Fanfiction: Part of the Morning (1/2)
Title: Part of the Morning (1/2)
Writer: Sporadic_Writer
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Arthur/Eames, Mal/Cobb, Ariadne, Yusuf, Nash. Reference to Saito/Fischer.
Rating: R
Warnings, kinks & contents:[Spoiler (click to open)]Mentions of depression, suicide, drug misuse, self-harm, attempted murder.
Length: 16,711 words.
Author's note: I have read fanfiction in which a character other than Fischer was the subject of a dream, and I wondered how each character in turn would react to being haunted by a loved one. With those two things in mind, I wrote this story about Arthur and Eames. Naturally, this is AU, but the basic premise of active dreaming remains the same. On a more personal note, I'm really happy since this is the longest fanfiction that I've written thus far.
Summary: Eames died three months ago, but Arthur's still haunted by the guilt that he could have done something differently. His dreams range from the nightmarish to the bittersweet as he goes through the five stages of grief.
Every time Arthur falls asleep, he tells himself that he won’t be dreaming of Eames, and sometimes luck doesn’t make a liar out of him.
Arthur pulls on his threadbare t-shirt and climbs into bed. He’s so tired that the pictures on the walls have a soft blur to them despite his 20/20 vision. But still he closes his eyes with trepidation, and he sets the alarm on his watch for 3:00 am.
The blueness of the sky is so intense that it's almost fake looking, and the sun’s glare sets it off like a regular picture postcard. Leaning back, Arthur lifts a hand to shield his eyes from the sight. Warm hands wrap around his middle from the back, and he stutters out a laugh from the unexpected, ticklish sensation.
“That makes me really want to give you a squeeze,” a husky voice purrs against his ear.
Arthur grins out at the swimming pool that their balcony overlooks, and he pretends that he's only closing his eyes because of the sun. “If you want a teddy bear so bad, I’ll buy one for you,” he retorts. He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t want to; this is a good one; he doesn’t want to wreak it.
A bristly chin lands on his shoulder, scratching his cheek a bit, and the warm hold tightens until Arthur can feel the pressure against his rib cage.
“I want to squeeze you,” Eames sings softly, a bit nonsensically, his embrace growing more and more constricting until the breath begins to rasp from Arthur’s mouth and nose.
“I want to hold you tight and never let you go.
“I’ll squeeze you...and squeeze...until every single thing inside you...comes on out.”
Arthur wakes up with a gasp, his arms flailing, and then he hisses at the sudden coldness of his water glass getting knocked off the bedside table and soaking into his bed sheets.
Blood thundering in his ears, Arthur is barely aware of but grateful to the insistent beeping that drowns out his thoughts. He holds his head on his knees and wishes that he can just scream and cry and get all those toxic thoughts out. But he’s done that for weeks, and he is just empty now. He feels hollow and brittle, and he really thinks one single touch will shatter him for good.
When he feels the nausea subside, he checks his watch and sighs. He stares at the ceiling for hours and hours, eyes half-shut in a fitful doze, until he has to meet Mal and Dom for dinner.
Looking awkward, Dom sits on the buttery brown couch while Mal comes over with a rustle of her silk dress and hugs Arthur. He flinches even as he breathes in her familiar perfume; he tries not to think about last night. He just wants a good peaceful dinner.
“Oh, Arthur,” Mal sighs into his hair. “Look at you; you have such heavy bags under your eyes. You lied to us on the phone. You’re not sleeping at all, are you?”
She tilts his head up for a closer examination, and Dom gets up and puts an arm around her waist as he gently pulls her away.
“I think Arthur could really use a beer,” Dom suggests, and Arthur gratefully escapes to the kitchen, where he grabs a cold bottle from the fridge and presses it to his forehead. He hopes that Philippa and James are with their grandparents in France; he doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep up the happy-go-lucky uncle act with them.
Mal’s pasta is wonderful, and the lemon zest makes Arthur’s stomach growl with real appetite, and he almost fools himself into thinking it’s the same as many other dinners he had with Dom and Mal while he was a hungry, clueless grad student.
Dessert is banana tarte tatin that Dom picked up from the local French bakery, and Arthur’s picking at it when Mal sends Dom away to prepare the after-dinner cups of espresso.
“Arthur,” Mal says softly. “I know you don’t appreciate me asking my questions, but you truly look ill-in heart and in spirit.” She leans over to grip his hand tightly as her eyes look deeply into his.
“Tell me: do you dream about him?” Mal’s expression lets Arthur know that he won’t get anywhere pretending that she's asking about regular dreams.
“Sometimes.” Arthur shrugs and takes his hand back to play around with his dessert some more, his fork scraping painfully over the delicate porcelain. “They’re usually good dreams. It’s worth it for the ones that turn sour.” Understatement of the year.
Mal smiles sadly but with incredible understanding, and Arthur feels a bit guilty. “He was your lover. He completed you.”
“Yeah,” Arthur smiles back wanly and hopes they’re done with the interrogation.
Then Mal’s smile falls away, and she tightens her fingers around his, manicured nails digging in a bit too deeply. “But he shouldn’t haunt you.”
“He’s dead, Mal. We were together for five years. I can’t just forget about him, you know,” Arthur says coolly. He means for his words to sting.
Too bad Mal isn’t the easily daunted type.
“Don’t deliberately misunderstand me, Arthur. Bittersweet dreams will eventually heal your heart, but the ones that you seem to be having-” Mal trails off. “The insomnia is taking such a toll on your health. Dom and I worry about you.”
“I’m not on my death bed, Mal.”
She makes a rude noise and, clearly affronted by his irreverence, begins shifting the serving plates to begin the wash-up.
“Mal. Mal, it was just a few months ago. Every single day I wake up and want to just lie in bed because I know that I’m going to have to remember what happened. And at least, in these dreams, I can see him. If I really need help, I’ll get it. But this is the best way for me to mourn him. Okay?”
Mal looks doubtful, but Arthur’s pained expression keeps her from saying more. Dom, who was probably waiting out in the hallway, finally comes in bearing the espresso.
Arthur puts the heavy earmuffs on, and the whole world fades away as he aims at his target and pulls the trigger, again and again and again.
It feels good to have some control when his life seems to be spiraling out wildly from his reach. He wonders what he’ll do with the week of paid leave that his boss pressed on him. James, the senior manager, is unfortunately the heart-to-heart type, and upon hearing about Arthur’s loss in the gossipy break room, came over and insisted that Arthur take some time off. He didn't show it in his face, but Arthur could tell that James was disconcerted, and maybe disapproving, that he hadn't asked for time off earlier.
Arthur doesn’t need time off. The last thing he needs is more time to spend in the barren hotel room that he took after Eames’s death.
As Arthur waits for a new target to take the shredded one’s place, he looks down at his gun and thinks about the option. It’s tempting. He forces himself to raise the gun, aim ahead, and shoot at the rightful target.
He stops once he notices that his shots are clustering around the paper figure’s heart. He shakes his head in self-disgust. The symbolism is just too obvious.
He washes his face in the men’s room before checking his watch and deciding that he’ll need to speed shop if he intends to get to the university in time. He only has himself to blame for just tossing in a few pieces of clothing before running out of the house. And nothing can make him go back there.
“Arthur,” Miles calls to him from behind, and he turns around. Mal's father takes him by the shoulders and smiles kindly. “It is so good to see you again. You should come with Dom and Mal to visit us in Paris.”
Arthur tries to demur.
“Nonsense. Well, I know they’re waiting for you, so I’ll let you go. Don’t let them make you into their guinea pig.”
Arthur laughs weakly and leaves with some vague pleasantries, awkwardly avoiding the subject of Eames when Miles remembers to ask after his partner.
Dom comes to meet Arthur at the door, swiping his pass through the reader until the lock turns green with a little beep.
“Glad you found your way here,” Dom says. “We lost track of time arguing about the next step in the project.
“Mal can the stubbornest woman in the world,” he adds with a fond, exasperated shake of the head.
Arthur swallows the sudden lump in his throat. He used to get so irritated by Eames’s contrary attempts to change the Monopoly rules. He feels like a goddamn idiot now.
They’re walking towards the sleep room, where Mal is checking on the volunteers, when Dom stops abruptly, and Arthur almost slams into his back.
“Oh, crap!” Dom exclaims. “I forgot to ask you: Arthur, are you going to be okay with seeing Yusuf? He’s starting some contract work with our department this month, and I think he’s already arrived.”
Arthur stares at Dom and wants to be sick on the floor. His stomach twists up like a tortuous maze as he absorbs the news. He wants to leave. He can’t handle seeing Yusuf right now.
Coward, one side of him jeers. You have nothing to hide, another side whispers in weak support.
“Arthur?” Dom’s voice sounds far away but distinctly worried. “Arthur!”
Shaking himself out of the fugue state, Arthur blurts out, “It’s fine, Dom. I’m not bothered.”
He ignores Dom’s narrowed eyes and pushes past to open the office door with bravado that he’s on the verge of losing at any second.
Mal is bent over a table, talking softly with a dark curly-haired man in a rumpled coat, clearly just off the airplane. When he looks up and spots them, Arthur freezes, as the guilt rises up from his heart.
The pinched expression on Yusuf’s face gives way to a look of shock, which in turn is quickly replaced with anger. He stomps over to them, eyes darkening in severe displeasure, and he shakes his finger at Arthur.
“You! How dare you be here!” Yusuf snarls, before abruptly laughing and grabbing Arthur in a friendly headlock.
“No calls or e-mail, and then you scare me like this, with a zombie face, out of nowhere?” Yusuf laughs again.
Relief floods Arthur’s veins, and he feels weak-kneed, as Yusuf lets go of his neck. “I wasn’t sure what to say. You and Eames were friends for so long, and-”
“Yeah.” Yusuf’s manic grin turns flat, and he searches for the right words before just hastily changing the topic. “Yeah, he, he was fun to be around-hey, so, you just visiting, or have Bonnie and Clyde hooked you into this too?”
Arthur shrugs as he automatically smoothes out his ruffled hair, grimacing at the feel of dried hair gel. “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is. Dom pretty much insisted that I come.”
Dom holds his hands up defenselessly. “Hey, let’s not shoot the messenger. Mal thought that you might want to know what we’re doing here.”
Yusuf raises a curious eyebrow and turns back to Arthur. “Is your firm doing some research work for the university?”
“No-”
“Yes,” Mal interrupts with a beautiful smile, having glided over to join the group. “Arthur’s going to hear all about Project Catharsis, and he can let us know if his company is interested.”
Arthur glares at Mal. He has no idea what Mal and Dom are doing right now at the university, but he has no intention of joining if it has anything to do with trauma or mourning or any of that bullshit.
“I actually can’t stay,” Arthur lies with a bright smile and no compunctions. He tries to look as sincere and guileless as possible. “I decided that I could use some professional help after all. To get over the accident. I made an appointment with a therapist, Dr. Cara Brown. But she’s in big demand, so I need to get going.”
Mal is starting to scowl at his admittedly weak excuse, but Dom just nods with a faint smile and offers, “Maybe some other time then.”
Mal whirls on him, but then they share one of those secret looks that only couples share-and Arthur’s heart bleeds at the thought-and Mal shakes her head resignedly. She still looks angry, but she graciously kisses Arthur on the cheek, and he takes the gentle sign of affection with him as a charm as he drives back to his hotel.
He’s swimming, paddling in a giant swimming pool that seems endless. First he heads towards the right, then the left, then forward, then back; his changes in direction seem pointless, and his efforts seem interminable.
He tells himself not to be a baby, and he switches from free-style to butterfly to sidestroke, as he tries to ignore the strain in his muscles. He tries floating, but every time he turns onto his back or stomach, he starts sinking like a rock.
He’s exhausted, ready to give up, and almost hysterical at the thought of drowning, lagging in the warm, chlorinated water, when he reaches the railing, and he puts a hand on the concrete above his head.
A sneaker clad foot lands on his head; the pressure is barely noticeable, but Arthur looks up into familiar eyes.
“Hello, Arthur. Darling. Love of my life.” The apparition smiles coldly, and Arthur flinches at the hatred he can see in its eyes.
“Eames.”
“Back to surnames already, love? And me dead in the ground for a mere three months. I do wonder-where is your heart? I know I never found it.” The bitterness makes it sound just like Eames during one of their arguments, and Arthur feels it like a punch in the gut.
“You always hated your first name,” Arthur says helplessly, unable to say a word in his defense even though the projection is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Eames kneels down, and he puts on a rough hand on Arthur’s chin. The apparition's hostility seems to fade, and as their eyes meet, they fall into one of those uncomfortably intimate gazes that always made Arthur fidget, thinking that life shouldn’t be like a daytime movie. Now Arthur is happy to enjoy the sappiness of it all.
Eames’s hand strokes down to Arthur’s neck, and cups the back of his head. Their foreheads touch, and the tears prickle at Arthur’s eyes. It's a little disquieting though. Eames’s nails are a bit sharp, and Arthur puts a hand on Eames’s to stop them from jabbing into him so much.
The nails dig deeper-they’re sinking into his neck- and suddenly the comforting touch hurts. Long fingers, stained with ink, come fully around his neck and wrap around, and once again, Arthur can’t breathe. The air whooshes out of his lungs in one squeeze, and Arthur’s barely hearing it when Eames says with a dark hint of satisfaction: “Now you know what I felt.”
Arthur wakes up to the beeping of his watch, and he huddles under the blankets for a near-hour before a knock on the door has him startling out of bed.
“Maid service!”
“Come back later!” he yells, heart thumping like a rabbit. He wants to stay in bed the rest of the day, but he's sick of himself, and he eventually throws back the covers and stumbles across the carpet to the bathroom.
It’s already morning. He flicks on the mildest light and starts the cold water running. He splashes some onto his face and then hisses at the incredible burning sensation across his neck. He catches a glimpse of red in the mirror, and he lifts his head to get a better look.
Holy shit.
...
Holding a bath towel to his neck, Arthur ignores the strange looks he receives as he looks over the staircase, finally catching sight of the slight young woman he's been waiting for.
Ariadne looks around the hotel foyer, and Arthur can see the faint furrow between her brows, at odds with her open features and young face. She’s a play in contrast, Eames would always remark, the first time appreciatively, then at later times, mock-salaciously to invite a jealous reaction from Arthur.
Ariadne catches sight of him on her second go-around, and she storms up to him, quietly furious but unwilling to make a scene in public.
Thank God, Arthur thinks.
“Arthur! Why didn’t you call me back? You sounded like you were dying-and, and what’s with that towel around your neck?”
Reluctantly, Arthur pulls the towel away enough to give her a glimpse of the half-inch long gouge marks. She stares for five seconds before she takes off her scarf, wraps it around his neck like a tourniquet, and hustles him to her blue jeep, which she left idling at the sidewalk.
“You’re asking to get car-jacked,” Arthur observes. He tries to loosen the scarf a little, but Ariadne smacks his hand down and punches him hard on the shoulder.
“Keep that around your neck,” she orders, as she fiddles with the GPS mounted in the middle of the dashboard. “Where’s the nearest hospital?”
“Third and Capital.”
She shakes her head in mute distress every time she takes a peek at him, and Arthur has to keep urging her to keep her eyes on the road.
“We promised to give each other a call whenever, with no questions asked, but you never take me up on it until after you’re out of college? You've lost your adult cred.” Her tone is teasing, but she’s biting her lip, and Arthur can see that she’s definitely freaked out.
Oddly enough, he feels pretty calm. Even with the little cuts in his throat, he feels a lot better than he has in days. But he probably shouldn’t share that train of thought with the E.R. doctor assigned to patch him up.
He doesn’t know what Dr. P-something told Ariadne, but when he gets out, she’s standing there with Dom (who looks really weird with his unshaven chin and bleary eyes), and they both look at him like he just tried to commit suicide.
He tries a smile. “Hey.”
Dom looks at him, horrified and a little uncomprehending. “Jeezus, Arthur! You had to get thirty stitches. Thirty! And Ariadne said some if those gashes were more than an inch long.”
“No, they weren’t,” Arthur tries to object after some deliberation. They were really closer to three-quarters of an inch. But Dom’s face is unimpressed with the semantics.
“I need coffee. I had to drive him over here at 4:00 in the morning,” Ariadne announces; she points a finger at Dom while she walks backward to the hospital cafeteria. “You have at him first, and then it’s my turn.”
Dom doesn’t say anything for a while, so they just sit in the lounge quietly while they wait for Arthur's antibiotics prescription to be filled. Arthur has no idea what to say. He didn’t have blood in his nails; he didn’t attack himself. But he didn’t check his fountain pens, shaving kit, breakfast tray from yesterday. There are myriad objects that he could have used to do this to himself while in the depths of restless sleep.
“I want to tell you about Project Catharsis,” Dom says abruptly, still looking at his clasped hands. “It’s for people like you. People who are caught in the grips of a painful event that they can’t relinquish.”
Arthur listens despite himself. When Dom commits himself to sounding like the academic that he is, he naturally compels an incredible amount of belief and attention in others.
“Mal and I currently have three volunteers. I can’t give you that much information about them, of course, due to privacy issues, but I can tell you that one lost her father, one lost his sister, and one lost his lover.” Dom’s voice softens on the last one, and Arthur can tell that it’s as much for him as for Dom himself.
“Mal and I have been doing some research into lucid dreaming. The problem with traumatic events is that they roam in a person’s subconscious and come out most prevalently in night terrors since dreaming is the brain’s way of cleaning house. Being an active dreamer can help you take control of the dream and make a positive impact on what happens.”
Dom looks intently at Arthur, but he doesn’t make the proposal.
Arthur shifts and looks out the window at the still dark early morning sky. Everything looks so peaceful, and he misses that. He misses being able to walk around without thoughts of Eames dimming everything he sees; he wants to fall asleep and wake up refreshed instead of a trembling mess. He hasn’t felt any peace for a while.
“Maybe I’ll give it a try,” Arthur finally says.
Mal and Dom don’t give him any time to regret his lukewarm acquiescence. The next day, they have him come into the sleep center, where he lies down on a bed that reminds him of the hospital. Mal herself attaches the sensors to his head and chest with aplomb while her eyes look at him with softness.
They review the sleeping techniques that Arthur should practice during this trial session, and Arthur feels so tense that he doubts he could fall asleep, especially not in an unfamiliar room, on a somewhat flimsy bed, being observed in a lab.
Mal strokes his forehead, gracefully avoiding the sensors stuck there; she seems oddly maternal, and Arthur remembers her old fears about motherhood, about not being ready to nurture a young life. Phillipa and James seemed to have smoothened out any uncertain edges.
Dom comes up and takes off his Zenith watch, a gift from his favorite uncle before the man died; he puts it on Arthur’s left wrist.
“What-?”
Dom tightens the strap to fit Arthur’s narrower wrist. “You haven’t been wearing your watch, but you’re used to checking the time. See if you can remember and do it in the dream. That’s going to be your best bet to gain lucidity and control.”
“That watch is worth $3,000.”
Dom shrugs cavalierly. “$4,000. Don’t flail in your sleep, and it’ll be fine.”
Mal keeps brushing her fingers over Arthur’s temples, and the smooth back-and forth starts to lull him to sleep. He blinks once, twice, a bit affronted that a bit of petting is so soothing. Man, the sleep deprivation from the past couple of nights is really getting to him.
Arthur wakes up in a familiar place that he can’t quite recognize. He wanders around, touching the little knickknacks, and he realizes, with some dread and some nostalgia, that he’s actually in Eames’s old apartment, a broken down brownstone building that he gave up after they decided to move in together and bought a townhouse in the suburbs.
He misses their place, and he wants to go back there. But he can’t. Not when every single thing in every room makes him want to scream and start a bonfire.
The living room seems shrunken, but Arthur doesn’t notice. He gives Eames’s favorite porcelain figure a caress and moves onto the bedroom. He sits there, hands scrunching up the old throw that Eames liked to use as a coverlet instead of a proper comforter. The hot chocolate stain on the very top edge reminds Arthur of the kitchen, warm, smelling of spices, and Arthur makes his way there. Maybe he could brew a cup of tea. Even though he hated tea.
He sits down at the small, wobbly dining room table, and his eyes catch on the kitchen timer on the oven. With a jolt, Arthur remembers his promise to Dom, and he checks his watch, marking the oddly spinning hands even as he becomes fully conscious of his dream state.
When Arthur wakes up, he can hear people talking. He recognizes Mal and Dom’s voices, but the softly accented one has an authoritative, nearly arrogant, air that people don’t usually use around them.
The discussion, or argument, falls to a halt when Mal ends it with an abrupt gesture, opening the sleeping room door with more force than usual.
Carefully gauging whether he feels woozy or not, Arthur sits up on the bed, and he gratefully drinks the glass of water that Mal hands him. It’s spiced with a little lemon, and it washes refreshingly down his dry throat.
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Three hours,” Mal answers with some satisfaction and asks a question of her own. “Did you dream about him? Eames?”
“No-maybe. I dreamed about his old apartment. But he didn’t show up there.” Arthur tries to curtail the disappointment in his tone.
Mal looks thoughtful. “It’s possible that your trying to become a more lucid dreamer is strengthening your unconscious desire to not see him.”
Arthur’s head snaps up. “I do want to see him.”
Mal smoothes out her skirt and then turns and sits down on the bed, next to Arthur. It is a bit cramped, and her cheek rests against his. He is reminded of the old days before Mal and Dom became a couple, when all three of them would snuggle on the couch in a platonic pile of limbs.
“You said that your dreams of Eames have been growing more and more violent. No one wants to remember their lover that way,” she says gently. “Don’t feel guilty for wanting to see him as he really was.”
Arthur shrugs a shoulder. He wants to go back to sleep, find that dream hidden in the recesses of his brain, and drag Eames out, kicking and screaming, if need be.
Dom finishes the discussion with the mystery visitor, drags over a swivel chair from outside the sleeping room, and plops down, clearly ready for the day to end.
“Problem?” Arthur asks to see how much Dom and Mal are willing to let him know about the more confidential parts of Project Catharsis. For all the time that Dom and Mal spend on their various university projects, Arthur doesn’t know too much about what they do, and that has to change if he is going to go through with this.
Dom rolls his eyes. “We have someone who wants to give us as a referral to a friend, and it’s tempting; if his friend’s father issues work out, then he’d be willing to bankroll a more ambitious study, but he’s asking for a guarantee, and we can’t give that.
“Not even to you, Arthur, and you’re our friend,” Dom adds, a somber look settling into his eyes.
Somehow Arthur finds Dom’s confession reassuring. He can't trust a proclaimed panacea. “I know, Dom; it’s okay. I want to give it a try anyway.”
Dom studies him with narrowed eyes before nodding and handing him a small bottle of clacking light brown pills. “Vitamin B6. Take it according to the instructions, and you’ll find that your dreams will start getting more vivid.”
Arthur takes the bottle and shakes it. “That’s it?”
“No guarantees,” Dom reminds him. “Although we’ve had some dreamers tell us that the dreams seem to get longer and more coherent. That’s probably more to do with them gaining more control over their dreaming though.”
That little white bottle gleams softly at Arthur with promise.
Arthur is sitting alone at a cozy table for two outside the soft-lit Thai restaurant. A waiter walks past, setting down two glasses of Chardonnay. The rich light gold color reflects against the light eyes that make contact with him as the owner sits down on the other chair with slightly insolent insouciance.
“I’m late. I know. I was fleshing out a character, and I couldn’t stop. I would have lost it otherwise.”
Arthur can count at least two, maybe three, innuendoes in what Eames says.
“You couldn’t even pick up the phone?” Arthur asks, but with resigned amusement, as he takes a swig of the Chardonnay.
Eames glances at the subsiding level in Arthur’s glass before flicking his eyes up to meet Arthur’s. “Are you very angry?”
“No,” Arthur says, and he’s being honest. The urge to drink deeply and quickly has taken him by surprise too, and he puts the glass down a little farther to the side and drops his hand into his lap.
Eames purses his lips but apparently decides to take Arthur’s words at face value, for fear of starting a fight for real.
“Well, then,” he says. “I’m a bit hurt that you didn’t come rushing home. I could have been in a faint.” He flutters his eyes dramatically, mouth in a moue, like a Victorian damsel suffering from heatstroke.
Arthur laughs. “If I ran home every single time you didn’t pick up, I’d never leave the house. I called three times, by the way. So, again, my question: you couldn’t pick up the phone even once and let me know that you’d be late?”
Eames looks at Arthur seriously, lips in a line. “If you called three times, and I didn’t pick up, you didn’t worry about me?”
The laugh dries up in Arthur’s throat, and the awful, unnamed feeling hits again, and Arthur almost lunges for the wine glass.
“I-”
“Well,” Eames continues on, with a rueful smile, “No point in thinking about what didn’t happen. You’re here. I’m here. Let’s start dinner?”
Arthur hesitates, but he caves in gratefully. “Yeah, you’re here. You’re…okay.”
Eames puts a hand on Arthur’s, and the warm solid weight grounds Arthur and keeps him from floating off in an alcoholic daze.
Arthur looks at the figure before him and starts laughing again, utter relief filling his body, even though he doesn't know why. “I don’t know what’s with me right now. I feel like I’m dreaming or something.”
Eames doesn’t laugh. He flinches.
Arthur’s heart begins to sink, as the horrible unnamed feeling begins to grow. But he suppresses the urge, the promise, to look at his watch.
Instead, he grabs Eames’s wrist and asks, “Am I dreaming?”
“No.” Lying, desperate.
Arthur opens his eyes.
He jams his hands against his eyes for a long moment, until he sees only a white haze from the pressure, and then he grabs his keys.
The percussive beat of the heavy metal music pounds into his head, and Arthur shrugs and pours another shot down his throat. He feels heavy and not a little bit woozy. Maybe he’s reaching the inner limits of alcohol poisoning, but at least he can barely remember why he’s here in this dive.
“Hello, darling.”
The tone is just right. But even Arthur can tell her that the eyeliner is smudged and the dress, which seems to be lacking falsies, doesn’t quite give the right amount of implied curves.
But it is a good try. And Eames showed no small number of amateurish attempts before he could really fool people. He tricked Arthur just once and never let him forget it.
“Hi,” Arthur replies tonelessly, but politely gestures for the bartender to bring the woman a drink.
“So, why are you all alone tonight?” the woman purrs, golden curls flipping over her dark shoulders naturally as she tilts her head and sips the Cosmopolitan.
Sullenly, Arthur shrugs. He’s not in the mood for company, but nostalgia is hitting him hard right now and rejecting this woman would take more energy than he can expend.
“Bad day?” She asks, with sincere sympathy in her heavy-lashed eyes. “Maybe bad year?”
“Bad year,” Arthur allows and tries to toss back another shot, but he misses, and the vodka spills in cold tendrils down his throat. He shudders uncontrollably, and a warm strong hand holds his shoulder firmly.
“Hey, really, you don’t look so good. You want me to call you a cab?”
The bartender, who has been eyeing Arthur dubiously for the past half hour, makes his decision and comes over to take away the shot glass. “All right, buddy, I’m cutting you off. I don’t need a corpse here come morning.”
Arthur stumbles away from the counter and nearly falls over the stool, so he doesn’t complain when the woman wraps an arm around his waist and holds him upright as she dials her phone.
Arthur stares blankly at the diamante stickers glittering like blurry stars and the beads clacking together as the woman shifts her phone against her ear.
“-address?”
“Huh?” The tiny corner of Arthur’s sober mind is impressed at making the sound that his old English teacher always called ‘that cow noise.’
“Your address,” the woman repeats patiently, and Arthur mumbles their address automatically and then falls into a doze until the taxi stops rather abruptly, and dulcet-toned cussing fills the air, as Arthur is half-carried to the front door.
Arthur inserts the key by jabbing viciously at the lock set until chance favors him. The door swings open, and the porch light illuminates the slice of living room visible. Squishy red-checked armchair with knitted throw. Multi-colored Pollock knockoff that Eames found at a flea market in Wyoming. Glass-top coffee table covered with dust bunnies and books.
Revulsion hits Arthur hard as he remembers that he never intended to come back here.
Dumbly, he walks deeper into the house and kneels down right on the carpet near the kitchen and just stares all around him at the well loved surroundings that he used to consider their home.
He reaches out to caress the pile of novels on the coffee table, and his lips quirk, despite his malaise. He was there for all those books; he watched fondly as Eames envisioned characters, inhabited their lives, and wrote them down on paper.
He just stood there as his lover lost his mind.
Arthur used to marvel at the way that Eames could create new people from the ether, and he was admiring up until the day he realized that sometimes Eames seemed to get lost in his characters. He could so enwrap himself in their mannerisms, their thoughts, their experiences that he seemed a bit schizophrenic at times.
Arthur swallows roughly, as tumultuous emotions well up, and he feels stomach acid making its way up his throat, burning and sharply sour.
“Are you going to be okay if I leave you here?” The interruption startles Arthur, and he realizes that the drag queen has taken off his wig and is scratching tiredly at his scalp.
“I’m fine,” Arthur says automatically, and he wishes that he’s getting sober enough to not make that statement a lie, but he’s exhausted, and the six, seven shots that he took back at the bar are making his head spin, and he thinks he’s going to regret the excess…
He's hang gliding.
He's not sure how he knows that since the closest he's gotten to hang gliding was looking at pictures of it in his dentist's office and wondering if that really fit author he met at one of Dom and Mal's parties would find a hobby like that impressive.
Right now he's swooping and soaring with the soft, gentle swells of wind, and he feels so at peace with himself. The sky is neither dark nor light, and he couldn't gauge the time of day or the season even if it occurs to him to try.
He can't see anything though, and he wonders mildly if his eyes are closed, and he tries opening them, but nope, he still can't see anything. He feels vaguely perturbed, but he's too comfortable with the soft breeze ruffling his hair like a lover's hand and the kiss of something like sunlight warming his face.
Something still niggles though in the back of his mind. It's a lot like driving somewhere in the car and then falling abruptly convinced that he's forgotten something back at home and needs to rush back.
He's not in a place for rushing though. He continues to fly vaguely upward, content that he has no worries, no fears-not really, anyway, but still, that niggle prickles like a burr in his sock, and he drifts back to the dark center of his consciousness.
And he remembers.
Eames.
He plummets to the ground.
It’s the most obnoxious ring tone. Ever. Arthur wants to take a hammer to it. But that would require getting up to find the hammer. Ugh.
“Uh, hey, your cell phone is ringing.”
Arthur forces his gummy eyes open to see a scrawny guy wearing a tank top and threadbare shorts standing in front of his TV. Before Arthur could fully give into his heart attack, the guy backs away with his hands held up in harmless pantomime.
“Look, I just came home with you to make sure you wouldn’t asphyxiate in your own vomit, and I had nothing to do with your living room. Okay? In case you don’t remember last night.”
Arthur surreptitiously checks below the afghan and is utterly relieved that he’s apparently still in his wrinkled jeans and button-down shirt.
The guy-the blonde from last night-looks eager to just be done with the unwarranted Good Samaritan act and get away.
“Uh, yeah,” Arthur ventures before his cell phone starts ringing again hysterically.
Shit, Arthur thinks. 10 voicemails. He skips through the missed calls list and winces at the mix of names.
Reluctantly, he listens to some of the messages.
“Arthur, I’ve been knocking on your hotel room door for the past half hour. Where are you? Are you in there? You’re not going to do something drastic, are you? Oh, crap, I’m going to call the hotel desk. Serves you right if we find something embarra-”
Message saved.
“It’s me again. I called Dom and Mal, and they’ve been looking for you too. Something about dream thera-”
Message saved.
“Arthur. It’s Dom-and Mal-She’s driving. We’re in our SUV, and we have James and Phillipa in the back, and we are looking for you. If you’ve done something to yourself, we’re going to hurt you. A lot. When we find you. And if you haven’t, well...Damnnit, Arthur, I told you to call me before you took the B6!”
Message saved.
“Ah, Arthur? Yusuf here. It's really awkward, but we both miss the bastard, so maybe we could go for a drink sometime, talk over good times, you know-”
Message saved.
Arthur thinks that Ariadne is at least less physically intimidating than the others, so he plans to dial her number first, but a flurry of knocks sounding on his front door tells him that he doesn’t have to bother. He glances around the chaotic room and wonders if Ariadne would exercise tact or start zooming in on the broken glass and torn up novels.
Ariadne doesn’t pull her punches. He should have remembered.
“Fuck, ow.” Arthur rubs his face; the blow wasn’t that hard, but it doesn’t do much for his hangover.
“I thought you killed yourself! And so did everyone else! You better let Dom and Mal know that you’re okay because if they run out of gas and get stranded checking every hospital and morgue in the area-!”
“I know, I’m sorry.” Arthur starts picking up the tattered novels on the floor. He tries to take his time and smooth out the pages, but he gives up after Ariadne almost cuts a finger on a hidden shard of glass when she tries to help.
Arthur surveys the floor and barely stifles a sigh. He really went to town on the coffee table, and the glass fragments are everywhere.
“What happened last night?” Ariadne’s voice is soft, like she’s talking to a wounded animal, and she watches him warily.
“I wanted to tell Eames that I hated him,” Arthur says flatly. “But he wasn’t here, so I took it out on his books.”
They sit quietly on the floor until Ariadne breaks the silence. “You blame his books for what happened to him?”
Arthur looks away. He’ll donate those books. He doesn’t want a single copy. If he could buy out all the bookstores and burn their stocks, he’d do it. “I blame them and me.”
Dom doesn’t sound happy when Arthur calls him back, but he grudgingly agrees to yell at Arthur later since he and Mal have to take James and Phillipa to the Pancake Breakfast fundraiser at their elementary school. Arthur wonders apprehensively if Dom would ask for the bottle of B6 back. He shakes the little bottle thoughtfully.
Lunch at her favorite bistro calms Ariadne down, and later, he waves her off when she leaves for her studio class. He waits a few minutes and then leaves the house with a big bag of Eames’s books. He drives several miles away to the city dump and stares at the large dumpsters filled with their heavy, towering, stinking piles of debris and waste.
He can’t do it.
Instead, he takes the books to the local library, where he sits outside the entrance on one of the concrete blocks and sorts through the bag. Some of the books are really badly torn, and Arthur doubts that the library would accept them. Those he leaves outside. It’s a nice warm day, and people might like a free book or two.
The rest he hands over to the librarian manning the used books shop on the first floor just past the front desk.
The librarian smiles as her eyes fall on the top novel. “Oh, my! The Minotaur’s Wife by Eames. He’s quite a talented author even if he's not very well known. I heard that he has a new one coming out in another month or so.” She gave a tinkly laugh. “Or maybe it already has. I just came back from Bolivia, so I’m afraid I’m still catching up on all sorts of news.”
Arthur’s smile turns out more than part grimace, and he practically shoves the bag into the woman’s arms before he rushes out the door. Outside the library, he slows his pace to a walk, and he wanders around the grounds for several restless minutes until his leftover headache pushes him to settle down at the small wishing well adorned with real ivy and filled with rusted nickels and pennies.
Whenever Eames went to the library for research, he always tossed a quarter into the well despite Arthur’s open scoffing.
“It’s for good karma, love,” Eames would explain lightly, stopping Arthur’s protest about the actual definition of karma with a kiss.
Then Arthur would push Eames away and roll his eyes and point out that a wishing well here isn’t like a real wishing well in Ireland or somewhere else with potential wild magic left.
And then Eames would tell Arthur sotto voce not to make assumptions about Europeans, thank you very much. Their magic was always potent, he would explain with a leer.
Oh, of course, Arthur would widen his eyes in apparent wonder at the revelation.
On and on they would go. A two-part comedy act, Dom once called them.
Now Arthur rustles in his jeans pocket and empties all his loose change into the small abyss, and with each soft watery plink, Arthur asks and wishes and pleads and begs.
But it’s just a wishing well after all.
The writer’s guiding principle is to create from what you know. Eames created various characters based on aspects of family members, friends, acquaintances, and random people he saw on the street as he sat in the café, watching the streets for inspiration.
The Minotaur's Wife is Eames's last published book. The young woman on the cover has nearly waist-long auburn hair and rather some height, but she looks as though she could be Ariadne’s sister.
Arthur was skeptical when Eames first sketched out his characters. He crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe to Eames’s study. “Don’t you think you should check with Ariadne before you start putting her into your book?”
Eames didn’t look up, busily inking in the hair with brown ink, then adding reddish highlights to transform a rather flat character into a radiant one.
“I didn’t check with you, Yusuf, Mal, Dom…in fact, Dom should be the one to call me out; I made his character a wife-murdering delusional sociopath. Suppose it doesn’t matter though; he thought it was funny, and he still has the copy I gave him.
“Anyway, what about that hermit magician, Norbert? I based him on a few parts of you, but it didn't bother you, right? It’s not you in there, really, is it?”
Arthur snorted and chose to avoid the tangent. “Okay, so, Ariadne gets to be the Minotaur’s lover, but how does that work? Doesn’t she have to go off with Theseus?”
Eames snorted as he started drawing the bare lines of the Greek hero, Theseus. “The ungrateful bastard leaves her on a deserted island for the god of wine to make off with. No, I’ll give my Ariadne a brain and a spine.”
The conversation stopped there when the doorbell rang, and Arthur went to pick up the Italian takeout for dinner. They got sidetracked talking about new grouting for the bathrooms and never got back to their original discussion.
Arthur never read the book. He wanted to, but the reviews came out, and Eames deleted all his files, and refused to sign for it when the publisher sent over a complimentary copy.
Arthur tosses the novel onto the kitchenette table and goes to the refrigerator, pulling out a cold beer, then changing his mind and grabbing another one. He doesn't feel like being sober for this.
Opening the book feels like a betrayal, but Arthur needs to read it. He would have done it as soon as he got it from the bargain bin at the local bookstore, but Eames rarely left the house then, and Arthur didn’t want a fight in case his lover found out about the purchase.
Now he reads about King Mino’s wild-spirited daughter who secretly wanders the mazes by herself, horrified by her father's sacrifices, enthralled by the moralistic minotaur. Stopping after a few chapters in, Arthur likes the story so far.
He never really liked fantasy and romance, but he can tell quality writing when he sees it. And as biased as it sounds, he can’t agree with the various critics who called the book insipid and unconvincing. He wishes he could have read it earlier and told Eames honestly that the public was full of idiots who couldn’t appreciate good literature.
Instead of taking a hiatus to recoup from the blow, Eames threw himself into writing another manuscript, the one he never completed before his suicide.
Part 2
Writer: Sporadic_Writer
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Arthur/Eames, Mal/Cobb, Ariadne, Yusuf, Nash. Reference to Saito/Fischer.
Rating: R
Warnings, kinks & contents:[Spoiler (click to open)]Mentions of depression, suicide, drug misuse, self-harm, attempted murder.
Length: 16,711 words.
Author's note: I have read fanfiction in which a character other than Fischer was the subject of a dream, and I wondered how each character in turn would react to being haunted by a loved one. With those two things in mind, I wrote this story about Arthur and Eames. Naturally, this is AU, but the basic premise of active dreaming remains the same. On a more personal note, I'm really happy since this is the longest fanfiction that I've written thus far.
Summary: Eames died three months ago, but Arthur's still haunted by the guilt that he could have done something differently. His dreams range from the nightmarish to the bittersweet as he goes through the five stages of grief.
Every time Arthur falls asleep, he tells himself that he won’t be dreaming of Eames, and sometimes luck doesn’t make a liar out of him.
Arthur pulls on his threadbare t-shirt and climbs into bed. He’s so tired that the pictures on the walls have a soft blur to them despite his 20/20 vision. But still he closes his eyes with trepidation, and he sets the alarm on his watch for 3:00 am.
The blueness of the sky is so intense that it's almost fake looking, and the sun’s glare sets it off like a regular picture postcard. Leaning back, Arthur lifts a hand to shield his eyes from the sight. Warm hands wrap around his middle from the back, and he stutters out a laugh from the unexpected, ticklish sensation.
“That makes me really want to give you a squeeze,” a husky voice purrs against his ear.
Arthur grins out at the swimming pool that their balcony overlooks, and he pretends that he's only closing his eyes because of the sun. “If you want a teddy bear so bad, I’ll buy one for you,” he retorts. He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t want to; this is a good one; he doesn’t want to wreak it.
A bristly chin lands on his shoulder, scratching his cheek a bit, and the warm hold tightens until Arthur can feel the pressure against his rib cage.
“I want to squeeze you,” Eames sings softly, a bit nonsensically, his embrace growing more and more constricting until the breath begins to rasp from Arthur’s mouth and nose.
“I want to hold you tight and never let you go.
“I’ll squeeze you...and squeeze...until every single thing inside you...comes on out.”
Arthur wakes up with a gasp, his arms flailing, and then he hisses at the sudden coldness of his water glass getting knocked off the bedside table and soaking into his bed sheets.
Blood thundering in his ears, Arthur is barely aware of but grateful to the insistent beeping that drowns out his thoughts. He holds his head on his knees and wishes that he can just scream and cry and get all those toxic thoughts out. But he’s done that for weeks, and he is just empty now. He feels hollow and brittle, and he really thinks one single touch will shatter him for good.
When he feels the nausea subside, he checks his watch and sighs. He stares at the ceiling for hours and hours, eyes half-shut in a fitful doze, until he has to meet Mal and Dom for dinner.
Looking awkward, Dom sits on the buttery brown couch while Mal comes over with a rustle of her silk dress and hugs Arthur. He flinches even as he breathes in her familiar perfume; he tries not to think about last night. He just wants a good peaceful dinner.
“Oh, Arthur,” Mal sighs into his hair. “Look at you; you have such heavy bags under your eyes. You lied to us on the phone. You’re not sleeping at all, are you?”
She tilts his head up for a closer examination, and Dom gets up and puts an arm around her waist as he gently pulls her away.
“I think Arthur could really use a beer,” Dom suggests, and Arthur gratefully escapes to the kitchen, where he grabs a cold bottle from the fridge and presses it to his forehead. He hopes that Philippa and James are with their grandparents in France; he doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep up the happy-go-lucky uncle act with them.
Mal’s pasta is wonderful, and the lemon zest makes Arthur’s stomach growl with real appetite, and he almost fools himself into thinking it’s the same as many other dinners he had with Dom and Mal while he was a hungry, clueless grad student.
Dessert is banana tarte tatin that Dom picked up from the local French bakery, and Arthur’s picking at it when Mal sends Dom away to prepare the after-dinner cups of espresso.
“Arthur,” Mal says softly. “I know you don’t appreciate me asking my questions, but you truly look ill-in heart and in spirit.” She leans over to grip his hand tightly as her eyes look deeply into his.
“Tell me: do you dream about him?” Mal’s expression lets Arthur know that he won’t get anywhere pretending that she's asking about regular dreams.
“Sometimes.” Arthur shrugs and takes his hand back to play around with his dessert some more, his fork scraping painfully over the delicate porcelain. “They’re usually good dreams. It’s worth it for the ones that turn sour.” Understatement of the year.
Mal smiles sadly but with incredible understanding, and Arthur feels a bit guilty. “He was your lover. He completed you.”
“Yeah,” Arthur smiles back wanly and hopes they’re done with the interrogation.
Then Mal’s smile falls away, and she tightens her fingers around his, manicured nails digging in a bit too deeply. “But he shouldn’t haunt you.”
“He’s dead, Mal. We were together for five years. I can’t just forget about him, you know,” Arthur says coolly. He means for his words to sting.
Too bad Mal isn’t the easily daunted type.
“Don’t deliberately misunderstand me, Arthur. Bittersweet dreams will eventually heal your heart, but the ones that you seem to be having-” Mal trails off. “The insomnia is taking such a toll on your health. Dom and I worry about you.”
“I’m not on my death bed, Mal.”
She makes a rude noise and, clearly affronted by his irreverence, begins shifting the serving plates to begin the wash-up.
“Mal. Mal, it was just a few months ago. Every single day I wake up and want to just lie in bed because I know that I’m going to have to remember what happened. And at least, in these dreams, I can see him. If I really need help, I’ll get it. But this is the best way for me to mourn him. Okay?”
Mal looks doubtful, but Arthur’s pained expression keeps her from saying more. Dom, who was probably waiting out in the hallway, finally comes in bearing the espresso.
Arthur puts the heavy earmuffs on, and the whole world fades away as he aims at his target and pulls the trigger, again and again and again.
It feels good to have some control when his life seems to be spiraling out wildly from his reach. He wonders what he’ll do with the week of paid leave that his boss pressed on him. James, the senior manager, is unfortunately the heart-to-heart type, and upon hearing about Arthur’s loss in the gossipy break room, came over and insisted that Arthur take some time off. He didn't show it in his face, but Arthur could tell that James was disconcerted, and maybe disapproving, that he hadn't asked for time off earlier.
Arthur doesn’t need time off. The last thing he needs is more time to spend in the barren hotel room that he took after Eames’s death.
As Arthur waits for a new target to take the shredded one’s place, he looks down at his gun and thinks about the option. It’s tempting. He forces himself to raise the gun, aim ahead, and shoot at the rightful target.
He stops once he notices that his shots are clustering around the paper figure’s heart. He shakes his head in self-disgust. The symbolism is just too obvious.
He washes his face in the men’s room before checking his watch and deciding that he’ll need to speed shop if he intends to get to the university in time. He only has himself to blame for just tossing in a few pieces of clothing before running out of the house. And nothing can make him go back there.
“Arthur,” Miles calls to him from behind, and he turns around. Mal's father takes him by the shoulders and smiles kindly. “It is so good to see you again. You should come with Dom and Mal to visit us in Paris.”
Arthur tries to demur.
“Nonsense. Well, I know they’re waiting for you, so I’ll let you go. Don’t let them make you into their guinea pig.”
Arthur laughs weakly and leaves with some vague pleasantries, awkwardly avoiding the subject of Eames when Miles remembers to ask after his partner.
Dom comes to meet Arthur at the door, swiping his pass through the reader until the lock turns green with a little beep.
“Glad you found your way here,” Dom says. “We lost track of time arguing about the next step in the project.
“Mal can the stubbornest woman in the world,” he adds with a fond, exasperated shake of the head.
Arthur swallows the sudden lump in his throat. He used to get so irritated by Eames’s contrary attempts to change the Monopoly rules. He feels like a goddamn idiot now.
They’re walking towards the sleep room, where Mal is checking on the volunteers, when Dom stops abruptly, and Arthur almost slams into his back.
“Oh, crap!” Dom exclaims. “I forgot to ask you: Arthur, are you going to be okay with seeing Yusuf? He’s starting some contract work with our department this month, and I think he’s already arrived.”
Arthur stares at Dom and wants to be sick on the floor. His stomach twists up like a tortuous maze as he absorbs the news. He wants to leave. He can’t handle seeing Yusuf right now.
Coward, one side of him jeers. You have nothing to hide, another side whispers in weak support.
“Arthur?” Dom’s voice sounds far away but distinctly worried. “Arthur!”
Shaking himself out of the fugue state, Arthur blurts out, “It’s fine, Dom. I’m not bothered.”
He ignores Dom’s narrowed eyes and pushes past to open the office door with bravado that he’s on the verge of losing at any second.
Mal is bent over a table, talking softly with a dark curly-haired man in a rumpled coat, clearly just off the airplane. When he looks up and spots them, Arthur freezes, as the guilt rises up from his heart.
The pinched expression on Yusuf’s face gives way to a look of shock, which in turn is quickly replaced with anger. He stomps over to them, eyes darkening in severe displeasure, and he shakes his finger at Arthur.
“You! How dare you be here!” Yusuf snarls, before abruptly laughing and grabbing Arthur in a friendly headlock.
“No calls or e-mail, and then you scare me like this, with a zombie face, out of nowhere?” Yusuf laughs again.
Relief floods Arthur’s veins, and he feels weak-kneed, as Yusuf lets go of his neck. “I wasn’t sure what to say. You and Eames were friends for so long, and-”
“Yeah.” Yusuf’s manic grin turns flat, and he searches for the right words before just hastily changing the topic. “Yeah, he, he was fun to be around-hey, so, you just visiting, or have Bonnie and Clyde hooked you into this too?”
Arthur shrugs as he automatically smoothes out his ruffled hair, grimacing at the feel of dried hair gel. “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is. Dom pretty much insisted that I come.”
Dom holds his hands up defenselessly. “Hey, let’s not shoot the messenger. Mal thought that you might want to know what we’re doing here.”
Yusuf raises a curious eyebrow and turns back to Arthur. “Is your firm doing some research work for the university?”
“No-”
“Yes,” Mal interrupts with a beautiful smile, having glided over to join the group. “Arthur’s going to hear all about Project Catharsis, and he can let us know if his company is interested.”
Arthur glares at Mal. He has no idea what Mal and Dom are doing right now at the university, but he has no intention of joining if it has anything to do with trauma or mourning or any of that bullshit.
“I actually can’t stay,” Arthur lies with a bright smile and no compunctions. He tries to look as sincere and guileless as possible. “I decided that I could use some professional help after all. To get over the accident. I made an appointment with a therapist, Dr. Cara Brown. But she’s in big demand, so I need to get going.”
Mal is starting to scowl at his admittedly weak excuse, but Dom just nods with a faint smile and offers, “Maybe some other time then.”
Mal whirls on him, but then they share one of those secret looks that only couples share-and Arthur’s heart bleeds at the thought-and Mal shakes her head resignedly. She still looks angry, but she graciously kisses Arthur on the cheek, and he takes the gentle sign of affection with him as a charm as he drives back to his hotel.
He’s swimming, paddling in a giant swimming pool that seems endless. First he heads towards the right, then the left, then forward, then back; his changes in direction seem pointless, and his efforts seem interminable.
He tells himself not to be a baby, and he switches from free-style to butterfly to sidestroke, as he tries to ignore the strain in his muscles. He tries floating, but every time he turns onto his back or stomach, he starts sinking like a rock.
He’s exhausted, ready to give up, and almost hysterical at the thought of drowning, lagging in the warm, chlorinated water, when he reaches the railing, and he puts a hand on the concrete above his head.
A sneaker clad foot lands on his head; the pressure is barely noticeable, but Arthur looks up into familiar eyes.
“Hello, Arthur. Darling. Love of my life.” The apparition smiles coldly, and Arthur flinches at the hatred he can see in its eyes.
“Eames.”
“Back to surnames already, love? And me dead in the ground for a mere three months. I do wonder-where is your heart? I know I never found it.” The bitterness makes it sound just like Eames during one of their arguments, and Arthur feels it like a punch in the gut.
“You always hated your first name,” Arthur says helplessly, unable to say a word in his defense even though the projection is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Eames kneels down, and he puts on a rough hand on Arthur’s chin. The apparition's hostility seems to fade, and as their eyes meet, they fall into one of those uncomfortably intimate gazes that always made Arthur fidget, thinking that life shouldn’t be like a daytime movie. Now Arthur is happy to enjoy the sappiness of it all.
Eames’s hand strokes down to Arthur’s neck, and cups the back of his head. Their foreheads touch, and the tears prickle at Arthur’s eyes. It's a little disquieting though. Eames’s nails are a bit sharp, and Arthur puts a hand on Eames’s to stop them from jabbing into him so much.
The nails dig deeper-they’re sinking into his neck- and suddenly the comforting touch hurts. Long fingers, stained with ink, come fully around his neck and wrap around, and once again, Arthur can’t breathe. The air whooshes out of his lungs in one squeeze, and Arthur’s barely hearing it when Eames says with a dark hint of satisfaction: “Now you know what I felt.”
Arthur wakes up to the beeping of his watch, and he huddles under the blankets for a near-hour before a knock on the door has him startling out of bed.
“Maid service!”
“Come back later!” he yells, heart thumping like a rabbit. He wants to stay in bed the rest of the day, but he's sick of himself, and he eventually throws back the covers and stumbles across the carpet to the bathroom.
It’s already morning. He flicks on the mildest light and starts the cold water running. He splashes some onto his face and then hisses at the incredible burning sensation across his neck. He catches a glimpse of red in the mirror, and he lifts his head to get a better look.
Holy shit.
...
Holding a bath towel to his neck, Arthur ignores the strange looks he receives as he looks over the staircase, finally catching sight of the slight young woman he's been waiting for.
Ariadne looks around the hotel foyer, and Arthur can see the faint furrow between her brows, at odds with her open features and young face. She’s a play in contrast, Eames would always remark, the first time appreciatively, then at later times, mock-salaciously to invite a jealous reaction from Arthur.
Ariadne catches sight of him on her second go-around, and she storms up to him, quietly furious but unwilling to make a scene in public.
Thank God, Arthur thinks.
“Arthur! Why didn’t you call me back? You sounded like you were dying-and, and what’s with that towel around your neck?”
Reluctantly, Arthur pulls the towel away enough to give her a glimpse of the half-inch long gouge marks. She stares for five seconds before she takes off her scarf, wraps it around his neck like a tourniquet, and hustles him to her blue jeep, which she left idling at the sidewalk.
“You’re asking to get car-jacked,” Arthur observes. He tries to loosen the scarf a little, but Ariadne smacks his hand down and punches him hard on the shoulder.
“Keep that around your neck,” she orders, as she fiddles with the GPS mounted in the middle of the dashboard. “Where’s the nearest hospital?”
“Third and Capital.”
She shakes her head in mute distress every time she takes a peek at him, and Arthur has to keep urging her to keep her eyes on the road.
“We promised to give each other a call whenever, with no questions asked, but you never take me up on it until after you’re out of college? You've lost your adult cred.” Her tone is teasing, but she’s biting her lip, and Arthur can see that she’s definitely freaked out.
Oddly enough, he feels pretty calm. Even with the little cuts in his throat, he feels a lot better than he has in days. But he probably shouldn’t share that train of thought with the E.R. doctor assigned to patch him up.
He doesn’t know what Dr. P-something told Ariadne, but when he gets out, she’s standing there with Dom (who looks really weird with his unshaven chin and bleary eyes), and they both look at him like he just tried to commit suicide.
He tries a smile. “Hey.”
Dom looks at him, horrified and a little uncomprehending. “Jeezus, Arthur! You had to get thirty stitches. Thirty! And Ariadne said some if those gashes were more than an inch long.”
“No, they weren’t,” Arthur tries to object after some deliberation. They were really closer to three-quarters of an inch. But Dom’s face is unimpressed with the semantics.
“I need coffee. I had to drive him over here at 4:00 in the morning,” Ariadne announces; she points a finger at Dom while she walks backward to the hospital cafeteria. “You have at him first, and then it’s my turn.”
Dom doesn’t say anything for a while, so they just sit in the lounge quietly while they wait for Arthur's antibiotics prescription to be filled. Arthur has no idea what to say. He didn’t have blood in his nails; he didn’t attack himself. But he didn’t check his fountain pens, shaving kit, breakfast tray from yesterday. There are myriad objects that he could have used to do this to himself while in the depths of restless sleep.
“I want to tell you about Project Catharsis,” Dom says abruptly, still looking at his clasped hands. “It’s for people like you. People who are caught in the grips of a painful event that they can’t relinquish.”
Arthur listens despite himself. When Dom commits himself to sounding like the academic that he is, he naturally compels an incredible amount of belief and attention in others.
“Mal and I currently have three volunteers. I can’t give you that much information about them, of course, due to privacy issues, but I can tell you that one lost her father, one lost his sister, and one lost his lover.” Dom’s voice softens on the last one, and Arthur can tell that it’s as much for him as for Dom himself.
“Mal and I have been doing some research into lucid dreaming. The problem with traumatic events is that they roam in a person’s subconscious and come out most prevalently in night terrors since dreaming is the brain’s way of cleaning house. Being an active dreamer can help you take control of the dream and make a positive impact on what happens.”
Dom looks intently at Arthur, but he doesn’t make the proposal.
Arthur shifts and looks out the window at the still dark early morning sky. Everything looks so peaceful, and he misses that. He misses being able to walk around without thoughts of Eames dimming everything he sees; he wants to fall asleep and wake up refreshed instead of a trembling mess. He hasn’t felt any peace for a while.
“Maybe I’ll give it a try,” Arthur finally says.
Mal and Dom don’t give him any time to regret his lukewarm acquiescence. The next day, they have him come into the sleep center, where he lies down on a bed that reminds him of the hospital. Mal herself attaches the sensors to his head and chest with aplomb while her eyes look at him with softness.
They review the sleeping techniques that Arthur should practice during this trial session, and Arthur feels so tense that he doubts he could fall asleep, especially not in an unfamiliar room, on a somewhat flimsy bed, being observed in a lab.
Mal strokes his forehead, gracefully avoiding the sensors stuck there; she seems oddly maternal, and Arthur remembers her old fears about motherhood, about not being ready to nurture a young life. Phillipa and James seemed to have smoothened out any uncertain edges.
Dom comes up and takes off his Zenith watch, a gift from his favorite uncle before the man died; he puts it on Arthur’s left wrist.
“What-?”
Dom tightens the strap to fit Arthur’s narrower wrist. “You haven’t been wearing your watch, but you’re used to checking the time. See if you can remember and do it in the dream. That’s going to be your best bet to gain lucidity and control.”
“That watch is worth $3,000.”
Dom shrugs cavalierly. “$4,000. Don’t flail in your sleep, and it’ll be fine.”
Mal keeps brushing her fingers over Arthur’s temples, and the smooth back-and forth starts to lull him to sleep. He blinks once, twice, a bit affronted that a bit of petting is so soothing. Man, the sleep deprivation from the past couple of nights is really getting to him.
Arthur wakes up in a familiar place that he can’t quite recognize. He wanders around, touching the little knickknacks, and he realizes, with some dread and some nostalgia, that he’s actually in Eames’s old apartment, a broken down brownstone building that he gave up after they decided to move in together and bought a townhouse in the suburbs.
He misses their place, and he wants to go back there. But he can’t. Not when every single thing in every room makes him want to scream and start a bonfire.
The living room seems shrunken, but Arthur doesn’t notice. He gives Eames’s favorite porcelain figure a caress and moves onto the bedroom. He sits there, hands scrunching up the old throw that Eames liked to use as a coverlet instead of a proper comforter. The hot chocolate stain on the very top edge reminds Arthur of the kitchen, warm, smelling of spices, and Arthur makes his way there. Maybe he could brew a cup of tea. Even though he hated tea.
He sits down at the small, wobbly dining room table, and his eyes catch on the kitchen timer on the oven. With a jolt, Arthur remembers his promise to Dom, and he checks his watch, marking the oddly spinning hands even as he becomes fully conscious of his dream state.
When Arthur wakes up, he can hear people talking. He recognizes Mal and Dom’s voices, but the softly accented one has an authoritative, nearly arrogant, air that people don’t usually use around them.
The discussion, or argument, falls to a halt when Mal ends it with an abrupt gesture, opening the sleeping room door with more force than usual.
Carefully gauging whether he feels woozy or not, Arthur sits up on the bed, and he gratefully drinks the glass of water that Mal hands him. It’s spiced with a little lemon, and it washes refreshingly down his dry throat.
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Three hours,” Mal answers with some satisfaction and asks a question of her own. “Did you dream about him? Eames?”
“No-maybe. I dreamed about his old apartment. But he didn’t show up there.” Arthur tries to curtail the disappointment in his tone.
Mal looks thoughtful. “It’s possible that your trying to become a more lucid dreamer is strengthening your unconscious desire to not see him.”
Arthur’s head snaps up. “I do want to see him.”
Mal smoothes out her skirt and then turns and sits down on the bed, next to Arthur. It is a bit cramped, and her cheek rests against his. He is reminded of the old days before Mal and Dom became a couple, when all three of them would snuggle on the couch in a platonic pile of limbs.
“You said that your dreams of Eames have been growing more and more violent. No one wants to remember their lover that way,” she says gently. “Don’t feel guilty for wanting to see him as he really was.”
Arthur shrugs a shoulder. He wants to go back to sleep, find that dream hidden in the recesses of his brain, and drag Eames out, kicking and screaming, if need be.
Dom finishes the discussion with the mystery visitor, drags over a swivel chair from outside the sleeping room, and plops down, clearly ready for the day to end.
“Problem?” Arthur asks to see how much Dom and Mal are willing to let him know about the more confidential parts of Project Catharsis. For all the time that Dom and Mal spend on their various university projects, Arthur doesn’t know too much about what they do, and that has to change if he is going to go through with this.
Dom rolls his eyes. “We have someone who wants to give us as a referral to a friend, and it’s tempting; if his friend’s father issues work out, then he’d be willing to bankroll a more ambitious study, but he’s asking for a guarantee, and we can’t give that.
“Not even to you, Arthur, and you’re our friend,” Dom adds, a somber look settling into his eyes.
Somehow Arthur finds Dom’s confession reassuring. He can't trust a proclaimed panacea. “I know, Dom; it’s okay. I want to give it a try anyway.”
Dom studies him with narrowed eyes before nodding and handing him a small bottle of clacking light brown pills. “Vitamin B6. Take it according to the instructions, and you’ll find that your dreams will start getting more vivid.”
Arthur takes the bottle and shakes it. “That’s it?”
“No guarantees,” Dom reminds him. “Although we’ve had some dreamers tell us that the dreams seem to get longer and more coherent. That’s probably more to do with them gaining more control over their dreaming though.”
That little white bottle gleams softly at Arthur with promise.
Arthur is sitting alone at a cozy table for two outside the soft-lit Thai restaurant. A waiter walks past, setting down two glasses of Chardonnay. The rich light gold color reflects against the light eyes that make contact with him as the owner sits down on the other chair with slightly insolent insouciance.
“I’m late. I know. I was fleshing out a character, and I couldn’t stop. I would have lost it otherwise.”
Arthur can count at least two, maybe three, innuendoes in what Eames says.
“You couldn’t even pick up the phone?” Arthur asks, but with resigned amusement, as he takes a swig of the Chardonnay.
Eames glances at the subsiding level in Arthur’s glass before flicking his eyes up to meet Arthur’s. “Are you very angry?”
“No,” Arthur says, and he’s being honest. The urge to drink deeply and quickly has taken him by surprise too, and he puts the glass down a little farther to the side and drops his hand into his lap.
Eames purses his lips but apparently decides to take Arthur’s words at face value, for fear of starting a fight for real.
“Well, then,” he says. “I’m a bit hurt that you didn’t come rushing home. I could have been in a faint.” He flutters his eyes dramatically, mouth in a moue, like a Victorian damsel suffering from heatstroke.
Arthur laughs. “If I ran home every single time you didn’t pick up, I’d never leave the house. I called three times, by the way. So, again, my question: you couldn’t pick up the phone even once and let me know that you’d be late?”
Eames looks at Arthur seriously, lips in a line. “If you called three times, and I didn’t pick up, you didn’t worry about me?”
The laugh dries up in Arthur’s throat, and the awful, unnamed feeling hits again, and Arthur almost lunges for the wine glass.
“I-”
“Well,” Eames continues on, with a rueful smile, “No point in thinking about what didn’t happen. You’re here. I’m here. Let’s start dinner?”
Arthur hesitates, but he caves in gratefully. “Yeah, you’re here. You’re…okay.”
Eames puts a hand on Arthur’s, and the warm solid weight grounds Arthur and keeps him from floating off in an alcoholic daze.
Arthur looks at the figure before him and starts laughing again, utter relief filling his body, even though he doesn't know why. “I don’t know what’s with me right now. I feel like I’m dreaming or something.”
Eames doesn’t laugh. He flinches.
Arthur’s heart begins to sink, as the horrible unnamed feeling begins to grow. But he suppresses the urge, the promise, to look at his watch.
Instead, he grabs Eames’s wrist and asks, “Am I dreaming?”
“No.” Lying, desperate.
Arthur opens his eyes.
He jams his hands against his eyes for a long moment, until he sees only a white haze from the pressure, and then he grabs his keys.
The percussive beat of the heavy metal music pounds into his head, and Arthur shrugs and pours another shot down his throat. He feels heavy and not a little bit woozy. Maybe he’s reaching the inner limits of alcohol poisoning, but at least he can barely remember why he’s here in this dive.
“Hello, darling.”
The tone is just right. But even Arthur can tell her that the eyeliner is smudged and the dress, which seems to be lacking falsies, doesn’t quite give the right amount of implied curves.
But it is a good try. And Eames showed no small number of amateurish attempts before he could really fool people. He tricked Arthur just once and never let him forget it.
“Hi,” Arthur replies tonelessly, but politely gestures for the bartender to bring the woman a drink.
“So, why are you all alone tonight?” the woman purrs, golden curls flipping over her dark shoulders naturally as she tilts her head and sips the Cosmopolitan.
Sullenly, Arthur shrugs. He’s not in the mood for company, but nostalgia is hitting him hard right now and rejecting this woman would take more energy than he can expend.
“Bad day?” She asks, with sincere sympathy in her heavy-lashed eyes. “Maybe bad year?”
“Bad year,” Arthur allows and tries to toss back another shot, but he misses, and the vodka spills in cold tendrils down his throat. He shudders uncontrollably, and a warm strong hand holds his shoulder firmly.
“Hey, really, you don’t look so good. You want me to call you a cab?”
The bartender, who has been eyeing Arthur dubiously for the past half hour, makes his decision and comes over to take away the shot glass. “All right, buddy, I’m cutting you off. I don’t need a corpse here come morning.”
Arthur stumbles away from the counter and nearly falls over the stool, so he doesn’t complain when the woman wraps an arm around his waist and holds him upright as she dials her phone.
Arthur stares blankly at the diamante stickers glittering like blurry stars and the beads clacking together as the woman shifts her phone against her ear.
“-address?”
“Huh?” The tiny corner of Arthur’s sober mind is impressed at making the sound that his old English teacher always called ‘that cow noise.’
“Your address,” the woman repeats patiently, and Arthur mumbles their address automatically and then falls into a doze until the taxi stops rather abruptly, and dulcet-toned cussing fills the air, as Arthur is half-carried to the front door.
Arthur inserts the key by jabbing viciously at the lock set until chance favors him. The door swings open, and the porch light illuminates the slice of living room visible. Squishy red-checked armchair with knitted throw. Multi-colored Pollock knockoff that Eames found at a flea market in Wyoming. Glass-top coffee table covered with dust bunnies and books.
Revulsion hits Arthur hard as he remembers that he never intended to come back here.
Dumbly, he walks deeper into the house and kneels down right on the carpet near the kitchen and just stares all around him at the well loved surroundings that he used to consider their home.
He reaches out to caress the pile of novels on the coffee table, and his lips quirk, despite his malaise. He was there for all those books; he watched fondly as Eames envisioned characters, inhabited their lives, and wrote them down on paper.
He just stood there as his lover lost his mind.
Arthur used to marvel at the way that Eames could create new people from the ether, and he was admiring up until the day he realized that sometimes Eames seemed to get lost in his characters. He could so enwrap himself in their mannerisms, their thoughts, their experiences that he seemed a bit schizophrenic at times.
Arthur swallows roughly, as tumultuous emotions well up, and he feels stomach acid making its way up his throat, burning and sharply sour.
“Are you going to be okay if I leave you here?” The interruption startles Arthur, and he realizes that the drag queen has taken off his wig and is scratching tiredly at his scalp.
“I’m fine,” Arthur says automatically, and he wishes that he’s getting sober enough to not make that statement a lie, but he’s exhausted, and the six, seven shots that he took back at the bar are making his head spin, and he thinks he’s going to regret the excess…
He's hang gliding.
He's not sure how he knows that since the closest he's gotten to hang gliding was looking at pictures of it in his dentist's office and wondering if that really fit author he met at one of Dom and Mal's parties would find a hobby like that impressive.
Right now he's swooping and soaring with the soft, gentle swells of wind, and he feels so at peace with himself. The sky is neither dark nor light, and he couldn't gauge the time of day or the season even if it occurs to him to try.
He can't see anything though, and he wonders mildly if his eyes are closed, and he tries opening them, but nope, he still can't see anything. He feels vaguely perturbed, but he's too comfortable with the soft breeze ruffling his hair like a lover's hand and the kiss of something like sunlight warming his face.
Something still niggles though in the back of his mind. It's a lot like driving somewhere in the car and then falling abruptly convinced that he's forgotten something back at home and needs to rush back.
He's not in a place for rushing though. He continues to fly vaguely upward, content that he has no worries, no fears-not really, anyway, but still, that niggle prickles like a burr in his sock, and he drifts back to the dark center of his consciousness.
And he remembers.
Eames.
He plummets to the ground.
It’s the most obnoxious ring tone. Ever. Arthur wants to take a hammer to it. But that would require getting up to find the hammer. Ugh.
“Uh, hey, your cell phone is ringing.”
Arthur forces his gummy eyes open to see a scrawny guy wearing a tank top and threadbare shorts standing in front of his TV. Before Arthur could fully give into his heart attack, the guy backs away with his hands held up in harmless pantomime.
“Look, I just came home with you to make sure you wouldn’t asphyxiate in your own vomit, and I had nothing to do with your living room. Okay? In case you don’t remember last night.”
Arthur surreptitiously checks below the afghan and is utterly relieved that he’s apparently still in his wrinkled jeans and button-down shirt.
The guy-the blonde from last night-looks eager to just be done with the unwarranted Good Samaritan act and get away.
“Uh, yeah,” Arthur ventures before his cell phone starts ringing again hysterically.
Shit, Arthur thinks. 10 voicemails. He skips through the missed calls list and winces at the mix of names.
Reluctantly, he listens to some of the messages.
“Arthur, I’ve been knocking on your hotel room door for the past half hour. Where are you? Are you in there? You’re not going to do something drastic, are you? Oh, crap, I’m going to call the hotel desk. Serves you right if we find something embarra-”
Message saved.
“It’s me again. I called Dom and Mal, and they’ve been looking for you too. Something about dream thera-”
Message saved.
“Arthur. It’s Dom-and Mal-She’s driving. We’re in our SUV, and we have James and Phillipa in the back, and we are looking for you. If you’ve done something to yourself, we’re going to hurt you. A lot. When we find you. And if you haven’t, well...Damnnit, Arthur, I told you to call me before you took the B6!”
Message saved.
“Ah, Arthur? Yusuf here. It's really awkward, but we both miss the bastard, so maybe we could go for a drink sometime, talk over good times, you know-”
Message saved.
Arthur thinks that Ariadne is at least less physically intimidating than the others, so he plans to dial her number first, but a flurry of knocks sounding on his front door tells him that he doesn’t have to bother. He glances around the chaotic room and wonders if Ariadne would exercise tact or start zooming in on the broken glass and torn up novels.
Ariadne doesn’t pull her punches. He should have remembered.
“Fuck, ow.” Arthur rubs his face; the blow wasn’t that hard, but it doesn’t do much for his hangover.
“I thought you killed yourself! And so did everyone else! You better let Dom and Mal know that you’re okay because if they run out of gas and get stranded checking every hospital and morgue in the area-!”
“I know, I’m sorry.” Arthur starts picking up the tattered novels on the floor. He tries to take his time and smooth out the pages, but he gives up after Ariadne almost cuts a finger on a hidden shard of glass when she tries to help.
Arthur surveys the floor and barely stifles a sigh. He really went to town on the coffee table, and the glass fragments are everywhere.
“What happened last night?” Ariadne’s voice is soft, like she’s talking to a wounded animal, and she watches him warily.
“I wanted to tell Eames that I hated him,” Arthur says flatly. “But he wasn’t here, so I took it out on his books.”
They sit quietly on the floor until Ariadne breaks the silence. “You blame his books for what happened to him?”
Arthur looks away. He’ll donate those books. He doesn’t want a single copy. If he could buy out all the bookstores and burn their stocks, he’d do it. “I blame them and me.”
Dom doesn’t sound happy when Arthur calls him back, but he grudgingly agrees to yell at Arthur later since he and Mal have to take James and Phillipa to the Pancake Breakfast fundraiser at their elementary school. Arthur wonders apprehensively if Dom would ask for the bottle of B6 back. He shakes the little bottle thoughtfully.
Lunch at her favorite bistro calms Ariadne down, and later, he waves her off when she leaves for her studio class. He waits a few minutes and then leaves the house with a big bag of Eames’s books. He drives several miles away to the city dump and stares at the large dumpsters filled with their heavy, towering, stinking piles of debris and waste.
He can’t do it.
Instead, he takes the books to the local library, where he sits outside the entrance on one of the concrete blocks and sorts through the bag. Some of the books are really badly torn, and Arthur doubts that the library would accept them. Those he leaves outside. It’s a nice warm day, and people might like a free book or two.
The rest he hands over to the librarian manning the used books shop on the first floor just past the front desk.
The librarian smiles as her eyes fall on the top novel. “Oh, my! The Minotaur’s Wife by Eames. He’s quite a talented author even if he's not very well known. I heard that he has a new one coming out in another month or so.” She gave a tinkly laugh. “Or maybe it already has. I just came back from Bolivia, so I’m afraid I’m still catching up on all sorts of news.”
Arthur’s smile turns out more than part grimace, and he practically shoves the bag into the woman’s arms before he rushes out the door. Outside the library, he slows his pace to a walk, and he wanders around the grounds for several restless minutes until his leftover headache pushes him to settle down at the small wishing well adorned with real ivy and filled with rusted nickels and pennies.
Whenever Eames went to the library for research, he always tossed a quarter into the well despite Arthur’s open scoffing.
“It’s for good karma, love,” Eames would explain lightly, stopping Arthur’s protest about the actual definition of karma with a kiss.
Then Arthur would push Eames away and roll his eyes and point out that a wishing well here isn’t like a real wishing well in Ireland or somewhere else with potential wild magic left.
And then Eames would tell Arthur sotto voce not to make assumptions about Europeans, thank you very much. Their magic was always potent, he would explain with a leer.
Oh, of course, Arthur would widen his eyes in apparent wonder at the revelation.
On and on they would go. A two-part comedy act, Dom once called them.
Now Arthur rustles in his jeans pocket and empties all his loose change into the small abyss, and with each soft watery plink, Arthur asks and wishes and pleads and begs.
But it’s just a wishing well after all.
The writer’s guiding principle is to create from what you know. Eames created various characters based on aspects of family members, friends, acquaintances, and random people he saw on the street as he sat in the café, watching the streets for inspiration.
The Minotaur's Wife is Eames's last published book. The young woman on the cover has nearly waist-long auburn hair and rather some height, but she looks as though she could be Ariadne’s sister.
Arthur was skeptical when Eames first sketched out his characters. He crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe to Eames’s study. “Don’t you think you should check with Ariadne before you start putting her into your book?”
Eames didn’t look up, busily inking in the hair with brown ink, then adding reddish highlights to transform a rather flat character into a radiant one.
“I didn’t check with you, Yusuf, Mal, Dom…in fact, Dom should be the one to call me out; I made his character a wife-murdering delusional sociopath. Suppose it doesn’t matter though; he thought it was funny, and he still has the copy I gave him.
“Anyway, what about that hermit magician, Norbert? I based him on a few parts of you, but it didn't bother you, right? It’s not you in there, really, is it?”
Arthur snorted and chose to avoid the tangent. “Okay, so, Ariadne gets to be the Minotaur’s lover, but how does that work? Doesn’t she have to go off with Theseus?”
Eames snorted as he started drawing the bare lines of the Greek hero, Theseus. “The ungrateful bastard leaves her on a deserted island for the god of wine to make off with. No, I’ll give my Ariadne a brain and a spine.”
The conversation stopped there when the doorbell rang, and Arthur went to pick up the Italian takeout for dinner. They got sidetracked talking about new grouting for the bathrooms and never got back to their original discussion.
Arthur never read the book. He wanted to, but the reviews came out, and Eames deleted all his files, and refused to sign for it when the publisher sent over a complimentary copy.
Arthur tosses the novel onto the kitchenette table and goes to the refrigerator, pulling out a cold beer, then changing his mind and grabbing another one. He doesn't feel like being sober for this.
Opening the book feels like a betrayal, but Arthur needs to read it. He would have done it as soon as he got it from the bargain bin at the local bookstore, but Eames rarely left the house then, and Arthur didn’t want a fight in case his lover found out about the purchase.
Now he reads about King Mino’s wild-spirited daughter who secretly wanders the mazes by herself, horrified by her father's sacrifices, enthralled by the moralistic minotaur. Stopping after a few chapters in, Arthur likes the story so far.
He never really liked fantasy and romance, but he can tell quality writing when he sees it. And as biased as it sounds, he can’t agree with the various critics who called the book insipid and unconvincing. He wishes he could have read it earlier and told Eames honestly that the public was full of idiots who couldn’t appreciate good literature.
Instead of taking a hiatus to recoup from the blow, Eames threw himself into writing another manuscript, the one he never completed before his suicide.
Part 2