] [ ❝u n t i t l e d.❞ (fill @ inception_kink)
→rating: G / ALL I should think...
→word count: ~4,500 ish
→warnings: I was sleeping when I wrote this... no seriously.
→notes: originally written for the prompt of [ It's not that Arthur doesn't talk about himself; it's that no one's ever asked. ] -- soooo olddddddd but it's here for my archiving purposes...derp-- too quiet maybe to qualify?
→extra: ♩ ♬ ♪
❝The life of every man is a diary
in which he means to write
one story, and writes another;
and his humblest hour is
when he compares the volume as it is with
what he vowed to make it.❞
Because Arthur always loved his dreams, because Arthur feared them, because he knew them as well as he knew his waking hours, Arthur doesn't hesitate when the military orders (there is no true offering when things go toward questionably legal territories) him into a new sector listed on paper only ever as a number and spoken of in public never.
The Dreamshare. It's impossibly romantic. It's permanently terrible. It's nothing like what Arthur had thought; but because he has always been a practical cut of mortality it's nothing different than he had hoped either. Fact is, he didn't hope about it, period. Whatever people tell each other, he knew before he joined up that something like hope had no reliable place in ranks of guns more precious than the men and women shouldering them.
Basic training for the Dreamshare starts where everything must: it starts with the building and Arthur is quite good at it because the dreamshare hasn't existed long enough to have specialists. Not enough people know about it to be superlative players in its confines, much less to be compared with. For dreams have limits just as reality has them, but the constraint of a dream is prone to splintering out of understanding, especially at the beginning, and the program loses more than it gains. This result fits neatly under the definition of inevitability in any halfway standardized dictionary; between learning to build, wake up, and that it's the dying that wakes, it would be foolish to expect anything less than an eventual and invisible chaos.
Some suffer sickness from the someday-Somnacin, and because the drug is new there is no research to go on concerning the incessant vomiting nor the spitting of blood reminiscent of a consumption not regularly seen in decades. Depending on whose opinion one seeks, those are the luckier kind, because there are still others worth remembering. One man takes out six others under the impression that he is still dreaming and no one ever knows what he thought they were about when he shot them because Arthur slits his throat from behind without asking. The five other people in the room are immeasurably grateful, but because they are only human they thank Arthur with fear threading through their irises.
He understands and he doesn't ask for more. Dreamshare project or not, at the end of the day a soldier is a soldier is a soldier and who is he to try and hook more out of a person than he or she is individually willing -- wanting -- to offer him? No one can do that, except for a superior officer and that's a different kind of requirement altogether -- one he'll never quite get the hang of.
Arthur draws himself up strong in the dream because he is strong outside of it to begin with, and his efficiency is well remarked on even if his decided quietness might not be; he can't be everything though. Being everything comes quid pro quo, by perception only. When Dominick Cobb comes into the picture Arthur is twenty-four and only looks about twenty -- emphasis on about.
He falls a little bit in like.
They are not friends at first, but Dominick is a brilliance unrivaled with his angles on dreams both awake and asleep. He fairly shines with them and people can't help but be drawn to that caliber of fire; Arthur is no exception, and though Dominick never asks his name, never asks what he thinks, Dominick does notice him -- notices the way Arthur plans and the way Arthur manages and, above those things, how Arthur often improvises. For that reason, the now only well-received, even regaled architect in their curtained world sits at Arthur's bedside in the infirmary after an especially nasty death. That's all this dreamshare has boiled down to in the end, or maybe even at the beginning: kill, be killed, and learn to deal with it. It's only a dream. It can't hurt you.
"Hurts doesn't it?" Dominick asks the unconscious form so heavily sedated that he knows Arthur can't hear him.
In the years to come, all the questions that really matter between them will happen this way.
. . .
Disbandment of the Dreamshare was also inevitable. No program lasts forever, certainly not the costly ones and almost all of them are costly even with the government issuing military causes more money than things people profess to care about like school and children who can't even get into that.
Arthur is twenty-six and Dominick is younger --or younger looking and feeling -- if anything because he has fallen in love and what is more: that love has fallen in with him as well. He likes Mal, Arthur does, and eventually he loves her too though not in the same way. Similarly, Mal loves Arthur and she tells him so with kind touches to his elbow when he could use a tiny comfort and doesn't even know it; she shows him by standing by his side but looking away when he can't completely hold that unreadable expression he has now perfected, mostly. Underneath that history-rich loveliness Arthur is aware of a sharpness too, flint-like and dangerous and he has no doubt that is part of the magnetism for Dom -- no longer Dominick because Dominick is what one calls a brother or a son or a father and Dom never has been nor will he ever be any of these things to Arthur. Dom has become the friend that he wasn't when they were both a little (a lot) younger, when Arthur saw him as a beacon for something he couldn't quite name. If Mal shows her brand of love with subtle empathy, Dom shows it by trusting Arthur with Philippa and, one day, sharing with him what he stole from the military more than a year before.
How none of them were the wiser to Dom taking the PASIV, Arthur doesn't know but he also doesn't doubt Dom's ability to erase his tracks. Not cover them, mind, but get rid of them entirely, because there's a mortal difference between the two in cases like this; one does not just steal something like that from a super power. Except that Dom did, has, and Arthur doesn't feel even a little guilty going under. He feels more than a little fear, but the day he stops fearing the lucid dream will probably be the day he can't tell the difference.
Going into business with the precious device is predictable only after enough time has passed that the government has probably spread itself ten ways too thin in every incorrect direction looking for it. Mal is an expert at what she and Dom call extracting. Dom is the architect, unquestioning. Arthur takes up point and like any good point man, he doesn't even ask why; it just feels like he belongs there and maybe Dom and Mal feel that way too because for all their caring they never ask him if it's the position he wanted or not. Practically speaking (and Arthur is little if not practical, frankly) Arthur is not a genius with chemicals anyway, so later on down the line he'll tell himself there wasn't something else he could have done.
Some people would say: you could have done anything. Why that? Do you even know?
But Arthur won't share his commitment, so no one will ever tell him that in return, will never point it out.
Arthur can be selfish too. He knows he works in a rare facet of life with two even rarer beings and they love him for all that nothing is perfect and Arthur never learns to have friends outside of them because he doesn't seem to need more.
. . .
Meeting the man who goes only by Eames (despite Arthur's painstaking research to find out anything else the man might have gone by in between now and the time he was old enough to breathe) tests that absence of wanting in all the right-wrong ways, but Arthur doesn't understand it or doesn't want to understand it. They work well together but Arthur still prefers the Cobbs (an entity, a force now) and makes no secret of it even though he never outright says so. Eames is a people-person by profession not nature, but he can tell anyway and it grates on him no less than if he actually cared. He comes from a question mark background and a question mark motivation but he's so despicably good at what he does -- what maybe only he does right now in their limited business circle -- that he is not to be overlooked or, worse, passed up. Arthur reminds himself of this as a rule and when Eames notices -- before their last job and quite some time after the first -- he catches the point man by the shoulder with an unforgiving hand.
"Don't hold back on account of me, Arthur, really now."
The look of confusion on Arthur's face must be quite thorough and Eames hand doesn't leave his shoulder.
"Because I won't hold back for you." He's bluffing but Arthur doesn't know that and the hand drops. The gaze doesn't and maybe Eames is giving Arthur time to process what he means or maybe he just knows that eye-contact is the true sign of power in a conversation no one else knows about. Maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, Arthur has constructed, compartmentalized, and virtually cleansed his own mentality with a counter-productive effectiveness, but he has never been stupid, so when he replies he does so with the conviction of his position.
"I don't treat you any differently than the other people we work with," he says and it's very Arthur -- hard angled words, intimately truthful but achingly distant words because he doesn't let anyone in that close except the people who are already there -- the dead and the living. Eames does not lean in, does not glare as Arthur might in response to his own version of such a statement. No, Eames only pierces the air with everything about him, which, as it so happens, is more vexing; he smells of smoke and something he was drinking though not drunk off of, and he looks like someone Arthur has seen never and always, and he sounds loud in the silence because even wordless moments have their volume. Arthur becomes so accustomed to the inventive quietness that the forger's question catches him off guard.
"Why?"
"Because."
One word signs him over to what proceeds to be years of cat and mouse, because Eames is a relentless human being and Arthur is a constant one and it's not lost on Dom or Mal that one day they could make for two creatures having become relentlessly constant together, but it's not the kind of thing Dom would ever say and Mal simply knows better.
. . .
When Dom and Mal fall back from limbo they are so changed that it threatens to break Arthur from the inside out. He takes jobs without them for the first time when he doesn't need to (except that he's desperate to get away, and maybe that's a sort of need) and he flees every corner of the world thrice over because when he stays in one place it means they can find him, tell him what he can feel coming with the authenticity of a fear that ordinary people can do nothing to stop; at the end of the day, everyone is ordinary, besides. He can't run for very long though, not without that sense of duty creeping up on him like his own shadow, not without recognizing that when things go as bad as he knows they will he could never stay away from the one left behind.
. . .
The sight when he arrives at what was once a home is everything he anticipated but nothing he could prepare for.
It's Dom, falling apart and when Arthur himself enters the picture it's also him -- not even trying to glue the pieces back together, because he knows he can't do it, knows his limits. Dom doesn't ask Arthur why Mal jumped, doesn't ask Arthur how he feels about it, doesn't ask Arthur anything. This is a blessing and a curse because everyone should be asked these things but Arthur has gotten to the point where someone asking him threatens to unravel his reliability, and he can't afford that now, maybe not ever. He sweeps every fragment that was once Dominick Cobb -- and then was Dom and now is just a man with an uncomfortable grief that feels like guilt -- into a series of distancing motions. Those motions take them away from Philippa and James and into dreamshare territory they never had to dabble in before, no longer research for the exploration but experimentation for the profit, to get by: to just keep running. It doesn't go well but it doesn't end either and all the while Dom goes more and more inward. Arthur watches and sometimes he yells. Dom always yells back. Still, Arthur thinks he prefers this to the impossible convulsions that can only mean Dom is trying to cry but seems to have forgotten how.
. . .
The Cobol job is a bust and Nash is a moron and Arthur is up to Here with the nastiness of everything but he conceals it because that's what the point man does, or if nothing else, it is what Arthur does. He hides in plain sight and he gets shit done because of it (or in spite of it). This matters most of all when he hears Saito offer Dom what the now extractor thought was impossible to have, which might be a theme because Arthur still believes inception itself is impossible. Only when Dom says he's done it before, it feels like a hit, hurts like Mal's shade shooting him hurts every time she does it - like Mal's shade whispering violence and repeating where is he, where is he because to the shade it's only Dom who matters. The terrible thing is, Arthur thinks he knows why he tries to ignore that borderline confession for a little longer. Men are fallible, even the brilliant ones -- especially the brilliant ones, and even if he couldn't go by this alone, the fuller truth is that Arthur won't leave Dom for anything now. By accident and on purpose both, they have become integral to each other. Though Arthur knows it more than Dom does, or maybe Dom just takes him for granted in his bitterness and when Arthur thinks that he tries not to care as much as he does, as much as he can no longer help. He hasn't let anyone else in and he needs to make what he has count; if it hurts, at least it means he feels something and there are still kindly fractures when Dom sends him a tired smile or picks something up for James and Philippa. That old love? It hasn't died out, even if the shape keeps curving and squaring in unexpected ways.
. . .
Because Arthur always loved his dreams he has now learned what it is to hate them but the Fischer job seems like it could give him something back and it's a nervous tic at the back of his skull, this not knowing what that might be with any kind of clarity. Granted, it's just a feeling and Arthur hasn't operated on his feelings since he was too short to reach the must-be-this-high-to-ride at the autumn carnival. A long time ago -- a lifetime ago.
Bringing Eames onto the job feels unavoidable but Arthur makes his terse argument against it anyway, and when Dom tells him they need a forger, he hears what the man really means: they need the best.
And Eames is that, credit given where credit is due.
. . .
It's more than 75% of the way through the real-world legwork that finds Arthur vaguely forgetting why he cared about keeping Eames -- still no surname to speak of whatever Arthur's mildly neurotic efforts and long-practiced hacking savoir-faire -- out at all, which is of course when Eames finds him alone in the warehouse, going over the research on Fischer Jr. and worrying over it in a way only Arthur can: invisibly. The forger rests a hand on the upper left corner of the fold-out table but Arthur ignores it, ignores him, which Eames expects but still very much minds.
"Why are you doing this?" he asks and Arthur isn't used to being asked why he thinks anything, so his pause here may be more genuine than he means it to be. As the universe would have it, that is precisely the kind of tell Eames learned to recognize early on -- before forging, before any of this. He watches with renewed acuity as Arthur's jaw seems to clench and his shoulders rise with a half-concealed breath before they fall with it too; he watches, because whether or not Arthur understands it, Arthur is worth watching, which is more than Eames can say for most people and he has seen more of them than anyone else he knows. It's not romantic. Eames isn't romantic, so it can't possibly be. But there's something to be said for being drawn to another person, to spend one's spare time toiling at what-ifs when one has never been a what-if kind of fellow, and just as Eames isn't exactly a romantic neither is he a blithering idiot. He'll take what snapshots of Arthur he can get. Maybe that's the only way to go at it -- this, Arthur -- piece by piece like a puzzle and Eames loves puzzles, likes a challenge. A forger must.
Minutes pass and Arthur knows it but he can't be rushed with this answer, can't say because again. Somehow he's tired of lying to himself, and it's only in realizing that, that Arthur catches onto the fact that he's been doing it for quite some time.
He clicks the ballpoint shut.
"I think I want him to be happy," he admits and that statement shouldn't feel so much like signing one's soul away or agreeing to die for a friend, but Arthur has died for Dom and will die again for him too. It's nothing special, he thinks; it's his job, but part of him remembers a time between not-knowing and knowing too much that they were friends -- hide and seek in a summer green backyard and Cabernet in a winter living room, forever perfectly mapped out the way companionship sometimes makes look possible. It wasn't about the job then. All this history, all this once we were, Eames can tell to the point of feeling a phantom anger well up in him, as if he's making up for the fact that Arthur doesn't seem to get angry. Some of it must show because Arthur's brow quirks at him then furrows. "What?" That single word has all the implications of: I told you the truth, isn't that enough?
Gears click. A few more pieces move into place. Eames returns the look with an inscrutable one of his own.
People don't ask Arthur things because Arthur is often too busy telling them what they need to know. When people have what they need they very rarely look beyond it, and what other people might need is incredibly, shamefully secondary. Arthur is not selfless though and he knows this, behind all of what Eames may be getting offended about on his behalf, and from where he understands, misplaces.
For his part, Eames thinks Arthur is an idiot -- well dressed and all, deadly accurate and similarly deadly foolish; men shouldn't live like this and it's not as though the forger's life has been a walk in any given park but he's certainly done things for himself and that's a plainer, truer kind of selfishness than this convolution Arthur has half let himself become and half let himself outright disappear into. But this conversation feels over and while Eames has not necessarily let that stop him before, he lets it stop him now, suddenly the epitome of foreign, displaced in his own misgivings about how a person lets himself get so far gone when he's sitting right there.
Is this what it's like talking to a crazy person? No, Eames has talked to those before; he talks to Dom every day they've been on this job, after all.
No Arthur's not crazy.
He's an idiot though.
And he's damaged. And no one ever asks him why. And Arthur doesn't want them to anymore.
Eames needs time to figure this out
"Right," he says, because the silence warrants a break and then he leaves, aware of the way dark eyes follow him but nothing else does.
. . .
They don't speak again until everything has gone to shit in the first layer and it's watching Arthur's feeble -- this isn't a criticism so much as a fact -- interrogation of Dom that shifts another oh into place for Eames, Eames who recognizes Dom's power-play and his selfishness and how Arthur's so-called sensible flaws are too weak to go up against all that fire. This may not have always been true, he accurately supposes; Arthur isn't a weak person, that's not what he observes, not what he means, but for every good there is a superior and in the case of the extractor and the point man there's just no question at all as to who simply hands a man his gun with orders to shoot, and who pulls the trigger. When Arthur stalks off to take care of some B-grade idiots with firearms on a nearby rooftop, it's a seamless thing for Eames to follow him: watching his shoulders, watching the careful curl of his hands and the trace-evidence of shame that coats him head to toe. It's the kind of strange, secret shame that everyone else will miss because they won't be looking for it. But Eames is looking for it, fueled by anger and that same disconnect from the warehouse, concerning understanding of how it gets this bad because he knows Arthur doesn't consciously register 'shame'. He just feels it.
And yet, if Arthur is going to feel anything, if they all might be nothing but walking vegetables three layers down gone wrong, Eames decides that's not the feeling he should lose himself to and resumes his approach, a common precipice.
When he tells Arthur he 'mustn't be afraid', he means don't sell yourself short. When he says 'dream a little bigger', he means because I don't think you ever have. And when he says 'darling', he means Arthur.
But he means it in a way no one else ever has.
. . .
Arthur helps Eames with the line for the PASIV, and this is a curious thing because they both know the floored man doesn't need any such help, but where their skin brushes there's kindling and where their dialogue overlaps there's quiet fire and where their smiles coincide there's a long overdue glimpse of mutual understanding.
"Go to sleep Mr. Eames."
And Eames does.
. . .
Extraction of an idea is one thing. Extrication of a person is something else.
Doing this with so much history is near impossible.
But so was inception.
Arthur will never truly leave Dom and all that has happened between them, but he stops hanging around with the closeness of a stray turned guard-dog, and as often is the case with such two-way enabling, Dom stops 'needing' him as much. It hurts at first, as if the only reason Arthur was there was out of need, but Arthur is too old now to stoop into that self-indulgence that bears wishing he had been loved or something. He knows that he was loved, is loved even, insofar as Dom is capable of loving someone who isn't one of his children. That's not much of course.
Eames tells him so and Arthur tells him he doesn't want to hear it, but that's one of the reasons Eames says so at all. He wants Arthur to remember and Eames was never a particularly gentle creature; he'll be circuitous and charming and on the turn of a dime be blunt and disillusioning, as much as illusion is his profession.
They argue a lot about Dom when they could be talking about other things and they don't even have that much time together to begin with, because it's not like they live together. Living together is for friends, for family, and for people who were once a bit of both and become something else irreversible along the way. The forger and the point are none of these. However, they are certainly something, and Eames believes in the hands that took control of his wrist on the second level, believes that crookedness to Arthur's smile was the first secret the younger man didn't keep from himself in an effort to keep it from everyone else as well.
And okay, maybe Eames is a little romantic, but he swears he wasn't always like this and funny thing: Arthur would believe him if that kind of swearing was the sort to ever actually get outside of one's head, to get through one's mouth and into the air for everyone else to see.
. . .
It's Paris that brings them together again after five months of coincidental distance; before that their jobs never lined up and they don't know what they are so they don't call and there's that thing of pride between men -- a better impulse-killer than anything else in the world, history withstanding.
Arthur arrives at the prescribed setting a minute behind Eames and when he closes the door behind him he knows without looking around that they are the only ones there so far. He finds, disconcertingly, that he doesn't mind as much as he thinks would be easier to.
"Arthur," the forger greets and it's distinct with how noncommittal the consonants sound, pricks at something tight and uncomfortable between Arthur's inhales and exhales.
"Eames," he replies neutrally, however, because he is trying to learn to give only as good as he gets and it's a long, long, slow, slow, slow process after everything that's happened -- after everything that never did. Eames detects some flicker of that reason for control and can't decide whether to laugh or yell or something in between, whatever that might be. Arthur is learning himself again but he's using Eames as the guinea pig, maybe because out of everyone in the world Eames is the only living soul left who Arthur knows even vaguely well; and that's ironic too though for a different reason entirely. Striding over until just a casual foot separates them, he eyes the well tailored suit, which means he eyes the accent of angles and lines beneath it and he takes his time doing so. For one reason or another, Arthur lets him, one of those reasons being that Eames doesn't make any secret of looking and that degree of candor earns its keep sometimes, just by being.
"You must spend all of your shares on clothing," he says at last, thoughtful rather than the cajoling criticism he meant, and his eyes crinkle at the corners with a smile that does not quite reach his mouth. He must be getting old after all, giving himself away like that but it's only Arthur. Perhaps he doesn't notice.
"I like them," comes the simple response and it's so forthright, so completely about Arthur that those three dull words become quite stunning. Eames marks them and takes back his previous thought, thinks: okay so maybe he does notice. About time too.
He reaches out and makes a show of dusting off nonexistent lint from a well cut shoulder.
"What else do you like?" he asks and it feels like he's holding his breath but he doesn't have to wait long, which shows they've come rather far after all, likely when neither of them was looking, neither of them noticing.
"Coffee."
"Black, lots of sugar."
"Yes."
"Favorite color?"
"Red."
"I figured you more for a blue person."
A pause.
"I used to be."
Another pause.
"Music?"
"Classical. Also U2. And some things you probably haven't heard of."
"So tell me about them."
Arthur does.