By Way Of Sorrow Commentary
Title: By Way Of Sorrow
Fandom: Inception
Rating: NC-17. Actually, I think PG-13 should cover it, but I'm rating for someone's suicide, a bit of gore and sensuality.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt and another prompt. Cobb jumps, on that anniversary night, with Mal. Arthur is left to pick up the pieces. Eames is patient. Arthur/Eames, implied one-sided Arthur/Cobb.
Note: Rough, and a bit gritty. Things will be painful. Be warned. Dedicated to my grandfather, who passed away one week before I wrote this. Thanks to zodiacal_light for the beta (:
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I think the biggest problem with this fic was that it became deeply personal for me.
My grandfather died about the week before I wrote this. I only mention this because first, this fic is dedicated to him, and second, because it brings me back to something I find myself observing - the effects of death on the lives of people. You don’t have to be a sobbing emotional wreck at a funeral in order to feel something. In my attempts to explore death and the effects of death, I might, advertently, have projected, just a little, into this fic. I hope you will forgive me for this; for a fic can only be richer because we, as writers, spin a little of ourselves into it. This is why we never need to fear about being unique, because it is us we write into the story, in bits and pieces, and in its essence and construction.
Yes, that’s a good thing. Until you get fanservice and stories like Twilight. I apologise to any Twilight fans.
Let me start from the beginning. I wanted a new take on Arthur and Eames, if only because I am working a similar piece on them - it’s a very long universe trilogy, and is set to grow, and I wanted to give myself a chance to recharacterise them. Characters are like people, and the beautiful thing about people is how wonderfully complex they can be. I’d played with a competent, controlled Arthur - now I wanted to peel back the layers and reveal just how wonderfully frail and vulnerable Arthur could be, given the right circumstances. Yet I wanted that sense of competence, and vulnerability together.
And then there was Eames. Eames is normally a bit of a prick, the way I characterise him, and I wanted him without characteristic pet-names (his dialogue only has darling once), and he doesn’t speak to Arthur with much hostility. Yes, there’s a banter-like rhythm to their dialogue, and I think I picked up on that later in the fic, but I wanted the gentler side of Eames. He’s a bit cold in the movie - in a totally different way from Arthur. He dissects people, and because of that, he can get close, but still keep a sense of emotional distance, and disentangles himself with equal ease. This is the other side of Eames; still mysterious, and he hides behind a smile and so many remarks, that it’s difficult to guess his motives. He never likes to showcase them. And Eames is patient. He knows people, and he isn’t afraid to wait and to give the support they need.
To keep Eames enigmatic, I decided not to write at all from his perspective. It resulted in a few deleted scenes.
How was I going to decide what Arthur would be like? Would he be furious, and self-destructive, or quietly disintegrate and break down inside? Or what about nuance and complexity? Would he do both? For a better understanding of their characters, I turned to the enneagrams. Arthur, I decided, was a Type Six, with a Five wing.
On Sixes - ‘The committed, security-oriented type. Sixes are reliable, hard-working, responsible, and trustworthy. Excellent "troubleshooters," they foresee problems and foster cooperation, but can also become defensive, evasive, and anxious-running on stress while complaining about it. What all Sixes have in common however, is the fear rooted at the center of their personality, which manifests in worrying, and restless imaginings of everything that might go wrong. This tendency makes Sixes gifted at trouble shooting, but also robs the Six of much needed peace of mind and tends to deprive the personality of spontaneity.
The essential anxiety at the core of the type Six fixation tends to permeate the personality with a sort of "defensive suspiciousness." Sixes don't trust easily; they are often ambivalent about others, until the person has absolutely proven herself, at which point they are likely to respond with steadfast loyalty. The loyalty of the Six is something of a two edged sword however, as Sixes are sometimes prone to stand by a friend, partner, job or cause even long after it is time to move on.’
I could go on and on about how that set the stage for the Cobb-Arthur relationship, for me. The Six relationship would be ambivalent, and Cobb would be his anchor. The Five wing lends him a sharp, professional edge - and his seeming dedication to his work, the expertise and sureness with which we see him.
Cobb jumping would screw with Arthur’s Six, that was definitely apparent. What was less obvious was just how that would work out. I could see the Cobb love thing as being ambiguous, if only because the Six would add an entirely new dimension of depth, maybe an element of dependency, even, to their relationship, which would muddy the waters terribly.
So there was that.
I didn’t want the enneagrams to become the characterisation rules, because the truth is, they’re more like guidelines. The suspicion and the loyalty that drives a Six provides a very nice sense of conflict to Arthur; the distrust, and yet the need to find security through a stabilising, positive relationship - be it friendship, or something else. I left it open on that front. Well, sort of.
For Eames - he was a bit of a bugger to place, but I tentatively characterised him as a Seven.
‘Sevens are exhilarated by the rush of ideas and by the pleasure of being spontaneous, preferring broad overviews and the excitement of the initial stages of the creative process to probing a single topic in depth. Sevens cope with this anxiety in two ways. First, they try to keep their minds busy all of the time. As long as Sevens can keep their minds occupied, especially with projects and positive ideas for the future, they can, to some extent, keep anxiety and negative feelings out of conscious awareness. Likewise, since their thinking is stimulated by activity, Sevens are compelled to stay on the go, moving from one experience to the next, searching for more stimulation. This is not to say that Sevens are "spinning their wheels." They generally enjoy being practical and getting things done. ‘
I’d actually hesitate to suggest Eames has a wing, if only because I see him as so heavily a Seven. He might have a bit of a Four or a Three aspect, definitely. It’s left open in the way I wrote him.
This fic, of course, mainly focused on the Six-Seven interaction, so the wings were pretty much backstory, or minor characterisation aspects to consider.
So the prompt asked for Arthur being left to pick up the pieces. Both, actually. Both of them were basically asking for Arthur-centric fic. So I considered the effect on Arthur which, as I pointed out earlier, was the whole purpose of working out their enneagrams.
A Six who just got his anchoring relationship destroyed, I decided, would be lost. And depending on the person, I figured that given his minor five wing, he’d be far more likely to lose himself in performing tasks that reinforced a sense of competency. He’d keep busy, sure. There’d be a sense of anger and betrayal, which Arthur experiences throughout the fic. And there’d be a sense of lostness, which lies beneath the surface of all those emotions, and which I do hope I hinted at successfully throughout the fic.
And there was the difficulty with expressing his anger. Throughout the fic, you’ll notice Arthur does curse. Quite a bit. I think that I wrestled with the cursing for a while. Arthur doesn’t curse so much in the movie. But I think in the movie, he isn’t under as much emotional stress as he is in this fic. More importantly, I read through the script again and analysed his dialogue. He generally stays on the mild end of the scale, so I left him with ‘asshole,’ ‘bastard,’ ‘shit,’ and ‘damn,’ all of which can be said to be milder. The few ‘fuck’s that appear came as emphasized intensifiers, or markers of the moments where stress really really mounted.
His normal language is an interesting thing to toy with too. He does use a great deal of colloquialisms, so I’ve slipped them in here and there.
Eames’ language went through similar changes. He’s very casual at times, as if he’s starting a conversation from where it got left off. He does have a tendency to be lightly sardonic at times; his sense of humor can be a bit biting, but it’s always in a teasing sense. There’s little sense of hostility to it. Other times, his sentences are very to the point and business-like. Dealing with another side of Eames meant I got to play with that last bit a little, given this is a life-after kind of fic and I didn’t need the professional side of Eames coming out.
This was one thing I tried; minimising character development of Eames in order to develop him in a different way. We see this nice side of Eames right from the start, through Arthur’s perceptions, because the third person narrative still dips into Arthur’s thought processes and perceptions, so it gave Eames that distant sense of being an enigma that we get in the movie as well. Or at least the sense that there are things to Eames that we don’t quite get, facets unexplored.
Other minor things about characterisation - I read someone’s complaint on inception_kink, I think, complaining that it was a common characterisation that Arthur’s good with kids. Okay, I decided, but take that Six-Five nature and twist it, and it’s entirely possible that he has problems with detachment and handling Cobb’s kids. Plot-wise, it made sense - I had to toss lots of stuff at Arthur, and I was pretty sure that Cobb’s kids would be helluva handful at times.
I wanted the knowing-people side of Eames to be very strong; he knows, and he waits patiently, because he knows he has to get Arthur to open to him, to trust him, and that you can’t rush the grieving process, nor can you rush a Six.
It’s in this fic, definitely, that you see the beginnings of a kind of head!canon. I used to typify Arthur as a Five, but I think the Six-Five works far better for his nature, and that might even carry over to how I see him in future. Again, it’s equally possible that this will be mutable. That’s the whole point of writing. Eames as a Seven, I like. I don’t know about the wing. I’ll have to think that through more.
I gave Eames and Mal a backstory, but then had to short on it for this fic. Arthur and Mal’s backstory also got left out in the end, in favor of the focus on the Cobb-Arthur dynamic. I do agree it disturbs me a little that he’s less cut up about Mal, but I’m basing that on his movie-detachment. He is far less disturbed about the Mal thing - again, it drops back to characterisation, because I might just write his Cobb-dynamic as a coping mechanism one day.
He sits down at the kitchen table and waits for Will to pick up. They never talk for very long over the phone, and even in person. There’s no real need to. People always assume he and Will aren’t on the best of terms because they hardly communicate. Neither of them see the point.
Will. Oh, Will. I was debating sticking him in, and finally decided to. I left him in, if only because I felt it was really…I don’t know, quite stretching how much I could believe to assume the whole team was made of only-children. I mean, seriously? Plot-wise, he served to show some kind of insight into Arthur’s character. That Arthur maintains an interesting amount of distance, even in his close relationships, and to hint at what a strange exception the Cobb-Arthur relationship is.
He actually appears in another fic that I’m working on, but whatever. Picking his name was hard. I wanted something that matched Arthur. So it’s Arthur and William, William is the older brother, goes by Will. Will is a UChicago lecturer, and a physicist and researcher. He’s rather casual. Arthur, on the other hand, studied engineering at MIT. In a strange way, they ground each other. Arthur’s far more grounded and application-focused in a way Will isn’t.
Again, backstory that got left out. I get generally uneasy about bringing OCs into fics, because sometimes, they end up dominating. So I tried to keep Will’s involvement to a minimum. As strict a minimum as possible. I did need some kind of impetus to get Arthur talking to Eames, because he’s stubborn that way, and so came the other Will snippet, another phone call.
Yes, physicists deal with the heck of a lot of uncertainty. Just ask any quantum mechanics student, if you get past the sound of screaming ;)
The entire segment with Richards forms the bulk of the new area of head!canon I developed for this fic. The PI angle was something I was going to explore in the trilogy ‘verse, but suffice to say it fit here, so it made its first appearance now, instead.
Everett’s solipsistic disorder - heh. A bit of a shoutout to the Everett-Wheeler many-worlds interpretation model for quantum physics ;) Appropriate, I think, given this is an AU after all.
I also liked the bit about licensing extraction. The Shooting Script seemed to hint at some kind of basic mechanism of legal control for extraction, and to some extent, I liked the way the idea worked - you could be a licensed extractor, which is how people legitly hire extractors to teach their subconscious defense, and that license would be a certification of competence, as well as (like any professional job, say accountancy), they’d be bound by a code of ethics. So theoretically speaking, if Cobb or Arthur were found out, then they’d be in shit for going into a grey area or against professional ethics.
So, for writing style. The prompt talked about picking up the pieces; I figured this meant a great deal of focusing on realism in the writing. There might have been a bit of a disjunct in style - the earlier section has a bit less realism, and I structured it tightly to time in order to give the feeling of a timer going off, and at the end of it, Cobb’s life ends. The lower sections are far more unrestricted and have a looser time-structure. It also gives this sense of time dilation - time stretching, because Arthur isn't consciously keeping track of time. Grief tends to narrow time down to the immediate - today, tomorrow, yesterday.
This is 2257 hours.
Arthur considers calling Cobb, to let him know that the children have been put to bed. He hesitates. The cell phone is in his hand.
He decides against it.
The cell phone slides into his pocket, quiet, dead.
Cobb closes his eyes.
This is 2258 hours.
Arthur goes down to the kitchen to get himself a drink.
Cobb jumps.
This is characteristic of the front bit, I think. Short, blunt comparison structures. This one is the hammer, and I (hopefully) used a brush by the time we reached the end.
I actually really love this bit, if only because of the vague hint there that Cobb might have stayed alive if only - if only Arthur had called. And Arthur doesn’t know that. It would, I think, quite break him if he knew.
Sikorski is medium-height, with dark almond-shaped eyes crinkled at the corners, and black hair. “You are Mr Arthur?” he asks.
Why don’t they have his surname? Good question ;) My personal take on it, when I was writing, anyway, was that Arthur really avoids using his surname when he can help it. He got out of it too when he was included in Cobb’s will. And yes, Arthur knew about it. I wanted a will background here, but I figured it detracted again, so I took it out.
In the original snippet, you have Cobb explaining to Arthur that he trusts Arthur with the kids, because he personally has no more family left living. And Arthur asks, ‘What about Mal?’ and we get some bits about Mal’s parents and how they’ve split and how Marie can’t really come down and handle children, not to mention she’s one continent away. Yes, Cobb has a little something against Marie. Just a little.
The list is overwhelming. Arthur finds himself pinching the bridge of his nose. One thing at a time, he tells himself firmly. He locks the front door, and heads for the study because he thinks he’s too keyed up to sleep tonight.
This was one of the easier parts to write. Arthur’s first, knee-jerk reaction, I believe, would be to bury himself in routine. Make lists. Keep himself busy and purposeful by giving himself a lot of tasks. Yes, it’s overwhelming, but he needs to feel like he’s wading in stress and Things To Do. It keeps him from feeling empty, and it keeps him from really having to emotionally confront his dynamic with Cobb and his feelings about Cobb’s death. It’s not the best of emotional stonewalls, but it works.
(He can’t even remember how he got here.)
The hint. Arthur is dreaming, and in his dream, he’s in Cobb’s perspective. We don’t know for sure this is what really happened, but that is as close to the truth as Arthur will ever get, because the only two who know are dead. Of course, we will notice there is a very striking similarity to the truth, and what really happened in the movie ;)
They’re both the same; practical men, who work with reality first, and ground all dreams in it. His daughter and son-in-law are dead. Are the children fine? Time for private little breakdowns later.
This, I think, is the key mentality Miles and Arthur work with. First things first. Except that for Arthur, it becomes an extended stonewall, because he’s never been entirely comfortable with having to plumb the depths of exactly what Cobb means to him, and to grieve would be to (to some extent) examine exactly that.
No.
Phillipa hates maple syrup and insists that she only wants blueberry jam, and surprise - there’s none to be had. James plays with his, mashes it around, and insists that he doesn’t like cornflakes.
This is the bit which, I think, is somewhat funny. Arthur’s either got really bad luck with kids, or he just can’t really connect with them. A bit of both, in my books. Cobb thinks it’s hilarious. He also trusts Arthur with his kids anyway. Kind of.
It seems neater, and he needs the security of the familiar white-tiled walls, the familiar door handle he always bangs his hip into by complete accident before muscle memory kicks in after the first few times and he avoids it subconsciously.
Reality isn’t made by a single scarlet die, a single brass top. Reality is defined by the thousand and eleven little details that strike him, all at once, and although it is theoretically possible to mimic every single one of them, the routine and the familiarity has a grounding effect on him.
No, that was not a Saito reference. Really. It isn’t just keeping busy that Arthur’s anchoring himself to - it’s the whole familiarity and routine thing. That is, that he can lose himself just doing things in automatic mode and shut down all higher brain functions and not have to think. Which is the key thing, I think, about Arthur when it comes to Cobb. He’s usually content to be non-confrontational, e.g. the Mal thing, which doesn’t always pan out well for him.
The bit about reality is interesting. Arthur’s got a very stable outlook on reality, I think, and he’s grounded far deeper than by just checking his totem. Also, the Cobb and Mal thing would really put a dent in any eagerness for reliance on his totem.
In the end, he gets stopped on the way back; the detective (because he’s in plainclothes) is a man with a nondescript, slightly round and pleasant face who asks him (not really asks, of course) if he’d like to stop and get a coffee and They Can Talk.
This is the bit onwards where there is quite a bit of infodump. I pretty much created and shared a lot of details between this fic and the Guns and Roses universe. I liked the PI idea, if only because I reasoned he had to get his sources from somewhere.
(Nothing to do with Brothers Bloom and fedoras. Nope.)
The paint is mostly dry, hopefully James did not swallow any of it but Arthur resigns himself to repainting the walls white, hiding the paints away, monitoring the children’s condition over the night and the next day, and forcing James to swallow charcoal pills, the boy kicking and screaming and wriggling, just in case.
He’s too tired to think about dinner, and he still hasn’t called the attorney or the undertaker yet and they’re probably going to be closed soon, so Arthur just calls in a pizza and makes it Hawaiian because no one hates Hawaiian, right? It turns out he’s wrong. Phillipa has a huge screaming fit over the pineapple chunks and he tells her to eat them anyway and she makes even more of a fuss.
Because kids will be kids, and whoever who thinks kids are terribly angelic beings normally doesn’t babysit on a regular basis. Not that I’m saying they’re diabolical, but they do get into the most startling of scrapes at times.
Neither of them are really good at goodbyes, and somewhere, it translates to neither of them really bothering.
It isn’t just with Will ;)
He doesn’t hug James, and tell him everything will be alright, because that’s a lie and Arthur knows he’s absolute crap at dealing with kids.
Because him hugging Cobb’s kids on a regular basis would be odd. Not to mention I’d be very surprised if James didn’t (through it), complain he was a crappy Dad substitute.
Arthur doesn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer. He realises, far too late, that he’s hit her.
Ah. Controversy. Controversy. I didn’t know whether to keep this in or cut this out. In all honesty, I can very likely say the outcome of Phillipa’s little tantrum was kind of obvious. He’d have to be what, an utter saint, not to be in some way affected. I saw the strike/slap as a very reflexive pain reaction - Arthur’s under great emotional stress, and Phillipa just goes ‘I wish you were the one dead.’
He does feel bad about it though. Very bad.
Miles looks at least ten years older since Arthur last saw him, and his eyes are red-rimmed and Arthur figures he doesn’t look much better.
That can mean at least two things, depending on how you read into it ;) Either it refers to Miles’ grief, or that Arthur hasn’t seen Miles in quite a while, or both.
He hears Miles inhale sharply, and a quick glance shows grim understanding. But Marie has never dealt with dreamsharing, and the only thing she knows is that her daughter is dead and that something has passed between her husband and her daughter’s friend that she cannot hope to understand.
I wanted to make it very clear; this was not about demonising Marie. Yes, she’s an antagonistic force in this, or being set up as an antagonistic force, but in all honesty, it’s partly fear, the desire for control and normalcy as her way of coping (sounds like Arthur?) and the fact that she really doesn’t know what dreamsharing is all about. And where the heck did Cobb and Mal’s friend come out from, and why is he legally supposed to take care of the grandchildren?
This is what having an almost-eidetic memory means; each nuance, each gesture, each word is as sharp and clear as if preserved in unchanging amber, and he has to be careful not to cut himself on their edges.
This (the nearly eidetic memory) was in on a whim. And I rather liked the idea ;)
“You know they know nothing about limbo. A notice needs to be sent out.” Miles reminds him, gently. “I’ve heard only vague accounts of the deepest dream-state. Stokes still says it should be possible to descend to an infinitely deep series of layers.”
A bit of background on limbo, because Arthur and Yusuf are clearly familiar (just a little) with the concept of limbo, and Eames might or might not be, depending on how you read into it. So I decided that maybe the concept of limbo should exist all along - but the accounts and empirical evidence was lacking. Until Cobb.
The die stays with him all the time, a hard lump in his pocket. He doesn’t need to look at it. He just needs to know it is there, a reminder of the line that he must never cross, a reminder of two who crossed it, and god it hurts.
I don’t see him as able to lose track of reality now, even though things are so terrible that he’s in denial, and they seem almost surreal. He hasn’t been going under. And I liked the idea he’s stable with his idea of reality - the die becomes a reminder, a fixation with staying grounded, because that is the imprint that the deaths have left on his psyche.
Eames is soaked to the skin. He doesn’t look like he’s slept much either.
“I heard,” he says. “God, I’m sorry, Arthur. I only heard the other day, from Ryan.”
And, the introduction of Eames! In the earlier version, Arthur only met Eames at the funeral. That was going to be bad for a few reasons, one of which has to do with a major fic I’m producing, and because I felt Eames needed to be introduced earlier. If this was going to be Arthur/Eames, or at least dubious Arthur/Eames, there needed to be an element of Eames present all along, even if I wasn’t ever going to explore his perspective. Also, I just loved the idea that Eames, too, is perfectly capable of finding out things in awesome ways ;)
Head!canon for this scene: Eames is disturbed, more because it’s Mal who’s dead, and he had a close but on-off friendship with her. Again, something that came from the other ‘verse.
Arthur notices, with mild surprise, that it is raining outside.
He pulls the door wide open. “Come in,” he says.
Yes, this is echoed in the ending ;) More importantly, Arthur’s not a bastard. He isn’t going to stick Eames in the rain and leave him there Just Because.
“She was a close friend.” Eames offers. An explanation and a statement and a reason, all in one, and none of them at the same time.
Eames is talking about why he’s here, why he’s sorry, what his connection with this whole sorry affair is - and yet it really doesn’t explain why he has come to find Arthur or what he’s doing here.
Arthur ends up walking away to cool off when the priest can’t contain his references to how suicide is a mortal sin and how Dom and Mal are going to spend the fuck of a time burning in Purgatory for it.
If she’s Catholic, and Marie is Catholic, then the priest at the funeral would be in one hell (pardon the pun) of a dilemma, because suicide is a mortal sin.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Arthur,” She sniffles, days after The Fight. “I…I didn’t mean it.”
“I’m sorry.” Arthur says, because he really is. “I know you didn’t.” (That one is a lie. She meant it, and she meant it to hurt, at that moment.) He doesn’t quite hold out his arms, but she manages to find her way into his awkward, one-armed hug anyway, and they stay like that for a while, and he holds her and pats her on the back and doesn’t complain when she cries into his jacket because she needs the release.
This, I think, is one of the turning points for Arthur, however awkward. In the Arthur-Phillipa/James dynamic, in any case.
“I’m sorry,” A familiar voice says, and Arthur blinks as he turns around, figuring who it is just a few seconds before he sees Eames, in a dark grey jacket. Eames had left in the morning, that day, sometime after Arthur finally dozed off. “Hello,” Eames says, bending down to Phillipa’s height. “You must be Phillipa.”
Eames is a ninja. He vanished in the morning and comes back one or two days later for the funeral.
“People don’t die, sweetheart. As long as we remember them, we carry a part of them with us. Here.” His hands are large on her small wrist - he moves her hand, gently, and touches it to his chest. “She’s here, with your Daddy.”
It’s sentimental horseshit.
It is sentimental horseshit. It doesn’t make it any less true, or any less a truth that can hold a person together, in the face of grief. And this is the really nice side of Eames, and the only endearment I ever let him use in this fic. Trust me on it.
Breathe, he thinks, or maybe Eames says, as the world flashes around him, receding away. He feels warm hands on his chest. Breathe, Arthur, breathe.
He breathes, and the world slows. It’s like the children’s game where they stand in a circle and spin around, faster and faster until the entire world is a blur of color and shapes that whips around them - and then when they slow down, the world keeps on spinning, and then stills.
He hyperventilated. Is that the correct term? Anyway, he had a panic attack, in some senses of the word. Lost control. First hints of breakdown. Arthur resists. Or he tries to. But it’s a sign he’s nearing the end of his ability to hold it back. The emotional strain he’s under is enormous.
Some Eames h/c moments. Because Eames has his eye on Arthur. While one of my betas saw this as Eames being mean and pouncing on Arthur so early, I think there’s something else to it - I think very simply, Eames knows people, and he knows Arthur is going to crack, and given the way he feels, he’s very big on being there as support.
“I know,” Eames says, voice gentle with the compassion that makes Arthur’s control fracture, a spiderweb of cracks radiating in all directions. He steps away, slowly and deliberately, leaving space between them. “I know.”
(He brushes the tears off like sand from a cracked hourglass.)
Especially when you’re trying to be strong, it isn’t the kindness you need. Sometimes, the kindness and pity breaks you far more than harshness.
Eames dangles a suspiciously familiar set of keys, and then snatches them away when Arthur makes a grab for them.
“Asshole.”
“So I’m told,” Eames says, unfazed. “Oh, come. I’ll drive you home.”
At that point in time, Eames figured Arthur wasn’t quite in a state to drive. Also, he’s a good pickpocket so he just lifted them from Arthur’s pocket.
Eames is playing with a poker chip by the window; he meets Arthur’s eyes, and his grey eyes glint, strangely bright as he smiles sadly and pockets the chip.
I leave it to you to decide the significance of the poker chip. Head!canon Eames for me doesn’t use a totem. The chip has significance because he spent time with Mal and that’s the chip he acquired when - yes, yes, my other fic ‘verse really leaks into this, okay? >.<
Eames might be crying too. Just a little.
He closes his eyes, against the gentle night, for fear of remembering something that was never real.
Ambiguous/open last lines ftw. Exactly what wasn’t real? Anything he had with Cobb? Eames? His dreams?
Eames is the dreamer.
Another sentence with a lot of backstory. Eames doesn’t want possible emotional volatility in the dreamer. He also does not want to be explicit in letting Arthur know that he thinks Arthur will have trouble being the dreamer.
It was another Eames POV section that got cut. The only sentence that remained - ‘Eames is the dreamer.’
The hotel wavers.
Sepia and the soft, classical edges sharpen and harden, become white and grey and monotone sharp-angles.
Arthur accidentally took control of the dream. That’s how I saw what happened when Cobb started manifesting things like trains, hotel drapes, and his children.
“Sorry,” Arthur murmurs. “It won’t happen again.”
Before Eames can say anything, he moves off, heading casually for the lift.
Cobb isn’t the only one who uses avoidance ;)
Cobb smiles crookedly, and Arthur’s heart breaks.
Yes, Arthur is projecting Cobb, no, his projections aren’t as insane as Cobb’s. For one, he doesn’t have the guilt - just the grief and the emotional mess. Hi, I think the Arthur/Cobb just got from implied to whack-you-in-the-face kind of implied.
Arthur staggers over the edge, and down into the night, and ohgod, his breathing is coming harder and faster, in the remembered patterns of the nightmare, he is falling but he’s still Arthur and when he glances up, he can’t see Cobb silhouetted against the open, lit window anymore, just Eames -
Symbolic/portentious, much? ;)
It’s too fucking soon. It’s too fucking soon, and god, Eames is crowding in on him and he isn’t ready.
Because Arthur has denial issues. Big denial issues. And emotional issues. And he loves to avoid them. And Eames - well, Eames has little sense of personal space. H/c, deep friendship-love, all of these, he gives, and sometimes physically.
Cobb’s lawyer turned up a document signed by Marie which said she went willingly with Cobb’s will, and that changed the pattern of things. Marie insisted she hadn’t ever written such a document, but the handwriting was undoubtedly hers.
*cough* Eames *cough*
“Yeah,” He agrees. He’s surprised to know that it’s honestly the truth. The raw, scraped pain of the past weeks seems nothing but a surreal memory. Everything is dull, and numbed, and maybe one day, it won’t even hurt at all. “Listen, sorry about the Chicago thing, I tried but - “
It takes time. Slowly, gradually.
“Come on in.” He invites, pulling the door open wide. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Arthur takes a step forward, through the open door.
Big damn open ending ;) I honestly think it can go both ways, if only because on one hand, you’ll notice Arthur hasn’t quite resolved the nightmare (psychological guilt/impact) of Cobb yet. Not entirely, anyway. It’s questionable what he wants with Eames, and a Cobb-substitute would probably result in their relationship getting screwed over one day.
And on the other hand, you have the positive ending - Eames taking what he can get, maybe Arthur’s always going to be just a little not-his, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll be together.
I wanted to go for a strong sense of katharsis in this. I hope it kicked in by the end (:
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Songs I listened to:
1. Gladiator Soundtrack: Elysium, Honor Him, Now We Are Free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHPTPUpQ1I&feature=related
(If you want background, listen and read the fic.)
2. Over You by Daughtry
3. It’s Not Over by Daughtry
4. Every Little Thing by Dishwalla
5. Until I Wake Up by Dishwalla
6. Mercy of the Fallen by Dar Williams
7. Kings and Queens by 30 Seconds To Mars
Ironically? I did not listen to By Way Of Sorrow.
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Fandom: Inception
Rating: NC-17. Actually, I think PG-13 should cover it, but I'm rating for someone's suicide, a bit of gore and sensuality.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt and another prompt. Cobb jumps, on that anniversary night, with Mal. Arthur is left to pick up the pieces. Eames is patient. Arthur/Eames, implied one-sided Arthur/Cobb.
Note: Rough, and a bit gritty. Things will be painful. Be warned. Dedicated to my grandfather, who passed away one week before I wrote this. Thanks to zodiacal_light for the beta (:
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I think the biggest problem with this fic was that it became deeply personal for me.
My grandfather died about the week before I wrote this. I only mention this because first, this fic is dedicated to him, and second, because it brings me back to something I find myself observing - the effects of death on the lives of people. You don’t have to be a sobbing emotional wreck at a funeral in order to feel something. In my attempts to explore death and the effects of death, I might, advertently, have projected, just a little, into this fic. I hope you will forgive me for this; for a fic can only be richer because we, as writers, spin a little of ourselves into it. This is why we never need to fear about being unique, because it is us we write into the story, in bits and pieces, and in its essence and construction.
Yes, that’s a good thing. Until you get fanservice and stories like Twilight. I apologise to any Twilight fans.
Let me start from the beginning. I wanted a new take on Arthur and Eames, if only because I am working a similar piece on them - it’s a very long universe trilogy, and is set to grow, and I wanted to give myself a chance to recharacterise them. Characters are like people, and the beautiful thing about people is how wonderfully complex they can be. I’d played with a competent, controlled Arthur - now I wanted to peel back the layers and reveal just how wonderfully frail and vulnerable Arthur could be, given the right circumstances. Yet I wanted that sense of competence, and vulnerability together.
And then there was Eames. Eames is normally a bit of a prick, the way I characterise him, and I wanted him without characteristic pet-names (his dialogue only has darling once), and he doesn’t speak to Arthur with much hostility. Yes, there’s a banter-like rhythm to their dialogue, and I think I picked up on that later in the fic, but I wanted the gentler side of Eames. He’s a bit cold in the movie - in a totally different way from Arthur. He dissects people, and because of that, he can get close, but still keep a sense of emotional distance, and disentangles himself with equal ease. This is the other side of Eames; still mysterious, and he hides behind a smile and so many remarks, that it’s difficult to guess his motives. He never likes to showcase them. And Eames is patient. He knows people, and he isn’t afraid to wait and to give the support they need.
To keep Eames enigmatic, I decided not to write at all from his perspective. It resulted in a few deleted scenes.
How was I going to decide what Arthur would be like? Would he be furious, and self-destructive, or quietly disintegrate and break down inside? Or what about nuance and complexity? Would he do both? For a better understanding of their characters, I turned to the enneagrams. Arthur, I decided, was a Type Six, with a Five wing.
On Sixes - ‘The committed, security-oriented type. Sixes are reliable, hard-working, responsible, and trustworthy. Excellent "troubleshooters," they foresee problems and foster cooperation, but can also become defensive, evasive, and anxious-running on stress while complaining about it. What all Sixes have in common however, is the fear rooted at the center of their personality, which manifests in worrying, and restless imaginings of everything that might go wrong. This tendency makes Sixes gifted at trouble shooting, but also robs the Six of much needed peace of mind and tends to deprive the personality of spontaneity.
The essential anxiety at the core of the type Six fixation tends to permeate the personality with a sort of "defensive suspiciousness." Sixes don't trust easily; they are often ambivalent about others, until the person has absolutely proven herself, at which point they are likely to respond with steadfast loyalty. The loyalty of the Six is something of a two edged sword however, as Sixes are sometimes prone to stand by a friend, partner, job or cause even long after it is time to move on.’
I could go on and on about how that set the stage for the Cobb-Arthur relationship, for me. The Six relationship would be ambivalent, and Cobb would be his anchor. The Five wing lends him a sharp, professional edge - and his seeming dedication to his work, the expertise and sureness with which we see him.
Cobb jumping would screw with Arthur’s Six, that was definitely apparent. What was less obvious was just how that would work out. I could see the Cobb love thing as being ambiguous, if only because the Six would add an entirely new dimension of depth, maybe an element of dependency, even, to their relationship, which would muddy the waters terribly.
So there was that.
I didn’t want the enneagrams to become the characterisation rules, because the truth is, they’re more like guidelines. The suspicion and the loyalty that drives a Six provides a very nice sense of conflict to Arthur; the distrust, and yet the need to find security through a stabilising, positive relationship - be it friendship, or something else. I left it open on that front. Well, sort of.
For Eames - he was a bit of a bugger to place, but I tentatively characterised him as a Seven.
‘Sevens are exhilarated by the rush of ideas and by the pleasure of being spontaneous, preferring broad overviews and the excitement of the initial stages of the creative process to probing a single topic in depth. Sevens cope with this anxiety in two ways. First, they try to keep their minds busy all of the time. As long as Sevens can keep their minds occupied, especially with projects and positive ideas for the future, they can, to some extent, keep anxiety and negative feelings out of conscious awareness. Likewise, since their thinking is stimulated by activity, Sevens are compelled to stay on the go, moving from one experience to the next, searching for more stimulation. This is not to say that Sevens are "spinning their wheels." They generally enjoy being practical and getting things done. ‘
I’d actually hesitate to suggest Eames has a wing, if only because I see him as so heavily a Seven. He might have a bit of a Four or a Three aspect, definitely. It’s left open in the way I wrote him.
This fic, of course, mainly focused on the Six-Seven interaction, so the wings were pretty much backstory, or minor characterisation aspects to consider.
So the prompt asked for Arthur being left to pick up the pieces. Both, actually. Both of them were basically asking for Arthur-centric fic. So I considered the effect on Arthur which, as I pointed out earlier, was the whole purpose of working out their enneagrams.
A Six who just got his anchoring relationship destroyed, I decided, would be lost. And depending on the person, I figured that given his minor five wing, he’d be far more likely to lose himself in performing tasks that reinforced a sense of competency. He’d keep busy, sure. There’d be a sense of anger and betrayal, which Arthur experiences throughout the fic. And there’d be a sense of lostness, which lies beneath the surface of all those emotions, and which I do hope I hinted at successfully throughout the fic.
And there was the difficulty with expressing his anger. Throughout the fic, you’ll notice Arthur does curse. Quite a bit. I think that I wrestled with the cursing for a while. Arthur doesn’t curse so much in the movie. But I think in the movie, he isn’t under as much emotional stress as he is in this fic. More importantly, I read through the script again and analysed his dialogue. He generally stays on the mild end of the scale, so I left him with ‘asshole,’ ‘bastard,’ ‘shit,’ and ‘damn,’ all of which can be said to be milder. The few ‘fuck’s that appear came as emphasized intensifiers, or markers of the moments where stress really really mounted.
His normal language is an interesting thing to toy with too. He does use a great deal of colloquialisms, so I’ve slipped them in here and there.
Eames’ language went through similar changes. He’s very casual at times, as if he’s starting a conversation from where it got left off. He does have a tendency to be lightly sardonic at times; his sense of humor can be a bit biting, but it’s always in a teasing sense. There’s little sense of hostility to it. Other times, his sentences are very to the point and business-like. Dealing with another side of Eames meant I got to play with that last bit a little, given this is a life-after kind of fic and I didn’t need the professional side of Eames coming out.
This was one thing I tried; minimising character development of Eames in order to develop him in a different way. We see this nice side of Eames right from the start, through Arthur’s perceptions, because the third person narrative still dips into Arthur’s thought processes and perceptions, so it gave Eames that distant sense of being an enigma that we get in the movie as well. Or at least the sense that there are things to Eames that we don’t quite get, facets unexplored.
Other minor things about characterisation - I read someone’s complaint on inception_kink, I think, complaining that it was a common characterisation that Arthur’s good with kids. Okay, I decided, but take that Six-Five nature and twist it, and it’s entirely possible that he has problems with detachment and handling Cobb’s kids. Plot-wise, it made sense - I had to toss lots of stuff at Arthur, and I was pretty sure that Cobb’s kids would be helluva handful at times.
I wanted the knowing-people side of Eames to be very strong; he knows, and he waits patiently, because he knows he has to get Arthur to open to him, to trust him, and that you can’t rush the grieving process, nor can you rush a Six.
It’s in this fic, definitely, that you see the beginnings of a kind of head!canon. I used to typify Arthur as a Five, but I think the Six-Five works far better for his nature, and that might even carry over to how I see him in future. Again, it’s equally possible that this will be mutable. That’s the whole point of writing. Eames as a Seven, I like. I don’t know about the wing. I’ll have to think that through more.
I gave Eames and Mal a backstory, but then had to short on it for this fic. Arthur and Mal’s backstory also got left out in the end, in favor of the focus on the Cobb-Arthur dynamic. I do agree it disturbs me a little that he’s less cut up about Mal, but I’m basing that on his movie-detachment. He is far less disturbed about the Mal thing - again, it drops back to characterisation, because I might just write his Cobb-dynamic as a coping mechanism one day.
He sits down at the kitchen table and waits for Will to pick up. They never talk for very long over the phone, and even in person. There’s no real need to. People always assume he and Will aren’t on the best of terms because they hardly communicate. Neither of them see the point.
Will. Oh, Will. I was debating sticking him in, and finally decided to. I left him in, if only because I felt it was really…I don’t know, quite stretching how much I could believe to assume the whole team was made of only-children. I mean, seriously? Plot-wise, he served to show some kind of insight into Arthur’s character. That Arthur maintains an interesting amount of distance, even in his close relationships, and to hint at what a strange exception the Cobb-Arthur relationship is.
He actually appears in another fic that I’m working on, but whatever. Picking his name was hard. I wanted something that matched Arthur. So it’s Arthur and William, William is the older brother, goes by Will. Will is a UChicago lecturer, and a physicist and researcher. He’s rather casual. Arthur, on the other hand, studied engineering at MIT. In a strange way, they ground each other. Arthur’s far more grounded and application-focused in a way Will isn’t.
Again, backstory that got left out. I get generally uneasy about bringing OCs into fics, because sometimes, they end up dominating. So I tried to keep Will’s involvement to a minimum. As strict a minimum as possible. I did need some kind of impetus to get Arthur talking to Eames, because he’s stubborn that way, and so came the other Will snippet, another phone call.
Yes, physicists deal with the heck of a lot of uncertainty. Just ask any quantum mechanics student, if you get past the sound of screaming ;)
The entire segment with Richards forms the bulk of the new area of head!canon I developed for this fic. The PI angle was something I was going to explore in the trilogy ‘verse, but suffice to say it fit here, so it made its first appearance now, instead.
Everett’s solipsistic disorder - heh. A bit of a shoutout to the Everett-Wheeler many-worlds interpretation model for quantum physics ;) Appropriate, I think, given this is an AU after all.
I also liked the bit about licensing extraction. The Shooting Script seemed to hint at some kind of basic mechanism of legal control for extraction, and to some extent, I liked the way the idea worked - you could be a licensed extractor, which is how people legitly hire extractors to teach their subconscious defense, and that license would be a certification of competence, as well as (like any professional job, say accountancy), they’d be bound by a code of ethics. So theoretically speaking, if Cobb or Arthur were found out, then they’d be in shit for going into a grey area or against professional ethics.
So, for writing style. The prompt talked about picking up the pieces; I figured this meant a great deal of focusing on realism in the writing. There might have been a bit of a disjunct in style - the earlier section has a bit less realism, and I structured it tightly to time in order to give the feeling of a timer going off, and at the end of it, Cobb’s life ends. The lower sections are far more unrestricted and have a looser time-structure. It also gives this sense of time dilation - time stretching, because Arthur isn't consciously keeping track of time. Grief tends to narrow time down to the immediate - today, tomorrow, yesterday.
This is 2257 hours.
Arthur considers calling Cobb, to let him know that the children have been put to bed. He hesitates. The cell phone is in his hand.
He decides against it.
The cell phone slides into his pocket, quiet, dead.
Cobb closes his eyes.
This is 2258 hours.
Arthur goes down to the kitchen to get himself a drink.
Cobb jumps.
This is characteristic of the front bit, I think. Short, blunt comparison structures. This one is the hammer, and I (hopefully) used a brush by the time we reached the end.
I actually really love this bit, if only because of the vague hint there that Cobb might have stayed alive if only - if only Arthur had called. And Arthur doesn’t know that. It would, I think, quite break him if he knew.
Sikorski is medium-height, with dark almond-shaped eyes crinkled at the corners, and black hair. “You are Mr Arthur?” he asks.
Why don’t they have his surname? Good question ;) My personal take on it, when I was writing, anyway, was that Arthur really avoids using his surname when he can help it. He got out of it too when he was included in Cobb’s will. And yes, Arthur knew about it. I wanted a will background here, but I figured it detracted again, so I took it out.
In the original snippet, you have Cobb explaining to Arthur that he trusts Arthur with the kids, because he personally has no more family left living. And Arthur asks, ‘What about Mal?’ and we get some bits about Mal’s parents and how they’ve split and how Marie can’t really come down and handle children, not to mention she’s one continent away. Yes, Cobb has a little something against Marie. Just a little.
The list is overwhelming. Arthur finds himself pinching the bridge of his nose. One thing at a time, he tells himself firmly. He locks the front door, and heads for the study because he thinks he’s too keyed up to sleep tonight.
This was one of the easier parts to write. Arthur’s first, knee-jerk reaction, I believe, would be to bury himself in routine. Make lists. Keep himself busy and purposeful by giving himself a lot of tasks. Yes, it’s overwhelming, but he needs to feel like he’s wading in stress and Things To Do. It keeps him from feeling empty, and it keeps him from really having to emotionally confront his dynamic with Cobb and his feelings about Cobb’s death. It’s not the best of emotional stonewalls, but it works.
(He can’t even remember how he got here.)
The hint. Arthur is dreaming, and in his dream, he’s in Cobb’s perspective. We don’t know for sure this is what really happened, but that is as close to the truth as Arthur will ever get, because the only two who know are dead. Of course, we will notice there is a very striking similarity to the truth, and what really happened in the movie ;)
They’re both the same; practical men, who work with reality first, and ground all dreams in it. His daughter and son-in-law are dead. Are the children fine? Time for private little breakdowns later.
This, I think, is the key mentality Miles and Arthur work with. First things first. Except that for Arthur, it becomes an extended stonewall, because he’s never been entirely comfortable with having to plumb the depths of exactly what Cobb means to him, and to grieve would be to (to some extent) examine exactly that.
No.
Phillipa hates maple syrup and insists that she only wants blueberry jam, and surprise - there’s none to be had. James plays with his, mashes it around, and insists that he doesn’t like cornflakes.
This is the bit which, I think, is somewhat funny. Arthur’s either got really bad luck with kids, or he just can’t really connect with them. A bit of both, in my books. Cobb thinks it’s hilarious. He also trusts Arthur with his kids anyway. Kind of.
It seems neater, and he needs the security of the familiar white-tiled walls, the familiar door handle he always bangs his hip into by complete accident before muscle memory kicks in after the first few times and he avoids it subconsciously.
Reality isn’t made by a single scarlet die, a single brass top. Reality is defined by the thousand and eleven little details that strike him, all at once, and although it is theoretically possible to mimic every single one of them, the routine and the familiarity has a grounding effect on him.
No, that was not a Saito reference. Really. It isn’t just keeping busy that Arthur’s anchoring himself to - it’s the whole familiarity and routine thing. That is, that he can lose himself just doing things in automatic mode and shut down all higher brain functions and not have to think. Which is the key thing, I think, about Arthur when it comes to Cobb. He’s usually content to be non-confrontational, e.g. the Mal thing, which doesn’t always pan out well for him.
The bit about reality is interesting. Arthur’s got a very stable outlook on reality, I think, and he’s grounded far deeper than by just checking his totem. Also, the Cobb and Mal thing would really put a dent in any eagerness for reliance on his totem.
In the end, he gets stopped on the way back; the detective (because he’s in plainclothes) is a man with a nondescript, slightly round and pleasant face who asks him (not really asks, of course) if he’d like to stop and get a coffee and They Can Talk.
This is the bit onwards where there is quite a bit of infodump. I pretty much created and shared a lot of details between this fic and the Guns and Roses universe. I liked the PI idea, if only because I reasoned he had to get his sources from somewhere.
(Nothing to do with Brothers Bloom and fedoras. Nope.)
The paint is mostly dry, hopefully James did not swallow any of it but Arthur resigns himself to repainting the walls white, hiding the paints away, monitoring the children’s condition over the night and the next day, and forcing James to swallow charcoal pills, the boy kicking and screaming and wriggling, just in case.
He’s too tired to think about dinner, and he still hasn’t called the attorney or the undertaker yet and they’re probably going to be closed soon, so Arthur just calls in a pizza and makes it Hawaiian because no one hates Hawaiian, right? It turns out he’s wrong. Phillipa has a huge screaming fit over the pineapple chunks and he tells her to eat them anyway and she makes even more of a fuss.
Because kids will be kids, and whoever who thinks kids are terribly angelic beings normally doesn’t babysit on a regular basis. Not that I’m saying they’re diabolical, but they do get into the most startling of scrapes at times.
Neither of them are really good at goodbyes, and somewhere, it translates to neither of them really bothering.
It isn’t just with Will ;)
He doesn’t hug James, and tell him everything will be alright, because that’s a lie and Arthur knows he’s absolute crap at dealing with kids.
Because him hugging Cobb’s kids on a regular basis would be odd. Not to mention I’d be very surprised if James didn’t (through it), complain he was a crappy Dad substitute.
Arthur doesn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer. He realises, far too late, that he’s hit her.
Ah. Controversy. Controversy. I didn’t know whether to keep this in or cut this out. In all honesty, I can very likely say the outcome of Phillipa’s little tantrum was kind of obvious. He’d have to be what, an utter saint, not to be in some way affected. I saw the strike/slap as a very reflexive pain reaction - Arthur’s under great emotional stress, and Phillipa just goes ‘I wish you were the one dead.’
He does feel bad about it though. Very bad.
Miles looks at least ten years older since Arthur last saw him, and his eyes are red-rimmed and Arthur figures he doesn’t look much better.
That can mean at least two things, depending on how you read into it ;) Either it refers to Miles’ grief, or that Arthur hasn’t seen Miles in quite a while, or both.
He hears Miles inhale sharply, and a quick glance shows grim understanding. But Marie has never dealt with dreamsharing, and the only thing she knows is that her daughter is dead and that something has passed between her husband and her daughter’s friend that she cannot hope to understand.
I wanted to make it very clear; this was not about demonising Marie. Yes, she’s an antagonistic force in this, or being set up as an antagonistic force, but in all honesty, it’s partly fear, the desire for control and normalcy as her way of coping (sounds like Arthur?) and the fact that she really doesn’t know what dreamsharing is all about. And where the heck did Cobb and Mal’s friend come out from, and why is he legally supposed to take care of the grandchildren?
This is what having an almost-eidetic memory means; each nuance, each gesture, each word is as sharp and clear as if preserved in unchanging amber, and he has to be careful not to cut himself on their edges.
This (the nearly eidetic memory) was in on a whim. And I rather liked the idea ;)
“You know they know nothing about limbo. A notice needs to be sent out.” Miles reminds him, gently. “I’ve heard only vague accounts of the deepest dream-state. Stokes still says it should be possible to descend to an infinitely deep series of layers.”
A bit of background on limbo, because Arthur and Yusuf are clearly familiar (just a little) with the concept of limbo, and Eames might or might not be, depending on how you read into it. So I decided that maybe the concept of limbo should exist all along - but the accounts and empirical evidence was lacking. Until Cobb.
The die stays with him all the time, a hard lump in his pocket. He doesn’t need to look at it. He just needs to know it is there, a reminder of the line that he must never cross, a reminder of two who crossed it, and god it hurts.
I don’t see him as able to lose track of reality now, even though things are so terrible that he’s in denial, and they seem almost surreal. He hasn’t been going under. And I liked the idea he’s stable with his idea of reality - the die becomes a reminder, a fixation with staying grounded, because that is the imprint that the deaths have left on his psyche.
Eames is soaked to the skin. He doesn’t look like he’s slept much either.
“I heard,” he says. “God, I’m sorry, Arthur. I only heard the other day, from Ryan.”
And, the introduction of Eames! In the earlier version, Arthur only met Eames at the funeral. That was going to be bad for a few reasons, one of which has to do with a major fic I’m producing, and because I felt Eames needed to be introduced earlier. If this was going to be Arthur/Eames, or at least dubious Arthur/Eames, there needed to be an element of Eames present all along, even if I wasn’t ever going to explore his perspective. Also, I just loved the idea that Eames, too, is perfectly capable of finding out things in awesome ways ;)
Head!canon for this scene: Eames is disturbed, more because it’s Mal who’s dead, and he had a close but on-off friendship with her. Again, something that came from the other ‘verse.
Arthur notices, with mild surprise, that it is raining outside.
He pulls the door wide open. “Come in,” he says.
Yes, this is echoed in the ending ;) More importantly, Arthur’s not a bastard. He isn’t going to stick Eames in the rain and leave him there Just Because.
“She was a close friend.” Eames offers. An explanation and a statement and a reason, all in one, and none of them at the same time.
Eames is talking about why he’s here, why he’s sorry, what his connection with this whole sorry affair is - and yet it really doesn’t explain why he has come to find Arthur or what he’s doing here.
Arthur ends up walking away to cool off when the priest can’t contain his references to how suicide is a mortal sin and how Dom and Mal are going to spend the fuck of a time burning in Purgatory for it.
If she’s Catholic, and Marie is Catholic, then the priest at the funeral would be in one hell (pardon the pun) of a dilemma, because suicide is a mortal sin.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Arthur,” She sniffles, days after The Fight. “I…I didn’t mean it.”
“I’m sorry.” Arthur says, because he really is. “I know you didn’t.” (That one is a lie. She meant it, and she meant it to hurt, at that moment.) He doesn’t quite hold out his arms, but she manages to find her way into his awkward, one-armed hug anyway, and they stay like that for a while, and he holds her and pats her on the back and doesn’t complain when she cries into his jacket because she needs the release.
This, I think, is one of the turning points for Arthur, however awkward. In the Arthur-Phillipa/James dynamic, in any case.
“I’m sorry,” A familiar voice says, and Arthur blinks as he turns around, figuring who it is just a few seconds before he sees Eames, in a dark grey jacket. Eames had left in the morning, that day, sometime after Arthur finally dozed off. “Hello,” Eames says, bending down to Phillipa’s height. “You must be Phillipa.”
Eames is a ninja. He vanished in the morning and comes back one or two days later for the funeral.
“People don’t die, sweetheart. As long as we remember them, we carry a part of them with us. Here.” His hands are large on her small wrist - he moves her hand, gently, and touches it to his chest. “She’s here, with your Daddy.”
It’s sentimental horseshit.
It is sentimental horseshit. It doesn’t make it any less true, or any less a truth that can hold a person together, in the face of grief. And this is the really nice side of Eames, and the only endearment I ever let him use in this fic. Trust me on it.
Breathe, he thinks, or maybe Eames says, as the world flashes around him, receding away. He feels warm hands on his chest. Breathe, Arthur, breathe.
He breathes, and the world slows. It’s like the children’s game where they stand in a circle and spin around, faster and faster until the entire world is a blur of color and shapes that whips around them - and then when they slow down, the world keeps on spinning, and then stills.
He hyperventilated. Is that the correct term? Anyway, he had a panic attack, in some senses of the word. Lost control. First hints of breakdown. Arthur resists. Or he tries to. But it’s a sign he’s nearing the end of his ability to hold it back. The emotional strain he’s under is enormous.
Some Eames h/c moments. Because Eames has his eye on Arthur. While one of my betas saw this as Eames being mean and pouncing on Arthur so early, I think there’s something else to it - I think very simply, Eames knows people, and he knows Arthur is going to crack, and given the way he feels, he’s very big on being there as support.
“I know,” Eames says, voice gentle with the compassion that makes Arthur’s control fracture, a spiderweb of cracks radiating in all directions. He steps away, slowly and deliberately, leaving space between them. “I know.”
(He brushes the tears off like sand from a cracked hourglass.)
Especially when you’re trying to be strong, it isn’t the kindness you need. Sometimes, the kindness and pity breaks you far more than harshness.
Eames dangles a suspiciously familiar set of keys, and then snatches them away when Arthur makes a grab for them.
“Asshole.”
“So I’m told,” Eames says, unfazed. “Oh, come. I’ll drive you home.”
At that point in time, Eames figured Arthur wasn’t quite in a state to drive. Also, he’s a good pickpocket so he just lifted them from Arthur’s pocket.
Eames is playing with a poker chip by the window; he meets Arthur’s eyes, and his grey eyes glint, strangely bright as he smiles sadly and pockets the chip.
I leave it to you to decide the significance of the poker chip. Head!canon Eames for me doesn’t use a totem. The chip has significance because he spent time with Mal and that’s the chip he acquired when - yes, yes, my other fic ‘verse really leaks into this, okay? >.<
Eames might be crying too. Just a little.
He closes his eyes, against the gentle night, for fear of remembering something that was never real.
Ambiguous/open last lines ftw. Exactly what wasn’t real? Anything he had with Cobb? Eames? His dreams?
Eames is the dreamer.
Another sentence with a lot of backstory. Eames doesn’t want possible emotional volatility in the dreamer. He also does not want to be explicit in letting Arthur know that he thinks Arthur will have trouble being the dreamer.
It was another Eames POV section that got cut. The only sentence that remained - ‘Eames is the dreamer.’
The hotel wavers.
Sepia and the soft, classical edges sharpen and harden, become white and grey and monotone sharp-angles.
Arthur accidentally took control of the dream. That’s how I saw what happened when Cobb started manifesting things like trains, hotel drapes, and his children.
“Sorry,” Arthur murmurs. “It won’t happen again.”
Before Eames can say anything, he moves off, heading casually for the lift.
Cobb isn’t the only one who uses avoidance ;)
Cobb smiles crookedly, and Arthur’s heart breaks.
Yes, Arthur is projecting Cobb, no, his projections aren’t as insane as Cobb’s. For one, he doesn’t have the guilt - just the grief and the emotional mess. Hi, I think the Arthur/Cobb just got from implied to whack-you-in-the-face kind of implied.
Arthur staggers over the edge, and down into the night, and ohgod, his breathing is coming harder and faster, in the remembered patterns of the nightmare, he is falling but he’s still Arthur and when he glances up, he can’t see Cobb silhouetted against the open, lit window anymore, just Eames -
Symbolic/portentious, much? ;)
It’s too fucking soon. It’s too fucking soon, and god, Eames is crowding in on him and he isn’t ready.
Because Arthur has denial issues. Big denial issues. And emotional issues. And he loves to avoid them. And Eames - well, Eames has little sense of personal space. H/c, deep friendship-love, all of these, he gives, and sometimes physically.
Cobb’s lawyer turned up a document signed by Marie which said she went willingly with Cobb’s will, and that changed the pattern of things. Marie insisted she hadn’t ever written such a document, but the handwriting was undoubtedly hers.
*cough* Eames *cough*
“Yeah,” He agrees. He’s surprised to know that it’s honestly the truth. The raw, scraped pain of the past weeks seems nothing but a surreal memory. Everything is dull, and numbed, and maybe one day, it won’t even hurt at all. “Listen, sorry about the Chicago thing, I tried but - “
It takes time. Slowly, gradually.
“Come on in.” He invites, pulling the door open wide. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Arthur takes a step forward, through the open door.
Big damn open ending ;) I honestly think it can go both ways, if only because on one hand, you’ll notice Arthur hasn’t quite resolved the nightmare (psychological guilt/impact) of Cobb yet. Not entirely, anyway. It’s questionable what he wants with Eames, and a Cobb-substitute would probably result in their relationship getting screwed over one day.
And on the other hand, you have the positive ending - Eames taking what he can get, maybe Arthur’s always going to be just a little not-his, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll be together.
I wanted to go for a strong sense of katharsis in this. I hope it kicked in by the end (:
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Songs I listened to:
1. Gladiator Soundtrack: Elysium, Honor Him, Now We Are Free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHPTPUpQ1I&feature=related
(If you want background, listen and read the fic.)
2. Over You by Daughtry
3. It’s Not Over by Daughtry
4. Every Little Thing by Dishwalla
5. Until I Wake Up by Dishwalla
6. Mercy of the Fallen by Dar Williams
7. Kings and Queens by 30 Seconds To Mars
Ironically? I did not listen to By Way Of Sorrow.
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