Inception: the lights, the tv, and the radio
Title: the lights, the tv, and the radio: parts 1 and 2
Characters/Pairing: Eames/Arthur
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~800 and ~1200
Disclaimer: Sadly these characters don't belong to me. Also sadly, this fic earns me no money.
Summary: (reposted from and written for a prompt on the kinkmeme) Arthur has faked his own death (and not for the first time) to escape his demons, past and present. He lets everyone, including the Inception team, believe he is dead. Still, he cannot stop himself from reaching out to Eames. Eames, already haunted in feeling by might-have-beens, starts fearing he is haunted in fact.
Author's note: My pretentious fic! It features a title deliberately not capitalized. It's written in present tense. It has self-indulgent imagery.
Just kidding! Mostly. This is a fic in which I explore new things.
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Part 1
It's not raining on the day of Arthur's memorial service. There's no wind with teeth of ice. It isn't a fine beautiful day either. The sunlight isn't raying out golden from behind clouds. There's nothing of drama or symbolism or bitter irony in the weather. Nothing poetic. It's just overcast and slightly muggy -- just hot enough that the people walking out of the mortuary are uncomfortable in their suits and dark, heavy dresses.
Eames, sitting in his car, watching them exit the stark concrete building, is not uncomfortable. He's not sure what he's feeling now, apart from the vague, heavy sickness in the pit of his stomach he's felt since Cobb called him.
"Arthur's dead," Cobb said flatly over the phone. "Killed in a car accident." There was no emotion in his voice -- no sympathy. As if the news were meaningless to Eames. The thought was unfair, of course. The flatness was the former extractor's defense mechanism. "It was Cobol."
Eames hand tightened around the phone and he grit his teeth against the words that were burning the back of his throat. He didn't check his totem -- he knew better than most the futility of denying reality. "Was--" Was it fast? Was it painful? They were stupid questions, but not as stupid as the five words that kept buzzing around his head like a fly in a jar: there must be some mistake. "Was there any evidence?" he asked finally.
"Enough." Anger and grief vibrated past the forced evenness of Cobb's voice. "Enough that they won't dare come after my family."
Eames sees that same anger and grief etching lines in Cobb's face when he walks out of the mortuary, children in tow. The little girl is crying, but Eames thinks it's more out of empathy than genuine feeling. Those are her father's tears running down her cheeks.
And who's crying for me?
But that, of course, is the stupidest question yet. What has he to cry over? The death of a sometime colleague? The loss of a man who was not quite a friend?
Their whole relationship is like water-soaked fireworks: flash and heat, color and beauty that will never explode into life. Unrealized potential.
The weight in his stomach pushes up into his throat, gagging him. Fuck this. He's just making himself sick with his own maudlin thoughts. Time to go.
He turns his key in the ignition and leaves the gray and black of mortuary and mourners behind without ever having gone inside. He turns on the radio as he drives back to his hotel though he doesn't really hear the music. He wishes there was more traffic on the road. It would at least be a distraction.
His uneventful drive ends in an uneventful arrival at his hotel's parking lot, followed by an uneventful trip up the elevator to his room. He slides his cardkey into the lock, pushes open the door, and freezes.
There are flowers on the desk -- flowers that certainly were not there when Eames left.
He moves slowly into the room, the door shutting behind him, and approaches the desk. He blinks and runs the backs of his hands over his eyes, but the large vase full of brightly colored lilies doesn't disappear. Their strong, sweet perfume fills the room and the smell tugs at Eames memory. He drops the room key and reaches an oddly trembling hand toward the flowers, all of which have had their stamens removed.
The memory downright assaults him then.
"Arthur, what are you doing?" Eames asked the dark-haired man as the scissors snicked again and another yellow pollen-covered stem dropped into a tissue.
"I hate these damn messy little things," Arthur replied, irritation evident in the small valley between his eyebrows.
"Then why not get other flowers?"
"Stargazers are my favorite," he replied with a shrug. But the lines smoothed out of his face as he closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath of the lilies' scent. The indentation moved from brow to cheek as Arthur lips curved up.
"Let me help," Eames said, surprising both of them.
There is no card amongst all the flowers. The trembling hand drops away from the lilies and goes to the phone. Eames' gaze drops too so that he can find the correct button on the phone.
"Front Desk, how can I help you?" An obscenely cheerful voice asks.
"This is Eames in room 517. Can you tell me when the flowers in my room were brought and who delivered them?"
"Just a moment, sir."
It's just a coincidence. A goddamn, bloody coincidence.
"I'm sorry sir, but we have no records of any deliveries or visitors to your room. Sir?"
Eames hangs up without responding and backs away from the desk. He can't get away from the smell, though. It's an almost tangible presence in the room.
"Arthur?"
The name hangs in the air like a ghost and the knot in Eames' stomach twists tighter and tighter until he finally admits to himself what it is.
It is grief for the man now haunting him.
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Part 2
The harsh white light flickers in the crypt like a lightning storm, intermittently glittering across shiny memorial plaques and illuminating wilting flowers. It’s nothing as dramatic as a thunderstorm, though - just a dying fluorescent filament sputtering its death and alternately casting Arthur’s shadow, like a ghost, across his own name.
Not my name, he reminds himself, just an identity. It is Arthur the point man whose name and alleged dates of birth and death (and nothing else - no “beloved son” or “loyal friend”) are memorialized here. It is the Arthur hunted for the secrets he carried whose ashes supposedly lay behind the plaque. Just a character I made up after the last time I ran away.
The identity he is left with is the name with which he was born - an identity he abandoned before it was even fully formed. This Arthur is someone nobody wanted and nobody Arthur has wanted to be.
But this Arthur’s reasons for running died a long time ago. This Arthur has no enemies and no secrets worth hiding.
No friends or secrets worth sharing, either, he thinks, reaching out to his plaque with fingers that flash deathly white in the intermittent glow. He slowly traces the letters of his one-time name. Damn Cobol - and all the others. The point man was more than he ever dreamed of becoming: not only strong and self-reliant, but also respected. The Cobbs relied on him, their clients valued his abilities, Ariadne looked up to him, and Eames…
Arthur jerks his hand away from the cold metal and spins around on his heel, turning his back on the ashes of his prospects that are entombed with some random John Doe from the morgue. Why did I come here? he asks himself, regret burning the back of his throat like bile. Is it the same masochistic impulse that inspired him to haunt the shadows of his own memorial service? It’s just like when he was a child, poking at the livid bruises on his limbs, irrationally surprised when they hurt.
It’s all wrong… He runs nervous hands through dark overlong hair as he shuffles out of the crypt. Even this hair is wrong. He tries to redirect his thoughts - to leave the tangled mass of regret and confusion behind him in the flickering gloom: a restless specter of his former life, joining the other unhappy shades.
I’ll get it cut tomorrow, Arthur decides. Hell, maybe I’ll even dye… it… His weak attempt at positive thought falters and freezes as a familiar scent fills his nostrils. He’s left with that same damned question repeating in his mind: why, why, why? Like a bewildered toddler.
Why did I leave those flowers in Eames’ hotel room? The lilies drooping beside the headstone of some “devoted husband and father” don’t answer Arthur’s unspoken question. What was I trying to do? The flowers just sit there, the light of the setting sun burnishing their faded glory.
Was I trying to say goodbye? That’s the answer he tried to satisfy himself with before. But that only leads to the question he’s been avoiding since he found himself frozen, hand trembling on the inside doorknob of Eames’ room, lower lip clenched between his teeth, and unable to leave the room for long moments.
Why Eames?
The question cuts through all the icy detachment he felt through the planning and execution of his own staged death, leaving him feeling sick and cold.
Why not Cobb? Arthur’s known him -- enjoyed an all too rare friendship with him -- far longer than he’s known the forger. If he risks the perfection of his escape for anyone, it should be Cobb, who’s already lost so much. He’s probably blaming himself.
He turns his eyes from lilies and from words that might describe his abandoned friend, only to let his gaze fall on other words.
“Friend, lover, soulmate” is carved into another headstone a few feet away.
“No,” he breaths, needing to vocalize the denial. Eames was never that.
But he could have been.
Cobb, Mal, Miles, Ariadne, all the people he might consider his friends in his former life… They made him feel comfortable. But Eames… He made Arthur feel warm, from the inside out.
He doesn’t choose to believe that it’s love, but it’s the closest he’s come to it in any of his lives. And he isn’t ready to let that go.
“Fool,” he derides himself, tearing his eyes from words that seem to glow in the rosy twilight. He straightens his shoulders and pushes his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket as he sets a brisk pace out of the cemetery.
His right hand brushes against rigid, glossy paper. Ah. He pulls the postcard out of his pocket and regards it in the fading light. Buying it was another thing he did without thought or clear motive - like the flowers and keeping tabs on Eames’ whereabouts, even though he has nothing to do with the knowledge.
M.C. Escher… He remembers this print.
“What is it with you and those prints?” Eames asked from behind Arthur as he moved to stand closer. His breath whispered across Arthur’s ear as he bent down to look over his shoulder at the book in his hands. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you on a job without that book.” It wasn’t the forger’s usual playful tone - he sounded genuinely interested.
“I’m not sure I can explain it,” Arthur answered honestly. No one had ever cared enough to ask before.
“Try.”
“Well, they’re beautiful and mysterious, yet geometrically precise. They’re not symmetrical, but they’re ordered. They’re impossible and confusing, and yet they feel like that if you follow every step in them, they’ll make perfect sense.”
“Some kind of order in chaos type of thing?”
“No. That’s not quite it.”
“Well, I can’t say that I understand that at all,” Eames said, a smile in his voice as he reached around Arthur to tap the print that covered the open page of the book. “But I’d say that fits you perfectly, Arthur.”
Arthur feels an echo now of the warm glow he felt then. At the time, he didn’t understand why he wanted to lean into that arm and press his cheek against the smile he could feel close beside it. Now…
Before he’s aware of what he’s doing, he’s pulling a pen out of another pocket and laying the postcard face down on the nearest gravestone. Without conscious thought, he writes Eames’ current address on the back - and nothing else.
It’s only after he asks the clerk at the front desk of his hotel to stamp and mail the postcard and he’s safe in his room that he allows himself to finally answer that persistent question.
“I don’t want Eames to forget me.”
It’s as simple as that - if longing and regret can ever be called simple.
It’s not a thought Arthur wants to dwell on right now. Instead, he pours himself a drink and sits down to think on more useful topics: plans. He’ll start with the short term.
Tonight, he’ll go to bed and, until he falls into deep, dreamless (for good or ill) sleep, he’ll tell himself the same bedtime stories he’s been repeating to himself since he ran away. That he’s free of the constant fear and tension of always looking over his shoulder. That he’s protecting Cobb and his family. That his decision to escape has nothing to do with the demon from his past he saw leaving Cobol’s corporate headquarters. That he’s better off now.
And a new one: that when he starts building his new life tomorrow, he’ll like the materials he has to work with.
~ continued~