(no subject)
Sometimes I think Weetbix ads have brainwashed us into thinking that sunny days at the beach are more important than they really are. People have died, property is damaged, crops and livelihoods are ruined but the most vocal complaints I'm hearing are people who want a tan.
Also, I did this.
Title: oh it’s a damned fine game
Fandom: Inception
Polyship: Ariadne/Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG
Summary: For the prompt: Sometimes the dream world isn't an escape or a job. It's just one massive game of Calvin ball.
Disclaimer: If I owned this movie, it would make even less sense.
When she sees him across the lecture hall, smiling and watching, she stumbles on the stairs. The light from the windows, perfect yellow parallelograms, flashes in her eyes. She feels the hollow yawning of space and thinks, I’ll wake up now.
Instead, she hits the ground, palms first, books flying.
The lecturer lets out a little shriek and runs to help her, but he’s already there. He presses a handkerchief to her grazed hand and, in French, charms the lecturer.
She didn’t hit her head, but she might have a concussion, because the first thing she says is “Who carries handkerchiefs?”
He smiles again, wide and wicked. “Gentlemen and thieves, darling.”
She had expected it to be Arthur.
~
Arthur, apparently, is in Poland, negotiating.
At a cafe with excellent baguettes, Eames hands her a phone. The line, as Arthur explains the job, is startlingly clear, as though he’s standing next to her.
“We need you.”
Her eyes slide to Eames, who is examining his nails with studied and utterly unbelievable disinterest.
“I appreciate the thought and all, but I’m three weeks from the presentation of my design thesis. I would like to have some kind of qualification I can put on a CV.”
Ariadne’s not completely sure why she’s fighting this.
“We’ll be done in two weeks. If not, Eames can write your CV.” She can hear something, some edge of amusement. Her assignment has been ready for a week, and she suspects he’s aware of this.
“You’ll need to spell check it,” she says. Eames lifts an eyebrow.
“I’ll see you soon,” the amusement now overflowing, rich. She holds out the phone. Eames takes her hand, brushing his thumb over the graze from the lecture room floor.
Her heart stutters.
Still looking at her hand, he says “He didn’t tell you the whole truth, I imagine.”
“No one ever does.”
The waitress delivers coffee. Eames lets go, with a flourish. She adds four sugars, for something to do.
“What he neglected to mention, perhaps, is our reputation. A lie of omission. Even though Cobb is retired, we carry his legacy of being the insane, ambitious and rather dangerous crew. Sins of the father and all that. Not many architects want to work with us.”
“That’s,” she frowns, “not actually comforting at all.”
“Ah, but I’ve not told you the second part.” He sips his coffee like an aristocrat in a stage play, perfect timing. “He misses you.”
The bishop is at her apartment, so she carefully remembers exactly how they got here. She runs through the events of the day: shower, toast, bus, lecture, Eames, he had offered his elbow, they had taken two lefts and decided not to cross the Pont de Nuef because of the baguettes here.
Eames laughs.
~
She falls asleep in the taxi from the airport.
There’s a clockwork counterweight bridge, made entirely of glass. What’s the point of that? she thinks, and the dream shifts to a picnic on a hill before a city that looks a little like London, a little like Chicago. She tries to count how many hands she has and wakes up.
Arthur is at the taxi’s open door, bent at the waist, reaching toward her. Eames has a hand on her shoulder and one tucked behind her knee.
Arthur’s hand falls.
“We were going to carry you,” he offers. They stay like that, for a moment, and the taxi driver clears his throat.
Eames pays him while Arthur gets her suitcase. On the sidewalk he smiles at her, with the corner of his mouth but mostly his eyes.
“She still dreams, you know.” Eames stands beside her as the taxi wheezes away.
She tilts her face up to the pale sky, the rough edged city blocks and accusatory church spires. It’s a heavy sky, but she feels light as air.
~
“Only two levels?” she asks.
“Only two?” echoes Eddie, incredulous.
Eames snorts, face half covered by his hand.
“Most extractions operate on one level of dreaming.” Arthur closes a manilla folder, leans very slightly toward her across the Iron Curtain office table. “Two at the most, three very very rarely.”
“She doesn’t even know about simple extractions? This isn’t daycare, Arthur.” Eddie swings her braids over her shoulder. She’s the extractor, in a disarmingly purple blazer and incredibly sensible shoes.
“Cobb had good things to say and we trust his judgement,” Jacob lays a hand over Eddie’s, rehashing a familiar discussion. An extractor married to a chemist: it’s very common, according to Eames, marrying within the profession. He turns to them, tone dropping from the domestic to the professional. “But she is very young.”
This is a test. Someone wearing shoes that sensible, someone who came recommended by Dom, wouldn’t be so dramatic.
She meets Eddie’s gaze. “I’ll show you.” Arthur’s smiling, and though she can’t see him, she knows Eames is too.
~
She takes them to London/Chicago, all waterfronts and elevated trains and underground pathways tiled in grey and white. She includes endless staircases and puts the river in the sky and leads them round and round the labirynth.
“No one’s looking at us,” Arthur says behind her ear, as water slides by overhead. She wants to laugh, but Eddie comes around the corner, trailed by Eames.
“We lost them.”
“Of course we did.” Eames winks as Eddie holsters a gun.
“Well, then.” Eddie inclines her head. She does the same thing when they wake up in the office. “I’d hate to have you on the other side.”
“That’s high praise,” says Jacob, with a sorry shrug and fond familiar look.
“Of course it is,” Eames echoes as he stands out of his chair. “She’s here because she is the best.”
“I thought it was because I’m the only architect who’ll work with you?" It’s meant as a joke, but Arthur is clipped, suddenly, and Eames looks like a child caught in a lie.
Eddie looks between them and offers Ariadne self defense lessons.
~
Eddie does start teaching her hand to hand, but Eames takes over.
He squares off and shows her judo sweeps, triangle holds, how to use everything as a weapon.
“You’ve got to get the dirty stuff, too.” Eddie rolls her eyes and offers an out in the form of more krav maga. Ariadne decides that she’ll only worry when he stops communicating entirely in innuendo.
~
She starts to worry on a Monday morning. When he suggests that Arthur should teach her how to handle a gun, it takes her a moment to grasp that he actually thinks she should know how to handle a gun, and actually thinks Arthur would be a good teacher.
Arthur is also surprised by this. He’s not got a lot of tells, but they are there. Eames is sort of wandering away, toward the whiteboard.
“What happened to your last architect?”
“Nothing that will happen to you,” says Eames, quickly. It's the most solid thing she’s heard him say. He’s still facing in the other direction.
“I can teach you.” Arthur's looking at Eames’ back as he says this, but turns to her, focuses everything on her. “If you want me to.”
“No,” she smiles, because it's not a rejection. That's exactly not what it is. “That’s OK.”
~
It’s busy, complicated work; less complicated than the Fischer job, but they have less time.
“You really were thrown in the deep end,” says Jacob, wide eyed. Eddie and Arthur are in the dream, the first layer, based on photographs and notes on a summer house. The notes are Arthur’s, they must be, listing every fabric, smell and light fall.
They’re sleeping on dusty couches, Jacob in a swivel chair, Ariadne behind what might have been a kitchen table, covered in old scratches, new blueprints and model parts.
It’s all very domestic, this little set up, in that surreal way dreams can never manage exactly right.
“It didn’t feel like that,” she presses the plywood into the glue and waits. “It felt like exactly what I was always meant to do.”
The door bangs open. “Honeys, I’m ho-ome!” Eames calls. He lifts Arthur’s feet from the couch, sits, drops them in his lap.
“Good sedative, this.” He taps the top of Arthur’s shoe. Jacob is diffident. He’s very careful, really, to seem harmless.
“So what am I building for the second level?” Ariadne props up the finished model.
“Oh, darling, you will love this.”
~
The target is a middle aged financial maven with a soft spot for Carnevale. She gets to make an endless corner of Venice, fill it with gloaming canals and winking masks.
By the time Arthur and Eddie wake up, she has two notebooks filled with ideas.
Arthur immediately notices his shoelaces are tied together. Eames is making tea.
~
Eames will be dreaming the first level, the mark the second. She takes them both into the second after teaching them the paths because they need to know. Because it’s significantly more complicated on the inside. Because the maze is not just walls, it’s people too. It’s a waltz.
Eames is wearing a red mask and a suit patterned in yellow diamonds. Arthur is all in black and white. She counts them out and they start to dance, Arthur with one of his constructs, Eames’ hand light on her back.
It’s a matter of timing, to cross the room, step in time, to exit when and where you need to. Behind the labirynthine lock of dancers, that’s the perfect place to hide secrets.
They don’t talk as they cross the room, but Eames is keeping time by tapping his fingers against her spine.
They stop by the safe, and Eames says “Do you think it’s got Arthur’s secrets in it?” with an entirely delighted smile and dark eyes.
She has to raise herself up on tiptoe to reach his mouth, but it’s worth it. He kisses with his feet planted and his hands spread at her waist.
A pair of dancers crash into them. And another. Someone pushes her to the wall and her mask slips. She tugs it up as she spins and sees Arthur, ducking away.
“Ah,” Eames tugs her into a room she designed exactly for this purpose and reaches for a gun. “Stupid bugger’s gone and got the wrong end of the stick.” He cocks the slide. “No imagination at all.”
She twists his hand away, as Eddie taught her. “You haven’t talked about this? At all?”
“Talking’s not really our strong point, love.”
“You idiots,” she breathes as she reaches out to the walls, the floor, the stairs she saw Arthur running up, the cherubim and Corinthian column tops, smoothing them together.
She is the architect. She can build the rules.
Now, it's the three of them in a room with no doors, no windows.
Eames raises his mask. “What did you just do?”
“I just shifted some space. Doesn’t matter, we need to talk.”
Arthur stares around him, mask already dangling from his hand. “Just shifted space. In an extremely complicated pattern, very quickly and very cleanly.”
Eames is looking at the vaulted ceiling. “Ariadne, we should pay you more.”
“We should talk, more. Eames?” Arthur’s face is flat again. Eames looks at him, at her.
He rolls his eyes, seizes Arthur by the frilly shirt front and kisses him. Arthur grabs at his collar in return. Ariadne finds herself fascinated by the tendons in their necks and wrists, the push and pull of tension in their faces.
Arthur breaks away, staring at her, almost asking permission. Eames lets go, brushing down the shirt he had rumpled.
“Ariadne, anything you’d care to add?”
“Shut up.” She steps between them, and realises she doesn’t know what to say either. “Hi. Arthur.”
Eames snorts that laugh again. Arthur, very slowly, starts to smile. It’s a gift. “Hello.”
“Well, kiss her, then.”
She was turning to tell Eames to shut up again, so his lips landed on her ear. He kisses up, along her hairline, down her cheek, her lips, chaste.
She closes her eyes and raises her hands to his shoulders and then he kisses her with intent, pressing her back into Eames, who laughs and runs his hands around her ribs -
They wake up.
“There was some odd activity toward the end,” said Jacob, sliding the canula out of her arm. “Were you attacked?”
“She was showing us some new techniques. Confusing at first, but impressive.” Arthur is rolling his wrist, already on his feet.
“Confusing at first.” Eames stretches, cat-like. “Listen to him. Like he had any idea what was going on.”
Arthur is looking at his watch. “Eames, do you want to help me and Ariadne at this meeting or not?”
“A meeting?” He claps, once, and beams at Jacob. “Well, needs must.” He strolls out the door. Arthur picks up his jacket and finally, finally looks at Ariadne.
“Ready?” Apparently, everyone was allowed to change the rules.
So, she pushes the emergency stop in the elevator.
~
Later, Eames says, “The pair of you really are insuperably attractive, you know.”
“Insuperably?” she feels, rather than hears, Arthur say.
“Oh yes. Separately you are both, of course, lovely, but together, particularly like this,” he drags his hand up over Ariadne’s back, along Arthur’s ribs, and covers his own eyes, “I feel I should avert my gaze, lest all this beauty damage my retinas.”
Arthur shifts the arm trapped between them; Ariadne anticipates it and curls her hand around Eames’ wrist, tugging until his face is clear. He keeps his eyes squinted shut, smiling.
“You’re very poetic when you’re naked,” Arthur says.
“Freer body, freer mind.” She traces an eyebrow, the folds of his eyelid twitching beneath her fingertips.
“That’s a bold claim,” Arthur says. “I’ll need more data.” She runs her fingers along his cheekbone, down his nose, tapping his lips. “Evidentiary proof.”
He opens his eyes. Arthur’s heart races under her ear.
“It would be my pleasure.”
She twists up to kiss Arthur, then Eames. “Look at you two. Talking. Was that so hard?”
Eames laughs until Arthur rolls them over him. The light through the window is cheap and grey and perfect.
Also, I did this.
Title: oh it’s a damned fine game
Fandom: Inception
Polyship: Ariadne/Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG
Summary: For the prompt: Sometimes the dream world isn't an escape or a job. It's just one massive game of Calvin ball.
Disclaimer: If I owned this movie, it would make even less sense.
When she sees him across the lecture hall, smiling and watching, she stumbles on the stairs. The light from the windows, perfect yellow parallelograms, flashes in her eyes. She feels the hollow yawning of space and thinks, I’ll wake up now.
Instead, she hits the ground, palms first, books flying.
The lecturer lets out a little shriek and runs to help her, but he’s already there. He presses a handkerchief to her grazed hand and, in French, charms the lecturer.
She didn’t hit her head, but she might have a concussion, because the first thing she says is “Who carries handkerchiefs?”
He smiles again, wide and wicked. “Gentlemen and thieves, darling.”
She had expected it to be Arthur.
~
Arthur, apparently, is in Poland, negotiating.
At a cafe with excellent baguettes, Eames hands her a phone. The line, as Arthur explains the job, is startlingly clear, as though he’s standing next to her.
“We need you.”
Her eyes slide to Eames, who is examining his nails with studied and utterly unbelievable disinterest.
“I appreciate the thought and all, but I’m three weeks from the presentation of my design thesis. I would like to have some kind of qualification I can put on a CV.”
Ariadne’s not completely sure why she’s fighting this.
“We’ll be done in two weeks. If not, Eames can write your CV.” She can hear something, some edge of amusement. Her assignment has been ready for a week, and she suspects he’s aware of this.
“You’ll need to spell check it,” she says. Eames lifts an eyebrow.
“I’ll see you soon,” the amusement now overflowing, rich. She holds out the phone. Eames takes her hand, brushing his thumb over the graze from the lecture room floor.
Her heart stutters.
Still looking at her hand, he says “He didn’t tell you the whole truth, I imagine.”
“No one ever does.”
The waitress delivers coffee. Eames lets go, with a flourish. She adds four sugars, for something to do.
“What he neglected to mention, perhaps, is our reputation. A lie of omission. Even though Cobb is retired, we carry his legacy of being the insane, ambitious and rather dangerous crew. Sins of the father and all that. Not many architects want to work with us.”
“That’s,” she frowns, “not actually comforting at all.”
“Ah, but I’ve not told you the second part.” He sips his coffee like an aristocrat in a stage play, perfect timing. “He misses you.”
The bishop is at her apartment, so she carefully remembers exactly how they got here. She runs through the events of the day: shower, toast, bus, lecture, Eames, he had offered his elbow, they had taken two lefts and decided not to cross the Pont de Nuef because of the baguettes here.
Eames laughs.
~
She falls asleep in the taxi from the airport.
There’s a clockwork counterweight bridge, made entirely of glass. What’s the point of that? she thinks, and the dream shifts to a picnic on a hill before a city that looks a little like London, a little like Chicago. She tries to count how many hands she has and wakes up.
Arthur is at the taxi’s open door, bent at the waist, reaching toward her. Eames has a hand on her shoulder and one tucked behind her knee.
Arthur’s hand falls.
“We were going to carry you,” he offers. They stay like that, for a moment, and the taxi driver clears his throat.
Eames pays him while Arthur gets her suitcase. On the sidewalk he smiles at her, with the corner of his mouth but mostly his eyes.
“She still dreams, you know.” Eames stands beside her as the taxi wheezes away.
She tilts her face up to the pale sky, the rough edged city blocks and accusatory church spires. It’s a heavy sky, but she feels light as air.
~
“Only two levels?” she asks.
“Only two?” echoes Eddie, incredulous.
Eames snorts, face half covered by his hand.
“Most extractions operate on one level of dreaming.” Arthur closes a manilla folder, leans very slightly toward her across the Iron Curtain office table. “Two at the most, three very very rarely.”
“She doesn’t even know about simple extractions? This isn’t daycare, Arthur.” Eddie swings her braids over her shoulder. She’s the extractor, in a disarmingly purple blazer and incredibly sensible shoes.
“Cobb had good things to say and we trust his judgement,” Jacob lays a hand over Eddie’s, rehashing a familiar discussion. An extractor married to a chemist: it’s very common, according to Eames, marrying within the profession. He turns to them, tone dropping from the domestic to the professional. “But she is very young.”
This is a test. Someone wearing shoes that sensible, someone who came recommended by Dom, wouldn’t be so dramatic.
She meets Eddie’s gaze. “I’ll show you.” Arthur’s smiling, and though she can’t see him, she knows Eames is too.
~
She takes them to London/Chicago, all waterfronts and elevated trains and underground pathways tiled in grey and white. She includes endless staircases and puts the river in the sky and leads them round and round the labirynth.
“No one’s looking at us,” Arthur says behind her ear, as water slides by overhead. She wants to laugh, but Eddie comes around the corner, trailed by Eames.
“We lost them.”
“Of course we did.” Eames winks as Eddie holsters a gun.
“Well, then.” Eddie inclines her head. She does the same thing when they wake up in the office. “I’d hate to have you on the other side.”
“That’s high praise,” says Jacob, with a sorry shrug and fond familiar look.
“Of course it is,” Eames echoes as he stands out of his chair. “She’s here because she is the best.”
“I thought it was because I’m the only architect who’ll work with you?" It’s meant as a joke, but Arthur is clipped, suddenly, and Eames looks like a child caught in a lie.
Eddie looks between them and offers Ariadne self defense lessons.
~
Eddie does start teaching her hand to hand, but Eames takes over.
He squares off and shows her judo sweeps, triangle holds, how to use everything as a weapon.
“You’ve got to get the dirty stuff, too.” Eddie rolls her eyes and offers an out in the form of more krav maga. Ariadne decides that she’ll only worry when he stops communicating entirely in innuendo.
~
She starts to worry on a Monday morning. When he suggests that Arthur should teach her how to handle a gun, it takes her a moment to grasp that he actually thinks she should know how to handle a gun, and actually thinks Arthur would be a good teacher.
Arthur is also surprised by this. He’s not got a lot of tells, but they are there. Eames is sort of wandering away, toward the whiteboard.
“What happened to your last architect?”
“Nothing that will happen to you,” says Eames, quickly. It's the most solid thing she’s heard him say. He’s still facing in the other direction.
“I can teach you.” Arthur's looking at Eames’ back as he says this, but turns to her, focuses everything on her. “If you want me to.”
“No,” she smiles, because it's not a rejection. That's exactly not what it is. “That’s OK.”
~
It’s busy, complicated work; less complicated than the Fischer job, but they have less time.
“You really were thrown in the deep end,” says Jacob, wide eyed. Eddie and Arthur are in the dream, the first layer, based on photographs and notes on a summer house. The notes are Arthur’s, they must be, listing every fabric, smell and light fall.
They’re sleeping on dusty couches, Jacob in a swivel chair, Ariadne behind what might have been a kitchen table, covered in old scratches, new blueprints and model parts.
It’s all very domestic, this little set up, in that surreal way dreams can never manage exactly right.
“It didn’t feel like that,” she presses the plywood into the glue and waits. “It felt like exactly what I was always meant to do.”
The door bangs open. “Honeys, I’m ho-ome!” Eames calls. He lifts Arthur’s feet from the couch, sits, drops them in his lap.
“Good sedative, this.” He taps the top of Arthur’s shoe. Jacob is diffident. He’s very careful, really, to seem harmless.
“So what am I building for the second level?” Ariadne props up the finished model.
“Oh, darling, you will love this.”
~
The target is a middle aged financial maven with a soft spot for Carnevale. She gets to make an endless corner of Venice, fill it with gloaming canals and winking masks.
By the time Arthur and Eddie wake up, she has two notebooks filled with ideas.
Arthur immediately notices his shoelaces are tied together. Eames is making tea.
~
Eames will be dreaming the first level, the mark the second. She takes them both into the second after teaching them the paths because they need to know. Because it’s significantly more complicated on the inside. Because the maze is not just walls, it’s people too. It’s a waltz.
Eames is wearing a red mask and a suit patterned in yellow diamonds. Arthur is all in black and white. She counts them out and they start to dance, Arthur with one of his constructs, Eames’ hand light on her back.
It’s a matter of timing, to cross the room, step in time, to exit when and where you need to. Behind the labirynthine lock of dancers, that’s the perfect place to hide secrets.
They don’t talk as they cross the room, but Eames is keeping time by tapping his fingers against her spine.
They stop by the safe, and Eames says “Do you think it’s got Arthur’s secrets in it?” with an entirely delighted smile and dark eyes.
She has to raise herself up on tiptoe to reach his mouth, but it’s worth it. He kisses with his feet planted and his hands spread at her waist.
A pair of dancers crash into them. And another. Someone pushes her to the wall and her mask slips. She tugs it up as she spins and sees Arthur, ducking away.
“Ah,” Eames tugs her into a room she designed exactly for this purpose and reaches for a gun. “Stupid bugger’s gone and got the wrong end of the stick.” He cocks the slide. “No imagination at all.”
She twists his hand away, as Eddie taught her. “You haven’t talked about this? At all?”
“Talking’s not really our strong point, love.”
“You idiots,” she breathes as she reaches out to the walls, the floor, the stairs she saw Arthur running up, the cherubim and Corinthian column tops, smoothing them together.
She is the architect. She can build the rules.
Now, it's the three of them in a room with no doors, no windows.
Eames raises his mask. “What did you just do?”
“I just shifted some space. Doesn’t matter, we need to talk.”
Arthur stares around him, mask already dangling from his hand. “Just shifted space. In an extremely complicated pattern, very quickly and very cleanly.”
Eames is looking at the vaulted ceiling. “Ariadne, we should pay you more.”
“We should talk, more. Eames?” Arthur’s face is flat again. Eames looks at him, at her.
He rolls his eyes, seizes Arthur by the frilly shirt front and kisses him. Arthur grabs at his collar in return. Ariadne finds herself fascinated by the tendons in their necks and wrists, the push and pull of tension in their faces.
Arthur breaks away, staring at her, almost asking permission. Eames lets go, brushing down the shirt he had rumpled.
“Ariadne, anything you’d care to add?”
“Shut up.” She steps between them, and realises she doesn’t know what to say either. “Hi. Arthur.”
Eames snorts that laugh again. Arthur, very slowly, starts to smile. It’s a gift. “Hello.”
“Well, kiss her, then.”
She was turning to tell Eames to shut up again, so his lips landed on her ear. He kisses up, along her hairline, down her cheek, her lips, chaste.
She closes her eyes and raises her hands to his shoulders and then he kisses her with intent, pressing her back into Eames, who laughs and runs his hands around her ribs -
They wake up.
“There was some odd activity toward the end,” said Jacob, sliding the canula out of her arm. “Were you attacked?”
“She was showing us some new techniques. Confusing at first, but impressive.” Arthur is rolling his wrist, already on his feet.
“Confusing at first.” Eames stretches, cat-like. “Listen to him. Like he had any idea what was going on.”
Arthur is looking at his watch. “Eames, do you want to help me and Ariadne at this meeting or not?”
“A meeting?” He claps, once, and beams at Jacob. “Well, needs must.” He strolls out the door. Arthur picks up his jacket and finally, finally looks at Ariadne.
“Ready?” Apparently, everyone was allowed to change the rules.
So, she pushes the emergency stop in the elevator.
~
Later, Eames says, “The pair of you really are insuperably attractive, you know.”
“Insuperably?” she feels, rather than hears, Arthur say.
“Oh yes. Separately you are both, of course, lovely, but together, particularly like this,” he drags his hand up over Ariadne’s back, along Arthur’s ribs, and covers his own eyes, “I feel I should avert my gaze, lest all this beauty damage my retinas.”
Arthur shifts the arm trapped between them; Ariadne anticipates it and curls her hand around Eames’ wrist, tugging until his face is clear. He keeps his eyes squinted shut, smiling.
“You’re very poetic when you’re naked,” Arthur says.
“Freer body, freer mind.” She traces an eyebrow, the folds of his eyelid twitching beneath her fingertips.
“That’s a bold claim,” Arthur says. “I’ll need more data.” She runs her fingers along his cheekbone, down his nose, tapping his lips. “Evidentiary proof.”
He opens his eyes. Arthur’s heart races under her ear.
“It would be my pleasure.”
She twists up to kiss Arthur, then Eames. “Look at you two. Talking. Was that so hard?”
Eames laughs until Arthur rolls them over him. The light through the window is cheap and grey and perfect.