Prompt Post No. 17
Welcome to Round 17 of the Inception Kink Meme.
Prompting System
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“Like a boss,” he says after Eames flirts his way out of coach somewhere in the air between Mombasa and Amsterdam to visit and steal a glass of scotch.
“Who did you bribe?” Eames asks. He’s trying to feign being oblivious to the woman behind Yusuf who is glaring at him from beneath overpriced noise blocking headphones. If she can’t hear him, he doesn’t understand what the problem is, but he suspects he may not look classy enough for her.
Like Yusuf is the epitome of class.
“One of the perks of being the extractor,” Yusuf says, gesturing expansively at his large seat, quiet neighbors.
“It was drugs, wasn’t it?” Eames mutters, and then he downs the scotch and makes his way back to 24B, conveniently situated between a screaming baby and a surly teen.
“It’s not always drugs,” Yusuf says. “Sometimes it’s money.”
Which is Yusuf summed up, isn’t it. If he weren’t such a genius, Eames would be--scratch that, Eames is terrified of him. They’ve run in the same circles for years, as you do when you’re two British ex-pats in dreamsharing living in Mombasa, and after each encounter Eames is torn between wanting to be Yusuf’s best friend, being grateful that they’re more or less on the same side, and hoping they never cross paths again. It’s a complicated cocktail of emotions, the sort that’s best served over ice.
In Amsterdam, they change planes. Eames takes a moment to stare at the Dreamers display in at an airport bookshop: a cardboard shelf, three levels, one for each book. It’s cut into a teenager-sized silhouette of a boy with his hands by his sides, coloured black with blue gradations.
“You still think Grey is based off you?” Yusuf asks, pausing to wait for Eames to catch up.
“Who else could it be?” Eames counters. Yusuf is traveling with little more than a small, rolling suitcase, and Eames is trying to determine whether it contains chemicals or clothes, and, if one, where the other is.
“You do realize that Grey only resembles you in the superficial details, don’t you?” Yusuf says as they step onto a moving walkway. “He doesn’t act anything like you.”
“But he resembles me in way too many superficial details,” Eames says, trying to keep his voice level. He had noticed that Grey was far more straightforward in his interactions than Eames, more honest, more loyal, generally better. But that was sort of a requirement for protagonists, wasn’t it? Oliver had a twist of darkness, Lizbet a dash of quirkiness, but Grey was, for lack of a better word, good.
Eames was honest with himself, occasionally with others. He was a little too sharp for goodness, a bit too jaded for loyalty.
Yusuf shrugs.
“I just thought I’d remind you,” he says. “Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”
Which is bullshit. It clearly has something to do with Eames.
“Or maybe whoever wrote those books just thought your backstory was interesting,” Yusuf continues. “It doesn’t need to be a big deal.”
Eames doesn’t say what he’s thinking.
He’s thinking that of course it has to be a big deal. Even if Grey doesn’t resemble him, it’s his life--details of his life that are, in large part, his business and his alone--tacked onto a character in a storybook.
He doesn’t sulk on the flight to Stockholm, but he does flip through both SkyMall and the in-flight magazine more than strictly necessary, and he barely resists ordering the world’s largest crossword puzzle. There’s a bare wall in the spare room that he might call the office if he ever did anything constituting work in it.
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