By Way Of Sorrow Part II
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 (:
-
Miles and Marie fly in on Tuesday.
Arthur is tired, feels haggard, and is living on caffeine and maybe two to four hours of sleep a day. He doesn’t know how he managed babysitting Phillipa and James for the past few days, with all the various little incidents and near mishaps that he barely even recalls.
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.
“You look terrible.” He finally says, after a shocked pause. Arthur takes the luggage trolley from Miles, despite his protests.
“Just a bit short on sleep.” Arthur brushes it off, dismissively. Marie is silent, pale blue eyes accusing, and she doesn’t look at him at all, mouth drawn into a tight line. There’s something of Mal in the shape of her features, but closed-off in a way Mal never was.
They aren’t staying in a hotel, they’re staying in the home where their daughter and their son-in-law once lived, and he can’t help but notice the distance between Marie and Miles, in the way they stand and move and in the way they carefully avoid each other, and yet not overtly.
Miles shoots him a look of thoughtful scrutiny but says nothing. Neither does Arthur. The airport isn’t the place for such discussions.
“I spoke to the undertaker already.” Arthur says, as they move towards where he’s parked the car. He carefully manoeuvres the trolley around possible obstacles. “He can’t do anything until the inquest is over.”
“Inquest?” Marie asks, sharply.
He can feel the weight of her glance, like a knife between the shoulder-blades.
That’s right; neither of them really know what happened. He’d only told Miles that Cobb and Mal were both dead.
“They jumped,” he said.
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.
“And?” Marie demands, impatiently.
They reach the car. Arthur loads the luggage into the boot, and is thankful for Miles’ help. Finally, they wrestle the last case into the boot and Arthur slams the cover shut, because the locking mechanism is sometimes faulty and needs brute force.
“They think Cobb killed her,” he says simply, in answer, and turns away to get into the driver’s seat, but not before he sees her eyes narrow.
-
Even with two new occupants in the house, it has never before felt so empty. Miles and Marie avoid each other, just barely, enough to create a sense of discordance. Marie immediately throws herself into looking after the children, and for that, Arthur is grateful. There’s something accusing about Phillipa’s silence that makes him feel terribly guilty.
Together, Miles and Arthur go through Cobb and Mal’s belongings, packing the clothing away, along with some other odds and ends, to donate to the Salvation Army. There is something painful about going through Cobb’s belongings at last, and cataloguing them neatly into cardboard boxes, as if to do so is to finally admit that Cobb is gone.
It’s a strange feeling, and the silence as they work is heavy, almost oppressive. It is as if with each shirt Arthur neatly folds away and leaves in the clothing box, he can feel the ghost of Cobb’s fingers where he must have brushed past this shirt, or maybe touched that other one.
His breath catches more than once when he finds something that brings back memories and he squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to breathe, breathe past the hand of cold hard stone that has his heart and lungs in a crushing fist.
By the time they move on to some of Mal’s belongings, Arthur feels like a scraped bundle of raw nerves, and Miles shoots him a concerned look but the tight set of his jaw, the way he tenses his shoulders say this isn’t any much easier for him, no matter how Miles might pretend it is.
Six boxes, and still counting. The clothes will probably go, but some of the things will be packed away in the attic, perhaps for one day when Phillipa and James grow up and are curious enough about who their parents were -
His hands tremble. Clinically, he watches them, willing them to still, and when they disobey, he shoves them into his pockets and draws a deep, shuddering breath.
This is the sum of Cobb’s life; six neatly-packaged cardboard boxes, and counting, all the little bits and pieces and detritus which are so much less than the person Cobb was. There are stacks of photo albums that neither of them feel up to going through just yet. He feels just a little like a voyeur, an intruder, as he carefully goes through a set of letters that Cobb has received from Mal, organises them by order of date, ties a string around them and leaves them in the personal belongings box.
He swallows hard. Each of these things are bits and pieces of Cobb’s life, and yet they can never be Cobb, and yet when he goes through the letters, it’s almost as if he can hear Cobb’s voice in his head, saying those things, and he knows eactly what Cobb’s expression would be like too, whether he was joking, serious, teasing -
He runs his fingers along the crinkled surface of the letters, tracing each shape in Cobb’s handwriting, and tries not think of the very crumpled and abused post-it in his pocket, with Cobb’s instructions on one side, and the hospital directions on the other.
When he places the stacks of letters back in the box, he makes a decision, and produces the crumpled post-it note and leaves it right at the very top.
It’s like prodding a barely-healed wound, and peeling back the thin scabs. Everything starts to bleed again, and Arthur can’t help but hate Cobb for killing himself.
-
“Aren’t you going to sleep?” Miles asks, by the time they’ve reached box nine.
Arthur shrugs. “Maybe in a while,” he says, evasively. “You?”
Miles ignores what he said, and the probing look on his face is so Mal that Arthur can’t help but realise where she must have gotten that expression from.
“Do you still dream?”
“Sometimes.” Arthur scribbles ‘clothing’ in black marker on top of the first box and tapes it up. They’ve packed all the clothes up already, and he’ll probably send them tomorrow or something. He moves on to the second box. “It’s not as bad for you, is it?” Miles might have pioneered most of the system, but he isn’t an extractor. He studies dream-architecture.
“No.” Miles says. “I stopped using the PASIV a long time ago.”
Their eyes flick simultaneously to the brushed-steel suitcase that Arthur retrieved an hour ago. He’s known where it is all along, just left it there in the same way he hasn’t done anything else other than making arrangements and taking care of Phillipa and James in the past. He’s too tired to think of anything related to extraction, especially when the niggling little voice at the back of his mind reminds him that this is what killed Cobb and Mal in the end and that one in three extractors goes insane before the end of their first five years and they aren’t quite out of the woods yet, because the attrition rates pile up with the years and one day, this might be him.
“You dream of him, don’t you.” It was a statement, phrased as a question. Arthur doesn’t look at Miles because he doesn’t know if he’ll see pity or sympathy, and he’s afraid of either one of them.
He stares, instead, at the boxes he’s got to seal and label.
“Yeah,” He says, quietly. Maybe it’s because it’s Miles, and he has a way of making people open up to him, just like his daughter, just like Mal. Maybe it’s because Miles did teach him for a while, and there’s an openness that dreamsharing brings (except Cobb still pretended he was coming back when he jumped in the end). “I get nightmares, these days.”
He doesn’t say of what. Miles doesn’t ask.
Instead, Miles sighs heavily and sits in that brown armchair and leans forward and asks, “Can you tell me what you know?”
Maybe because Miles is Miles, and not some detective asshole looking for enough rope to hang Cobb from, never mind that Cobb is dead, Arthur nods. And definitely, because Mal was Miles’ daughter and Cobb was his son-in-law and Miles has a right to know.
He starts from the day when Cobb turns up at his doorstep at four AM in the morning, and looked at him and said, “Arthur, I’m seventy-nine.”
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 is one of the few times Arthur hears Miles curse, and by the time he is done, the man sits there, very still, tears coursing down his face. But that’s to be expected, and Arthur’s done his own share of breaking down.
“If only,” Miles says, and smiles sadly, “Is a word we say far too often.”
“Still teaching?”
Miles inclines his head.
“I suppose it never really ends,” He says, almost to himself. As a distraction, Arthur picks up one of the photo albums they didn’t dare to touch and flipped through it, blinking through eyes gone misty at all the familiar laughing faces; he recognises several from Cobb’s wedding, he’s in quite a few of them, and he shuts the album, knowing it was a mistake to open it.
He’s not ready to go through them yet. (Will he ever be?)
“We don’t have to do this one today,” Miles reminds him, and Arthur nods, stacking the albums on top of each other, even though he’s not sure if they’re in the right order. He’s not going to check. He’s had enough of an emotional onslaught for the day.
They sit there for a while, neither of them saying anything.
“Are you going to submit a report to IIPE?” Miles asks, finally.
IIPE is to extraction what IEEE is to engineers. Arthur knows because he’s been in both of them at some point in time. IIPE just stands for the International Institute of Professional Extraction, and he’s vaguely surprised by the question.
“Are you?”
“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.”
“Stokes,” Arthur says, with just a bit of contempt, “Can’t do the mathematics to save his life. Your equations made far more sense. Infinite depth isn’t theoretically possible. You risk running into a time paradox where an infinite amount of time passes for none in reality.”
Miles smiles, just slightly. “That may be, but almost no one’s gone that deep.”
“And look what happened,” Arthur points out, bitterly. “Yeah, I’ll have to do the report. I’ve got to cancel Cobb’s membership. And Mal’s.”
Dreamsharing hasn’t been around for long. They’re still learning the rules as they go along, only now there’s a new set of rules to add to the theoretical experience. By the rules Miles had set out in his infamous ‘The Infinite Subconscious’ paper, limbo was the end - infinite, raw subconscious, where structures were retained from previous visits because, he theorised, the mind thought in symbols and such structures were inherently symbolic.
Cobb’s experience said Miles was at least partly right.
And that limbo is dangerous. It made two extractors go insane and kill themselves.
“It’s not too late, you know,” Miles says, then.
“I know,” Arthur replies, acutely aware of the statistics and the attrition rate. Two out of five, one out of three, the attrition piles up as the years do…
The thing is, he just can’t think of anything else he’d rather be doing.
Maybe he’ll end up where Cobb went, ten years down the road. He’s acutely aware that he’s been one of the lucky ones, one of the lucky three, one of the lucky two. Miles is the same, he knows, staying and clinging firmly to reality, even when some of his colleagues succumbed and Everett, the Everett killed himself.
Maybe he won’t be so lucky in the years to come. Maybe he’ll be the next person to go, the next statistic in a list that grows increasingly long each year. Still, he’d made his peace with that all those years ago, when he first signed on, long before he left and did extraction freelance as a licensed PI.
(And yet it’s always different, and so much more personal when it was someone he knew and was close to. Like Cobb. Like Mal.)
Sometimes, that’s what being an extractor really seems to be about. Waiting for the next person to surrender, one way or another.
For some reason, he’s feeling terribly fatalistic today. Death has this way of putting it all in perspective.
There are always alternatives. MIT qualifications pretty much mean that he’ll probably be able to find a job somewhere as an engineer, but when it gets down to it, Arthur admits that isn’t what he wants to do with his life. It all comes back to risk, and making his peace with it. He’s done that. (Sort of). Even Will has.
And Miles made his decision long ago, when he knew he couldn’t keep going and he had to stop active experimentation, or risk losing his sense of reality.
“I’ll think about it,” He adds, because Miles is staring at him expectantly, and Arthur figures that maybe he’ll change his mind by the time the funeral comes around. By the time it really becomes personal.
(He’s never had a close friend and colleague go insane before.)
He’s too tired for the reflexive Damn you, Dom. He’s too tired to care, and by the time he makes his way downstairs and sleeps on the couch, he’s too tired to dream.
-
He’s right about the inquest, and right about the verdict.
Marie’s smug, because she can’t believe Mal would kill herself. Where have you been? Arthur wants to demand. He says nothing because Miles says nothing, and because talking to her is like talking to Richards - how do you describe to a blind man just what color is like and what the difference between a vibrant, burning red and a sombre charcoal grey is?
Because Marie is French and Marie is Catholic, the funeral ends up being officiated by a priest from said church, and being filled with so many planned rites that Arthur isn’t even bothering with the affair.
He doesn’t forget about the report and spends one entire night finishing it in painful, exacting detail (with just about everything he remembers Cobb saying about limbo) and emailing it in along with a notice that Mr Dominic Cobb and Mrs Mallorie Cobb were both deceased.
He does, however, settle the problem of who to notify of the upcoming funeral, and pulls out Cobb’s address book to figure just who he’s supposed to contact. No, he remembers, it’s supposed to be a small affair, with close friends and family, and he hesitates over Eames. But Cobb’s worked with him on several occasions, and Eames knew Mal back from their days in university, so Arthur figures the answer should be a ‘yes’, although Eames is a nightmare to contact.
He doesn’t stay in any place for too long, and is terrible with keeping up on emails or letters. Arthur isn’t particularly sure if Eames even checks his email anymore, but figures (optimistically) that it’s worth a shot, along with actually returning Eames’ call.
Eames doesn’t pick up, and Eames doesn’t answer his email.
Arthur shrugs. He’s done the best he could.
-
The dreams come and go sporadically. Sometimes he’s Cobb, pleading with Mal. Other times, he’s watching helplessly, screaming when Cobb goes over the edge, and then he wakes up in cold sweat.
He isn’t supposed to dream that often anymore. Not with the times he’s gone under. But Arthur can hardly bring himself to dream with the PASIV. In the aftermath of Cobb and Mal’s death, he skirts almost reflexively around anything that will remind him of them, achingly, and the PASIV will only bring that fierce ache back, because the last few times he’s gone under, it’s been with them.
Arthur resorts to popping the occasional valium to get some sleep, especially after a bad night. 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.
He isn’t yet asleep at almost one when the doorbell rings. (He’s back home already. Marie is looking after Phillipa and James, and Miles is living in that house. Frankly, Arthur is grateful. Cobb’s house is a place of ghosts and memories, and there’s a sense of security when he’s back in his own house, as if he can pretend the past few days never really happened - as if he can wall the memories off with layers and layers of ritual so he doesn’t have to confront them.)
He stays in bed a moment longer, staring at the empty white space of the ceiling, then heads for the door. He peers through the peephole, then opens it, just a little.
“What,” Arthur asks, “Are you doing here?”
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.”
“How’d you know where I live?” The thought just occurs to him - he’s never given Eames anything more to go on than a number, and that’s because he keeps meticulous contact with everyone in the industry, just in case.
“I have my sources,” Eames says. He tries to smirk, but it falls apart a few moments after he tries to. He leans against the doorframe, hands in his coat pockets.
Arthur notices, with mild surprise, that it is raining outside.
He pulls the door wide open. “Come in,” he says.
-
“I’m amazed you don’t microwave your coffee.” Eames drawls, a towel wrapped around his shoulders. He’s dripping all over, but Arthur’s too tired to bother. Tomorrow, he thinks. It doesn’t matter - the rainwater will have dried by then.
“An experiment on superheating in science class will do that to you,” Arthur notes. “Sugar?”
“Yes, please.” Eames says. Arthur adds half a spoon to Eames’ tea, and some milk, and then dumps two-and-a-half spoons into his coffee, and a bit more milk. “How long have the teabags been in that cupboard?”
“Years,” Arthur says, with a straight face. “I haven’t touched them since Mal wanted to try something with reading the future in a teacup.”
“I think they use tea leaves for that,” Eames points out, meditatively. “Oh, that sounds like her.”
“That explains why it didn’t work, then.”
He feels the slight stab of pain when he talks about Mal, or remembers how she talked him into so many things he’d never otherwise do. Not about the teabags - he’s making that up in the same way he just runs with some of Cobb’s bluffs. Eames, Arthur figures, knows that.
He slides the cup over.
Eames regards the cup. “If I get any kind of food poisoning from this, I’m blaming you,” he warns.
“I don’t think so,” Arthur says. “Tea keeps for a long time.”
He isn’t going to be sleeping tonight. Not for quite a while. Eames makes no sign of moving off. Outside, he can hear the sound of the falling rain.
It is quiet. Arthur drinks his coffee, Eames drinks his tea. The dull, muffled sound as he sets his cup back on the table.
“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.
Arthur stares into his almost-empty cup. Closes his eyes.
“Yeah,” He says, tiredly. “Yeah, I know.”
-
The funeral is the day after the night they sit up together. Arthur can’t really remember if they spent the night talking; it’s far more likely they spent it in silence, with the occasional word and memory shared.
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.
Phillipa and James are just there, listening wide-eyed and looking generally confused, and Arthur’s already had to pry James away from the coffins, and god, the undertaker’s done a good job, because Arthur doesn’t see the blood and the fractured bones and the snapped necks - it’s almost as if Cobb and Mal are sleeping, and the thought almost breaks him again, because wasn’t that what started the whole mess in the first place?
He can even ignore the thick black stitches in Mal’s hair where they sewed her shut, if he closes his eyes.
Phillipa is uncharacteristically quiet, and solemn. There’s something unbearably final about seeing her parents in their coffins, lips pale enough that they’re almost-blue, waxen figures that are most definitely not alive.
He doesn’t have the heart to think damn you anymore, when he sees Dom’s corpse. There’s no anger left, just an empty, aching sadness. He kneels down and wipes at Phillipa’s tears with the tissue, so he doesn’t have to think about trying to keep from breaking down again (god, he’s an emotional basket case right now).
“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.
I didn’t mean to hurt you, he’d say, except then, he did as well, because both of them were frustrated and just hurting, even though he’s supposed to know better.
Maybe, he thinks, something is starting to go right at last. The attorney called and confirmed what Cobb had said, several years ago, and what he’d agreed to (then, without knowing what he was getting into) because he didn’t think Cobb was going to die, and there was no one else around who could look after Cobb’s kids without making the flight from France. The will (neither Cobb nor Mal had thought to change it, not in the aftermath of limbo) had him as the legal guardian of Cobb’s children.
So maybe things are starting, just starting to come together. His chest hurts, with a dull and hollow ache, and funny how it hurts to breathe and how he’s never noticed that Phillipa’s got the exact shade of her hair from her father.
“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.”
“Who are you?” she asks, chin stubbornly thrust out.
“Eames,” Eames says cheerfully. “Did your mother tell you about me?”
“Mummy’s dead.” Phillipa tells him, eyes wide and solemn and blurring with tears.
“She isn’t, sweetheart.” Arthur hasn’t ever seen such a sad edge to Eames’ smile, or the surprisingly gentle way with which he cups Phillipa’s chin in his hands and brings her closer to him. This is Eames - always slipping through the gaps in people’s guard, with no sense of personal space, and yet he has this way of making people feel comfortable around him. “Let me tell you a secret.”
Arthur doesn’t lean in, but Eames’ whisper carries anyway, sharp and soft.
“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.
But Phillipa stares adoringly at Eames, and Arthur turns away because he’s a grown-up, and he’s supposed to know better, and hell if he’ll break down in front of Eames.
-
After a lot of readings, the priest finally hits the Beatitudes.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy shown them. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God…”
And as the priest intones on, Arthur finds his vision blurring. Shit, he thinks angrily, because anger is the only thing he has left, and he closes his eyes against the prickling of tears. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in there about the kind, the compassionate, the loving, because that was what Cobb was, and god, if Mal didn’t qualify for pure in heart…
His hand tightens around the die in his pocket, feeling the hard plastic edges, unyielding, no matter how much he squeezes. This is real. This is real. Cobb is dead. Mal is dead. They’re burying them today, then going home to live their lives, and god, how do they keep living in the face of death, and telling themselves that one day, they’re going to come here too?
“Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be comforted.”
Well, screw him, Arthur thinks, with unwarranted savageness. That’s all that’s left for them; the cold grave in the soil, and a bunch of platitudes for everyone left behind, who has to find their way somehow, until the day this shit happens to them.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Eames giving him a concerned glance. Screw this, Arthur thinks. He’s holding up fine. He’s not going to be breaking down. He’s not. He’s not. Hasn’t he been through this enough times? He clenches his fist, feeling the die bite into his skin, homing in on the physical sensation of the pain as a distraction.
Halfway through, he feels hands on his shoulder, steering him away. “Don’t argue,” Eames whispers into his ear. “Don’t say anything.”
Eames leads him away from the gathered group, towards the edge of the cemetary, easily picking his way across the neatly-lined tombstones. Arthur resists only half-heartedly. He should really be there to watch as Cobb and Mal are interred in the earth, but it’s just a symbol, at the end of everything, and he can’t find it in himself to argue right now.
“You looked like you needed the air,” Eames says. Arthur wonders how Eames can keep it all together, then notices the tight line of Eames’ jaw, the way his grey eyes flick like lightning and bleak arctic ice back towards where everyone is.
Arthur just nods. His throat is painfully tight, and he can’t trust his voice not to give way right now. And god, he is not doing this in front of Eames. They haven’t much other than something slightly more than an acquaintance, maybe an odd kind of friendship, and this is probably just as bad for Eames and just being an emotional basketcase isn’t going to help matters for anyone.
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.
It’s that kind of shock, that kind of lightning-strike suddenness, with which the pain comes, and he gasps.
Breathe, he thinks, or Eames orders. Keep breathing.
It recedes, like the ocean at low tide, sucking the water and everything back, leaving stretches of barren, scoured sand, and maybe a few footprints that didn’t get washed away. He feels hollow.
Breathe. The mechanical action grounds him. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Arthur is acutely aware of just how close Eames is, how he can feel Eames’ breath against his skin, too close, and the terrible compassion in his glance.
He looks away. “Thank you,” He says. His voice almost cracks. He doesn’t trust himself to say more.
“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.)
-
“Where are you going?” Eames asks, after the funeral and the burial both, when everyone is heading off in different directions. Miles and Marie should be staying a little longer; Miles will fly back home in a while, and Marie -
He doesn’t know what Marie will do. If she wants to go to court for custody of her grandchildren. The court will be inclined to give it to her, of course. She’s their grandmother. And frankly, Arthur can’t say they’d be wrong.
“Home.” Arthur replies. That’s the only place left, right now, with the comfort that familiar spaces bring. He reaches into his pocket for the car keys, and finds abruptly that they’re missing. Shit. He tries to recall if he’s brought them, or maybe dropped them somewhere -
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.”
“I’m capable of driving myself.”
Eames studies him, for a few long moments, and then nods and tosses the keys over. Arthur catches them reflexively.
“Alright,” he concedes, cheerfully. “Then you can drive me.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Nowhere, at the moment.”
Arthur stares at him.
“I heard last minute,” Eames says, a tad defensively. “I flew down without making arrangements.”
“What did you do last night?”
“Went to a pub. Got pissed. Don’t ever try bringing your suitcase with you there.”
It’s not very likely, Arthur thinks. In fact, it’s even quite possible that Eames is lying.
“Oh come now,” Eames prods when he hesitates. “It’s not like I’m going to ask you to put me up for long.”
Arthur raises an eyebrow, but says, slowly, “Okay.”
“Wonderful. So you can drop me at the hotel to get my things.”
“Do I even want to bother asking why you’re staying with me?”
Eames rolls his eyes. “They’re almost fully-booked. I’ve got to vacate the room by this afternoon. Late afternoon,” he adds, when Arthur glances at his watch. “I told you. I heard last minute.”
“How much longer are you planning on staying in the States, anyway?”
Eames shrugs, rain-grey eyes faintly amused. “We’ll see,” he allows. “I’ve all but overstayed my welcome in São Paulo, in any case. And I’ve unfinished business here.”
“Business?” Arthur asks. He turns the key in the ignition, listens to the car start up.
A smirk, inscrutable. “Of course.”
-
I have to go, Cobb insists, torn. He stares desperately at the window, where Mal has thrown herself over. She’s waking up, don’t you see? I promised her. She’s my wife, Arthur.
No, he wants to say, don’t go, don’t do it - you have your children to think about, damn you, no -
He can’t say a word, no matter how much his choked throat works. He’s always been the responsible one, out of the two of them.
I have to go, Cobb whispers. A touch, and he turns and walks out of the window, and falls away into the night.
That’s how it’s always been. Cobb goes somewhere else, and he’s the one left behind to pick up everything that Cobb abandoned.
Damn you, he thinks, even as he is screaming Dom’s name, and his paralysed body finally moves and he’s running to the window, peering over the edge, desperately reaching out for the ghost of a touch, even though he knows it’s too late.
The empty night looks back up at him, and smiles.
-
He wakes up, to the sound of his harsh, heavy breathing.
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.
They say nothing. Arthur scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. Raw, bloodshot, and he doesn’t know why it hurts so much.
The die digs into his thigh, reminding him there’s a line he mustn’t ever cross.
This is pain, a terribly private affair.
It glides up his lungs like glass when he breathes - oh, sharp, cold, wicked like frost, giving the moment a transparent, surreal quality.
They each clutch this pain with a fierce, almost-jealous fear, close to their hearts.
This is the sound of grief, this deeply personal sadness.
Silence.
-
“You dream, don’t you?” Eames asks. The city is beautiful at night, spread out before the view from the balcony, concrete etherised and softened by the dusk.
“Yeah.” Arthur says, leaning against the rail, looking at everything and nothing in particular. It is cool and breezy at night, but he doesn’t look down. The wind tugs a little at his jacket.
“Of him?”
“Miles told you,” He says, flatly.
“No.” Eames is watching him, carefully, with a look Arthur can’t quite place, until later, he realises it is the kind of careful, measuring look you give a ticking timebomb. “I guessed,” He says, carefully. “I heard you talk in your sleep the other night.”
Arthur takes the couch. Eames takes the bed. Or so it’s supposed to go. In truth, they take turns, and Arthur sometimes still has trouble sleeping, so he just sits up the whole night, and Eames has nocturnal tendencies, so more often than not, they just sit up together in perfect silence.
Eames doesn’t say anything, and Arthur often isn’t in the state to say anything, after one of those nightmares. It doesn’t matter. Someone being there, physically there, in the same room, is enough.
Other times, they talk about the most inconsequential of things - what those things are, it doesn’t matter, just that he’s doing something, wrapping himself in layers of ritual that cushion him from things he doesn’t want to confront, much less think about. Insulation.
It is this need for consistency, some measure of constancy that means neither of them talk about when Eames is leaving.
The days are mostly spent watching the children, and avoiding Marie, and Arthur has to wonder at how readily forgiving children can be, because they aren’t at all unhappy (or too unhappy) at the prospect of being under the care of Uncle Arthur, and he knows he’s terrible with children. It isn’t about responsibility. He’s plenty responsible, and Cobb isn’t always responsible, but -
He exhales sharply. Marie wants custody, of course. He wonders how she’s going to do it when she still has so many loose ends in France left untied.
And there are the dreams.
A part of Arthur is aware this isn’t normal. He isn’t supposed to dream this much, and hell, he isn’t supposed to be having variations on the same dream, across nights. He should be seeing a psychiatrist right now, before things get worse. He just can’t bring himself to.
He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s Cobb, isn’t it?”
The look of understanding on Eames’ face, the way he always comes just a little too close for comfort (Arthur is always acutely aware of this when Eames tries to probe him), the way he’s always inscrutable, as if he’s watching and learning and looking out for something; Arthur doesn’t know what - it disquiets him. He doesn’t know why, just that it leaves him feeling strangely vulnerable and laid-open, and he doesn’t like that feeling at all.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Eames nods. He turns to walk away, and pulls closer for a moment. Eyes closed, Arthur feels Eames’ hand on his shoulder. “Just remember,” he breathes, so terribly close, “I’ll be here if you need someone to talk to.”
Arthur doesn’t open his eyes. He hears the soft tread of Eames’ footsteps walking away.
He closes his eyes, against the gentle night, for fear of remembering something that was never real.
-