These are the dreams we should be having.
When; Backdated to 04/12, 2AMish.
Rating; PG-13
Characters; Arthur ( specifics ) & Eames ( shifts )
Summary; Arthur is dead and it's not a dream....but what else could it be?
Log;
These are the things Arthur knows: how old he is supposed to be, what he's done with his life so far, what he hasn't done, who his friends are (who his friends were), and who his enemies are (who his enemies likely will be). Arthur knows the weight of his own Glock shoved hard against his ribcage when a power struggle went out of his favor, and Arthur knows the way Dominick Cobb looked when he was golden - how he could light the world up with his theories and how insanely good he was with the dream - how he seemed made for the dream and not the other way around. Arthur knows how Philippa will stare at the phone sometimes, when he's visiting - or did, before Dom went home, as if it was betraying her with its silence; and Arthur knows James' incorrigible faith, something more like his father used to be and something his sister probably never will be. Arthur knows he is, in the world - small and large as it can be - not quite alone. He has associates he can depend on for the right price and there is Dom insofar as Dom can be there for anyone else these days (generous to the pain of stupidity or so selfish Arthur thinks he'd prefer having his knees shot out again) and there is Eames too of course. Eames.
Some constant.
He finds it a little strange - how the dream got turned on him and he didn't even know it, because it's not like what happened with Mal from what he understands, but even with all the well-meaning citizens around him saying it's not a dream, Arthur just is not equipped to believe it could be real. Even when he was growing up his suspension of belief in the hard wood under his bare feet and the painstaking blue sky overhead was only halfway. He could never just put a sliver of faith in the idea of time travel or, say, unicorns and harpies.
A natural dream?
Or not.
He has not ruled out that possibility, that despite Eames' facetiousness when he suggested it, they have been taken and maybe the architect let Eames' subconscious run amuck and here they are, a half-remembered unreality in which to screw themselves over, apparently, if Arthur's own track record is anything to go by.
When he shot himself he expected to die. Then he expected to wake up. And he did - without a heartbeat, winter cold to the touch, and foreign to himself; a heavy ghost.
Flexing his hand now, he can feel stiffness too and it does not scare him the way he half wishes it would, as he views it with a clinical eye while stepping out through the cross-gates to the beach where the only light is from the suggestion of a moon shattering across the water - an ocean it looks like, even if it isn't. Toeing off his shoes, he drags his feet through the sand near to the waterline and stops an arm's breadth short of it, raises his other hand to his temple and draws it away clean.
A look in the mirror already told him he looks the same as he always does, paler in the dark but he's always been pale. No amount of sun in Mombasa or anywhere else could change that, apparently. His eyes tangle vision through the waves and the shadows, struck by the notion of limbo, struck by everything all over again. When he revived, it was in the nowhere location he had offed himself originally, and it was not at all like waking from a dream so much as emerging from a long sickness, tripping into an uncomfortable convalescence which was, is in fact animated death. In the back of his throat there's an itch, and when he recognizes it for a strangled sort of laugh he just stifles it there and then. He can't even feel the breeze.
And it's useless, so fucking useless, but Arthur can't help the things he knows.
He reaches for his totem, turns it over - once, twice, three times, and on until he's not sure how long he has been standing there to begin with and ends up adding that to the long and still growing list of other things he does not know.
Eames picks up smoking after over two decades of a certain amount of abstinence (cigarettes are too permanent, when you're trying to run cons) for something to do with his rage, exhales smoke like a terrible dragon for the longest time spent avoiding the apartment that Arthur had swept into. That Arthur, who was supposed to be dead, who indeed still was dead but just a state of disturbing amount of animation in his limbs and at the back of his eyes that made Eames' skin crawl, that Arthur that still had no interest in listening to what he was told. There's a difference between, Eames thinks, sharing information and being told - less room to wiggle on the latter. There are times when he thinks Arthur of little more than a child, petulant and unwilling to bend to the notions of differentials. It's not that Arthur doesn't know when he's made mistakes - because he does, graciously, accept them with tact and simply finds a different way to resolve for them - but rather that his perceptions won't lend themselves toward a mistake, that his observations are what is the most correct in his world.
Such as the idea that, were he to off himself, he would conveniently wake up.
Perhaps Eames had been riding too hard on the wonder that maybe it would be true, too, but he had enough sense not to try it out for himself when the people here, when they die, simply come back. And he remembers telling Arthur this as much - sometime in between their arrival and being a lounge chair, that normal removals wouldn't work as neatly, that they'd already theorized and tried certain methods that never quite panned out as intended, to not jump the gun.
Which, of course, mattered very little in the face of Arthur staring at him because - well - talking chair and all that.
Eames can hardly blame him for that. He supposes most of his frustration of it is to be so promptly accused of being a projection when he isn't the one with no heart beat. That his own thoughts had been turned on him, backwards. That nothing about this is as normal as it ought to be, but he knows just as well that there are enough dangers in taking things at face value. That Arthur should have known that for how strange this dream was, that normal mechanisms to wake up simply wouldn't work even were he real. Eames supposes he can't accuse him, though, in the same manner that he himself was blamed of being. No, while Eames may figure it, it doesn't do well to lash at it like an insult.
Doesn't mean he knows, exactly, what to do with the situation at hand.
He meanders his way down the stretch of beach, kicking up sand with the toe of his shoes as he pads along, the tip of his cigarette a burning orange in the dark. It's only natural that, with how populated the City is, that Eames comes across someone eventually - someone that, in this certain light of the moon, he can see quite well that holds himself very much like Arthur within the silhouette of his clothes. He tosses the cigarette somewhere by his feet before promptly closing the distance. It occurs to Eames that he has nothing very scathing to say, at the moment, so he plops himself down on the sand, instead, legs bent at the knee with his shoes digging into the sand, arms draped overtop the flat of the bone with his hands left dangling.
Even from here, Arthur feels cool.
There are a few things Arthur could say. The obvious would be you were right but that's so sorely redundant at this point that he would sooner stuff his mouth full of sand than say it. He could say I'm cold without feeling it. He could say when I woke up, I thought I was someone else. He could say sorry. In the end he doesn't say any of these things however, just looks down at the familiar picture of Eames, Eames sitting and looking far away when he's less than a foot apart. Arthur isn't sure they were ever friends, or if he was even ever sure what a friend was. Falling in love with Mal and Dom was like falling in love with a force of nature and there wasn't much room for friendship in that; there was family though and he never really lets go of that. With Eames it was, it goes without needing to be said, different. It was like a literal gravitation that irritated him at first for its foreignness, for how he didn't know what to make of it in the least, and then how it drew him, over and over even when it became apparent they might both be better off otherwise. They worked well together though - a versatility of strengths as it happened, delving into the research not quite pioneers like Dom and Mal but not exactly the backseat either. Some other vehicle through the terrain.
Now of course, things are at that truly disparate stage, where they are old and new because the Fischer job was something even if Arthur couldn't put a name to it on his own. Reconvening seems a little on the side of technical, even for him. Giving up the effort, he sits instead, digs his feet into the sand, heels first and the fronts scooping under the way he might to acquire a bit of warmth had he any need of it; he doesn't. Oh he could say a few things.
But what he ends up saying is, more or less, the gist of the moment when he says with a careless resignation:
"Being dead's fucking weird." Understatement, overstatement, Arthur could hash the math between the two and still come up with the wrong result. He knows. Bowing his head forward, he places a hand at the back of his own neck, tries to feel for the tightening there, for the discomfort, because feeling something is better than feeling nothing; but it's barely there, even that. No pulse, no warmth; for all intensive meanings of the word, he perceives himself as hollow and that's just the mother of all doors to the one-way ticket on existentialism express - something he does not need nor want. It might, it would seem, be coming to pick him up anyway.
Which just kind of figures too.
He digs his heels down deeper.
Yes, well. "If it was supposed to feel natural, they wouldn't refer to it as an abomination." Eames' tone is still smooth, somewhat short. He stretches his arms up over his head, his elbow brushing against Arthur's shoulder as he leans back, laying down against the cool sand and toeing his shoes off. Eames somehow manages to wrestle his socks away with an imaginative use of his pinky toe before pushing his legs out straight, crossing them at the ankle, rearranging his arms so that he can link his fingers together and rest them on his belly, thumbs tapping a bit against the soft of his shirt. There are sharper things he could say- insult Arthur's common sense, for one thing, insult his inability to take direction from others that don't start in D and end in -ominick. Still, ridiculing the dead for getting themselves killed in the first place seems, honestly, somewhat less kosher than even he's willing to outright bark on and - all that aside - he'd said the majority of his words at the flat, said the rest in the way he'd felt the hinges rattle when he'd slammed the front door shut behind him.
Like don't pretend as though you can't tell the difference.
He untangles his fingers long enough to slide them into the breastpocket of his shirt, pulling from within the folds the chip he utilizes as his totem. It's worn at the edges, carved into distinct swirls that he's longsince memorized under the rough of his thumb. It's a useless thing that's supposed to tell him what real and what isn't, something Mal assigned them so many years ago, though at the time he'd only wondered why she had such difficulty in knowing in the first place. When they dreamt, they were god-like. When they woke, they were mortal again. Eames has a checklist of things to remember his existence by - the tattoos on his skin, the crooked value to his fingers, whether or not he can change any of these things - made obsolete by natural dreaming, where the mechanisms are balanced by the heavy knowledge of his memories.
It's a bit of a silly system, totems. They place so much of their confidence in tiny pieces of plastic. It's enough of a reason why the rest of the dreaming world hasn't caught onto such a habitual system as theirs.
He tosses it up in the air, once, catching it before it can smack him in the nose, repeating the motion a few times before he gets used to no longer carrying it about, and then promptly chucks it in the vicinity of Arthur's head.
Arthur, credit where credit is due, catches the trajectory but he simply lets it hit him in the side of the head, watches it fall, path deflected to a slight hollow in the sand next to him, between them. He knows what it is but that's all the more reason for him to leave it be, to not touch it even the least bit, no bare brush of knuckles or curiosity of fingertips across its worn state. For a while - he does not know how long in any exact terms he would generally prefer - Arthur only stares at the chip in the half glittered grains of sand, half shadowed, a curve of earth likened for a blink to a hand he knows ten times as well. What, he has to wonder, does Eames even expect him to do with this?
Asking that very thing feels inane though, so he just looks at the other man, stares and stares and thinks that whether this is a dream or isn't, whether he's real or not real - being dead and yet not dead batting a solid hundred for that scenario, whether it all makes sense or not, a totem is personal. Not special per se, Arthur's certainly isn't anything grand in story or origin. But they are individual with good reason. Mal's hadn't worked - they know now, not just guess or fear - that this was due to the compromise Dom struck to get her home at all, not that it had, in the end, served anyone he supposes. It's all so messy.
Disheartening, he thinks, that he can see himself - or could have seen himself decades older and feeling no differently about it all.
The thought of Mal in the cold earth still brings him the dryness of his throat and the tight discomfort behind his eyes like a whole feeling repressed - too volatile to be let out anymore, if he ever could completely anyway. The thought of Dom still makes him think he ought to regret and then angry that he can't, and then grateful, and then a little crazy for it. Two years is hardly forever but Arthur is mostly certain all parties remotely involved with the previous reality aged maybe ten years, invisible ways and visible ways.
As for Eames.
Well.
Arthur could write a book if he was so inclined, but he's not now, and he never will be.
Eyes flicking from the poker chip back to Eames, who's getting sand in his hair that makes Arthur almost itch with the thought, he waits, wordless, and that's inquiry enough all on its own.
What do you want me to do with this?
Not that he'll oblige as it is, he figures. Some things are too much; there are rules, boundaries. Arthur has come to rely on them.
"I'm real," is what Eames says, hands rearranging themselves to that comfortable grasp on the bulk of his stomach, uninclined to pick the chip back up.
He gazes, instead, not at Arthur nor at the slowly rolling tides of the ocean but instead at the stars, wondering which ones denote any sort of barrier to the outside apparent dangers out the city. Wondering which one he plants for himself, knowing nothing of constellations, or if they're just the picture of what he imagines the universe to be like. The latter, in all likelihood, always the latter with some intermingling of memories of sleeping in the back of a car with the top pulled down in the middle of the summer, sticky and uncomfortable and unable to sleep, teeth set on edge. They're not always very pleasant things, memories, but that's what makes life - harshness, with the sprinkle of pleasantries, of what you enjoy, of conversations and of ventures.
"That chip is real."
Totems, to Eames, are hardly intimate things. They all know what eachother's are, considering they conceived theirs around the same time, though Mal a few steps ahead of everyone else (as she often was). His poker chip, Arthur's loaded die (no correlation, despite the faint amusement, despite the commentary of you've no imagination, Arthur, go find something not-casino related), Mal's top, Cobb's wedding ring (also not very imaginative, but whatever works for a man is what satisfies his consciousness in the sea of his subconscious) - they're plain things, some a little more obvious than others if you know the mechanics of what a totem is and how they ought to work. Most don't, though, hence the security they found in them.
Eames, though, doesn't need something so small to tell him the weight of something so much more grand. He can't even cash on the thing any longer, considering it was never a real chip to begin with. One of his more faulty replicas.
Not something anyone could make up, even if they did catch a handful of it. There are too many divots to be exact of it, and only Eames knows the pattern to it, where the defects lay.
Rather than pick it up, Arthur takes out his die only to half crush it in the loose fold of his fist, knuckles cutting against the sand as if to weigh anchor. He knows all too well that Eames has a near immovable grip on his own reality, strong in all the ways it ought to be strong and perhaps unexpectedly flexible in all the ways Arthur never expected his awareness of reality to require; though it definitely did, still does.
"Okay, Okay, fine," he hears himself say more than he consciously forms the words, hears his own voice continue, "Pick it up." Why it unsettles him at this moment, Arthur can no more identify than anything else save for his lack of a heartbeat and how everything remains reliably a little bit off compared to how he is sure it ought to be, from a body that breathes because it needs to, not because it's just in the banal habit of doing so. Pick it up, he thinks a little anxiously, realizes he wants it away and out of sight again, because sure, the totems themselves aren't special, but the meaning therein? It's irreplaceable. He can't reach out for even the idea of the poker chip because Arthur doesn't think his own particular constitution of yes and no is equipped for this kind of thing. What few parameters have stayed behind to let him clutch at and build card houses out of and upon them, well, they are very few indeed. So he'd like to keep them.
The sea breeze looses a few stray strands of hair into his face, and he lets his vision catch itself out of focus, blur until those strands are sharp lines leading his eyes off the page of sand and a shoulder, eventually to Eames' face, as if he'll learn anything from it.
"Leave it."
Eames doesn't move from his position in the sand, each inhale sinking him further in that he knows, when he gets up - aside from his entire back likely dotted with the stuff - he might leave an Eames-shaped imprint behind. Still, he doesn't pick it back up, he doesn't look to Arthur until the weight of his gaze is heavy, too-searching, that to ignore him entirely might be somewhat cruel - and Eames is many things, but not cruel. No, that's a lie, he's cruel when it suits him, and it has yet suited him to be as such to Arthur. He catches his eye in the dark of night on the beach, moon bright enough here so that he doesn't need any lights to know where exactly they sit on his face, rolling his shoulders a bit against the grind of the sand.
Totems are such fickle things. If he so chooses, when he wakes up, he can make another to keep - or simply fashion one in this dreaming world, to have only when he's asleep. That's the beauty of the idea, really, something that's yours to own and keep thought of, if rather idealistic at best (and at worst). In the end, if you think your reality is some level above you, a little toy is not going to save the type of your madness. Or does he need to bring up a certain Mallorie Cobb? No, he'd rather not. His point is apparent.
The rules, here, don't follow the rules they've set up before - it's more raw, like they're relearning the motions of how to dream, and how to deal with extended dreaming. Before totems, before the literal grounds of identity theft, their realities were distinct between who they killed in a dream versus who woke up on the cot next to you in the bunkers on base, vitroil pumping through your veins.
If one could pluck a thought out from behind another person's eyes, through the curve of their mouth perhaps, or out of a dream as it were - and well all right that one is perfectly doable, then Arthur might extend the empty hand and drag at the unspoken, the name they don't say because of different reasons. Arthur finds saying Mal's name hurts, more often than anything else, though it is worthwhile to point out that he gets the same pang when he thinks of Dom now. He can't quite trick the why of that out.
But if Eames isn't going to say it, neither will Arthur. It's like standing on two sides of a bridge; they can both see the center of the thing, but they're sticking to one side and the other and that's that.
Isn't it?
Arthur has been so sure for so long that the whole concept of being less than that threatens the kind of instability he thinks most people don't recover from, from what he's seen, from what he's heard. As he's dead, it could dryly be argued he's got nothing to lose but even when he hasn't got a breath in his lungs Arthur like this can't let go of the memory of being alive enough to embrace that liberation, where a different Arthur would pick up the chip, would pocket it, or maybe he would snap it in two, or press it back into Eames' hand or not at all, a different Arthur would would lean over him and try to figure out all the ways this dream doesn't match up, and why that is.
But he's not quite that Arthur, even if parts of him used to be.
So he doesn't reach for the poker chip, just turns his gaze away, his profile set and chin level, eyes locked onto the distance where the horizon and the sky get all caught up in each other and they could be a floor to walk on or a ceiling to hang lights from, those stars. The geography of the dream. Under moonlight alone he normally feels secret; it's telling enough that the only company he has renders this usual thing not the case at all, that he feels unveiled though he guesses he can allot half of that credit to dying.
Dead.
He's trying to get his mouth around the word again but ends up just setting it in a thin, discontented line, a line which he breaks only to say, without even the barest hint of looking over, "You're getting sand in your hair."
It means nothing. That's what makes it easy to say, of course.
"It's only sand."
His chip is only plastic alloy. Arthur's die is but a simple toy, much like Mal's top had been, but Eames had always liked how the thing was transparent for the most part, not like the obvious nail-in-the-hold that solid dies could be to get them loaded. That there'd been care to it, to have a weight in something that seemed so weightless - but Arthur had always been like that, not necessarily purposefully thoughtful or careful (though that came later, certainly) but ending up with creations just on this side of paradoxical. A loaded die despite its transparency, the clean press of his suit in combination with the scruff of his shoes (maybe not as noticeable, if you're not looking for it, and by habit alone Eames is always looking for things to offset the image Arthur has created for himself - not that it's particularly unnatural, image management, everyone does it - whether it be societal pressure, the eyes of a friend, the stroke of a passing memory), the strong-man persona of Arthur's behavior that would seem out of place if you didn't know him, before everything else.
It's not as though Arthur suddenly became the person he is now, no, it's always been there - his linear way of doing things, his firmness, the quiet snap to his voice despite it's soft tones, the strength in his bones. But the fact of the matter is that Eames has seen Arthur soft in ways that are hardly weak, pried open and pliant under Mal and Cobb both that rears itself occasionally here and there in his concern for Cobb, the warm way he falls into with Ariadne when he's explaining something, the hilarious twist to his face when Yusuf is tipping him over to test the sedative, the casualness of his speech that is reminiscent of when his hair was buzzed off in combination with the short and purposeful route his emails take. There is, purposeful or not, a difference between Arthur now and Arthur before, enough for Eames to notice (though he does notice rather much everything, not for ego's sake, it's just the proverbial handshake of how he interacts with people) even now, and that's what strikes him most of all.
Complexity. It is, of course, the same complexity that he remembers having so much difficulty with the people here his time past - and it doesn't have to mean much, because it's the things that Eames notices most and then would, of course, project them into the space of his dream. But it's enough to have a pause at it, he supposes.
Nothing is ever just only a dream - it's just that whether or not they stay relevant depends on the circumstances at hand, and Eames can't decide for himself where to draw the line in the sand.
Managing to inject some old eye-rolling sentiment into the short break of a laugh here, Arthur just shakes his head once - the way people do when they say I don't believe this or I can't believe you and it's not about the sand in the least. Everyone knows reality is important, that you keep a line between you and what it means to stick a gun to the side of your head or jump from fifteen stories up in a hotel that was supposed to only mean good memories. But in this dream people of disturbing density and complexity function, for all regulatory purposes appear to live and they've not got the half-thereness of a projection who, sure, could become hostile in a nanosecond but when they don't they stay almost vacant, like they don't even know you're there. That wasn't always the case; they had to learn how to be subtle after all, though the slipping around of mental spaces always came easier to Dom of all people, Dom who could - they found out when things were not about crime but simply about limits - find people's secrets and read them plain as anything, no matter how locked up. He didn't become the most renowned extractor on sheer dumb luck; that's not how any of this works.
Shifting on the sand, his legs stretching out in front of him now, upsetting the piles of sand making modest hills over his feet and ankles previously, Arthur stuffs the loaded die back into one of his pockets. The oxford and the slacks make him look put together, even in the dark, even when he's dead, even when pretty much nothing is as it ought to be from where he's looking. Eames says Ariadne was here, and that hits him hard too. He should remember that, should remember the girl he spent time showing the extent of his own building capacity, going through mazes, and raising cities with a thought. But he doesn't. There isn't even a glimpse of a memory, as with a dream or even an imagined thing - just blank, and he figures that for some people it's enough to hear that 'this stuff happens', but Arthur can't take it at face value like that. He can't just decide to believe in a bunch of things he already decided years ago - as a child for god's sake - were nothing but stories; and he can't, couldn't just resign himself to floating nebulously in a place where people knew him but not the other way around. How could a whole City like that exist, without a great deal of time and planning?
The word 'limbo' rests like cresting nausea rooted in the pit of his stomach.
He regrets with a sudden intensity, not trying to contact Ariadne and ask her about it, but that wouldn't be his way would it? Without being clairvoyant of this particular situation, Arthur never would have called - which is to say he didn't, and won't. People say this place isn't a dream. They believe it. He can tell that much easily, and if they're lying to themselves they're doing it so impressively that he has to imagine the problem goes back further, and, ultimately, in a circular line of argument that he might be that problem, considering he's the guy who won't take yes for an answer - the guy who decided he'd shoot himself just to see what happened. Psychologists would have a field day with this, or never-ending migraines, or both. Arthur supposes that's warranted, but he has always been the kind of person who prefers to know his limits; and preferring, somewhere along the time-line, became needing, needed.
With his legs flat, die tucked away, and nothing useful to say, Arthur relents in one of the only ways remaining to him, for now. He lowers himself back and feels the sand slip fast under his collar and - he guesses - into his hair, not as Eames said, that it matters. Above them, the stars are admirable structures, whoever put them there. If they scattered in just the right way, they would be pinpricks of light in skyscrapers he knows. But they could be anything. A hundred burning planets contained in the distance, here, where there's magic, where people run around like that's normal. And well, okay, here it is. He closes his eyes. Believing isn't really an option, even when he's dead - dead in a way that again only brings him back to thoughts of Mal and limbo and all it seemed to her and never actually was - but he has tricked himself into routines before.
When he opens his eyes again, they focus as though he's alive, so he listens for his own breathing to confirm the absence, the useless habitual rise and fall of his chest not functional. Just muscle memory.
Death shouldn't bother them.
They've been killing themselves for years, killing others for longer - and while most might argue that there's a resounding difference with doing it in dreams versus doing it in reality, one inevitably leads to the other despite how good you might be. Your intention is the same whether it be real or not, and Eames has always been of the belief that you can't choose your morality, that what you do in someone's mind has every much of a parallel to the kind of man you are outside of it. Well, aside from forges, but the intent in that is something he embraces in both worlds - a con is not a restriction. Still, this isn't about killing or suicide, which both of them would be at ease with - this is about death. Maybe it is different, he notes, because death is different from being the cause of it - but in this situation where the two are intermingled, Eames is at somewhat of a loss.
Arthur's death hardly hurts like a family member or anything of the sort, being the nature of the dream, but there is still a discomfort - maybe even something close to pity - as they lie there next to each other. They both breathe but for entirely different reasons and he has to wonder, if Arthur should get something as minimal as a papercut, if he would bleed. With no heartbeat, likely not. A disturbing image, the idea of split skin to no affects other than the drainage of gravity. See, this is why Eames doesn't watch ridiculous zombie films that choke up the media of this day and age. No, then again, maybe he would prefer it if Arthur were the stereotypical image of the undead - then it would, in affect, no longer really be Arthur at all.
He's thinking too much of it, in the end.
This is likely the part where someone would ask the other whether or not they were alright, but they haven't operated like that in a very long time, and Eames finds himself always having to be more calculative nowadays than before. People change, and though it might not necessarily that Arthur has changed in very many ways but Cobb has, certainly, and to think that wouldn't have an affect on the point is just aching to be blind for sake of it.
"I've no clue if there's anything akin to an Orion's belt, here," is what he says.
Close enough.
Between the silence and the white noise - waves, wind, their own unconscious shifting - Arthur gauges the situation first this way and then that way, several times over until he comes back to the same place: that none of this fits to the formula he has gotten to know over the years. Okay then.
"I don't see it," he says, which is not the same thing as saying it's not there at all. For all they know, the sky splits itself in a blink and rearranges the darks and the brights until they're meeting new locations - striations of light delineating a new path to navigate by coordinates or otherwise. Already at work since 'waking', Arthur has heard of 'deals' struck in return for a life, in return for a number of things actually, all at varying prices, import depending. What other citizens here have to trade however, Arthur can barely even fathom much less offer himself. Magic capacities, seemingly superhuman ability the result of mutated genetics, it's still all the kind of stuff his brain has reserved rather strictly for fiction. No Arthur doesn't have any of that, and maybe in a place where occasionally harpies come to town, being dead is an advantage, one less crucial thing to be concerned with when going about whatever he might be up to. A job, his mind interjects helpfully and he sits up again, sand stuck to the back of his neck and running down the front of him with the switch to vertical posture.
Would it be worth it to make a deal? That's a question made moot by the fact that Arthur doesn't have anything to make a deal with, except for a literal part of himself; because yeah, he's done his research. It's his strong suit, to get information as fast and thoroughly as possible anyway. He has heard of the trades involving memory, some of them, but because it's all secondary data at best, he doesn't know the full extent of those trades. Are the memories gone forever? Or would it even be a big deal considering he can't remember the last time he was here in the first place? Well, no, that's not a fair comparison. It is Arthur's history - like anyone else's - that has brought him to this point, to who he is and who he isn't. Without that, he feels the ghost of his pulse stutter, uncertain, a delicate tangle.
Staring at the water, dark and darker, slices of moonlight carved into the movement, Arthur shakes his head and rests his arms on his knees, now drawn up.
What would Dom say about this? What would Mal say? Hard to be sure.
Out of the corner of his eye, Eames is just another shadow.
Arthur is still trying to decide whether he's more disappointed or humiliated by the whole situation when he lands on the notion of being apologetic again. But it's such an odd thing to feel compared to the other two that he doesn't know what to do with it at first. He realizes a moment later that it's because he thinks he ought to be sorry, but he isn't sorry - not for trying to get to the center of all this, even if he went at it wrong, even if given a do over he would be more careful. And Arthur isn't afraid of this, of death or being dead; that's not it either, but he doubts anyone would call it comfortable. Tolerable, he guesses, if it has to be, and he's known how to work with 'tolerable' for quite some time now.
"I can hear you thinking from here."
Which is a lie, to say the last, but the silence does little to calm the edge of Eames' nerves. Dream or no doesn't halt the mild unease from the idea of Arthur being dead but not-dead, where the breaths he takes in the span of their silence reminds Eames too much of what a death rattle might sound like. But even beyond that, much more at the front of anything else, is curiousity. That's always been on the basis of many things, Eames wanting to know things and then thusly finding ways to discover them - it should stand, too, that Arthur has been at the receiving end of this on many occasions - more often before than now, more serious now than ever before.
Eames finally pushes himself up to a sitting position, brushing sand from his shoulders and reaching back to ruffle the back of his head, dislodging more of the stuff from the gelled locks. His gaze turns from the sky and the ocean to Arthur enough to catch the shake of his head - denying something to himself, maybe, working through the clockwork of his thoughts. It's a familiar tic motion, and Eames gives him a few minutes to think for himself because he's generous and Arthur's dead. Regardless of the fact it was at his own doing, regardless of the fact that they both thought he was right for it, that something would come of it, he deserves at least a little bit of that much, of time to think for himself.
But not very long, because Eames isn't so sacrificial, nor very sympathetic, just a constant state of perturbed as of now.
"Well?"
Ducking his head, Arthur's eyes aren't closed but this close to his knees the darkness has a majority rule. He lets his shoulders rise and fall - a shrug, an I don't know, any given gesture of noncommittal tendency because he simply isn't sure of that in the least. Deals. Trades. These things, for all the data he has amassed, mean very little to him in the scope of experience, of actually knowing, to the point where he isn't sure it's worth mentioning at all. His hands plant in the sand, fingers splaying underneath the shallow dig for a long moment. Well what is redundant and they're both smart enough to know it even if sometimes Arthur has opted for the path of selective understanding because it made things simpler at the time. No, that would be an utter waste here though. Right hand dragging nameless shapes into the sand, he shrugs again at last.
"I could get it back....not sure how though...yet," he says and doesn't elaborate, isn't sure elaboration is even wanted at present; it wouldn't be odd to find that it wasn't. Discussing the ways of restoring life after death is not very high on Arthur's own list as it is, but the fact that it has made it onto a list at all is staggering all on its own. Nothing makes sense, he mulls no less irritably than before he shot himself in the head, and has the peace of mind to think: well, shows how much I learned.
It may or may not be a pattern.
"It?" Eames echoes, but then catches on. "Is that even possible?" Then again, against the mechanics of a structure where deities are involved - maybe it isn't so much of a stretch. He remembers something being traded for the PASIV, last time he was here - it, with some stretch, wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that to initiate other changes would involve the same system. It's a bewildering check and balance, honestly, but when it's what operates here it's what they must abide by - for now. And if it's the easiest, Eames sees no reason for an alternative.
"A trade," he continues, but he figures if Arthur has thought of it then Arthur has done his research. He's had all day, after all, to go over the processes in between whatever he busied himself with from when Eames left the apartment to finding him on the beach. He couldn't have been here the entire time, no, it hardly seems productive enough. "What would you even give?"
Bewildering is one way to put it, and honestly the only reason Arthur can put any stock into the 'research' he's done is that he's sitting here right now, talking, without a pulse, without a breath, without life; so if he was looking for proof of the impossible, in short, he's it. He just didn't expect it to be true in any lasting capacity, but that too is water under the bridge - a line not crossed so much as drawn over, choppy and directionless.
Arthur flicks a particularly intrusive grain of sand off of his knee.
"Don't know," he pauses, eyes narrowing on the motion of the water out ahead. It certainly looks real. Everything here does, even the things Arthur strictly according to his own reality knows cannot be. What he says next has the nearly droll tone of someone who can't decide whether he's bored or amused or both; Arthur is neither, which as often in these cases means he's distancing, but he has to in order to be able to do anything about it at all. "I can't fly, can't really do anything that seems like it'd be worth..." he trails off, stops the habit of his inhale and exhale, thinks. "I don't know," he repeats eventually, but it sounds more like, I'll figure it out. The implications of this are hard to miss, that he is going to find something to trade. A few people he asked - nobodies, people who liked him enough to talk to him but probably forgot about him even as they turned away back to their own affairs - mentioned they had heard of deals involving all manner of things - from memories to senses to yes, abilities.
He keeps returning to how unbelievable this all is but every time he does, he just checks for his own heartbeat, blinks and thinks: or not.
Or not.
That's the thing about reality, really - you've nothing special about you, and if that's what you strive to have out of life (some sort of unique individualism that the youth revel in) then you'll find yourself rather disappointed. It's dreams that set them apart from anyone else, the creations they make there that they'll never be able to do in the real world, where a man can decide to be a gentleman thief of sorts yet still have a family to go home to, where Eames can pose as a woman and sashay about in four inch heels if he so desires, where Arthur explodes into an environment uncontrolled by anything other than the tether on his violence - no fear, no regrets, the single mindedness that comes from mowing down waves of projections from a helicopter (which, were he not to have, would only leave him with a rubber band and a stick of gum).
There's nothing about themselves that would be spectacular enough to trade for a life, Eames thinks, but maybe the thing that makes them as such to begin with.
"Last I was here," he starts, calculative because he knows Arthur is going to be angry he didn't bring this up the moment they fell into the fountain, "you traded your totem in for the PASIV. Now, I'm not certain whether or not the deities took it back when we all left, but if they didn't." Well, maybe. Trade in reality for the PASIV, trade the PASIV for the reality of a heartbeat. Life works like totems, don't they? In some manner, what you choose to believe is what you create for yourself.
"We could try that."
True to form, Arthur's head snaps around, which he realizes is an erroneous movement in that had he snapped it just a bit harder he may have had it snapping clean to the side. The delights of being dead. Readjusting, he turns the whole of his torso, which brings him closer, and he's not breathing anymore - just silent and staring and wondering exactly what possessed Eames, that he thought not mentioning this initially was fine, wasn't important. Or at least, could wait.
"You had--" he stops, shakes his head, has to look away. "Why didn't y--" he can't seem to complete his sentences, so he just stops, shoving his hands into the sand and focusing on the friction, wishing it would feel cold or warm or anything, anything but the nothing at least. He thinks about trading his totem, about handing over the token that doesn't seem to work anyway. There is a practicality to it that he can appreciate even if his stomach remembers how it is to lurch and his chest reminds him that he isn't breathing but a tightness is possible. What few rules they had laid out for themselves, at the beginning of the dreamshare, and then later at the beginning of something more criminal, don't hold here, and Arthur keeps having to remember. Almost he could laugh at himself; as if death wasn't enough to drive it home.
When he finds his voice again, he tucks away his frayed edges with a scowl directed at the waterline, not looking at Eames, not looking anywhere he can give too much away without meaning to, sifting one hand back up and resting it on his knee.
"Even if they didn't," he sighs, "Do you really think that'd be enough?"
Arthur doesn't, and that much isn't something worth hiding, so he doesn't try. It appeals to him, to view it with a weigh on pessimism, as he perceives strategies and plans for jobs, because it's the best way to temper other things, things like hope and the difference between likely and maybe, maybe not.
There's a tightness in Eames' spine at the way Arthur jerks his body around like he has no control over it anylonger, the way he stops breathing as he stares at him - and it's now that Eames truly thinks as him as something that should be at the bottom of a casket. He can't decide if he prefers to have him around or at the bottom of a casket, like this, whether or not he would either choose to grieve a little bit or find too much reprieve in the fact that at least, were he buried, he wouldn't be able to look at him like that. Eames is never afraid to look people straight in the eye but Arthur is not quite a person right now, and he can't pretend otherwise, so he has to look away even if Arthur is doing the same anyway.
"I didn't think of whether or not it'd still be here," he clarifies, because he wasn't really thinking of it at all. Natural dream, as it were, why would they need the construct of the PASIV? And so soon after they had received it, they had left. It was impossible to say whether or not it would operate the way it was meant to, only present as something to have that was familiar, to work as a comparison between a level down and here - but offer no real clues as for escape, if kicks didn't work.
"It's difficult to say," Eames offers lightly, shifting to fold his legs underneath him lotus style, running a hand over the knuckles of his opposite and pressing until each one pops comfortably. "There's no harm in the offer, is there? If they decline, then at least we've found the PASIV for you to amuse yourself with in the meantime."
Peripherally, Arthur can tell when Eames looks away, notices because he knows Eames well enough to recognize a tick of motion that does not quite match up. Cast out of the light, even Eames' eyes shade themselves a black that gleams in juxtaposition with more natural shadows, and for a moment they're strangers. Under his breath, he stifles some kind of sigh or word; he's not sure which but it feels like something he could take or leave. A hand raised to the back of his neck, he doesn't press, just lets it rest there before letting it fall to his side again and leaning back, making him the one reclining this time, sand in his hair and under his collar already.
"For me to be amused with. Great," he says after a few long moments, closing his eyes to greet a different kind of dark, though he imagines he can feel the moonlight on his eyelids - not that he could while he was alive, but not being able to feel anything has him conceiving of feeling things one can't feel to begin with. Again Arthur wonders if Eames only thinks of him as a projection, which would be ironic considering their argument earlier when Arthur accused him of being one himself; but how do they prove it one way or the other? They could sit down, hash out a time line between them, if they were either of them straightforward about masochism, but they're not and they won't. Arthur could say things only Arthur should know - not some projection however well created; Eames could do the same. They could test each other, they could make blind guesses and catch each other out in the lies.
But that's never really been their way and Arthur is dead and no amount of proving what's real and what's not is changing that for him in the here and now.
So then, something else.
The PASIV.
Or if not that, then...well, he blinks his eyes open to the broadness of the sky. He'll think of something. That's what he's supposed to be good at, besides - improvising - and now isn't the time to approach the exception.
Maybe no time really is.
Rating; PG-13
Characters; Arthur ( specifics ) & Eames ( shifts )
Summary; Arthur is dead and it's not a dream....but what else could it be?
Log;
These are the things Arthur knows: how old he is supposed to be, what he's done with his life so far, what he hasn't done, who his friends are (who his friends were), and who his enemies are (who his enemies likely will be). Arthur knows the weight of his own Glock shoved hard against his ribcage when a power struggle went out of his favor, and Arthur knows the way Dominick Cobb looked when he was golden - how he could light the world up with his theories and how insanely good he was with the dream - how he seemed made for the dream and not the other way around. Arthur knows how Philippa will stare at the phone sometimes, when he's visiting - or did, before Dom went home, as if it was betraying her with its silence; and Arthur knows James' incorrigible faith, something more like his father used to be and something his sister probably never will be. Arthur knows he is, in the world - small and large as it can be - not quite alone. He has associates he can depend on for the right price and there is Dom insofar as Dom can be there for anyone else these days (generous to the pain of stupidity or so selfish Arthur thinks he'd prefer having his knees shot out again) and there is Eames too of course. Eames.
Some constant.
He finds it a little strange - how the dream got turned on him and he didn't even know it, because it's not like what happened with Mal from what he understands, but even with all the well-meaning citizens around him saying it's not a dream, Arthur just is not equipped to believe it could be real. Even when he was growing up his suspension of belief in the hard wood under his bare feet and the painstaking blue sky overhead was only halfway. He could never just put a sliver of faith in the idea of time travel or, say, unicorns and harpies.
A natural dream?
Or not.
He has not ruled out that possibility, that despite Eames' facetiousness when he suggested it, they have been taken and maybe the architect let Eames' subconscious run amuck and here they are, a half-remembered unreality in which to screw themselves over, apparently, if Arthur's own track record is anything to go by.
When he shot himself he expected to die. Then he expected to wake up. And he did - without a heartbeat, winter cold to the touch, and foreign to himself; a heavy ghost.
Flexing his hand now, he can feel stiffness too and it does not scare him the way he half wishes it would, as he views it with a clinical eye while stepping out through the cross-gates to the beach where the only light is from the suggestion of a moon shattering across the water - an ocean it looks like, even if it isn't. Toeing off his shoes, he drags his feet through the sand near to the waterline and stops an arm's breadth short of it, raises his other hand to his temple and draws it away clean.
A look in the mirror already told him he looks the same as he always does, paler in the dark but he's always been pale. No amount of sun in Mombasa or anywhere else could change that, apparently. His eyes tangle vision through the waves and the shadows, struck by the notion of limbo, struck by everything all over again. When he revived, it was in the nowhere location he had offed himself originally, and it was not at all like waking from a dream so much as emerging from a long sickness, tripping into an uncomfortable convalescence which was, is in fact animated death. In the back of his throat there's an itch, and when he recognizes it for a strangled sort of laugh he just stifles it there and then. He can't even feel the breeze.
And it's useless, so fucking useless, but Arthur can't help the things he knows.
He reaches for his totem, turns it over - once, twice, three times, and on until he's not sure how long he has been standing there to begin with and ends up adding that to the long and still growing list of other things he does not know.
Eames picks up smoking after over two decades of a certain amount of abstinence (cigarettes are too permanent, when you're trying to run cons) for something to do with his rage, exhales smoke like a terrible dragon for the longest time spent avoiding the apartment that Arthur had swept into. That Arthur, who was supposed to be dead, who indeed still was dead but just a state of disturbing amount of animation in his limbs and at the back of his eyes that made Eames' skin crawl, that Arthur that still had no interest in listening to what he was told. There's a difference between, Eames thinks, sharing information and being told - less room to wiggle on the latter. There are times when he thinks Arthur of little more than a child, petulant and unwilling to bend to the notions of differentials. It's not that Arthur doesn't know when he's made mistakes - because he does, graciously, accept them with tact and simply finds a different way to resolve for them - but rather that his perceptions won't lend themselves toward a mistake, that his observations are what is the most correct in his world.
Such as the idea that, were he to off himself, he would conveniently wake up.
Perhaps Eames had been riding too hard on the wonder that maybe it would be true, too, but he had enough sense not to try it out for himself when the people here, when they die, simply come back. And he remembers telling Arthur this as much - sometime in between their arrival and being a lounge chair, that normal removals wouldn't work as neatly, that they'd already theorized and tried certain methods that never quite panned out as intended, to not jump the gun.
Which, of course, mattered very little in the face of Arthur staring at him because - well - talking chair and all that.
Eames can hardly blame him for that. He supposes most of his frustration of it is to be so promptly accused of being a projection when he isn't the one with no heart beat. That his own thoughts had been turned on him, backwards. That nothing about this is as normal as it ought to be, but he knows just as well that there are enough dangers in taking things at face value. That Arthur should have known that for how strange this dream was, that normal mechanisms to wake up simply wouldn't work even were he real. Eames supposes he can't accuse him, though, in the same manner that he himself was blamed of being. No, while Eames may figure it, it doesn't do well to lash at it like an insult.
Doesn't mean he knows, exactly, what to do with the situation at hand.
He meanders his way down the stretch of beach, kicking up sand with the toe of his shoes as he pads along, the tip of his cigarette a burning orange in the dark. It's only natural that, with how populated the City is, that Eames comes across someone eventually - someone that, in this certain light of the moon, he can see quite well that holds himself very much like Arthur within the silhouette of his clothes. He tosses the cigarette somewhere by his feet before promptly closing the distance. It occurs to Eames that he has nothing very scathing to say, at the moment, so he plops himself down on the sand, instead, legs bent at the knee with his shoes digging into the sand, arms draped overtop the flat of the bone with his hands left dangling.
Even from here, Arthur feels cool.
There are a few things Arthur could say. The obvious would be you were right but that's so sorely redundant at this point that he would sooner stuff his mouth full of sand than say it. He could say I'm cold without feeling it. He could say when I woke up, I thought I was someone else. He could say sorry. In the end he doesn't say any of these things however, just looks down at the familiar picture of Eames, Eames sitting and looking far away when he's less than a foot apart. Arthur isn't sure they were ever friends, or if he was even ever sure what a friend was. Falling in love with Mal and Dom was like falling in love with a force of nature and there wasn't much room for friendship in that; there was family though and he never really lets go of that. With Eames it was, it goes without needing to be said, different. It was like a literal gravitation that irritated him at first for its foreignness, for how he didn't know what to make of it in the least, and then how it drew him, over and over even when it became apparent they might both be better off otherwise. They worked well together though - a versatility of strengths as it happened, delving into the research not quite pioneers like Dom and Mal but not exactly the backseat either. Some other vehicle through the terrain.
Now of course, things are at that truly disparate stage, where they are old and new because the Fischer job was something even if Arthur couldn't put a name to it on his own. Reconvening seems a little on the side of technical, even for him. Giving up the effort, he sits instead, digs his feet into the sand, heels first and the fronts scooping under the way he might to acquire a bit of warmth had he any need of it; he doesn't. Oh he could say a few things.
But what he ends up saying is, more or less, the gist of the moment when he says with a careless resignation:
"Being dead's fucking weird." Understatement, overstatement, Arthur could hash the math between the two and still come up with the wrong result. He knows. Bowing his head forward, he places a hand at the back of his own neck, tries to feel for the tightening there, for the discomfort, because feeling something is better than feeling nothing; but it's barely there, even that. No pulse, no warmth; for all intensive meanings of the word, he perceives himself as hollow and that's just the mother of all doors to the one-way ticket on existentialism express - something he does not need nor want. It might, it would seem, be coming to pick him up anyway.
Which just kind of figures too.
He digs his heels down deeper.
Yes, well. "If it was supposed to feel natural, they wouldn't refer to it as an abomination." Eames' tone is still smooth, somewhat short. He stretches his arms up over his head, his elbow brushing against Arthur's shoulder as he leans back, laying down against the cool sand and toeing his shoes off. Eames somehow manages to wrestle his socks away with an imaginative use of his pinky toe before pushing his legs out straight, crossing them at the ankle, rearranging his arms so that he can link his fingers together and rest them on his belly, thumbs tapping a bit against the soft of his shirt. There are sharper things he could say- insult Arthur's common sense, for one thing, insult his inability to take direction from others that don't start in D and end in -ominick. Still, ridiculing the dead for getting themselves killed in the first place seems, honestly, somewhat less kosher than even he's willing to outright bark on and - all that aside - he'd said the majority of his words at the flat, said the rest in the way he'd felt the hinges rattle when he'd slammed the front door shut behind him.
Like don't pretend as though you can't tell the difference.
He untangles his fingers long enough to slide them into the breastpocket of his shirt, pulling from within the folds the chip he utilizes as his totem. It's worn at the edges, carved into distinct swirls that he's longsince memorized under the rough of his thumb. It's a useless thing that's supposed to tell him what real and what isn't, something Mal assigned them so many years ago, though at the time he'd only wondered why she had such difficulty in knowing in the first place. When they dreamt, they were god-like. When they woke, they were mortal again. Eames has a checklist of things to remember his existence by - the tattoos on his skin, the crooked value to his fingers, whether or not he can change any of these things - made obsolete by natural dreaming, where the mechanisms are balanced by the heavy knowledge of his memories.
It's a bit of a silly system, totems. They place so much of their confidence in tiny pieces of plastic. It's enough of a reason why the rest of the dreaming world hasn't caught onto such a habitual system as theirs.
He tosses it up in the air, once, catching it before it can smack him in the nose, repeating the motion a few times before he gets used to no longer carrying it about, and then promptly chucks it in the vicinity of Arthur's head.
Arthur, credit where credit is due, catches the trajectory but he simply lets it hit him in the side of the head, watches it fall, path deflected to a slight hollow in the sand next to him, between them. He knows what it is but that's all the more reason for him to leave it be, to not touch it even the least bit, no bare brush of knuckles or curiosity of fingertips across its worn state. For a while - he does not know how long in any exact terms he would generally prefer - Arthur only stares at the chip in the half glittered grains of sand, half shadowed, a curve of earth likened for a blink to a hand he knows ten times as well. What, he has to wonder, does Eames even expect him to do with this?
Asking that very thing feels inane though, so he just looks at the other man, stares and stares and thinks that whether this is a dream or isn't, whether he's real or not real - being dead and yet not dead batting a solid hundred for that scenario, whether it all makes sense or not, a totem is personal. Not special per se, Arthur's certainly isn't anything grand in story or origin. But they are individual with good reason. Mal's hadn't worked - they know now, not just guess or fear - that this was due to the compromise Dom struck to get her home at all, not that it had, in the end, served anyone he supposes. It's all so messy.
Disheartening, he thinks, that he can see himself - or could have seen himself decades older and feeling no differently about it all.
The thought of Mal in the cold earth still brings him the dryness of his throat and the tight discomfort behind his eyes like a whole feeling repressed - too volatile to be let out anymore, if he ever could completely anyway. The thought of Dom still makes him think he ought to regret and then angry that he can't, and then grateful, and then a little crazy for it. Two years is hardly forever but Arthur is mostly certain all parties remotely involved with the previous reality aged maybe ten years, invisible ways and visible ways.
As for Eames.
Well.
Arthur could write a book if he was so inclined, but he's not now, and he never will be.
Eyes flicking from the poker chip back to Eames, who's getting sand in his hair that makes Arthur almost itch with the thought, he waits, wordless, and that's inquiry enough all on its own.
What do you want me to do with this?
Not that he'll oblige as it is, he figures. Some things are too much; there are rules, boundaries. Arthur has come to rely on them.
"I'm real," is what Eames says, hands rearranging themselves to that comfortable grasp on the bulk of his stomach, uninclined to pick the chip back up.
He gazes, instead, not at Arthur nor at the slowly rolling tides of the ocean but instead at the stars, wondering which ones denote any sort of barrier to the outside apparent dangers out the city. Wondering which one he plants for himself, knowing nothing of constellations, or if they're just the picture of what he imagines the universe to be like. The latter, in all likelihood, always the latter with some intermingling of memories of sleeping in the back of a car with the top pulled down in the middle of the summer, sticky and uncomfortable and unable to sleep, teeth set on edge. They're not always very pleasant things, memories, but that's what makes life - harshness, with the sprinkle of pleasantries, of what you enjoy, of conversations and of ventures.
"That chip is real."
Totems, to Eames, are hardly intimate things. They all know what eachother's are, considering they conceived theirs around the same time, though Mal a few steps ahead of everyone else (as she often was). His poker chip, Arthur's loaded die (no correlation, despite the faint amusement, despite the commentary of you've no imagination, Arthur, go find something not-casino related), Mal's top, Cobb's wedding ring (also not very imaginative, but whatever works for a man is what satisfies his consciousness in the sea of his subconscious) - they're plain things, some a little more obvious than others if you know the mechanics of what a totem is and how they ought to work. Most don't, though, hence the security they found in them.
Eames, though, doesn't need something so small to tell him the weight of something so much more grand. He can't even cash on the thing any longer, considering it was never a real chip to begin with. One of his more faulty replicas.
Not something anyone could make up, even if they did catch a handful of it. There are too many divots to be exact of it, and only Eames knows the pattern to it, where the defects lay.
Rather than pick it up, Arthur takes out his die only to half crush it in the loose fold of his fist, knuckles cutting against the sand as if to weigh anchor. He knows all too well that Eames has a near immovable grip on his own reality, strong in all the ways it ought to be strong and perhaps unexpectedly flexible in all the ways Arthur never expected his awareness of reality to require; though it definitely did, still does.
"Okay, Okay, fine," he hears himself say more than he consciously forms the words, hears his own voice continue, "Pick it up." Why it unsettles him at this moment, Arthur can no more identify than anything else save for his lack of a heartbeat and how everything remains reliably a little bit off compared to how he is sure it ought to be, from a body that breathes because it needs to, not because it's just in the banal habit of doing so. Pick it up, he thinks a little anxiously, realizes he wants it away and out of sight again, because sure, the totems themselves aren't special, but the meaning therein? It's irreplaceable. He can't reach out for even the idea of the poker chip because Arthur doesn't think his own particular constitution of yes and no is equipped for this kind of thing. What few parameters have stayed behind to let him clutch at and build card houses out of and upon them, well, they are very few indeed. So he'd like to keep them.
The sea breeze looses a few stray strands of hair into his face, and he lets his vision catch itself out of focus, blur until those strands are sharp lines leading his eyes off the page of sand and a shoulder, eventually to Eames' face, as if he'll learn anything from it.
"Leave it."
Eames doesn't move from his position in the sand, each inhale sinking him further in that he knows, when he gets up - aside from his entire back likely dotted with the stuff - he might leave an Eames-shaped imprint behind. Still, he doesn't pick it back up, he doesn't look to Arthur until the weight of his gaze is heavy, too-searching, that to ignore him entirely might be somewhat cruel - and Eames is many things, but not cruel. No, that's a lie, he's cruel when it suits him, and it has yet suited him to be as such to Arthur. He catches his eye in the dark of night on the beach, moon bright enough here so that he doesn't need any lights to know where exactly they sit on his face, rolling his shoulders a bit against the grind of the sand.
Totems are such fickle things. If he so chooses, when he wakes up, he can make another to keep - or simply fashion one in this dreaming world, to have only when he's asleep. That's the beauty of the idea, really, something that's yours to own and keep thought of, if rather idealistic at best (and at worst). In the end, if you think your reality is some level above you, a little toy is not going to save the type of your madness. Or does he need to bring up a certain Mallorie Cobb? No, he'd rather not. His point is apparent.
The rules, here, don't follow the rules they've set up before - it's more raw, like they're relearning the motions of how to dream, and how to deal with extended dreaming. Before totems, before the literal grounds of identity theft, their realities were distinct between who they killed in a dream versus who woke up on the cot next to you in the bunkers on base, vitroil pumping through your veins.
If one could pluck a thought out from behind another person's eyes, through the curve of their mouth perhaps, or out of a dream as it were - and well all right that one is perfectly doable, then Arthur might extend the empty hand and drag at the unspoken, the name they don't say because of different reasons. Arthur finds saying Mal's name hurts, more often than anything else, though it is worthwhile to point out that he gets the same pang when he thinks of Dom now. He can't quite trick the why of that out.
But if Eames isn't going to say it, neither will Arthur. It's like standing on two sides of a bridge; they can both see the center of the thing, but they're sticking to one side and the other and that's that.
Isn't it?
Arthur has been so sure for so long that the whole concept of being less than that threatens the kind of instability he thinks most people don't recover from, from what he's seen, from what he's heard. As he's dead, it could dryly be argued he's got nothing to lose but even when he hasn't got a breath in his lungs Arthur like this can't let go of the memory of being alive enough to embrace that liberation, where a different Arthur would pick up the chip, would pocket it, or maybe he would snap it in two, or press it back into Eames' hand or not at all, a different Arthur would would lean over him and try to figure out all the ways this dream doesn't match up, and why that is.
But he's not quite that Arthur, even if parts of him used to be.
So he doesn't reach for the poker chip, just turns his gaze away, his profile set and chin level, eyes locked onto the distance where the horizon and the sky get all caught up in each other and they could be a floor to walk on or a ceiling to hang lights from, those stars. The geography of the dream. Under moonlight alone he normally feels secret; it's telling enough that the only company he has renders this usual thing not the case at all, that he feels unveiled though he guesses he can allot half of that credit to dying.
Dead.
He's trying to get his mouth around the word again but ends up just setting it in a thin, discontented line, a line which he breaks only to say, without even the barest hint of looking over, "You're getting sand in your hair."
It means nothing. That's what makes it easy to say, of course.
"It's only sand."
His chip is only plastic alloy. Arthur's die is but a simple toy, much like Mal's top had been, but Eames had always liked how the thing was transparent for the most part, not like the obvious nail-in-the-hold that solid dies could be to get them loaded. That there'd been care to it, to have a weight in something that seemed so weightless - but Arthur had always been like that, not necessarily purposefully thoughtful or careful (though that came later, certainly) but ending up with creations just on this side of paradoxical. A loaded die despite its transparency, the clean press of his suit in combination with the scruff of his shoes (maybe not as noticeable, if you're not looking for it, and by habit alone Eames is always looking for things to offset the image Arthur has created for himself - not that it's particularly unnatural, image management, everyone does it - whether it be societal pressure, the eyes of a friend, the stroke of a passing memory), the strong-man persona of Arthur's behavior that would seem out of place if you didn't know him, before everything else.
It's not as though Arthur suddenly became the person he is now, no, it's always been there - his linear way of doing things, his firmness, the quiet snap to his voice despite it's soft tones, the strength in his bones. But the fact of the matter is that Eames has seen Arthur soft in ways that are hardly weak, pried open and pliant under Mal and Cobb both that rears itself occasionally here and there in his concern for Cobb, the warm way he falls into with Ariadne when he's explaining something, the hilarious twist to his face when Yusuf is tipping him over to test the sedative, the casualness of his speech that is reminiscent of when his hair was buzzed off in combination with the short and purposeful route his emails take. There is, purposeful or not, a difference between Arthur now and Arthur before, enough for Eames to notice (though he does notice rather much everything, not for ego's sake, it's just the proverbial handshake of how he interacts with people) even now, and that's what strikes him most of all.
Complexity. It is, of course, the same complexity that he remembers having so much difficulty with the people here his time past - and it doesn't have to mean much, because it's the things that Eames notices most and then would, of course, project them into the space of his dream. But it's enough to have a pause at it, he supposes.
Nothing is ever just only a dream - it's just that whether or not they stay relevant depends on the circumstances at hand, and Eames can't decide for himself where to draw the line in the sand.
Managing to inject some old eye-rolling sentiment into the short break of a laugh here, Arthur just shakes his head once - the way people do when they say I don't believe this or I can't believe you and it's not about the sand in the least. Everyone knows reality is important, that you keep a line between you and what it means to stick a gun to the side of your head or jump from fifteen stories up in a hotel that was supposed to only mean good memories. But in this dream people of disturbing density and complexity function, for all regulatory purposes appear to live and they've not got the half-thereness of a projection who, sure, could become hostile in a nanosecond but when they don't they stay almost vacant, like they don't even know you're there. That wasn't always the case; they had to learn how to be subtle after all, though the slipping around of mental spaces always came easier to Dom of all people, Dom who could - they found out when things were not about crime but simply about limits - find people's secrets and read them plain as anything, no matter how locked up. He didn't become the most renowned extractor on sheer dumb luck; that's not how any of this works.
Shifting on the sand, his legs stretching out in front of him now, upsetting the piles of sand making modest hills over his feet and ankles previously, Arthur stuffs the loaded die back into one of his pockets. The oxford and the slacks make him look put together, even in the dark, even when he's dead, even when pretty much nothing is as it ought to be from where he's looking. Eames says Ariadne was here, and that hits him hard too. He should remember that, should remember the girl he spent time showing the extent of his own building capacity, going through mazes, and raising cities with a thought. But he doesn't. There isn't even a glimpse of a memory, as with a dream or even an imagined thing - just blank, and he figures that for some people it's enough to hear that 'this stuff happens', but Arthur can't take it at face value like that. He can't just decide to believe in a bunch of things he already decided years ago - as a child for god's sake - were nothing but stories; and he can't, couldn't just resign himself to floating nebulously in a place where people knew him but not the other way around. How could a whole City like that exist, without a great deal of time and planning?
The word 'limbo' rests like cresting nausea rooted in the pit of his stomach.
He regrets with a sudden intensity, not trying to contact Ariadne and ask her about it, but that wouldn't be his way would it? Without being clairvoyant of this particular situation, Arthur never would have called - which is to say he didn't, and won't. People say this place isn't a dream. They believe it. He can tell that much easily, and if they're lying to themselves they're doing it so impressively that he has to imagine the problem goes back further, and, ultimately, in a circular line of argument that he might be that problem, considering he's the guy who won't take yes for an answer - the guy who decided he'd shoot himself just to see what happened. Psychologists would have a field day with this, or never-ending migraines, or both. Arthur supposes that's warranted, but he has always been the kind of person who prefers to know his limits; and preferring, somewhere along the time-line, became needing, needed.
With his legs flat, die tucked away, and nothing useful to say, Arthur relents in one of the only ways remaining to him, for now. He lowers himself back and feels the sand slip fast under his collar and - he guesses - into his hair, not as Eames said, that it matters. Above them, the stars are admirable structures, whoever put them there. If they scattered in just the right way, they would be pinpricks of light in skyscrapers he knows. But they could be anything. A hundred burning planets contained in the distance, here, where there's magic, where people run around like that's normal. And well, okay, here it is. He closes his eyes. Believing isn't really an option, even when he's dead - dead in a way that again only brings him back to thoughts of Mal and limbo and all it seemed to her and never actually was - but he has tricked himself into routines before.
When he opens his eyes again, they focus as though he's alive, so he listens for his own breathing to confirm the absence, the useless habitual rise and fall of his chest not functional. Just muscle memory.
Death shouldn't bother them.
They've been killing themselves for years, killing others for longer - and while most might argue that there's a resounding difference with doing it in dreams versus doing it in reality, one inevitably leads to the other despite how good you might be. Your intention is the same whether it be real or not, and Eames has always been of the belief that you can't choose your morality, that what you do in someone's mind has every much of a parallel to the kind of man you are outside of it. Well, aside from forges, but the intent in that is something he embraces in both worlds - a con is not a restriction. Still, this isn't about killing or suicide, which both of them would be at ease with - this is about death. Maybe it is different, he notes, because death is different from being the cause of it - but in this situation where the two are intermingled, Eames is at somewhat of a loss.
Arthur's death hardly hurts like a family member or anything of the sort, being the nature of the dream, but there is still a discomfort - maybe even something close to pity - as they lie there next to each other. They both breathe but for entirely different reasons and he has to wonder, if Arthur should get something as minimal as a papercut, if he would bleed. With no heartbeat, likely not. A disturbing image, the idea of split skin to no affects other than the drainage of gravity. See, this is why Eames doesn't watch ridiculous zombie films that choke up the media of this day and age. No, then again, maybe he would prefer it if Arthur were the stereotypical image of the undead - then it would, in affect, no longer really be Arthur at all.
He's thinking too much of it, in the end.
This is likely the part where someone would ask the other whether or not they were alright, but they haven't operated like that in a very long time, and Eames finds himself always having to be more calculative nowadays than before. People change, and though it might not necessarily that Arthur has changed in very many ways but Cobb has, certainly, and to think that wouldn't have an affect on the point is just aching to be blind for sake of it.
"I've no clue if there's anything akin to an Orion's belt, here," is what he says.
Close enough.
Between the silence and the white noise - waves, wind, their own unconscious shifting - Arthur gauges the situation first this way and then that way, several times over until he comes back to the same place: that none of this fits to the formula he has gotten to know over the years. Okay then.
"I don't see it," he says, which is not the same thing as saying it's not there at all. For all they know, the sky splits itself in a blink and rearranges the darks and the brights until they're meeting new locations - striations of light delineating a new path to navigate by coordinates or otherwise. Already at work since 'waking', Arthur has heard of 'deals' struck in return for a life, in return for a number of things actually, all at varying prices, import depending. What other citizens here have to trade however, Arthur can barely even fathom much less offer himself. Magic capacities, seemingly superhuman ability the result of mutated genetics, it's still all the kind of stuff his brain has reserved rather strictly for fiction. No Arthur doesn't have any of that, and maybe in a place where occasionally harpies come to town, being dead is an advantage, one less crucial thing to be concerned with when going about whatever he might be up to. A job, his mind interjects helpfully and he sits up again, sand stuck to the back of his neck and running down the front of him with the switch to vertical posture.
Would it be worth it to make a deal? That's a question made moot by the fact that Arthur doesn't have anything to make a deal with, except for a literal part of himself; because yeah, he's done his research. It's his strong suit, to get information as fast and thoroughly as possible anyway. He has heard of the trades involving memory, some of them, but because it's all secondary data at best, he doesn't know the full extent of those trades. Are the memories gone forever? Or would it even be a big deal considering he can't remember the last time he was here in the first place? Well, no, that's not a fair comparison. It is Arthur's history - like anyone else's - that has brought him to this point, to who he is and who he isn't. Without that, he feels the ghost of his pulse stutter, uncertain, a delicate tangle.
Staring at the water, dark and darker, slices of moonlight carved into the movement, Arthur shakes his head and rests his arms on his knees, now drawn up.
What would Dom say about this? What would Mal say? Hard to be sure.
Out of the corner of his eye, Eames is just another shadow.
Arthur is still trying to decide whether he's more disappointed or humiliated by the whole situation when he lands on the notion of being apologetic again. But it's such an odd thing to feel compared to the other two that he doesn't know what to do with it at first. He realizes a moment later that it's because he thinks he ought to be sorry, but he isn't sorry - not for trying to get to the center of all this, even if he went at it wrong, even if given a do over he would be more careful. And Arthur isn't afraid of this, of death or being dead; that's not it either, but he doubts anyone would call it comfortable. Tolerable, he guesses, if it has to be, and he's known how to work with 'tolerable' for quite some time now.
"I can hear you thinking from here."
Which is a lie, to say the last, but the silence does little to calm the edge of Eames' nerves. Dream or no doesn't halt the mild unease from the idea of Arthur being dead but not-dead, where the breaths he takes in the span of their silence reminds Eames too much of what a death rattle might sound like. But even beyond that, much more at the front of anything else, is curiousity. That's always been on the basis of many things, Eames wanting to know things and then thusly finding ways to discover them - it should stand, too, that Arthur has been at the receiving end of this on many occasions - more often before than now, more serious now than ever before.
Eames finally pushes himself up to a sitting position, brushing sand from his shoulders and reaching back to ruffle the back of his head, dislodging more of the stuff from the gelled locks. His gaze turns from the sky and the ocean to Arthur enough to catch the shake of his head - denying something to himself, maybe, working through the clockwork of his thoughts. It's a familiar tic motion, and Eames gives him a few minutes to think for himself because he's generous and Arthur's dead. Regardless of the fact it was at his own doing, regardless of the fact that they both thought he was right for it, that something would come of it, he deserves at least a little bit of that much, of time to think for himself.
But not very long, because Eames isn't so sacrificial, nor very sympathetic, just a constant state of perturbed as of now.
"Well?"
Ducking his head, Arthur's eyes aren't closed but this close to his knees the darkness has a majority rule. He lets his shoulders rise and fall - a shrug, an I don't know, any given gesture of noncommittal tendency because he simply isn't sure of that in the least. Deals. Trades. These things, for all the data he has amassed, mean very little to him in the scope of experience, of actually knowing, to the point where he isn't sure it's worth mentioning at all. His hands plant in the sand, fingers splaying underneath the shallow dig for a long moment. Well what is redundant and they're both smart enough to know it even if sometimes Arthur has opted for the path of selective understanding because it made things simpler at the time. No, that would be an utter waste here though. Right hand dragging nameless shapes into the sand, he shrugs again at last.
"I could get it back....not sure how though...yet," he says and doesn't elaborate, isn't sure elaboration is even wanted at present; it wouldn't be odd to find that it wasn't. Discussing the ways of restoring life after death is not very high on Arthur's own list as it is, but the fact that it has made it onto a list at all is staggering all on its own. Nothing makes sense, he mulls no less irritably than before he shot himself in the head, and has the peace of mind to think: well, shows how much I learned.
It may or may not be a pattern.
"It?" Eames echoes, but then catches on. "Is that even possible?" Then again, against the mechanics of a structure where deities are involved - maybe it isn't so much of a stretch. He remembers something being traded for the PASIV, last time he was here - it, with some stretch, wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that to initiate other changes would involve the same system. It's a bewildering check and balance, honestly, but when it's what operates here it's what they must abide by - for now. And if it's the easiest, Eames sees no reason for an alternative.
"A trade," he continues, but he figures if Arthur has thought of it then Arthur has done his research. He's had all day, after all, to go over the processes in between whatever he busied himself with from when Eames left the apartment to finding him on the beach. He couldn't have been here the entire time, no, it hardly seems productive enough. "What would you even give?"
Bewildering is one way to put it, and honestly the only reason Arthur can put any stock into the 'research' he's done is that he's sitting here right now, talking, without a pulse, without a breath, without life; so if he was looking for proof of the impossible, in short, he's it. He just didn't expect it to be true in any lasting capacity, but that too is water under the bridge - a line not crossed so much as drawn over, choppy and directionless.
Arthur flicks a particularly intrusive grain of sand off of his knee.
"Don't know," he pauses, eyes narrowing on the motion of the water out ahead. It certainly looks real. Everything here does, even the things Arthur strictly according to his own reality knows cannot be. What he says next has the nearly droll tone of someone who can't decide whether he's bored or amused or both; Arthur is neither, which as often in these cases means he's distancing, but he has to in order to be able to do anything about it at all. "I can't fly, can't really do anything that seems like it'd be worth..." he trails off, stops the habit of his inhale and exhale, thinks. "I don't know," he repeats eventually, but it sounds more like, I'll figure it out. The implications of this are hard to miss, that he is going to find something to trade. A few people he asked - nobodies, people who liked him enough to talk to him but probably forgot about him even as they turned away back to their own affairs - mentioned they had heard of deals involving all manner of things - from memories to senses to yes, abilities.
He keeps returning to how unbelievable this all is but every time he does, he just checks for his own heartbeat, blinks and thinks: or not.
Or not.
That's the thing about reality, really - you've nothing special about you, and if that's what you strive to have out of life (some sort of unique individualism that the youth revel in) then you'll find yourself rather disappointed. It's dreams that set them apart from anyone else, the creations they make there that they'll never be able to do in the real world, where a man can decide to be a gentleman thief of sorts yet still have a family to go home to, where Eames can pose as a woman and sashay about in four inch heels if he so desires, where Arthur explodes into an environment uncontrolled by anything other than the tether on his violence - no fear, no regrets, the single mindedness that comes from mowing down waves of projections from a helicopter (which, were he not to have, would only leave him with a rubber band and a stick of gum).
There's nothing about themselves that would be spectacular enough to trade for a life, Eames thinks, but maybe the thing that makes them as such to begin with.
"Last I was here," he starts, calculative because he knows Arthur is going to be angry he didn't bring this up the moment they fell into the fountain, "you traded your totem in for the PASIV. Now, I'm not certain whether or not the deities took it back when we all left, but if they didn't." Well, maybe. Trade in reality for the PASIV, trade the PASIV for the reality of a heartbeat. Life works like totems, don't they? In some manner, what you choose to believe is what you create for yourself.
"We could try that."
True to form, Arthur's head snaps around, which he realizes is an erroneous movement in that had he snapped it just a bit harder he may have had it snapping clean to the side. The delights of being dead. Readjusting, he turns the whole of his torso, which brings him closer, and he's not breathing anymore - just silent and staring and wondering exactly what possessed Eames, that he thought not mentioning this initially was fine, wasn't important. Or at least, could wait.
"You had--" he stops, shakes his head, has to look away. "Why didn't y--" he can't seem to complete his sentences, so he just stops, shoving his hands into the sand and focusing on the friction, wishing it would feel cold or warm or anything, anything but the nothing at least. He thinks about trading his totem, about handing over the token that doesn't seem to work anyway. There is a practicality to it that he can appreciate even if his stomach remembers how it is to lurch and his chest reminds him that he isn't breathing but a tightness is possible. What few rules they had laid out for themselves, at the beginning of the dreamshare, and then later at the beginning of something more criminal, don't hold here, and Arthur keeps having to remember. Almost he could laugh at himself; as if death wasn't enough to drive it home.
When he finds his voice again, he tucks away his frayed edges with a scowl directed at the waterline, not looking at Eames, not looking anywhere he can give too much away without meaning to, sifting one hand back up and resting it on his knee.
"Even if they didn't," he sighs, "Do you really think that'd be enough?"
Arthur doesn't, and that much isn't something worth hiding, so he doesn't try. It appeals to him, to view it with a weigh on pessimism, as he perceives strategies and plans for jobs, because it's the best way to temper other things, things like hope and the difference between likely and maybe, maybe not.
There's a tightness in Eames' spine at the way Arthur jerks his body around like he has no control over it anylonger, the way he stops breathing as he stares at him - and it's now that Eames truly thinks as him as something that should be at the bottom of a casket. He can't decide if he prefers to have him around or at the bottom of a casket, like this, whether or not he would either choose to grieve a little bit or find too much reprieve in the fact that at least, were he buried, he wouldn't be able to look at him like that. Eames is never afraid to look people straight in the eye but Arthur is not quite a person right now, and he can't pretend otherwise, so he has to look away even if Arthur is doing the same anyway.
"I didn't think of whether or not it'd still be here," he clarifies, because he wasn't really thinking of it at all. Natural dream, as it were, why would they need the construct of the PASIV? And so soon after they had received it, they had left. It was impossible to say whether or not it would operate the way it was meant to, only present as something to have that was familiar, to work as a comparison between a level down and here - but offer no real clues as for escape, if kicks didn't work.
"It's difficult to say," Eames offers lightly, shifting to fold his legs underneath him lotus style, running a hand over the knuckles of his opposite and pressing until each one pops comfortably. "There's no harm in the offer, is there? If they decline, then at least we've found the PASIV for you to amuse yourself with in the meantime."
Peripherally, Arthur can tell when Eames looks away, notices because he knows Eames well enough to recognize a tick of motion that does not quite match up. Cast out of the light, even Eames' eyes shade themselves a black that gleams in juxtaposition with more natural shadows, and for a moment they're strangers. Under his breath, he stifles some kind of sigh or word; he's not sure which but it feels like something he could take or leave. A hand raised to the back of his neck, he doesn't press, just lets it rest there before letting it fall to his side again and leaning back, making him the one reclining this time, sand in his hair and under his collar already.
"For me to be amused with. Great," he says after a few long moments, closing his eyes to greet a different kind of dark, though he imagines he can feel the moonlight on his eyelids - not that he could while he was alive, but not being able to feel anything has him conceiving of feeling things one can't feel to begin with. Again Arthur wonders if Eames only thinks of him as a projection, which would be ironic considering their argument earlier when Arthur accused him of being one himself; but how do they prove it one way or the other? They could sit down, hash out a time line between them, if they were either of them straightforward about masochism, but they're not and they won't. Arthur could say things only Arthur should know - not some projection however well created; Eames could do the same. They could test each other, they could make blind guesses and catch each other out in the lies.
But that's never really been their way and Arthur is dead and no amount of proving what's real and what's not is changing that for him in the here and now.
So then, something else.
The PASIV.
Or if not that, then...well, he blinks his eyes open to the broadness of the sky. He'll think of something. That's what he's supposed to be good at, besides - improvising - and now isn't the time to approach the exception.
Maybe no time really is.