I set a fire (just to see what it kills) . Part III/III . Inception . Arthur/Eames . NC-17 .
Author: pprfaith
Title: I set a fire (just to see what it kills) - Part III/III
Summary: The first time Arthur shoots Eames in the head at point blank range is when Eames falls in love. That’s the beginning. That’s the end. (Or: Tattoo!Arthur gone sideways.)
Disclaimer: I do not own Inception, any of its concepts or characters. I just borrow, play and put back. I also don’t own the title, which is a line from The National’s Little Faith and kills me every time.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Ahem. Deep breath. Okay. Mindfuckery, as given to us by the great and mighty Nolan. Dream!weirdness. Sex. Gay sex, to be specific. (Yes, I wrote sex again. There was much facepalming involved.) Rude people, bad words, insanity, suicide of a minor character, gore, violence, cavalier attitude to all things bad, deadly and violent, tattoos, tattoo!kink and the actual process of tattooing. I’m told that freaks people out. Huh.
Additional Warning: Folks, do not use this story as any sort of guide on how to deal with tattoos. It hurts, even if you do really get a nifty high off of it, it takes an age to heal, you have to be careful as hell and many of the things Arthur and Eames do with new tattoos are neither sanitary nor smart. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t wash off. Ever. Do not try this at home, please.
Words: 23k and a little something extra.
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Part I
Part II
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Arthur’s father is a tall, pale man with wire rim glasses and a mop of salt and pepper hair that curls above the collar of his cardigan. Something of Arthur’s indomitable fury glints in his eyes (or so Eames like to think) but it’s offset by warmth and careworn age. His face was in Arthur’s mirror, so long ago, in the dream.
His back it straight, his facial structure a copy of his son’s. He doesn’t look like a new widower. He doesn’t look like a man who hasn’t seen his son in years and years. His arms twitch, as he opens the door, like he wants to hug Arthur, but he doesn’t.
Arthur introduces Eames, asks if they can come in, polite and succinct as always. He’s wearing one of those horrible, uptight suits he’s discovered recently.
(They make him look sharper than he is, harder, colder, and like the world’s most expensive rent boy. Eames has always told him that he’d pay the price and he would. Those waistcoats, they do things to him.)
The man allows Arthur to slip past, holds out a hand for Eames to shake. “Mr. Eames,” he says, because that’s how Arthur introduced him, because that’s what his latest (and longest lasting, so far) passport says.
“Just Eames,” he answers, and follows Arthur inside with a belated, “My condolences.”
Something like realization dawns on the man as he closes the door, says, “You found out about your mother.”
Arthur nods. “By accident.”
He doesn’t look like someone who’s grieving either.
“I would have called but… they tell me you are a criminal now.”
Arthur tilts his head, fire rising in him. (Eames knows the signs. He has long since made it his job to know all of Arthur’s signs. This is Arthur, aiming for furious and getting there fast. Why?) “Are you going to call the police on me?”
Mr. Arthur - (That’s not his name, but that’s how Eames thinks about him henceforth, because Arthur has just recently decided to become Arthur and the name slotted into place like it was always meant to be his. There is a sword running down the length of his breastbone to prove the point. Arthur is Arthur and his father can only be a continuation of that, a footnote.) - Mr. Arthur shakes his head. “I never have,” like that explains everything.
To Eames it only means that Arthur was a criminal before the military and he thinks what? why? how?, Arthur, little Arthur, a bad boy? He tries to feign surprise and fails. Instead he smirks at Arthur over his father’s shoulder, gets an annoyed look in return, says nothing.
“Would you like… would you like to visit the grave?”
Arthur, kindly, does not say that is what we’re here for. What he says is, “Yes.”
+
They hang back as Arthur goes to stand at the foot of his mother’s grave, staring blankly at the simple, new tombstone. Eames smokes, offers Mr. Arthur a cigarette and gets turned down with a smile.
They lean against the car. Silence.
“Have you known my son long, Mr. Eames?”
“We go back,” he admits without admitting anything. Conman at heart, never give anything up for free. He flicks ash into the wind, hooks his thumb awkwardly at Arthur’s still, black form (like a carrion crow, waiting to feast on the bodies of the newly dead.), “He doesn’t seem very… desolate.”
The hand over his face, that’s a gesture Arthur sometimes makes, when he’s not paying attention to his body language. Mr. Arthur sighs with it, heavy and tired. “I never meant to marry Judy,” he confesses after a moment of nothing, deliberation perhaps. “She was a fling, nothing more, but then she got pregnant… I was trying to do the right thing. I thought… I thought a child needs both parents to turn out right.”
He shakes his head. His hair flops in his face. Arthur in his movements again. Arthur in every part of him. (Or him in Arthur. Genesis in reverse.) “Judy had no interest in her son, never paid much attention to him. She chafed at being a mother, a wife. I should have let her go. I should just have let her go, but instead I made her stay. For our son’s sake. I think I did more harm than good.”
Eames wants to say something make the old man look less drawn. Something meaningful and surprisingly, startlingly true. (It’s not your fault. He was born like this, angry and cold. He turned out okay. You’re too much alike. Your son is brilliant and beautiful and deadly and I love him like I love knives and stealing things. I stole him. I won’t give him back.)
Before he can settle on any one thing, Arthur turns, coat flapping (wings spreading) and comes toward them.
“You’ll stay the night, won’t you?” his father asks.
He is kind enough to not say no. Eames drops his fag, steps on the cherry, opens the car door with a flourish and waves Arthur inside. (Doesn’t call him darling, though.)
+
After the strangest dinner he has ever had, Eames flees onto the porch, where silence reigns.
(A different kind of silence than the one inside, where both Arthur and his father want to speak but don’t dare, where years and years hang between them and they’re perfectly cordial and polite anyway.)
Arthur says goodnight half an hour later. Eames has already been shown to the guest room. He plans on messing up the bed and then fucking Arthur on his childhood quilt, among the things that must have once meant something to him.
Mr. Arthur finds Eames fifteen minutes after that, two tumblers of amber liquid in hand and a look like a confession on his face. He holds one glass out for Eames, who accepts it, and the conversation with it.
“He’s dreaming again, isn’t he?”
It’s only the fact that he’s suspected for a long time that keeps Eames from dropping the expensive scotch and ruining both their shoes. He nods but says nothing, watches the older man take a long sip and post himself against the porch rail, facing the quiet neighbourhood.
“The people who came here after he deserted didn’t tell me anything. Just said some tech had disappeared. I know enough to read between the lines. I helped develop the technology, has he told you that?”
“No.”
“His best friend, Mal, she’s the daughter of another man who worked on the project. They used to live next door, while we were working at the base. Contractors for the military. Miles is an architect, I’m an engineer.” He shakes his head while Eames thinks Mal and Miles and of course (bloody fucking hell). “We thought we were inventing something great. Something brilliant.”
The man turns around, looks at Eames with eyes that belong to Arthur. “My son was fourteen, Mal just barely eighteen when I caught them using my prototype in my study. I was… I slipped into their dream. I wanted to see.”
A hand over his face and that is Arthur again, a man seen through an Arthur-shaped lens. (Distortion is a kind of art.) “The things they dreamed were more brilliant and amazing than anything we’d ever managed.”
Eames knows. He understands. He sees, every time they go under. Arthur builds cathedrals in the sky, never a hint of vertigo on his face. (He wonders, quietly, how long Arthur and his Mal, two wild children, must have been dreaming to become so good.)
“I took it away from them. I had to. It was a breach of security and I can only imagine what the military would have done to them, had they realized what they could do. I tried to save my son, Mr. Eames. The dreaming… you can’t… you can’t ever really stop. It’s an addiction. I think, by taking it away from him, I drove him mad.”
(He didn’t. Some people are born with fire under their skin and Arthur burns brightest of all Eames has ever met.)
“He started slipping. Looking for the danger and thrill he found in dreams up here, in the real world. He tried to dream while he was awake.”
“The gun,” Eames realizes out loud, earning himself a nod.
“You should have heard his mother when she saw the tattoo. She thought it was a gang mark, but he just said, ‘one shot is all it takes’, and I knew what it meant. I knew. I quit the project the next day, but it was too late. He got in too deep. Beat a kid half to death. It was either jail or the military. He picked the army and the rest, I guess, is history. Someone must have connected him to me, must have referred him to the right people. In the end, he willingly walked into the arms of the people I tried to protect him from, because he hated me so much for taking away his dreams.”
(How long have you carried that with you, old man? How long have you waited for someone to tell your sins to, someone who knows your son and his dreams? How long have you spent on your knees, asking for forgiveness for something Arthur did on his own, only on his own? No-one makes Arthur do anything. Not ever.)
“The star,” Eames asks instead of a thousand other things he could say. “What does the star stand for?”
A shrug and a chuckle and a long sip from a mostly empty glass. “There was a girl. I think her name was Julie. Janie? I can’t remember? They were… I think they were in love. She got pregnant by another boy, had an abortion in some backroom clinic. She bled to death in her own bed and the boy…”
The boy was the one Arthur almost beat to death before getting a tattoo of a star on his hip, a dead girl immortalized in cheap ink on creamy skin. A memory.
(Bam.
One shot is all it takes.)
Eames knows more about Arthur now, after a ten minute conversation, than he did after years sleeping next to him, years of tracing ink on skin and guessing at meanings.
(Permission to touch skin is not permission to get under it.)
Suddenly Mr. Arthur stands right in front of Eames and his eyes are sharp and dark, the way Arthur’s are. There’s fire left in the old man, something that survived a screwed-up marriage and a son with dreams too big and deadly to contain. “Promise me you will look after my son, Mr. Eames. Promise me you won’t let him get lost.”
As if Eames could budge Arthur even an inch. As if they aren’t both in too deep already. He remembers the fever hot, slick-dirty months after they ran, the months without dreams, without Somnacin. He knows he’ll never go there again. Knows he’ll never stop dreaming.
(And Arthur, darling Arthur, is so much deeper, so much longer in this game already.)
The only promise Eames can make is that, when Arthur finally goes down (in a hail of bullets or into the rabbit hole to madness), he will be right there with him, gun in hand.
But he’s a liar and a thief and so he says, “Yes,” as easy as breathing.
+.
Arthur’s mother becomes a sparrow him his other hipbone, black and grey, feathers soft enough to almost touch, almost feel. It’s a stark contrast to the blotchy, thick star on his other side, but it fits in a way Eames can’t quite put into words.
He asks, later, why the bird. Arthur shrugs into the dark. “She always wanted to fly away.”
(It’s grief, in its own way.)
Eames frames the bird with one hand while he goes down on Arthur. The next morning the spot beside him is cold and Arthur gone.
+
Silence.
+
Eames finds a pretty little blonde to shag, kisses her for an entire weekend, until her lips look like strawberries left in the sun, (hot slick red rotting), drops her at her workplace on Monday and forgets her name by Tuesday.
(She’s not the first he’s taken to his to bed in absence of Arthur, but somehow she marks a change anyway. She feels final. Eames is old and sentimental and ridiculous. Bloody hell.)
Months later, halfway across the globe, he picks up a school boy, sugary sweet eighteen, fucks him in the dark and afterwards trails a finger down his bare spine, says, “You should get ink.”
The boy blinks up at him, sleepy and defiant, the mixture that drew Eames in the first place. “Are you offering or something? You do tats?”
“No.”
+
He does another job with the Cobbs, late one spring. It’s the semi-legal kind of work they both adore, especially now that Mal is slowly rounding, pregnancy barely visible but the glow of it reaching wide and far. There’s no way, no angle from which to look at her, and miss that she’s with child.
(Eames draws her and never quite catches her radiance.)
Dom does the necessary research himself, Mal is their architect, Eames the forger. No chemist required, the standard drugs will do. Eames feels it all goes a bit too smoothly, but the job really is that simple.
There’s time enough for Mal to drag them out for a picnic in a nearby park, chequered blanket, basket, wine, the whole nine yards. Dom looks like an idiot the whole time, smiling hard enough to make Eames’s face hurt.
(He doesn’t miss Arthur. That would be ridiculous.)
After they’ve eaten, Mal demands a dance but Dom has not two but three left feet and possibly two left hands, as well, and he refuses steadfastly, claiming he’ll manage to break his pregnant wife’s ankle without meaning to. So Mal sets her sights on Eames, who gives in gracefully and twirls her around a perfectly Disney field of grass and little pink flowers he can’t identify.
Mal laughs and laughs and laughs, sparkling like diamonds in the sun, alive and loud and brilliant, speaking about crime and love and beauty like she knows it all.
“I can see why he loves you so much,” Eames finally blurts, and his own face might hurt, too, from smiling. (It’ll hurt more, later, when she’s gone and the memory of how alive she was will be brutal and brilliant, still.)
“Dom?” she asks, twirling under his arm, forward, back, around.
“Arthur,” he corrects. She blinks big eyes at him, momentarily confused, but he can see the pieces slot into place in her mind, just like they eventually slotted into place in his.
(This Mal is Arthur’s Mal. This Eames is Arthur’s Eames. He feels the need to say hello to her, like they’ve just been introduced.)
“Oh,” Mal finally breathes and laughs, long and hard. And then, “Would you like me to tell you embarrassing childhood stories about him, Mr. Eames?”
Of course he says yes.
Three days later, when the job is done and all their transactions finished, Mal bends herself around Eames’s back to whisper in his ear, “Should I tell our darling Arthur something for you?”
(At this point, Eames hasn’t had a life sign from Arthur in thirteen months and at least two new tattoos.)
“Tell him I said hello, will you, love?”
+
Philippa’s birth announcement comes from Arthur, including all her measurements, a time and a date. And then a second text. They made me godfather.
(Even in writing, it sounds mildly stunned.)
Closely followed by, Mal says you’re invited to the baptism. Don’t wear paisley.
+
Phillipa’s great day brings a harried looking Dom and a radiant Mal. Eames pecks her on the cheek and admires her daughter dutifully before wandering off. Dom catches him half an hour later and drags him aside, introduces him to ‘a friend of his by the name of Arthur’ and then hurries off again before they can correct him.
For shits and giggles, they mime not knowing each other all day and Eames thinks they’re being ridiculous, thinks this is ridiculous, because they haven’t seen each other in almost two years and here they are, taking the piss.
(Eames thinks the word ‘ridiculous’ pops up too often in his life. He blames Arthur.)
Long after midnight he sneaks into Arthur’s room and after Arthur’s half-arsed attempts at kicking him out, they shag very quietly and very hurriedly. He sends Eames back to his room afterwards, like a naughty schoolboy.
Morning finds them both sitting in the kitchen, looking half-dead. Eames pours them both coffee while Mal coos over her darling baby and Arthur watches, allowing himself to show his exhaustion for once. Dom comes stumbling in and Eames can’t quite shut up, asks, “Still black, darling?”
And Arthur, true to form, snaps, “Don’t fucking call me that, Eames.”
Dom catches on with a slow blink. “You two know each other.”
“Project Somnacin,” they chorus dutifully. Dom scowls all day.
+
A butterfly right below the gun, detailed and delicate. Philippa.
Sanskrit poetry down the outside of one hip and Arthur doesn’t say a word about it.
A pair of masks - Comedy and Tragedy - on his biceps, sculpted artfully to the muscle and Arthur provides a laconic, “Don’t believe what you see.”
(Eames is smart enough not to ask if the gun shot scar under the ink has anything to do with that lesson.)
Two Norse runes on his chest, just below the shoulder joints. It takes Eames two days of research to find their meaning. Mannaz, stands for the self, individual or collective. Eames finds it appropriate, in this business of losing oneself. Kenaz translates, quite simply, as ‘beacon’ or ‘fire’. Eames has nothing to add to that.
(One day, Arthur will set the world aflame and Eames will be the only one who isn’t surprised.)
+
For hours, Eames traces dark lines with deft fingers while above them, the sky purples and then shatters, stars falling like glittering rain. Afterward, Arthur shoots him out of the dream with a smirk and Eames wonders how anyone, anywhere, could ever even think of giving this up.
+
There’s more poetry in a foreign language running along Arthur’s waistband and it’s in the itchy, healing stage when Eames first sees it, on the second night of the Cobbs’ first post-baby job.
The next day Arthur keeps twitching his jaw like he wants to rub himself against his chair and moan in bliss. No-one else notices, but then no-one else has made a study of the man for as long as Eames has.
They take a break and Eames whisks Arthur away into an empty room, holds out his hands for the little tube of Bepanthen he knows Arthur will carry and applies it to the crumbling black scab carefully.
“You could just leave your shirt untucked, darling. It would probably chafe less.”
“No,” Arthur answers and that’s the first time Eames realizes that the expensive, beautiful suits Arthur wears buttoned up perfectly aren’t just a way to make him look older, to make people take him seriously. They’re also there to hide the ink, because the ink is a secret and Eames honestly, absolutely, did not realize it until this moment.
Arthur’s gallery of successes and failures is a secret.
(Eames feels humbled and dumb and hates both with a resigned sigh.)
+
“We could stick together, for a while,” Eames mutters into Arthur’s pale, perfect skin, half asleep.
It’s bloody stupid and he leaves before morning.
+
Eames keeps up with Arthur through Mal and the rumour mill, wonders if Arthur does the same and never asks.
He works with the Cobbs and with rank amateurs, with professionals who whisper about Arthur like he will appear if called three times.
They fear him, admire him, hate him, want him. But all of them respect him, for his skills and his ruthlessness, his coldness. Eames smiles at all of them, builds up his own reputation, gets rich fast and loses his fortunes faster.
(Eames wonders if his reputation matches Arthur’s when he’s out of earshot. Somehow he doubts it. Even at his most spectacular, Eames lacks the sharpness, the vicious brilliance Arthur exudes with every breath. Arthur speaks seven languages, but his first will always be murder.)
The criminal lifestyle with its ups and downs lulls him like the ocean. He fucks colleagues, fucks strangers, gets more ink on his shoulders and back, tattoos that mean absolutely nothing.
(That’s not spite.)
Arthur pulls a job in Shanghai that has the entire dreamsharing world going a bit nuts. Three levels. Three. No-one’s ever done more than two.
Eames forges women, children, animals. He lies and steals and dabbles in his old passion, meatspace forgery.
He makes money, he loses it.
Arthur barely makes it out of Romania in one piece.
Mal is pregnant again.
Eames screws a job in Sri Lanka and runs for his life.
James is born and Arthur walks away from a clusterfuck in South America, leaving twenty odd bodies on the ground, on both sides.
A second, smaller butterfly joins the first, siblings united under the stark black of a gun aimed at a heart. That’s Arthur for you, Eames thinks, trailing his tongue along the trigger and muzzle, biting right above the heart until he tastes copper and Arthur fists his hair to pull him away.
The Cobbs try to stop dreaming and return to it within six months. They look hollowed out and hunted when Eames welcomes them back.
Addiction.
(You can never stop dreaming. He wonders if any of them ever planned for this. Did they plan to walk away one day? To raise their children without dreams? Did they think the magic of chemicals and hallucination would release them?)
Arthur tours Europe, six jobs in seven months and Eames runs into him four times, quick, dirty nights in expensive hotels before they return to their separate jobs and lives.
Mal deteriorates.
Eames works a few corporate espionage jobs that amuse him to no end, with rank amateurs that drive him up the wall. He sends a text off to Arthur, begging him for permission to shoot the bloody idiots.
Arthur replies instantly, but not with anything Eames expects.
Mal is dead.
+
Mal is dead, Mal is gone, Mal is a suicide, bright, brilliant Mal.
(Eames remembers her in sunlight, pregnant and so alive it hurt to look at her and he gets drunk, far, far too drunk.)
Mal is a body in a coffin, Mal is six feet under, Mal isn’t a mother anymore, has left her children behind. Mal is nothing.
Mal is a grey scale image of the ocean, endless and calm, of a pale beach, of crying seagulls.
Mal loved the sea and Mal is the sea, below Arthur’s navel, gently sloping upwards on his side, toward the butterflies, toward her children, toward the gun that means one shot is all it takes here, above, in meatspace.
Eames wonders how he could ever find Arthur’s symbolism shallow and digs blunt nails into new ink until it hurts them both.
(Bam.
Nothing’s sacred anymore.)
+
A year later they only meet on jobs because Arthur is busy keeping Dom alive and the last shreds of his sanity intact and Eames is loitering around California a lot, keeping an eye on Phillippa and James, watching them grow.
(He’s their favourite uncle, long after they’ve both forgotten Daddy as more than a voice on the phone.)
One night Eames is woken by his phone chirping and an envelope spinning dizzily across the screen. Text message from Abby, which is what Arthur is saved as at the moment.
I just killed a man for you.
Eames stares. (How do you respond to this? Are there cards for the occasion?)
Ukrainian. Asked about you. Sunflower, I think.
Sunflower is a code word. Sunflower means get your shit together and get the fuck out because someone’s coming for you.
The last text he receives is, I ruined my fucking suit for you.
He thumbs a quick thank you, because he has no idea what else to say and sends it off before dumping the phone, in several pieces, along the way to the airport.
Mombasa, he thinks. Yussuf probably has a bloody couch for him, at least.
+
Arthur gets a red dice tattooed just above the crook of his left elbow. It’s the only colour on his monochromatic body, the only splash of life.
It’s a perfect copy of the die he keeps in his pocket, his totem, his anchor to reality. He plays with the real die occasionally, but keeps it close, secret. Away from others.
After Mal, that seems important.
It takes Eames the entirety of a two-week job to realize he’s the only one aware that the real die is a fake totem, and the fake die the real one.
In dreams, there is no red die on Arthur’s arm. Eames has no idea how Arthur does it, how he changes his self-image to reflect his waking self perfectly, minus that one detail.
(And he’s supposed to be the bloody forger here, damn it.)
But there it is.
Arthur’s real totem is a quick check under his rolled up sleeve, a graze of fingers against skin that’s just the slightest bit raised. (He probably made the poor artist add something to the ink to make sure it turned out this way.)
Eames is the only one who knows. Everyone else looks at the die in Arthur’s hands and falls for the ruse.
(He has no idea what it means, this trust, this truth, him knowing and everyone else only thinking they do. It means something but damn if he understands it.)
He does the only sensible thing: he flees back to Mombasa and gets so drunk he thinks he’s gone blind.
+
“Inception,” Dom says.
(A man blowing his head off with his military issued gun, Arthur’s eyes like bullet holes when he finds him, peanuts in a tree house. Bam.)
Arthur says it’s impossible. Eames says it’s possible. Both are right. Surprisingly, Arthur’s version is the one that’ll leave less bodies on the ground.
So he says yes (because he was never going to say no) and lets Saito and Dom drag him to Paris, of all bloody places. He still remembers dying in the Seine, even if he never did. Another bit about dreamsharing they never spell out for you: It taints everything, sometimes with magic, sometimes with horror but always, always, with a high you think you can never come down from.
Lovely, that. He snorts and squares his shoulder, marches into the warehouse like he owns it, winks at Arthur and flirts with Ariadne because she’s cute as a button, tiny and shiny and red.
Arthur glowers and snaps and Eames snaps back. It’s darling-this, don’t-call-me-that, pulling each other’s pigtails the way they have been doing for… god, has it really been this long?
Almost ten years.
Ten years of Eames and Arthur orbiting each other, colliding and bouncing off the other. Ten years of tattoos on Arthur’s skin and bodies on the ground, of war stories and funerals.
Eames is on the wrong side of thirty and older than he’s ever been. He watches their little sprite of an architect flit around the warehouse, flirting with Arthur, pushing Dom places no-one wants him to go. Was he ever that young? Was Arthur?
He doesn’t notice that he’s reached around Arthur from where’s he’s standing behind him in front of the whiteboard and started tracing the outline of the star through multiple layers of cloth. Not until Arthur elbows him in the gut anyway and steps away, smooth as all get out and snarls, “Personal space, Mr. Eames. I suggest you investigate the concept.”
Eames cocks his hip, thumbs in his belt loops and smirks. “Of course, darling. Would you like to help?”
Arthur’s expression goes flat. “I am sure you can handle the daunting task on your own.”
(He says it in the exact same tone of voice he once said, steal me. Challenge and sex and derision, exquisitely crafted to make Eames feel seven feet tall and absolutely insignificant in same breath.)
“Guys,” Ariadne interrupts from where she’s puttering around her models. “Do you have to fight all the time? Some of us are trying to work.”
Eames looks at her, startled and suspecting it shows. But he doesn’t say anything, so she huffs and stomps away.
Behind Eames, Arthur quietly starts laughing so Eames raises his hand, cocks an imaginary gun and says, “Bam.”
Arthur still jumps, just the tiniest bit. Satisfaction rolls in Eames’s gut.
+
One night in Sydney, after following the mark around all day, Eames calculates the number of all the people he’s killed. Calculates also, the number of projections he slew since he first stepped into a dream, a newborn god. Approximations only. There were machine guns and bombs and grenades and once, memorably, a tank.
Eames has seen worlds crumble under the blinding blast of atomic bombs and died with the satisfaction of knowing that he was the one that pushed the button.
He calculates the times he’s died in a dream, blood on his lips and holes in his gut and also the times Arthur was the one to finish him off, a bullet to the skull, the sleekest, most elegant of gifts. Wine, dinner, bullets.
He adds up all the times he’s kissed Arthur while he was bleeding, the times they’ve fought, back to back, gun in each hand and the times he’s looked at Arthur and seen only fire and murder and wondered how, in god’s name, this world hasn’t burned to the ground around them by now.
(How he hasn’t completely cut himself up on Arthur’s gleaming edges by now.)
The numbers are enormous, large and fearsome, and Eames tries to recoil a bit in horror, at seeing it all spelled out like this. Tries to scrounge up regret for what he’s done to this world.
But he’s a thief. Taking is what he does.
He gropes blindly for his phone, dials Arthur’s number from memory and asks, even as he hears the racket of a restaurant on Arthur’s end, Ariadne’s voice asking who’s calling, “Would you care for me if I were a simple accountant, darling?”
“Are you high?” Arthur asks and then becomes tinny as he makes excuses, finds a quieter place to talk.
“No. Unfortunately. A tragedy, really. Would you?”
Arthur must be tipsy, at the very least, to let Eames get away with this. “Redundant, Mr. Eames. I never would have met you.”
(Eames likes to imagine that he’d somehow, someway, always collide with Arthur, no matter what world they lived in, but he’s not sodding romantic enough to say that out loud.)
Instead he hums, says, “Too right.”
And hangs up.
+
Ariadne is about to stomp off yet again when Eames rolls his eyes, blocks her path and says, “Love, we’re not fighting.”
(I’ve been in love with Arthur for ten years and this is how I say, ‘I love you’, and he puts bullets in my brain in return. Somehow, he doesn’t think she would understand that quite right.)
She gives him one sardonic eyebrow, too adorable for words. “Could have fooled me.”
“Arthur and me, we simply know each other too well.”
Her expression says she doesn’t believe him, still, because they’re too vicious for it to be just flirting. Sweet, innocent girl. He smiles. “There’s just nothing sacred anymore, these days, pet, is there?”
Arthur’s hand twitches toward his hip, where even the sleek cut of his jacket can’t hide the bulge of a gun. Eames bows, mockingly, and goes on a coffee run.
+
“Do I ever get my own?” Eames asks, languid and fucked out, less than twenty-four hours after inception, raw and tired and exhilarated. Half-grieving for Mal anew and angry with Cobb and proud. So bloody proud, it’s ridiculous.
(There’s that word again.)
Arthur, lying next to him, smoking, raises his head limply, curiously. His chest and arms are a dark tangle of skin and ink and scars, a network, a hatch work, a patchwork, a forest to get lost in. (Tracing Arthur’s life in black lines, Eames knows how Alice must have felt.)
Eames remembers when all that skin was almost bare, nothing but a few numbers, a gun and a dead girl. Now Arthur is a puzzle of his loves and losses, his torso almost filled. He’s not even thirty yet and he’s running out of space.
(Eames suspects they’re living wrong, but remembers the feeling of him and Arthur, dreaming the impossible time and again. They’re immortal until the day they die.)
“What?” Arthur asks. His eyes are red from all the crying he didn’t do for Mal, for how she didn’t kill herself. Cobb murdered her, put the madness in her head and left it there to fester.
Eames doesn’t think he’ll work with Dom again. Not anytime soon. Doesn’t think he can, not with the memory of Mal, sun-bright, pregnant and vibrant, still wedged somewhere in his skull, the memory of her teenage self running from a runty Arthur, laughing so hard she could barely breathe. (Out of all the deaths he’s witnessed, only Mal’s seems like a sin.)
He puts a palm flat over the gun and the butterflies, trails along the beach, finger walks along the scattered lines of poetry in a dozen different languages.
“Ink,” he tells Arthur’s navel, framed by a star and a sparrow, the tip of a sword almost, but not quite, touching it.
“No,” the answer comes, instantly, coldly. Arthur’s hand sinks into Eames’s hair, faintly trailing heat and smoke from the cigarette still between his fingers. Eames reaches around his head, snatches it and takes a long drag.
He rolls onto his back, away. (He expected this answer, knew it, understood it. He thinks he would have preferred a gun to his forehead, Arthur’s beautiful hands clenching and pulling the trigger. A bullet as a gift.
Permission to touch skin is not permission to get under it.)
“Why ever not, darling?” He pulls one knee up, smokes in silence until Arthur rolls after him, onto his stomach, on top of Eames and into him, pushing him down, shoving him away. Smothering him with weight and heat.
Arthur’s body always tells of rage and murder and locked doors and Eames has long since learned to listen only to his words, not the line of his shoulders, always poised for a fight.
(Arthur could say something like, I took you to meet my father, could say I let you see me. Could say, I let you steal me.)
What he does say is, “You’re always here.”
+
They dream together, months after inception, in a rundown hut somewhere in South America, dream of a clean, modern hotel with five hundred identical rooms.
They have the mark, they have the safe, they have the information and they have fifteen minutes until the kick.
Eames is bleeding from a steak knife to the gut and Arthur is bent over him, kisses him with hot lips, kisses him as he presses a cold barrel to his temple.
“Darling,” Eames says into the kiss, tasting blood. “You’re so very good at shooting people in the head.”
“I’m only waking them up,” Arthur answers, dimpling a bit. Eames does so love those dimples, all the more because they show so seldom.
And because Arthur’ll never say it, bloody wanker that he is, Eames says it for him.
Says, “You let me steal you.”
(They’re immortal until the day they die and Eames hopes he’ll die like this.)
Arthur smiles as he pulls the trigger.
+
Fin
+
+
You know, I honestly didn't think this was ever going to end. Thanks for your endurance. :)
Title: I set a fire (just to see what it kills) - Part III/III
Summary: The first time Arthur shoots Eames in the head at point blank range is when Eames falls in love. That’s the beginning. That’s the end. (Or: Tattoo!Arthur gone sideways.)
Disclaimer: I do not own Inception, any of its concepts or characters. I just borrow, play and put back. I also don’t own the title, which is a line from The National’s Little Faith and kills me every time.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Ahem. Deep breath. Okay. Mindfuckery, as given to us by the great and mighty Nolan. Dream!weirdness. Sex. Gay sex, to be specific. (Yes, I wrote sex again. There was much facepalming involved.) Rude people, bad words, insanity, suicide of a minor character, gore, violence, cavalier attitude to all things bad, deadly and violent, tattoos, tattoo!kink and the actual process of tattooing. I’m told that freaks people out. Huh.
Additional Warning: Folks, do not use this story as any sort of guide on how to deal with tattoos. It hurts, even if you do really get a nifty high off of it, it takes an age to heal, you have to be careful as hell and many of the things Arthur and Eames do with new tattoos are neither sanitary nor smart. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t wash off. Ever. Do not try this at home, please.
Words: 23k and a little something extra.
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Part I
Part II
+
+
Arthur’s father is a tall, pale man with wire rim glasses and a mop of salt and pepper hair that curls above the collar of his cardigan. Something of Arthur’s indomitable fury glints in his eyes (or so Eames like to think) but it’s offset by warmth and careworn age. His face was in Arthur’s mirror, so long ago, in the dream.
His back it straight, his facial structure a copy of his son’s. He doesn’t look like a new widower. He doesn’t look like a man who hasn’t seen his son in years and years. His arms twitch, as he opens the door, like he wants to hug Arthur, but he doesn’t.
Arthur introduces Eames, asks if they can come in, polite and succinct as always. He’s wearing one of those horrible, uptight suits he’s discovered recently.
(They make him look sharper than he is, harder, colder, and like the world’s most expensive rent boy. Eames has always told him that he’d pay the price and he would. Those waistcoats, they do things to him.)
The man allows Arthur to slip past, holds out a hand for Eames to shake. “Mr. Eames,” he says, because that’s how Arthur introduced him, because that’s what his latest (and longest lasting, so far) passport says.
“Just Eames,” he answers, and follows Arthur inside with a belated, “My condolences.”
Something like realization dawns on the man as he closes the door, says, “You found out about your mother.”
Arthur nods. “By accident.”
He doesn’t look like someone who’s grieving either.
“I would have called but… they tell me you are a criminal now.”
Arthur tilts his head, fire rising in him. (Eames knows the signs. He has long since made it his job to know all of Arthur’s signs. This is Arthur, aiming for furious and getting there fast. Why?) “Are you going to call the police on me?”
Mr. Arthur - (That’s not his name, but that’s how Eames thinks about him henceforth, because Arthur has just recently decided to become Arthur and the name slotted into place like it was always meant to be his. There is a sword running down the length of his breastbone to prove the point. Arthur is Arthur and his father can only be a continuation of that, a footnote.) - Mr. Arthur shakes his head. “I never have,” like that explains everything.
To Eames it only means that Arthur was a criminal before the military and he thinks what? why? how?, Arthur, little Arthur, a bad boy? He tries to feign surprise and fails. Instead he smirks at Arthur over his father’s shoulder, gets an annoyed look in return, says nothing.
“Would you like… would you like to visit the grave?”
Arthur, kindly, does not say that is what we’re here for. What he says is, “Yes.”
+
They hang back as Arthur goes to stand at the foot of his mother’s grave, staring blankly at the simple, new tombstone. Eames smokes, offers Mr. Arthur a cigarette and gets turned down with a smile.
They lean against the car. Silence.
“Have you known my son long, Mr. Eames?”
“We go back,” he admits without admitting anything. Conman at heart, never give anything up for free. He flicks ash into the wind, hooks his thumb awkwardly at Arthur’s still, black form (like a carrion crow, waiting to feast on the bodies of the newly dead.), “He doesn’t seem very… desolate.”
The hand over his face, that’s a gesture Arthur sometimes makes, when he’s not paying attention to his body language. Mr. Arthur sighs with it, heavy and tired. “I never meant to marry Judy,” he confesses after a moment of nothing, deliberation perhaps. “She was a fling, nothing more, but then she got pregnant… I was trying to do the right thing. I thought… I thought a child needs both parents to turn out right.”
He shakes his head. His hair flops in his face. Arthur in his movements again. Arthur in every part of him. (Or him in Arthur. Genesis in reverse.) “Judy had no interest in her son, never paid much attention to him. She chafed at being a mother, a wife. I should have let her go. I should just have let her go, but instead I made her stay. For our son’s sake. I think I did more harm than good.”
Eames wants to say something make the old man look less drawn. Something meaningful and surprisingly, startlingly true. (It’s not your fault. He was born like this, angry and cold. He turned out okay. You’re too much alike. Your son is brilliant and beautiful and deadly and I love him like I love knives and stealing things. I stole him. I won’t give him back.)
Before he can settle on any one thing, Arthur turns, coat flapping (wings spreading) and comes toward them.
“You’ll stay the night, won’t you?” his father asks.
He is kind enough to not say no. Eames drops his fag, steps on the cherry, opens the car door with a flourish and waves Arthur inside. (Doesn’t call him darling, though.)
+
After the strangest dinner he has ever had, Eames flees onto the porch, where silence reigns.
(A different kind of silence than the one inside, where both Arthur and his father want to speak but don’t dare, where years and years hang between them and they’re perfectly cordial and polite anyway.)
Arthur says goodnight half an hour later. Eames has already been shown to the guest room. He plans on messing up the bed and then fucking Arthur on his childhood quilt, among the things that must have once meant something to him.
Mr. Arthur finds Eames fifteen minutes after that, two tumblers of amber liquid in hand and a look like a confession on his face. He holds one glass out for Eames, who accepts it, and the conversation with it.
“He’s dreaming again, isn’t he?”
It’s only the fact that he’s suspected for a long time that keeps Eames from dropping the expensive scotch and ruining both their shoes. He nods but says nothing, watches the older man take a long sip and post himself against the porch rail, facing the quiet neighbourhood.
“The people who came here after he deserted didn’t tell me anything. Just said some tech had disappeared. I know enough to read between the lines. I helped develop the technology, has he told you that?”
“No.”
“His best friend, Mal, she’s the daughter of another man who worked on the project. They used to live next door, while we were working at the base. Contractors for the military. Miles is an architect, I’m an engineer.” He shakes his head while Eames thinks Mal and Miles and of course (bloody fucking hell). “We thought we were inventing something great. Something brilliant.”
The man turns around, looks at Eames with eyes that belong to Arthur. “My son was fourteen, Mal just barely eighteen when I caught them using my prototype in my study. I was… I slipped into their dream. I wanted to see.”
A hand over his face and that is Arthur again, a man seen through an Arthur-shaped lens. (Distortion is a kind of art.) “The things they dreamed were more brilliant and amazing than anything we’d ever managed.”
Eames knows. He understands. He sees, every time they go under. Arthur builds cathedrals in the sky, never a hint of vertigo on his face. (He wonders, quietly, how long Arthur and his Mal, two wild children, must have been dreaming to become so good.)
“I took it away from them. I had to. It was a breach of security and I can only imagine what the military would have done to them, had they realized what they could do. I tried to save my son, Mr. Eames. The dreaming… you can’t… you can’t ever really stop. It’s an addiction. I think, by taking it away from him, I drove him mad.”
(He didn’t. Some people are born with fire under their skin and Arthur burns brightest of all Eames has ever met.)
“He started slipping. Looking for the danger and thrill he found in dreams up here, in the real world. He tried to dream while he was awake.”
“The gun,” Eames realizes out loud, earning himself a nod.
“You should have heard his mother when she saw the tattoo. She thought it was a gang mark, but he just said, ‘one shot is all it takes’, and I knew what it meant. I knew. I quit the project the next day, but it was too late. He got in too deep. Beat a kid half to death. It was either jail or the military. He picked the army and the rest, I guess, is history. Someone must have connected him to me, must have referred him to the right people. In the end, he willingly walked into the arms of the people I tried to protect him from, because he hated me so much for taking away his dreams.”
(How long have you carried that with you, old man? How long have you waited for someone to tell your sins to, someone who knows your son and his dreams? How long have you spent on your knees, asking for forgiveness for something Arthur did on his own, only on his own? No-one makes Arthur do anything. Not ever.)
“The star,” Eames asks instead of a thousand other things he could say. “What does the star stand for?”
A shrug and a chuckle and a long sip from a mostly empty glass. “There was a girl. I think her name was Julie. Janie? I can’t remember? They were… I think they were in love. She got pregnant by another boy, had an abortion in some backroom clinic. She bled to death in her own bed and the boy…”
The boy was the one Arthur almost beat to death before getting a tattoo of a star on his hip, a dead girl immortalized in cheap ink on creamy skin. A memory.
(Bam.
One shot is all it takes.)
Eames knows more about Arthur now, after a ten minute conversation, than he did after years sleeping next to him, years of tracing ink on skin and guessing at meanings.
(Permission to touch skin is not permission to get under it.)
Suddenly Mr. Arthur stands right in front of Eames and his eyes are sharp and dark, the way Arthur’s are. There’s fire left in the old man, something that survived a screwed-up marriage and a son with dreams too big and deadly to contain. “Promise me you will look after my son, Mr. Eames. Promise me you won’t let him get lost.”
As if Eames could budge Arthur even an inch. As if they aren’t both in too deep already. He remembers the fever hot, slick-dirty months after they ran, the months without dreams, without Somnacin. He knows he’ll never go there again. Knows he’ll never stop dreaming.
(And Arthur, darling Arthur, is so much deeper, so much longer in this game already.)
The only promise Eames can make is that, when Arthur finally goes down (in a hail of bullets or into the rabbit hole to madness), he will be right there with him, gun in hand.
But he’s a liar and a thief and so he says, “Yes,” as easy as breathing.
+.
Arthur’s mother becomes a sparrow him his other hipbone, black and grey, feathers soft enough to almost touch, almost feel. It’s a stark contrast to the blotchy, thick star on his other side, but it fits in a way Eames can’t quite put into words.
He asks, later, why the bird. Arthur shrugs into the dark. “She always wanted to fly away.”
(It’s grief, in its own way.)
Eames frames the bird with one hand while he goes down on Arthur. The next morning the spot beside him is cold and Arthur gone.
+
Silence.
+
Eames finds a pretty little blonde to shag, kisses her for an entire weekend, until her lips look like strawberries left in the sun, (hot slick red rotting), drops her at her workplace on Monday and forgets her name by Tuesday.
(She’s not the first he’s taken to his to bed in absence of Arthur, but somehow she marks a change anyway. She feels final. Eames is old and sentimental and ridiculous. Bloody hell.)
Months later, halfway across the globe, he picks up a school boy, sugary sweet eighteen, fucks him in the dark and afterwards trails a finger down his bare spine, says, “You should get ink.”
The boy blinks up at him, sleepy and defiant, the mixture that drew Eames in the first place. “Are you offering or something? You do tats?”
“No.”
+
He does another job with the Cobbs, late one spring. It’s the semi-legal kind of work they both adore, especially now that Mal is slowly rounding, pregnancy barely visible but the glow of it reaching wide and far. There’s no way, no angle from which to look at her, and miss that she’s with child.
(Eames draws her and never quite catches her radiance.)
Dom does the necessary research himself, Mal is their architect, Eames the forger. No chemist required, the standard drugs will do. Eames feels it all goes a bit too smoothly, but the job really is that simple.
There’s time enough for Mal to drag them out for a picnic in a nearby park, chequered blanket, basket, wine, the whole nine yards. Dom looks like an idiot the whole time, smiling hard enough to make Eames’s face hurt.
(He doesn’t miss Arthur. That would be ridiculous.)
After they’ve eaten, Mal demands a dance but Dom has not two but three left feet and possibly two left hands, as well, and he refuses steadfastly, claiming he’ll manage to break his pregnant wife’s ankle without meaning to. So Mal sets her sights on Eames, who gives in gracefully and twirls her around a perfectly Disney field of grass and little pink flowers he can’t identify.
Mal laughs and laughs and laughs, sparkling like diamonds in the sun, alive and loud and brilliant, speaking about crime and love and beauty like she knows it all.
“I can see why he loves you so much,” Eames finally blurts, and his own face might hurt, too, from smiling. (It’ll hurt more, later, when she’s gone and the memory of how alive she was will be brutal and brilliant, still.)
“Dom?” she asks, twirling under his arm, forward, back, around.
“Arthur,” he corrects. She blinks big eyes at him, momentarily confused, but he can see the pieces slot into place in her mind, just like they eventually slotted into place in his.
(This Mal is Arthur’s Mal. This Eames is Arthur’s Eames. He feels the need to say hello to her, like they’ve just been introduced.)
“Oh,” Mal finally breathes and laughs, long and hard. And then, “Would you like me to tell you embarrassing childhood stories about him, Mr. Eames?”
Of course he says yes.
Three days later, when the job is done and all their transactions finished, Mal bends herself around Eames’s back to whisper in his ear, “Should I tell our darling Arthur something for you?”
(At this point, Eames hasn’t had a life sign from Arthur in thirteen months and at least two new tattoos.)
“Tell him I said hello, will you, love?”
+
Philippa’s birth announcement comes from Arthur, including all her measurements, a time and a date. And then a second text. They made me godfather.
(Even in writing, it sounds mildly stunned.)
Closely followed by, Mal says you’re invited to the baptism. Don’t wear paisley.
+
Phillipa’s great day brings a harried looking Dom and a radiant Mal. Eames pecks her on the cheek and admires her daughter dutifully before wandering off. Dom catches him half an hour later and drags him aside, introduces him to ‘a friend of his by the name of Arthur’ and then hurries off again before they can correct him.
For shits and giggles, they mime not knowing each other all day and Eames thinks they’re being ridiculous, thinks this is ridiculous, because they haven’t seen each other in almost two years and here they are, taking the piss.
(Eames thinks the word ‘ridiculous’ pops up too often in his life. He blames Arthur.)
Long after midnight he sneaks into Arthur’s room and after Arthur’s half-arsed attempts at kicking him out, they shag very quietly and very hurriedly. He sends Eames back to his room afterwards, like a naughty schoolboy.
Morning finds them both sitting in the kitchen, looking half-dead. Eames pours them both coffee while Mal coos over her darling baby and Arthur watches, allowing himself to show his exhaustion for once. Dom comes stumbling in and Eames can’t quite shut up, asks, “Still black, darling?”
And Arthur, true to form, snaps, “Don’t fucking call me that, Eames.”
Dom catches on with a slow blink. “You two know each other.”
“Project Somnacin,” they chorus dutifully. Dom scowls all day.
+
A butterfly right below the gun, detailed and delicate. Philippa.
Sanskrit poetry down the outside of one hip and Arthur doesn’t say a word about it.
A pair of masks - Comedy and Tragedy - on his biceps, sculpted artfully to the muscle and Arthur provides a laconic, “Don’t believe what you see.”
(Eames is smart enough not to ask if the gun shot scar under the ink has anything to do with that lesson.)
Two Norse runes on his chest, just below the shoulder joints. It takes Eames two days of research to find their meaning. Mannaz, stands for the self, individual or collective. Eames finds it appropriate, in this business of losing oneself. Kenaz translates, quite simply, as ‘beacon’ or ‘fire’. Eames has nothing to add to that.
(One day, Arthur will set the world aflame and Eames will be the only one who isn’t surprised.)
+
For hours, Eames traces dark lines with deft fingers while above them, the sky purples and then shatters, stars falling like glittering rain. Afterward, Arthur shoots him out of the dream with a smirk and Eames wonders how anyone, anywhere, could ever even think of giving this up.
+
There’s more poetry in a foreign language running along Arthur’s waistband and it’s in the itchy, healing stage when Eames first sees it, on the second night of the Cobbs’ first post-baby job.
The next day Arthur keeps twitching his jaw like he wants to rub himself against his chair and moan in bliss. No-one else notices, but then no-one else has made a study of the man for as long as Eames has.
They take a break and Eames whisks Arthur away into an empty room, holds out his hands for the little tube of Bepanthen he knows Arthur will carry and applies it to the crumbling black scab carefully.
“You could just leave your shirt untucked, darling. It would probably chafe less.”
“No,” Arthur answers and that’s the first time Eames realizes that the expensive, beautiful suits Arthur wears buttoned up perfectly aren’t just a way to make him look older, to make people take him seriously. They’re also there to hide the ink, because the ink is a secret and Eames honestly, absolutely, did not realize it until this moment.
Arthur’s gallery of successes and failures is a secret.
(Eames feels humbled and dumb and hates both with a resigned sigh.)
+
“We could stick together, for a while,” Eames mutters into Arthur’s pale, perfect skin, half asleep.
It’s bloody stupid and he leaves before morning.
+
Eames keeps up with Arthur through Mal and the rumour mill, wonders if Arthur does the same and never asks.
He works with the Cobbs and with rank amateurs, with professionals who whisper about Arthur like he will appear if called three times.
They fear him, admire him, hate him, want him. But all of them respect him, for his skills and his ruthlessness, his coldness. Eames smiles at all of them, builds up his own reputation, gets rich fast and loses his fortunes faster.
(Eames wonders if his reputation matches Arthur’s when he’s out of earshot. Somehow he doubts it. Even at his most spectacular, Eames lacks the sharpness, the vicious brilliance Arthur exudes with every breath. Arthur speaks seven languages, but his first will always be murder.)
The criminal lifestyle with its ups and downs lulls him like the ocean. He fucks colleagues, fucks strangers, gets more ink on his shoulders and back, tattoos that mean absolutely nothing.
(That’s not spite.)
Arthur pulls a job in Shanghai that has the entire dreamsharing world going a bit nuts. Three levels. Three. No-one’s ever done more than two.
Eames forges women, children, animals. He lies and steals and dabbles in his old passion, meatspace forgery.
He makes money, he loses it.
Arthur barely makes it out of Romania in one piece.
Mal is pregnant again.
Eames screws a job in Sri Lanka and runs for his life.
James is born and Arthur walks away from a clusterfuck in South America, leaving twenty odd bodies on the ground, on both sides.
A second, smaller butterfly joins the first, siblings united under the stark black of a gun aimed at a heart. That’s Arthur for you, Eames thinks, trailing his tongue along the trigger and muzzle, biting right above the heart until he tastes copper and Arthur fists his hair to pull him away.
The Cobbs try to stop dreaming and return to it within six months. They look hollowed out and hunted when Eames welcomes them back.
Addiction.
(You can never stop dreaming. He wonders if any of them ever planned for this. Did they plan to walk away one day? To raise their children without dreams? Did they think the magic of chemicals and hallucination would release them?)
Arthur tours Europe, six jobs in seven months and Eames runs into him four times, quick, dirty nights in expensive hotels before they return to their separate jobs and lives.
Mal deteriorates.
Eames works a few corporate espionage jobs that amuse him to no end, with rank amateurs that drive him up the wall. He sends a text off to Arthur, begging him for permission to shoot the bloody idiots.
Arthur replies instantly, but not with anything Eames expects.
Mal is dead.
+
Mal is dead, Mal is gone, Mal is a suicide, bright, brilliant Mal.
(Eames remembers her in sunlight, pregnant and so alive it hurt to look at her and he gets drunk, far, far too drunk.)
Mal is a body in a coffin, Mal is six feet under, Mal isn’t a mother anymore, has left her children behind. Mal is nothing.
Mal is a grey scale image of the ocean, endless and calm, of a pale beach, of crying seagulls.
Mal loved the sea and Mal is the sea, below Arthur’s navel, gently sloping upwards on his side, toward the butterflies, toward her children, toward the gun that means one shot is all it takes here, above, in meatspace.
Eames wonders how he could ever find Arthur’s symbolism shallow and digs blunt nails into new ink until it hurts them both.
(Bam.
Nothing’s sacred anymore.)
+
A year later they only meet on jobs because Arthur is busy keeping Dom alive and the last shreds of his sanity intact and Eames is loitering around California a lot, keeping an eye on Phillippa and James, watching them grow.
(He’s their favourite uncle, long after they’ve both forgotten Daddy as more than a voice on the phone.)
One night Eames is woken by his phone chirping and an envelope spinning dizzily across the screen. Text message from Abby, which is what Arthur is saved as at the moment.
I just killed a man for you.
Eames stares. (How do you respond to this? Are there cards for the occasion?)
Ukrainian. Asked about you. Sunflower, I think.
Sunflower is a code word. Sunflower means get your shit together and get the fuck out because someone’s coming for you.
The last text he receives is, I ruined my fucking suit for you.
He thumbs a quick thank you, because he has no idea what else to say and sends it off before dumping the phone, in several pieces, along the way to the airport.
Mombasa, he thinks. Yussuf probably has a bloody couch for him, at least.
+
Arthur gets a red dice tattooed just above the crook of his left elbow. It’s the only colour on his monochromatic body, the only splash of life.
It’s a perfect copy of the die he keeps in his pocket, his totem, his anchor to reality. He plays with the real die occasionally, but keeps it close, secret. Away from others.
After Mal, that seems important.
It takes Eames the entirety of a two-week job to realize he’s the only one aware that the real die is a fake totem, and the fake die the real one.
In dreams, there is no red die on Arthur’s arm. Eames has no idea how Arthur does it, how he changes his self-image to reflect his waking self perfectly, minus that one detail.
(And he’s supposed to be the bloody forger here, damn it.)
But there it is.
Arthur’s real totem is a quick check under his rolled up sleeve, a graze of fingers against skin that’s just the slightest bit raised. (He probably made the poor artist add something to the ink to make sure it turned out this way.)
Eames is the only one who knows. Everyone else looks at the die in Arthur’s hands and falls for the ruse.
(He has no idea what it means, this trust, this truth, him knowing and everyone else only thinking they do. It means something but damn if he understands it.)
He does the only sensible thing: he flees back to Mombasa and gets so drunk he thinks he’s gone blind.
+
“Inception,” Dom says.
(A man blowing his head off with his military issued gun, Arthur’s eyes like bullet holes when he finds him, peanuts in a tree house. Bam.)
Arthur says it’s impossible. Eames says it’s possible. Both are right. Surprisingly, Arthur’s version is the one that’ll leave less bodies on the ground.
So he says yes (because he was never going to say no) and lets Saito and Dom drag him to Paris, of all bloody places. He still remembers dying in the Seine, even if he never did. Another bit about dreamsharing they never spell out for you: It taints everything, sometimes with magic, sometimes with horror but always, always, with a high you think you can never come down from.
Lovely, that. He snorts and squares his shoulder, marches into the warehouse like he owns it, winks at Arthur and flirts with Ariadne because she’s cute as a button, tiny and shiny and red.
Arthur glowers and snaps and Eames snaps back. It’s darling-this, don’t-call-me-that, pulling each other’s pigtails the way they have been doing for… god, has it really been this long?
Almost ten years.
Ten years of Eames and Arthur orbiting each other, colliding and bouncing off the other. Ten years of tattoos on Arthur’s skin and bodies on the ground, of war stories and funerals.
Eames is on the wrong side of thirty and older than he’s ever been. He watches their little sprite of an architect flit around the warehouse, flirting with Arthur, pushing Dom places no-one wants him to go. Was he ever that young? Was Arthur?
He doesn’t notice that he’s reached around Arthur from where’s he’s standing behind him in front of the whiteboard and started tracing the outline of the star through multiple layers of cloth. Not until Arthur elbows him in the gut anyway and steps away, smooth as all get out and snarls, “Personal space, Mr. Eames. I suggest you investigate the concept.”
Eames cocks his hip, thumbs in his belt loops and smirks. “Of course, darling. Would you like to help?”
Arthur’s expression goes flat. “I am sure you can handle the daunting task on your own.”
(He says it in the exact same tone of voice he once said, steal me. Challenge and sex and derision, exquisitely crafted to make Eames feel seven feet tall and absolutely insignificant in same breath.)
“Guys,” Ariadne interrupts from where she’s puttering around her models. “Do you have to fight all the time? Some of us are trying to work.”
Eames looks at her, startled and suspecting it shows. But he doesn’t say anything, so she huffs and stomps away.
Behind Eames, Arthur quietly starts laughing so Eames raises his hand, cocks an imaginary gun and says, “Bam.”
Arthur still jumps, just the tiniest bit. Satisfaction rolls in Eames’s gut.
+
One night in Sydney, after following the mark around all day, Eames calculates the number of all the people he’s killed. Calculates also, the number of projections he slew since he first stepped into a dream, a newborn god. Approximations only. There were machine guns and bombs and grenades and once, memorably, a tank.
Eames has seen worlds crumble under the blinding blast of atomic bombs and died with the satisfaction of knowing that he was the one that pushed the button.
He calculates the times he’s died in a dream, blood on his lips and holes in his gut and also the times Arthur was the one to finish him off, a bullet to the skull, the sleekest, most elegant of gifts. Wine, dinner, bullets.
He adds up all the times he’s kissed Arthur while he was bleeding, the times they’ve fought, back to back, gun in each hand and the times he’s looked at Arthur and seen only fire and murder and wondered how, in god’s name, this world hasn’t burned to the ground around them by now.
(How he hasn’t completely cut himself up on Arthur’s gleaming edges by now.)
The numbers are enormous, large and fearsome, and Eames tries to recoil a bit in horror, at seeing it all spelled out like this. Tries to scrounge up regret for what he’s done to this world.
But he’s a thief. Taking is what he does.
He gropes blindly for his phone, dials Arthur’s number from memory and asks, even as he hears the racket of a restaurant on Arthur’s end, Ariadne’s voice asking who’s calling, “Would you care for me if I were a simple accountant, darling?”
“Are you high?” Arthur asks and then becomes tinny as he makes excuses, finds a quieter place to talk.
“No. Unfortunately. A tragedy, really. Would you?”
Arthur must be tipsy, at the very least, to let Eames get away with this. “Redundant, Mr. Eames. I never would have met you.”
(Eames likes to imagine that he’d somehow, someway, always collide with Arthur, no matter what world they lived in, but he’s not sodding romantic enough to say that out loud.)
Instead he hums, says, “Too right.”
And hangs up.
+
Ariadne is about to stomp off yet again when Eames rolls his eyes, blocks her path and says, “Love, we’re not fighting.”
(I’ve been in love with Arthur for ten years and this is how I say, ‘I love you’, and he puts bullets in my brain in return. Somehow, he doesn’t think she would understand that quite right.)
She gives him one sardonic eyebrow, too adorable for words. “Could have fooled me.”
“Arthur and me, we simply know each other too well.”
Her expression says she doesn’t believe him, still, because they’re too vicious for it to be just flirting. Sweet, innocent girl. He smiles. “There’s just nothing sacred anymore, these days, pet, is there?”
Arthur’s hand twitches toward his hip, where even the sleek cut of his jacket can’t hide the bulge of a gun. Eames bows, mockingly, and goes on a coffee run.
+
“Do I ever get my own?” Eames asks, languid and fucked out, less than twenty-four hours after inception, raw and tired and exhilarated. Half-grieving for Mal anew and angry with Cobb and proud. So bloody proud, it’s ridiculous.
(There’s that word again.)
Arthur, lying next to him, smoking, raises his head limply, curiously. His chest and arms are a dark tangle of skin and ink and scars, a network, a hatch work, a patchwork, a forest to get lost in. (Tracing Arthur’s life in black lines, Eames knows how Alice must have felt.)
Eames remembers when all that skin was almost bare, nothing but a few numbers, a gun and a dead girl. Now Arthur is a puzzle of his loves and losses, his torso almost filled. He’s not even thirty yet and he’s running out of space.
(Eames suspects they’re living wrong, but remembers the feeling of him and Arthur, dreaming the impossible time and again. They’re immortal until the day they die.)
“What?” Arthur asks. His eyes are red from all the crying he didn’t do for Mal, for how she didn’t kill herself. Cobb murdered her, put the madness in her head and left it there to fester.
Eames doesn’t think he’ll work with Dom again. Not anytime soon. Doesn’t think he can, not with the memory of Mal, sun-bright, pregnant and vibrant, still wedged somewhere in his skull, the memory of her teenage self running from a runty Arthur, laughing so hard she could barely breathe. (Out of all the deaths he’s witnessed, only Mal’s seems like a sin.)
He puts a palm flat over the gun and the butterflies, trails along the beach, finger walks along the scattered lines of poetry in a dozen different languages.
“Ink,” he tells Arthur’s navel, framed by a star and a sparrow, the tip of a sword almost, but not quite, touching it.
“No,” the answer comes, instantly, coldly. Arthur’s hand sinks into Eames’s hair, faintly trailing heat and smoke from the cigarette still between his fingers. Eames reaches around his head, snatches it and takes a long drag.
He rolls onto his back, away. (He expected this answer, knew it, understood it. He thinks he would have preferred a gun to his forehead, Arthur’s beautiful hands clenching and pulling the trigger. A bullet as a gift.
Permission to touch skin is not permission to get under it.)
“Why ever not, darling?” He pulls one knee up, smokes in silence until Arthur rolls after him, onto his stomach, on top of Eames and into him, pushing him down, shoving him away. Smothering him with weight and heat.
Arthur’s body always tells of rage and murder and locked doors and Eames has long since learned to listen only to his words, not the line of his shoulders, always poised for a fight.
(Arthur could say something like, I took you to meet my father, could say I let you see me. Could say, I let you steal me.)
What he does say is, “You’re always here.”
+
They dream together, months after inception, in a rundown hut somewhere in South America, dream of a clean, modern hotel with five hundred identical rooms.
They have the mark, they have the safe, they have the information and they have fifteen minutes until the kick.
Eames is bleeding from a steak knife to the gut and Arthur is bent over him, kisses him with hot lips, kisses him as he presses a cold barrel to his temple.
“Darling,” Eames says into the kiss, tasting blood. “You’re so very good at shooting people in the head.”
“I’m only waking them up,” Arthur answers, dimpling a bit. Eames does so love those dimples, all the more because they show so seldom.
And because Arthur’ll never say it, bloody wanker that he is, Eames says it for him.
Says, “You let me steal you.”
(They’re immortal until the day they die and Eames hopes he’ll die like this.)
Arthur smiles as he pulls the trigger.
+
Fin
+
+
You know, I honestly didn't think this was ever going to end. Thanks for your endurance. :)