Part one *
Eames's favourite room in his flat was his washroom. It had an old, long tub (sans curtain) with its original taps; with some money from an art forgery he did several years back, he'd had wood paneling put on the walls and new red and white tiles on the floor, giving the whole thing a very Edwardian look. He had a proper shower in the adjoining room, which was more practical and the one he used more often, but sometimes it was nice to stretch out in the tub after long weeks of pretending to be someone else or fighting for his life.
Arthur hooked a leg over either side of the tub. His flexibility was really something else. "If you drown me," Arthur warned, as Eames moved between his legs, "I'll come back and haunt you for the rest of your miserable days."
Eames leaned forward and kissed him, brushing the wet fringe out of Arthur's eyes. "Calm down, I've got you."
He grabbed the lube off the floor and double-checked to make sure it was silicone-based before slicking up his fingers and pushing one inside Arthur. He had yet to tire of this, of the way Arthur's breath stuttered when Eames's fingers were inside him, where he was hot and tight. When it felt like there was enough of a stretch, he slipped in a second finger, scissoring. Arthur hummed approvingly.
By now, he knew when Arthur was ready, and he slowly pressed in, Arthur clutching at his face, his arms, the backs of his thighs. With the warm water all round them, Arthur's body felt open and languid, and the expression on his face was blissful. Eames couldn't help but bend forward and kiss him again.
"I was wrong," Arthur said, almost sounding drunk. "This bathroom isn't a sign of your pathetic longing for your nation's glory days."
"See, I told you you'd love it," Eames replied, punctuating his statement with a harder thrust.
One hand braced on the tub beside Arthur's head, he pushed their foreheads together. They rocked together slowly, Arthur's hands gripping his sides firmly. The water lapped at Arthur's chin, but he didn't seem to notice. Arthur smelled like an alluring combination of Eames's soap and his own skin, mixed in with the faint smells of the ocean and petrol and sticky tropical pollen that permeated Mombasa.
He knew Arthur was getting close when he started to groan with every thrust, head tipping back and nails digging into Eames's sides. Eames panted in Arthur's ear as felt his own orgasm building up and threatening to spill over. It surprised him when he came first, and Arthur made a disappointed sound until he reached between their bodies and began expertly jacking Arthur off, sinking his teeth into the sensitive skin between Arthur's jaw and neck.
Arthur flailed, splashing water onto the floor. "Fuck, you fucking vampire," he called, and came.
With his tongue, Eames chased away the drops of water slipping down Arthur's neck and onto his collarbone, soothing away the teeth indentations he'd just left. Arthur cupped his hand firmly round the back of Eames's head and said, "We're all wrinkly." But neither got out of the tub until the water grew lukewarm.
*
For his next job, Eames worked without Arthur. To be fair, he and Arthur hadn't worked that much together, considering he had only known Arthur for three years, and he had been in his line of work -- on the non-dreamshare side, at least -- for nearly fifteen. He hadn't met either Arthur or Cobb until after Cobb had fled the States and started doing extractions, and all together, he had only worked with them six times, including the Fischer job. Arthur was a point man, which was a job that was also necessary in real world crime, but his expertise was in dreamsharing only. To suddenly work exclusively with Arthur would have meant a reshuffling of Eames's priorities.
On the day he left for Shanghai, Arthur and Yusuf were sitting in the lounge arguing over which gangster movie was the best, The Godfather (Arthur) or Pulp Fiction (Yusuf), and Eames realised not only was Arthur wearing jeans (to be fair, they were 7 For All Mankind jeans and cost more than all of Eames's trousers combined), but he had also cleared out half the junk in the room and fixed the eastern window that had been stuck closed for ages. It hadn't occurred to him until that very moment that perhaps Arthur was more than a long-term guest. It became especially more apparent when he thought back and noticed neither he nor Arthur had suggested Arthur find accommodation elsewhere whilst Eames was away.
Eames lingered in the doorway. "So. Goodbye then."
Arthur handed him his carry on. "Bye," he said tonelessly.
They stared at each other.
"Don't hold yourselves back for my sake," Yusuf called.
Arthur glared in Yusuf's general direction. He stepped forward and gave Eames a kiss. Ten minutes later, Eames was still trying to get out the door; every time he glanced over his shoulder and saw Arthur standing there with that little scowl on his face, he had to kiss him again.
Finally, Yusuf said, "I was wrong. For the love of all that is holy, please, please think of poor me sitting here having to watch this disgusting display of cuteness."
On the painfully long plane ride, Eames downed several small bottles of gin and thought to himself, Maybe I shouldn't go back, maybe I should change aliases and leave; it's too much; I have no bloody clue what I'm doing.
That feeling only lasted as long as a week. The job was agonisingly simple -- smuggling a set of Song dynasty ceramics out from under the nose of the Chinese government and into the hands of a Dutch collector with an inheritance to burn -- and more than once, Eames found himself wondering what Arthur was up to. By the third week, he found himself in his lumpy hotel bed at night, messing with his mobile and contemplating how much of a tosser he'd look if he called. By week six, he was irritated and horny.
It wasn't unusual for him to think about Arthur, or to even miss Arthur's company. Now, though, he couldn't stop thinking about the way Arthur tasted, or how he liked to sleep half on top of Eames like a giant and particularly bony cat, or the fact he laid out his clothes (now hanging in Eames's wardrobe) each morning in the order he was going to put them on, even if he was only wearing jeans and a t-shirt. These were things he hadn't known about Arthur before, and now that he did, everything was different. Before, Arthur had been captivating and mysterious and so very dangerous, but now he was merely handsome and real and somehow even more dangerous, and Eames missed him impossibly.
As he was packing up his things, one of the antiques smugglers, a rather strange bloke who went by the name of Gilsdorf who Eames had worked with several times before, said, "I bet you're excited to get out of here."
Eames snorted, tucking the last of his inks and brushes into their case. "I'm excited when any job ends with me a free man and enough money to buy a small island."
"I hear you have a nice young man waiting for you back home."
Eames glanced up, startled. "Arthur is many things, but nice is not one of them," he replied. "Who told you this?"
Gilsdorf shrugged. "Ong," he answered, naming the point man for this job, "said some guy called a few weeks ago and threatened to hunt us down if he didn't tell him if you'd been caught yet or not. Also, you've been kind of mopey and miserable."
Eames was simultaneously offended and touched. On the one hand, he didn't need Arthur to check up on him, and on the other, clearly Arthur had been fretting and, like Eames himself, had simply too much pride to call. His anger was tinged with a terrifying relief.
Six and a half weeks after he'd left Mombasa, Eames returned several hundred thousand euros richer and randy as hell. He got back to the flat very late and slightly pissed after one too many complimentary beverages. His clothes smelled like an aeroplane -- stale from the recycled air -- and he was starving, but when he went into the bedroom and opened the door, Arthur was sleeping on his belly in the centre of the bed, lean arms and legs akimbo. Eames stripped to his t-shirt and pants and slid in beside him.
Arthur was awake, of course. He blinked sleepily as Eames rolled onto his side to face him. "Welcome back."
"Sorry, I was trying to be quiet," Eames whispered.
"Wasn't you," Arthur said. "I put in a new security system."
Without moving out of his position, he pointed behind him to Eames's desktop, which was sitting on the heavy oak desk in the corner of the room. Eames had already had the cameras installed ages ago, but it looked like Arthur had updated the software.
"Is this what you did in your spare time?" Eames asked admiringly. He ran a hand down Arthur's back, enjoying the way the threadbare t-shirt felt against his skin.
"I went bar-hopping with Yusuf a few times," Arthur sighed. "He hit on pretty much every single woman we met. It was embarrassing."
Eames snorted. "Ah, yes, Yusuf Saif, the original ladies man."
Arthur rolled onto his side, eyes closed. "It was worse than when Cobb used to try to make me go with him and Mal on dates because he was nervous," he said.
"That sounds horrendous," Eames said.
"It was." Arthur reached down and hooked his fingers in Eames's waistband. "You wanna...?"
He smelled amazing and Eames hadn't had sex in over six weeks, but Arthur's eyes were slipping shut, and he looked so very comfortable all stretched out there on the bed. "In the morning," Eames replied, sliding his hands under Arthur's shirt to rest against his bare back, warm and solid. They fell asleep like that.
*
It was Arthur's turn to disappear next. While he took a job in Munich, Eames went back to the casinos, gambling away a few hundred thousand Kenyan shillings. He won more than he lost, but not by much. He managed to make friends with a group of South African businessmen who were looking for a true "Kenyan" experience, and for a few days he let them buy him drinks and rounds of golf, and he left them in a disco in the dodgy part of the city without their wallets, passports, and hotel keys at four 'o' clock in the morning.
He shamelessly jerked off to the thought of Arthur every single night, remembering Arthur's smell (which still lingered on the pillows and in the sheets tangled round Eames's legs), the taste of his skin, the weight of his cock in his mouth, the tight heat of his arse. He tried fantasising about other people he'd been with, and even some he hadn't, but it was Arthur that turned him on the most.
He was terribly bored. Aside from wanking, everything was boring; even Yusuf was boring. He didn't know if it was because now that he had helped perform the impossible, inception, nothing could compare, or if it was because his flat suddenly seemed so empty.
"You've become pathetic," Yusuf told him over beans and toast one brekkie. "How long have you been together now?"
Yusuf's latest girlfriend, Akinyi, was watching telly in the next room with the volume turned all the way up, and it was giving Eames a headache. She walked in the kitchen for more tea as Eames said, "We've been sleeping together since LA, so it's been five months."
"I didn't know you had a girlfriend, George," Akinyi said.
"I hate to repeat myself, but I've asked you many times to call me Eames, not George," he said. "And I don't have a girlfriend."
"He has a boyfriend," said Yusuf.
"He's not my boyfriend," Eames corrected. "I don't do long-term relationships. I don't need the complication in my life."
Akinyi tutted at him. "You're so cynical, George."
As soon as she was out of earshot, Yusuf whispered, "I like her."
"She's horrible," said Eames.
"Look here," Yusuf said, cross now, "it's hard for someone to take you seriously about this whole non-commitment shite when you're not sleeping with anyone else and you're sitting in my kitchen pining over him. Monogamy and pining sounds like a relationship to me."
"Do you think Arthur is sleeping with other people?" Eames asked, alarmed.
"I prefer not to think about Arthur and sex," Yusuf replied, standing up to dump his plate in the sink. "And that's probably a question you should ask him, don't you think?"
Quite honestly, the thought of Arthur fucking anyone else made him want to kill everyone. Eames slammed his mug down on the table with enough force for Yusuf to jump.
"He seems to like you, God knows why," Yusuf continued. "Frankly, I'm surprised he's sleeping with you at all. Now, Saito I could see him sleeping with. But you?"
Eames mentally added Yusuf to the hit list he was building in his head.
Shortly after, he received a call from one of his contacts about a small-time job in Dar es Salaam. It was a standard corporate espionage gig, looking for someone to forge some paperwork and photos in order to get an insider snuck into a rival company; Eames recognised the number his contact forwarded him as belonging to Ibada, a highly-reputable thief he'd had the pleasure of working with before.
So Eames packed his equipment and headed to Tanzania. But he was only two days into the job when Arthur called. He was sitting in a dodgy bar in the city centre, nursing a bottle of Ndovu, and he was so surprised Arthur was calling he almost didn't answer; he was fairly certain Arthur had never called him in all the time they had known each other. One time, years ago, he had sent Arthur a text, and Arthur had immediately changed his number.
"Darling, are you missing me?" he asked. "I'm touched."
"Are you busy?"
"I'm never too busy for you," Eames replied. The man sitting next to him at the bar rolled his eyes.
Arthur snorted. "Look, we need a forger. How fast can you get to Munich?"
"Ah," Eames said, "you meant that kind of busy."
"You're on a job."
"I'll cancel it, if you need me," Eames said.
"You don't have to come here for me," Arthur said, but it was in the same voice as when he said, "You don't have to make dinner," and "You don't have to wake me up with a blowjob." In other words, Eames didn't have to, but Arthur would like it very, very much if he did.
"How soon do you need me?" Eames asked.
"As soon as you can get here. The planning is almost done, and you'll be forging our client. We're scheduled to go in a week."
Eames raised his eyebrows. "That soon?"
"It's not a complicated job. One level."
Eames finished his beer, gave Ibada what he had finished ("Terribly sorry, family emergency," was his excuse, giving Ibada his best forlorn expression), and packed his things. Twenty-six hours later, he was climbing into Arthur's hired car in Munich.
*
Munich was a gorgeous city, full of beautiful Baroque buildings and stunning cathedrals. Eames had always been fond of Germany; he'd done German for A-levels. In the past, he had performed several high-risk cons in Germany, and six out of seven of them had gone swimmingly. He had always loved the history, the language, the pilsner, and, of course, the men.
He tried saying as much to Arthur on the drive from the aeroport even as Arthur kept telling him to stop kissing his ear whilst he was driving, but when he got to the part about the men, Arthur interrupted, tersely, "Are you planning on having a fling while you're here, Mr Eames?"
Because Eames was an arsehole, he was pleased at the way Arthur's knuckles went white round the steering wheel. "Of course not, love, I was simply reminiscing." He looked at Arthur's frowning profile and thought, Sodding Yusuf. "Are you planning on having one?"
"Yes, as soon as we finish this job I'm leaving you for this hot German guy I've been fucking," Arthur said. "His name's Hans Gruber, and he's built like a linebacker."
Eames raised his eyebrows. "You're leaving me for the villain from Die Hard?"
"Oh, you've seen that movie?" Arthur asked, shoulders slumping.
"Darling, it's Die Hard. Contrary to how I dress, I was not, in fact, born in the nineteen twenties."
"Wait," Arthur said, looking at him in shock, "that's the look you're going for? Your pleated pants are vintage?"
"What's a linebacker?" Eames asked.
Other than Arthur, the team for this job consisted of the extractor, Traverso, and the architect, a French-Canadian named Chantel Bonneau who took one look at Eames and arched a ginger eyebrow at him. He wondered what Arthur had been saying about him behind his back; the last time Arthur had described him to a teammate it had been Ariadne, and she had told Arthur, in front of everyone, "He seems pretty normal to me." Arthur was always terribly cruel that way.
After introductions, the extractor made himself scarce, and Bonneau went to go play with her models. Arthur handed Eames a thick folder and told him to take a seat. "Our client is Lara Koch. Recently, for reasons unknown to us--" Arthur sounded amused here "--she had a DNA test performed on herself and her parents. Neither of them were a match. Now, they claim she wasn't adopted and the lab made a mistake, but Lara suspects otherwise."
"An extraction on her own parents?" Eames asked. "How bourgeois."
The corners of Arthur's mouth twitched upward. "Traverso thinks the father will be the easiest one to break. According to Lara, her father has always been distant. She says he's always made her feel like a stranger in her own family."
"So this extractor, Traverso -- he already has a plan?" Eames asked, knowing full well Arthur never planned the jobs himself. His Arthur was many things, but creative was not one of them. Eames opened the folder and inside found a very blond set of middle-aged parents and a dark-haired woman roughly Arthur's age; they were dressed in appropriately upper-middle-class clothing.
Arthur nodded. "We'll need you to forge Lara; we'll begin the dream with both parents believing she died in an accident."
Eames looked up in surprise. "An extraction with two marks?" he asked. "The dream will collapse within minutes. If the father is responsible, why don't you have me forge the mother?"
"Traverso says it's less 'authentic' that way," Arthur said dryly. "After they see Lara, we'll put the parents into an interrogation room and tell them Lara's fingerprints match a kidnap victim from the eighties. Then we'll bring in files and say we have evidence they kidnapped her."
"The files will be our safe," Eames said, understanding dawning on him.
"Right, they'll project their secrets into the files. Then we wake up and give Lara the information."
"What if she's only been adopted?" Eames asked. "Or what if they were right and it was a laboratory error?"
Arthur frowned. "Then the files would say that, wouldn't they?"
Eames looked down at the photo of the unhappy family. "There seems to be a big flaw in this plan."
That was how Eames came to understand the extractor was mostly incompetent. Perhaps incompetent was not entirely the right word, but Eames thought his plan was stupid and probably going to end in tears. Traverso was a tall, willowy American with big, wet eyes like a chameleon, and he kept making them do runs through Bonneau's maze of a police station she'd obviously constructed after a gritty, American-style cop show; in each run, explosives were rigged to go off after twenty minutes. Blowing up was not Eames's preferred method of dying. He didn't know where Arthur had found this guy.
Eames tried to approach Traverso about adjusting the plan, but he was dead set against it.
"You're just the forger," Traverso said, looking down his nose at Eames. "I'm the extractor. I make the plan, you follow it. Capiche?"
"We should kill him," said Bonneau one afternoon, breaking open her second pack of fags of the day. Traverso had gone for more coffee -- how very American of him -- leaving the rest of them in the flat. "I died eight times today."
Arthur looked at her darkly. "Don't be so dramatic."
"Besides, killing him means a lot of mess to clean up," Eames said. "I'm not one for physical labour."
Privately, though, Eames agreed. Not necessarily on the killing part, but he had a feeling this job was not going to go well. Already he was having the same feeling of dread he'd had when they'd realised Fischer's subconscious was militarised, and they hadn't even done the damn job yet. Sadly, he knew Arthur would never leave, because Arthur would count leaving as a personal failure. Also, it turned out Arthur and Bonneau were friends from when he had first started in dreamsharing, or at least as close to a friend as one could be to Arthur; she reminded Eames a bit of Ariadne, except with a funnier accent.
"Traverso doesn't seem the type to hunt you down and kill you for not finishing a job," Eames murmured the night before the job was scheduled to go down, kissing along Arthur's jaw line.
"He's cashing in on a favour Bonneau owes him," said Arthur. He tilted his neck helpfully. "She asked me to help."
Eames grinned lecherously. "And you asked me to help."
Arthur rolled his eyes.
On the day of the extraction, Bonneau went to the Kochs' house as Lara's guest. She dropped the sedative into their drinks, and five minutes later Eames was lying on the floor and sticking in his IV. He felt a cool rush as Bonneau pressed the release, and the next thing he knew he was standing in a morgue.
*
Eames had exactly thirty seconds to forge a naked Lara and climb onto the examination table before Traverso and Arthur would bring Mr and Mrs Koch in to see their poor daughter's broken, dead body. He'd decided Lara would have been in a car accident, so he gave her a few broken bones and a now-cleaned-up head wound from where she would have smacked against the windshield; he threw in a nice Y-incision for effect. He had just pulled a small sheet over himself and closed his eyes when the door opened.
Footsteps approached the table. Eames made it so the body didn't appear to be breathing. Even with his eyes closed, Eames could tell when the lights began to flicker overheard. Already the dream was starting to unravel.
"Is this your daughter?" Traverso asked.
"Yes," a man whispered.
"I'm very sorry for your loss," Traverso said, not sounding sorry in the least.
Eames could hear the parents sobbing and crying out about their little girl, and one of them -- it felt like the mother -- lifted Eames's hand and pressed it against her wet face.
He hoped they'd hurry this part up; he was freezing, and his arse was starting to stick to the metal table.
As soon as the heavy door shut behind them, carrying their tears away, he threw off the blanket and forged back into himself, this time wearing a brown tweed suit and a DI's badge. He keyed opened the door and found Arthur standing in a dark hexagon-shaped room. Four doors led out: one to the morgue, where Eames had come from; one to the maze outside, where no doubt the projections were already getting antsy; and two to interrogation rooms. One-way mirrors showed everything that was happening in the latter. A single table stood in the centre of this room, with several meticulously-labeled folders stacked on it.
Arthur was watching as Traverso set the parents in one of the interrogation rooms. "Fifteen minutes," he told Eames.
"Right," Eames said. "Here goes nothing."
"Do you know where your daughter was last night?" Traverso asked, his voice small over the speaker.
"No, no," the mother choked out.
Arthur picked the top folder out of the stack and marched into the interrogation room, handing it to Traverso with the air of a royal messenger on a mission from the king himself. Then he walked right back out and moved to stand beside Eames.
After opening the folder, Traverso held up a paper with Lara's fingerprints, along with a police record and a photo of her pale face with her eyes closed, taken after her "death"; Eames had constructed it on top and had forced Arthur to memorize it. As usual, Arthur's attention to detail was impeccable. Had Eames not known they were in a dream, he would have thought the document was the original; he knew Arthur had not made a single mistake.
"We ran your daughter's fingerprints," said Traverso. His voice was hard now. "We found her fingerprints match those of a little girl who has been missing since the early nineteen eighties. Who's daughter is Lara really, Herr and Frau Koch?"
From where he was standing, Eames had the perfect view of the Kochs' faces. As Papa Koch's face twisted in shock and horror, Mama Koch stared down at the table, mouth drawn.
"That's impossible," the father gasped, but Mrs Koch remained silent.
The hairs on the back of Eames's neck stood up.
Traverso stood. "I'll be right back."
When Travers stepped into the same room as Arthur and Eames, the tile under Eames's feet cracked. They needed to hurry this up.
"I told you it was the dad," said Traverso. "Could his response have been more exaggerated?"
"It's the mother," Eames said.
"Don't be absurd," Traverso replied haughtily, whilst Arthur turned to stare at Eames.
Eames waved a hand in the parents' direction. "Look at their faces; the father's baffled, but the mum's scared."
"She's in shock, as any mother would be," Traverso snapped. He looked to Arthur. "What do you think?"
Arthur wouldn't able to spot it, Eames knew, and he was right. "I don't know," Arthur replied, his eyes flickering to the parents and then back to Eames. "They both look upset to me."
"That," Eames insisted, pointing to the mother's face, "is fear, and probably guilt, as well. It's not the dad."
Traverso shook his head. "We're sticking to the original plan. Arthur, take the mother to the other room. Eames, when I say 'Inspector Kappel should be here with the file any minute now,' tap on the glass, and I'll come get the folder. How much time do we have?"
"I give it ten before the dream collapses," Arthur said.
Following Traverso's plan, Arthur escorted Mrs Koch to the other room. She went without protest, although Mr Koch called after them, "Where are you taking my wife? What's going on?" Eames looked at her through the one-way mirror, noting the way she was very carefully keeping her face blank, her hands folded in her lap.
"Who is Lara?" Traverso asked Mr Koch.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Mr Koch cried. "Lara's my daughter!"
Arthur came back out. He was frowning. "You're sure it's the mother?" he asked Eames. He sounded uncertain. "She just thanked me for taking her away from her husband."
"It's her," Eames insisted. "I know you're not good with people, darling, but trust me on this. The father has no idea what's going on, but she knows exactly why they're here."
"What did you do to her?" Traverso was screaming in the other room.
The ground trembled, and Eames had to grab the wall to keep upright; Arthur wasn't so lucky, and he stumbled to the floor. Behind them in the maze, Eames could hear a dull roar of voices and things shattering. The maze was filled with desks and file cabinets amongst a labryinth of wooden walls, a twisted version of an actual police station, in an attempt to keep the projected police officers from finding them too soon; it sounded like a desk was being thrown against the door to where they were hiding.
A chunk of ceiling collapsed, narrowly missing Arthur, who threw himself out of the way just in time. He jumped to his feet. "This is taking too long."
"She's my daughter, she's my daughter," Mr Koch was repeating, his eyes huge and frightened.
In the other room, Mrs Koch sat calmly, staring at herself in the one-way mirror.
"Inspector Kappel should be here with the file any minute now," said Traverso loudly.
Eames grabbed the file labeled 'Koch, Dieter' from where it had fallen onto the floor. He entered the room and handed it over to Traverso, whose face was splotchy from shouting.
Traverso leaned over Mr Koch with a menacing expression on his face. "We have all the evidence we need here to throw you in gaol for life, Mr Koch. Are you sure you don't want to confess now? Once I open this folder, we can't go back."
Outside, the sky rumbled. They didn't have time for this, Eames knew. The dream was collapsing, and Traverso had the wrong bloody parent.
With a flourish, Traverso threw open the file.
It was blank.
"What's happening?" Mr Koch demanded, as the blood drained from Traverso's face. "What's supposed to be in there?"
Traverso slapped him across the face; Mr Koch fell back. The one-way mirror shattered, glass flying in every direction, stinging Eames's cheek and neck. He could hear the voices from the maze more clearly now. Furious, Eames yanked Traverso out of the room by his arm, not bothering to be gentle. Their feet crunched over the glass.
Traverso struggled in Eames's grasp. "Let me go! What are you doing, I've almost got him!"
He wheeled Traverso round by his arm and slammed him up against the wall, and then he pulled out his Beretta and shot him in the head. Traverso's body collapsed to the floor.
Arthur wasn't in the room anymore; with a feeling of dread, Eames realised he must have been out there with projections. But then the door slammed open and Arthur was running inside, deadbolting it behind him. There was a long, bloody scratch following the curve of his cheek, and the sleeve of his right arm was ripped, but he looked fine.
He took one look at Traverso and gaped. "What happened?"
"You're the dreamer," Eames said, "so we're fine. I'm going to get the truth from the mum."
Suddenly, the ground shook again, this time much harder; Eames clutched the door frame for support. That didn't sound like a dream collapsing; it sounded like an explosion. Outside, projections were screaming bloody murder. "What the hell was that?" he demanded.
"Yusuf's latest batch," Arthur explained, smirking. Another explosion rocked the building. "I figured we might need it. It'll keep them occupied for a while."
Eames checked his watch. "Five minutes?" he asked.
Arthur shook his head. "Four, at the most."
Eames snatched Mrs Koch's folder -- Koch, Anna Roth -- off the floor and went inside. She glanced up as he pulled a chair up to the table, holding the folder in such a way so she could read her own name on the label, neatly printed in Arthur's handwriting.
He could tell by the dull look in her eyes that she knew it was finished.
"We know Lara's not your daughter, Mrs Koch," Eames said calmly.
Mrs Koch frowned. "I don't understand," she said tonelessly. "Lara's my daughter; I gave birth to her."
"I know she's not."
She looked away, eyes focused on the mirror behind him.
It was obvious to Eames the husband didn't know a thing. If the blank evidence folder wasn't enough, she'd been happy to be separated from him; he'd seen the guilt and fear on her face. She'd either been hoping they would think she was innocent (as Traverso had), or--
"Do you know what this is going to do to Dieter?" he asked.
Mrs Koch's face crumpled. "I--"
The wall to Eames's right left split in two. In the distance, there was another explosion. There was a window in this room, and the sky outside was black.
"What did you do?" he asked, his voice steady.
"Dieter doesn't know," she said. Her voice was flat and dull, even as her eyes were wild. "His company had sent him to Britain for a year, but I stayed behind in Berlin. One day... my baby, my Lara... I only left her the bath for a minute!"
Eames barely managed to keep the grimace off his face.
"I couldn't tell him. But I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, all I could think was how I killed my baby. All I could do was walk through the city for hours." She paused. "One day, I saw a little girl playing in her parents' garden. She looked just like my Lara."
Eames nodded. "So you took her."
"I did. I took her, and I ran. The girl's disappearance was in all the papers, so I told Dieter our house was too small, and I moved us to Munich. When he came home, he didn't even notice the difference."
The door burst open. Eames turned, but it wasn't Arthur -- it was a crowd of angry, nameless projections, and they rushed in one after another. Mrs Koch screamed, and Eames jumped to his feet and began firing. The floor broke apart and Mrs Koch fell backwards through the hole; a projection threw the outside table through the one-way mirror. A jagged piece of glass stabbed Eames in his side.
Eames dived across the table and grabbed the folder, even as he felt hands on him, nails digging into his legs and fists hitting his back. The wound in his side burned. He flipped open the folder; inside was a single sheet of white paper with the name Maria Beckenbauer in block type.
And then a projection bashed him in the head with a brick.
Eames woke up with a gasp, conscious enough to feel every bit of the punch to his face that immediately followed. It sent him reeling as pain blossomed in his jaw, matching the pounding in his head from being killed. When he was able to open his eyes again he found Arthur had knocked Traverso to the floor.
"I got it," Eames said, pressing a cool hand against his face where no doubt he would bruise horribly. "I have Lara's real name."
"Fuck you, Eames," Traverso shouted.
Arthur moved toward Traverso again, and he scrambled backward on his hands and knees.
Eames's head was aching, and his face hurt like a motherfucker, and stealing children was one of those things Eames thought pushed a person from being merely a criminal into a genuinely evil human being, but that had been almost as exciting as inception. Was that how Cobb felt with every job? When Fischer had opened his safe and found the pin wheel -- and really, Eames had no idea what that had been about, but it had made Fischer sob pathetically -- Eames'd had the biggest rush of his life. He had thought it was knowing they had done inception, but he was having the same rush now. If that was the way Cobb felt all the time, no wonder he was such a ponce.
"Thank you," he told Traverso as they were packing up.
Bonneau and Lara were tucking her still-sleeping parents into bed -- she'd planned on telling them they had taken an afternoon nap, and then Eames suspected they had a very long talk ahead of them -- and Arthur was wiping down fingerprints.
Traverso shot him a look that could have curdled milk. "If I ever see you again, I'm shooting you in the nuts."
"Not if I shoot you first," Eames said sweetly as he handed over the tubing, "again, that is."
Traverso tried to slam the PASIV case shut on his fingers.
"Watch it," Eames snapped, snatching his hands away.
"Traverso," Arthur said loudly. He glanced at Eames. "What exactly happened after I died?"
"I convinced the lovely and psychotic Mrs Koch to reveal her deepest, darkest secret to me," Eames replied triumphantly. He knew he was grinning like a mad man, but he couldn't help stop.
Arthur looked confused. "And you're... happy?"
"I'm ecstatic."
Traverso pointed to Arthur. "Your boyfriend's a fucking lunatic!" he hissed.
Bonneau chose that moment to come down the stairs. "Time to get a move on," she said. If she noticed they were having a strop, she didn't mention it. "Lara's just sent the money to your account, Traverso. Guys, it was a pleasure working with you. Well--" She glanced back at Travero "--most of you, anyway."
"She should've put it in my account," said Eames, "since it appears I did most of the work."
Even Arthur looked irritated at that, but Eames couldn't help himsef. He continued, "I'd had no idea being an extractor was so easy. All you lot appear to do is cock up and expect other people to fix your mistakes."
He wasn't outright thinking of the Fischer job, but Arthur said, "Cobb didn't--" He cut off whatever it was he was going to say, and his face went blank in a way that meant he was probably either offended or angry.
Eames had spent most of his adult life studying people, and deciphering Arthur's various subtle facial cues had been an interest of his for three years now. He had thought he'd gotten exceptionally better at it in recent months (and had been able to add a few previously-unknown expressions to his repertoire, including but not limited to the face Arthur made when he came and the face he made when Eames left his shoes by the door). So he was quite aware that insulting Cobb, even indirectly, was not the quickest path to Arthur's heart.
Arthur looked away. "We need to get out of here and split up. Eames," and here he paused with a hand on the door, "I'll see you soon."
"Bugger," Eames said.
*
They didn't get back to Mombasa until three days later. Eames took the Munich-Amsterdam-Athens-Cairo-Nairobi route; he lost Arthur somewhere in the Airport Schiphol. Part of Eames expected Arthur to not show up in Mombasa at all -- or worse, to have gone back to Cobb; when Eames was waiting for his flight in Cairo they were probably sitting in Cobb's lounge and drinking red wine and talking about how Eames was a git and how Arthur had just wasted six months of his life, and then they probably locked the kiddies in their playroom and fucked -- no, no, that last one was truly paranoid, and Eames hadn't slept in a while -- but when he arrived home, Arthur was there.
"When'd you get in?" Eames asked, dropping his bags on the floor by the door.
Arthur looked nonplussed. "A few hours ago; I flew in from Dubai."
Eames was relieved and furious and a hundred different emotions all at once. First Cobb had nearly dropped them all into limbo, keeping not one but two vital pieces of information from them, and now Traverso had proven to be dead from the neck up. Eames was sick of incompetence coming at him from all sides, and he was bored with his usual work, and he hated being separated from Arthur when they could be brilliant together. They had always been brilliant together. Lately, it seemed everything in his life had gone topsy-turvy -- but the thought of Arthur leaving him had left him feeling ill.
He took a step toward Arthur, but Arthur just stood there, arms at his sides and face blank. He was holding himself stiffly.
"Are you in a strop?" Eames demanded.
"I don't know what that means," Arthur said tightly, "but I'm probably not in one."
"Then what's your problem?" His voice was calm if not hoarse from exhaustion, and he scratched his cheek with his palm, feeling too many days' worth of stubble.
Arthur wrenched Eames forward by his shirtfront. "There's no problem," he replied, and Eames realised Arthur was sweating. "What you did in Munich was very-- impressive."
"You're not angry about what I said about extractors?"
"I was," Arthur admitted, "but then I thought about what you'd done in the dream, and I don't care anymore."
"Oh," said Eames, because Arthur wasn't angry; he was violently turned on. He settled his hands on Arthur's waist. "Are we back to how I'm smarter than Cobb? Tell me, am I smarter than all the extractors you've worked with?"
"I wouldn't want your head to get any bigger than it already is," Arthur said, raising an eyebrow at him. That was as good a 'yes' as Eames was going to get.
Eames chuckled. His life may have been lacking sense recently, but he had Arthur in his arms right now, and all it took was one small movement and they were kissing. Arthur's mouth opened under his, and Eames swept his tongue in, lightly nipping at Arthur's lip. He felt Arthur's hand slide into his hair as they ground their hips into each other, want curling hotly in Eames's abdomen.
Merely kissing felt amazing right now, even better than when he had pulled off the Koch extraction single-handedly, and that itself had felt pretty unbelievable. He couldn't believe his luck lately; he'd been saddled with two extractors in the last few months who had fucked up, albeit in entirely different ways.
He pulled away as a thought occurred to him. "I should be an extractor."
Arthur blinked at him. "What?"
"I should be an extractor," Eames repeated. "If any little shit can fuck up this job why shouldn't it be me? I'd be good at it; I'd be the best."
It made utterly perfect sense to him. He would become an extractor, and Arthur would be his point man.
Arthur just stared at him, a crease starting to form between his brows. "But you're a forger."
"Arthur," Eames said patiently, "it is possible for one to wear many hats."
Something changed in Arthur's face, but he couldn't read what it was. "Do you--?" Eames began.
"Yes," Arthur interrupted fiercely.
Eames snorted. "You don't even know what I was about to say."
"You were going to ask if I wanted to fuck," Arthur said. A few pieces of hair were sticking up, having broken away from the control of Arthur's pomade, and a line of sweat slid down Eames's back in anticipation. "The answer's yes. The answer's always yes."
"Actually," Eames replied, "I was going to ask if you would do me the honour of becoming my point man."
"Obviously I will," said Arthur. "Now take off your pants."
They barely made it to the bedroom, tossing clothes every which way. Once inside and starkers, Eames pulled Arthur down onto the bed and unceremoniously sucked his cock into his mouth. Arthur made a keening sound and arched up, sliding his cock deeper, but Eames wrapped his arms round Arthur's legs and held him still. He felt Arthur's hands tangle in his hair once more, and he loosened his throat and let Arthur in as far as he could go, wetly dragging his tongue along the underside of Arthur's cock.
"Eames," Arthur groaned.
He pulled back until just the head was in his mouth. Arthur's hands tightened in his hair, tugging a little; his mouth was slack and his eyes were closed, his cheeks and ears flushed. After all these months, Eames still found him so gorgeous, especially now when he was like this, open and wanton. Eames unwrapped his arms and instead ran his palms up the inside of Arthur's shaking thighs, sinking back down on Arthur's cock, letting Arthur move again in tiny thrusts. His hands tightened round Arthur's thighs to stop from touching himself.
Arthur was swearing, pulling his knees up and placing his feet flat on the bed. "God, Eames, your mouth, I can't get enough."
His hips bucked and Eames took it, letting Arthur fuck his mouth and clench his fingers painfully tight in his hair. Once Arthur's breath started to turn ragged he held him down again, causing Arthur to gasp and shake, but it only took a few bobs of his head before Arthur was coming, Eames swallowing through it.
While Arthur was still shivering, Eames dragged himself up between Arthur's thighs and began rubbing off against his stomach, smearing precum against Arthur's abs. He kissed every inch of pale skin he could, licking Arthur's nipples, his collarbone, and Arthur's arms came up and held him tight. He could feel Arthur's heart pounding in his chest, the beat matching Eames's own.
Eames was going to come any second. "We're going to be the best, darling," he whispered as he started to lose control, shoving himself against Arthur with enough force to rattle the bedframe. "You'll see, we're going to be fucking brilliant."
"I know," Arthur murmured softly in his ear, cradling him as he came.
*
They were, indeed, brilliant. Eames was not the kind of bloke to say 'I told you so,' but he felt it with every successful, satisfying completion of each extraction they pulled off. He and Arthur had always worked splendidly with each other, even when Arthur had been pretending to hate him for whatever ridiculous reason. Just as before, they still fought and bickered and, on one occasion, threw things at each other during the planning stages, but in the dreams they fit together in perfect harmony. It was like a symphony; it was like bloody Mozart.
*
In addition, Arthur seemed to have some kind of thing, because when they were on the job, he jumped Eames for what appeared to be, to Eames, completely random reasons: when Eames came up with a solid plan, or after they had to improvise and came out of it better than when they had gone in, or even, one time, when Eames had turned down a job that was obviously ripe for disaster. One day Eames truly expected to be kicked back to reality and find Arthur humping his leg like a dog. Either it was Eames's far superior extraction skills or the new Dunhill suits Eames had bought specifically for meeting with clients, but whichever it was, Eames was clearly benefiting, so he had no complaints. They had been shagging plenty before, but now it had increased thricefold.
"Why are you so happy lately?" Yusuf asked him one day, clearly disgusted. Akinyi had recently moved back to Uganda to be closer to her family, and Yusuf was being a bastard about it.
"Ah, but, Yusuf," said Eames, "I'm naturally a very happy person. Didn't you know?"
He caught Arthur's eyeroll and smirked, and Yusuf said, "Blimey, you two."
Eventually, the mind heist collective that unfortunately still continued to exist beyond Mombasa intervened, getting in the way of Eames's plans to never work with any incompetent slag. More specifically, it happened on their fourth job as an extractor-point man duo, when they were in Croatia finishing a job extracting from an oil tychoon whose mind was rumoured to be aggressively militarised. Eames found Arthur at a sea-side cafe one cloudy afternoon in Zadar, gazing down at his phone with his brow furrowed. Arthur did love to make frowny faces, but this particular one told Eames he wasn't about to receive good news.
Arthur didn't meet Eames's eyes as he sat across from him. "Cobb called me," he said to his espresso and burek. "He asked me to join him on a job."
Eames stiffened. "And what did you tell him?" he asked coldly.
"I told him we should work with other people," Arthur replied, finally meeting his eyes.
"You did?" Eames asked. He rocked back in his chair, not quite sure what to say. "You turned Cobb down?"
This was something Eames hadn't ever expected to witness; Arthur was the most loyal person he knew, sticking by Cobb's side through thick and thin (even though Cobb was coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs), and in all the years he had known the two of them, he had never heard Arthur tell Cobb no. Not the time they'd had to jump off the roof and Arthur had been blatantly terrified; not for the entirety of the inception job, when they were all one bullet away from being shot into limbo.
"How'd he take it?"
"I think it went well," Arthur said after a moment, voice turning slightly higher-pitched and slow in the way it did when he was lying through his teeth.
Clearly, Cobb had freaked out and called Arthur a few choice names, and had possibly told Arthur was disappointed in him -- Arthur's Achilles' heel. Eames let him know exactly how much he appreciated it later in their hotel room.
He didn't think he was behaving oddly, even though the whole time he was thinking of how relieved he was Arthur was here with him and not gallivanting across the globe with Cobb and Cobb's trigger-happy projections, because Arthur wasn't Cobb's point man anymore, he was Eames's point man, and he belonged in Eames's bed and Eames's flat and Eames's life -- until Arthur grabbed his face and held it tight.
"Eames, I'm not going anywhere," he said sternly, eyes dark and furious, "so stop being such an idiot."
And it was like being incepted without even having to go three layers deep, because Eames, miraculously, did.
*
Somewhere between the Fischer job and dragging Arthur with him to Mombasa and becoming an extractor, Eames had forgotten not to underestimate Dom Cobb. There was a reason Cobb and Arthur had been the best team in the dreamsharing business, and as skilled a point man as Arthur was, Cobb had been the one calling the shots. Eames respected Cobb, despite everything that had happened. He was charismatic and brilliantly creative, and Arthur still spoke of him with fondness.
It was also a bad idea to underestimate Cobb because he was a complete and utter control freak.
The day after they arrived home from Croatia, Eames went to the supermarket to pick up sandwich fixings. He was searching vainly for gherkins when his mobile rang; he fished it out of his pocket and frowned at the screen, which flashed, 'Unidentified caller.'
Assuming it was a client or one of his contacts, Eames answered it. "Hello?"
No response.
Eames tried again. "Habari? Marhaba? Goedendag?" he asked casually as he abandoned his trolley and ducked into an emptier aisle; a Walther PPK/S was tucked into an ankle holster on his right leg, and a Ka-bar TDI knife was in a holster on the left. From his position in front of the bananas, he could keep an eye on both the front and side entrances.
"Eames," said Cobb.
At that, he nearly dropped the mobile; he accidentally bumped into an older gentleman picking out kiwis who turned and threw him a nasty look. "Hello, Cobb," he replied once he got his bearings. "This is a surprise. How are you? How are the little ones?"
There was another long, pregnant pause.
"Eames," Cobb repeated, menacingly.
"We've already established it's me," Eames said. The produce aisle was really not the place he wanted to be having this conversation. "Is there something I can help you with?"
Cobb hung up.
"Well, that was incredibly unsettling," Eames murmured to himself.
"We should upgrade our mobiles," he told Arthur when he got home. Arthur took the bag from his hands so he could put everything in its proper place before Eames shoved them anywhere they'd fit, as was his wont; Eames sat at the table and watched him organise the pasta by shape. "And while we're at it, we should change our numbers, and maybe our names. I hear Fiji is lovely this time of year."
Arthur slowly turned his head to glare at him. "Eames, what did you do?"
He briefly considered telling Arthur all about what had just happened, but firstly, Eames knew Arthur felt his previous partnership with Cobb was finished; secondly, the last thing he wanted was for Arthur to go guiltily skipping off to LA or wherever thinking he would be the one to restore Cobb's long-gone sanity; and thirdly, that phone call had scared the shit out of him. Arthur was much safer in Mombasa with him, or at least with him and their weapons stockpile. It wasn't like Cobb knew where they lived. Probably. That night, Eames triple-checked the locks on the windows and doors, though, just in case.
The next time 'unidentified caller' rang was a fortnight later. Eames almost didn't answer it, but Arthur gave him a funny look.
Luckily, it wasn't Cobb calling this time; it was one of Eames's old acquaintances, ringing him about a forging gig. And unlike Arthur's Cobb situation, due to Eames's history with this particular extractor he didn't have much of a choice when it came to taking it -- and even if he'd had the option, he still would have accepted the job. The one downside was he was informed a point man had already been hired, and the team wasn't looking for another one; Eames would be heading to Oslo on his own. Eames didn't mind, per se, but he had gotten used to Arthur by his side.
Arthur wasn't happy about it, to put it mildly.
"I don't know even know who this guy is," he said as Eames hastily packed, and if it had been anyone else Eames would have said he was whinging.
"As touched as I am by your concern, dearest," Eames told him, blindly throwing a few jumpers into his bag, "I assure you that other than yourself, Patel is one of the better people I've worked with in the past few years. Don't worry your pretty little head over it."
Arthur's eyes narrowed. "'Patel,' huh?"
The first thing Patel said to Eames when he arrived at the rendezvous was, "I just got the world's scariest phone call, mate. Who the fuck is 'Arthur'?"
Eames owed Vijay Patel a favour going on five years now, from a job they had done together in London during which Patel had taken the fall for him, earning a vicious gang beating for his trouble. Patel was hardly the easiest bloke to work with -- he was far too impulsive even for Eames -- but he always managed to find relatively safe jobs that paid outrageous sums of money, and if Eames had to leave Arthur in Kenya for a few weeks, at least he was being generously compensated for it. (The downside was that those few weeks made him feel as if he was going into withdrawal, going from having sex between two to four times a day to nil. It was sexual cold turkey. He did miss Arthur's charming personality as well, of course, but he managed to sneak a few calls in.
"I told you never to call me on the job," Arthur snapped. "Are you trying to get caught?"
"Then why are you answering?" Eames asked. "Did you miss the sound of my voice? What are you wearing?"
Arthur hung up on him.)
It wasn't until he and Patel arrived at the abandoned warehouse they were squatting at and Eames met his other teammate, Ben Abdel, that he realised something was wrong.
"You must be the forger," Abdel said, shaking Eames's hand.
"And you must be the architect," Eames replied.
Abdel's eyebrows shot up. "No, I'm on point."
"Then who's the architect?" Eames's stomach tightened with dread.
"He's been here for ages," Patel said. "Said you two knew each other already."
"Eames," called a familiar voice.
Eames went still. Slowly, he turned and found that Dom Cobb had entered the warehouse when he wasn't looking, probably whilst making introductions. Cobb's face was stony, and Eames knew he had one chance to talk himself out of this before blood was spilled, or at least before his face was rearranged. Eames knew how to fight, and he could fight well. But Cobb was bigger than him (as well as mental), and he reckoned Cobb would get a few good shots in before Eames could incapacitate him. Fighting crazy people was not on the top of Eames's list right now.
"Cobb, good to see you again," Eames said cheerfully, walking to him as if Cobb hadn't recently been harassing him over the phone, and that was when Cobb punched him right in the stomach.
Eames doubled over; the room spun as all the air was sucked from his lungs.
"What the fuck?" he demanded, wheezing. Black spots danced in his vision, and he tried to blink them away. Cobb had a hell of a right hook.
"You stole my point man," Cobb yelled.
Eames stared up at him dumbly. "I beg your pardon?"
Cobb stabbed a finger at him accusingly. "You. Stole. My. Point. Man." Eames didn't respond, and Cobb added pointedly, "Arthur."
"Listen here, Cobb," Eames said, straightening up with a grimace, whilst Patel and Abdel stared openly at them from the other side of the room, "you're sorely mistaken. Arthur isn't my point man. Wait, sorry, that's not true; he is my point man, but he's--"
"You're a goddamned liar," Cobb snapped. "Bonneau told me she worked with the two of you in Munich."
"Ah," was all he could say in reply, because, well, what use was there in denying it?
The look on Cobb's face was not unlike the one he'd had when he'd been screaming at Arthur in the top layer of the Fischer job: red face, crazy eyes. This time, however, it was directed at Eames.
Cobb worked his jaw. Finally, he growled, "So you're not even--?"
"Arthur's more than my point man," Eames said carefully.
When Cobb tried to rush him, Eames raised his arms in self-defense. "We're in a relationship," he shouted.
Cobb froze, one clenched fist aimed directly at Eames's face. "What?"
"We're in a relationship," Eames repeated. He shuffled back a bit, outside of Cobb's range.
Cobb's mouth opened and closed a few times. "But-- but I thought Arthur didn't like you."
"He was trying to disguise his true feelings for me," said Eames. "We're working on that."
"He once said if the choice came between going on a date with you or getting a ride home from a serial killer, he'd have to seriously think about it."
Eames pursed his lips. "But notice his mind immediately went to going on a date with me, and not spending a platonic evening together as co-workers. You see, it's really a very subtle compliment."
Cobb stared at him. Eames tried to smile encouragingly, but he felt it was perhaps more of a cringe. Whatever his expression was, it made Cobb's face turn doubtful, and he crossed his arms over his chest, mouth twisting.
"I don't believe you."
Eames sighed. "Of course you don't." He pulled out his mobile and dialed Arthur's number. "Here, talk to him."
With a suspicious squint, Cobb snatched the mobile out of his hand and pressed it to his ear. "Arthur?" he called. "Arthur, don't hang-- No, Eames is not dead! Who do you take me for? He's right here. We're in Oslo."
"Hello, darling," said Eames, hoping Arthur could hear him.
Cobb turned away, scowling, and Abdel took that moment to sidle up to Eames. "Arthur, huh?" he asked knowingly, a speculative look on his face. "I worked with him once. He's really--"
"Finish that thought," Eames interrupted, "and I won't be responsible for my actions. Also, Cobb would probably kneecap you."
"What do you mean, you're living together?" Cobb demanded loudly. "I haven't even been gone a year!"
Abdel edged away.
Finally, Cobb turned back to Eames. He handed over the mobile with a sheepish look. The look in his eyes was still crazy, but much of the rage had faded. "Arthur confirmed what you said," Cobb said stiffly. "Also, he called me an asshole and hung up on me."
Eames couldn't help but smirk. "I told you--"
Suddenly, Cobb threw his arms round Eames's shoulders and hugged him.
"What's going on?" Eames asked fearfully.
"Welcome to the family," Cobb sniffed.
"I should've checked Cobb's background more thoroughly for mental illnesses," said Patel from somewhere in the distance.
*
Months after Oslo, they were on a job in Siem Reap when Arthur looked down at the lines of notes scribbled in his moleskine and said, "We need an architect for this. I don't think either of us are going to be able to build an Angkor Wat that's more elaborate than the one that exists in reality. I drew some sketches when I was in the park yesterday, and I've seen the movie, but--"
"What movie?" Eames interrupted.
"Tomb Raider," Arthur replied, completely unironically. Eames rolled his eyes, but then Arthur said:
"I want to hire Cobb for this."
One long argument and an embarrassing slap fight later, Eames watched as Arthur hit the number two on his mobile and the name 'Cobb' flashed across the screen.
"Wait," Eames said, plucking the mobile out of Arthur's hand, "put it on speaker. I have to hear this."
Cobb answered on the second ring. "Hello?"
"It's Arthur," said Arthur briskly. "Eames and I need an architect. Are you available?"
There was a long pause. "This is weird," Cobb said.
Arthur looked annoyed. "Is that a yes or a no?"
"This is just so weird," Cobb repeated. "I mean, yes, of course I'll be your architect, but-- don't you feel weird you're calling me for your job?"
"There is nothing weird about this," Arthur replied firmly.
Eames looked across the table at Arthur and smiled, pleased with the knowledge that after Cobb helped them design a temple so magnificent their mark would immediately fill its tombs with her secrets, they would go home to Mombasa and fall into their bed, and maybe later they'd go drinking with Yusuf and help him find the next love of his life. In the end, the next job might not come for weeks or even months, but Eames was strangely okay with that.
"Can I bring the kids?" Cobb asked.
"Hush, Cobb, you're ruining my moment," Eames said.
*
The End.
Super huge thanks to
moleskinned for beta reading this monster and for coming up with the summary. This would suck balls without all her help. Any and all mistakes are mine.
Disclaimer: Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures. The "king of the lab" bit is a direct reference to Bones; Traverso's extraction is loosely based on episode 2x07 of Lie to Me. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.