It starts to feel like a barricade to keep us away
Title: It starts to feel like a barricade to keep us away
Fandom: Inception
Disclaimer: The movie Inception does not belong to me and I am making no money from this story, just a good-ole fanwork!
Pairing/Characters: Arthur focus; Arthur/Eames, mentions of Ariadne, Yusuf, and Cobb
Word Count: 3,800
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Eames fell and knocked into Arthur as he was shot in the back and died. Arthur tumbled down with him, gun flying away, only Arthur didn’t get shot. Arthur got kicked in the jaw, hauled to his feet, dragged three floors down, and thrown into a cell.
Author notes: The title comes from an Interpol song
‘Why did we make the dream a fortress?’ is all Arthur can think over and over. ‘Why a jail fortress? Why? Why?’
It may have been the stupidest decision any of them has every made. Arthur can guess Ariadne got the idea from the third level of Inception. Arthur never saw that level in person but now he feels like he’s got a pretty good idea of what it must have looked like.
‘Less snow this time,’ Eames’ voice says in his head.
Less snow is hardly a consolation as Arthur stares at the bars in front of him.
He should have known from the start this was a job not to take. Extracting information from any sort of police officer is always a red flag, alarms ringing, no go. And then, oh, let’s add another twist, why not make it two? Two marks at once. Did they get greedy? Were they just too excited for some sort of challenge? Maybe they were just stupid because it sure feels like that now.
Arthur looks around his cell, completely bare but for the dark gray cement walls. It doesn’t even have a window on the back wall. The construction has a flair of Alcatraz to it with the door not being solid but plain vertical and horizontal bars instead. Was Ariadne going through some historic phase when they planned this?
“Run, just run!” Eames’ voice screamed at him before Arthur had even seen the projections coming.
Arthur ran without question, head down, slamming the safe shut behind him. He had the information in his hand and he just ran down the steps with Eames pounding behind him. They’d both made it to the first floor again flying by cells with cheering prisoner projections inside. Arthur had smiled with some sort of childish glee; they were doing a prison break! He’d tried to glance down at the pages in his hand as they went but they were moving too fast.
“Wait, look -” Eames’ voice cut off with a bang before Arthur knew what Eames was going to say.
Eames fell and knocked into Arthur as he was shot in the back and died. Arthur tumbled down with him, gun flying away, only Arthur didn’t get shot. Arthur got kicked in the jaw, hauled to his feet, dragged three floors down, and thrown into a cell.
Arthur stares at the bars in front of him as if he could dream them into changing form. It’s his dream; he should be able to change things. But dreams do not always obey and sometimes you can only change so much. The bars do not bend at his will. This is the second level and it is more solid than it should be. He thinks hard about splintering metal, crumbling walls but nothing changes.
“Break!” Arthur shouts and grabs the bars with both hands.
He’s not concentrating, that has to be it. Arthur reaches and pulls and feels through the dream but nothing moves. Maybe its Yusuf’s chemical, maybe he’s too sedated to dream his way out. Maybe something is wrong.
“Obviously,” Arthur grumbles.
Of course something is wrong. He’s in a fucking prison cell! Then a light bulb ignites in Arthur’s mind.
“Oh fuck,” Arthur can’t stop himself from hissing.
He breathes in sharply and paces twice back and forth across the six feet, wall to wall, of the width of his cell. He is on the second level right now and the timer up in reality is set for eight hours. Equations, clock hands, and pencil to paper flash through his head. His fingers flip flying through numbers, eight hours, six some days…
“Four months!” Arthur barks.
‘Four months and twenty days,’ Yusuf’s voice says helpfully in his head, ‘Approximately.’
“Damn it.” Arthur tries to breathe slowly.
He could be trapped down here for four months, almost five, until the time runs out. It’s not inception long but it’s long enough that Arthur suddenly punches the wall to his right. Pain shoots through him trying to tell him this world is only so much a dream. Arthur hisses and flexes his hand but wants to do it again.
He won’t be stuck here for four months, no way. Eames will kick him awake. Eames wouldn’t leave him. He’d come back for Arthur just like Arthur would for him.
Eames and Ariadne are on the first level now running around Chicago streets with Arthur’s body lying in the back of the favorite cop bar. They’ll have to do something to bring Arthur up.
‘Kick me back,’ Arthur thinks as if his request will travel up a layer directly into Eames’ brain. ‘Kick me back! Now!’
He’s uncertain if they can do an external kick for him up there.
Arthur’s been in a cell before, even once in reality, but it isn’t something he enjoys repeating. Arthur hates being cooped up, enclosed, no room to think, to breathe, to fight back. He’s not claustrophobic; he just doesn’t like being contained. He wants to be able to move as he wants, go where he needs to go. He wants room to fight and solve the problem. Three concrete walls and a door of bars leave him nothing, no escape.
There’s no telling how long it will take Eames and Ariadne to realize something is wrong on his level. They could be in any sort of trouble themselves. Arthur doesn’t even know if the marks are still on this level or not. They should be because as far as they know this is just work, days at the job. But it would make more sense for Eames and Ariadne if the marks were on level one. The projections were pretty fierce up on level one so it’s even possible that Eames and Ariadne have been shot back into reality. Too many avenues, too many possibilities, too many ways this dream could be driving and Arthur can’t figure it out at all from in here.
“Let me out!” Arthur shouts impulsively out of the bars, griping them like so many captives in so many movies.
It had always looked so silly on screen, people with their faces pressed into the bars as if they could slip through. But now Arthur mirrors the action just the same and he understands the feeling, the desire to tear his self right through. His skin crawls and his teeth are barred and the phrase ‘dog in a cage’ keeps flashing in Technicolor behind his eyes. Arthur tries to keep control, tries to keep calm but he’s all alone on this level now with no way to call for help.
Arthur has to wait.
---------------
Three hours pass. Arthur counts the time by heart beats, number of times he takes a breath for each minute. He traces the square of his cell with his eyes, measuring it in inches then feet then switching over to centimeters.
The cell contains nothing but empty walls, no bed, no classic metal toilet fixed to the concrete. Arthur gets no window, no scenery to distract him. All he has are the walls, the bars, and himself.
‘Maybe they won’t feed me,’ he thinks though Arthur’s not too keen on the idea of starving to death or dehydration as the way back up to level one.
“At least it would be faster,” Arthur mutters to himself.
A noise passes by his cell door and a bowl with some indefinable food matter clatters to the floor just inside the bars. Arthur leans back against the wall and glares. The sense of irony in this dream is all too apparent.
--------------
Twenty-four hours here, just a bit over an hour above.
‘Come on, Ariadne,’ Arthur thinks sending his thoughts as high as he can. ‘You’re smart enough, figure it out!’
Maybe if he can’t dream bending bars he can dream a telephone line upwards. Maybe he can get cell reception between dream layers.
‘Operator, could you connect me to layer one please?’
‘Hello? Ariadne? Yes, would you mind posting me bail on layer two, please?’
Arthur hates this fortress idea. The next time Ariadne suggests some sort of impregnable structure for their mark’s over protective brain to hide away secrets in Arthur is going to break all of her drafting pencils. Then maybe he’ll shoot her in the face. The vision of a gun against the architect’s head gives Arthur a little too much pleasure.
God, he’s starting to think like a prisoner.
He misses kissing Eames already and decides he really doesn’t do it enough. Arthur shakes his head and covers his face with his hands. Since when was he sappy? Can’t handle a day away from Eames, has to be a bad sign.
“Are you guys awake up there?” Arthur grumbles then sighs in annoyance at the double meaning in his words.
------------
Five days. Arthur wishes he had a pencil or a pen to keep track. He could go real old fashioned movie-like and put tick lines on the wall; one line per day or should he do a line per hour? He could keep a tally for level two time and a tally for level one time; hours for level one and days for level two.
“I am going to kill Yusuf,” Arthur mutters as he sits on the floor.
It has to be Yusuf’s sedation to blame for the unchanging dream world. Eames says he has no imagination but if Arthur had just a little room to maneuver he’s sure he could dream enough space between those bars to squeeze through.
‘You’re so small and lithe, darling,’ Eames coos in his mind; ‘You could fit through a crack in the wall.’
“I’d love a crack in the wall,” Arthur responds then smacks himself for responding to his stream of consciousness.
-----------
Arthur’s been tortured before.
He’s been shot just about everywhere a person can be on one dream layer or another. He was even shot right through the eye once. Mal stabbed him in the neck in Venice. Mal also shot him in the stomach, twice in fact. The second time took him half an hour to die and hurt worse than anything before it. He has a lot of Mal related deaths to his credit. Another time three projections shot him together, each hitting a different limb then they left him to bleed out. A mark figured out the dream and broke both of Arthur’s arms trying to get information out of him before Cobb broke down the door and shot Arthur back into reality. The worst was probably a three hour dream torture session with a rival extraction team, three fingers cut off to go with the beatings every five minutes and a rather elegant knife slice across his face. Arthur never screamed like that before.
This however, this cell, is a different sort of torture. Arthur feels no physical pain but the waiting, the time passing slower and slower, the walls crushing the air around him, stabs needles into his brain just as deadly.
Arthur begins to worry as the days pass that he might forget he’s dreaming.
------------
After a week and a half Arthur stops eating. He just can’t wait any longer. He gets two days into it, weak with chapped lips and a tongue like some sort of cardboard in his mouth. Then two projection guards hold him down while a third forces food and water down his throat. It’s the first time he’s actually seen anyone since he’s been locked up.
‘What?’ Arthur thinks as he chokes. ‘No IV?’
He never sees them bring the food but they show up when he stops eating it, how nice.
A new level of irony adds to the already considerable layers in this situation when Arthur thinks about the fact that the enemy is keeping him alive because that’s the job of a prison guard when there’s no death penalty. Keep those prisoners alive so they can suffer out their sentence.
‘Where’s my trial by jury?’ Arthur laughs at himself as strength starts to come back.
He stops caring about finishing the job.
Arthur wants to touch someone, to have someone here. He wants Eames’ arms around him, lips on his cheek. He wants to hear Ariadne laughing, Yusuf’s snort about ridiculous children, Cobb sighing yet again. He wants Eames in his arms warm and close.
It’s amazing how fast solitary confinement can bring on despair. And Arthur used to think he didn’t need people.
------------
“Wake me up!” Arthur shouts because the silence is too much.
He punches the wall again and feels some fingers break. He groans but does it again just to feel the blast and hear the crunch.
“Eames! Ariadne!” Arthur shouts, head tilted back and sound forced upward. “Wake me up, Eames!”
He knows Eames would come back for him if he knew. Ariadne even would. They can’t know he’s trapped here or something else went wrong up above.
Arthur can’t stop himself from pacing, from squeezing his other hand over his broken fingers just to feel the pain. If he feels the pain it keeps him centered, gives him something to focus on beyond the cement under his feet and above his head and on both sides and the bars at his back.
“Wake me up!”
He can’t sleep even though he is asleep and the silence just doesn’t stop.
-------------
Arthur tries to get creative with killing himself.
Hang himself by his tie? The only thing he could fix it to would be the top horizontal bar on the door and that is at eye level. The body’s instinctive need to live would make him stand up again, probably. It’s certainly not high enough to break his neck.
Stab himself with the spoon from his daily gruel? Neither end of the spoon is sharp enough and even if he took the time to get under the skin with the blunt tool the guards would stop him. He’d probably pass out from shock or blood loss or just the pain before he could even get close to death by spoon.
Starving? Oh, wait, been there, done that.
‘No imagination,’ Eames’ voice in his mind says again.
He could bash his head against the wall until he cracks his skull and scrambles his brains? Sadly it’s the only one which seems like a viable idea.
------------
Arthur watches the mental tick marks on the wall. They glow like imaginary night lights though the lights here never go out which has to be another level of torture. No sleeping when you’re already asleep twice. (Arthur thinks the unending light and lack of sleep must be adding to his growing mental instability). The tick marks are starting to take up considerable space. Arthur still wants a real pencil to jot them down or stab himself in the eye.
“Two weeks… four days… or is it five days?”
Shit, he can’t lose count. The passing time keeps him here, keeps him on the dream. He wonders if limbo was like this, minutes and hours and days all blurring together? He feels like maybe when he wakes up again he should ask Cobb or Saito.
Or maybe when he wakes up he should just fucking shoot some people because that would feel damn good. Either that or fuck Eames until he can’t feel anything else but hot bliss. Eames sounds like the better idea. Maybe he’ll do both.
He’s making plans, has to be a good sign he’s not totally losing his mind.
Arthur’s not even sure if he’s charting the time correctly. His watch stopped after the first day in the cell. The implications of that scare Arthur sometimes more than the walls boxing him up.
-----------
He needs to just suck it up. If he has to ride out the full four and a half months or whatever days then so be it. It’s not the third level where he’d be waiting years. If Arthur really thinks hard about it then he’s actually lucked out. So, he’s stuck in a prison cell on level two, oh well! There are people stuck in prison cells in reality for their whole lives.
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Arthur snaps at himself.
It does mean he needs to maintain control. If he can’t get out, if he has to stay trapped in a cage, in a box, in this empty, lonely space then he can at least stay sane. The job has got to be completely fucked by now so no need to think about that.
“Only three weeks,” Arthur tells himself. “You’ve done it this long.”
Just keep track of every week, every day, every hour, every minute. All he needs to do is know how long he’s been here, how long this dream has been winding on. The time will run down eventually and he’ll see the sky again. He’ll see Ariadne and Yusuf and maybe even Cobb if the man’s not too busy being a dad. He’ll see Eames, God, yes, please, he’ll see Eames. He has to.
Arthur hopes. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
------------
Four weeks, passed the one month mark.
His broken fingers healed, bones connected in incorrect ways to give him different knobs on his fist. It’s strange to look at and Arthur finds himself spending three hours and twenty-two minutes staring at the changes in his hand. He has nothing else to do but count time and the only real thing to look at in this cell is him. He’s grown thinner on the prison food if that’s even possible in a dream. Can’t slip through the bars though, he’s tried.
“A month…” he says it out loud. “One month, thirty days…”
Arthur won’t let himself calculate the hours.
He thinks about Cobb and their first job together after Mal in Germany, two layers then as well. He thinks about Ariadne and how vulnerable she looked the first time she gasped awake after dream death. He thinks about Yusuf and the time he went on a ten minute rant about charlatans who sell false chemicals and kill dreamers. He thinks of Eames and their first kiss from an ironic accident of ice in Seattle. He thinks of Eames asleep in his arms. He thinks…
“One month.” Arthur cracks his knuckles just to hear some noise. “One month.”
He thinks how the time feels so much longer, so less distinct than he’d imagined.
-----------
Tick marks on the wall, growing fuzzy, growing harder to keep track of. It can’t really have been that long. A timer in reality ticks toward his salvation. He won’t be here forever, won’t be left alone.
He punches the wall again with his bad hand just to reset the bones. He doesn’t scream but it sharpens his view and that’s what he needs.
-------------
Sometimes an irrational and terrifying thought creeps into his head.
‘What if this isn’t level two? What if this is limbo?’
------------
Then the lights flicker. Arthur is on his feet so fast he almost forgets this is a dream.
‘Bring me my release!’
Arthur grabs the bars with both hands and tries to peer out. He can’t see anything like always but something, some urgency he feels says, ‘now, now now!’
He hears gunshots from somewhere overhead. He hasn’t heard anything from the floors above in the entire time he’s been here. Arthur’s pulse jumps, adrenaline rushes and he begins to pull on the bars without realizing it. Suddenly something crashes and a guard runs past his cell. Just the sight of another person makes a flutter of happiness flash through his chest. Arthur hears the feet skid, stop, and the man reappears in front of the bars. Arthur catalogs him quickly: tall, reddish blond hair, thin but not as thin as himself. Arthur could beat him in a fight. The man sighs heavily and touches Arthur’s hand on the bars.
“Oh, darling,” he says.
“Eames!” Arthur cries with more pain and relief than he realized he felt.
Arthur blinks and Eames hastily forces a key into the lock. The door swings open, bars out of Arthur’s way to sweet open air beyond. Arthur takes two steps out of the cell and into Eames’ arms.
“This job has been bloody awful,” Eames starts as Arthur buries his face in the warm fabric of Eames’ shirt, “shot in the back here then Ariadne is locked up in the freezer of that bar, lost four hours right there when they knocked me out. Unconscious twice in the same layer. Had the two of us locked up for a day and -”
“Shut up,” Arthur says and kisses Eames like it’s been more than weeks, like it’s been years, like he thought the last time had been the very last time.
Arthur backs Eames up into the wall, kissing hard, tasting everything he can and clutching Eames as close as possible because if he lets go then he might be back in the cell alone again.
“Arthur -”
Eames feels hot and real and alive and Arthur didn’t realize how cold he’d become before just now. He can’t stop touching Eames to be sure he’s really there; to be sure he’s actually real. His lips feel just as full and perfect as always under Arthur’s. Eames is the perfect height, the stubble on his face, his hair brushing Arthur’s forehead, everything perfect, every muscle, perfect Eames and Arthur wants more.
“Arthur -”
Eames tries to disentangle Arthur from him.
“No,” Arthur says through kisses, “not yet, please.”
“Arthur we -” Arthur kisses Eames again - “we have to go.”
“It’s been so long,” Arthur whispers, a tiny crack.
“I’m sorry,” Eames thumbs Arthur’s cheek and rubs his back. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“A month… month and half, God, I don’t know.”
Eames kisses Arthur hard then steps him back just a few inches so they can look at each other.
“We’ve got the information.”
Arthur blinks before memory clicks in. ‘Oh yeah, they were here on a job.’
“Ariadne is waiting.” Eames nods his head in the direction of the stairs leading up. “But I came back.” He breathes out slowly and Arthur realizes then that Eames has been holding back panic. “I came back for you.”
Arthur laughs. The action feels foreign, like something he’d forgotten.
“You’re beautiful,” he says.
Eames smiles and looks sad, like he’s failed. Arthur kisses him again to make the expression go away.
“As much as I love kissing you…” Eames starts.
Arthur pulls away just a fraction. “Time to wake up.”
Eames puts his gun against Arthur’s temple and Arthur smiles, ride the kick. Eames shoots and the walls, the cell, the silence, the lost time all disappear.
Fandom: Inception
Disclaimer: The movie Inception does not belong to me and I am making no money from this story, just a good-ole fanwork!
Pairing/Characters: Arthur focus; Arthur/Eames, mentions of Ariadne, Yusuf, and Cobb
Word Count: 3,800
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Eames fell and knocked into Arthur as he was shot in the back and died. Arthur tumbled down with him, gun flying away, only Arthur didn’t get shot. Arthur got kicked in the jaw, hauled to his feet, dragged three floors down, and thrown into a cell.
Author notes: The title comes from an Interpol song
‘Why did we make the dream a fortress?’ is all Arthur can think over and over. ‘Why a jail fortress? Why? Why?’
It may have been the stupidest decision any of them has every made. Arthur can guess Ariadne got the idea from the third level of Inception. Arthur never saw that level in person but now he feels like he’s got a pretty good idea of what it must have looked like.
‘Less snow this time,’ Eames’ voice says in his head.
Less snow is hardly a consolation as Arthur stares at the bars in front of him.
He should have known from the start this was a job not to take. Extracting information from any sort of police officer is always a red flag, alarms ringing, no go. And then, oh, let’s add another twist, why not make it two? Two marks at once. Did they get greedy? Were they just too excited for some sort of challenge? Maybe they were just stupid because it sure feels like that now.
Arthur looks around his cell, completely bare but for the dark gray cement walls. It doesn’t even have a window on the back wall. The construction has a flair of Alcatraz to it with the door not being solid but plain vertical and horizontal bars instead. Was Ariadne going through some historic phase when they planned this?
“Run, just run!” Eames’ voice screamed at him before Arthur had even seen the projections coming.
Arthur ran without question, head down, slamming the safe shut behind him. He had the information in his hand and he just ran down the steps with Eames pounding behind him. They’d both made it to the first floor again flying by cells with cheering prisoner projections inside. Arthur had smiled with some sort of childish glee; they were doing a prison break! He’d tried to glance down at the pages in his hand as they went but they were moving too fast.
“Wait, look -” Eames’ voice cut off with a bang before Arthur knew what Eames was going to say.
Eames fell and knocked into Arthur as he was shot in the back and died. Arthur tumbled down with him, gun flying away, only Arthur didn’t get shot. Arthur got kicked in the jaw, hauled to his feet, dragged three floors down, and thrown into a cell.
Arthur stares at the bars in front of him as if he could dream them into changing form. It’s his dream; he should be able to change things. But dreams do not always obey and sometimes you can only change so much. The bars do not bend at his will. This is the second level and it is more solid than it should be. He thinks hard about splintering metal, crumbling walls but nothing changes.
“Break!” Arthur shouts and grabs the bars with both hands.
He’s not concentrating, that has to be it. Arthur reaches and pulls and feels through the dream but nothing moves. Maybe its Yusuf’s chemical, maybe he’s too sedated to dream his way out. Maybe something is wrong.
“Obviously,” Arthur grumbles.
Of course something is wrong. He’s in a fucking prison cell! Then a light bulb ignites in Arthur’s mind.
“Oh fuck,” Arthur can’t stop himself from hissing.
He breathes in sharply and paces twice back and forth across the six feet, wall to wall, of the width of his cell. He is on the second level right now and the timer up in reality is set for eight hours. Equations, clock hands, and pencil to paper flash through his head. His fingers flip flying through numbers, eight hours, six some days…
“Four months!” Arthur barks.
‘Four months and twenty days,’ Yusuf’s voice says helpfully in his head, ‘Approximately.’
“Damn it.” Arthur tries to breathe slowly.
He could be trapped down here for four months, almost five, until the time runs out. It’s not inception long but it’s long enough that Arthur suddenly punches the wall to his right. Pain shoots through him trying to tell him this world is only so much a dream. Arthur hisses and flexes his hand but wants to do it again.
He won’t be stuck here for four months, no way. Eames will kick him awake. Eames wouldn’t leave him. He’d come back for Arthur just like Arthur would for him.
Eames and Ariadne are on the first level now running around Chicago streets with Arthur’s body lying in the back of the favorite cop bar. They’ll have to do something to bring Arthur up.
‘Kick me back,’ Arthur thinks as if his request will travel up a layer directly into Eames’ brain. ‘Kick me back! Now!’
He’s uncertain if they can do an external kick for him up there.
Arthur’s been in a cell before, even once in reality, but it isn’t something he enjoys repeating. Arthur hates being cooped up, enclosed, no room to think, to breathe, to fight back. He’s not claustrophobic; he just doesn’t like being contained. He wants to be able to move as he wants, go where he needs to go. He wants room to fight and solve the problem. Three concrete walls and a door of bars leave him nothing, no escape.
There’s no telling how long it will take Eames and Ariadne to realize something is wrong on his level. They could be in any sort of trouble themselves. Arthur doesn’t even know if the marks are still on this level or not. They should be because as far as they know this is just work, days at the job. But it would make more sense for Eames and Ariadne if the marks were on level one. The projections were pretty fierce up on level one so it’s even possible that Eames and Ariadne have been shot back into reality. Too many avenues, too many possibilities, too many ways this dream could be driving and Arthur can’t figure it out at all from in here.
“Let me out!” Arthur shouts impulsively out of the bars, griping them like so many captives in so many movies.
It had always looked so silly on screen, people with their faces pressed into the bars as if they could slip through. But now Arthur mirrors the action just the same and he understands the feeling, the desire to tear his self right through. His skin crawls and his teeth are barred and the phrase ‘dog in a cage’ keeps flashing in Technicolor behind his eyes. Arthur tries to keep control, tries to keep calm but he’s all alone on this level now with no way to call for help.
Arthur has to wait.
---------------
Three hours pass. Arthur counts the time by heart beats, number of times he takes a breath for each minute. He traces the square of his cell with his eyes, measuring it in inches then feet then switching over to centimeters.
The cell contains nothing but empty walls, no bed, no classic metal toilet fixed to the concrete. Arthur gets no window, no scenery to distract him. All he has are the walls, the bars, and himself.
‘Maybe they won’t feed me,’ he thinks though Arthur’s not too keen on the idea of starving to death or dehydration as the way back up to level one.
“At least it would be faster,” Arthur mutters to himself.
A noise passes by his cell door and a bowl with some indefinable food matter clatters to the floor just inside the bars. Arthur leans back against the wall and glares. The sense of irony in this dream is all too apparent.
--------------
Twenty-four hours here, just a bit over an hour above.
‘Come on, Ariadne,’ Arthur thinks sending his thoughts as high as he can. ‘You’re smart enough, figure it out!’
Maybe if he can’t dream bending bars he can dream a telephone line upwards. Maybe he can get cell reception between dream layers.
‘Operator, could you connect me to layer one please?’
‘Hello? Ariadne? Yes, would you mind posting me bail on layer two, please?’
Arthur hates this fortress idea. The next time Ariadne suggests some sort of impregnable structure for their mark’s over protective brain to hide away secrets in Arthur is going to break all of her drafting pencils. Then maybe he’ll shoot her in the face. The vision of a gun against the architect’s head gives Arthur a little too much pleasure.
God, he’s starting to think like a prisoner.
He misses kissing Eames already and decides he really doesn’t do it enough. Arthur shakes his head and covers his face with his hands. Since when was he sappy? Can’t handle a day away from Eames, has to be a bad sign.
“Are you guys awake up there?” Arthur grumbles then sighs in annoyance at the double meaning in his words.
------------
Five days. Arthur wishes he had a pencil or a pen to keep track. He could go real old fashioned movie-like and put tick lines on the wall; one line per day or should he do a line per hour? He could keep a tally for level two time and a tally for level one time; hours for level one and days for level two.
“I am going to kill Yusuf,” Arthur mutters as he sits on the floor.
It has to be Yusuf’s sedation to blame for the unchanging dream world. Eames says he has no imagination but if Arthur had just a little room to maneuver he’s sure he could dream enough space between those bars to squeeze through.
‘You’re so small and lithe, darling,’ Eames coos in his mind; ‘You could fit through a crack in the wall.’
“I’d love a crack in the wall,” Arthur responds then smacks himself for responding to his stream of consciousness.
-----------
Arthur’s been tortured before.
He’s been shot just about everywhere a person can be on one dream layer or another. He was even shot right through the eye once. Mal stabbed him in the neck in Venice. Mal also shot him in the stomach, twice in fact. The second time took him half an hour to die and hurt worse than anything before it. He has a lot of Mal related deaths to his credit. Another time three projections shot him together, each hitting a different limb then they left him to bleed out. A mark figured out the dream and broke both of Arthur’s arms trying to get information out of him before Cobb broke down the door and shot Arthur back into reality. The worst was probably a three hour dream torture session with a rival extraction team, three fingers cut off to go with the beatings every five minutes and a rather elegant knife slice across his face. Arthur never screamed like that before.
This however, this cell, is a different sort of torture. Arthur feels no physical pain but the waiting, the time passing slower and slower, the walls crushing the air around him, stabs needles into his brain just as deadly.
Arthur begins to worry as the days pass that he might forget he’s dreaming.
------------
After a week and a half Arthur stops eating. He just can’t wait any longer. He gets two days into it, weak with chapped lips and a tongue like some sort of cardboard in his mouth. Then two projection guards hold him down while a third forces food and water down his throat. It’s the first time he’s actually seen anyone since he’s been locked up.
‘What?’ Arthur thinks as he chokes. ‘No IV?’
He never sees them bring the food but they show up when he stops eating it, how nice.
A new level of irony adds to the already considerable layers in this situation when Arthur thinks about the fact that the enemy is keeping him alive because that’s the job of a prison guard when there’s no death penalty. Keep those prisoners alive so they can suffer out their sentence.
‘Where’s my trial by jury?’ Arthur laughs at himself as strength starts to come back.
He stops caring about finishing the job.
Arthur wants to touch someone, to have someone here. He wants Eames’ arms around him, lips on his cheek. He wants to hear Ariadne laughing, Yusuf’s snort about ridiculous children, Cobb sighing yet again. He wants Eames in his arms warm and close.
It’s amazing how fast solitary confinement can bring on despair. And Arthur used to think he didn’t need people.
------------
“Wake me up!” Arthur shouts because the silence is too much.
He punches the wall again and feels some fingers break. He groans but does it again just to feel the blast and hear the crunch.
“Eames! Ariadne!” Arthur shouts, head tilted back and sound forced upward. “Wake me up, Eames!”
He knows Eames would come back for him if he knew. Ariadne even would. They can’t know he’s trapped here or something else went wrong up above.
Arthur can’t stop himself from pacing, from squeezing his other hand over his broken fingers just to feel the pain. If he feels the pain it keeps him centered, gives him something to focus on beyond the cement under his feet and above his head and on both sides and the bars at his back.
“Wake me up!”
He can’t sleep even though he is asleep and the silence just doesn’t stop.
-------------
Arthur tries to get creative with killing himself.
Hang himself by his tie? The only thing he could fix it to would be the top horizontal bar on the door and that is at eye level. The body’s instinctive need to live would make him stand up again, probably. It’s certainly not high enough to break his neck.
Stab himself with the spoon from his daily gruel? Neither end of the spoon is sharp enough and even if he took the time to get under the skin with the blunt tool the guards would stop him. He’d probably pass out from shock or blood loss or just the pain before he could even get close to death by spoon.
Starving? Oh, wait, been there, done that.
‘No imagination,’ Eames’ voice in his mind says again.
He could bash his head against the wall until he cracks his skull and scrambles his brains? Sadly it’s the only one which seems like a viable idea.
------------
Arthur watches the mental tick marks on the wall. They glow like imaginary night lights though the lights here never go out which has to be another level of torture. No sleeping when you’re already asleep twice. (Arthur thinks the unending light and lack of sleep must be adding to his growing mental instability). The tick marks are starting to take up considerable space. Arthur still wants a real pencil to jot them down or stab himself in the eye.
“Two weeks… four days… or is it five days?”
Shit, he can’t lose count. The passing time keeps him here, keeps him on the dream. He wonders if limbo was like this, minutes and hours and days all blurring together? He feels like maybe when he wakes up again he should ask Cobb or Saito.
Or maybe when he wakes up he should just fucking shoot some people because that would feel damn good. Either that or fuck Eames until he can’t feel anything else but hot bliss. Eames sounds like the better idea. Maybe he’ll do both.
He’s making plans, has to be a good sign he’s not totally losing his mind.
Arthur’s not even sure if he’s charting the time correctly. His watch stopped after the first day in the cell. The implications of that scare Arthur sometimes more than the walls boxing him up.
-----------
He needs to just suck it up. If he has to ride out the full four and a half months or whatever days then so be it. It’s not the third level where he’d be waiting years. If Arthur really thinks hard about it then he’s actually lucked out. So, he’s stuck in a prison cell on level two, oh well! There are people stuck in prison cells in reality for their whole lives.
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Arthur snaps at himself.
It does mean he needs to maintain control. If he can’t get out, if he has to stay trapped in a cage, in a box, in this empty, lonely space then he can at least stay sane. The job has got to be completely fucked by now so no need to think about that.
“Only three weeks,” Arthur tells himself. “You’ve done it this long.”
Just keep track of every week, every day, every hour, every minute. All he needs to do is know how long he’s been here, how long this dream has been winding on. The time will run down eventually and he’ll see the sky again. He’ll see Ariadne and Yusuf and maybe even Cobb if the man’s not too busy being a dad. He’ll see Eames, God, yes, please, he’ll see Eames. He has to.
Arthur hopes. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
------------
Four weeks, passed the one month mark.
His broken fingers healed, bones connected in incorrect ways to give him different knobs on his fist. It’s strange to look at and Arthur finds himself spending three hours and twenty-two minutes staring at the changes in his hand. He has nothing else to do but count time and the only real thing to look at in this cell is him. He’s grown thinner on the prison food if that’s even possible in a dream. Can’t slip through the bars though, he’s tried.
“A month…” he says it out loud. “One month, thirty days…”
Arthur won’t let himself calculate the hours.
He thinks about Cobb and their first job together after Mal in Germany, two layers then as well. He thinks about Ariadne and how vulnerable she looked the first time she gasped awake after dream death. He thinks about Yusuf and the time he went on a ten minute rant about charlatans who sell false chemicals and kill dreamers. He thinks of Eames and their first kiss from an ironic accident of ice in Seattle. He thinks of Eames asleep in his arms. He thinks…
“One month.” Arthur cracks his knuckles just to hear some noise. “One month.”
He thinks how the time feels so much longer, so less distinct than he’d imagined.
-----------
Tick marks on the wall, growing fuzzy, growing harder to keep track of. It can’t really have been that long. A timer in reality ticks toward his salvation. He won’t be here forever, won’t be left alone.
He punches the wall again with his bad hand just to reset the bones. He doesn’t scream but it sharpens his view and that’s what he needs.
-------------
Sometimes an irrational and terrifying thought creeps into his head.
‘What if this isn’t level two? What if this is limbo?’
------------
Then the lights flicker. Arthur is on his feet so fast he almost forgets this is a dream.
‘Bring me my release!’
Arthur grabs the bars with both hands and tries to peer out. He can’t see anything like always but something, some urgency he feels says, ‘now, now now!’
He hears gunshots from somewhere overhead. He hasn’t heard anything from the floors above in the entire time he’s been here. Arthur’s pulse jumps, adrenaline rushes and he begins to pull on the bars without realizing it. Suddenly something crashes and a guard runs past his cell. Just the sight of another person makes a flutter of happiness flash through his chest. Arthur hears the feet skid, stop, and the man reappears in front of the bars. Arthur catalogs him quickly: tall, reddish blond hair, thin but not as thin as himself. Arthur could beat him in a fight. The man sighs heavily and touches Arthur’s hand on the bars.
“Oh, darling,” he says.
“Eames!” Arthur cries with more pain and relief than he realized he felt.
Arthur blinks and Eames hastily forces a key into the lock. The door swings open, bars out of Arthur’s way to sweet open air beyond. Arthur takes two steps out of the cell and into Eames’ arms.
“This job has been bloody awful,” Eames starts as Arthur buries his face in the warm fabric of Eames’ shirt, “shot in the back here then Ariadne is locked up in the freezer of that bar, lost four hours right there when they knocked me out. Unconscious twice in the same layer. Had the two of us locked up for a day and -”
“Shut up,” Arthur says and kisses Eames like it’s been more than weeks, like it’s been years, like he thought the last time had been the very last time.
Arthur backs Eames up into the wall, kissing hard, tasting everything he can and clutching Eames as close as possible because if he lets go then he might be back in the cell alone again.
“Arthur -”
Eames feels hot and real and alive and Arthur didn’t realize how cold he’d become before just now. He can’t stop touching Eames to be sure he’s really there; to be sure he’s actually real. His lips feel just as full and perfect as always under Arthur’s. Eames is the perfect height, the stubble on his face, his hair brushing Arthur’s forehead, everything perfect, every muscle, perfect Eames and Arthur wants more.
“Arthur -”
Eames tries to disentangle Arthur from him.
“No,” Arthur says through kisses, “not yet, please.”
“Arthur we -” Arthur kisses Eames again - “we have to go.”
“It’s been so long,” Arthur whispers, a tiny crack.
“I’m sorry,” Eames thumbs Arthur’s cheek and rubs his back. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“A month… month and half, God, I don’t know.”
Eames kisses Arthur hard then steps him back just a few inches so they can look at each other.
“We’ve got the information.”
Arthur blinks before memory clicks in. ‘Oh yeah, they were here on a job.’
“Ariadne is waiting.” Eames nods his head in the direction of the stairs leading up. “But I came back.” He breathes out slowly and Arthur realizes then that Eames has been holding back panic. “I came back for you.”
Arthur laughs. The action feels foreign, like something he’d forgotten.
“You’re beautiful,” he says.
Eames smiles and looks sad, like he’s failed. Arthur kisses him again to make the expression go away.
“As much as I love kissing you…” Eames starts.
Arthur pulls away just a fraction. “Time to wake up.”
Eames puts his gun against Arthur’s temple and Arthur smiles, ride the kick. Eames shoots and the walls, the cell, the silence, the lost time all disappear.