Four Corners [Part 1 of 2]
.
I suppose everyone has her own take on the canon’s immediate backstory. And yeah, this one’s mine.
But mine started with “I want to write Arthur and Eames having really bloody fightsex” and then kind the story of grew horns and a tail and a second row of teeth and turned into a plot-significant monster.
And I also kind of got super-proud of this one too and am so psyched to share this you have no idea.
Title: Four Corners
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Eames: Arthur, Dom, Mal, Miles, some marks from the past. Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Dom/Mal. The explicit sex in this fic is Arthur/Eames.
Words: 12500. Split into two posts.
Rating: NC-17. Plot, and backstory!, in which there is also porn.
Things I go into far too much detail about: Art theft, poker, vegetarian restaurants in Hong Kong, pralines, everyone’s personal armaments, Turkish resorts, the process of forging, Arthur’s naked body, post-war British painters, bank robbery tropes, Escher’s Relativity, what I think happened to make dream-sharing technology illegal, and Eames in general.
What is a fic but: A miserable pile of references.
Warnings: Directed violence, including pistol-whipping, collateral property damage, and people trying to shoot each other before they bang. Also mood whiplash.
Summary: In Eames’ line of work, a first impression means nearly everything. It’s always a pity when he doesn’t get off on the right foot.
art by pinstripesuit
Four Corners
inception
“Mallorie? Mallorie Miles?”
“It’s Mallorie Cobb now,” she says, not garbled in the least by the phone, in that smirking sultry way that evokes a particular smile that Eames has never been on the receiving end of. “But I am glad that you remember me.”
“Even to a man who builds his life on dreams, you’re unforgettable, love.” Eames picks up the hotel phone by the base, brings it to the chaise by the open balcony and sets it on the little accompanying warped-glass table. “And as apt as ever at tracking me down. Where are you?”
“My husband and I are in Bad Neuenahr.” Mal’s pervasive French accent makes the German interesting. Eames smiles. “How is Munich?”
“Hell if you have no intention of cheering for the boys from Bayern.”
“But of betting on them?”
“Kitten, I’m sure you don’t take me for a fool. I’ve got about five thousand Euro riding on them this afternoon.” And it is a brilliant day for a football game too; the air, down the side of this hotel, is clear and, if not as healthful as the spa air where Mal is, certainly cleaner than anyplace Eames has been for at least a year.
Mal laughs. It is good to hear that again, after all these years. “Well I hope that leaves you enough for you to join us in Hong Kong.”
Eames takes a moment to put his heels up on the chaise, and shuts his eyes for the clear summer sun. “To think, the first time you call me since they reelected Blair, and it’s for a job. I don’t suppose your father will be joining us?”
“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly. Two weeks. Are you interested?”
“In working with you? Always, love.”
“You won’t be working with me.”
Eames laughs. “Don’t tell me your husband doesn’t approve.”
“He certainly does, and you’ll be working with him at least. I can’t, this time. That’s why we need you.”
“There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
She laughs, and he thinks upon replaying it in his head that the cadence is very like his own, if higher, crisper, hers. “Let us just say I have an especially resilient parasite.”
-
Mal is invisibly-visibly pregnant, in the way that haloes her and adds just a slight curve under her breasts, which Eames can bring himself to appreciate. She looks good, deadly and charming as Eames remembers, definitely armed at the garter where the crinoline of her dress conceals. She stands up from the table, pushing her chair back gracefully; Eames assumes that the quicker of the two men at the table to stand, the one nearest to her, is her husband.
“My dear Mal. Lovely as ever,” Eames says, taking her left hand and kissing it on the knuckles, far below her engagement and wedding rings.
“Mr. Eames,” she says, and favors him with a smile that could color a silent film. She glances over her shoulder, around the table’s corner. “My husband, Dominic Cobb.”
Mr. Cobb, it turns out, would probably be Mal’s height were she not wearing heels. He is a broad-shouldered man with clean lines all through, or lines that would be clean if the sheer ink of his tuxedo didn’t erase nearly everything from the neck down. His face, hair, and hands are colored and textured like sand. It suits him. They shake hello, over the candlesticks. “Pleasure to meet you,” Cobb says.
“In person,” Eames agrees. “I’m sure you’ve done your research.”
“Your name’s made its share of rounds,” Cobb says, smiling, stepping back. He permits Eames to see that he is also armed, a Beretta as thick and dark as the tuxedo, nestled against the lining like a leech. “And I assume you’ve done yours.”
“Well, I can’t say the name rang any bells until I passed the cathedral.” Eames spreads his arms a bit, does Cobb the same courtesy if he’s looking for preparedness. “Whereupon the celestial chorus started going on about just who rebuilt the bloody walls of Jericho.”
Cobb’s laugh is thin but brash, a bit sudden, but his whole face relaxes into it. It makes his eyes seem wider. “I can assure you, it wasn’t me.”
Eames turns his attention to the fourth person at the table-and laughs as well. “Shite, Mal. I thought your little son was still gestating.”
“Daughter,” Mal corrects, “and yes, she is. Eames, this is Arthur. Your Point Man.”
“This little bit?” Well, that is a bit of a facetious exaggeration, since the child in question is taller than Eames by about two centimeters, perhaps three. But honestly, no matter how respectable an admittedly close-tailored tux makes him look, that creature can’t possibly be older than sixteen. “Precocious thing, aren’t you.”
Eames can tell that he’s been privileged, to watch the polite expectation on Arthur’s face crack and peel away and reveal something much truer. Despite how open Arthur’s face is-his hair, thick and dark, is slicked insufferably back, he has no facial hair to speak of, and his eyes are at least wider than Cobb’s-there’s a stillness to his skin. Not a blankness; more in the way of sculptors never giving their marble pores. It’s the sort of staid effect that Eames occasionally has difficulty replicating in forge, and it’s refreshing to see ire instead.
Arthur offers his hand, over the table’s corner. “I suppose you think you’re charming.”
Eames clasps him closer to the wrist, slipping his fingers up the cuff and tapping right on the pressure point between Arthur’s bones. “I’d hoped you would think so too.”
“I don’t,” he says, flinching, with a smile at the corners of his mouth that’s more than half sneer, and Eames can hardly wait to have a mirror in dreams and put that on.
Mal and Cobb laugh, as does Eames when he realizes that they’re aiming to diffuse the tension. It won’t work. Arthur at least brightens his smile-falsely, Eames thinks-and when Mal gives them the cue they all take their seats.
The restaurant, a thoroughly gilt pagoda of Chi Lin Vegetarian, makes Eames feel delightfully imperialist. He says so. Mal agrees. It starts a conversation superficial enough that the busboys and waiters, who take drink orders in reasonable English, won’t overhear anything untoward. Eames chides Arthur for ordering alcohol. Arthur tells Eames that he is twenty-two years old, and if Eames judges his expression correctly Arthur is letting the potentially appended and you can shove it up your ass, you patronizing piece of shit slide. Eames thinks that by the end of the night, the left side of his mouth will have gotten much more of a workout smirking than the right.
And speaking of the right, Mal, at Eames’ right (with the backdrop of the zen garden and only water to drink), says, “I do wish I could go with you.”
“Let’s hope there’s a next time, then,” Eames says, and leans on his elbow toward her. “But what’s this time going to be?”
“Architecture. The terrestrial kind,” Cobb answers for her, after tucking his napkin onto his lap. (Eames hasn’t bothered with his just yet.) “Our client wants to know precisely what vision the city planners have for the Tamar site so his firm can cater to it.”
“Speaking of imperialism.” Eames snickers, smiles brightly at Cobb, and settles back in his chair. “So you took the job before you knew-”
“Yes,” Mal says, and so Eames turns back to her. “We’d planned this for months, but I can’t extract in my condition.”
Eames is going to be ping-ponging between the two of them all night, isn’t he. “Right, then. Am I doing this as me, or as you?”
“If you’re doing this, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, just in Eames’ blind spot.
“I think we’re certain he’s doing this, Arthur,” Mal says before Eames gets a chance.
“I think we should strive for someone a little more professional.” Arthur is talking as if Eames isn’t there.
Arthur, who Eames is certain is lying about his age, is talking as if Eames isn’t there.
If there is one thing in the world Eames hates, with the visceral vitriol only derived from childhood, it’s that.
-
Cobb is a brilliant enough Architect that Eames forgives him for not installing an escape route on the second level down.
Sure, it puts Mr. Carroll Tse rather at Eames’ mercy, and Eames (in forge as Tse’s Personal Assistant Marie Lau) in somewhat dire straits if Arthur doesn’t come up with a way to connect the two of their somewhat disparate paths through this museum. Cobb can weave a maze like no one Eames has ever seen, defiantly illogical and yet irrepressible. It’s not exactly a pleasure to be in one.
The successive noises of gunfire and shattering glass echo through the marble halls-well, that’s all right, then-and Eames squeaks, in character, and pulls Mr. Tse behind a statue. It’s impressive. Strategic. Eighty percent cover. Little Arthur has an eye for art, or at least for copying it, Eames will give him that.
Mr. Tse is crumpled on the floor. “Marie,” he says, covering his head like he’s remembering the old air raid drills, even if he’s as postwar as the Francis Bacon two rooms back. “Marie, I don’t know what they want.”
“I don’t either,” Eames says, makes sure Marie’s hand shakes a little when it rests on Tse’s shoulder. Tse’d like to think she wants him, Eames knows that for certain. “I don’t know, but they’re going to catch us. And they’re going to ask.”
Bullets strafe the air. Eames won’t look up to check if it’s Arthur or Tse’s militarized projections. It’s probably both, since they must have caught up with Arthur by now. Plaster dust follows the arc of the bullets and spatters onto their heads.
“We need a plan, Mr. Tse,” Eames says, letting Marie’s fingers still, letting Mr. Tse feel the sweat through his suit jacket. “We need to think ahead.”
Plan. They planted that thought on Tse on the first level, the pub in Cardiff where Cobb is, no doubt, having an enviable barfight; Eames watches Tse’s eyes, makes sure it clicks. -good, there. Tse looks up, at the gallery roof. There’s a thin spiral stair, wrought iron, leading to a floor that promises an exit (which Cobb didn’t actually put there, not that Eames can blame him, but the promise is what matters).
“Higher,” Tse says. “It’s always safer to leave them behind.”
Well, that’s a component if Eames ever heard one. “Up we go then,” he says, and helps Tse to his feet. The gunfire’s closer, conveniently so.
They race to the stairs-Eames resents having both tiny legs and high-heeled shoes right now-and Eames stands aside so Tse can start climbing them first. Better for Tse to lead. (Eames knows Mal would be doing it this way, she never likes turning her back on a Mark, and Tse’s still technically her Mark after all.) By the time they get to the first full turn, the projections on the bottom floor have rounded their corner and are visible, anonymous suited security with highly improbable guns.
And where, Eames wonders when the walls of the dream shudder, clearly unstable, where the bloody fuck is Arthur?
There’s less time than Eames would like, but still enough to make Tse run. Eames yells at him to, lets Marie’s voice carry through the hall, reverberate on the statues and at least momentarily forestall the guns. The bullets start to fly again-at least they’re not aiming at Tse-and when the heel of Eames’ shoe hits the balcony rail just under the exit sign, he knows it’s close.
But there, in a frame between the falsely advertised exit and a well-replicated Klimt, is an Indian-ink-and-watercolor of an augmented Hong Kong skyline.
Eames lets Tse start running down the hallway that will take him nowhere, only deeper into Cobb’s maze. He holds onto the frame of the painting and stares, memorizes, traces the jagged ridges of skyscrapers and the particularly amorphous form that occupies the position of the Tamar harbor, commits them to mind the way he does bodies and mannerisms.
Someone shoots him in the left ankle, right through the strap of his shoe. He screams like a girl, because right now, he is one, and holds on to the painting for support-he needs more time, damn it, they should never have sent him down here with only that obviously inexperienced-
Wait.
The chaos on the iron stairs isn’t the projections converging. It’s the projections scattering, because Arthur is climbing up the outside rails, gun in hand. It never takes him more than one bullet to down a guard, not when they don’t have time to see him coming. This one, through the eye. That one, in the gut. That one, when Arthur pulls himself up to Eames’ level and vaults over the rail, in the right hand at point-blank range. That guard’s weapon and frankly most of his hand spatter onto the glass frame, right over Eames’ head.
“Need more time?” Arthur asks, stable, as if he didn’t just do a whit of that.
“I do now,” Eames says, indicating the blood smeared over the frame.
Arthur leans over him and gives the glass one good swipe with his shirtsleeve. The blood matches his suspenders. Eames has never liked suspenders. He thinks he might, now. “There,” Arthur says, reloading and turning away. “Keep going. There are two more around the corner down there.”
“Ta, darling.” Eames swats Arthur’s heel with his good foot. The one with a goddamned bullet in it hurts almost too much to concentrate. Almost, Eames reminds himself. Almost.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Our time or Cobb’s?”
“Ours. Twenty-eight.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re coming around the goddamn corner, Mr. Eames. Twenty-five. Memorize the sketch.”
“Touché,” Eames says, but leans in closer to the frame and gets to work. There. Fine. “How about getting us out ten seconds early?”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’m shot in the heel, darling.”
He can hear Arthur turn, one steady slide of dress shoe on marble tile. And then he can feel, distinct against the crest of his forge’s skull, the muzzle of Arthur’s gun.
“Drop the forge,” Arthur says.
Eames does. “Just wanted to be certain, did you?”
Arthur blows his brains out and makes it painless.
Eames jolts awake, lying on a seedy bed in the backroom of a pub in, ostensibly, Cardiff. He plucks the IV out of his arm and pushes a bit of the beaded somnacin residue out of the wound, then listens. This dream within a dream concept that Mal and Cobb have going does have its virtues, but ignorance of pain apparently isn’t one of them, and Eames limps a bit when he puts his feet on the floor.
Cobb is crouched in the cracked and barricaded doorway, Beretta out and drenched in sweat and stale beer. “Good timing. I was just about to put Arthur’s headphones on.”
“I’ll grant you the little buggerer’s fast on his feet. Paper and pen, Cobb?”
“Next to the PASIV. How much time do you need?”
“If you don’t mind wet watercolors and cross-hatching, ten minutes.”
“You got it. Arthur, you awake?”
“No,” Arthur says. Apparently he’s managed to get up and to his own feet with the silence of a declawed housecat. Tse is still asleep within a sleep in the room’s tattered armchair. “But I’m here.”
“Ten minutes?”
Arthur nods. On the museum level he had been wearing a dark suit with suspenders; this level, it’s a bit more casual, slacks and a cardigan and tie. He pushes up his sleeves and sidles past Cobb at the door. Eames swears he can hear teeth breaking.
He concentrates on replicating the idea so he can share it with Cobb. The reds turn out a bit richer than he intended, but he’s confident enough with it in the end.
-
“So there does get to be a second round. Excellent. How was the birth?”
“Early,” Cobb says. They start down the dilapidated stone staircase to the Savannah harbor. “But everyone’s fine. Her name’s Philippa.”
“Can’t wait to see the little thing. What is she now, eight months? A year?”
“Eleven months. And if Mal and her mother give you the opportunity, you’re more than welcome to meet her.” Cobb laughs. Outside of mission planning, where the man is almost criminally serious, it turns out that the first-impression diner’s-congeniality wasn’t the least bit false, and Cobb is companionable, if a bit fixated. Eames has worked with much worse. The sun in Savannah has browned his skin a little, and he wears sunglasses. Eames follows his example, once the glare of the harbor blasts past the crowd of tourists and hawkers and people advertising oysters five dollars a dozen.
Cobb’s paused a moment to look at the lewd T-shirts displayed in one of the storefronts, so Eames stops, just a step ahead. “Is this job stateside?”
“Yeah. Mal’s still not up for traveling much. But she does want to take this job. You get to depend on it, you know?”
Eames knows. “So it’s the three of us? Or are you still training Arthur?”
“Training?” Cobb laughs, again, brighter than the light refracted off his shades. “Arthur’s been in dreams almost as long as I have.”
Fine. Eames snickers. “What, did they wean him on it? That might explain a few things.”
“Joke all you want, but it’s not far from the truth.”
They slink out of the sun and into a bustling candy store. A teenaged girl is handing out samples of the local pralines. Eames takes two, hands one to Cobb, and leans over the glass rail to watch them being made. Scintillating things, really. Eames thinks he’ll buy a few. Cobb, evidently, has the same idea.
“I met Arthur when he was about sixteen,” Cobb is saying, hands braced on the glass divider, where all the little misshapen candies are in orderly lines, ten high. “I was designing dreams for combat scenarios in the U.S. Special Forces.”
“That’s a bit dubiously legal.”
“It wasn’t back then.”
“I mean his age.”
“Oh. Not without a draft. He was JROTC, then. Training with the PASIV...well, that’s just because he was that good a fit.”
The man at the counter asks Cobb and Eames how many pralines they want. Cobb says a dozen, Eames says two, half of them chocolate.
“I can picture it,” Eames says, completely honest. And he is picturing it: Arthur, a bit shrunken, with a shaved head and an ill-fitting khaki hat. “And he was a good fit, was he?”
“The best,” Cobb says. He accepts his box of pralines. The candy-maker is still packing Eames’ in plastic dividers. “Miles was big on the theory of multiple intelligences, back when it first came out-he discussed it with us a lot, and why wouldn’t he? he was teaching a room full of architects. Unique snowflakes. But when I met Arthur, I distinctly remember saying to myself, so kinesthetic intelligence really does exist.”
Eames nods, raises an eyebrow, considers. “And you what, snapped him up right there?”
“No. He turned up on my doorstep about two years ago, when he heard I had work.”
“And threw away a fruitful career in the armed forces?”
“Not when they took away his reason for serving.”
...Ah.
Eames takes his pralines with a smile and goes to look at a wall of saltwater taffy in colors almost as rich as the ones in dreams. Cobb is scooping some out into a clear plastic bag, one or two from about every other flavor bin. “Right,” Eames says. “Can’t ask an Architect to build only in three dimensions after he’s learned to think in four, four and a half. Same applies to us all, I suppose.”
Defensively, and a bit traitorously, Eames finds himself thinking, Doesn’t mean I have to like him.
“So, where is this job, anyway, and why do you need me?”
-
The job is in Las Vegas, and they need Eames to cheat at cards.
It is a good old-fashioned poker con, and Eames is surprised that he’s never done this in dreams before. That would be Mal’s particular genius; one con, their client, wants to learn another con’s specific method of cheating to prevent it in a waking-world game. Mal’s scheme involves a dream of playing Omaha high/low with one of the con’s living idols, the kind of person he definitely wants to impress with a well-timed hand.
And so Eames is perfectly within his character-poker stud Frank Canvasser-to flirt ostentatiously with the dealer until his little shirtsleeve arm-garters catch on fire.
Mal wins the high hand, and incurs a polite round of applause from the projections and a partial smile from Arthur, dealing; the mark, who has the improbable last name of Dorothy, wins the low hand with a held three of clubs and four of diamonds. His projections are enthusiastic on his behalf. Cobb, at the mark’s right, is considerably less so, but he’s maintaining an entire fictitious casino and the maze within it so Eames supposes he ought to have a little sympathy.
“You tend to play low,” Eames remarks, as Frank, and sets up the chips for his next bet.
“I tend to play the odds,” Dorothy says, collecting his winnings. He bets a little higher than Eames, a little lower than Mal, who is raking it in. “Someone’s bound to catch on, though, right?”
“If you don’t change it up,” Eames agrees. Canvasser is American, from Louisiana, with an accent that’s easy to recognize but difficult to imitate. But now that he’s gotten it down, it’s a matter of pride to exploit it, and Eames grins at Arthur, asks him, “How ‘bout you blow on the cards a little, sweet thing? I could use the luck.”
Arthur deals. Eames winks at him, and Arthur bristles, and Eames wonders just how well little Arthur counts cards.
“Well, this one’s a pot I don’t plan to split,” Dorothy says. He looks at his starting cards, which Eames knows through one of Cobb’s faltering-transparency tricks to be the queen, four, and two of clubs, and the eight of hearts. A good double hand, to be sure, better for the nuts than the high. This will be the round.
The agreed-upon signal to anyone not looking is for Eames to order a round of drinks for everyone at the table, including the dealer; he raises his hand and flags down a projection in a tasseled bustier, does just that. The signal for Arthur and the deck being ready to comply with that is for Arthur to accept the offer.
“And whatever this dear boy wants, he can have on me. How ‘bout it?”
Eames expects Arthur to glare and grudgingly accept. What he gets is infinitely more fascinating-an arched brow and an arch grin that almost follows it in contrapasso. “Sure, as long as you don’t mind buying off my boss. Something with a straw.”
His first thought really should be deck’s ready, then, not you can take much more than a straw, love.
The drink order goes out, the community cards are summarily dealt. It isn’t real money so no one folds right away, in to raise the pot and thus the stakes so Dorothy keeps at it. The community cards turn up an array of clubs-clever Arthur!-the five, the jack, the six-Dorothy doesn’t give away that he has a flush-and then the jack of diamonds, which gives Eames jacks full of sixes and Cobb, evidently, jacks full of fives, and Mal jack shit and the best shot at the nuts considering Dorothy is probably going to be crippled by the straight flush this next turn. Eames spares another glance at Dorothy’s cards, peeks through them.
The eight of hearts is now a six.
Arthur turns up the three of clubs and calls for showdown bets. The drinks arrive and are distributed as all four of the players stay in. The casino waitress has apparently taken something with a straw to mean a rum and coke, and sets this at Arthur’s right hand with a winning smile.
The entire poker table flashes clear as glass.
Before Eames even gets the chance to glare at Cobb, the mark notices. So do the projections. The waitress smacks Cobb over the head with her tray.
“-Jesus,” Eames swears, and hopes his accent is holding up. He grabs Dorothy and Dorothy’s cards and bolts from the table, shouldering through the projections and dodging the chips and glass as they fly. The table’s not the only thing transparent now, the slot machines and the neon lights and the walls are all washing clear, and Eames can even see through the poker chips that smack him in the face as he drags Dorothy into an elevator.
“You cheated,” Eames says once the door obeys him and closes. He keys it for just one floor up. “Didn’t you?”
“Is that what-”
Eames grabs Dorothy’s wrist, and the cards right along with it. He presses in hard, makes Dorothy fan them out. The two center hearts of the former eight are whited out thinly but completely, with a paint just the same sheen as the plastic card face. One of the corner eights has become a six as well, the same paint, just enough insinuation of red. Eames plucks the card out of Dorothy’s hand and is about to bend it and see how fast a good shuffle makes the paint immolate, when someone attempts to throw a slot machine through the elevator doors.
Attempts, of course, being the operative word, because Arthur has just beaten that beefy projection over the head with an automatic shuffler.
“I designed the paint,” Dorothy says, trying to wrench out of Eames’ grip. He pulls Eames just far enough that Eames can see out of the wavering glass of the elevator and the equally clear impending hallway floor. Back at their card table Mal has acquired a pool cue and is standing in the way of anyone trying to get between her and her husband. Cobb’s supporting himself on the table’s edge, that waitress got him hard, no wonder the dream’s collapsing. “Me and my girlfriend designed the paint. The cartridge is up my sleeve. What, are you going to turn me in?”
They’re one floor higher, and the elevator opens on Arthur, his dealer’s uniform half in shreds, gun level.
“Just for the night,” Eames says, and then, to Arthur: “You enjoy shooting me, don’t you.”
“Like it’s my job,” Arthur says, and frags him as if it’s a game.
-
Work is scarce, scarcer when one is on the run from the law in bloody Thailand, and scarcer still when one’s addictions require curling up with one’s own contraband and knocking oneself out every few nights. (Of all the places to bugger things up, it had to be Thailand. None of the clothes fit Eames here.) Nevertheless, here he is, holed up in a hostel with an amicably bribed receptionist and a flight to a much-less-inhospitable Calcutta in the morning, if he can get all his ducks in a row.
Unfortunately for Eames, getting all his ducks in a row means going to sleep for the first time in three days.
So he sprawls on an awful bed-honestly, the one in prison was better-and reaches under the frame to turn his PASIV on. He can’t help sighing as the somnacin kicks in. The sorry excuses for boxsprings creak.
His imagination throws him clean into the lap of luxury. Oh, Eames is no great Architect, but he does know a beachfront cabana when he sees one, and it takes a matter of microseconds for Eames to furnish it. The red hardwood floors gleam almost pertly up at him, as do the glass seaside doors, ajar onto a veranda with a comfortable breeze to rustle the translucent white drapes. It is early evening out there, with the sun setting over, presumably, the Mediterranean, which looks rather like a sea of still fire. It reminds him altogether of Turkey, so he runs with it, projects the exterior with tourists returning from the beach, hawkers selling fish that Eames can’t quite recall the smell of, and the crackle of peeling skin.
Inside, it is mostly mirrors. There are always mirrors, for Eames, no matter where he goes alone, and in this cabana the wall that faces the seaside doors is made entirely of mirror, with a doorframe in the center that leads to the rest of this space. They reflect the sea, and Eames, and the sconces and lights on the walls, with a silted thoroughness. Eames wonders if he still looks this good in the waking world. Surely he’s lost weight, in prison and without dreams, though he has kept up a physical regimen by necessity. He makes a mental note to get to a mirror, a good one, before he goes to the airport tomorrow. And to shave.
He walks about, nude and barefoot, the floor warm and clean. He glances in the mirror as he passes through the doorframe, and finds that his newest tattoo is still swollen around the edges, even in dreams. The eyes lift out of his bicep, follow themselves in the mirror. He stalls, touches it. Gives himself a smile.
The next room has chaises and a wicker card table and still more windows, but the floor is a wider expanse, almost large enough to be a rehearsal room. He wonders if, in wherever this is, all four sides lead to the same sea and the same sunset. But the light in here is dimmer, the windows smaller, the mirrors with less of the outside to reflect.
Eames relaxes, in here, and goes through his forms.
He starts in one corner, and crosses to the other, a neutral walk, as if crossing the street with the light. At the next corner, he turns, picks up speed, as if he’s crossing against. At the next corner, faster still, jaywalking. Last corner, he slows down again, gauges the distance, and builds a list of characters in his head.
He starts simple: The dean of his old elementary school. The elderly man who sold him his first set of lockpicks. The first guy he fucked, then the first girl. His best friend from college. Mallorie. Her father. Then harder, more amorphous: His last employer, the bastard. That chemist what’s-his-face he worked with on the Delacruz job. Marie Lau, before the shot heel. Cobb. The forges from the past three jobs. He shifts his centers, his speed, his weight and his walk, but not his form, not yet.
In the rhythm of the walking, even more than in the haze of dreaming, he leaves Thailand and prison and seedy hostels completely. He laughs, when he rounds the next corner, and the laugh isn’t his own-it’s Canvasser’s, from the poker job almost two years ago. So Eames stops at the nearest mirror, and superimposes Canvasser over the wicker and the sea. And there Canvasser is in all his Cajun glory, with his crisp polo shirt and unbluffing brown eyes and sunglasses propped just so on his crown. He preens, a moment, recalls Canvasser’s manner, the hunch of one shoulder and the reliance on peripheral vision. There. Good. He blinks, and breathes, and assumes the forge from the Cabot job the year before last, the cheeky flight attendant who unassumingly ruined the mark’s marriage. He smoothes down his skirt and reties his scarf to bare a little more of the lady’s sleek neck. From her, he shifts up to Myrna Baskin, who it was truly a pleasure to impersonate, it’s rare Eames gets called in to play directors, let alone venerated and respected ones. Then Tony Blair. Then Nash, the Architect whose lack of attention to detail landed Eames in prison in the first place. Then Arthur.
Arthur. Interesting.
He’s forged Arthur in the tuxedo he first saw him in, which seems wrong; after a breath, he amends it, dresses Arthur in a three-piece suit, grey on the side of blue, tailored scandalously close. He knows how Arthur slicks back his hair-gel and strength of will, not pomade-so he lets the remaining sun from outside shine a little cleaner through it. There are slight ridges at the crest over the right temple that Eames hadn’t consciously noticed, but that makes sense when he recalls that Arthur always cracks his neck to that side. Eames goes through that motion, runs Arthur’s hand through Arthur’s hair and tilts his head to the side. The gesture bares Arthur’s throat. He’s pale there, vulnerable, and Eames hadn’t thought he wanted to see that.
Arthur isn’t immaculate. He’s put together, certainly, an array of parts and cartridges as functional as the gun on his hip. But now that Eames has him on he can see the hitches, the yellow calluses on Arthur’s fingers, the asymmetry of his eyes, the dryness of his lips.
Eames starts with the imperfections. He’s seen how Arthur deals with imperfections; when he can’t erase them, he makes use of them. He has Arthur pat down the ridges of his hair, fail, and then wet his fingertips and try again. Arthur’s tongue is soft, warm, and his fingers are sensitive. So is his right ear. Eames traces it, outside, then into the whorl. Attached lobes, never been pierced. What is he now, supposedly, twenty-four, twenty-five? And Eames would wonder where Arthur is, but where is effectively here, over Eames’ skin, and there’s nothing to wonder after that.
He’s seen Arthur take off his jackets before, in planning sessions, in entryways, in dreams. It’s a decisive motion, solid, respectful of the fabric. The shirt has French cuffs, slightly long, and Eames has to maneuver around the cufflinks. They reflect Eames’ face, for a moment, but Eames wearing Arthur’s blasé concentration. The image is arresting, entirely gone when the sleeves come off.
It leaves Arthur in waistcoat, belt, trousers and shirt and tie and gun and Eames starts unwrapping the lot of it piece by piece, motion by inferred motion. The tie is long, half-Windsored, the blue that sea outside probably would be if it weren’t at the mercy of a setting sun. Eames unbuttons Arthur’s waistcoat to get at it, quick and efficient, as if dissatisfied with the angle. He shucks the waistcoat with less care than the jacket, lets it fall away into wherever it is in his head forged clothing goes. The tie isn’t pinned to the collar, so much the better, and Eames has seen Arthur in shirtsleeves with the collar and tie undone before, so this is no stretch, no inference. He loosens the tie, which tightens the knot, and then picks away at it with Arthur’s deft, clever, surprisingly rough fingers. Arthur wears his gun on his belt, probably so that it doesn’t affect the line of the waistcoat, and since Eames has never gotten a clear look at it (despite how many times Arthur has pulled it on him) he’s outfitted Arthur with a Beretta like Cobb’s. He unsnaps the holster, takes the gun out and examines it on his own. He steps back from the mirror, assumes Arthur’s stance, envisions himself in Arthur’s sight and wonders if Arthur feels as genuinely aroused by that as Eames does on his behalf right now.
He kneels to remove Arthur’s shoes and socks, and feels the strain in the crotch of Arthur’s trousers, the shift of cloth over cloth over skin over skin. Right shoe, then left-this, Eames has seen too, in the waking world, changing socks after a storm all the way back in Hong Kong. Arthur doesn’t push them down, he peels them off by the toe. When Eames is done, he finds himself even on both knees, Arthur’s bare toes feeling the same warm red wood floor that Eames had been enjoying, and Eames swears he could measure the width of the gaps between every laid board without looking.
This time, when he looks at the cufflinks, he sees Arthur’s face in the little octagonal mirrors.
He removes them, opens the cuffs of the shirt, rolls up the sleeves. The hair on Arthur’s arms is like his eyebrows, slightly lighter than the rest but evident to the touch. It prickles when Eames slides Arthur’s fingertips over it. He sweats. The underside of his forearm is soft, freckled, sensitive enough that his eyes flutter shut, lips flutter open. Eames watches, in the mirror, studies it, wets Arthur’s lips again from corner to corner.
The shirt isn’t easy to unbutton, not with Arthur’s hands slipping like this, or Eames’ hands, but Eames can’t be entirely sure. He does know, though, what Arthur does when faced with imperfections. He gets the shirt undone, pries it off his shoulders too fast, and then pulls Arthur’s sleeveless undershirt hastily over his head, stretching his back so punitively that air escapes from between damn near every bone in his upper body.
And then he focuses, and stares.
Arthur’s hair is undone, afflicted with slight waves and flyaways and the faintest trace of static, just on the right side. The gel is cracked, sticking to his temples and hairline and the hollows just behind his ears. His body is bony but cut, overworked and underfed, elbows curving out prominently where his upper arms fall short. And Eames would never have doubted Arthur’s stated age if he’d seen him like this from the start-the column from Arthur’s neck to navel is concave, but not devoid of hair, and toward the bottom the trail thickens and darkens to spread past the low waist of his trousers.
Eames follows it, straight to the source.
His left arm is braced on the mirror, his forehead leaned into the crook, trapping Arthur’s loose and gel-stiff hair over his eyes. His right is pressed flush against Arthur’s chest, hand down Arthur’s trousers and shoving his underwear aside. He keeps his eyes on the mirror, just to make sure that it’s Arthur, all through. Arthur, struggling to breathe, to match the speed of his heart with the speed of his hand-Arthur, mouth slack and eyes shining and determined-Arthur the way he looks in those moments at the end of dreams, when the blood is still on him and the heat of his weapon haloes his hand and he worries, doesn’t he, worries that once the dream goes it won’t come back and god that must chafe as much as his palm.
Arthur comes so hard that Eames loses himself.
-
.
On to Part 2...
.
I suppose everyone has her own take on the canon’s immediate backstory. And yeah, this one’s mine.
But mine started with “I want to write Arthur and Eames having really bloody fightsex” and then kind the story of grew horns and a tail and a second row of teeth and turned into a plot-significant monster.
And I also kind of got super-proud of this one too and am so psyched to share this you have no idea.
Title: Four Corners
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Eames: Arthur, Dom, Mal, Miles, some marks from the past. Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Dom/Mal. The explicit sex in this fic is Arthur/Eames.
Words: 12500. Split into two posts.
Rating: NC-17. Plot, and backstory!, in which there is also porn.
Things I go into far too much detail about: Art theft, poker, vegetarian restaurants in Hong Kong, pralines, everyone’s personal armaments, Turkish resorts, the process of forging, Arthur’s naked body, post-war British painters, bank robbery tropes, Escher’s Relativity, what I think happened to make dream-sharing technology illegal, and Eames in general.
What is a fic but: A miserable pile of references.
Warnings: Directed violence, including pistol-whipping, collateral property damage, and people trying to shoot each other before they bang. Also mood whiplash.
Summary: In Eames’ line of work, a first impression means nearly everything. It’s always a pity when he doesn’t get off on the right foot.
art by pinstripesuit
Four Corners
inception
“Mallorie? Mallorie Miles?”
“It’s Mallorie Cobb now,” she says, not garbled in the least by the phone, in that smirking sultry way that evokes a particular smile that Eames has never been on the receiving end of. “But I am glad that you remember me.”
“Even to a man who builds his life on dreams, you’re unforgettable, love.” Eames picks up the hotel phone by the base, brings it to the chaise by the open balcony and sets it on the little accompanying warped-glass table. “And as apt as ever at tracking me down. Where are you?”
“My husband and I are in Bad Neuenahr.” Mal’s pervasive French accent makes the German interesting. Eames smiles. “How is Munich?”
“Hell if you have no intention of cheering for the boys from Bayern.”
“But of betting on them?”
“Kitten, I’m sure you don’t take me for a fool. I’ve got about five thousand Euro riding on them this afternoon.” And it is a brilliant day for a football game too; the air, down the side of this hotel, is clear and, if not as healthful as the spa air where Mal is, certainly cleaner than anyplace Eames has been for at least a year.
Mal laughs. It is good to hear that again, after all these years. “Well I hope that leaves you enough for you to join us in Hong Kong.”
Eames takes a moment to put his heels up on the chaise, and shuts his eyes for the clear summer sun. “To think, the first time you call me since they reelected Blair, and it’s for a job. I don’t suppose your father will be joining us?”
“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly. Two weeks. Are you interested?”
“In working with you? Always, love.”
“You won’t be working with me.”
Eames laughs. “Don’t tell me your husband doesn’t approve.”
“He certainly does, and you’ll be working with him at least. I can’t, this time. That’s why we need you.”
“There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
She laughs, and he thinks upon replaying it in his head that the cadence is very like his own, if higher, crisper, hers. “Let us just say I have an especially resilient parasite.”
-
Mal is invisibly-visibly pregnant, in the way that haloes her and adds just a slight curve under her breasts, which Eames can bring himself to appreciate. She looks good, deadly and charming as Eames remembers, definitely armed at the garter where the crinoline of her dress conceals. She stands up from the table, pushing her chair back gracefully; Eames assumes that the quicker of the two men at the table to stand, the one nearest to her, is her husband.
“My dear Mal. Lovely as ever,” Eames says, taking her left hand and kissing it on the knuckles, far below her engagement and wedding rings.
“Mr. Eames,” she says, and favors him with a smile that could color a silent film. She glances over her shoulder, around the table’s corner. “My husband, Dominic Cobb.”
Mr. Cobb, it turns out, would probably be Mal’s height were she not wearing heels. He is a broad-shouldered man with clean lines all through, or lines that would be clean if the sheer ink of his tuxedo didn’t erase nearly everything from the neck down. His face, hair, and hands are colored and textured like sand. It suits him. They shake hello, over the candlesticks. “Pleasure to meet you,” Cobb says.
“In person,” Eames agrees. “I’m sure you’ve done your research.”
“Your name’s made its share of rounds,” Cobb says, smiling, stepping back. He permits Eames to see that he is also armed, a Beretta as thick and dark as the tuxedo, nestled against the lining like a leech. “And I assume you’ve done yours.”
“Well, I can’t say the name rang any bells until I passed the cathedral.” Eames spreads his arms a bit, does Cobb the same courtesy if he’s looking for preparedness. “Whereupon the celestial chorus started going on about just who rebuilt the bloody walls of Jericho.”
Cobb’s laugh is thin but brash, a bit sudden, but his whole face relaxes into it. It makes his eyes seem wider. “I can assure you, it wasn’t me.”
Eames turns his attention to the fourth person at the table-and laughs as well. “Shite, Mal. I thought your little son was still gestating.”
“Daughter,” Mal corrects, “and yes, she is. Eames, this is Arthur. Your Point Man.”
“This little bit?” Well, that is a bit of a facetious exaggeration, since the child in question is taller than Eames by about two centimeters, perhaps three. But honestly, no matter how respectable an admittedly close-tailored tux makes him look, that creature can’t possibly be older than sixteen. “Precocious thing, aren’t you.”
Eames can tell that he’s been privileged, to watch the polite expectation on Arthur’s face crack and peel away and reveal something much truer. Despite how open Arthur’s face is-his hair, thick and dark, is slicked insufferably back, he has no facial hair to speak of, and his eyes are at least wider than Cobb’s-there’s a stillness to his skin. Not a blankness; more in the way of sculptors never giving their marble pores. It’s the sort of staid effect that Eames occasionally has difficulty replicating in forge, and it’s refreshing to see ire instead.
Arthur offers his hand, over the table’s corner. “I suppose you think you’re charming.”
Eames clasps him closer to the wrist, slipping his fingers up the cuff and tapping right on the pressure point between Arthur’s bones. “I’d hoped you would think so too.”
“I don’t,” he says, flinching, with a smile at the corners of his mouth that’s more than half sneer, and Eames can hardly wait to have a mirror in dreams and put that on.
Mal and Cobb laugh, as does Eames when he realizes that they’re aiming to diffuse the tension. It won’t work. Arthur at least brightens his smile-falsely, Eames thinks-and when Mal gives them the cue they all take their seats.
The restaurant, a thoroughly gilt pagoda of Chi Lin Vegetarian, makes Eames feel delightfully imperialist. He says so. Mal agrees. It starts a conversation superficial enough that the busboys and waiters, who take drink orders in reasonable English, won’t overhear anything untoward. Eames chides Arthur for ordering alcohol. Arthur tells Eames that he is twenty-two years old, and if Eames judges his expression correctly Arthur is letting the potentially appended and you can shove it up your ass, you patronizing piece of shit slide. Eames thinks that by the end of the night, the left side of his mouth will have gotten much more of a workout smirking than the right.
And speaking of the right, Mal, at Eames’ right (with the backdrop of the zen garden and only water to drink), says, “I do wish I could go with you.”
“Let’s hope there’s a next time, then,” Eames says, and leans on his elbow toward her. “But what’s this time going to be?”
“Architecture. The terrestrial kind,” Cobb answers for her, after tucking his napkin onto his lap. (Eames hasn’t bothered with his just yet.) “Our client wants to know precisely what vision the city planners have for the Tamar site so his firm can cater to it.”
“Speaking of imperialism.” Eames snickers, smiles brightly at Cobb, and settles back in his chair. “So you took the job before you knew-”
“Yes,” Mal says, and so Eames turns back to her. “We’d planned this for months, but I can’t extract in my condition.”
Eames is going to be ping-ponging between the two of them all night, isn’t he. “Right, then. Am I doing this as me, or as you?”
“If you’re doing this, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, just in Eames’ blind spot.
“I think we’re certain he’s doing this, Arthur,” Mal says before Eames gets a chance.
“I think we should strive for someone a little more professional.” Arthur is talking as if Eames isn’t there.
Arthur, who Eames is certain is lying about his age, is talking as if Eames isn’t there.
If there is one thing in the world Eames hates, with the visceral vitriol only derived from childhood, it’s that.
-
Cobb is a brilliant enough Architect that Eames forgives him for not installing an escape route on the second level down.
Sure, it puts Mr. Carroll Tse rather at Eames’ mercy, and Eames (in forge as Tse’s Personal Assistant Marie Lau) in somewhat dire straits if Arthur doesn’t come up with a way to connect the two of their somewhat disparate paths through this museum. Cobb can weave a maze like no one Eames has ever seen, defiantly illogical and yet irrepressible. It’s not exactly a pleasure to be in one.
The successive noises of gunfire and shattering glass echo through the marble halls-well, that’s all right, then-and Eames squeaks, in character, and pulls Mr. Tse behind a statue. It’s impressive. Strategic. Eighty percent cover. Little Arthur has an eye for art, or at least for copying it, Eames will give him that.
Mr. Tse is crumpled on the floor. “Marie,” he says, covering his head like he’s remembering the old air raid drills, even if he’s as postwar as the Francis Bacon two rooms back. “Marie, I don’t know what they want.”
“I don’t either,” Eames says, makes sure Marie’s hand shakes a little when it rests on Tse’s shoulder. Tse’d like to think she wants him, Eames knows that for certain. “I don’t know, but they’re going to catch us. And they’re going to ask.”
Bullets strafe the air. Eames won’t look up to check if it’s Arthur or Tse’s militarized projections. It’s probably both, since they must have caught up with Arthur by now. Plaster dust follows the arc of the bullets and spatters onto their heads.
“We need a plan, Mr. Tse,” Eames says, letting Marie’s fingers still, letting Mr. Tse feel the sweat through his suit jacket. “We need to think ahead.”
Plan. They planted that thought on Tse on the first level, the pub in Cardiff where Cobb is, no doubt, having an enviable barfight; Eames watches Tse’s eyes, makes sure it clicks. -good, there. Tse looks up, at the gallery roof. There’s a thin spiral stair, wrought iron, leading to a floor that promises an exit (which Cobb didn’t actually put there, not that Eames can blame him, but the promise is what matters).
“Higher,” Tse says. “It’s always safer to leave them behind.”
Well, that’s a component if Eames ever heard one. “Up we go then,” he says, and helps Tse to his feet. The gunfire’s closer, conveniently so.
They race to the stairs-Eames resents having both tiny legs and high-heeled shoes right now-and Eames stands aside so Tse can start climbing them first. Better for Tse to lead. (Eames knows Mal would be doing it this way, she never likes turning her back on a Mark, and Tse’s still technically her Mark after all.) By the time they get to the first full turn, the projections on the bottom floor have rounded their corner and are visible, anonymous suited security with highly improbable guns.
And where, Eames wonders when the walls of the dream shudder, clearly unstable, where the bloody fuck is Arthur?
There’s less time than Eames would like, but still enough to make Tse run. Eames yells at him to, lets Marie’s voice carry through the hall, reverberate on the statues and at least momentarily forestall the guns. The bullets start to fly again-at least they’re not aiming at Tse-and when the heel of Eames’ shoe hits the balcony rail just under the exit sign, he knows it’s close.
But there, in a frame between the falsely advertised exit and a well-replicated Klimt, is an Indian-ink-and-watercolor of an augmented Hong Kong skyline.
Eames lets Tse start running down the hallway that will take him nowhere, only deeper into Cobb’s maze. He holds onto the frame of the painting and stares, memorizes, traces the jagged ridges of skyscrapers and the particularly amorphous form that occupies the position of the Tamar harbor, commits them to mind the way he does bodies and mannerisms.
Someone shoots him in the left ankle, right through the strap of his shoe. He screams like a girl, because right now, he is one, and holds on to the painting for support-he needs more time, damn it, they should never have sent him down here with only that obviously inexperienced-
Wait.
The chaos on the iron stairs isn’t the projections converging. It’s the projections scattering, because Arthur is climbing up the outside rails, gun in hand. It never takes him more than one bullet to down a guard, not when they don’t have time to see him coming. This one, through the eye. That one, in the gut. That one, when Arthur pulls himself up to Eames’ level and vaults over the rail, in the right hand at point-blank range. That guard’s weapon and frankly most of his hand spatter onto the glass frame, right over Eames’ head.
“Need more time?” Arthur asks, stable, as if he didn’t just do a whit of that.
“I do now,” Eames says, indicating the blood smeared over the frame.
Arthur leans over him and gives the glass one good swipe with his shirtsleeve. The blood matches his suspenders. Eames has never liked suspenders. He thinks he might, now. “There,” Arthur says, reloading and turning away. “Keep going. There are two more around the corner down there.”
“Ta, darling.” Eames swats Arthur’s heel with his good foot. The one with a goddamned bullet in it hurts almost too much to concentrate. Almost, Eames reminds himself. Almost.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Our time or Cobb’s?”
“Ours. Twenty-eight.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re coming around the goddamn corner, Mr. Eames. Twenty-five. Memorize the sketch.”
“Touché,” Eames says, but leans in closer to the frame and gets to work. There. Fine. “How about getting us out ten seconds early?”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’m shot in the heel, darling.”
He can hear Arthur turn, one steady slide of dress shoe on marble tile. And then he can feel, distinct against the crest of his forge’s skull, the muzzle of Arthur’s gun.
“Drop the forge,” Arthur says.
Eames does. “Just wanted to be certain, did you?”
Arthur blows his brains out and makes it painless.
Eames jolts awake, lying on a seedy bed in the backroom of a pub in, ostensibly, Cardiff. He plucks the IV out of his arm and pushes a bit of the beaded somnacin residue out of the wound, then listens. This dream within a dream concept that Mal and Cobb have going does have its virtues, but ignorance of pain apparently isn’t one of them, and Eames limps a bit when he puts his feet on the floor.
Cobb is crouched in the cracked and barricaded doorway, Beretta out and drenched in sweat and stale beer. “Good timing. I was just about to put Arthur’s headphones on.”
“I’ll grant you the little buggerer’s fast on his feet. Paper and pen, Cobb?”
“Next to the PASIV. How much time do you need?”
“If you don’t mind wet watercolors and cross-hatching, ten minutes.”
“You got it. Arthur, you awake?”
“No,” Arthur says. Apparently he’s managed to get up and to his own feet with the silence of a declawed housecat. Tse is still asleep within a sleep in the room’s tattered armchair. “But I’m here.”
“Ten minutes?”
Arthur nods. On the museum level he had been wearing a dark suit with suspenders; this level, it’s a bit more casual, slacks and a cardigan and tie. He pushes up his sleeves and sidles past Cobb at the door. Eames swears he can hear teeth breaking.
He concentrates on replicating the idea so he can share it with Cobb. The reds turn out a bit richer than he intended, but he’s confident enough with it in the end.
-
“So there does get to be a second round. Excellent. How was the birth?”
“Early,” Cobb says. They start down the dilapidated stone staircase to the Savannah harbor. “But everyone’s fine. Her name’s Philippa.”
“Can’t wait to see the little thing. What is she now, eight months? A year?”
“Eleven months. And if Mal and her mother give you the opportunity, you’re more than welcome to meet her.” Cobb laughs. Outside of mission planning, where the man is almost criminally serious, it turns out that the first-impression diner’s-congeniality wasn’t the least bit false, and Cobb is companionable, if a bit fixated. Eames has worked with much worse. The sun in Savannah has browned his skin a little, and he wears sunglasses. Eames follows his example, once the glare of the harbor blasts past the crowd of tourists and hawkers and people advertising oysters five dollars a dozen.
Cobb’s paused a moment to look at the lewd T-shirts displayed in one of the storefronts, so Eames stops, just a step ahead. “Is this job stateside?”
“Yeah. Mal’s still not up for traveling much. But she does want to take this job. You get to depend on it, you know?”
Eames knows. “So it’s the three of us? Or are you still training Arthur?”
“Training?” Cobb laughs, again, brighter than the light refracted off his shades. “Arthur’s been in dreams almost as long as I have.”
Fine. Eames snickers. “What, did they wean him on it? That might explain a few things.”
“Joke all you want, but it’s not far from the truth.”
They slink out of the sun and into a bustling candy store. A teenaged girl is handing out samples of the local pralines. Eames takes two, hands one to Cobb, and leans over the glass rail to watch them being made. Scintillating things, really. Eames thinks he’ll buy a few. Cobb, evidently, has the same idea.
“I met Arthur when he was about sixteen,” Cobb is saying, hands braced on the glass divider, where all the little misshapen candies are in orderly lines, ten high. “I was designing dreams for combat scenarios in the U.S. Special Forces.”
“That’s a bit dubiously legal.”
“It wasn’t back then.”
“I mean his age.”
“Oh. Not without a draft. He was JROTC, then. Training with the PASIV...well, that’s just because he was that good a fit.”
The man at the counter asks Cobb and Eames how many pralines they want. Cobb says a dozen, Eames says two, half of them chocolate.
“I can picture it,” Eames says, completely honest. And he is picturing it: Arthur, a bit shrunken, with a shaved head and an ill-fitting khaki hat. “And he was a good fit, was he?”
“The best,” Cobb says. He accepts his box of pralines. The candy-maker is still packing Eames’ in plastic dividers. “Miles was big on the theory of multiple intelligences, back when it first came out-he discussed it with us a lot, and why wouldn’t he? he was teaching a room full of architects. Unique snowflakes. But when I met Arthur, I distinctly remember saying to myself, so kinesthetic intelligence really does exist.”
Eames nods, raises an eyebrow, considers. “And you what, snapped him up right there?”
“No. He turned up on my doorstep about two years ago, when he heard I had work.”
“And threw away a fruitful career in the armed forces?”
“Not when they took away his reason for serving.”
...Ah.
Eames takes his pralines with a smile and goes to look at a wall of saltwater taffy in colors almost as rich as the ones in dreams. Cobb is scooping some out into a clear plastic bag, one or two from about every other flavor bin. “Right,” Eames says. “Can’t ask an Architect to build only in three dimensions after he’s learned to think in four, four and a half. Same applies to us all, I suppose.”
Defensively, and a bit traitorously, Eames finds himself thinking, Doesn’t mean I have to like him.
“So, where is this job, anyway, and why do you need me?”
-
The job is in Las Vegas, and they need Eames to cheat at cards.
It is a good old-fashioned poker con, and Eames is surprised that he’s never done this in dreams before. That would be Mal’s particular genius; one con, their client, wants to learn another con’s specific method of cheating to prevent it in a waking-world game. Mal’s scheme involves a dream of playing Omaha high/low with one of the con’s living idols, the kind of person he definitely wants to impress with a well-timed hand.
And so Eames is perfectly within his character-poker stud Frank Canvasser-to flirt ostentatiously with the dealer until his little shirtsleeve arm-garters catch on fire.
Mal wins the high hand, and incurs a polite round of applause from the projections and a partial smile from Arthur, dealing; the mark, who has the improbable last name of Dorothy, wins the low hand with a held three of clubs and four of diamonds. His projections are enthusiastic on his behalf. Cobb, at the mark’s right, is considerably less so, but he’s maintaining an entire fictitious casino and the maze within it so Eames supposes he ought to have a little sympathy.
“You tend to play low,” Eames remarks, as Frank, and sets up the chips for his next bet.
“I tend to play the odds,” Dorothy says, collecting his winnings. He bets a little higher than Eames, a little lower than Mal, who is raking it in. “Someone’s bound to catch on, though, right?”
“If you don’t change it up,” Eames agrees. Canvasser is American, from Louisiana, with an accent that’s easy to recognize but difficult to imitate. But now that he’s gotten it down, it’s a matter of pride to exploit it, and Eames grins at Arthur, asks him, “How ‘bout you blow on the cards a little, sweet thing? I could use the luck.”
Arthur deals. Eames winks at him, and Arthur bristles, and Eames wonders just how well little Arthur counts cards.
“Well, this one’s a pot I don’t plan to split,” Dorothy says. He looks at his starting cards, which Eames knows through one of Cobb’s faltering-transparency tricks to be the queen, four, and two of clubs, and the eight of hearts. A good double hand, to be sure, better for the nuts than the high. This will be the round.
The agreed-upon signal to anyone not looking is for Eames to order a round of drinks for everyone at the table, including the dealer; he raises his hand and flags down a projection in a tasseled bustier, does just that. The signal for Arthur and the deck being ready to comply with that is for Arthur to accept the offer.
“And whatever this dear boy wants, he can have on me. How ‘bout it?”
Eames expects Arthur to glare and grudgingly accept. What he gets is infinitely more fascinating-an arched brow and an arch grin that almost follows it in contrapasso. “Sure, as long as you don’t mind buying off my boss. Something with a straw.”
His first thought really should be deck’s ready, then, not you can take much more than a straw, love.
The drink order goes out, the community cards are summarily dealt. It isn’t real money so no one folds right away, in to raise the pot and thus the stakes so Dorothy keeps at it. The community cards turn up an array of clubs-clever Arthur!-the five, the jack, the six-Dorothy doesn’t give away that he has a flush-and then the jack of diamonds, which gives Eames jacks full of sixes and Cobb, evidently, jacks full of fives, and Mal jack shit and the best shot at the nuts considering Dorothy is probably going to be crippled by the straight flush this next turn. Eames spares another glance at Dorothy’s cards, peeks through them.
The eight of hearts is now a six.
Arthur turns up the three of clubs and calls for showdown bets. The drinks arrive and are distributed as all four of the players stay in. The casino waitress has apparently taken something with a straw to mean a rum and coke, and sets this at Arthur’s right hand with a winning smile.
The entire poker table flashes clear as glass.
Before Eames even gets the chance to glare at Cobb, the mark notices. So do the projections. The waitress smacks Cobb over the head with her tray.
“-Jesus,” Eames swears, and hopes his accent is holding up. He grabs Dorothy and Dorothy’s cards and bolts from the table, shouldering through the projections and dodging the chips and glass as they fly. The table’s not the only thing transparent now, the slot machines and the neon lights and the walls are all washing clear, and Eames can even see through the poker chips that smack him in the face as he drags Dorothy into an elevator.
“You cheated,” Eames says once the door obeys him and closes. He keys it for just one floor up. “Didn’t you?”
“Is that what-”
Eames grabs Dorothy’s wrist, and the cards right along with it. He presses in hard, makes Dorothy fan them out. The two center hearts of the former eight are whited out thinly but completely, with a paint just the same sheen as the plastic card face. One of the corner eights has become a six as well, the same paint, just enough insinuation of red. Eames plucks the card out of Dorothy’s hand and is about to bend it and see how fast a good shuffle makes the paint immolate, when someone attempts to throw a slot machine through the elevator doors.
Attempts, of course, being the operative word, because Arthur has just beaten that beefy projection over the head with an automatic shuffler.
“I designed the paint,” Dorothy says, trying to wrench out of Eames’ grip. He pulls Eames just far enough that Eames can see out of the wavering glass of the elevator and the equally clear impending hallway floor. Back at their card table Mal has acquired a pool cue and is standing in the way of anyone trying to get between her and her husband. Cobb’s supporting himself on the table’s edge, that waitress got him hard, no wonder the dream’s collapsing. “Me and my girlfriend designed the paint. The cartridge is up my sleeve. What, are you going to turn me in?”
They’re one floor higher, and the elevator opens on Arthur, his dealer’s uniform half in shreds, gun level.
“Just for the night,” Eames says, and then, to Arthur: “You enjoy shooting me, don’t you.”
“Like it’s my job,” Arthur says, and frags him as if it’s a game.
-
Work is scarce, scarcer when one is on the run from the law in bloody Thailand, and scarcer still when one’s addictions require curling up with one’s own contraband and knocking oneself out every few nights. (Of all the places to bugger things up, it had to be Thailand. None of the clothes fit Eames here.) Nevertheless, here he is, holed up in a hostel with an amicably bribed receptionist and a flight to a much-less-inhospitable Calcutta in the morning, if he can get all his ducks in a row.
Unfortunately for Eames, getting all his ducks in a row means going to sleep for the first time in three days.
So he sprawls on an awful bed-honestly, the one in prison was better-and reaches under the frame to turn his PASIV on. He can’t help sighing as the somnacin kicks in. The sorry excuses for boxsprings creak.
His imagination throws him clean into the lap of luxury. Oh, Eames is no great Architect, but he does know a beachfront cabana when he sees one, and it takes a matter of microseconds for Eames to furnish it. The red hardwood floors gleam almost pertly up at him, as do the glass seaside doors, ajar onto a veranda with a comfortable breeze to rustle the translucent white drapes. It is early evening out there, with the sun setting over, presumably, the Mediterranean, which looks rather like a sea of still fire. It reminds him altogether of Turkey, so he runs with it, projects the exterior with tourists returning from the beach, hawkers selling fish that Eames can’t quite recall the smell of, and the crackle of peeling skin.
Inside, it is mostly mirrors. There are always mirrors, for Eames, no matter where he goes alone, and in this cabana the wall that faces the seaside doors is made entirely of mirror, with a doorframe in the center that leads to the rest of this space. They reflect the sea, and Eames, and the sconces and lights on the walls, with a silted thoroughness. Eames wonders if he still looks this good in the waking world. Surely he’s lost weight, in prison and without dreams, though he has kept up a physical regimen by necessity. He makes a mental note to get to a mirror, a good one, before he goes to the airport tomorrow. And to shave.
He walks about, nude and barefoot, the floor warm and clean. He glances in the mirror as he passes through the doorframe, and finds that his newest tattoo is still swollen around the edges, even in dreams. The eyes lift out of his bicep, follow themselves in the mirror. He stalls, touches it. Gives himself a smile.
The next room has chaises and a wicker card table and still more windows, but the floor is a wider expanse, almost large enough to be a rehearsal room. He wonders if, in wherever this is, all four sides lead to the same sea and the same sunset. But the light in here is dimmer, the windows smaller, the mirrors with less of the outside to reflect.
Eames relaxes, in here, and goes through his forms.
He starts in one corner, and crosses to the other, a neutral walk, as if crossing the street with the light. At the next corner, he turns, picks up speed, as if he’s crossing against. At the next corner, faster still, jaywalking. Last corner, he slows down again, gauges the distance, and builds a list of characters in his head.
He starts simple: The dean of his old elementary school. The elderly man who sold him his first set of lockpicks. The first guy he fucked, then the first girl. His best friend from college. Mallorie. Her father. Then harder, more amorphous: His last employer, the bastard. That chemist what’s-his-face he worked with on the Delacruz job. Marie Lau, before the shot heel. Cobb. The forges from the past three jobs. He shifts his centers, his speed, his weight and his walk, but not his form, not yet.
In the rhythm of the walking, even more than in the haze of dreaming, he leaves Thailand and prison and seedy hostels completely. He laughs, when he rounds the next corner, and the laugh isn’t his own-it’s Canvasser’s, from the poker job almost two years ago. So Eames stops at the nearest mirror, and superimposes Canvasser over the wicker and the sea. And there Canvasser is in all his Cajun glory, with his crisp polo shirt and unbluffing brown eyes and sunglasses propped just so on his crown. He preens, a moment, recalls Canvasser’s manner, the hunch of one shoulder and the reliance on peripheral vision. There. Good. He blinks, and breathes, and assumes the forge from the Cabot job the year before last, the cheeky flight attendant who unassumingly ruined the mark’s marriage. He smoothes down his skirt and reties his scarf to bare a little more of the lady’s sleek neck. From her, he shifts up to Myrna Baskin, who it was truly a pleasure to impersonate, it’s rare Eames gets called in to play directors, let alone venerated and respected ones. Then Tony Blair. Then Nash, the Architect whose lack of attention to detail landed Eames in prison in the first place. Then Arthur.
Arthur. Interesting.
He’s forged Arthur in the tuxedo he first saw him in, which seems wrong; after a breath, he amends it, dresses Arthur in a three-piece suit, grey on the side of blue, tailored scandalously close. He knows how Arthur slicks back his hair-gel and strength of will, not pomade-so he lets the remaining sun from outside shine a little cleaner through it. There are slight ridges at the crest over the right temple that Eames hadn’t consciously noticed, but that makes sense when he recalls that Arthur always cracks his neck to that side. Eames goes through that motion, runs Arthur’s hand through Arthur’s hair and tilts his head to the side. The gesture bares Arthur’s throat. He’s pale there, vulnerable, and Eames hadn’t thought he wanted to see that.
Arthur isn’t immaculate. He’s put together, certainly, an array of parts and cartridges as functional as the gun on his hip. But now that Eames has him on he can see the hitches, the yellow calluses on Arthur’s fingers, the asymmetry of his eyes, the dryness of his lips.
Eames starts with the imperfections. He’s seen how Arthur deals with imperfections; when he can’t erase them, he makes use of them. He has Arthur pat down the ridges of his hair, fail, and then wet his fingertips and try again. Arthur’s tongue is soft, warm, and his fingers are sensitive. So is his right ear. Eames traces it, outside, then into the whorl. Attached lobes, never been pierced. What is he now, supposedly, twenty-four, twenty-five? And Eames would wonder where Arthur is, but where is effectively here, over Eames’ skin, and there’s nothing to wonder after that.
He’s seen Arthur take off his jackets before, in planning sessions, in entryways, in dreams. It’s a decisive motion, solid, respectful of the fabric. The shirt has French cuffs, slightly long, and Eames has to maneuver around the cufflinks. They reflect Eames’ face, for a moment, but Eames wearing Arthur’s blasé concentration. The image is arresting, entirely gone when the sleeves come off.
It leaves Arthur in waistcoat, belt, trousers and shirt and tie and gun and Eames starts unwrapping the lot of it piece by piece, motion by inferred motion. The tie is long, half-Windsored, the blue that sea outside probably would be if it weren’t at the mercy of a setting sun. Eames unbuttons Arthur’s waistcoat to get at it, quick and efficient, as if dissatisfied with the angle. He shucks the waistcoat with less care than the jacket, lets it fall away into wherever it is in his head forged clothing goes. The tie isn’t pinned to the collar, so much the better, and Eames has seen Arthur in shirtsleeves with the collar and tie undone before, so this is no stretch, no inference. He loosens the tie, which tightens the knot, and then picks away at it with Arthur’s deft, clever, surprisingly rough fingers. Arthur wears his gun on his belt, probably so that it doesn’t affect the line of the waistcoat, and since Eames has never gotten a clear look at it (despite how many times Arthur has pulled it on him) he’s outfitted Arthur with a Beretta like Cobb’s. He unsnaps the holster, takes the gun out and examines it on his own. He steps back from the mirror, assumes Arthur’s stance, envisions himself in Arthur’s sight and wonders if Arthur feels as genuinely aroused by that as Eames does on his behalf right now.
He kneels to remove Arthur’s shoes and socks, and feels the strain in the crotch of Arthur’s trousers, the shift of cloth over cloth over skin over skin. Right shoe, then left-this, Eames has seen too, in the waking world, changing socks after a storm all the way back in Hong Kong. Arthur doesn’t push them down, he peels them off by the toe. When Eames is done, he finds himself even on both knees, Arthur’s bare toes feeling the same warm red wood floor that Eames had been enjoying, and Eames swears he could measure the width of the gaps between every laid board without looking.
This time, when he looks at the cufflinks, he sees Arthur’s face in the little octagonal mirrors.
He removes them, opens the cuffs of the shirt, rolls up the sleeves. The hair on Arthur’s arms is like his eyebrows, slightly lighter than the rest but evident to the touch. It prickles when Eames slides Arthur’s fingertips over it. He sweats. The underside of his forearm is soft, freckled, sensitive enough that his eyes flutter shut, lips flutter open. Eames watches, in the mirror, studies it, wets Arthur’s lips again from corner to corner.
The shirt isn’t easy to unbutton, not with Arthur’s hands slipping like this, or Eames’ hands, but Eames can’t be entirely sure. He does know, though, what Arthur does when faced with imperfections. He gets the shirt undone, pries it off his shoulders too fast, and then pulls Arthur’s sleeveless undershirt hastily over his head, stretching his back so punitively that air escapes from between damn near every bone in his upper body.
And then he focuses, and stares.
Arthur’s hair is undone, afflicted with slight waves and flyaways and the faintest trace of static, just on the right side. The gel is cracked, sticking to his temples and hairline and the hollows just behind his ears. His body is bony but cut, overworked and underfed, elbows curving out prominently where his upper arms fall short. And Eames would never have doubted Arthur’s stated age if he’d seen him like this from the start-the column from Arthur’s neck to navel is concave, but not devoid of hair, and toward the bottom the trail thickens and darkens to spread past the low waist of his trousers.
Eames follows it, straight to the source.
His left arm is braced on the mirror, his forehead leaned into the crook, trapping Arthur’s loose and gel-stiff hair over his eyes. His right is pressed flush against Arthur’s chest, hand down Arthur’s trousers and shoving his underwear aside. He keeps his eyes on the mirror, just to make sure that it’s Arthur, all through. Arthur, struggling to breathe, to match the speed of his heart with the speed of his hand-Arthur, mouth slack and eyes shining and determined-Arthur the way he looks in those moments at the end of dreams, when the blood is still on him and the heat of his weapon haloes his hand and he worries, doesn’t he, worries that once the dream goes it won’t come back and god that must chafe as much as his palm.
Arthur comes so hard that Eames loses himself.
-
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On to Part 2...
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