Bada', Part 1
Title: Bada'
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Cobb, Mal, Miles
Summary: Arthur never went for the internship under Stephen Miles. Never went back to Paris. Never met Cobb. Years later, when Stephen Miles shows up again, Arthur finds himself heading down a path he didn’t choose. (It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.) Mild Arthur/Cobb.
Note: First fic of the Ṛta series.
The sky was a shade of grey so thin it was almost colourless, and a fresh, sharp smell lingered in the air, with the promise of rain to come. Too early in the year for snow. Arthur grunted and tugged his canvas jacket tighter to ward off the lingering chill. He wondered if he should have brought an umbrella.
He stretched to bleed the tension from his muscles and grimaced as the motion tugged at the curving scar that followed the line of his shoulder-blade. The stitches had just been removed, and the healing wound both ached and itched at intervals, and Arthur was sorely tempted to reach over to his right shoulder but he knew better than to touch it.
A little something to remember the Jacob Gardner case by, Arthur thought, with a trace of dry humour. He found the café and got a table outside, sitting down with a cup of coffee. People walked past the small café without glancing in. A man read his newspaper nearby, at a different table. A light breeze blew, sending the dry leaves and discarded sweet wrappers and a crumpled fragment of paper dancing all across the concrete pavement. It cut above the sound of traffic, the sound of the city.
If Arthur kept looking, his eyes could almost - just almost - make out a pattern in their circling, whirling and dancing movement. The noise from the busy road, the people passing by; everything faded, subsumed by the quiet of the café. There was nothing but the rustling of detritus stirred about by the wind.
The silence, the eerie sense of calm stretched over his senses like a thin sheet of cellophane paper, tinting everything with a quality Arthur couldn’t quite have described. He was acutely aware of every sound, of the slow patterns of his own breathing, of every particle of his surroundings. A sparrow cheep-ed and fluttered onto his table, the sound sharp in his ears. It fixed curious, beady eyes on him, apparently unafraid. His eyes made out the light dusting of darker shades on brown feathers.
Arthur stared back at it. His eyes flicked over to his watch, watching the second hand move as if through swirls of liquid glass. Tick. Tick.
“Shoo,” Arthur said aloud, flapping his arm at the intruding bird. The sparrow gave an alarmed chirp and took off; in a flurry of feathers, the other birds on the pavement wheeled about and headed up for the sky. The sense of stillness that had blanketed the entire café vanished in their wake, ruptured like a bubble and the real world bled back in, expanding to fill the gaping vacuum it had left in its wake.
Waiting was always the same. Sometimes, his mind played tricks on him. For a moment, everything had seemed distant, and very unreal, as if last night’s dream had lingered on for a while in his mind.
Arthur knew better than to think dreams couldn’t be real. He sighed, and stretched again, ignoring the tug of the stiffened scar on his back, right along his shoulder-blade. It hurt, but just a little. Scars healed. Time ticked. Life went on. Jacob Gardner was behind bars, and hopefully, he wouldn’t be out again for quite a while.
With mindcrime, a lot of things were uncertain.
He leaned back in his seat, careful not to jostle his right shoulder, closed his eyes, and breathed. He wasn’t going to have to meet Jase. Not for a while yet.
Arthur never quite liked being at loose ends, with all that empty space and nothing to do. But now he found himself confronted with exactly that. Mindcrime wasn’t exactly anything like violent crimes. It’d have been exceedingly odd for Arthur to find himself with the typical caseload of someone working violent crimes or drugs, but the lack of purpose, the lack of anything to do always got to him.
He blinked, and stared up at the places where the thin fractured blue of the sky oozed the vague white mist of clouds, and thought about rain.
Arthur wasn’t sure how many times he’d counted the cracks: thin, hairline fractures in the off-white of the ceiling. For all he knew, it could be raining outside the hospital. Either that, or they’d just turned the air-conditioning up. Wasn’t it supposed to be almost winter?
There was one thing about hospitals: the clean, sharp smell of the disinfectant and the sterile white lighting that cast harsh shadows on the walls and the flooring. Arthur pushed open the door marked ‘Employees Only’, feeling the motion tug at the wound again. It didn’t hurt as much as it did a few short days after Gardner had slashed at him; it was only that he was right-handed, and it seemed that almost anything that used his right hand brought back twinges of pain.
He leaned against the heavy door, and shifted so he wasn’t taking the weight so squarely on his right shoulder and allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Oh, hey,” Jase said, by way of greeting. He didn’t look too good, as if he hadn’t been getting too much sleep. Arthur noticed the dark smudges of eye bags, and the sharp red imprint that matched the edge of the table, and the mess that Jase’s dirty-blond hair was in. Jase blinked and ran a hand through his hair in a bid to neaten up. The slightly absent look was gone, replaced by an attempt to focus. Some people took a while to wake up. Jase was one of them.
“Hey,” Arthur replied. He hesitated, feeling bad about Jase’s current state. “Actually, I just came for the lab report for the tests you ran on McKinney…”
Jase groaned. “Oh, that one,” he said, shaking his head. “Very, very messy. I’m surprised you didn’t just send it straight to the labs at Quantico and have them try something.”
Arthur settled for a noncommittal shrug in response to Jase’s veiled question. “Messy how?” he asked.
Jase ran his fingers through his hair again. “Look,” he said, “Can we go get something to drink? I really need that cup of coffee…and I’ll bring the file along.”
“Sounds good,” Arthur said. And then he added, apologetically, “I’ll buy.” It was the least he could do, considering he’d asked the favour from Jase.
“Okay,” Jase said. He gathered up his jacket from where it’d been slung over the chair and slipped it on, one arm at a time. “You remember how to get to the -”
“No, I don’t,” Arthur said. He glanced pointedly at the door and Jase took the hint, padding over to the filing cabinets and retrieving a brown manila folder. He tucked it under his arm and headed for the door.
“How’s the shoulder, man?”
Arthur resisted the urge to check by flexing his shoulder. “Healing,” he said. “I didn’t use the painkillers after all.”
Jase nodded approvingly. “That’s good,” he said. “Painkillers aren’t that great, you know? But I figure trying to get you to rest it was too much to hope for?” His tone alone made the last statement a question.
“Well,” Arthur said neutrally, “I had paperwork to file. Took a bit of a rest.” He didn’t have to articulate the but that lay concealed in his words. Jase sighed and rolled his eyes.
“You’re going to have one hell of a scar there, you know. You’re pretty damn lucky. If you hadn’t been moving, guy could have cut deep into an axillary vessel. Or a little higher, and it’d have been your neck.”
Arthur shrugged. It wasn’t as if he’d much of a choice, when trying to subdue Gardner. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said aloud. He shut the door quite firmly after them.
“Well, you were right,” Jase said, drinking his coffee. The folder was pushed to one side on the table, safely out of harm’s way. “That was some guess.”
“So, what was it?”
“Toxicology showed elevated somnacin count, which - well, you know what that means. He hadn’t managed to clear it, or he’d been using it fairly regularly. Now, the other checks you asked for were the interesting bit. You asked me to check about fear and stress, right?”
Arthur waited. His sandwich sat untouched on the table, still wrapped. He held his coffee as if he’d quite forgotten about it, and only the warmth from the drink reminded him he was still holding it between both hands.
“Elevated cortisol levels, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was definitely overworked, shouldn’t be surprised if they go on holiday anytime soon. His orbitofrontal cortex is displaying signs of dysfunction, and the amygdala shouldn’t be showing so much activity… ”
“Layman’s terms?” Arthur suggested, and Jase had the grace to look vaguely ashamed.
“Right,” he said, setting down his cup. “Sorry, I forgot. Well, McKinney’s definitely a user. I think we can establish that much. You weren’t particularly specific about what to look out for, so I started checking for any oddities in his brain chemistry, running the usual scans and all. Turned out, you were right. Without resorting to wild guesses…McKinney’s got some similarities to what I’d expect from someone with PTSD. I’d suspect the differences can be chalked down to general trauma but there hasn’t been a great deal of study on trauma itself in general so I’m not going to guess. What’s definite is that this guy was running on a hair-trigger. Pumped full of adrenaline and constant stress. They’ve got him in five-points, but PET showed too much activity in the fear centre - that’s his amygdala, and I’d take out the fMRI to show you where, but - ” Jase gestured at the coffee cups. “Basically, he’s paranoid. I’m not sure what the docs are gonna say about that, but from a neuroscientific point of view…well, there’s something really odd going down in that guy’s brain. But why…well, that’ll be anyone’s guess.”
Arthur turned the cup around in his hand. His mouth twisted. So near, yet so far. “So there’s no way of precisely pin-pointing the cause.”
Jase shook his head. “Not in the way you wanted. Sorry. It was a wild guess from the start. I can’t prove causation, only correlation.”
Arthur shrugged, waving off Jase’s apology. “Was worth a shot,” he said. “At least there’s something to go on. McKinney was an accountant. I’m not sure if there’s anything that could explain what the anomalies in his brain chemistry. Thanks.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Jase said, with a perfect straight face. “Tax records can be pretty scary things, you know. But hey, since it got me lunch, you’re welcome.”
“Very funny. So what’s the egg about?”
Jase glanced down. “Oh, right,” he said. “That egg.” He held it up, making sure Arthur got a good look at it. “Ordinary chicken egg. That was the other odd thing I wanted to show you. Not very odd, but it just caught my attention when I picked up on it.” He deftly snagged his empty coffee cup and slipped it before him, and then held the egg above it. “Okay, so pretend this is someone’s head.”
“I’m trying,” Arthur said dryly.
Jase shot him a stern look. “Try harder.” He picked up his teaspoon and rapped sharply on the side of the egg. Arthur heard the sharp crack as eggshell gave way to the firm force of the metal spoon, watched the thin web of tiny hairline cracks form on the eggshell.
“Does that mean I have to take you in for assault, now?”
Jase rolled his eyes. “Missed your calling as a stand-up comedian?” he asked, a little sourly. “Okay, now this.” This time, the eggshell gave way, and bright yellow yolk dripped between the cracks and bits of eggshell and into the cup. Sticky, translucent albumen followed. “See the difference?”
Arthur leaned across the table, taking a look. The second set of fractures had been sharper, and far neater. Part of the egg had actually caved in from the blow. “Yeah,” he said, slowly.
“If his docs were gonna explain away some of the anomalies in McKinney as due to brain injury, they’d have to figure which of these it was. My bets would be on the first type - a depressed skull fracture. But there’s a clean, linear fracture there. Now, we don’t know a lot about the brain. Mostly, the idea is that if anything’s broken, it’s bad. But here’s two problems. First, linear fractures usually aren’t anything to freak out about. Second, to explain McKinney’s psychological problems by the fracture alone wouldn’t make sense, unless there was bruising or something of that sort showing up as a closed head injury on the CT. Which it didn’t. Not to mention the amygdala’s pretty tucked away. So in short, I don’t think that it’s plausible, in McKinney’s case, to explain a software problem by citing damage to the hardware.”
“Any explanation?” Arthur asked, frowning. He thought he saw the problem. “What about the other way around - software problems creating anomalies in the hardware?”
“…Arthur?”
Arthur blinked. Jase was waving a hand in front of his face. “You look pretty tired yourself,” Jase noted. “Anyway, I was saying. There was something odd about the report’s findings, though. Here. Ordinary chicken egg, I promise.”
Arthur took a deep breath and stared at the whole egg that Jase showed him.
How did you get here?
He remembered the walk down through almost-featureless corridor after corridor, with faces that blurred in his memory, nurses wheeling carts, open and closed doorways and a thin blue sky, the sort of blue that was so drained of colour that it was almost grey. The sharp smell that promised rain.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Arthur blinked, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said at last, finding his voice. “Yeah, I think I am.” He focused on the egg, taking in the brown shell. If he leaned over and stared, after a while, he thought he could imagine the irregularities, the small pits in what appeared to be smooth, seamless eggshell, and the pattern of cracks that would form and the sharp crack of metal meeting eggshell with precisely-applied force. “Wasn’t paying attention for a moment.”
“Alright,” Jase said.
Arthur watched bright yellow yolk spill out from between Jase’s fingers where they held the egg out for his inspection, and watched the way albumen seeped through the cracks and how they dripped and mixed in swirling patterns in the coffee cup, with streaks of brown where they met the dregs of Jase’s coffee.
This time, the lines seemed less clear. Less sharp. Less neat. Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur saw an old man, balding, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a tweed jacket. Something about him seemed familiar, but Arthur couldn’t quite place him.
Déjà vu, Arthur thought, and he watched the egg break. Sharp and clear and slow.
The sound of Jase’s cell phone going off startled both of them. “Christ,” Jase swore as he fumbled for it and answered. “Hello? Yes, this is Jason Barrett speaking. What? Okay,” He adjusted the phone. “Give me a moment,” he told Arthur, and then stood up. “I can’t quite hear you right now. I’m moving to somewhere with less noise. Okay. What did you…”
Arthur made a vaguely disgusted sound as he glanced at the brown-yellow mess puddling like slime at the bottom of Jase’s abandoned cup. He pushed the remnants of the eggshell in, and ground them to pieces with the spoon.
“Excuse me,” Someone - a female, in lightly-accented English - said, from right behind him. Arthur twisted about, feeling the requisite pain in his right shoulder at the movement. He wasn’t doing a good job at avoiding sudden, twisting motions, he thought. At least he wasn’t in danger of tearing the wound open again.
She had dark brown curls, almost auburn in the light, cut short, and translucent blue eyes, more artic-grey touched faintly with blue than blue; the sort of blue with a strange cold clarity to it. She would have looked striking, in any case, but then she smiled, and she was beautiful. “Do you know how you got here?”
Arthur froze. “Sorry?” he asked, trying to recall exactly that. He breathed in disinfectant, and the faintest hint of jasmine. He remembered the three questions that he’d been trained to ask himself every time something seemed strange. It had been a firm part of the course on dreamsharing. He’d picked that. He’d wanted mindcrime.
What do you remember?
Sky. Thin, blue, and the promise of rain. Sterile smell of disinfectant. Discussing the McKinney case with Jase.
How did you get here?
Down the corridor. We made it from the staff area to the cafeteria. Anything except the coffee here tastes like crap.
What are you doing?
Waiting for Jase. Collecting the reports from the tests done on McKinney, to complete the investigation. Extraction. The victimless crime, except that McKinney hadn’t been extracted from. He’d…
He felt his fingers curl around the edge of the table and breathed and let the tension ease from his muscles, felt the blurred edges of his perceptions uncurl before his certainty that this was no dream. Reality, the details whispered.
“I haven’t been here before,” she explained, patiently. The cool glance she directed at him was mildly concerned, even a little puzzled. “I am due at radiology for an MRI, but must meet someone here…I am not certain I know how to find the cafeteria again.”
“Oh,” Arthur said, feeling foolish. There was no reason he would have been under, after all. Not dreaming. He caught a glimpse of something dark and ugly, snaking up her wrist. And the glint of a gold wedding ring. Why, Arthur couldn’t quite say. Jase wasn’t going to be back for a while. Chances were, he’d been called off for something gone wrong.
He picked up the brown manila folder, felt paper flex beneath his fingers. Maybe because he felt an awful lot like being a white knight today. Maybe because it was something to do.
Arthur hated loose ends. The feeling that he wasn’t doing what he should be. The feeling of aimlessness, of a lack of purpose. He breathed and inhaled the light scent of jasmine, glanced closely at her upturned hand and the purple-brown scar snaking along the wrist, down to what must have been her elbow, dark against her pale skin.
“I’ll show you,” he offered.
She smiled then, and she was beautiful.
“Do you dream?” she asked him. Down connecting corridors that intersected all over the place, and Arthur wondered if the hospital was built to distort the perception of space. To distort the perception of time. Certainly, hospital clocks always seemed to distort time. You could never get something that made sense from them. He’d been to Radiology several times before. He couldn’t recognise most of the faces now. The hospital was a large group of interconnected buildings but this was just absurd.
“Everyone does,” he said absently, wondering if he’d missed a turn somewhere, along the endless labyrinth of corridors. He read the brass-plated signs again. The main MRI centre was supposed to be on this level. He’d been there enough times, picking up alphabet soup from Jase. That was what they called it anyway, the endless strings of MRIs, fMRIs, PETs, EEGs…he could probably read some of them on his own. He should have known the way by now.
“Vivid,” she said quietly. “Beautiful colours, so vivid you would believe the dream is real.”
“No,” Arthur said. “I can’t remember my dreams.” He retraced his steps, and realised they must have gone straight through the Employees-Only door that normally barred the passage between the two buildings. What the hell? He’d just walked on autopilot, straight through the wrong corridor, to boot.
He wondered if he could remember them even if he tried. They were mostly faded things, distant, and murky as hell. Here, walking down corridors that never seemed to end, lit with bright fluorescent lights, Arthur could almost believe that this wasn’t real.
He bumped into an orderly. “Hey, watch it, man,” the orderly snapped, irritably, and shouldered past him. He had the distinct, prickling sensation of eyes on him, as if he was being watched, and glanced back to see the orderly still staring at him, hostility in his dark eyes.
Arthur almost paused.
What do you remember?
“An ocean,” he said aloud. His companion paused, quirked a thin eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry?”
Arthur exhaled and took a step forward. And then another. He was really off his game today. Only, the funny thing was, he couldn’t quite shake the lingering feeling that he could be doing something else. That he should be doing something else. “You asked,” he said, retracing their steps. “It’s the only dream I can remember. A large ocean, and grey skies. The waves are sweeping in on the sand. Maybe they’ll destroy the whole beach.”
There’s footsteps in the sand. Maybe the waves will wash them out.
He considered asking her why she was here. In the end, he didn’t.
“I dream,” she said, “Always.” Her fingers traced the outline of the crooked scar that ran along the inside of her forearm, from wrist to elbow, following the tracery of veins faintly green, and standing out against her skin. It was a swollen scar, a livid purple worm. “Sometimes, it is a world just like this one. With people…lovers…children…”
She caught him gazing at the scar. She didn’t cover it, as if she was oddly proud of it. She looked up at him then, face upturned, serenely defiant. “We all have scars,” she said, and she reached over - not quite - towards his right shoulder. She did not touch it; the infringement of his personal space went no further. Arthur felt himself tense and made himself relax. As his shoulders dropped, he felt the light tug of stiff keloid against the cloth of his shirt, felt the slight jab of pain.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain about how to extricate himself. He was taller than her; she glanced up at him, with those translucent blue eyes, as if he was peering through sheet after sheet of transparencies tinted only faintly blue. Ice blue.
He’d read stories about expeditions getting lost in the snow and ice. Going mad. Hallucinating. Of the way light reflected off jagged shards of ice, and how their beauty was always deceptive. It was a sharp, stark kind of beauty, that these ice fields possessed. Something that didn’t quite seem of this world; the real world outside of pedestrians and traffic lights and impatient cars and casefiles that never seemed to end. The real world that belonged to desks, and knives and investigation after investigation.
“Sometimes, the dreams are so real that you can lose yourself. That you only want to wake up. That you can believe that you haven’t yet woken up.”
Arthur didn’t realise he’d stepped back, until he’d actually done it. He was moving away from her outstretched hand, away from her. “The scars remind us,” she said. “Don’t they?”
Arthur would have bet that she was a user.
“Ma’am,” he said, as firmly as he could, “Why are you here?”
She glanced at him, ice-eyes guileless. “So they can tell me,” she said, “That this isn’t a dream I can wake up from.”
“And this is a dream?”
She smiled - gently, affably, but now, there was something about it that set Arthur on edge. “Isn’t it? You just have to wake up.”
Arthur blinked, taking in his surroundings. Oh. The hospital cafeteria. He swallowed several times. His mouth felt very, very dry. “Okay,” Jase said, from the other side of the table. “I know that call took a long time, but you look completely wiped.”
“Feel that way too,” Arthur croaked, and would have narrowly missed knocking his mostly empty cup off the table, except that Jase had deftly rescued it. “Thanks.” So maybe he was still short on sleep. “Wasn’t entirely asleep, though. Walked a woman to Radiology and back. It didn’t take long. Then I thought I’d wait for you. Must have dozed off.” He felt more awake now, snapping back to full awareness. He got up, stretching out, and gestured in the direction of the exit. Jase nodded and stood up. “You?”
“A call from Talia,” Jase explained. “She’s in the lab now. Guy by the name of Miles is asking for the results of…”
Arthur hesitated in mid-stride, as they cut through the lobby. It was common enough name, surely, but even then… “Miles?” he asked, casually, as Jase stopped as well. “A Stephen Miles, by any chance?”
Jase looked mildly impressed. “Professor Stephen Miles, actually. The one with all the credentials in the study of dreamsharing, though he has a background in architecture, the last time I heard.”
They started walking again. “What reports?” Arthur wanted to know.
Jase shrugged. “Something to do with some suicide,” he said easily. “I hear the police are on it. Talia’s new, so she’s on probation for now. I had to talk her through getting the forms, and questions, and then I’ve got to get back to her now to deal with the signatures. You got anywhere to be?”
“Actually…” Arthur hesitated. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t have anything better to do. Mindcrime, he thought ruefully. He was sitting on only a few cases, and most of them were still open and as inconclusive as hell. “I thought I’d drop by. I…knew a Professor Miles, back in college. He taught me.”
“Well. Aren’t you full of surprises?”
Arthur shifted a little under Miles’ steady gaze. He caught his former professor’s eyes flicking to the nondescript windbreaker. He shrugged in response to Miles’ rhetorical question. The years had been kind enough to Miles. He’d lost some more hair, and he hunched a little. His thick-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose in the same way they always did, but his watery blue eyes were bloodshot, as if Miles hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep lately.
Still, little changed from the gentle but firm teacher that Arthur had known. Miles had been a visiting appointment then, who had taught the course on dreamsharing simulation. It’d looked a lot better, and a lot more interesting than the structural modelling program module. And then when he had the chance to run a small research project on dreamsharing with Miles standing in as his mentor…
Maybe he should have taken that French internship after all. But it was too late for regrets. And Arthur tried not to play the ‘What-If’ game, because there were too many things he could kick himself for.
“We all are,” he said, maybe a bit more flippantly than he had intended.
“Still,” Miles said. He looked at Arthur again, assessing him, as if Arthur was still an undergraduate with an interest in learning about dreamsharing. “FBI?”
Arthur shrugged self-consciously. “Mindcrime,” he explained. “They were looking for some people with a background in architecture, or anywhere close. I thought it was worth a shot.”
Miles looked surprised - and maybe a little impressed. “Interesting,” he said neutrally. “I’d wondered about you, especially after you elected not to pursue further studies in the field. It was quite an opportunity, that project.”
“I had personal reasons.” None of which he felt comfortable bringing up here, in the corridor outside. Jase had made himself scarce after he signed off the forms, and was trying to get his in-tray of requisitioned tests cleared. Talia was probably off helping him, and still finding her way around. Probation. Now that was a period Arthur was too familiar with.
“I dare say you did,” Miles said at last, with another lingering, measuring glance. Arthur wondered what the hell that was for.
“Why’re you here?” Arthur settled for asking. “Last time I heard, you were teaching in France.”
Miles’ gaze grew almost hard. He folded his arms across his chest, leaned hard against the wall, eyes flicking to the opposite end of the corridor. His mouth straightened out into a firm, unhappy line. “My daughter died,” he stated.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
He vaguely remembered Miles mentioning once that he had a daughter. But that was it. Arthur hadn’t bothered to inquire either. Except that this was neuroscience. Jase handled the tests that weren’t already covered by Radiology. Any autopsy would be going on in the morgue. Not here.
A gesture Arthur couldn’t quite interpret. Discomfort. Unease. Miles thrust his hands sharply into his coat pocket. His shoulders tensed, and then relaxed. “Thank you,” he said, his words clipped.
“Why Jase?” Arthur asked.
“Because,” Miles said, too gently, “They think she was murdered by her husband.”
Arthur blinked. “There’s an ongoing investigation then,” he guessed. He flipped the switch in his brain, let the logical possibilities unfold like a staircase, step by consecutive step. Cold and professional, assessing. “This is neuroscience. Irregularities?”
Miles hesitated, before saying, “I don’t think he did it.”
“Why not?”
“Are you pursuing this?”
Arthur held up his hands in surrender. “No,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I’m not asking in any official capacity. If there’s no word about this in mindcrime…well. I don’t think they think there’s anything else apart from foul play.”
Miles flinched. “This…they aren’t,” he said reluctantly. “Dom said he was framed.”
“Dom. He’s the husband?”
“My son-in-law,” Miles confirmed. He looked away for a moment, as if he was thinking. Weary eyes, with traces of suspicion flicked back to glance directly at Arthur again, almost challenging him to say something. “I…I did not think this was possible. But I believe him.”
“Why?” Arthur asked bluntly. “And who would have framed him?” Means. Motive. Opportunity. There wasn’t enough data to go on. He briefly wondered why he was even assessing the case. LAPD had their work cut out for them, with this one. Why did they think it was a murder? What had happened? Arthur grimaced; he wouldn’t have even tried considering any kind of possibility with so little information.
“Dreamsharing,” Miles explained. Was that a bitter edge to his smile? “I taught him what he knew. They wanted to explore, see what they could find. Pushing the boundaries.”
“And they went too far?”
Some of his scepticism must have shown. Certainly, it sounded like one of those bad stories, those for children, with some kind of moral concealed at the centre of the tale. The story changed in the telling as the years gnawed away at it, but at the kernel was the typical cautionary moral. Don’t do this. Hubris. Arrogance.
The best stories were the old ones.
Miles’ glance was sharp and incisive. “You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Arthur said quietly. It seemed best.
“Come, now,” Miles scoffed, “You must have had dreams so real that you find yourself asking if you’ve ever woken up. We’ve always had our fantasies. Dreamsharing just made them more real - and more dangerous.”
Arthur frowned, trying to follow what Miles was getting at. “You’re saying - they thought this was a dream?”
“Mal,” Miles said patiently. “Mal thought this was a dream. You know how to wake up from a dream.”
“Waiting for the timer to run out,” Arthur said, counting them off one by one. “Disconnection. A kick.”
“Death,” Miles said. “It’s been documented that death in dreams causes anyone engaged in the dream to wake up.”
“So she kills herself from persistent solipsistic delusions. Persistent specific solipsistic delusions. And the husband says he was framed?”
Miles considered it, hands tucked away in his pocket. Arthur made note after note in his mental notebook. Too many things didn’t add up. Too many things were odd. There was no way to prove solipsistic delusions. Was there? Had she seen a psychiatrist? A psychologist? Mindcrime was so new that he half-expected the nameplate in his section to squeak every time someone laid eyes on it. Were there even properly documented aftereffects when it came to dealing with potential backlash from dreaming?
He suddenly felt very cold. This could be one of his. If he could believe Miles. If the toxicology turned up oddities. Would she show the same paranoia-markers as McKinney? Arthur thought briefly of the man, sequestered away in a mental hospital, watched around the clock in five-point restraints. Could it be that their delusions had the same psychological root?
“He says she framed him,” Miles said evenly. There was a spot of colour in his cheeks. Arthur caught a flash of temper that his steady doubt had provoked. “She left a letter with their lawyer, saying he’d threatened to kill her. That she was going to confront him at the hotel they’d always booked for their anniversary.”
Arthur wanted to groan. That as good as sealed this Dom as one of the primary suspects, or at least would have incited questions of foul play. And in these cases, the spouse was always one of the first suspects and the letter would have made certain the police would be sniffing around the husband first. “The lawyer didn’t notice any irregularity? Didn’t try to dissuade her from a direct confrontation?”
“Are you looking into this?” Miles asked, warily, for the second time.
He’d said no the first time. Now, there was a chance it could even be something he’d have to look into. It was just a chance, really. Maybe he could have said no, but Arthur paused there and took a look - really took a look at Miles. The dark rings around his eyes. The faintly glazed expression that someone’s face took on when they were running on nothing but caffeine, sugar, and desperation. The tight, unhappy line of his mouth and the way his soft features had taken on a pinched and hard cast.
Miles had lost a daughter. The least Arthur could do was to see if it had really been the husband. If Miles was right, it could even end up being exactly in his department.
“Maybe,” Arthur said honestly.
Detective Ralph Stiles narrowed his eyes at the bland statement, arms folded across his chest. “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, G-Man. Yes or no?”
Arthur shrugged. “You’re asking me for specificity I can’t give,” he pointed out, and hid a smile as Ralph almost choked.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?” Ralph muttered, rifling among the papers on his desk, trying to find what Arthur had asked for. “Look, this is an open investigation. I can’t help you unless you’ve got some official interest in this.”
“Try ‘maybe’,” Arthur told him. “I’ve got some similarities to one of my cases. Thought I’d take a look at what’s going on.”
“Similarities?” Ralph wanted to know. He frowned, his fingers drumming absently on the surface of his working table in thought. “Oh, hell - Arthur, it’s a typical case of domestic violence. We retrieved the letter from the lawyer later. Said he didn’t have any idea at all; it was sealed, and only to be opened in the event of her death.”
Well, Arthur thought, that certainly explains why he didn’t stop her. It also said absolutely nothing except that there was premeditation involved. Now the question was - who was the one out of the couple who’d planned this? It was odd, but not unusual, he reflected, that Miles believed the husband. Maybe he just didn’t want to lose a son-in-law too. Still, to believe the worst of his daughter...Mal. Must put a name to her.
Arthur realised Ralph was staring at him expectantly, and he nodded, waiting for Ralph to move on. “Looks cut and dried,” Ralph finally said. “We’re waiting for the results to get back from the crime labs, but I’d bet on the husband. Looks premeditated, all right. He pushed her.”
Arthur leafed through the rest of the file, speed reading and letting his eyes skim past the irrelevant details, just trying to pick up the essentials. “Anything that doesn’t fit?”
Ralph coughed. He looked a little uncomfortable. “Well,” he hedged, “We did, as a matter of fact, go down to the house. We spoke a bit to the children. To the neighbours. And…the husband, as a matter of fact. There’s nothing. If we’re taking the domestic abuse angle, we should have had something. Anything. Three psychiatrists declared this woman sane before her death. Neighbours recalled one or two altercations, but maintained they were very much in love. The usual, of course. ‘Can’t believe he could have done it, seems like a nice sort.’ The mother said it had to be him.”
“Father?”
Ralph shook his head slowly. “Believes the husband.”
Nothing Arthur didn’t already know. He frowned, thinking back to the conversation with Miles, and flipped briefly through the folder, looking for anything in particular that could have helped him. There was nothing much, of course. The investigation had barely begun. It wasn’t going to happen until the lab came back with something, and they’d already tried to get a statement from the husband. Dominic Cobb. Don’t forget the names.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Ralph added. “We’re working on probable cause,” he added darkly, with just a trace of humour there. “So, what’s going on in that head of yours?”
If they hadn’t been under since…whenever that trip to Limbo had been, he’d be more than just lucky to find anything useful from toxicology. It should have cleared entirely out of her bloodstream altogether. Increased paranoia. An obsession with death. With waking up. He thought of McKinney, restrained in a mental hospital, completely paranoid and afraid of the projections. Completely unstable. Could there be any basis for comparison? Any irregularities?
Did he believe Miles? Miles believed Cobb. Could he believe Cobb?
He was supposed to be handling McKinney now. Arthur felt for his cell phone. He could patch a call through to Ellis, let Ellis know what exactly was going on before Ellis could kill him. Dominic Cobb killed his wife. The woman had been afraid for her life, but went with her husband for their anniversary, anyway. He saw it in his mind, as clear as if it was happening before him right now. Another of the loud arguments the neighbours had spoken off. Perhaps Cobb hadn’t even intended to kill her. He’d lost his temper, they’d fought, and he’d pushed her, straight out the window (why had the window been open?)
Or they’d woken up, and they’d gone too deep. She couldn’t tell the difference between reality and dreaming any longer, had thought they needed to die to wake up. Why the arguments? Why the letter framing Cobb? Leverage? Had Cobb balked at killing himself? Why was Cobb’s grasp on reality far more certain than Mal’s?
In his mind, one figure plummeted from a hotel window. The other stood there, watching. He couldn’t see their faces, no matter how hard he tried.
“I’m thinking,” Arthur said aloud, “That I need to call my SAC. And pay a visit to this Dominic Cobb.”
“You taking the case off my hands?” Ralph wanted to know. “Because if you are, I could buy you lunch. Wrap the files in a pink ribbon, with a bow on top. Mind taking a few more while you’re at it?”
“That bad?”
Ralph shrugged. “Some things don’t add up,” he said agreeably. “Whether you buy that story about his wife wanting to get out of a dream…well, that’s your department. I’m not going to argue with you about it. But I could have sworn we didn’t pick up anything about domestic violence. And normally, these perps work their way up. You don’t hit full murder on the first try.” His tone made it quite clear he didn’t find too much credence in that story, nevertheless. He finally found the report Arthur had been looking for and thrust it into the folder. “If they’re still not on the autopsy yet, I’ll get them to send the reports to you too.”
Arthur made a vaguely sympathetic sound. Ralph was probably snowed under with cases, as it was. He located the crumpled blue Post-it in his pocket, and straightened it out as best as he could. He slipped it over to Ralph who took it and read it. His eyebrows furrowed. “What the hell is that?”
“See if you can get them to run those tests,” Arthur said. “It might help with figuring what the hell went on that night.” He flipped through the folder once again, and memorised Dominic Cobb’s address. LAPD had talked to him, of course. But in the end, everything came back to this man. Cobb was the key to what had happened that night, which meant Arthur needed to sound him out, and see just how much credence to lend to the dreamsharing hypothesis.
“Got it,” Ralph said. His mouth took on his loose, easy smile. “Now, if you were this helpful all the time…”
“In your dreams,” Arthur retorted.
Cobb’s eyes narrowed at the almost-hostile rejoinder.
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Cobb, Mal, Miles
Summary: Arthur never went for the internship under Stephen Miles. Never went back to Paris. Never met Cobb. Years later, when Stephen Miles shows up again, Arthur finds himself heading down a path he didn’t choose. (It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.) Mild Arthur/Cobb.
Note: First fic of the Ṛta series.
The sky was a shade of grey so thin it was almost colourless, and a fresh, sharp smell lingered in the air, with the promise of rain to come. Too early in the year for snow. Arthur grunted and tugged his canvas jacket tighter to ward off the lingering chill. He wondered if he should have brought an umbrella.
He stretched to bleed the tension from his muscles and grimaced as the motion tugged at the curving scar that followed the line of his shoulder-blade. The stitches had just been removed, and the healing wound both ached and itched at intervals, and Arthur was sorely tempted to reach over to his right shoulder but he knew better than to touch it.
A little something to remember the Jacob Gardner case by, Arthur thought, with a trace of dry humour. He found the café and got a table outside, sitting down with a cup of coffee. People walked past the small café without glancing in. A man read his newspaper nearby, at a different table. A light breeze blew, sending the dry leaves and discarded sweet wrappers and a crumpled fragment of paper dancing all across the concrete pavement. It cut above the sound of traffic, the sound of the city.
If Arthur kept looking, his eyes could almost - just almost - make out a pattern in their circling, whirling and dancing movement. The noise from the busy road, the people passing by; everything faded, subsumed by the quiet of the café. There was nothing but the rustling of detritus stirred about by the wind.
The silence, the eerie sense of calm stretched over his senses like a thin sheet of cellophane paper, tinting everything with a quality Arthur couldn’t quite have described. He was acutely aware of every sound, of the slow patterns of his own breathing, of every particle of his surroundings. A sparrow cheep-ed and fluttered onto his table, the sound sharp in his ears. It fixed curious, beady eyes on him, apparently unafraid. His eyes made out the light dusting of darker shades on brown feathers.
Arthur stared back at it. His eyes flicked over to his watch, watching the second hand move as if through swirls of liquid glass. Tick. Tick.
“Shoo,” Arthur said aloud, flapping his arm at the intruding bird. The sparrow gave an alarmed chirp and took off; in a flurry of feathers, the other birds on the pavement wheeled about and headed up for the sky. The sense of stillness that had blanketed the entire café vanished in their wake, ruptured like a bubble and the real world bled back in, expanding to fill the gaping vacuum it had left in its wake.
Waiting was always the same. Sometimes, his mind played tricks on him. For a moment, everything had seemed distant, and very unreal, as if last night’s dream had lingered on for a while in his mind.
Arthur knew better than to think dreams couldn’t be real. He sighed, and stretched again, ignoring the tug of the stiffened scar on his back, right along his shoulder-blade. It hurt, but just a little. Scars healed. Time ticked. Life went on. Jacob Gardner was behind bars, and hopefully, he wouldn’t be out again for quite a while.
With mindcrime, a lot of things were uncertain.
He leaned back in his seat, careful not to jostle his right shoulder, closed his eyes, and breathed. He wasn’t going to have to meet Jase. Not for a while yet.
Arthur never quite liked being at loose ends, with all that empty space and nothing to do. But now he found himself confronted with exactly that. Mindcrime wasn’t exactly anything like violent crimes. It’d have been exceedingly odd for Arthur to find himself with the typical caseload of someone working violent crimes or drugs, but the lack of purpose, the lack of anything to do always got to him.
He blinked, and stared up at the places where the thin fractured blue of the sky oozed the vague white mist of clouds, and thought about rain.
Arthur wasn’t sure how many times he’d counted the cracks: thin, hairline fractures in the off-white of the ceiling. For all he knew, it could be raining outside the hospital. Either that, or they’d just turned the air-conditioning up. Wasn’t it supposed to be almost winter?
There was one thing about hospitals: the clean, sharp smell of the disinfectant and the sterile white lighting that cast harsh shadows on the walls and the flooring. Arthur pushed open the door marked ‘Employees Only’, feeling the motion tug at the wound again. It didn’t hurt as much as it did a few short days after Gardner had slashed at him; it was only that he was right-handed, and it seemed that almost anything that used his right hand brought back twinges of pain.
He leaned against the heavy door, and shifted so he wasn’t taking the weight so squarely on his right shoulder and allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Oh, hey,” Jase said, by way of greeting. He didn’t look too good, as if he hadn’t been getting too much sleep. Arthur noticed the dark smudges of eye bags, and the sharp red imprint that matched the edge of the table, and the mess that Jase’s dirty-blond hair was in. Jase blinked and ran a hand through his hair in a bid to neaten up. The slightly absent look was gone, replaced by an attempt to focus. Some people took a while to wake up. Jase was one of them.
“Hey,” Arthur replied. He hesitated, feeling bad about Jase’s current state. “Actually, I just came for the lab report for the tests you ran on McKinney…”
Jase groaned. “Oh, that one,” he said, shaking his head. “Very, very messy. I’m surprised you didn’t just send it straight to the labs at Quantico and have them try something.”
Arthur settled for a noncommittal shrug in response to Jase’s veiled question. “Messy how?” he asked.
Jase ran his fingers through his hair again. “Look,” he said, “Can we go get something to drink? I really need that cup of coffee…and I’ll bring the file along.”
“Sounds good,” Arthur said. And then he added, apologetically, “I’ll buy.” It was the least he could do, considering he’d asked the favour from Jase.
“Okay,” Jase said. He gathered up his jacket from where it’d been slung over the chair and slipped it on, one arm at a time. “You remember how to get to the -”
“No, I don’t,” Arthur said. He glanced pointedly at the door and Jase took the hint, padding over to the filing cabinets and retrieving a brown manila folder. He tucked it under his arm and headed for the door.
“How’s the shoulder, man?”
Arthur resisted the urge to check by flexing his shoulder. “Healing,” he said. “I didn’t use the painkillers after all.”
Jase nodded approvingly. “That’s good,” he said. “Painkillers aren’t that great, you know? But I figure trying to get you to rest it was too much to hope for?” His tone alone made the last statement a question.
“Well,” Arthur said neutrally, “I had paperwork to file. Took a bit of a rest.” He didn’t have to articulate the but that lay concealed in his words. Jase sighed and rolled his eyes.
“You’re going to have one hell of a scar there, you know. You’re pretty damn lucky. If you hadn’t been moving, guy could have cut deep into an axillary vessel. Or a little higher, and it’d have been your neck.”
Arthur shrugged. It wasn’t as if he’d much of a choice, when trying to subdue Gardner. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said aloud. He shut the door quite firmly after them.
“Well, you were right,” Jase said, drinking his coffee. The folder was pushed to one side on the table, safely out of harm’s way. “That was some guess.”
“So, what was it?”
“Toxicology showed elevated somnacin count, which - well, you know what that means. He hadn’t managed to clear it, or he’d been using it fairly regularly. Now, the other checks you asked for were the interesting bit. You asked me to check about fear and stress, right?”
Arthur waited. His sandwich sat untouched on the table, still wrapped. He held his coffee as if he’d quite forgotten about it, and only the warmth from the drink reminded him he was still holding it between both hands.
“Elevated cortisol levels, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was definitely overworked, shouldn’t be surprised if they go on holiday anytime soon. His orbitofrontal cortex is displaying signs of dysfunction, and the amygdala shouldn’t be showing so much activity… ”
“Layman’s terms?” Arthur suggested, and Jase had the grace to look vaguely ashamed.
“Right,” he said, setting down his cup. “Sorry, I forgot. Well, McKinney’s definitely a user. I think we can establish that much. You weren’t particularly specific about what to look out for, so I started checking for any oddities in his brain chemistry, running the usual scans and all. Turned out, you were right. Without resorting to wild guesses…McKinney’s got some similarities to what I’d expect from someone with PTSD. I’d suspect the differences can be chalked down to general trauma but there hasn’t been a great deal of study on trauma itself in general so I’m not going to guess. What’s definite is that this guy was running on a hair-trigger. Pumped full of adrenaline and constant stress. They’ve got him in five-points, but PET showed too much activity in the fear centre - that’s his amygdala, and I’d take out the fMRI to show you where, but - ” Jase gestured at the coffee cups. “Basically, he’s paranoid. I’m not sure what the docs are gonna say about that, but from a neuroscientific point of view…well, there’s something really odd going down in that guy’s brain. But why…well, that’ll be anyone’s guess.”
Arthur turned the cup around in his hand. His mouth twisted. So near, yet so far. “So there’s no way of precisely pin-pointing the cause.”
Jase shook his head. “Not in the way you wanted. Sorry. It was a wild guess from the start. I can’t prove causation, only correlation.”
Arthur shrugged, waving off Jase’s apology. “Was worth a shot,” he said. “At least there’s something to go on. McKinney was an accountant. I’m not sure if there’s anything that could explain what the anomalies in his brain chemistry. Thanks.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Jase said, with a perfect straight face. “Tax records can be pretty scary things, you know. But hey, since it got me lunch, you’re welcome.”
“Very funny. So what’s the egg about?”
Jase glanced down. “Oh, right,” he said. “That egg.” He held it up, making sure Arthur got a good look at it. “Ordinary chicken egg. That was the other odd thing I wanted to show you. Not very odd, but it just caught my attention when I picked up on it.” He deftly snagged his empty coffee cup and slipped it before him, and then held the egg above it. “Okay, so pretend this is someone’s head.”
“I’m trying,” Arthur said dryly.
Jase shot him a stern look. “Try harder.” He picked up his teaspoon and rapped sharply on the side of the egg. Arthur heard the sharp crack as eggshell gave way to the firm force of the metal spoon, watched the thin web of tiny hairline cracks form on the eggshell.
“Does that mean I have to take you in for assault, now?”
Jase rolled his eyes. “Missed your calling as a stand-up comedian?” he asked, a little sourly. “Okay, now this.” This time, the eggshell gave way, and bright yellow yolk dripped between the cracks and bits of eggshell and into the cup. Sticky, translucent albumen followed. “See the difference?”
Arthur leaned across the table, taking a look. The second set of fractures had been sharper, and far neater. Part of the egg had actually caved in from the blow. “Yeah,” he said, slowly.
“If his docs were gonna explain away some of the anomalies in McKinney as due to brain injury, they’d have to figure which of these it was. My bets would be on the first type - a depressed skull fracture. But there’s a clean, linear fracture there. Now, we don’t know a lot about the brain. Mostly, the idea is that if anything’s broken, it’s bad. But here’s two problems. First, linear fractures usually aren’t anything to freak out about. Second, to explain McKinney’s psychological problems by the fracture alone wouldn’t make sense, unless there was bruising or something of that sort showing up as a closed head injury on the CT. Which it didn’t. Not to mention the amygdala’s pretty tucked away. So in short, I don’t think that it’s plausible, in McKinney’s case, to explain a software problem by citing damage to the hardware.”
“Any explanation?” Arthur asked, frowning. He thought he saw the problem. “What about the other way around - software problems creating anomalies in the hardware?”
“…Arthur?”
Arthur blinked. Jase was waving a hand in front of his face. “You look pretty tired yourself,” Jase noted. “Anyway, I was saying. There was something odd about the report’s findings, though. Here. Ordinary chicken egg, I promise.”
Arthur took a deep breath and stared at the whole egg that Jase showed him.
How did you get here?
He remembered the walk down through almost-featureless corridor after corridor, with faces that blurred in his memory, nurses wheeling carts, open and closed doorways and a thin blue sky, the sort of blue that was so drained of colour that it was almost grey. The sharp smell that promised rain.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Arthur blinked, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said at last, finding his voice. “Yeah, I think I am.” He focused on the egg, taking in the brown shell. If he leaned over and stared, after a while, he thought he could imagine the irregularities, the small pits in what appeared to be smooth, seamless eggshell, and the pattern of cracks that would form and the sharp crack of metal meeting eggshell with precisely-applied force. “Wasn’t paying attention for a moment.”
“Alright,” Jase said.
Arthur watched bright yellow yolk spill out from between Jase’s fingers where they held the egg out for his inspection, and watched the way albumen seeped through the cracks and how they dripped and mixed in swirling patterns in the coffee cup, with streaks of brown where they met the dregs of Jase’s coffee.
This time, the lines seemed less clear. Less sharp. Less neat. Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur saw an old man, balding, with thick-rimmed spectacles and a tweed jacket. Something about him seemed familiar, but Arthur couldn’t quite place him.
Déjà vu, Arthur thought, and he watched the egg break. Sharp and clear and slow.
The sound of Jase’s cell phone going off startled both of them. “Christ,” Jase swore as he fumbled for it and answered. “Hello? Yes, this is Jason Barrett speaking. What? Okay,” He adjusted the phone. “Give me a moment,” he told Arthur, and then stood up. “I can’t quite hear you right now. I’m moving to somewhere with less noise. Okay. What did you…”
Arthur made a vaguely disgusted sound as he glanced at the brown-yellow mess puddling like slime at the bottom of Jase’s abandoned cup. He pushed the remnants of the eggshell in, and ground them to pieces with the spoon.
“Excuse me,” Someone - a female, in lightly-accented English - said, from right behind him. Arthur twisted about, feeling the requisite pain in his right shoulder at the movement. He wasn’t doing a good job at avoiding sudden, twisting motions, he thought. At least he wasn’t in danger of tearing the wound open again.
She had dark brown curls, almost auburn in the light, cut short, and translucent blue eyes, more artic-grey touched faintly with blue than blue; the sort of blue with a strange cold clarity to it. She would have looked striking, in any case, but then she smiled, and she was beautiful. “Do you know how you got here?”
Arthur froze. “Sorry?” he asked, trying to recall exactly that. He breathed in disinfectant, and the faintest hint of jasmine. He remembered the three questions that he’d been trained to ask himself every time something seemed strange. It had been a firm part of the course on dreamsharing. He’d picked that. He’d wanted mindcrime.
What do you remember?
Sky. Thin, blue, and the promise of rain. Sterile smell of disinfectant. Discussing the McKinney case with Jase.
How did you get here?
Down the corridor. We made it from the staff area to the cafeteria. Anything except the coffee here tastes like crap.
What are you doing?
Waiting for Jase. Collecting the reports from the tests done on McKinney, to complete the investigation. Extraction. The victimless crime, except that McKinney hadn’t been extracted from. He’d…
He felt his fingers curl around the edge of the table and breathed and let the tension ease from his muscles, felt the blurred edges of his perceptions uncurl before his certainty that this was no dream. Reality, the details whispered.
“I haven’t been here before,” she explained, patiently. The cool glance she directed at him was mildly concerned, even a little puzzled. “I am due at radiology for an MRI, but must meet someone here…I am not certain I know how to find the cafeteria again.”
“Oh,” Arthur said, feeling foolish. There was no reason he would have been under, after all. Not dreaming. He caught a glimpse of something dark and ugly, snaking up her wrist. And the glint of a gold wedding ring. Why, Arthur couldn’t quite say. Jase wasn’t going to be back for a while. Chances were, he’d been called off for something gone wrong.
He picked up the brown manila folder, felt paper flex beneath his fingers. Maybe because he felt an awful lot like being a white knight today. Maybe because it was something to do.
Arthur hated loose ends. The feeling that he wasn’t doing what he should be. The feeling of aimlessness, of a lack of purpose. He breathed and inhaled the light scent of jasmine, glanced closely at her upturned hand and the purple-brown scar snaking along the wrist, down to what must have been her elbow, dark against her pale skin.
“I’ll show you,” he offered.
She smiled then, and she was beautiful.
“Do you dream?” she asked him. Down connecting corridors that intersected all over the place, and Arthur wondered if the hospital was built to distort the perception of space. To distort the perception of time. Certainly, hospital clocks always seemed to distort time. You could never get something that made sense from them. He’d been to Radiology several times before. He couldn’t recognise most of the faces now. The hospital was a large group of interconnected buildings but this was just absurd.
“Everyone does,” he said absently, wondering if he’d missed a turn somewhere, along the endless labyrinth of corridors. He read the brass-plated signs again. The main MRI centre was supposed to be on this level. He’d been there enough times, picking up alphabet soup from Jase. That was what they called it anyway, the endless strings of MRIs, fMRIs, PETs, EEGs…he could probably read some of them on his own. He should have known the way by now.
“Vivid,” she said quietly. “Beautiful colours, so vivid you would believe the dream is real.”
“No,” Arthur said. “I can’t remember my dreams.” He retraced his steps, and realised they must have gone straight through the Employees-Only door that normally barred the passage between the two buildings. What the hell? He’d just walked on autopilot, straight through the wrong corridor, to boot.
He wondered if he could remember them even if he tried. They were mostly faded things, distant, and murky as hell. Here, walking down corridors that never seemed to end, lit with bright fluorescent lights, Arthur could almost believe that this wasn’t real.
He bumped into an orderly. “Hey, watch it, man,” the orderly snapped, irritably, and shouldered past him. He had the distinct, prickling sensation of eyes on him, as if he was being watched, and glanced back to see the orderly still staring at him, hostility in his dark eyes.
Arthur almost paused.
What do you remember?
“An ocean,” he said aloud. His companion paused, quirked a thin eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry?”
Arthur exhaled and took a step forward. And then another. He was really off his game today. Only, the funny thing was, he couldn’t quite shake the lingering feeling that he could be doing something else. That he should be doing something else. “You asked,” he said, retracing their steps. “It’s the only dream I can remember. A large ocean, and grey skies. The waves are sweeping in on the sand. Maybe they’ll destroy the whole beach.”
There’s footsteps in the sand. Maybe the waves will wash them out.
He considered asking her why she was here. In the end, he didn’t.
“I dream,” she said, “Always.” Her fingers traced the outline of the crooked scar that ran along the inside of her forearm, from wrist to elbow, following the tracery of veins faintly green, and standing out against her skin. It was a swollen scar, a livid purple worm. “Sometimes, it is a world just like this one. With people…lovers…children…”
She caught him gazing at the scar. She didn’t cover it, as if she was oddly proud of it. She looked up at him then, face upturned, serenely defiant. “We all have scars,” she said, and she reached over - not quite - towards his right shoulder. She did not touch it; the infringement of his personal space went no further. Arthur felt himself tense and made himself relax. As his shoulders dropped, he felt the light tug of stiff keloid against the cloth of his shirt, felt the slight jab of pain.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain about how to extricate himself. He was taller than her; she glanced up at him, with those translucent blue eyes, as if he was peering through sheet after sheet of transparencies tinted only faintly blue. Ice blue.
He’d read stories about expeditions getting lost in the snow and ice. Going mad. Hallucinating. Of the way light reflected off jagged shards of ice, and how their beauty was always deceptive. It was a sharp, stark kind of beauty, that these ice fields possessed. Something that didn’t quite seem of this world; the real world outside of pedestrians and traffic lights and impatient cars and casefiles that never seemed to end. The real world that belonged to desks, and knives and investigation after investigation.
“Sometimes, the dreams are so real that you can lose yourself. That you only want to wake up. That you can believe that you haven’t yet woken up.”
Arthur didn’t realise he’d stepped back, until he’d actually done it. He was moving away from her outstretched hand, away from her. “The scars remind us,” she said. “Don’t they?”
Arthur would have bet that she was a user.
“Ma’am,” he said, as firmly as he could, “Why are you here?”
She glanced at him, ice-eyes guileless. “So they can tell me,” she said, “That this isn’t a dream I can wake up from.”
“And this is a dream?”
She smiled - gently, affably, but now, there was something about it that set Arthur on edge. “Isn’t it? You just have to wake up.”
Arthur blinked, taking in his surroundings. Oh. The hospital cafeteria. He swallowed several times. His mouth felt very, very dry. “Okay,” Jase said, from the other side of the table. “I know that call took a long time, but you look completely wiped.”
“Feel that way too,” Arthur croaked, and would have narrowly missed knocking his mostly empty cup off the table, except that Jase had deftly rescued it. “Thanks.” So maybe he was still short on sleep. “Wasn’t entirely asleep, though. Walked a woman to Radiology and back. It didn’t take long. Then I thought I’d wait for you. Must have dozed off.” He felt more awake now, snapping back to full awareness. He got up, stretching out, and gestured in the direction of the exit. Jase nodded and stood up. “You?”
“A call from Talia,” Jase explained. “She’s in the lab now. Guy by the name of Miles is asking for the results of…”
Arthur hesitated in mid-stride, as they cut through the lobby. It was common enough name, surely, but even then… “Miles?” he asked, casually, as Jase stopped as well. “A Stephen Miles, by any chance?”
Jase looked mildly impressed. “Professor Stephen Miles, actually. The one with all the credentials in the study of dreamsharing, though he has a background in architecture, the last time I heard.”
They started walking again. “What reports?” Arthur wanted to know.
Jase shrugged. “Something to do with some suicide,” he said easily. “I hear the police are on it. Talia’s new, so she’s on probation for now. I had to talk her through getting the forms, and questions, and then I’ve got to get back to her now to deal with the signatures. You got anywhere to be?”
“Actually…” Arthur hesitated. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t have anything better to do. Mindcrime, he thought ruefully. He was sitting on only a few cases, and most of them were still open and as inconclusive as hell. “I thought I’d drop by. I…knew a Professor Miles, back in college. He taught me.”
“Well. Aren’t you full of surprises?”
Arthur shifted a little under Miles’ steady gaze. He caught his former professor’s eyes flicking to the nondescript windbreaker. He shrugged in response to Miles’ rhetorical question. The years had been kind enough to Miles. He’d lost some more hair, and he hunched a little. His thick-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose in the same way they always did, but his watery blue eyes were bloodshot, as if Miles hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep lately.
Still, little changed from the gentle but firm teacher that Arthur had known. Miles had been a visiting appointment then, who had taught the course on dreamsharing simulation. It’d looked a lot better, and a lot more interesting than the structural modelling program module. And then when he had the chance to run a small research project on dreamsharing with Miles standing in as his mentor…
Maybe he should have taken that French internship after all. But it was too late for regrets. And Arthur tried not to play the ‘What-If’ game, because there were too many things he could kick himself for.
“We all are,” he said, maybe a bit more flippantly than he had intended.
“Still,” Miles said. He looked at Arthur again, assessing him, as if Arthur was still an undergraduate with an interest in learning about dreamsharing. “FBI?”
Arthur shrugged self-consciously. “Mindcrime,” he explained. “They were looking for some people with a background in architecture, or anywhere close. I thought it was worth a shot.”
Miles looked surprised - and maybe a little impressed. “Interesting,” he said neutrally. “I’d wondered about you, especially after you elected not to pursue further studies in the field. It was quite an opportunity, that project.”
“I had personal reasons.” None of which he felt comfortable bringing up here, in the corridor outside. Jase had made himself scarce after he signed off the forms, and was trying to get his in-tray of requisitioned tests cleared. Talia was probably off helping him, and still finding her way around. Probation. Now that was a period Arthur was too familiar with.
“I dare say you did,” Miles said at last, with another lingering, measuring glance. Arthur wondered what the hell that was for.
“Why’re you here?” Arthur settled for asking. “Last time I heard, you were teaching in France.”
Miles’ gaze grew almost hard. He folded his arms across his chest, leaned hard against the wall, eyes flicking to the opposite end of the corridor. His mouth straightened out into a firm, unhappy line. “My daughter died,” he stated.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
He vaguely remembered Miles mentioning once that he had a daughter. But that was it. Arthur hadn’t bothered to inquire either. Except that this was neuroscience. Jase handled the tests that weren’t already covered by Radiology. Any autopsy would be going on in the morgue. Not here.
A gesture Arthur couldn’t quite interpret. Discomfort. Unease. Miles thrust his hands sharply into his coat pocket. His shoulders tensed, and then relaxed. “Thank you,” he said, his words clipped.
“Why Jase?” Arthur asked.
“Because,” Miles said, too gently, “They think she was murdered by her husband.”
Arthur blinked. “There’s an ongoing investigation then,” he guessed. He flipped the switch in his brain, let the logical possibilities unfold like a staircase, step by consecutive step. Cold and professional, assessing. “This is neuroscience. Irregularities?”
Miles hesitated, before saying, “I don’t think he did it.”
“Why not?”
“Are you pursuing this?”
Arthur held up his hands in surrender. “No,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I’m not asking in any official capacity. If there’s no word about this in mindcrime…well. I don’t think they think there’s anything else apart from foul play.”
Miles flinched. “This…they aren’t,” he said reluctantly. “Dom said he was framed.”
“Dom. He’s the husband?”
“My son-in-law,” Miles confirmed. He looked away for a moment, as if he was thinking. Weary eyes, with traces of suspicion flicked back to glance directly at Arthur again, almost challenging him to say something. “I…I did not think this was possible. But I believe him.”
“Why?” Arthur asked bluntly. “And who would have framed him?” Means. Motive. Opportunity. There wasn’t enough data to go on. He briefly wondered why he was even assessing the case. LAPD had their work cut out for them, with this one. Why did they think it was a murder? What had happened? Arthur grimaced; he wouldn’t have even tried considering any kind of possibility with so little information.
“Dreamsharing,” Miles explained. Was that a bitter edge to his smile? “I taught him what he knew. They wanted to explore, see what they could find. Pushing the boundaries.”
“And they went too far?”
Some of his scepticism must have shown. Certainly, it sounded like one of those bad stories, those for children, with some kind of moral concealed at the centre of the tale. The story changed in the telling as the years gnawed away at it, but at the kernel was the typical cautionary moral. Don’t do this. Hubris. Arrogance.
The best stories were the old ones.
Miles’ glance was sharp and incisive. “You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Arthur said quietly. It seemed best.
“Come, now,” Miles scoffed, “You must have had dreams so real that you find yourself asking if you’ve ever woken up. We’ve always had our fantasies. Dreamsharing just made them more real - and more dangerous.”
Arthur frowned, trying to follow what Miles was getting at. “You’re saying - they thought this was a dream?”
“Mal,” Miles said patiently. “Mal thought this was a dream. You know how to wake up from a dream.”
“Waiting for the timer to run out,” Arthur said, counting them off one by one. “Disconnection. A kick.”
“Death,” Miles said. “It’s been documented that death in dreams causes anyone engaged in the dream to wake up.”
“So she kills herself from persistent solipsistic delusions. Persistent specific solipsistic delusions. And the husband says he was framed?”
Miles considered it, hands tucked away in his pocket. Arthur made note after note in his mental notebook. Too many things didn’t add up. Too many things were odd. There was no way to prove solipsistic delusions. Was there? Had she seen a psychiatrist? A psychologist? Mindcrime was so new that he half-expected the nameplate in his section to squeak every time someone laid eyes on it. Were there even properly documented aftereffects when it came to dealing with potential backlash from dreaming?
He suddenly felt very cold. This could be one of his. If he could believe Miles. If the toxicology turned up oddities. Would she show the same paranoia-markers as McKinney? Arthur thought briefly of the man, sequestered away in a mental hospital, watched around the clock in five-point restraints. Could it be that their delusions had the same psychological root?
“He says she framed him,” Miles said evenly. There was a spot of colour in his cheeks. Arthur caught a flash of temper that his steady doubt had provoked. “She left a letter with their lawyer, saying he’d threatened to kill her. That she was going to confront him at the hotel they’d always booked for their anniversary.”
Arthur wanted to groan. That as good as sealed this Dom as one of the primary suspects, or at least would have incited questions of foul play. And in these cases, the spouse was always one of the first suspects and the letter would have made certain the police would be sniffing around the husband first. “The lawyer didn’t notice any irregularity? Didn’t try to dissuade her from a direct confrontation?”
“Are you looking into this?” Miles asked, warily, for the second time.
He’d said no the first time. Now, there was a chance it could even be something he’d have to look into. It was just a chance, really. Maybe he could have said no, but Arthur paused there and took a look - really took a look at Miles. The dark rings around his eyes. The faintly glazed expression that someone’s face took on when they were running on nothing but caffeine, sugar, and desperation. The tight, unhappy line of his mouth and the way his soft features had taken on a pinched and hard cast.
Miles had lost a daughter. The least Arthur could do was to see if it had really been the husband. If Miles was right, it could even end up being exactly in his department.
“Maybe,” Arthur said honestly.
Detective Ralph Stiles narrowed his eyes at the bland statement, arms folded across his chest. “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, G-Man. Yes or no?”
Arthur shrugged. “You’re asking me for specificity I can’t give,” he pointed out, and hid a smile as Ralph almost choked.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?” Ralph muttered, rifling among the papers on his desk, trying to find what Arthur had asked for. “Look, this is an open investigation. I can’t help you unless you’ve got some official interest in this.”
“Try ‘maybe’,” Arthur told him. “I’ve got some similarities to one of my cases. Thought I’d take a look at what’s going on.”
“Similarities?” Ralph wanted to know. He frowned, his fingers drumming absently on the surface of his working table in thought. “Oh, hell - Arthur, it’s a typical case of domestic violence. We retrieved the letter from the lawyer later. Said he didn’t have any idea at all; it was sealed, and only to be opened in the event of her death.”
Well, Arthur thought, that certainly explains why he didn’t stop her. It also said absolutely nothing except that there was premeditation involved. Now the question was - who was the one out of the couple who’d planned this? It was odd, but not unusual, he reflected, that Miles believed the husband. Maybe he just didn’t want to lose a son-in-law too. Still, to believe the worst of his daughter...Mal. Must put a name to her.
Arthur realised Ralph was staring at him expectantly, and he nodded, waiting for Ralph to move on. “Looks cut and dried,” Ralph finally said. “We’re waiting for the results to get back from the crime labs, but I’d bet on the husband. Looks premeditated, all right. He pushed her.”
Arthur leafed through the rest of the file, speed reading and letting his eyes skim past the irrelevant details, just trying to pick up the essentials. “Anything that doesn’t fit?”
Ralph coughed. He looked a little uncomfortable. “Well,” he hedged, “We did, as a matter of fact, go down to the house. We spoke a bit to the children. To the neighbours. And…the husband, as a matter of fact. There’s nothing. If we’re taking the domestic abuse angle, we should have had something. Anything. Three psychiatrists declared this woman sane before her death. Neighbours recalled one or two altercations, but maintained they were very much in love. The usual, of course. ‘Can’t believe he could have done it, seems like a nice sort.’ The mother said it had to be him.”
“Father?”
Ralph shook his head slowly. “Believes the husband.”
Nothing Arthur didn’t already know. He frowned, thinking back to the conversation with Miles, and flipped briefly through the folder, looking for anything in particular that could have helped him. There was nothing much, of course. The investigation had barely begun. It wasn’t going to happen until the lab came back with something, and they’d already tried to get a statement from the husband. Dominic Cobb. Don’t forget the names.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Ralph added. “We’re working on probable cause,” he added darkly, with just a trace of humour there. “So, what’s going on in that head of yours?”
If they hadn’t been under since…whenever that trip to Limbo had been, he’d be more than just lucky to find anything useful from toxicology. It should have cleared entirely out of her bloodstream altogether. Increased paranoia. An obsession with death. With waking up. He thought of McKinney, restrained in a mental hospital, completely paranoid and afraid of the projections. Completely unstable. Could there be any basis for comparison? Any irregularities?
Did he believe Miles? Miles believed Cobb. Could he believe Cobb?
He was supposed to be handling McKinney now. Arthur felt for his cell phone. He could patch a call through to Ellis, let Ellis know what exactly was going on before Ellis could kill him. Dominic Cobb killed his wife. The woman had been afraid for her life, but went with her husband for their anniversary, anyway. He saw it in his mind, as clear as if it was happening before him right now. Another of the loud arguments the neighbours had spoken off. Perhaps Cobb hadn’t even intended to kill her. He’d lost his temper, they’d fought, and he’d pushed her, straight out the window (why had the window been open?)
Or they’d woken up, and they’d gone too deep. She couldn’t tell the difference between reality and dreaming any longer, had thought they needed to die to wake up. Why the arguments? Why the letter framing Cobb? Leverage? Had Cobb balked at killing himself? Why was Cobb’s grasp on reality far more certain than Mal’s?
In his mind, one figure plummeted from a hotel window. The other stood there, watching. He couldn’t see their faces, no matter how hard he tried.
“I’m thinking,” Arthur said aloud, “That I need to call my SAC. And pay a visit to this Dominic Cobb.”
“You taking the case off my hands?” Ralph wanted to know. “Because if you are, I could buy you lunch. Wrap the files in a pink ribbon, with a bow on top. Mind taking a few more while you’re at it?”
“That bad?”
Ralph shrugged. “Some things don’t add up,” he said agreeably. “Whether you buy that story about his wife wanting to get out of a dream…well, that’s your department. I’m not going to argue with you about it. But I could have sworn we didn’t pick up anything about domestic violence. And normally, these perps work their way up. You don’t hit full murder on the first try.” His tone made it quite clear he didn’t find too much credence in that story, nevertheless. He finally found the report Arthur had been looking for and thrust it into the folder. “If they’re still not on the autopsy yet, I’ll get them to send the reports to you too.”
Arthur made a vaguely sympathetic sound. Ralph was probably snowed under with cases, as it was. He located the crumpled blue Post-it in his pocket, and straightened it out as best as he could. He slipped it over to Ralph who took it and read it. His eyebrows furrowed. “What the hell is that?”
“See if you can get them to run those tests,” Arthur said. “It might help with figuring what the hell went on that night.” He flipped through the folder once again, and memorised Dominic Cobb’s address. LAPD had talked to him, of course. But in the end, everything came back to this man. Cobb was the key to what had happened that night, which meant Arthur needed to sound him out, and see just how much credence to lend to the dreamsharing hypothesis.
“Got it,” Ralph said. His mouth took on his loose, easy smile. “Now, if you were this helpful all the time…”
“In your dreams,” Arthur retorted.
Cobb’s eyes narrowed at the almost-hostile rejoinder.