out of the frying pan (and into the fire) part four
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN (AND INTO THE FIRE) PART FOUR
word count: 5,48O
Living without Eames was like not living at all. Suddenly, every pastime, every activity, felt mundane and useless, or too strenuous. Arthur spent his time lying in bed, or watching television, until finally, in August, Amanda declared that enough was enough and called a road trip to New York to change Arthur's thoughts.
The room Arthur had been given on campus was a double, and it felt small and cramped even though his roommate hadn't even arrived with all of his stuff yet. Taking a note of the utter lack of privacy the room offered, Arthur tried hard not to think of the cozy little apartments he'd looked at before Eames had gone off and left him.
Although they had agreed to keep the relationship going, Arthur had thought he'd scared Eames off with his declaration and that he had seen or heard the last of Eames. Surprisingly, Eames had called every week, sometimes as often as three times a week, and they'd talked for hours. It was almost like being together again, until Arthur rolled over for a kiss in a moment of lapse and heard the loud beeping of pressed buttons when he crushed the phone between his cheek and the bed.
"My roommate's a total slob," Arthur told him after the guy finally moved in. "He's always leaving stuff lying around, loose papers on his desk, under a pile of books. And he's always squinting at everything. Seriously, I'm not sure he's even ever heard of the concept of glasses or contact lenses."
Eames chuckled on the other line. "What's the bloke's name?" His accent had gotten thicker over the few months he'd been there; at first, Arthur had been so surprised that he hadn't understood the new curve of consonants. Now, though, he found the voice a soothing melody he could melt into. He often found himself grinning while listening to Eames talk, even if what was being said was not particular funny or even cause for smiling.
"Dominic Cobb. Total weirdo. I don't even know how he made it to adulthood, let alone third year of architectural school, without walking off a cliff."
"Maybe he's a hidden genius."
Arthur thought of Cobb's tattered yellow sweater and his drooping eyelids as he read over a creased and stained document because it had been serving as a coaster for a week, and snorted. "Please. If a guy like that can get on the honor roll three years standing, then I've got my career in my pocket."
By the end of the first semester, Arthur felt like the only thing he lived for was the ring of the phone, hoping to hear Eames on the other line.
His head teacher had pulled him aside a week before the finals. "Your work is good, Arthur," he'd began, staring down at his latest essay on Jorn Utzon. Arthur could sense the conjunction coming, and he could tell by the crease between his teacher's eyes and the downward tilt of his head, not meeting his eyes, it would not be 'and’ followed by ‘you're one of the best students of this academy.' "But, I'm not sure you're cut out for this line of work."
To be honest, Arthur had been having nagging thoughts along this trend for a few months now. Although his grades were decent, and most likely more than satisfactory for any average student, they were the lowest they had ever been in his life. He didn't think he was producing work of a lesser quality than the other students, but somehow, all his grades stagnated at the same point and he could not seem to pass the bar from 'acceptable' work to 'outstanding' quality. Only obstinacy and a personal feeling of failure if he were to accept that he had chosen the wrong path kept the thoughts at bay. Hearing them said aloud formed a bulge of dread and fear inside of Arthur's throat.
"It's not even the end of the first semester of the first year," Arthur pleaded. "Don't you think it's a bit early to be making such calls?"
Mr. Franks finally raised his head to meet Arthur's gaze. "Any other student," he heaved his shoulders, "maybe. I'd have let it play it out. But, you... you're a high-level student, Arthur. I saw your records; I know what you're capable of. You like clean-cut edges, numbers and logic and symmetrical structures. You thought that's what you would find in architecture. But this is an art, there's an abstract dimension to this world that you haven't been able to grasp."
Arthur nodded fervently. "Sure. Abstraction. I can work with that, honestly. I know all about Delaunay and Matisse."
Mr. Franks had a sad look about him when he shook his head. "I just don't think you have enough imagination to create on your own, Arthur."
**
"Who does that old bastard think he is to make such a call?!" Arthur yelled over the phone. He felt momentarily like an asshole for taking his anger out on Eames who couldn't help how the stupid teachers graded his assignments or called shots on his future, but then he remembered that Eames had chosen to leave him for another continent across the ocean and deserved at least part of the anger directed at him.
On the other end, Eames chuckled. "That you lack imagination is not news to me, Arthur." His voice was calm and low, hardly above a whisper, as though he was purposely controlling it.
"Are you okay? Where are you right now? On the underground?" He doubted it, since it was completely quiet on Eames' end. Besides, it was ten at night in London, and Eames was usually at home. It was five o'clock for Arthur, and he was walking home from class. It was a long walk, but it was the highlight of his week: Friday nights were the only times their schedules overlapped, and Eames kept him company as he walked.
"Not the kind you're thinking of." There was a muffled movement, whispers, more than one voice from the sound of it. Arthur frowned. Eames was usually home at this time. Sometimes he had a few friends over, but they never made much effort to keep quiet, especially since they probably had no idea Eames was talking to his boyfriend. Eames probably told him it was just a friend on the line.
He was about to ask, with irrational jealousy, who he was with. Eames had missed their last two meets, and Arthur had especially hoped to have him all to himself tonight, when Eames beat him to the punch. "Listen, Arthur, now's not the greatest time, actually. Forgot we were Friday, made some plans with a few mates. What you say we postpone to Wednesday?"
"Uh." Arthur wanted to tell Eames where his friends could go. This was their time, goddamnit, and Arthur needed to vent. He knew he was being pettish, and he hated himself for it. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, of course, no problem. Have fun with your friends."
"Yeah." He could hear the smile in Eames' voice. He'd have felt better if he'd sounded the least bit remorseful about the situation. "Ta."
"See you," Arthur replied, even though the line had already gone dead.
The walk home was very quiet.
**
Arthur was determined to prove Mr. Franks wrong. He wasn't a genius for nothing, and he would substantiate that there was more to him than straight lines and perfect angles. So, he sucked up his pride and went to the only person he knew could help him: Dominic Cobb.
Despite first appearances, Cobb wasn't such a bad guy. Over the course of several months, Arthur had come to accept Cobb's brilliancy, though Arthur did doubt at times that architecture was really the only place it shone. After a month of the only contact being Arthur coolly telling him when his mess was seeping over onto his side of the room, Cobb made a wavering attempt to make friends and Arthur had taken pity on him and allowed it.
They weren't exactly friends, but their relationship had budded past the distantly polite into something a little more comfortable - roommates on good terms, Arthur thought. Not that they were in the same room all that often, to be honest. Cobb was usually with his girlfriend, an exquisite French beauty by the name of Mallorie Miles.
Arthur had actually first met Mal on the first day of class, when she had taken the seat next to him and then proceeded to be the most out-of-this world character he had ever met. She had all the grace and sensuality expected of in a French exchange student, but she stood out even more through a vibe of mystery and aloofness. Looking to replace the void Eames had left, Arthur felt drawn to her complexity, drawn by the desire to work her out, to understand and to be a part of a world he was sure was so extraordinary he could never dream of its true nature. This desire only strengthened when Cobb introduced her to Arthur as his girlfriend. Arthur had remained dumbfounded for several minutes before stammering out some kind of wondering about how they had met, when in truth all he wanted to know was how a girl like Mal could have ever gone for a guy like Cobb.
He thought he understood, though, months later, when he tentatively asked Cobb for a few pointers on how to improve his class notes, and Cobb had enthusiastically sat down and talked through the night. Arthur thought he understood then, what Mr. Franks had been saying. Arthur liked architecture, but he didn't even hold a tenth of an ounce of the passion Cobb possessed.
They became closer after that. Some wind had changed, and they saw more of each other now. Mal began coming over to the dorm, instead of Cobb always going to her place, and soon she was coming even when Cobb wasn't around.
"He thought you were some pretentious stick in the mud," Mal told Arthur one afternoon while digging through their miniature fridge. They had been discussing the latest Mies van der Rohe award bestowed to Peter Zumthor, so the comment came somewhat out of nowhere.
Arthur didn't have to ask who she was talking about though. "Fair enough, I thought he was a pretentious slob who had somehow managed to fraud his way up the years."
Mal smiled at him. "Yet you were always so polite. You are a hard man to figure out, Arthur." She came back to the bed with a can of coke, and sat cross-legged across from him. The irony of the comment made him grin. If only she knew how mutual the feeling was. "Do you not have any other friends on campus? We never see you with anyone else. A girlfriend, perhaps?"
Arthur looked out the window over Mal's shoulder. He didn't know what it was, maybe the feeling of having found a kindred spirit that he had never thought would happen again made him reluctant to lie, or maybe he was just tired of having to hide himself. "I have a boyfriend, actually. In England, studying."
It felt strange, saying the words to someone other than his family for the first time. No one else at school had known, or had even suspected. Sab had asked Eames to Prom, for crying out loud. Still, the world continued spinning on its axis, and Mal didn't spit out her soda or curse him to hell.
"I can't wait to see him," she said with a small, non-judgmental smile.
Arthur snorted. "Yeah. Me too."
**
A few days later, Arthur looked up Mal's history. Or in other words, he broke into the school's server to read her student records. She came from a French bourgeois family. Other than that, her record was straightforward and clean, just like any other average American student. He frowned. Something didn't feel right though. Something about Mal made words like 'common' and 'standard' appear absurd and distorted when applied to her. He dug deeper. He found the hidden truth quickly enough, though it hardly felt like a secret: her father was an ex-military man, retired, who now taught architecture in Paris. He couldn't understand why that would have been covered up, but from what Arthur gathered, Cobb had gone on a year exchange to Paris, met Mal through his teacher, and she had followed him back. It was all gushingly romantic, really, and Arthur couldn't help but feel a pang of resentment at their commitment. It was at times such as these that Arthur knew Eames' return to London had more to do with Arthur than Eames had let on; Eames had loved America too much, and he had been accepted to all his university choices in America. There was no valid reason as to why he would have chosen to leave, other than to get away from Arthur.
Miserably, Arthur closed the tabs on his browser. He felt uncharacteristically guilty for looking up Mal's life behind her back, as though by resorting to such an underhanded method to extract information, he was looking at the answer key.
He called Eames that night, though it wasn't Friday and two in the morning in London.
"Where have you been?" Arthur asked before any sort of greeting when Eames groggily answered the phone. He felt irritable and jealous and angry that Eames hadn't called or picked up the phone in three weeks. He felt an empty yearning; he hadn't wanted to see Eames so much, to hold him and kiss him, in months. Eames had been meant to come to New York for the winter, he had even bought his ticket and everything, but then his parents had shown up for a surprise visit and everything had been ruined. Most of all, though, Arthur wanted to know that Eames hadn't gone to London to get away from him. He wanted to know that things between them were fine, that they were not falling apart.
"Hello, Arthur, lovely to hear from you. It's been a while, how are you?" Eames replied sardonically in a low drawl.
"And whose fault is that, exactly?" Arthur snapped. He was picking a fight, which was contrary to what he really wanted: listen to Eames talk, listen to his laugh, maybe have a bout of phone sex. They had been getting better at it, before all communication between them had seemed to cease.
"I've been busy." His voice is hard now, awake, knowing Arthur wasn't going let him off that easily. "Life tends to happen, Arthur. I can't always be at your beck and call, same time same place, just for you."
"It's once a week, for Chrissake, Eames. I'm hardly asking for your hand in marriage."
"Arthur, it's two in the bloody morning."
"Well, it's apparently the only time I can get a hold of you. You're never there when I call. Unless you are, but you just don't pick up." Tears of anger burned his eyes, but Arthur wiped them away irritably.
"Arthur, I cannot do this right now, I’m bloody exhausted. I'll call you tomorrow, all right?"
Arthur felt wound up so tight he was about to snap. This wasn't what he had signed up for. It didn't feel right and it didn't feel normal, either. But he was tired, emotionally more so than physically, and he figured he owed it to Eames, and to them, to give him one last chance. "Okay," he said softly. "Call me tomorrow morning."
**
Eames didn't call the next morning, and Arthur had class in the afternoon. He hesitated, earnestly considered skipping, but Cobb was absorbed in building blueprints, a sure sign he would be there for hours still, so Arthur went.
He came back to find Mal and Cobb whispering between them. He could tell by the fast-paced dialog and the uncontrollable grin on Cobb's face that something exciting must have happened. Mal was the one who heard him first and jabbed Cobb in the ribs to quiet him. Arthur didn't mind the secrecy. They were often muttering between themselves, and he supposed that it was their right as a couple. But it annoyed him today. He didn't want to know what they were saying so much as he wanted to be in their place.
"Did anyone call for me?" he asked.
Cobb wasn't listening. His grin was wide still, and his eyes seemed to shine. He was standing by the time Arthur had closed the door, and had already gathered his jacket by the time he spoke. "We've got to head out, Arthur. Mal's father is arriving at the airport, so we've got to go pick him up."
"Oh, is there holidays at university in France at the moment?" he asked without thinking.
Mal paused. "How do you know my father works at the university?"
"Y-you must have mentioned," Arthur faltered. "Or Cobb. I can't recall."
Mal and Cobb exchanged a slow look, but Cobb gave a small shrug and a sheepish smile. He couldn't remember, so he assumed he must have let it slip. Mal rolled her eyes. "Come on, we don't want to be late. See you later, Arthur." She pecked him on the cheek and then rushed Cobb out the door.
"Bye," Arthur muttered, rushing to his phone to check his messages. Nothing. He did his homework and waited for the call, but the phone remained silent throughout the entire evening.
It rang three times during the week, but it was never Eames.
Finally, Arthur picked up the phone halfway through the next week. Unsurprisingly, he landed on the answering machine. 'It's me," he said. He felt strangely calm about what he was about to do. Numb, perhaps, like the finality of his actions had not yet impacted and when they would, the consequences would be disastrous. As it was, he felt hazy, as though he was walking behind a veil of purpose and all else was blurry and unimportant. "I don't think this will come as a surprise to you, and maybe I'm not aware of some unwritten memo which dictates such situations, but I need it said. This isn't working out. I can't go on waiting for you to call and feeling disappointed when you don't, again. I'd have preferred to this with you on the other line, but it's kind of hard when you never pick up. I'm not angry, and I'll always cherish our memories. So, thanks for everything, and good luck with your studies and the rest."
When Arthur hung up the phone, he told himself that he wasn't disappointed and that he wasn't surprised. He told himself that this was what he had expected to happen all along.
But he had never been very good at lying to himself.
**
They were sitting at the café close to the school, and the sun was shining on Arthur's face. Mal was bringing out the drinks: Arthur's no sugar, no cream, or milk coffee, Cobb's all-American pint of beer, and a fancy cocktail for herself.
Arthur reached into his bag for the money to pay her back, and his fingers brushed the spine of a book. He lifted the book up just high enough to see the title: A Pattern Language. He frowned. He had finished the book three days ago, but he couldn't recall why he had packed it in his bag that morning.
"Don't bother, darling. This is on me." Mal waved a hand Arthur's way when she saw him rummaging through his bag. She smiled brilliantly at him, and Arthur sat back in his chair, a bit perplexed.
Cobb was grinning at Mal, and it really was such a nice day outside, for mid-February. Though the sun was bright in the clear sky, it brought little warmth, and Arthur was surprised the outside tables had been put up. Maybe Cobb or Mal had asked. They did bring them out upon customer request on nice days, but Arthur couldn't remember.
"You have been acting strangely, these last few days, Arthur," Mal began after a quick look Cobb's way. Cobb sobered up, as if on cue, but Arthur could still tell there was a sort of thrill about him.
Arthur had broken up with Eames two weeks ago, but he had yet to tell Mal or Cobb. Somehow, he had thought that they wouldn't notice. He talked so rarely of Eames, the only proof they had that he actually existed was the rare times they had come home to find Arthur on the phone with him. Arthur thought he hid his grief exceptionally well. He hadn't even cried. He supposed that he felt like they had broken up weeks before the actual event - sometimes he even felt as though their break-up had occurred the night he’d watched Eames’ truck drive away without him. It touched him that they had noticed. He smiled.
"I'm fine," and it wasn't a lie. He reached for his glass, but miscalculated the distance and his drink went spilling all over the table. Arthur gave a small cry as the scalding hot coffee spilled all over the table, but Mal and Cobb thankfully pulled back in time. Arthur turned around to catch the attention of a waiter, to have him bring them napkins, and froze when he saw that he had the attention of everybody. Even the person across the street had stopped to stare at him.
"Er," he said. "Sorry?" Talk about awkward.
"It's fine, it's fine," Mal was saying behind him, and when Arthur turned around, she had a handful of napkins and was sponging up the mess. The people around them resumed their normal routine.
"Okay, that was just weird." Arthur put his empty cup upright again. Cobb no longer looked cheerful, his mouth a straight line and his eyes a half circle beneath lowered lids. "Guys, what's going on, you're starting to worry me."
"Arthur," Mal leaned forward, her voice dropping to a hush. "What do you remember of today?"
Arthur frowned. "What do you mean? I woke up, had a blueberry muffin for breakfast, and then went to class."
"How did you get here?" Cobb asked.
People around them were walking slower, glancing their way. Arthur wondered what was up with them today.
"Uh," he searched his mind, recalling his morning's routine up to his architectural theory lecture class, but everything after that remained a blank. He couldn't even remember when and where he had met Cobb and Mal. At the campus? Their dorm? Or here? "I'm not sure..." He rubbed his temple. The light was abnormally bright, and he could feel a headache coming on. People were staring, and Arthur wanted to go home. "What's going on, do I have something on my face or what?"
Mal smiled. "No. You're just dreaming, that's all."
That's when the café blew up, and a shard of glass came flying toward Arthur's head.
**
When he woke up in the armchair of a chic hotel he had never been in before, his eye throbbing dully with the memory of the impact and his heart hammering with the memory of realizing he was going to die, Arthur rounded on Cobb and punched him right in the face.
"What the fuck was that?" he hollered, and then cradled his fist in his other hand because okay, he wasn't the most physical guy out there, and the punch had probably hurt him just as much as it had hurt Cobb.
"Sorry," Cobb replied thickly, checking to see if his nose was bleeding. It wasn't. "That wasn't supposed to happen."
"Which part?" Arthur snapped, but he could feel the anger and fear starting the ebb out, replaced by a budding curiosity. "The part where the cafe blew up? The part where I thought I was going to die by a shard of glass slicing my skull open? Or the part where we were sharing a fucking lucid dream together?"
Cobb grimaced. "The middle one, actually. I thought I had better control on the explosion than that."
"This can't be happening." Arthur didn't know if he was being incredulous or gullible, because he hoped it was happening so he could hear more. He turned around to Mal, but she was already behind him, taking his hands in hers and steering him to a chair.
That's where they told him about dreamshare. The Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device (PASIV for short, she said); a box roughly the size of a suitcase, which resembled more a square of discarded wires rather than a multi-billion dollar project being secretly funded by the American, British, French, and Israeli armies. Mal told him about Somnacin, the powerful drug that allowed them to enter the comatose state in real life, but be lucid and functioning in the dream world.
If Arthur hadn't survived from an immediately fatal injury just half an hour ago, he would have thought that Mal and Cobb had officially gone stark-raving mad. That, or they were running by him some kind of science-fiction scenario they wanted to incorporate into a novel.
As it was, Arthur believed every single word they said, and his fingertips tingled. He felt a brush of excitement stirring inside of him that he hadn't felt in years, not even when he had been accepted to architecture school. "How did you guys get a hold of the machine?" If the project was really as top-secret as they claimed, then they probably had Interpol out looking for them as they spoke.
Mal's mouth formed a grim line. "My dad," she said.
Arthur frowned. "I thought he retired from the military."
Mal almost smiled at that. "And where did you get that information from?" Arthur opened his mouth, and then realized he had shot himself in his own foot. He had never told Mal or Cobb about his exceptional skills on the computer. Mal did smile then, soft and reassuring. "It's fine, Arthur. We kind of figured a while ago that you had some...way of knowing things that weren't meant to be known. This is why we're showing you this. We want you onboard."
Arthur didn't even know what was on the board. He didn't know what the job was, what sort of commitment or sacrifices it entailed. He didn't know the risks involved (though he could gather the big points, from what he had experienced and heard so far). He knew nothing about the safety measures or risks, and he sure as hell didn't know what the ultimate goal of it all was. All he knew was that this felt right. Here was the biggest mystery he would ever discover, and if he didn't get onboard, Arthur would never forgive himself. He could feel it in his gut. It didn't feel like the most normal career path (or hell, even hobby, if that's what it turned out to be), but perhaps it was about time that Arthur admitted to himself that maybe he had just never been cut out to be normal.
He looked at Mal, then he looked at Cobb. They were both serious, and Arthur could feel the tightness in his own face as he leveled with them both and gave a short, controlled nod. "I'm onboard," he said.
**
After the initial trauma of thinking his skull had been split open by a large shard of window glass, Arthur took to dreamshare remarkably well, to the point that his life began to revolve around dreamsharing.
Cobb showed him how to build in dreams, and suddenly school felt so mundane and trivial. In the dream world, the imagination could truly be let to run wild. Cobb built skyscrapers which would have toppled over due to the laws of gravity in real life. He showed Arthur, but somehow he still couldn't get the art down right. The people in the dreams - the projections, Cobb and Mal called them - always turned on Arthur faster than on Cobb and Mal when he built.
"Forget all the rules you've been taught," Cobb told him after Arthur had received a swing of a metal bat to the head. Arthur rubbed the back of his head. There was no blood or even pain, only the throbbing sensation of the impact which had lasted seconds. Arthur didn't have much trouble with dying. It always happened quickly, and more or less painlessly. He found that he was good at detaching himself from the reality of what it implied. After all, it was only a dream. "
Gravity, physics, those don't apply, Arthur. But, don't forget, it's a dream. Stop focusing on the details. There needs to be a fuzzy feeling that something is off. It's not perfect, and if focused on too much, the flaws will become apparent. The details must only be noticeable up close. Further away, and you need to make them blurry."
Telling Arthur not to focus on details was like telling him not to focus on the elephant taking up all the space in the closet. Gravity and physics, in the long run, he could do without, but it unnerved him not to see the cracks in a hundred-year-old building, or to know that the posts of the white picket fence down the street were not of an equal distance from each other.
They didn't take on clients, at first. Though they had known about dreamsharing for over a year now, and had tried it out more than a handful of times when they had been in France, Cobb and Mal were still novices in the field, and had never had their own PASIV.
They discovered the nooks and crannies of the world together. They learned that the moods of the projections varied greatly on the environment of the dream. Real places linked to bad memories made them more hostile, more prone to murder on the slightest hint of an intruder, and vice-versa for real places linked to good memories. For that reason, Cobb encouraged them to discover the PASIV in what he liked to call "neutral dreams," dreams where all the buildings and landscapes were original designs, though possibly inspired from a wide variety of real places. Arthur found that he was even worse at this creation than he was at recreating real places with less detail.
Mal's father, Stephen Miles, had acquired the PASIV for her so that she and Cobb could run their tests separately and independently from the military. Ultimately, he was the one who tipped them off about extracting, and asked them to give it a shot. In a nut shell, extraction was discovering and possessing someone's secret in the dream.
At first, they only had each other to practice on. It was fine, when they were just learning the ropes of the concept, but soon it became much too easy. They knew each other backwards and sideways, and came to rely on well-known ticks and tricks to get the other to open up.
Miles was the one who sent their first client their way. That's when everything finally came together for Arthur.
**
The client was a wealthy businessman who knew Miles through his investments in the military. He had strong suspicions that his daughter's fiancé was only with her for the benefits of her contacts and wealth, but every time he brought up the subject, she felt personally attacked. During their last fight, she had threatened to break off all ties if he did not stop with his outlandish, unfounded accusations. So now he wanted concrete proof to show her, but all the private investigators he had hired had come back empty-handed. They were his last resort.
Arthur wasn't sure how he fit into the mold of the team at that time. They had agreed that Mal would be the main architect, though Cobb would be there for help and advice if needed, while Cobb would take on the main bulk of directing the extraction. Arthur shifted to the side, feeling awkward and left out, wondering if he was going to be asked to sit this one out, when Cobb turned to him.
"Arthur, we need you on research. Find out everything and anything about this guy. I'm sure Payne -" their client, "-hired the top PIs, but even they can't get to the places you can. I want to know everything about Hall’s childhood, his education. I want to know what motivates him, his exact schedule, when he eats, when he sleeps, and when he sneezes. We have to know this guy as well as we know each other, and we only have a week to do it."
Mal was all but bouncing on the balls of her feet, and even Arthur oddly found Cobb's authoritarian tone to be motivating.
part five...
word count: 5,48O
Living without Eames was like not living at all. Suddenly, every pastime, every activity, felt mundane and useless, or too strenuous. Arthur spent his time lying in bed, or watching television, until finally, in August, Amanda declared that enough was enough and called a road trip to New York to change Arthur's thoughts.
The room Arthur had been given on campus was a double, and it felt small and cramped even though his roommate hadn't even arrived with all of his stuff yet. Taking a note of the utter lack of privacy the room offered, Arthur tried hard not to think of the cozy little apartments he'd looked at before Eames had gone off and left him.
Although they had agreed to keep the relationship going, Arthur had thought he'd scared Eames off with his declaration and that he had seen or heard the last of Eames. Surprisingly, Eames had called every week, sometimes as often as three times a week, and they'd talked for hours. It was almost like being together again, until Arthur rolled over for a kiss in a moment of lapse and heard the loud beeping of pressed buttons when he crushed the phone between his cheek and the bed.
"My roommate's a total slob," Arthur told him after the guy finally moved in. "He's always leaving stuff lying around, loose papers on his desk, under a pile of books. And he's always squinting at everything. Seriously, I'm not sure he's even ever heard of the concept of glasses or contact lenses."
Eames chuckled on the other line. "What's the bloke's name?" His accent had gotten thicker over the few months he'd been there; at first, Arthur had been so surprised that he hadn't understood the new curve of consonants. Now, though, he found the voice a soothing melody he could melt into. He often found himself grinning while listening to Eames talk, even if what was being said was not particular funny or even cause for smiling.
"Dominic Cobb. Total weirdo. I don't even know how he made it to adulthood, let alone third year of architectural school, without walking off a cliff."
"Maybe he's a hidden genius."
Arthur thought of Cobb's tattered yellow sweater and his drooping eyelids as he read over a creased and stained document because it had been serving as a coaster for a week, and snorted. "Please. If a guy like that can get on the honor roll three years standing, then I've got my career in my pocket."
By the end of the first semester, Arthur felt like the only thing he lived for was the ring of the phone, hoping to hear Eames on the other line.
His head teacher had pulled him aside a week before the finals. "Your work is good, Arthur," he'd began, staring down at his latest essay on Jorn Utzon. Arthur could sense the conjunction coming, and he could tell by the crease between his teacher's eyes and the downward tilt of his head, not meeting his eyes, it would not be 'and’ followed by ‘you're one of the best students of this academy.' "But, I'm not sure you're cut out for this line of work."
To be honest, Arthur had been having nagging thoughts along this trend for a few months now. Although his grades were decent, and most likely more than satisfactory for any average student, they were the lowest they had ever been in his life. He didn't think he was producing work of a lesser quality than the other students, but somehow, all his grades stagnated at the same point and he could not seem to pass the bar from 'acceptable' work to 'outstanding' quality. Only obstinacy and a personal feeling of failure if he were to accept that he had chosen the wrong path kept the thoughts at bay. Hearing them said aloud formed a bulge of dread and fear inside of Arthur's throat.
"It's not even the end of the first semester of the first year," Arthur pleaded. "Don't you think it's a bit early to be making such calls?"
Mr. Franks finally raised his head to meet Arthur's gaze. "Any other student," he heaved his shoulders, "maybe. I'd have let it play it out. But, you... you're a high-level student, Arthur. I saw your records; I know what you're capable of. You like clean-cut edges, numbers and logic and symmetrical structures. You thought that's what you would find in architecture. But this is an art, there's an abstract dimension to this world that you haven't been able to grasp."
Arthur nodded fervently. "Sure. Abstraction. I can work with that, honestly. I know all about Delaunay and Matisse."
Mr. Franks had a sad look about him when he shook his head. "I just don't think you have enough imagination to create on your own, Arthur."
**
"Who does that old bastard think he is to make such a call?!" Arthur yelled over the phone. He felt momentarily like an asshole for taking his anger out on Eames who couldn't help how the stupid teachers graded his assignments or called shots on his future, but then he remembered that Eames had chosen to leave him for another continent across the ocean and deserved at least part of the anger directed at him.
On the other end, Eames chuckled. "That you lack imagination is not news to me, Arthur." His voice was calm and low, hardly above a whisper, as though he was purposely controlling it.
"Are you okay? Where are you right now? On the underground?" He doubted it, since it was completely quiet on Eames' end. Besides, it was ten at night in London, and Eames was usually at home. It was five o'clock for Arthur, and he was walking home from class. It was a long walk, but it was the highlight of his week: Friday nights were the only times their schedules overlapped, and Eames kept him company as he walked.
"Not the kind you're thinking of." There was a muffled movement, whispers, more than one voice from the sound of it. Arthur frowned. Eames was usually home at this time. Sometimes he had a few friends over, but they never made much effort to keep quiet, especially since they probably had no idea Eames was talking to his boyfriend. Eames probably told him it was just a friend on the line.
He was about to ask, with irrational jealousy, who he was with. Eames had missed their last two meets, and Arthur had especially hoped to have him all to himself tonight, when Eames beat him to the punch. "Listen, Arthur, now's not the greatest time, actually. Forgot we were Friday, made some plans with a few mates. What you say we postpone to Wednesday?"
"Uh." Arthur wanted to tell Eames where his friends could go. This was their time, goddamnit, and Arthur needed to vent. He knew he was being pettish, and he hated himself for it. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, of course, no problem. Have fun with your friends."
"Yeah." He could hear the smile in Eames' voice. He'd have felt better if he'd sounded the least bit remorseful about the situation. "Ta."
"See you," Arthur replied, even though the line had already gone dead.
The walk home was very quiet.
**
Arthur was determined to prove Mr. Franks wrong. He wasn't a genius for nothing, and he would substantiate that there was more to him than straight lines and perfect angles. So, he sucked up his pride and went to the only person he knew could help him: Dominic Cobb.
Despite first appearances, Cobb wasn't such a bad guy. Over the course of several months, Arthur had come to accept Cobb's brilliancy, though Arthur did doubt at times that architecture was really the only place it shone. After a month of the only contact being Arthur coolly telling him when his mess was seeping over onto his side of the room, Cobb made a wavering attempt to make friends and Arthur had taken pity on him and allowed it.
They weren't exactly friends, but their relationship had budded past the distantly polite into something a little more comfortable - roommates on good terms, Arthur thought. Not that they were in the same room all that often, to be honest. Cobb was usually with his girlfriend, an exquisite French beauty by the name of Mallorie Miles.
Arthur had actually first met Mal on the first day of class, when she had taken the seat next to him and then proceeded to be the most out-of-this world character he had ever met. She had all the grace and sensuality expected of in a French exchange student, but she stood out even more through a vibe of mystery and aloofness. Looking to replace the void Eames had left, Arthur felt drawn to her complexity, drawn by the desire to work her out, to understand and to be a part of a world he was sure was so extraordinary he could never dream of its true nature. This desire only strengthened when Cobb introduced her to Arthur as his girlfriend. Arthur had remained dumbfounded for several minutes before stammering out some kind of wondering about how they had met, when in truth all he wanted to know was how a girl like Mal could have ever gone for a guy like Cobb.
He thought he understood, though, months later, when he tentatively asked Cobb for a few pointers on how to improve his class notes, and Cobb had enthusiastically sat down and talked through the night. Arthur thought he understood then, what Mr. Franks had been saying. Arthur liked architecture, but he didn't even hold a tenth of an ounce of the passion Cobb possessed.
They became closer after that. Some wind had changed, and they saw more of each other now. Mal began coming over to the dorm, instead of Cobb always going to her place, and soon she was coming even when Cobb wasn't around.
"He thought you were some pretentious stick in the mud," Mal told Arthur one afternoon while digging through their miniature fridge. They had been discussing the latest Mies van der Rohe award bestowed to Peter Zumthor, so the comment came somewhat out of nowhere.
Arthur didn't have to ask who she was talking about though. "Fair enough, I thought he was a pretentious slob who had somehow managed to fraud his way up the years."
Mal smiled at him. "Yet you were always so polite. You are a hard man to figure out, Arthur." She came back to the bed with a can of coke, and sat cross-legged across from him. The irony of the comment made him grin. If only she knew how mutual the feeling was. "Do you not have any other friends on campus? We never see you with anyone else. A girlfriend, perhaps?"
Arthur looked out the window over Mal's shoulder. He didn't know what it was, maybe the feeling of having found a kindred spirit that he had never thought would happen again made him reluctant to lie, or maybe he was just tired of having to hide himself. "I have a boyfriend, actually. In England, studying."
It felt strange, saying the words to someone other than his family for the first time. No one else at school had known, or had even suspected. Sab had asked Eames to Prom, for crying out loud. Still, the world continued spinning on its axis, and Mal didn't spit out her soda or curse him to hell.
"I can't wait to see him," she said with a small, non-judgmental smile.
Arthur snorted. "Yeah. Me too."
**
A few days later, Arthur looked up Mal's history. Or in other words, he broke into the school's server to read her student records. She came from a French bourgeois family. Other than that, her record was straightforward and clean, just like any other average American student. He frowned. Something didn't feel right though. Something about Mal made words like 'common' and 'standard' appear absurd and distorted when applied to her. He dug deeper. He found the hidden truth quickly enough, though it hardly felt like a secret: her father was an ex-military man, retired, who now taught architecture in Paris. He couldn't understand why that would have been covered up, but from what Arthur gathered, Cobb had gone on a year exchange to Paris, met Mal through his teacher, and she had followed him back. It was all gushingly romantic, really, and Arthur couldn't help but feel a pang of resentment at their commitment. It was at times such as these that Arthur knew Eames' return to London had more to do with Arthur than Eames had let on; Eames had loved America too much, and he had been accepted to all his university choices in America. There was no valid reason as to why he would have chosen to leave, other than to get away from Arthur.
Miserably, Arthur closed the tabs on his browser. He felt uncharacteristically guilty for looking up Mal's life behind her back, as though by resorting to such an underhanded method to extract information, he was looking at the answer key.
He called Eames that night, though it wasn't Friday and two in the morning in London.
"Where have you been?" Arthur asked before any sort of greeting when Eames groggily answered the phone. He felt irritable and jealous and angry that Eames hadn't called or picked up the phone in three weeks. He felt an empty yearning; he hadn't wanted to see Eames so much, to hold him and kiss him, in months. Eames had been meant to come to New York for the winter, he had even bought his ticket and everything, but then his parents had shown up for a surprise visit and everything had been ruined. Most of all, though, Arthur wanted to know that Eames hadn't gone to London to get away from him. He wanted to know that things between them were fine, that they were not falling apart.
"Hello, Arthur, lovely to hear from you. It's been a while, how are you?" Eames replied sardonically in a low drawl.
"And whose fault is that, exactly?" Arthur snapped. He was picking a fight, which was contrary to what he really wanted: listen to Eames talk, listen to his laugh, maybe have a bout of phone sex. They had been getting better at it, before all communication between them had seemed to cease.
"I've been busy." His voice is hard now, awake, knowing Arthur wasn't going let him off that easily. "Life tends to happen, Arthur. I can't always be at your beck and call, same time same place, just for you."
"It's once a week, for Chrissake, Eames. I'm hardly asking for your hand in marriage."
"Arthur, it's two in the bloody morning."
"Well, it's apparently the only time I can get a hold of you. You're never there when I call. Unless you are, but you just don't pick up." Tears of anger burned his eyes, but Arthur wiped them away irritably.
"Arthur, I cannot do this right now, I’m bloody exhausted. I'll call you tomorrow, all right?"
Arthur felt wound up so tight he was about to snap. This wasn't what he had signed up for. It didn't feel right and it didn't feel normal, either. But he was tired, emotionally more so than physically, and he figured he owed it to Eames, and to them, to give him one last chance. "Okay," he said softly. "Call me tomorrow morning."
**
Eames didn't call the next morning, and Arthur had class in the afternoon. He hesitated, earnestly considered skipping, but Cobb was absorbed in building blueprints, a sure sign he would be there for hours still, so Arthur went.
He came back to find Mal and Cobb whispering between them. He could tell by the fast-paced dialog and the uncontrollable grin on Cobb's face that something exciting must have happened. Mal was the one who heard him first and jabbed Cobb in the ribs to quiet him. Arthur didn't mind the secrecy. They were often muttering between themselves, and he supposed that it was their right as a couple. But it annoyed him today. He didn't want to know what they were saying so much as he wanted to be in their place.
"Did anyone call for me?" he asked.
Cobb wasn't listening. His grin was wide still, and his eyes seemed to shine. He was standing by the time Arthur had closed the door, and had already gathered his jacket by the time he spoke. "We've got to head out, Arthur. Mal's father is arriving at the airport, so we've got to go pick him up."
"Oh, is there holidays at university in France at the moment?" he asked without thinking.
Mal paused. "How do you know my father works at the university?"
"Y-you must have mentioned," Arthur faltered. "Or Cobb. I can't recall."
Mal and Cobb exchanged a slow look, but Cobb gave a small shrug and a sheepish smile. He couldn't remember, so he assumed he must have let it slip. Mal rolled her eyes. "Come on, we don't want to be late. See you later, Arthur." She pecked him on the cheek and then rushed Cobb out the door.
"Bye," Arthur muttered, rushing to his phone to check his messages. Nothing. He did his homework and waited for the call, but the phone remained silent throughout the entire evening.
It rang three times during the week, but it was never Eames.
Finally, Arthur picked up the phone halfway through the next week. Unsurprisingly, he landed on the answering machine. 'It's me," he said. He felt strangely calm about what he was about to do. Numb, perhaps, like the finality of his actions had not yet impacted and when they would, the consequences would be disastrous. As it was, he felt hazy, as though he was walking behind a veil of purpose and all else was blurry and unimportant. "I don't think this will come as a surprise to you, and maybe I'm not aware of some unwritten memo which dictates such situations, but I need it said. This isn't working out. I can't go on waiting for you to call and feeling disappointed when you don't, again. I'd have preferred to this with you on the other line, but it's kind of hard when you never pick up. I'm not angry, and I'll always cherish our memories. So, thanks for everything, and good luck with your studies and the rest."
When Arthur hung up the phone, he told himself that he wasn't disappointed and that he wasn't surprised. He told himself that this was what he had expected to happen all along.
But he had never been very good at lying to himself.
**
They were sitting at the café close to the school, and the sun was shining on Arthur's face. Mal was bringing out the drinks: Arthur's no sugar, no cream, or milk coffee, Cobb's all-American pint of beer, and a fancy cocktail for herself.
Arthur reached into his bag for the money to pay her back, and his fingers brushed the spine of a book. He lifted the book up just high enough to see the title: A Pattern Language. He frowned. He had finished the book three days ago, but he couldn't recall why he had packed it in his bag that morning.
"Don't bother, darling. This is on me." Mal waved a hand Arthur's way when she saw him rummaging through his bag. She smiled brilliantly at him, and Arthur sat back in his chair, a bit perplexed.
Cobb was grinning at Mal, and it really was such a nice day outside, for mid-February. Though the sun was bright in the clear sky, it brought little warmth, and Arthur was surprised the outside tables had been put up. Maybe Cobb or Mal had asked. They did bring them out upon customer request on nice days, but Arthur couldn't remember.
"You have been acting strangely, these last few days, Arthur," Mal began after a quick look Cobb's way. Cobb sobered up, as if on cue, but Arthur could still tell there was a sort of thrill about him.
Arthur had broken up with Eames two weeks ago, but he had yet to tell Mal or Cobb. Somehow, he had thought that they wouldn't notice. He talked so rarely of Eames, the only proof they had that he actually existed was the rare times they had come home to find Arthur on the phone with him. Arthur thought he hid his grief exceptionally well. He hadn't even cried. He supposed that he felt like they had broken up weeks before the actual event - sometimes he even felt as though their break-up had occurred the night he’d watched Eames’ truck drive away without him. It touched him that they had noticed. He smiled.
"I'm fine," and it wasn't a lie. He reached for his glass, but miscalculated the distance and his drink went spilling all over the table. Arthur gave a small cry as the scalding hot coffee spilled all over the table, but Mal and Cobb thankfully pulled back in time. Arthur turned around to catch the attention of a waiter, to have him bring them napkins, and froze when he saw that he had the attention of everybody. Even the person across the street had stopped to stare at him.
"Er," he said. "Sorry?" Talk about awkward.
"It's fine, it's fine," Mal was saying behind him, and when Arthur turned around, she had a handful of napkins and was sponging up the mess. The people around them resumed their normal routine.
"Okay, that was just weird." Arthur put his empty cup upright again. Cobb no longer looked cheerful, his mouth a straight line and his eyes a half circle beneath lowered lids. "Guys, what's going on, you're starting to worry me."
"Arthur," Mal leaned forward, her voice dropping to a hush. "What do you remember of today?"
Arthur frowned. "What do you mean? I woke up, had a blueberry muffin for breakfast, and then went to class."
"How did you get here?" Cobb asked.
People around them were walking slower, glancing their way. Arthur wondered what was up with them today.
"Uh," he searched his mind, recalling his morning's routine up to his architectural theory lecture class, but everything after that remained a blank. He couldn't even remember when and where he had met Cobb and Mal. At the campus? Their dorm? Or here? "I'm not sure..." He rubbed his temple. The light was abnormally bright, and he could feel a headache coming on. People were staring, and Arthur wanted to go home. "What's going on, do I have something on my face or what?"
Mal smiled. "No. You're just dreaming, that's all."
That's when the café blew up, and a shard of glass came flying toward Arthur's head.
**
When he woke up in the armchair of a chic hotel he had never been in before, his eye throbbing dully with the memory of the impact and his heart hammering with the memory of realizing he was going to die, Arthur rounded on Cobb and punched him right in the face.
"What the fuck was that?" he hollered, and then cradled his fist in his other hand because okay, he wasn't the most physical guy out there, and the punch had probably hurt him just as much as it had hurt Cobb.
"Sorry," Cobb replied thickly, checking to see if his nose was bleeding. It wasn't. "That wasn't supposed to happen."
"Which part?" Arthur snapped, but he could feel the anger and fear starting the ebb out, replaced by a budding curiosity. "The part where the cafe blew up? The part where I thought I was going to die by a shard of glass slicing my skull open? Or the part where we were sharing a fucking lucid dream together?"
Cobb grimaced. "The middle one, actually. I thought I had better control on the explosion than that."
"This can't be happening." Arthur didn't know if he was being incredulous or gullible, because he hoped it was happening so he could hear more. He turned around to Mal, but she was already behind him, taking his hands in hers and steering him to a chair.
That's where they told him about dreamshare. The Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device (PASIV for short, she said); a box roughly the size of a suitcase, which resembled more a square of discarded wires rather than a multi-billion dollar project being secretly funded by the American, British, French, and Israeli armies. Mal told him about Somnacin, the powerful drug that allowed them to enter the comatose state in real life, but be lucid and functioning in the dream world.
If Arthur hadn't survived from an immediately fatal injury just half an hour ago, he would have thought that Mal and Cobb had officially gone stark-raving mad. That, or they were running by him some kind of science-fiction scenario they wanted to incorporate into a novel.
As it was, Arthur believed every single word they said, and his fingertips tingled. He felt a brush of excitement stirring inside of him that he hadn't felt in years, not even when he had been accepted to architecture school. "How did you guys get a hold of the machine?" If the project was really as top-secret as they claimed, then they probably had Interpol out looking for them as they spoke.
Mal's mouth formed a grim line. "My dad," she said.
Arthur frowned. "I thought he retired from the military."
Mal almost smiled at that. "And where did you get that information from?" Arthur opened his mouth, and then realized he had shot himself in his own foot. He had never told Mal or Cobb about his exceptional skills on the computer. Mal did smile then, soft and reassuring. "It's fine, Arthur. We kind of figured a while ago that you had some...way of knowing things that weren't meant to be known. This is why we're showing you this. We want you onboard."
Arthur didn't even know what was on the board. He didn't know what the job was, what sort of commitment or sacrifices it entailed. He didn't know the risks involved (though he could gather the big points, from what he had experienced and heard so far). He knew nothing about the safety measures or risks, and he sure as hell didn't know what the ultimate goal of it all was. All he knew was that this felt right. Here was the biggest mystery he would ever discover, and if he didn't get onboard, Arthur would never forgive himself. He could feel it in his gut. It didn't feel like the most normal career path (or hell, even hobby, if that's what it turned out to be), but perhaps it was about time that Arthur admitted to himself that maybe he had just never been cut out to be normal.
He looked at Mal, then he looked at Cobb. They were both serious, and Arthur could feel the tightness in his own face as he leveled with them both and gave a short, controlled nod. "I'm onboard," he said.
**
After the initial trauma of thinking his skull had been split open by a large shard of window glass, Arthur took to dreamshare remarkably well, to the point that his life began to revolve around dreamsharing.
Cobb showed him how to build in dreams, and suddenly school felt so mundane and trivial. In the dream world, the imagination could truly be let to run wild. Cobb built skyscrapers which would have toppled over due to the laws of gravity in real life. He showed Arthur, but somehow he still couldn't get the art down right. The people in the dreams - the projections, Cobb and Mal called them - always turned on Arthur faster than on Cobb and Mal when he built.
"Forget all the rules you've been taught," Cobb told him after Arthur had received a swing of a metal bat to the head. Arthur rubbed the back of his head. There was no blood or even pain, only the throbbing sensation of the impact which had lasted seconds. Arthur didn't have much trouble with dying. It always happened quickly, and more or less painlessly. He found that he was good at detaching himself from the reality of what it implied. After all, it was only a dream. "
Gravity, physics, those don't apply, Arthur. But, don't forget, it's a dream. Stop focusing on the details. There needs to be a fuzzy feeling that something is off. It's not perfect, and if focused on too much, the flaws will become apparent. The details must only be noticeable up close. Further away, and you need to make them blurry."
Telling Arthur not to focus on details was like telling him not to focus on the elephant taking up all the space in the closet. Gravity and physics, in the long run, he could do without, but it unnerved him not to see the cracks in a hundred-year-old building, or to know that the posts of the white picket fence down the street were not of an equal distance from each other.
They didn't take on clients, at first. Though they had known about dreamsharing for over a year now, and had tried it out more than a handful of times when they had been in France, Cobb and Mal were still novices in the field, and had never had their own PASIV.
They discovered the nooks and crannies of the world together. They learned that the moods of the projections varied greatly on the environment of the dream. Real places linked to bad memories made them more hostile, more prone to murder on the slightest hint of an intruder, and vice-versa for real places linked to good memories. For that reason, Cobb encouraged them to discover the PASIV in what he liked to call "neutral dreams," dreams where all the buildings and landscapes were original designs, though possibly inspired from a wide variety of real places. Arthur found that he was even worse at this creation than he was at recreating real places with less detail.
Mal's father, Stephen Miles, had acquired the PASIV for her so that she and Cobb could run their tests separately and independently from the military. Ultimately, he was the one who tipped them off about extracting, and asked them to give it a shot. In a nut shell, extraction was discovering and possessing someone's secret in the dream.
At first, they only had each other to practice on. It was fine, when they were just learning the ropes of the concept, but soon it became much too easy. They knew each other backwards and sideways, and came to rely on well-known ticks and tricks to get the other to open up.
Miles was the one who sent their first client their way. That's when everything finally came together for Arthur.
**
The client was a wealthy businessman who knew Miles through his investments in the military. He had strong suspicions that his daughter's fiancé was only with her for the benefits of her contacts and wealth, but every time he brought up the subject, she felt personally attacked. During their last fight, she had threatened to break off all ties if he did not stop with his outlandish, unfounded accusations. So now he wanted concrete proof to show her, but all the private investigators he had hired had come back empty-handed. They were his last resort.
Arthur wasn't sure how he fit into the mold of the team at that time. They had agreed that Mal would be the main architect, though Cobb would be there for help and advice if needed, while Cobb would take on the main bulk of directing the extraction. Arthur shifted to the side, feeling awkward and left out, wondering if he was going to be asked to sit this one out, when Cobb turned to him.
"Arthur, we need you on research. Find out everything and anything about this guy. I'm sure Payne -" their client, "-hired the top PIs, but even they can't get to the places you can. I want to know everything about Hall’s childhood, his education. I want to know what motivates him, his exact schedule, when he eats, when he sleeps, and when he sneezes. We have to know this guy as well as we know each other, and we only have a week to do it."
Mal was all but bouncing on the balls of her feet, and even Arthur oddly found Cobb's authoritarian tone to be motivating.
part five...