His eyes were a light, distant blue; his fingers twitched just slightly, as if he was spinning a small, brass top. Arthur didn’t know how the totem worked, and didn’t care to know. “She didn’t want to doubt, so she discarded it.”
“And your totem?”
Cobb reached for his pocket. “It’s still there.” He said, quietly. “I’m fine, now. I will be.”
Arthur said nothing. He wanted to say that things weren’t fine - how could Cobb have broken his own rules? How could Mal have forgotten? You’re bound, you fool. You can’t break your contract.
He watched Mal move through the house, pausing, awkward, a ghost in a world she didn’t fully inhabit. It was as if some part of her, the animus, had died in limbo and had never emerged.
Eternity, he thought, turning the concept over and over again in his mind. Oblivion.
Perhaps, just perhaps, he could understand why Mal hadn’t wanted to leave.
Sentiment from you, Arthur? How…unexpected. Arthur tightened his grip on the metal of the window sill, feeling it press into his skin, harder and harder. Stop it, he told himself. You serve out your contract. Nothing more.
You do not get attached.
Sentiment, Arthur? She breathes. He says nothing, but she smiles in delight anyway, because she knows she’s right.
-
Cobb didn’t know how long he stood there, on the ledge, stunned, screaming, begging, and pleading. A small part of his mind whispered he should follow her down, it didn’t matter where they were going, until he heard cat-soft footsteps behind him. Arthur had a way with locks. His scar was a freezing brand, and he couldn’t think, was just numb with incomprehension and stunned grief.
Arthur took one glance and crossed the room in a few swift steps. “Cobb!” He shouted. “It’s not safe on that ledge!”
Cobb turned, a harder task than it seemed. His footing and his grip were threatening to give out on him; the pentacle throbbed with each breath. Phillipa, he thought. James.
Mal.
“She’s dead!” He screamed. “She threw herself down, goddamnit!”
“What?” Arthur demanded, paling. “She - “
“Jumped off the godamn ledge.” Cobb half-snarled in a rictus of agony. He thought he was sobbing, he wasn’t sure, only that his breath was coming in shuddering gasps. “Threw herself down because she thought this world wasn’t real. Because I - I - “
“Cobb,” Arthur said, his voice strangely gentle. “You need to get off that ledge. It’s not safe there.” Was that pity?
“I wanted to go deeper. So deep she lost herself. So deep she couldn’t - “
“I’m sorry.”
He laughed, harsh, mocking. He hardly recognised his own voice, cracked from screaming, crying, and pleading. “Don’t bother.” He said, dismissively. “I’m just - just your next godamn meal in a list of - “
“You aren’t in your right mind.” Arthur said, curtly. “I’m getting you off the ledge this instant.” He clambered over a tipped chair, and reached for Cobb’s hand. Cobb barely resisted, and he managed to get Cobb safely into the hotel room.
“She wanted me to jump too,” Cobb whispered. He found himself clinging reflexively to Arthur, who flinched for a moment, before reluctantly relaxing. Even now, Arthur was always the faint smell of clean laundry and sulphur.
Arthur’s arm snaked around his back, supporting him. “Come on,” Arthur said, very quietly, glancing around at the ruined room. He just barely missed stepping on the remains of a broken vase. Glass shards crunched beneath his heel. “We better get you to somewhere safe.”
Cobb turned his head away, into Arthur’s jacket, and let himself sob. He didn’t want to see her, splayed out, cold and dead on the street, limbs broken, bleeding. He didn’t want to remember her dead. Arthur said nothing, just steered them out of the minefield of broken objects the room had become.
Gently, he felt Arthur ease his head away when they reached the street pavement, and left the hotel behind. He let Arthur do it. He didn’t want to see anything.
Not her. Not dead.
-
The next few days passed by in a blur to Cobb. Arthur did everything; he went with the officers to identify the corpse, he made funeral plans (even down to the amaranth wreaths; Mal had always loved Paradise Lost), watched Phillipa and James, but most of all, watched Cobb to make sure Cobb did nothing stupid.
It was Arthur who made the call to Miles and Marie, Mal’s mother - and broke the news to them. It was Arthur who sat in the faded brown armchair that Cobb had always hated but Mal had always loved and watched Cobb sleep each night, making sure that was all Cobb planned on doing.
“Don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Cobb said blearily, on the second night, with too much to drink, after Phillipa and James were safely in bed. “Why don’t you just - “ He waved his hands about vaguely, “Ignore this. Screw this. Take me. Devour me and kill me now.”
“You’re drunk.” Arthur said bluntly, almost-accusingly. He gauged the distance between Cobb, himself, and the kitchen knives, and decided all sharp implements were safely out of useable range. “Sleep, Cobb.”
“’M not drunk,” Cobb slurred, eyes half-closed. He was almost close to passing out; he flopped limply onto the kitchen table, fumbling blindly for another bottle of beer - Arthur caught his hand.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” He informed Cobb.
“Why?” Cobb demanded. He struggled to open his eyes just a bit more. The room was beginning to blur and tilt. “Just get done with it. Kill me. Complete the contract.”
“Cobb, I am not having this conversation with a drunk and grieving man.” Arthur almost snapped, folding his arms across his chest. “And you are not giving your children nightmares.”
“I know,” Cobb mumbled. “She killed herself. She thought they weren’t real.” He was beginning to get incoherent. “Hurts.”
“It gets better.” Arthur said, distantly. “With time.”
“Never been there.” Cobb accused. He wasn’t even lifting his head by now.
“You’re wrong.” Arthur said, and the words brought with them memories and quiet pain. Of her pleas? Of how painful her death was? “She trusted me.” He said, bitterly. “And at the end of it - I killed her.” For a contract.
“Always knew - you weren’t a cold bastard.” Cobb whispered. He tried staring at Arthur through bleary eyes but it took too much effort.
Arthur said nothing to that. Cobb wasn’t even going to remember this conversation in the morning.
Cobb’s lips quirked in a bitter half-smirk. “Mal always believed that, you know? Even when - even when - “ He broke down again, muffled, dry, choking sobs racking his shoulders. Arthur went for the tissue box. “Don’t.” Cobb mumbled, blindly grabbing Arthur’s arm. “Don’t go. Please.”
Carefully, Arthur sat back down. Cobb didn’t let go, so he scooted closer, moving his chair right next to Cobb’s. He didn’t say anything, and Cobb made a muffled croak and rested his head on Arthur’s shoulder in a limp, flopping motion. Arthur decided that yes, Cobb was most definitely drunk, and that neither of them was going to talk about this in the morning.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He said quietly, and Cobb sighed and closed his eyes.
It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, Arthur decided, on the matter of Cobb possibly dozing off on his shoulder. It certainly kept him out of trouble. In the dim kitchen lighting, (Phillipa and James both in bed), and shadows playing across his face, Cobb looked oddly vulnerable.
After a while, Cobb muttered something vague, possibly almost-asleep by then, and pulled closer. Arthur fought the reflexive need to pull away, forcing himself to relax, instead of disturbing Cobb. But it turned out that Cobb wasn’t entirely asleep yet.
“Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“When you kill me,” Cobb said softly, resigned and weary, but words painfully clear, “Make every moment painful. Every second of it, make me suffer.”
When you kill me, please don’t, what are you doing, why, sentiment, Arthur? Did you care for her - there is no sentiment for you, you’re not supposed to care or feel for them, you fool you fool -
“Liar,” Arthur whispered aloud. But by then, Cobb had already dozed off.
Sentiment.
He watched Cobb’s chest rise and fall, carefully eased away, and tossed the bottles into the trash before someone stumbled on them in the morning.
It was going to be another long night.
-
After the first week, Cobb slipped into a quiet despair. He was emerging from his depression, and was actually beginning to pay attention to James and Phillipa. It was, however, still evident that he wasn’t entirely there. Arthur decided it wasn’t safe to leave the sharp objects in plain sight. The medication migrated to various obscure cabinets, and he never let Cobb out of his sight.
(Cobb, however, was equally reluctant to let Arthur out of his sight, and somewhere in the middle of all that, Arthur found himself moving in again.)
Windows were a different story. Cobb gave them a wide berth, in the almost unconscious daze in which he did everything. That meant Arthur didn’t have to sit in on Cobb showering. (Not that he particularly minded or felt disturbed.)
Then the news that Cobb never mentioned in the entire episode came; Mal left notes with their lawyer. She’d implicated Cobb in her death, and Arthur cursed himself for not putting the pieces together sooner - the times when Mal went to see the lawyer, alone, the furtive way she glanced at Cobb, the hotel room, ransacked and ruined by artifice.
How, with centuries upon centuries of memories did the idea that Mal was conspiring, planning something bad not occur to him?
(Limbo killed a part of her, he knew. Since she emerged, there was something about her, as if she stood on the very edge of sanity as fragile as glass - and a single word could shatter it.)
The police investigation brought with it a trial. That, at least, brought Cobb back from his daze as he conferred with his lawyer about his alternatives and what he planned to do. Mal’s mother had moved in with them; she took care of the kids, now, and it was clear from the bitter glances she shot Cobb that she blamed him for just about everything that had happened, including Mal’s death.
Arthur watched Phillipa and Cobb and marvelled (still, even now) at how human children could be so oblivious, innocent, and happy at once, even when their world had been destroyed.
Everything comes to an end, Arthur. Everything.
“Not today,” He said aloud, watching them play, knowing Cobb would soon return from another (hopefully more useful) discussion. “Not for a long time.”
-
Mal went insane, Cobb thinks dully, with the kind of pounding, sinking feeling in your gut that you get right before the edge of a sheer cliff - look over the edge and there’s nothing but a drop and there’s no knowing where it ends.
Insane. Insane. Limbo drove her insane. It matches the rhythmic pattern as he taps his fingers on the smooth pannelled wood. God help him, Miles believes him, that he didn’t kill Mal, because Miles knows how the dreams work. How they can slip between what you know to be real and what you know to be a dream, until you can’t tell the difference anymore.
His mother-in-law doesn’t care. Neither do the police. Barnes thinks that his chances of walking away with a not-guilty verdict are terribly slim. “She knew what she was doing,” Barnes said (then), apologetically. “She closed every avenue to you, Dom. You can’t even declare her insane, because of the three psychologists.”
He wonders vaguely why Arthur remains. Would Arthur kill him now if he ordered him to? Would Arthur end the contract and devour his soul right now? Arthur, who’s being a better parent now that he can bring himself to be. Who is all that is holding them together - Cobb and his children.
(Arthur, who watches him, with those solemn eyes, and with a worried gaze, who hides the scissors and ties the sharp can-tabs into plastic bags to be dumped into the recycling bin, just in case. Who has carefully spirited even the valium and the aspirin away. Arthur, who fills up the empty, gaping side of the bed wordlessly, but when Cobb wakes up, he isn’t Mal - he’s solid, reassuring, but not Mal, sulphur and pressed laundry, not orange and rosemary, and God, he needs her, but he drifts into sleep anyway and in the morning, finds himself curled against Arthur, and the fresh pain comes again.)
Cobb finds himself tracing the pentacle, every line purchased in pain, and then he hears Phillipa screaming with laughter in the backyard and closes his eyes. He wants to weep, because God help him, he can’t do it. He couldn’t follow her down then because of their children, and he still can’t now.
But he’s exhausted all his tears in the past weeks.
-
When Barnes tells him, Cobb wants to reject the solution. But it sticks, with the gravity of the lawyer’s words. Run or die. It’s that simple.
Cobb chooses to run. He takes the tickets, packs his essentials, and gets out of the house, moving for the next flight to - wherever it is. Barnes bought the tickets, Cobb hasn’t even glanced at them before he shoved them into his pocket.
By the time he’s at the airport, he learns he’s on a flight to Madrid.
Well.
Arthur won’t be dissuaded. Arthur packs whatever he has and heads off with him. “Marie,” He says, in that wry way of his, “Is looking after your children, and I’m not your babysitter.”
No, not a babysitter, Cobb thinks, watching layers and layers of puffy clouds and knowing he can never come home again. A damned good pointman, and maybe, just maybe, a friend. A damned good friend.
(The night at the hotel in Madrid is also the last night they share a bed.)
-