04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.specificsApril 15 2011, 04:19:31 UTC
[ As with the injury itself, Arthur is only loosely aware of the contact. Eames' words don't carry the chiding tone of someone overly affectionate, of what an outsider might expect considering the chosen phrasing; but they were never so clear cut, so black and white, even when the days passed normally and the nights were communal instead of strained. The arm hanging at his side has the hand lightly caught on the edge of the chair, and his fingers flex almost imperceptibly. Really though, one of the last things Arthur wants or needs to deal with right now is Eames telling him something about how careful he is or isn't being.
He looks at the forger, follows an unofficial line from a shoulder to the crook of his neck, to the hard line of his jaw up to just beyond the right eye. ]
Believe it or not, he caught me off guard.
[ While this is utterly true, it's only fair to strike down now for the record that Eames isn't wrong; Arthur has gotten blithe about his mere existence, though part of him understands it's heavily erroneous - this behavior that stems from something deeper he can't even dig down to anymore. It's not that he's fine with his death, or his non-life -- depending on who you ask. No, that's not it. So what then?
He roots around and comes up empty-handed, and when he settles back a little more against the chair, it's an unconscious shift of posture, like a breath released even though he hasn't taken one, which makes the actuality impossible outside of muscle memory. ] Not [ he pauses, adding with a slight grimace borderlining on a smile so out of place he'd be better off not making the expression at all ] that it would've made a difference. [ Being dead, he could have taken that 'trident' or whatever through his stomach and walked away with the larger collateral done to his waistcoat. ]
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.shiftsApril 15 2011, 11:42:52 UTC
I meant in general.
[ Eames thinks about offering Arthur something to drink, or something to take the edge off of what he's about to do - or even sending him to the bloody hospital, for Christ's sake - but the point seems much more intent on focusing on how much he isn't living, how he doesn't need anything, that Eames thinks fuck it. He keeps Arthur's arm flat against the table, leaning over it as he lines up the split edges of the wound best he can. The lack of blood leaking profusely makes the entire affair much easier, more like working with a practice doll than a real person, and Eames starts sewing the split muscle together with the catgut thread. He'll get the skin afterward, naturally, but a process is a process and - living or not - he's going to treat Arthur as he would anyone else. ]
If it hurts- [ He prompts, glancing at Arthur's features again, but doesn't expand on it. ]
You aren't dead, Arthur. [ Not dead like his precious Mallorie, in any case. ] It's only a dream, but treating your body this way isn't going to make leaving any easier. [ There was a reason none of them had attempted this route the time last, but he can no longer pinpoint it aside from the fact that Ariadne had been worried it was real and they indulged her for a little while. There was something else, just on the edge of his mind, but Eames has been able to remember everything important thus far so assumes this small little detail is less-so.
Besides, Arthur's general behavior is starting to grate on his nerves. ]
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.specificsApril 15 2011, 18:05:31 UTC
[ His first response silence, he watches Eames align the split skin. Arthur doesn't flinch even a little, just observes like it's happening to someone else, the hand at his side a loose angle of wrist-bone jutting out for how the fingers remain lightly hooked on the chair edge. The ruling awareness lets the vague flicker of warmth from Eames' hands, from his proximity register more so than the needle and subsequent administrations, but it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows Arthur that he would prefer the latter. He slips into a quasi-comfortable distance - trying yet again to look at what is happening here from a new overpass, one where he can remotely approach the possibility of sense being made - and only comes out of it with his head jerking up (as if he can feel his arm, as if it hurts like it shoulder) at the next utterance.
You aren't dead.
And Arthur can hear the unspoken even if he can't read minds. Not like Mal. The stillness of him seems to ingrain itself for a moment, for two moments, for three. It's only a dream... It doesn't follow, that anger should sneak in at high speeds, fill up the soundless would-be staccato of his pulse, not at this point. Yet he is angry, frustrated with the situation, a dozen types of sentiment Arthur only seems inspired to when Dom is involved, or the memory of Mal; they're showing up, as if to remind him precisely how little he controls here, which should be proof enough maybe - in its own perverse right - that this is not only a dream, but Eames' dream, where Arthur is only a projection.
But he's a projection that the forger insists on stitching up however difficult Arthur rallies to being, a visceral discontent that sparks outward in his eyes like a shattered catch of the light. How does this fall together? Or doesn't it? He looks away and when he speaks, his voice comes across closer to raw, scraped than he would like but he's trying to keep a remaining chain on the disorientation of simply not knowing under wraps. Dead. Not dead. Only a dream. But whose dream? ]
Exactly whose dream do you think this is?
[ And it's a callous question but Arthur hasn't played any version of nice with Eames at any length for a very long time. He had what he supposes amounts to a flicker of nostalgia, a human longing for an old warmth on that hotel room floor, Eames' wrist in his grasp, an amused rejoinder slipping out the corner of his mouth.
Whose dream?
The reason it's tasteless, is that Arthur already knows what Eames thinks on this matter, but he's asking anyway as if to make him say it.
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.shiftsApril 15 2011, 18:40:33 UTC
[ Eames knows it for what it is - a little volatile, the twist of a knife to spill onto the table. Were he more mature, he would ignore it entirely - serve Arthur his own dosage of a cold shoulder - but there's something about the air, when they're in the same room nowadays, that pulls on him to never treat Arthur like a proper professional, to pull at his proverbial pigtails until he snaps.
It's a little bit strange, to see it twist back to him, when Arthur had let the remarks roll off of him in waves when preparing for the Fischer job, as was his usual focus and Eames' calculation for it. Arthur already knows whose dream Eames believes it to be, for he's been straight of it since the beginning, but there's anger and a bitterness to it that he shouldn't approach. He shouldn't acknowledge it, because it'll open something they've been letting well enough alone for years now, the way it's always been - a certain amount of versus, obligations, a strain that had admittedly developed even before Mallorie's death, a casuality to walking off and the strangers they made of themselves thereafter. People come together and move apart all the time, Arthur and Eames are no different in this, it's just that at some points they were more violent about it. Friendship had never been worth much, anyway, not in the face of larger-scaled things when it matters little in the face of respect.
He focuses, instead, on threading the needle through Arthur's flesh, wondering where the days of Arthur saying nothing at all have gone. ]
You're being childish, Arthur.
[ You'll upset yourself only for the sake of making a point that we already know. ]
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.specificsApril 15 2011, 19:10:23 UTC
[ Saying nothing? That's for people who understand each other's silences. Childish? Arthur doesn't know whether he's more incredulous or angry or something not quite either. Maybe, a thin voice as far back as he can reach whispers, maybe it's because he's right. Maybe not. Arthur can't square with that, is the real thing blockading this argument all the way around. Under the fingers and the needle and the focus all pinpointed, he considers just wrenching away and some of that may be clear in the sudden tension that laces itself throughout his frame, cut up arm included. ]
And you were so adult when I turned it around on you.
[ He can't laugh about it, not even sardonically, but the way he refuses to look at Eames again serves a similar function: contradiction, acknowledging without acknowledging. That Eames stormed out of here when Arthur had implied it might not be his dream, that he might not be real, and suddenly, now, here, his arm lain open and the echo of a heartbeat cresting his awareness, it's childish of Arthur to make Eames admit what they both know already? Childish.
In his pocket, the loaded die could, for a split instant, belong to someone else. Arthur could be someone who isn't Arthur at all. He could be a face in the crowd, mistaken. He could be a stranger. He could be no one.
But he can't accept it.
How does he even begin to touch that ghost? How can he? What do you say about how you've heard this before? And would it even matter? Eames knows. He may have never been as close to Mal as Arthur was, the way Arthur was a little in love with her and didn't know it until Mal no longer knew him at all; but Eames knew what was happening. This was before everything went into hiding, before everything got cataloged and separated until it became almost nothing, an open door leading Arthur away - wherever Dom could stand being.
It's quiet in here, just one person breathing.
Rationally, Arthur shouldn't compare, but he's sitting here, he's staring at the ceiling like it has answers for him, he's lining up all the pieces on the board and sending them scattering when they won't do what he knows they're supposed to, he's running headlong toward the only familiar thing and casting it off at the same time. He wants something simple for once, he wants to know he can get on with his life after cleaving to the well-being of someone who could make jokes with him but never once tell him what was killing him from the inside, he wants...
...well he's not sure there's a word for it after all.
And suddenly he's tired, but that's a trick too, because whatever Eames says or refuses to say, Arthur is dead, biologically. Sleep isn't on the agenda.
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.shiftsApril 15 2011, 19:29:50 UTC
I didn't say I was, now did I? The difference is that you like to uphold yourself a pedestal higher.
[ As though it makes him the morally better person. As though throwing shit away for the sake of someone else leaves him anything to stand for other than stupid behavior that, in the end, gets him nowhere. Cobb would have created his successes, travelled his miles, eventually brought himself into the predicament with Saito regardless of whether or not Arthur had come along. That Arthur believes his presence is of much importance to a grieving man is silly, maybe even a bit vain, because Cobb has never needed anyone's help except for when he travels the span of distance to ask for it himself. Arthur readily just makes himself a resource out of what, Eames presumes, he believes is friendship and properly supportive to a man whose wife you were in love with, as if trying to make up for it. But this is the shit Eames stopped giving mind to so long ago, because Arthur's a grown man with childish ideals and he's accepted that. There's nothing for him to change on the basis of wants, and he could take the time to throw open the shutters Arthur blinds himself to on some label of loyalty, but it's Eames who doesn't have the time nor interest in being fought on it.
If Arthur wants to play the resource, then he's allowed, but Eames doesn't have to respect it - Arthur is no much more a better person than him, he's just disillusioned himself into justifications. There's no upstanding morality to be had in mind crime - it's all about extortion and exploitation of trust. They're all very bad men, no matter what limelight Arthur prefers to hold Cobb to, because Eames knows Cobb has always been terrible and dirty but that had been (and it is still) what makes him so brilliant, what puts him in the arms and company of thieves, this proposed family man. It's also what makes him an awful father. Eames rather feels bad for those children, in the end.
But he doesn't say any of that, because he never has, and he has no interest in laying down the shit Arthur refuses to see for himself.
This is why Eames knows this is his dream.
Because Arthur is too single-minded to think in the delicate ways that encompass anything here, and Arthur would never have the knowledge that Eames knows composes himself - right now, in this moment - for him to be the point's projection.
He feels Arthur try to pull his arm away, and he abandons the needle midway through a cut of muscle to pin one hand over the thin of Arthur's wrist, the other at the crook of his elbow. ]
04 / 12 ⚀ the Henry that is not a Henry, the Henry with a needle and thread.specificsApril 15 2011, 20:03:39 UTC
[ The problem with Arthur stems from his strength, as most weaknesses do. It comes out of history and drags along whoever might be so unfortunate as to get snagged by a stray hook or razor's eye. How Arthur fell in love with Mal was not how he loved Dom, things he can't even think to himself now, doesn't admit because it feels foolish and obsolete and a number of other adjectives that he hasn't got the time for. He can acknowledge that there was something bright back then though, days that lit up from the inside: gold rooms, dreams where the sky and the water became just one thing, and Arthur walked through it with them, he walked through it all - and it felt like home.
Then came the jump, came running, came tailoring himself to the kinds of capabilities that best suited this line of work they know inhabit - or, did, in Dom's case. Arthur knows they aren't good people, and he'll never claim otherwise. It's not like he's proud of the invasions but he can admit to never having had moral distress over them either. The things Arthur covets on those sorts of lines and spaces are deeply personal, and in that sense, yes, he might also have to concede to some pedestal pushing - easier to get away with regarding Mal and more or less the stuff that makes him look insane in regards to Dom; he knows. It hasn't changed how he's operated though.
If he could read Eames' mind, Arthur would lash out, would demand how Eames could ever really know what Dom had needed, and what he hadn't. You didn't see him, Arthur would say, would not tell Eames because it isn't any of Eames' business exactly how bad it was, how it is to watch up close as someone dies from the inside out. In a way, it grinds on his nerves because the forger specializes in people; he should know some of this anyway, at this point, but he pushes, and the point doesn't have to be telepathic to be aware of some of Eames' broader sentiments on the whole arrangement. To some, Arthur knows, he is a well-dressed facilitator, and little more. But possibly it wasn't about that, chasing Dom - possibly, he wants to say, has to think: it was about what they had been, and how had been never mattered to Arthur before Eames, or Dom, or Mal - all in different ways, though in the end the Cobbs had the scale tilting in their direction. Arthur didn't know how to walk away from them.
Maybe he still doesn't.
As it is, the only thing he ends up doing is staring at the hand over his wrist, aware of the one at his elbow, and thinking how warm they are, which only makes him hate Eames a little bit more at the moment.
Don't know what? His quick glance over punctuates before dropping again as he relents, lets his arm stay properly flat again on the table.
And here is the silence in return, but it's not one he understands. ]
He looks at the forger, follows an unofficial line from a shoulder to the crook of his neck, to the hard line of his jaw up to just beyond the right eye. ]
Believe it or not, he caught me off guard.
[ While this is utterly true, it's only fair to strike down now for the record that Eames isn't wrong; Arthur has gotten blithe about his mere existence, though part of him understands it's heavily erroneous - this behavior that stems from something deeper he can't even dig down to anymore. It's not that he's fine with his death, or his non-life -- depending on who you ask. No, that's not it. So what then?
He roots around and comes up empty-handed, and when he settles back a little more against the chair, it's an unconscious shift of posture, like a breath released even though he hasn't taken one, which makes the actuality impossible outside of muscle memory. ] Not [ he pauses, adding with a slight grimace borderlining on a smile so out of place he'd be better off not making the expression at all ] that it would've made a difference. [ Being dead, he could have taken that 'trident' or whatever through his stomach and walked away with the larger collateral done to his waistcoat. ]
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[ Eames thinks about offering Arthur something to drink, or something to take the edge off of what he's about to do - or even sending him to the bloody hospital, for Christ's sake - but the point seems much more intent on focusing on how much he isn't living, how he doesn't need anything, that Eames thinks fuck it. He keeps Arthur's arm flat against the table, leaning over it as he lines up the split edges of the wound best he can. The lack of blood leaking profusely makes the entire affair much easier, more like working with a practice doll than a real person, and Eames starts sewing the split muscle together with the catgut thread. He'll get the skin afterward, naturally, but a process is a process and - living or not - he's going to treat Arthur as he would anyone else. ]
If it hurts- [ He prompts, glancing at Arthur's features again, but doesn't expand on it. ]
You aren't dead, Arthur. [ Not dead like his precious Mallorie, in any case. ] It's only a dream, but treating your body this way isn't going to make leaving any easier. [ There was a reason none of them had attempted this route the time last, but he can no longer pinpoint it aside from the fact that Ariadne had been worried it was real and they indulged her for a little while. There was something else, just on the edge of his mind, but Eames has been able to remember everything important thus far so assumes this small little detail is less-so.
Besides, Arthur's general behavior is starting to grate on his nerves. ]
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You aren't dead.
And Arthur can hear the unspoken even if he can't read minds. Not like Mal. The stillness of him seems to ingrain itself for a moment, for two moments, for three. It's only a dream... It doesn't follow, that anger should sneak in at high speeds, fill up the soundless would-be staccato of his pulse, not at this point. Yet he is angry, frustrated with the situation, a dozen types of sentiment Arthur only seems inspired to when Dom is involved, or the memory of Mal; they're showing up, as if to remind him precisely how little he controls here, which should be proof enough maybe - in its own perverse right - that this is not only a dream, but Eames' dream, where Arthur is only a projection.
But he's a projection that the forger insists on stitching up however difficult Arthur rallies to being, a visceral discontent that sparks outward in his eyes like a shattered catch of the light. How does this fall together? Or doesn't it? He looks away and when he speaks, his voice comes across closer to raw, scraped than he would like but he's trying to keep a remaining chain on the disorientation of simply not knowing under wraps. Dead. Not dead. Only a dream. But whose dream? ]
Exactly whose dream do you think this is?
[ And it's a callous question but Arthur hasn't played any version of nice with Eames at any length for a very long time. He had what he supposes amounts to a flicker of nostalgia, a human longing for an old warmth on that hotel room floor, Eames' wrist in his grasp, an amused rejoinder slipping out the corner of his mouth.
Whose dream?
The reason it's tasteless, is that Arthur already knows what Eames thinks on this matter, but he's asking anyway as if to make him say it.
Go ahead.
Tell me I'm not dead.
Tell me I can't be dead.
Because I'm not real to begin with.
Tell me all about it. ]
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It's a little bit strange, to see it twist back to him, when Arthur had let the remarks roll off of him in waves when preparing for the Fischer job, as was his usual focus and Eames' calculation for it. Arthur already knows whose dream Eames believes it to be, for he's been straight of it since the beginning, but there's anger and a bitterness to it that he shouldn't approach. He shouldn't acknowledge it, because it'll open something they've been letting well enough alone for years now, the way it's always been - a certain amount of versus, obligations, a strain that had admittedly developed even before Mallorie's death, a casuality to walking off and the strangers they made of themselves thereafter. People come together and move apart all the time, Arthur and Eames are no different in this, it's just that at some points they were more violent about it. Friendship had never been worth much, anyway, not in the face of larger-scaled things when it matters little in the face of respect.
He focuses, instead, on threading the needle through Arthur's flesh, wondering where the days of Arthur saying nothing at all have gone. ]
You're being childish, Arthur.
[ You'll upset yourself only for the sake of making a point that we already know. ]
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And you were so adult when I turned it around on you.
[ He can't laugh about it, not even sardonically, but the way he refuses to look at Eames again serves a similar function: contradiction, acknowledging without acknowledging. That Eames stormed out of here when Arthur had implied it might not be his dream, that he might not be real, and suddenly, now, here, his arm lain open and the echo of a heartbeat cresting his awareness, it's childish of Arthur to make Eames admit what they both know already? Childish.
In his pocket, the loaded die could, for a split instant, belong to someone else. Arthur could be someone who isn't Arthur at all. He could be a face in the crowd, mistaken. He could be a stranger. He could be no one.
But he can't accept it.
How does he even begin to touch that ghost? How can he? What do you say about how you've heard this before? And would it even matter? Eames knows. He may have never been as close to Mal as Arthur was, the way Arthur was a little in love with her and didn't know it until Mal no longer knew him at all; but Eames knew what was happening. This was before everything went into hiding, before everything got cataloged and separated until it became almost nothing, an open door leading Arthur away - wherever Dom could stand being.
It's quiet in here, just one person breathing.
Rationally, Arthur shouldn't compare, but he's sitting here, he's staring at the ceiling like it has answers for him, he's lining up all the pieces on the board and sending them scattering when they won't do what he knows they're supposed to, he's running headlong toward the only familiar thing and casting it off at the same time. He wants something simple for once, he wants to know he can get on with his life after cleaving to the well-being of someone who could make jokes with him but never once tell him what was killing him from the inside, he wants...
...well he's not sure there's a word for it after all.
And suddenly he's tired, but that's a trick too, because whatever Eames says or refuses to say, Arthur is dead, biologically. Sleep isn't on the agenda.
He tries to pull his arm away. ]
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[ As though it makes him the morally better person. As though throwing shit away for the sake of someone else leaves him anything to stand for other than stupid behavior that, in the end, gets him nowhere. Cobb would have created his successes, travelled his miles, eventually brought himself into the predicament with Saito regardless of whether or not Arthur had come along. That Arthur believes his presence is of much importance to a grieving man is silly, maybe even a bit vain, because Cobb has never needed anyone's help except for when he travels the span of distance to ask for it himself. Arthur readily just makes himself a resource out of what, Eames presumes, he believes is friendship and properly supportive to a man whose wife you were in love with, as if trying to make up for it. But this is the shit Eames stopped giving mind to so long ago, because Arthur's a grown man with childish ideals and he's accepted that. There's nothing for him to change on the basis of wants, and he could take the time to throw open the shutters Arthur blinds himself to on some label of loyalty, but it's Eames who doesn't have the time nor interest in being fought on it.
If Arthur wants to play the resource, then he's allowed, but Eames doesn't have to respect it - Arthur is no much more a better person than him, he's just disillusioned himself into justifications. There's no upstanding morality to be had in mind crime - it's all about extortion and exploitation of trust. They're all very bad men, no matter what limelight Arthur prefers to hold Cobb to, because Eames knows Cobb has always been terrible and dirty but that had been (and it is still) what makes him so brilliant, what puts him in the arms and company of thieves, this proposed family man. It's also what makes him an awful father. Eames rather feels bad for those children, in the end.
But he doesn't say any of that, because he never has, and he has no interest in laying down the shit Arthur refuses to see for himself.
This is why Eames knows this is his dream.
Because Arthur is too single-minded to think in the delicate ways that encompass anything here, and Arthur would never have the knowledge that Eames knows composes himself - right now, in this moment - for him to be the point's projection.
He feels Arthur try to pull his arm away, and he abandons the needle midway through a cut of muscle to pin one hand over the thin of Arthur's wrist, the other at the crook of his elbow. ]
You still don't know, do you?
[ How to let anyone do anything for you. ]
Let me fucking finish.
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Then came the jump, came running, came tailoring himself to the kinds of capabilities that best suited this line of work they know inhabit - or, did, in Dom's case. Arthur knows they aren't good people, and he'll never claim otherwise. It's not like he's proud of the invasions but he can admit to never having had moral distress over them either. The things Arthur covets on those sorts of lines and spaces are deeply personal, and in that sense, yes, he might also have to concede to some pedestal pushing - easier to get away with regarding Mal and more or less the stuff that makes him look insane in regards to Dom; he knows. It hasn't changed how he's operated though.
If he could read Eames' mind, Arthur would lash out, would demand how Eames could ever really know what Dom had needed, and what he hadn't. You didn't see him, Arthur would say, would not tell Eames because it isn't any of Eames' business exactly how bad it was, how it is to watch up close as someone dies from the inside out. In a way, it grinds on his nerves because the forger specializes in people; he should know some of this anyway, at this point, but he pushes, and the point doesn't have to be telepathic to be aware of some of Eames' broader sentiments on the whole arrangement. To some, Arthur knows, he is a well-dressed facilitator, and little more. But possibly it wasn't about that, chasing Dom - possibly, he wants to say, has to think: it was about what they had been, and how had been never mattered to Arthur before Eames, or Dom, or Mal - all in different ways, though in the end the Cobbs had the scale tilting in their direction. Arthur didn't know how to walk away from them.
Maybe he still doesn't.
As it is, the only thing he ends up doing is staring at the hand over his wrist, aware of the one at his elbow, and thinking how warm they are, which only makes him hate Eames a little bit more at the moment.
Don't know what? His quick glance over punctuates before dropping again as he relents, lets his arm stay properly flat again on the table.
And here is the silence in return, but it's not one he understands. ]
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