fic: In Our Line of Work [2/2]
He found Cobb next. Actually, he found Mal. It wasn’t hard to find her, and he was a real idiot not to have tried it before, but he was looking through newspaper archives for any mentions of PASIV technology and there, from two months ago, was a headline that made Arthur’s heart jump to his throat.
Mallorie Cobb’s lectures at Columbia on ‘mind heist’ and criminal action in the new field of ‘lucid dreaming’ bring in record numbers of law students.
It was a tiny article caught up in a newspaper with far bigger stories, but Arthur stared at it for a long time before his breathing returned to normal.
He googled Mal’s name, hating himself for not having researched through such obvious routes sooner. Hundreds of articles appeared. He found an address through a university website and was on a plane to LA the next day.
It was too early in the morning to knock on the door when Arthur’s taxi dropped him off outside the quaint house. It was the house Cobb and Mal lived in when he first met them. He’d been there hundreds of time. The first time he ever woke up with Eames next to him in bed was Christmas morning the year before Mal died, in the spare bedroom in that house. The house was even before Phillipa and James and those awful days when Arthur would bring them presents because Cobb couldn’t.
Arthur walked up the steps to the front door and leaned his head back against the door, closing his eyes and breathing long, calming pulls of air through his nose. He was scared to knock, and it was too early so he still had an excuse not to.
There was a soft click and Arthur opened his eyes. Cobb was standing in front of him, a gun trained on Arthur’s chest.
“Who are you?” Cobb said, gruffly.
“What!” Arthur asked, “Jesus Christ, Cobb, put the gun down. It’s me, Arthur. I know I’m pretty young but I don’t look that different.”
“Arthur?” Cobb asked, tilting his head in slight confusion. “I don’t recognize the name. I can see you’ve got a gun there from the way you’re holding yourself, so don’t try to lie, just take it out, with two fingers, and put it down on the ground.”
Arthur put up one hand and used the other to do as Cobb instructed. He couldn’t help but stare at Cobb he did so. Cobb looked shockingly young. His hair was soft and loose in his face and he was practically skinny. Cobb from when they first met had been something like this, but broader from military training and a little age.
“Cobb, maybe you don’t remember me, but I promise I know you,” Arthur said, steadily.
Cobb’s eyes flicked to Arthur’s face and then away again. Holding the gun as steady as possible with only one hand, he reached behind Arthur and pushed the front door open. “Mal,” he called, “Mal, there’s a guy here. Name is Arthur. Do I know him?”
There was a familiar shriek and the sound of footsteps crashing down a staircase. Mal flung herself out the door, slamming into Arthur, laughing as her hair (much longer than Arthur remembered) got in the way of her kiss to his cheek.
“Arthur! Arthur, look at you, you’re a child. I am so glad to see you. Dom, put down your gun, please, please come inside, you must meet Arthur. This man saved your life too many times for you not to share a glass of wine with him.”
She was talking too fast, tripping over the shape of the words in her mouth, and laughing, and Arthur was nearly shaking apart because Mal wasn’t dead.
Mal tugged them both inside and she really did open a bottle of wine even though it was barely six thirty in the morning. Cobb was looking at Arthur like he was a little afraid of him, which was strange all on its own.
“They got to Dom too quick,” Mal said, by way of explanation. “He doesn’t remember the dream. It’s probably for the best, you know. I’m sure he was insufferable after I died.”
“The inception,” Arthur asked, knowing it wasn’t the time, because they shouldn’t be worrying about that kind of thing right now, and yet unable to help himself. “It didn’t carry over? I mean…you know this is real?”
She pursed her lips and glared at him good-naturedly while Cobb sank down into the space beside her. “Maybe it would have. I don’t really know. It didn’t. Inception is tricky. I know you know this. It stays if there is some reason for it to stay, and otherwise, it’s only an idea. It can just as easily blow away. Perhaps my mind was only holding on so tight because I was right all along.”
“I’m so glad…you’re here,” Arthur said, softly.
“Yes, yes, so tell me what happened after I woke up. Dom is useless to me. He remembers only that it was a long dream, nothing else.”
Arthur told his story until they’d finished the bottle of wine and he was feeling sleepy and heavy with the weight of the alcohol though it was barely nine o’clock, and caught between the feeling of deep joy at Mal’s aliveness, and the painful undercurrent of Cobb having forgotten Arthur completely. He smiled like Cobb smiled and talked like Cobb talked, but he was missing so much of himself. It was like losing a brother without being allowed to grieve.
That night, Mal cooked dinner and Arthur told the story of the time he and Cobb and Eames had been chased across Brooklyn by the NYPD and had to climb down into the sewer to avoid being caught, and Cobb laughed in the same places he did when he used to tell the story himself in the dream life.
After dinner Arthur sat on the back steps and lit a cigarette, watching the curls of smoke climb upwards and then dissipate.
“Cigars,” Cobb said, coming down the steps and sitting one above Arthur, stretching his legs down.
“What?” Arthur asked, turning towards him.
“I don’t know. I just saw you sitting there, and I thought of cigars. It happens sometimes. I don’t remember the dream, but I get little flashes.”
“Eames used to send me cigars when we didn’t see each other for more than a few months. I had boxes and boxes. I kept them on a bookshelf and alphabetized them by country of origin. Eames liked to mix them around when he visited to see if I’d notice they were out of order.”
“I bet you noticed,” Cobb said. Arthur couldn’t see his face in the dark but he knew the sound of Cobb’s voice when he smiled.
“Yeah, I did,” Arthur said.
“Are you looking for him?” Cobb asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said. It was a simple answer for a complicated question.
“And when you find him, what if he’s forgotten you?”
Arthur had considered the possibility, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d keep looking for Eames until he found him. It was terrible to imagine finding an Eames without any of the history that had stacked up between them and shaped them both into people who fit together around the edges almost gracefully like pebbles in a riverbed sliding against each other for millennia. It was much more terrible to imagine never seeing Eames again at all, so Arthur left it at that and tried to not think about it if he could help it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Arthur said, finally.
“I hacked into the camera systems in the room I was in while dreaming. They never had us in the same place at the same time. Somehow they’ve been doing long-distance shared dreams. But that’s not the important part. I thought you’d want to know that I was tested after the dream and before I was drugged to forget, and the guy who did it is called George Clark. Maybe the name will help you find Eames.”
Arthur felt a shiver creep down his spine. Clark he thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It was fucking Clark. He allowed for approximately thirty seconds of anger for being so close and yet so far before he lurched to his feet and turned on his heel, going back into the house.
“Thanks,” he called to Cobb. Mal was in the hallway, and she looked at him, perplexed as he headed straight for the front door.
“Are you leaving now, Arthur?” she asked, sounding worried.
“Lead on Eames,” Arthur said. “Cobb mentioned the name Clark. Well, I know him.”
“Call if you need anything,” Mal said, seriously, not fighting at all to make him stay, understanding like he knew she would. “Don’t get hurt, either.”
“I won’t.” Arthur promised, lying. In all honesty, Arthur would go through worse than hurt if it meant he found Eames.
---
“What the fuck?” Clark muttered at the feeling of the cool muzzle of Arthur’s gun against the top of his spine.
“Clark,” Arthur said, voice low and smooth. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“This is my fucking hotel room,” Clark said, breathing fast and short and fearful. “Is that…Arthur?”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “It’s me. Come along, lets have you go close the curtains, and then you can take the gun out of your holster and leave it on top of the TV.”
Clark’s hands shook as he pulled the cheap blackout curtains across the window, and he made a little whimpering sound of nervous energy when they caught half-way, sticking on the old track the curtain hooks were slotted into.
“Easy there, Clark,” Arthur said. “I’m not going to shoot you yet.”
Clark set his gun down on the TV next, and watched as Arthur’s hand darted out to take the gun. He recognized the black leather gloves Arthur was wearing from the Munich Job. Arthur had worn them when they’d temporarily kidnapped the mark’s wife to lure him out to the warehouse.
Clark had asked Arthur why he was wearing the gloves and Arthur had said, in that flat little voice he used sometimes that made shivers slide down the back of Clark’s neck, “I always wear gloves when there’s a chance I’ll have to kill someone.”
“Why did you take my gun?” Clark said. His breath seemed very loud in his own ears.
“It will look like a suicide if I use your gun,” Arthur replied evenly.
“Look, whatever they’re paying you to get info out of me, I’ll double it. I swear to God. Even if I don’t have the money right now, I’ll get it. I know rich people.” He felt desperate even as he spoke, “Arthur, come on man, we’ve worked together. We’re fucking associates. I trusted you, man…”
“Don’t go there, Clark,” Arthur whispered against his ear. “Don’t bring trust into this, because that might make me angry. Let’s sit down on the bed now. We can talk some that way.”
“Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll triple it,” Clark said, as Arthur eased him down onto the cheap mattress. The duvet crinkled like newspapers as Clark sat. Arthur didn’t join him, but moved so they were facing each other. Arthur looked taller than Clark remembered. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Arthur was still growing. He looked about seventeen; if you ignored the way he held his shoulders painfully tight with exhaustion.
“I don’t want your money,” Arthur murmured. “I want to know what you know about The Extended Expansive Uninterrupted Use of PASIV Controlled Dreaming project.”
“Fuck,” Clark muttered. “Look man, that’s military shit. You think you’re scary, standing there with your gun, but they won’t just kill me, they’ll torture me and then do me in. I can’t talk about that.”
“You think I won’t torture you, Clark?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Clark said, slowly. “You’re just a kid though. You can’t have the practice they’ve had.”
Arthur smiled a little, thin lipped and not pleasant at all. “Maybe when I was the age I am, that would have been true, but I was in that lovely little project for ten years, Clark.”
“Oh,” Clark said. His upper lip beaded with sweat. “Is this a revenge killing, or something?”
“No,” Arthur said. “It’s exactly what I told you before. I want to know what you know about the project. Specifically, about an involved party, a man called Eames?”
Clark went a little pale. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him.” he replied stiffly.
“Yes?” Arthur asked. Clark noticed that Arthur’s eyes darkened almost imperceptibly, and Arthur leaned forward, his grip on the gun a little tighter.
“Look Arthur,” Clark said, “That guy, he was just a subject like you, so if you’re looking for revenge he’s not your guy. And as far as I know, he’s dead.”
“What?” Arthur said, softly.
“Something happened to him in the dream in his last year in there. This guy he was sleeping with in the dream got pulled out of it and I heard he went practically psycho. They had to pull him out too because he was killing off all the government guys in the dream…”
“That doesn’t mean he’s dead,” Arthur said harshly.
“Look, what I heard was, they woke him up and he freaked out on the assessment team, demanding they give him information and shit, and he got a hold of a gun and…” Clark shrugged limply, “Well, he was a central part of the whole thing. An interesting case, you know. But they weren’t gonna let him kill the assessment team. He disappeared off the records, and that’s just a clean way saying they killed him, isn’t it?”
“Fuck,” Arthur whispered brokenly. His grip on the gun didn’t change but he dropped his head into his free hand, pulling at his hair and swallowing against some emotion caught in his throat.
“Jesus, Arthur, I already told you he wouldn’t know any more about the project than you do.”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Clark,” Arthur said, voice still quiet but lined with the weight of grief. “You think I really care so much about revenge? I was the guy, Clark. I was the fucking guy.”
“The guy…?” Clark asked.
“The guy that died and sent Eames into a psychotic rampage. The guy he was sleeping with. That was me.”
“Shit,” Clark said, staring up at Arthur. “Arthur. Fuck, I knew I recognized your name…. Shit. Sorry, man.”
Arthur looked across to him incredulously. “Don’t fucking apologize, Clark. I can’t…I can’t….” He gasped a long shaking breath that would have been a sob if he were some other kind of person. “I’m so angry,” he muttered, almost sounding awed about the furious heat bubbling up under his skin. “I didn’t know…I could be so angry.”
The gun in Arthur’s hand was trembling now, and Clark stared at it with a sick sense of realisation.
“You’re still gonna kill me, aren’t you,” he whispered. Arthur’s eyes, more black than brown now, snapped to his.
“I want to,” Arthur said softly, like it was a terrible secret. “I’ve never really wanted to kill someone before,” he admitted.
“Please….” Clark murmured. Arthur’s hand shook around the gun. There was a click. Clark’s eyes fluttered closed. His head raised just a tiny bit and his neck was pale orange and exposed in the cheap sodium lamplight.
Arthur hesitated, and then he spun on his heal and left, the door to the hotel room shutting behind him with a soft snick.
Clark, who had never witnessed the miracle of mercy before, slid off the bed to his knees and retched into a waste-paper basket, shivering and coughing and gasping with broken thankfulness at the rush of air in and out of his lungs.
It was quiet in the lonely room.
---
Arthur checked up on Clark’s story, but he couldn’t find anything to contradict it. He went back to Paris to see Ariadne; she cried when she saw him, and then yelled at him for making her cry twice, and repeated how she hated to cry. Arthur got drunk for the first time in his life, and threw up twice in Ariadne’s ancient claw footed bathtub.
He went back to LA and slept in the spare bedroom at the Cobb’s for three days straight. He woke on the third day with the strange feeling that he’d never be able to sleep naturally again. Mal brought him soup like the fog hanging around him was a winter cold and he ate the soup and then dropped the bowl out the window watching it break to white sharp pieces when it hit the ground, beautiful like slivers of crystallised milk.
Ramirez called his cell phone and told him some guys had been asking for his number to do a job.
“Sure,” Arthur said. “I haven’t got anything else to do.”
“Hey, you’re okay, right?” Ramirez asked. “I was talking to some guys, and when I mentioned your name they said the government had you in on a fucked up project that they pulled a few months back.”
“Oh, I guess,” Arthur replied. “That’s why I left the military anyway.”
“Eh, good riddance,” Ramirez said magnanimously.
The extraction was based in Saigon and Arthur was practically drunk on memories by the time he got to the warehouse. He was setting up his laptop in the back corner on some dusty dragon fruit crates, remembering Eames eating slice after slice of the soft white fruit, his fingers sticky with the juice, smiling at Arthur and pressed tight up behind him on a motorcycle, teeth glinting through the dust from the road.
“Hey,” a voice pulled him away from his thoughts. Arthur looked up. There was a man leaning against a chalk-board that he’d apparently been dragging behind him.
“I’m James,” the guy said, “The forger.” He had a generic London accent, and he held himself the same way Eames always had, like he was about to shift into something else at any given moment. It wasn’t quite as convincing as Eames, though; Eames sometimes seemed more like a mirage than a person. Arthur had the sudden terrible thought that he’d always be reminded of Eames in tiny ways, and he’d be endlessly scraped raw every time it happened.
“Right,” Arthur said blankly. “Well, I’m doing research, but Henderson should be around soon, if you’re looking for someone to talk to.”
“Oh,” James said, taken aback at Arthur’s brusque words. “Right, sorry. I’ll just be over here, then.”
It was a two level extraction. They would go in and shake the mark up on the first level; then the forger and Arthur would drop down to the second level in a bid to win the mark’s trust while he was vulnerable, then kick back to the first level and allow the extractor to pull out the information he needed that much more easily.
The first part went almost suspiciously perfectly. Then he and the forger got ready to drop down to the next level and there was suddenly a lot of shouting and a black bag was pulled over Arthur’s head and when he blinked his eyes open again, he was in the second level they’d designed but it was not right, not exactly.
Arthur stood up. There was a woman with acres of long soft brown hair next to him, who looked mostly like the mark’s sister, whom James was supposed to be forging. The difference was that she was too convincing.
James had been a fair enough forger but he didn’t move like a woman would. He was always holding his hips at the wrong angle. If Arthur was looking for it, he could tell there was something off about her. This woman here was perfect. Arthur would have bet his life that she was the real deal.
The mark was sitting in the chair across the table from Arthur and the woman. There was a lit candle in a small glass between them, and a basket of bread. The restaurant was dimly lit and it looked like an expensive steakhouse from the nineties.
“Fuck,” the woman next to Arthur muttered under her breath, “Damn.”
Arthur turned to her, thinking very quickly about what must have happened. “Are you all right…?” he asked.
His best theory was that another team wanted the information they were trying to extract and had carefully infiltrated the dream just after they’d gone under, sending their forger down with Arthur and hoping he wouldn’t notice the difference. It was very clever. If Arthur were a little less smart, he’d probably have unknowingly done the infiltrating team’s work for them.
“No, Arthur,” the woman sighed. “I am not okay, because you are here, and I thought we had sorted this little issue, but apparently that was terribly naïve of me.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Arthur said.
The woman rolled her eyes. “Sure, whatever you say,” she said. “Right, okay, you don’t happen to know where these idiots sent their point man, do you?”
Arthur creased his eyebrows in confusion. “You know,” he said, almost annoyed with this apparent display of incompetence. “If you expect me to believe that you’re James, it would work better if you acted like this was the plan.”
“I think I’ll have the sirloin,” the mark said, conversationally. Arthur glanced away from the woman for a moment, and smiled at the mark absently, before turning back and raising a gun under the tablecloth just where the woman could see. He pressed it against his own stomach.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the woman whispered furiously. “That won’t do anything. You know I have always appreciated my subconscious’s ability to not do a Mal on me, but what you’re doing doesn’t even make sense.”
Arthur brought his free hand up to pinch his nose. “I feel like we’re having two different conversations here and neither has much to do with the other. What are you talking about?”
“Hello, may I take your order?”
The woman’s head darted up at the words, an expression of shock falling across her face. Arthur followed her gaze slowly, already knowing what he was going to see.
There he was. Arthur, standing at the side of the table with his familiar black notebook, now being used to take orders. Arthur blinked at the image of himself in dumb disbelief. He looked just like he had the night he died in the dream. His hair was a little dishevelled from frustrated fiddling and there was the familiar scar just beneath his jaw from falling off a swing set when he was ten and also scars from the dream life - things that Arthur felt on his twenty-nine year old skin but wouldn’t when he woke, like the scars on his hands and the slightly tilted way he stood because of the phantom ache in his leg from a gun shot wound. The shirt that waiter-Arthur was wearing was lower cut than most things Arthur owned and he could see the shadow of a bruise Eames had sucked into his skin hours before he’d been killed.
There was only one man who could dream Arthur like that that.
---
THEN
The second time Arthur told Eames he loved him in the dream went like this:
“Did you miss me?” Eames asked. It was late Monday night, nearly eleven, when Arthur answered the door to find Eames on the other side, holding a bottle of wine and a bag of Chinese takeout.
“You mean in the twenty-five minutes it took you to run to Tesco and to Jade Palace for food?” Arthur asked, raising and eyebrow fondly. “No, I can’t say I did.”
Eames pulled a face, sticking his bottom lip out a little.
“When you do that it makes be think I could set a flowerpot on your lip,” Arthur said, taking the bottle of wine and going into the kitchen with it. “It’s like a fucking shelf.”
“Was that a compliment?” Eames asked, leaning over the counter. “You know I find it hard to tell.”
“It was a compliment if you wanted one, Eames,” Arthur muttered. His mouth was curved into half a smile as he reached up to take two plates down. There was a bowl sitting on top of them and Arthur swallowed a surprised yelp as it slid across the plate, tipped off and fell to the kitchen floor, smashing to white slivers across the grey tile.
Eames, who had been about to swipe his thumb across the strip of skin exposed by Arthur’s reaching, held his hands up as if to say, don’t move.
“Shit,” Arthur said. “I wish you’d stop leaving bowls on top of the plates, Eames. That’s the third one I’ve broken this week.”
“Sorry,” Eames said, voice muffled as he dug through the hallway closet for a broom. “I forget where the dishes go because I don’t, you know, live here.”
“Eames,” Arthur said, exasperated. “Passive aggression really doesn’t suit you. I’ve said before, I’m not trying to distance us by keeping the house in my name and having you keep an apartment. You do live here. It’s just…if something were to happen, it’s better if it’s easy for us to split up.”
Eames reappeared with the broom and began sweeping the shards of bowl away from Arthur’s bare feet so he could walk back out into the dining room. His face was twisted down as he said, “Why do you say things like that, then?”
“Like what?” Arthur sighed.
“Like ‘if something were to happen’. What’s going to happen that’s going to mean we have to ‘split up’?”
“I don’t know, Eames. People can use us against each other. Maybe some past mark or a company will catch up with us. In our line of work---”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that too… ‘in our line of work’. It’s not an excuse, and you use it like an excuse. I ask you, ‘Arthur why can’t I take you as my date to my little brother’s wedding’ and you say, ‘in our line of work…’ and I ask you, ‘What’s your middle name’ and you say, ‘in our line of work…’ and I ask you, ‘Why can’t I stay here tonight’ and you say, ‘in our line of work….’”
Eames looked at Arthur sadly, standing in the piles of broken bowl pieces, spilled around his feet the same colour as milk. “If someone is going to use us against each other,” he finished, “They’d just do it. They don’t care if I’m sleeping in your bed six nights a week versus seven.”
“You really want to have this fight right now?” Arthur said, setting the plates down hard enough that the table shook.
“I don’t want to fight about this at all,” Eames growled. “But I don’t see what choice I have. I mean, we’ve been together for, what is it, eight years now, and you won’t even…I mean…”
“What?” Arthur asked, practically sneering. “What won’t I do? I won’t tell you how much I need you, I won’t tell you how much I care? Is that what you want, Eames? Because those are just words, you know….” Arthur paused, staring at Eames hard. He fists were clenched into tight fists that made his knuckles stand out snowy white. “I love you,” he snapped harshly. “There you go. I said some words. Does that make you happy?”
Eames’s face crumpled like he’d been physically struck. He turned away from Arthur so he was only visible in profile and his shoulders were sloping horribly downwards, devastatingly hurt and Arthur felt suddenly sick.
“Oh, god,” Arthur whispered. “Eames, Eames. Oh, god, I shouldn’t have said---”
And that was when the assassins burst through the hallway door and shot Arthur in the chest. He gasped with the shock of it, crumpling down, and Eames stared at him in confusion for a moment before he understood what had happened and he was launching himself over the counter, collecting Arthur up in his arms.
Arthur’s lungs were filling up with blood too quickly to say anything but he tried anyway, to say I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it like that. The words came out as a trickle of red blood instead. Arthur was tired, very tired, closing his eyes and fading.
Only, none of that ever happened.
---
NOW
“Who are you?” the woman said stiffly. Even as Arthur blinked, and Eames was there instead of the woman, abruptly, his voice smooth and low and quiet like Arthur remembered it but better.
“Eames,” Arthur whispered.
“I don’t use that name anymore,” Eames said, glaring at him like Arthur was hurting him by being there. The mark was gaping at them. Eames reached out, hand sliding over Arthur’s and he didn’t even think twice before releasing his grip on the gun. Eames lifted the gun and shot Arthur in the forehead point blank. Arthur crumpled over on to the table, the sound of a second and third shot ringing over the restaurant as he collapsed.
Arthur barely blinked his eyes open on the first level before Eames was standing over him again, ripping the black bag off his head, and frowning with disgust when Arthur’s face was the same.
“Maybe you think this is funny,” Eames growled. “But it’s not going to be funny when we wake up and I find out who you are.”
He shot Arthur again.
Arthur coughed as he woke. They were in the mark’s living room, and Arthur could see as he stood up and pulled the wrinkle out of his jacket why Eames hadn’t noticed him when the second team came in to infiltrate the dream.
The room was pitch black, and Arthur himself had been behind the sofa, a little away from the PASIV. He tended to put himself somewhere that kept him out of the direct line of fire. Eames, on the other hand, was slumped over in the chair right next to the device. He was already stirring.
Arthur watched him as he woke, drinking in the familiar sight. Eames was young like Arthur was young. Intense around the edges, and dressed too much like someone who knew their own tastes for his relative youth.
His stubble was longer than Arthur liked it, and shaved messily underneath his chin. His hair was just the length Arthur remembered it, but lighter in colour, more dirty blond than brown. He had a military bulk to his shoulders that told of hours spent in the gym, but it was already beginning to soften into the practical broadness Arthur remembered. He guessed Eames must have left the military right when he woke, just as Arthur had.
Arthur hesitated, a few steps away, but as Eames’ eyes blinked open the distance become too great, and Arthur crossed to Eames and leaned over him.
“Damn it,” Eames whispered, seeing Arthur. “I must give your team some credit. You’ll have to tell me how you found out we were infiltrating. And putting another dream layer over the top…. Genius.”
Eames trailed away as he raised the gun underneath his chair, and Arthur’s face creased with fear.
“Eames, no!” he said, urgently. “Fuck, you can’t shoot me again, this is real now.”
“Well, that’s a nice thought,” Eames said, smiling broadly, but not happily. “Unfortunately, you’re dead. I looked you up, you know. Traced you back to your military base in California and found out that you committed suicide three days after they put us all under for their little experiment.”
“You’re dead according to fucking military records too,” Arthur said, exasperated. “They blanked you out.”
Eames fell silent, looking up at Arthur with a shuttered expression that could have been hiding any emotion. “Arthur,” Eames murmured. “What were you trying to say to me, when they killed you? That’s what I dream about, you know. Those red words bleeding from your mouth.”
Arthur experienced the curious sensation of having his heart broken and remade at the same time. He slid his leg over Eames lap, taking the gun out of his hand gently and setting it on the table next to them. He shifted his weight down so he was straddling Eames’ hips. Eames’ hands came up automatically to balance them as Arthur leaned forward to rest his head against Eames’ collarbone.
“I was trying to tell you that I was so sorry I said it like that, but that I meant it,” Arthur whispered. “Not everything, of course. Just the ‘I love you’ part.”
“Oh,” Eames replied, hushed and soft where he spoke against Arthur’s hair. His voice rumbled in his chest shaking through Arthur like warmth. “Okay.”
Then, from behind him, there was that soft click that Arthur was beginning to get very sick of hearing at all the worst moments.
“I knew you’d lead us right to him, Arthur,” Ramirez said, softly.
Arthur swallowed thickly.
“I didn’t know he’d be here,” he replied to Ramirez, not turning to look at him and instead, sliding back enough to see Eames’s eyes. They were very dark in the dim light; he was watching Arthur so closely, like he’d been starved from the sight of him. But even as he drank Arthur in, his face was twisting into terrible understanding.
“I don’t think he cares much either way whether you knew or not,” Eames murmured.
“You understand why I have to do this, don’t you?” Ramirez asked, sounding almost sad. “It’s just that you both know too much, and you’ve proved that you can’t be dealt with the easy way.”
Arthur mouthed when I count to three.. Eames tilted his head just slightly in aknowledgement.
One.
Eames, very slowly and carefully, using Arthur’s body in front of him to block Ramirez’s vision, pulled his gun from the table where Arthur had just set it.
Two.
Arthur tugged his own gun from the shoulder holster he was wearing, hoping the dark of the room might mask his movement just enough to draw.
Three.
Arthur lunged from the chair, in one direction while Eames went the other way, crashing through a table and knocking a lamp to the floor. There were two shots fired, both speeding uselessly through the chair they’d occupied only a moment ago. Arthur rolled to his feet and spun on Ramirez, who was still caught in that moment of crucial indecision about whether to aim at Arthur or Eames.
Arthur fired just as Ramirez swung around to aim at him. The bullet slammed through Ramirez’s right leg, making him stagger and drop to one knee with a shout of pain. Eames fired his own shot at Ramirez, who finally crumpled down completely as Eames’ bullet buried itself just off centre of his spinal cord. But Eames had been a second too late. He looked up, gasping with adrenaline to see Arthur clutching at his shoulder, cold sweat from the pain already dampening his hair.
“No fucking way is this happening again,” Eames shouted at him, crossing the room in three strides and sinking down next to Arthur. His hand was soaked with blood.
“I’m not going to die, Eames,” Arthur mumbled, closing his eyes tightly and gasping as his shoulder throbbed.
“There would be more blood if it had hit something important,” Eames agreed, ripping the bottom of his shit into strips and tying them across the wound, while Arthur strained away from Eames’ hands though he could escape the pain by distancing himself from his shoulder.
“How long till someone else who wants to kill us wakes up?” Eames said. Even through the haze of pain, Arthur recognized the look on Eames’ face as something he never wanted to see again; he looked utterly heartbroken.
“Approximately ten seconds,” Arthur replied, voice tilting up at the end with a swallowed scream of pain.
“Okay, we’ve got to run.” Eames whispered. “Can you get up?”
“Yeah,” Arthur grit out. Then, as an afterthought, or like he didn’t quite want to say it, Arthur added, “You’ll have to help.”
Eames stood up, leaning one arm down and grasping Arthur’s uninjured side to pull him to his feet. For a moment they were pressed all together down one side, close so that Arthur could smell Eames again, and distantly he heard to beep that signified the PASIV was about to wake everyone else up, but it barely mattered, even the flares of pain in Arthur’s shoulder barely mattered, because Eames was right there.
“Jesus Christ,” Eames laughed, turning to him as he shoved his gun into his waistband. “I’m still so fucking happy.”
Arthur knew exactly what he meant.
---
“I can’t believe this place really exists,” Eames said to Arthur, picking up a jar of pickles with the hand not tangled in Arthur’s belt loops. There was a certain amount of whimsical marvel present in his expression. Arthur smiled.
“It’s not exactly the same,” Arthur pointed out. “I haven’t seen that lady with the broom around to injure you.”
“You never know,” Eames offered mysteriously. “Maybe it’s her day off. Broom wielding is tiring business.”
Arthur rolled his eyes. Eames pulled Arthur down the bread aisle, ripping a bit off a loaf and stuffing it in his mouth, spilling crumbs of crust down the front of his shirt.
“You better pay for that,” Arthur muttered, disapproving. Eames loomed over him, crowding into his space and kissing Arthur with crumbs still smeared across his mouth. He tasted wheaty, like the bread.
“That’s disgusting, Eames,” Arthur said, trying not to laugh as he pulled away. Eames tugged him closer again, lifting him a little and pinning him against the shelves.
“You’re so goddamn light now,” he murmured against Arthur’s neck. Arthur tipped his head back, forgetting they were in a public grocery store. He let his eyes drift shut, feeling all of Eames’ heat bleed into him sweetly.
“Oh, the wonders of being nineteen,” Arthur said, swallowing thickly so he wouldn’t sound so breathless.
“I bet you’re shockingly flexible,” Eames said, drawing the tip of his nose up the line of Arthur’s neck.
“Could be….” Arthur promised.
“OUT. OUT.”
“What?” Eames asked, leaning his head back far enough to see a tiny woman clutching a broom in her fists.
“NOT IN MY SHOP. NO. OUT. OUT.”
Arthur clapped his hand over his mouth to keep from screaming with laughter. “Oh my God,” he muttered through his fingers.
Eames turned, pulling Arthur with him as he left walking very quickly and peering over his shoulder with something close to nervousness. He jarred Arthur’s shoulder in his effort to escape and Arthur winced. Eames slid around to walk on the other side, touching Arthur’s wrist apologetically.
“I’ve got to give it to those fuckers, whoever they are,” Eames said once they were a few blocks away, leaning against the door of a closed restaurant. “The level of detail in that dream was beautiful. I mean, really, really beautiful. Their architects are artistes.”
“Hmm…” Arthur agreed, watching Eames slump down onto the stoop. It was too hot and humid to be wearing the suit Arthur had changed into that morning, and he stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, working gingerly around his arm, and sighing at the feeling of a gentle breeze across his forearms. “Have you ever thought of the fact that we get an extra ten years?” he said, after a moment, sitting down on the step below Eames and leaning back so he was resting against Eames’ knees.
“What do you mean?” Eames asked, vaguely, sliding his thumb across Arthur’s neck.
“I mean, we’re so young, but we’ve already had time to screw up and figure ourselves out and here we are knowing things like we’re thirty and living like we’re twenty. Worse things have happened to better people.”
“An extra ten years,” Eames murmured, leaning forward to rest his chin on Arthur's uninjured shoulder. “An extra ten years of you.”
Arthur turned slightly so he could see Eames’ closed eyes, pale gold in the sun and moving restlessly. He felt new and unlined, but smoothed away so Eames could fit against him just right, and it was good to feel so young with Eames feeling so young beside him.
fin
(Return to: PART ONE)
Notes:
Translations:
“Merde! Merde! Vous êtes une merde!” - “Shit. Shit. You are a shit.”
“Duoc. Xin loi. Toi xin loi.” - “Okay. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
(NB: Vietnamese has a lot of accent marks which were sadly removed in fear of the internet turning them into funny little meaningless pictures of boxes instead of letters.)
Some disclaimers discussing random crap:
1. I have to imagine the military doesn’t keep all their weapons on a wall in a room protected by a single pass-code in some easily accessible corner of a military base. Unfortunately for the military, they have no fact-checking power over my fic.
2. I thought I’d mention that I’m pretty sure I wasn’t totally consistent with British vs. American spellings in this fic. I am unfortunately the product of half an education in America and half in England. It’s not my fault. D:
3. I don’t know why I decided to use Saigon over Ho Chi Minh City. A mark of personal taste, I guess. synaereses would like me to inform you that this is more a matter of my personal taste against dictators than against the flow of the word Saigon vs Ho Chi Minh City. Yeah, so what, I got politics in my fic and fic in my politics.
4. What, you’re asking me why they didn’t all end up in limbo if they were three levels down in the long dream? What? Sorry, I did not hear you. :DDD
5. THIS FIC IS SO MUCH LONGER THAN IT’S MEANT TO BE, WTF, IT JUST GOES ON AND ON. Also I don’t know the last scene totally doesn’t go with everything else. I guess I was just thinking, so tired of angst, blargh. I have NO EXCUSES ;___;
As always, thanks to synaereses for being awesome in such a multitude of ways. REAL BOY ARTHUR FTW.
(x-posted to eames_arthur)