Volta [1/2]

[weatherfront]

Artist: keelain
Word Count: 20,000
Rating: R overall
Pairings: Arthur/Eames
Notes: For inception_bang. Endless thanks to keelain, who pulled through wonderfully and blew my mind despite all the difficulties in her way, and to starbolin, whose phenomenal editing skills are directly responsible for every single thing you may happen to enjoy about this fic, and who also made an amazing mix for it. (Go download it now!) I shudder to think the wreck this would have been without their generosity and talent :'(
Summary: Ten months after a savage split, Arthur climbs down to pull Eames out of limbo.



00.

Seawater. Arthur gags on the taste. He struggles to his feet, the weight of his waterlogged clothes like a pendulum, pulling him back down into the surf. The sky is milky flat and bright, all sun.

Cobb said it would be, that he'd wake up on the shores of limbo with the ocean in his mouth. Cobb said a lot of things. Filling Arthur's half-hour drive with the vexed litany of his disapproval over the phone. You don't have to do this. You're not being objective right now. But Dom, that's just the way it is with me and Eames. Nearly a decade on each other's nerves, in each other's beds, under each other's skins, never for a moment managing anything close to objectivity.

Leaving Eames down here, lost in his own subconscious-- well, he would deserve it. A five-person team, four of them green, unprepared for the burden of Eames's bad blood. Eight years he'd spent screwing people over left and right. Did they expect him to have more friends than enemies? That a line a block long wouldn't spring up at the first chance to tamper with the compounds? Near-hysteria in the voice of the twenty-year-old architect: we can't figure out how anyone could have messed with it, no one else had access. And now he's been under for a couple hours already and the kick isn't working right--

"Why call me," asked Arthur, weary to the bone.

"Because," he said, "you and Eames--"

"We're not, anymore," said Arthur. "Your information's out of date."

"I-- I'm sorry," he said, and then driven bolder by the lack of recourse, "but you're in town, aren't you? Couldn't you just-- drop by, since you're close? We don't even know where the nearest qualified dreamer might be. He could be stuck down there for days, Jesus Christ. How long is that in limbo time? Please, you have to--"

Arthur didn't have to do shit. He swore as he tore his clothes off the hangers, fuck, with each shirt he threw into his suitcase. Fucking idiot. Motherfucker. What did Arthur expect out of this, anyway? For Eames to owe him something, to be overwhelmed with gratitude for his timely savior? To tug Eames out of limbo by the hand and straight into his own life again?

Disgusted at himself, Arthur slammed his suitcase closed, stormed down the hotel hallway toward the elevator. No, fuck that. Good fucking riddance. Arthur wasn't accustomed to begging, and besides, it was Eames who--

Forget it. Fair business and basic human decency, that was all this was, a favor as impersonal as a handful of dirty change. God, what the hell else could he do. In the half-basement studio, surrounded by the anxious greenhorns, Arthur stared down at the slack pause of Eames's face and was consumed with something altogether unpleasant. Too bitter to be sadness, too sharp to be regret. More than a little angry, at any rate.

Ten months, he thought. How nice of you to call, Eames.

He lay himself down on the dilapidated mattress, side by side with the slow rise and fall of Eames's chest. Under their weight, they dipped an inch toward each other, Eames's hand sliding down the incline, coming to rest against Arthur's thigh. Just like old times.

+



+

He drags himself onto the beach, against the pull of the waves and the sand breaking under his feet. It's sure as hell not seawater, that wash at the back of his throat. There's none of the acrid burn of sea salt in it. The taste is softer, sweeter, and thinner, something far more familiar than the ocean. Something suggestive and fraught.

Arthur grits his teeth when he realizes it-- tears, he thinks. It tastes like tears. Eames, that son of a bitch, subtle as a fucking hammer to the skull. He must have known Arthur was running a job nearby. If he knew where Eames was, Eames knew where he was.

Something about Eames's carelessness didn't add up. The haphazard team of rookies milling around him, an unnerving imprudence. Probably he hadn't courted the sabotage, that was too unlike him; but if it had been a mistake, a slip of his guard, what had kept him so distracted? What had been on his mind instead? Regardless of how he got there, by the time he understood where he'd ended up, Eames knew that Arthur would have to be the one to fetch him.

Here I am, your villain, thinks Arthur. He peels himself out of his sodden jacket, lets it drop into the water. The rest of him is heavy enough. I came down to get you. I'm not here for your guilting games.

There's no pier anywhere in sight, no boardwalk, and the smudge of buildings in the distance is a blur at best. It's impossible to guess how long it might take him to get to them, and what they would resolve themselves into, if he ever arrived. But with the cloying depth of the sea behind and desolation to either side of him, there's nowhere else for him to go but forward.

A path unwinds at his feet, unpaved but well-trodden enough to make out. It stretches toward the city. Arthur wonders if he's standing at the edge of a gigantic map, too large to read, vast Peruvian sketches in the sand that spell out wherever Eames is huddled away. Eight years a dreamer and he's never stepped foot anywhere like limbo, too unbridled and eloquent for him to wade through alone. The empty air hums, restless with potential.

And so hostile. Under Eames's watch, the expanse seems a weapon. It's enemy terrain, maybe with entire mountains left to climb. Arthur wants a ghost on his shoulder, the warm weight of something watching over him, if only to keep him company. Something more attentive than dice, at least. There's always the thought of Cobb; he knows what it's like here, doesn't he, knows how to stop the dream from getting in. It wouldn't hurt to keep him in mind.

But if he were allowed just one hand to take him through this minefield-- he keeps coming back to someone else. To Mal, in her full imperial benevolence, before she was lost to him. She never really woke up, is the way Cobb put it, but that shard of limbo lodged in her, wouldn't it have pushed out something of her awake? Some bright-eyed part of her, displaced like a crest of water swelling over the edge of a tub. She might be down here still, listening for someone to call for her help. Arthur thinks of her drifting in the ether, a weary owl winging through the void, waiting for someone to need her.

Do you remember me? thinks Arthur. Be good to me a little while longer, Mal. Tell me where he is. Sing me to him.

+

01.

The city, when he gets to it, isn't much of a city at all. Most of the buildings hardly deserve the name, silhouettes thrown together in dry, desert sand, crumbling at the edges and trickling to the ground in a hushed hourglass whisper. Everything golden, decaying and useless. It's the work of a mind too impatient to linger for long, uninterested in fleshing out architectural minutiae. Quick to bore. All Eames.

Stranded amidst terracotta facades and stray brick pockmarks, there's a single metal door set in concrete. Arthur puts a hand to it, his palm bitten with the acetate edge of his die, and pushes-- it swings open, the only real thing in a counterfeit landscape.

On the other side of the door, he finds a warehouse. Seen one warehouse, you've seen them all, but this one does feel familiar. The lights are off, only the thin sun filtering through a latticework of grime-darkened windows. The floor has been cleared of shelves, populated instead with a setup of shoddy desks and lawn chairs. The whole layout has his touch to it, only, he can't remember ever having worked a job here. Arthur runs a finger across the dusty top of a filing cabinet.

"Maybe that's your mistake," someone says. "Assuming that you'd remember everything."

Arthur takes a step back, hand shooting inside his jacket. Do firearms function as expected, down this deep? He closes his grip around the pistol there, tilting his elbow like he's about to draw it out, and there's laughter from a far corner of the room. That emphysema rattle, he recognizes.

"Madigan," he says, "what are you doing here?"

"Where do you think you are?" asks Madigan. "What do you think I'm doing here?"

He lowers himself off the edge of the desk, stepping out into the grid of squalid sunlight. Eames's recast of Madigan, of course, only a projection, but authentic down to the drag of his left knee, the white beginning to speckle through his stubble. The only kind of detailing that Eames gives a shit about.

At least, that explains why Arthur doesn't remember the job. He never got a chance to run it.

+

The autumn that Arthur turned twenty-two, Madigan was itching to make something of himself. He had no outfit of his own. Even his PASIV was on loan from his superiors, who were perennially at odds with him as to what cut he deserved of his meager take. Aimlessly ambitious, like Fagin among the urchins, Madigan turned to the army to recruit for his eventual coup.

Arthur never meant to become a criminal. But the army wouldn't let him build and Madigan did, with the ratty first-generation PASIV that Arthur thought was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. The wrong side of the tracks turned out to be no stranger than the straight and narrow, and so it was that Arthur fell in with the wrong crowd, free in his forest of skyscrapers.

Madigan was small fry, in over his head with regard to the finer aspects of dreamshare. But he was an avuncular mountebank who showed Arthur the rudimentary ropes and left him the space to figure out the rest for himself, and when he floated the possibility of mutiny, think of what you could do with your very own PASIV, Arthur was unmoored, thirsty for something or someone to be loyal to.

That was their first and last job together. Madigan, Arthur, and a two-bit forger Madigan had scrounged up from somewhere overseas that wouldn't be joining them until the day of.

"Twenty-five, fresh out of the army just like you," said Madigan. "You've never seen a forger work, have you? It's really something, Arthur, you're in for a treat."

Yes, well. No points for guessing who.

Arthur was tasked with lifting the PASIV from Madigan's bosses, and considering his inexperience in any form of theft up until that point, he was lucky to have made it out after only getting shot once. Knowing his way around guns as he did, maybe he ought to have dispatched a few of them in turn; then again, it was a hell of a lot harder to aim at civilians with a bullet already embedded in you.

It was fucking pouring, the whole world green. He'd lost his phone somewhere. One hand pressed to the searing pain in his shoulder and the other clutching the glossy handle of a second-gen PASIV that he would have risked a few more bullets for, Arthur staggered three miles to the warehouse, the trail of blood behind him washed away by the torrential sheet rain. Good thing I lost them, thought Arthur, and had no idea how he did it, not least because it was taking all his concentration just to keep himself upright.

He made the third mile bent double, the bottom of the PASIV case scraping along the asphalt. It could have gone either way. He knew how to get back, but the rain and the blood leaking out of him blurred each street corner with the next. Providence had as much to do with it as practice when he threw his good shoulder against a door and it turned out to be the right one, the musty warehouse smell suffocating him, the glare of fluorescent lights blinding him all at once. The sudden deafening absence of the roaring rain. Like the runner to Marathon with his duty performed, he said something, and passed out.

+

Madigan was dozing in a chair next to his bed. Too timid to be unscrupulous. Wincing, Arthur tried to shift his shoulder into view, and immediately regretted it.

"PASIV," he said, blearily.

"Got it," said Madigan, and held it up for him. "You're up a little too late to catch Eames, though."

"Who's Eames?" asked Arthur.

"He was in the backseat with you while I drove you here," said Madigan. "Kept you from bleeding out and everything. He stayed until this morning. Our forger, remember? You didn't see him in the warehouse?"

"I didn't see much," said Arthur. "Where is this, anyway? Fuck, for fuck's sake, I need more morphine."

"You're okay," said Madigan. "You're with a doctor."

"Don't bullshit me, Madigan," said Arthur, closing his eyes to the fleur-de-lis pattern of the wallpaper, the mahogany posts of the bedframe. "Like hell this is a hospital."

"Not all doctors walk the reputable path," said Madigan, "or are licensed to practice. Anyway, I know the guy, he split with my bosses a couple years back. You can trust him. Only he doesn't like charity cases, and he did say that he was going to have to charge you extra for extra morphine. Listen, I know you're broke, I know I'm broke, but-- he's something of a dreamshare hobbyist, and he's willing to trade--"

"Over my dead body," said Arthur. "I'm never working with you again either way, you old bastard, but if you don't get me my morphine, I'm going to snitch on you and wring your neck myself."

"Okay," said Madigan. "Jesus Christ."

+

"Do you remember what you said," asks Madigan, "when you ran in through that door with the PASIV in your hand?"

"Was it something funny?" asks Arthur, though he knows the answer already. "I hope it was something funny."

"Let's leave, you said, like you were about to ask for the check," says Madigan. "Almost eight years ago, wasn't it? What a nestling you were back then. You've changed."

"I'm exactly the same," says Arthur. "So are you here to tell me about how Eames dragged me to the doctor, kept sleepless watch over me for the better part of three days, and generally did a bang-up job of saving my sorry ass? Because I've really had enough of that story, to be honest. It's one of his favorites."

Every damn time. Eames put his fingers to the raised edge of skin, tracing the scar slowly like Arthur was something he'd brought back to life. Like Arthur was something he'd created. Eames held him down by his arms, made him listen as he said, I had you on my back while Madigan got the car. God, you were so cold, I was half afraid that you were dead already--

Eames, said Arthur, pushing up against him, this isn't really working for my libido.

And I had my jacket on you to keep you as warm as I could, said Eames. You bled straight through it, through your own jacket and your shirt, my shirt too, it was stained all over with your blood when I got you into the back seat. White as a sheet, you were. I tried to feel you for a pulse, and your fingers were fucking cold as ice while I fumbled with your wrist--

"Do I owe him something?" asks Arthur. "I've more than made up for it, since then. I've gotten him out of more scrapes than he can keep track of. Or does he think that if I felt beholden to him somehow, I'd try a bit harder to be what he wants? That I'd do a better job of pretending?"

"You really think that's why he put this warehouse here?" asks Madigan. "So that you could look at it and feel thankful? For Christ's sake, Arthur, he likes this story because that's how you two met. He likes it because that's how it started. Because ever since then, he's been a little in love with you."

"Of course," spits Arthur, a mouthful of the ache in his chest, because it's nothing he hasn't heard before. "Those precious, frantic five minutes when he thought I just didn't have it in me to run. Hoping I'd shake him free and dart right off as soon as the stitches were out."

"Just because you have some sort of trouble," says Madigan, "with letting people see you with your guard down--"

"You think that's what this is?" asks Arthur. "Jesus Christ, that's what Eames thinks I've been on about all this while? That I didn't want him to talk about that job because I fancied myself too good to get shot? Does he seriously think I'm that fucking stupid?"

"What else is your goddamn problem, then?" asks Madigan.

"I'm not here to chat with you," says Arthur, and breathes in, deep. "He's been down here for a while-- I need to get to him, Madigan. As fast as I can."

Madigan considers it. He leans back on his heels, his back sagging, Eames draining out of him, harmless and clueless again with the fire quenched. With nothing to rail against, Arthur deflates in turn. He shoves his hands back into his pockets, oddly bereft, digging his die into the meat of his thumb.

"Use the car outside," says Madigan. "The one we drove you to the doctor in."

"How do I know which road to take?" asks Arthur.

"There's only one road," says Madigan. "He didn't build anything he didn't want you to see. Keep driving, you'll get somewhere."

He'll get somewhere. Not necessarily where he wants to end up. Of course Eames wouldn't stop at just the one hurdle, not when he's had this much time to shape limbo to his own liking, to paint himself a fucking polyptych of resentment. How much time is this much time? Eames is the type to be readily lost, less concerned with stumbling free of a maze than with prying his way deeper into it, drawn to the ineffable weight of the Minotaur at its center. It shouldn't matter to Arthur; this whole mess is Eames's own doing, anyhow. But-- well, it's always hard to uproot someone that's taken hold in you, flower or strangler fig.

It takes time, Arthur is thinking, certainly longer than ten months, when a faint scent drifts by him. Something like lemon, sharp, there and gone too quick for him to follow. Scant as his memories of the warehouse are, he knows that's definitely out of place, too bright and fresh to be anything it has to offer. With one hand already on the doorknob, he looks over his shoulder to ask about it-- what's that smell?--

--but wordlessly, Madigan crusts over into sand right before his eyes, a pillar, like a lesser Midas has brushed against his back. His face swallowed last by the grains sweeping over his skin. And as Arthur watches, transfixed, tendrils of sand begin to creep across the walls, across every piece of furniture, until the whole room starts to shudder and cave under its own uncertain weight.

The doorknob crumbles in his grasp. Arthur pitches out of the warehouse through a curtain of sand, and a sudden gust of hot wind whips past him, nearly staggering him off his feet. He throws his arms up, lips drawn and eyes squeezed tight against the sand stinging his skin. The gale roars through his ears.

When he raises his head again, the land is a flat stretch straight to the horizon, all the makeshift buildings razed to the ground. The beaten path lies waiting at his feet. So this is what you do to the things you don't need anymore, he thinks, and looks around. Just him and a beat-up Ford Escort as far as he can see.

+

02.

One of Madigan's fuck-ups, they tagged him. Word spread fast. Arthur almost wished he hadn't kicked Madigan to the curb as quickly as he had, because at least with Madigan he would have been assured a career, small-time though it might have been. He would have had a rung to climb up on.

Otherwise work was slow to come by. Like any other industry, dreamshare was kind toward experience, toward a certain amount of age and accompanying sense. Any sort of formal training at all. No one adopts a dog straight out of a fighting ring, they told him. You've got the stench of the wrong kennel on you. But how am I supposed to smell like anything else, when none of you will take me in? What a lousy fucking metaphor. No, please stop asking, obviously I didn't bleed to death a couple months ago. Arthur had nothing, a toxic hired hand, even his PASIV still too hot to put to work.

Worse yet, the market was saturated with architects. Academics dipping their toes into the questionably legal waters, for a fast handful of cash or a taste of the forbidden before legislative loopholes closed in on them. The only way Arthur could run any job at all was to switch his position to point, drop his rates to rock bottom, and put himself out for rent at something close to half the going price.

That other one must be having a better time of it, he thought. Forgers are hard to come by.

He holed up in a studio and took to practicing on his own, loath to fall behind in a dry spell. Clocked more hours on the PASIV than he spent awake. Working point was a different set of skills from the boundlessness of building, called for a brutal physicality and a passion for the breakdown. Arthur found himself caught up in the rejection of things, further immersed in practicalities than the ornery idealism of dream architecture, and thought, with a distant understanding, maybe this is how people are made to change.

Resentful as he was of this theoretically fortunate and well-employed Eames, the long-lost classmate from his school of bad beginnings, Arthur only met him almost a year later when they were roped in together for something off the coast of somewhere. It was a beach resort. Madigan had put him in a suit for that first botched job, but at twenty-three he still itched in it like he'd itched in his dress blues, inside anything that wasn't made of denim or otherwise cotton. He showed up at the lobby in jeans, a bake sale t-shirt from high school.

"Jesus, Arthur," said Eames when he saw him. "Is this what you look like when you're casual?"

"I'm sorry," said Arthur, "do I know you?"

"Madigan's other fuck-up," said their extractor, snapping her nicotine gum.

"Oh, that," said Arthur, and extended his hand.

Exile has been kind to you, he thought. Here he was, then-- Eames, twenty-six, with none of the hungry impatience of the recently blacklisted, probably hired at several times what Arthur was making. Someone he had to run to catch up to. That proffered handshake was as much a challenge as it was a salutation, daring Eames to show him the smallest flicker of pity.

But listen. Regard is a thing easy enough to spot in the smallest of gestures. The right dip of a tilted head, the soft hesitation at the end of a question. What happened was that Eames had a rather nice handshake, and his palm was a warm weight, pressed against Arthur's. The curl of his fingers steady. Eames took his hand with the barest of tugs, like he wanted to see Arthur from closer up, like he wanted to peer into all of Arthur's corners and dust off the pieces of him left discarded along the way, hunting for treasure, polishing the burnished bronze of Arthur's scrap metal.

And for a moment, Arthur forgot to let go, lost in the face of someone so ready for him.

+

The years threw them together, job after job. A series of cities that Arthur didn't care to commit to memory, mad-lib encounters, on the tail of a different mark for each ephemeral rendezvous. Arthur remembers wisps-- what they were having for lunch, what the weather was like. The sudden hot streak of a flash of detail, like the muscles in Eames's jaw pulling tight. The nick of skin where he'd cut himself shaving. The sizzle of his cigarette, a burn down the length of Arthur's spine. The smell of the rain.

Delicious mud-thick coffee, overcast skies. Eames asked him about the suit he'd been wearing when they'd met, whether he still had it. There was some singeing around the bullet hole, Arthur told him, and the splash of blood turned out to be a bit troublesome for the dry cleaners. Eames didn't fight the sarcasm, only nodded and let it slide off of him, and Arthur wondered if Eames had read something into the bite that wasn't there. If Eames thought Arthur was uncomfortable with the reminder of the firefight, or worse, that he was scared. I only mean, you look good in button-downs, said Eames, simple as that. Sartorial advice. Just think about it. When he set down his cup, there was a spot of sludge on his upper lip.

+

An Italian bistro, balmy on the edge of autumn. I swear I can feel it, said Eames, I'm growing older by the minute. Isn't a life on the run better suited for a younger generation than mine? Do you know, there was a time I hardly believed jet lag would ever affect me. It was only half a joke, the way all his jokes were-- or half a joke, the way all his candor was. So what, said Arthur, biting into his sandwich, you want to settle down? This is too much excitement for you? Eames toyed with the condensation on his glass, guiding the beaded water droplets into a converging trickle. Then I'd have to earn a living somehow, he said, and my back's not what it used to be. Eames was twenty-six. That's not being old, said Arthur. That's needing exercise. He was wearing a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up past his elbows in the late dazzling glow of the sun. Well, what do you know about it, said Eames, good-naturedly.

+

Take-out deli containers, the magnolias beginning to bloom. Arthur had found someone suitably trustworthy yet disreputable enough to file off all the serial numbers tucked away in his PASIV. You wouldn't think it, said Arthur, but there are identifying markers branded onto every last piece of that machine. You have to take the whole thing apart, sand it and weld it, and then put it back together in working order. He was champagne-giddy with the future. You can use it on jobs now, can't you? asked Eames. Yeah, I've already got the word out, said Arthur. All of a sudden, I'm in demand. It feels odd. Eames worried a cherry tomato with the prongs of his fork and said, so you'll be building again? That's what you like best, isn't it? Which was true, Arthur hadn't forgotten. With the PASIV he had the edge up on most other architects, could go right back to building and never lack for work again, on the steady track to glory doing what he loved. But there was no rush-- so as long as he had the PASIV, he could schedule a comeback at his own leisure. He would slum it as point for just a little longer, because the thought of chasing after an architect's job made him feel like it was running from him, like it would drift to someone else if he didn't reach for it, and that wasn't true, was it? He could have it anytime he wanted it. His waiting was the proof. Later, he told Eames, I'll have plenty of time to get to that, and wondered how Eames knew what it was that he liked best.

+

Paper cones of roasted chestnuts, snow an inch deep. Have you been sleeping enough? asked Eames, looking at him like a curio he wanted to take apart, feature by feature. Arthur was too stubborn to duck into the folds of his scarf. Yes, he said. Enough to make a living. Eames peeled a chestnut, then a second, and didn't eat either. You know that's not what I mean, he said. Arthur knew; it was none of Eames's business. The silence was flat, muffled by the snow, and Arthur couldn't decide if he wanted to break it or not. The words were on the tip of his tongue, I've stopped dreaming, nights-- but it seemed childish, cozying up to Eames like that, asking to be spoiled and fretted over. No other side effects, and maybe it was only temporary. And if his dreams weren't coming back, then so much for that, surely it wouldn't matter when Eames was told of it. There'll be other times to let him know, thought Arthur. In the end, it was Eames that spoke. Sometimes I don't quite understand you, he said, and didn't seem upset. Most of the time. Most of the time, I don't quite understand you.

+

Dumplings, monsoon. Eames's hair was limp in the humidity. The rain had let off and they were huddled outside under a parasol, the sun glinting silver off the puddles. Muggy in his jacket, Arthur took it off and pulled up his sleeves, reaching across the table for the soy sauce.

Arthur, said Eames, and caught him around the elbow. What the fuck is this?

He was staring at the inside of Arthur's arm, bruises staining the skin, creeping up past the cuff of his shirt. In the unforgiving white light of the outdoors, the mark seemed starker than Arthur remembered, and he faltered for a moment, fascinated by the startling expanse of it.

What's going on? asked Eames, fingers tightening.

Never mind, said Arthur. I'll get it out of your way, if it bothers you.

Is this from the needles? asked Eames.

Trihypnyl, said Arthur, irked by the dispproval in Eames's look. As though what he did with himself in his own damn time was any of Eames's concern, as though the sheer ridiculous scope of Eames's meddling gave him the right to revulsion. It's the toxicity buildup. Trihypnyl's not known to be the most easily metabolized of drugs, but it's the strongest available compound on the market right now--

Why are you using Trihypnyl? demanded Eames. You were fine with the standard-issue Cyclotraumine, last time I saw you. You liked the dilation rate. I remember you said that.

Cyclotraumine's too weak, said Arthur, it doesn't hold up under repeated use. Too easy to develop resistance to it. I can't stay under with Cyclotraumine anymore, soon after that job, it started jolting me up topside. Trihypnyl's the only thing that still works.

You're immune to-- how much bloody dreaming-- said Eames, and dropped his eyes to Arthur's arm again. Are you still using the same site? For injections?

Can't, said Arthur. The veins went into hiding, is what the chemist on my last run said. I can't find anything to stick a needle into. She had me switch to my foot, though, that seems to have solved the problem for the time being.

You fucking idiot, said Eames.

ALT levels through the roof, said Arthur, as casually as he could.

But the quiet film of cease-fire that settled over them felt too grimy to be a cause for triumph, the furrow of Eames's forehead like a knot in Arthur's stomach. What a nosy son of a bitch, judgmental and sanctimonious like I've managed to personally betray him, but his silence was an unpleasant weight. Stifling as the monsoon mist. Why the hell did either of them give a shit-- Arthur rolled down his sleeves, vindictive enough to refuse to ask, but miserable enough to make nice.

They're developing something, have you heard? he asked, an awkward flurry. It's supposed to be a drastic improvement from anything in circulation right now, easier to take, harder to build resistance to. Still in the testing stages, but they've got the dilation rate stabilized around twelve. Word is that it's steady enough to hold two layers at once. What's that like, do you think-- what do you suppose it looks like, that far down below? They haven't got a name for it yet. They say it smells like witch hazel.

Jesus Christ, Arthur, said Eames.

We'll switch, said Arthur, when they release it. No more nausea, no more loss of appetite. The only thing we'll have left to worry about is the saline flush. God, I fucking hate that taste, but I guess we can't get rid of everything. As an afterthought, though he wished they were talking about anything else at all, but this-- this will fade in time. You know.

Why did you do it? asked Eames, still stiff. Was it practice? Because you thought you would fall behind?

That was always some part of it. The need to keep abreast of a shifting landscape, treading water just to avoid drowning. But maybe that was just a cover story all along-- underneath it, there was a mandate more desperate than the pursuit of excellence, a drive that had nothing to do with competence, with anything as luminous as self-improvement.

I don't know, Eames, said Arthur. I guess I screwed up.

+

03.

His beautiful, untraceable, obsolete second-gen PASIV. Arthur took a hammer and a chainsaw to it, the day after he had his own serial baked into his third-gen device. The wreck of the LCD splintering, the sparks skipping across the oil-stained floor. Delighted with the boy's-dream of the mayhem of destruction, he rubbed his welding goggles clean of debris and turned to Eames.

"I'll let you have a go at it," he offered. "Maybe it'll cheer you up."

Arthur had rented himself a house for recon in some suburb somewhere, and in the far corner of the garage, Eames sat puddled in a folding lawn chair, looking like it was his head Arthur had been sawing open. He'd just been militarized, in a foul humor still from the aftermath of the process. Shut-eye and a half-assed attempt at meditation will help, Arthur had advised him, take my word for it, but Eames had insisted on following him to the garage where he winced his way through the screech of metal meeting metal.

"To think, just yesterday you were so fond of that heap of rubble," said Eames. "Have some heart. Don't you feel an inkling of pity for it? Isn't it anything like dismantling your own child?"

"Have you seen the third-genners?" asked Arthur. "Lightweight cases, shockproof construction, battery life up to two hundred fucking hours. There's an internal memory chip for retaining output flow rate across sessions, Eames. Where the hell does pity come into it?"

In spite of his indisposition, Eames laughed, stretching as he stood. "Let's put your new love to some use, then," he said. "I'll go mad if I'm down here another minute longer listening to you work out your aggression by way of power tools."

"I have to get rid of it somehow," Arthur told him, "the PASIV, I mean, not my aggression," but he set the goggles down and jogged after Eames anyway, through the door he held open behind him.

+

Everything that passed between them and around them, Arthur catalogues now in loose Dylanesque ebbs and flows, a folk song retrospective of the years. Well, his PASIV has been the third-gen model for a while now, worn along the corners and a little temperamental at the hinges. The fourth-gen, he found to his chagrin, did away with the extra vial storage compartments in favor of IV lines coaxed to a monstrous twenty feet in length. Assholes, we're not using the tubing to go mountaineering, he thought, and wondered if progress had grown stagnant after all.

He's in suits more often than not, and Eames is thirty-two, perhaps finally old enough for the complaints about his back to carry some weight-- but really thirty-two is young still, sturdy as an oak. Twelve times as young, the first level down. They've thrown themselves together, they've wrenched themselves apart, and Mallorie and Dominic Cobb have worn their slow furrowed grooves into both their lives, snail trails deep as the dig of fingernails, indelible and raw. Eames, too, has long since stopped dreaming at nights. The witch-hazel compound Somnacin came and conquered them all.

And here I am again, at the door of the chapel I dreamed for us, our bodies strewn across the pullout couch. I recognize it. Arthur steps out of the car, raising his eyes to the spires overhead, a stark towering imprint against the halo of the sun. The stairs at his feet are running sand, and there are grains trickling from the mouths of huddled gargoyles, but other than that restless inattention, it's a decent enough replica of the church they built for the job.

Of the church their architect built for the job. Arthur was on point, lips sewn shut, itching to tweak the layout to his liking.

"God, you want to rip this place apart," said Eames as they strolled down the nave, their footsteps echoing off the vaulted ceiling. "What is it you hate so much about it?"

"I don't hate it," said Arthur. "Did you leave the garage door open? I think I smell gasoline--"

"The carvings keep shifting," said Eames. "I can see it out of the corners of my eyes. You're dissatisfied, aren't you?"

"It's just-- look, the whole thing is just so inefficient," Arthur relented, digging his hands into his pockets. "I get that a little dim organ music in the background adds atmosphere, but I could easily take a couple bars of something obscure and turn it into a Shepard melody. The stained-glass shards could self-replicate, and the pews could all stem from one mother object with some randomized imperfections superimposed on each instance-- the way it's set up now, the entire level is built without any loops or shortcuts. As the dreamer, I'm very frustrated."

"As an architect, you're very frustrated," said Eames. "Did you talk to Reznikov about it?"

"Reznikov is a senile fascist who is terrified of heterarchies because he doesn't understand the first fucking thing about them," said Arthur. "I can dream it, no problem, but the amount of unnecessary sprawling bullshit here is incredible. With an approach like this, you can't build anything beyond the scope of a block or two, you know? What sort of breakthrough is that?"

Seething, he dropped into a seat in the chancel, the marble cloaks of the saints stirring in his inquietude. Eames crossed his arms and leaned his hip against the altar, commiserating. Each unnecessary sprawling inefficient piece of colored glass let the sunlight through, casting kaleidoscope patterns across the floor, and even though he was in the right -- even though Eames knew he was in the right -- Arthur felt a bit petty, like he'd thrown a tantrum rendered insubstantial in the vast shadow of divinity. He hated it.

"And also, I don't like churches much," he said, out of spite.

"Not very religious, I take it," said Eames.

"There's another thing that's frustrating," said Arthur. "Why all that insistence on the great life beyond, anyway? What about this one? What about the one we're already thrust into the middle of? Isn't this one good enough to make something out of-- or bad enough, it's probably the same thing, but I don't know that there's a point to always chasing after what you don't have."

"Well," said Eames, vague, "maybe you needn't be quite so dogmatic about this."

"No, really?" asked Arthur, pleased by the revelation. "You're religious? Seriously, you? Eames, the great iconoclast, the quintessential skeptic?"

"And you thought me a lone wolf," said Eames.

"A mongrel," said Arthur, gently.

Eames spanned the chapel with his eyes, reaching into the speckled light, letting the colors play across his hand. Arthur was still caught in the implications of his discovery -- did Eames practice, he wondered, did he attend mass or was it Anglican services, and wasn't he uneasy with giving himself up like that for someone else to inhabit, or was that territory well-mapped by the art of forging -- when Eames cut through his reverie and said, "Don't you want to try it?"

"Try what?" asked Arthur.

"Building this dream the way you want to," said Eames. "With all the loops and shortcuts that make for an elegant solution."

Arthur thought of it, and shivered. There were arches, confessional grilles, fractal laces of filigree gold, all the mouth-watering potential for a chapel magnificently folded upon itself; and if the rooms were constructed in Bramantine symmetry, maybe it would be possible to set up a figure-ground illusion where the inverse of the nave would serve as the transept and no transept would have to be built at all, a subconscious bargain at half the blueprint for the full perception--

"I'd kill for it," breathed Arthur. "I mean, I don't know that I'd be able to do it on the fly, especially with as many reflexive and paradoxical elements as I'd ideally like to include in a setting this conducive to geometry, but-- do I sound pedantic right now? This isn't interesting to you, is it?"

"What's interesting, I think," said Eames, "is the part where you do it."

In his concentration, Arthur found himself perched on the pew assuming an attitude of prayer, eyes closed, hands steepled together. It was a matter of juggling all the pieces at once, like poetry in translation, or picturing someone you'd loved. Silencing the point in him for a little while, because the way he wanted to do it was no more practical than Reznikov's pigheaded ineptitude. It wasn't for the sake of feasibility that he yearned for the impossible chapel. Only for the helpless exhilaration of it, for a taste of of the autumn he'd turned twenty-two, what had granted him the first intimations of flight.

A bit of warmth brushed against his wrist. Startled, Arthur jerked away, and the crucifix in the sanctuary came loose by one arm, swinging in a perilous arc.

"Go on," said Eames, and Arthur knew he was hunting for the bruising there.

"Hey," snapped Arthur, "I thought we were done with this shit," knocking his hand away.

In return he expected exasperation or contempt, a stern talking-to, frosting up all the easy air between them. Fuck you, not this again. Who are you to think you can bend me into shape? But instead, Eames just took his arm, his grip gentle enough but firm, wordlessly determined.

"How do you hold yourself together, the way that you are," said Eames. "I'll never know." And then, so grave and clear-eyed that Arthur couldn't bear to look away: "Take care of yourself, please, Arthur."

"You--" he faltered.

"Ready, set, build," said Eames, and kept at rucking down the sleeve of Arthur's shirt.

At the touch of his skin Arthur thought, topside, we're lying next to each other, the reminder of it strangely ticklish to consider, like he might burst out laughing at any moment. He worries-- about me. Worry, not scorn, his solicitude no sermon. He worries about me? God, the sound of it, scarcely real.

Instead of laughing, there was something Arthur wanted to say. An apology and a half. Sorry I was wrong, I thought you were trying to make me a better man. Sorry I made you worry. But trying to give any shape to the words made it seem as though it was the last time he could, digging his own grave, concocting a finality out of his own agitation. There would be better chances. One day, the stars would align.

They had time. So Arthur closed his eyes again, let Eames's fingers trace the discolored mottle of his arm, more tender than he had any right to ask for.

+

That's what you remember, isn't it, thinks Arthur. That's what you want me to remember, the way you took me under your wing in the rain. Showing me I could still build.

Arthur stands in the chancel arch, staring down the withered body of Jesus hanging from the wall. Of course he could still fucking build. It's not a skill you lose with disuse, any more than you can forget how to ride a bike, or how to recognize your own reflection in a mirror. Yes; Arthur closed his eyes and bowed his head and dreamed up a gorgeous fucking wonder of the world, every last bit of the chapel curving back on itself-- but it was no singularity. It wasn't anything he couldn't do again. It wasn't ever anything to write home about, Eames.

So what did he bring me here for? he asks the crucifix. What happened here that's worth reliving? Does he remember what I did to the chapel at all? Or does this saga come to a convenient end for him, the moment he put his hand on my arm like he could heal it?

The air in the sanctuary tastes stale, the sand beginning to hiss across the mosaic floor. And the chapel, so callous and quixotic in the flaunting of itself-- completely useless, like a monument of shame to his own precocious youth. It's not a building, it's a work of masturbation. He wants to rip the whole place apart.

Cobb, in his brief telephone rundown, taught him that space was shared between dreamers in limbo. As the domain of no one in particular, anything created there is necessarily collaborative in nature. The only danger, said Cobb, is complicating the path leading to Eames. You can't know the repercussions of any given change.

But Eames's limbo isn't Cobb's, formed without streets or neighborhoods or cities. A domino block set in the middle of the desert can only fall alone, and what's the worst that can happen, anyway? The two of us are already down as deep as we can go. Arthur raises his eyes to the stained-glass windows and thinks of untangling the ouroboros, soothing the snake into vomiting up its own tail. Severing each feedback loop, unknotting each goddamn Penrose staircase into a long honest line of steps leading nowhere.

It fights him. The corpus is the first to go. It shivers and disintegrates into a handful of sand, leaving an empty cross behind-- before the cross crumbles in turn. The windows crust and choke out the light. Arthur grits his teeth together, unsure if it's the instability of limbo against him, or Eames exacting his demolition on a landmark with its purpose served. Either way, the sand weaves through the pillars and the arches of the ceiling, and he braces himself for the collapse, shit, the mountain of sand to come rushing down on his shoulders.

No, not quite-- there it is again, the wind. It scatters the sand above him, a blast of heat that surrounds him like the eye of a hurricane. Sure, that's one way to rip it apart, he thinks, wincing. Through the rush of the grains he picks out a distant sound too silver to belong, airy and sweet. A chime? But it's a hell of a job to ask himself questions in a sandstorm. He shakes out his hair when the roar dies down, left ankle-deep in the remnants of pipe organs, confessional booths, someone's skeletal savior.

At the mouth of the winding road, half buried alongside him, Arthur uncovers a motorcycle. Its frame glows hot beneath the layer of sand, like something just pulled from a blacksmith's forge.

+

04.

There's no name to put to the bike. No one cares how unfamiliar you are with them, his extractor had said. It's an urban dream. What the hell else are you going to ride, the metro? which had truth to it if not tact. Speed and mobility and stealth. So he cobbled something together from pictures of an MV Agusta F4 Tamburini, and his extractor rolled her eyes and laughed when she saw it.

All right, I see where you meant to go with it, she said. Fix the steering head and at least give it a black paint job if you can't bear to make it homelier, which he couldn't.

The details are unclear; on the one hand, it was before the advent of Somnacin. On the other hand, he thinks, Eames was already militarized by then. They were running a pair of different jobs in a pair of different cities, but Arthur needed someone's head to rampage through, and Eames needed someone's rampage to put his head to the test.

"But Arthur," said Eames, "no mark you will ever target in your entire life will be equipped with militarization of my caliber. You may be overpreparing."

"You don't know that I won't extract from you someday," said Arthur, phone against his shoulder, rifling through an issue of Cycle World. "Who'd you get it done from, anyway? Who's so good that you don't think I can break it?"

"Fatima, but that's not the point," said Eames. "It doesn't seem to be a function of the militarization so much as it is a function of my own subconscious-- it's a bit difficult to explain, really. The best way to tell you would be for you to taste the bile of your own defeat."

"What an asshole," said Arthur, and was knocking on Eames's door with a duffel bag on his shoulder by Saturday afternoon.

+

It wasn't so difficult, the first time round. Arthur sped through the alleys on his Frankenstein motorbike, an ambush, a rushing of the bank where the safe deposit box served as the primary hotspot. Familiarity with the geography, the element of surprise. Only five shots fired in toto. He woke with his hand clenched tight like he still held the scrap of paper he found, a child's-scrawl on a sheet torn from a notebook. It was some city or some town, he thinks, though he can't recall the name. He told Eames what he'd read there.

"Was it now," said Eames.

"All in all, I don't know what you were scaring me for," said Arthur. "It seemed pretty straightforward. I got in, got the info, and got out. Were you overconfident, or am I just overqualified?"

He propped himself up on an elbow, drawing his leg up, fingers to the cannula at his ankle. Eames caught him by his shirt and tugged him back down onto the floor.

"Give it another go," said Eames. "It's not the full experience until you've repeated it."

The second time round, Arthur woke up drenched in sweat, gasping for breath. Fuck, he was coughing, Jesus fucking Christ, palm pressed to his ribcage just to feel it there, intact. Eames slid free from his tubing and padded into the kitchen, returning with a cold glass of water.

"Why didn't that happen before," asked Arthur, between gulps of water and air alike.

"It's an adaptive mechanism," said Eames. "Standard-issue militarization, but it works a little differently with me, for better or for worse. The security system appears to extrapolate the extractors' method of approach based on previous attacks it's fended off, and concentrates all defensive effort into the channels it predicts will be the most effective. Since you used the grid plan of the city to your advantage in approaching the bank in your first offensive, my subconscious minimized guard personnel and decided instead to-- well, decided to bring the city against you."

"I was fucking pulverized," said Arthur. "The buildings, Eames. They moved in on me. When I was in that alleyway--"

"Yes," said Eames, fiddling with the IV line like he was apologetic.

"Seriously, I mean it, no mark in the world will ever be half this hard to extract from," said Arthur. "Let's go again."

+

With his topographical edge rendered meaningless, Arthur opted for scorched earth. He dreamed himself an arsenal fit to bring down Jericho, peppering the landscape with repositories, every nook a depot for more firepower. In the dusking twilight, the four-lane road cutting the city open was a desolate stretch, bare for him and the security van swerving closer behind him.

Thrilling with the speed and the blood rising in him, Arthur tore off his helmet, discarding it with a merry clatter somewhere along the asphalt. Like music to his ears. He yanked a hand grenade from his belt, eyes narrowed against the wind. Wrong guy to mess with, he thought, taking a moment to bask in his enjoyably musty bravado. Frag out, you sorry bastards.

He leaned forward, grenade lever squeezed tight, pressing his chest flat against the gas tank for balance. His other hand would have to stay on the handlebar, keeping this gorgeous purring beast steady underneath him. My Agusta Tamburini. Were you a woman, I probably couldn't keep up with you. He bit down on the pull ring of the grenade, clenched his jaw tight, and jerked his head away.

Later, much later, Eames would run his index finger down the length of Arthur's neck, slicked with the sweat between them. Remember that time right after my militarization, he asked, when you were trying to break in by blowing up everything within sight?

I was adapting, Arthur told him, humming against the curl of Eames's hand resting over his throat. Just trying to get through before your subconscious murdered me again.

You were on a bike, said Eames. You didn't know it, but I was standing at a third-floor window, watching you go by. I kept seeing it for days on end on the insides of my lids, you pulling that pin from the grenade with your teeth. The stretch of your neck above your jacket. When you bared your teeth like you were smiling, I thought you were tearing straight inside my chest--

Chew through bone and spit out your heart, said Arthur.

He hooked his heel around Eames's calf and turned them over, and Eames went down without fighting it, landing in the sheets with his hand still resting against the back of Arthur's neck. Outside in the afternoon haze, a piping chorus of children were hawking something in a language neither of them spoke. Arthur dipped his head down and took the damp heat of Eames's cock into his mouth, sheathing his teeth.

Fuck, Eames would choke out then, his voice shuddering, hand grasping for the strands of Arthur's hair-- and he would come without the presence of mind to warn for it, so suddenly that there was something unfair about it, and Arthur would suck in a sharp breath and swallow down every last bit of him. But that would be much later.

In Arthur's dream, wracked with the hit, the security van careened into the divider between the roads. Arthur didn't turn to look when the blast sounded behind him, but he figured that it made a slow-motion sight for sore eyes, him and his bike kissing the highway to a backdrop of smoke and blooming fire. Some real Hollywood shit, wasn't it; who didn't love Hollywood. He dug a Javelin launcher out from behind a dumpster, and oh, honest to god, listen. He brought a fucking chopper right out of the sky.

If you'd shipped me off to the front lines somewhere back when I'd enlisted, maybe I'd have less of a taste for this sort of thing. But Arthur watched the propellers flutter and shatter in the brief ardent light of the explosion, and then he razed down the wall of the bank with the same Javelin, shooting stars skimming the surface of the darkened city. Eames watched him, perhaps.

+

"Got it," said Arthur, still warm from the heat of the flames he walked through, his palms thick with the residue of ash. "The paper was a little charred because I got carried away, but I'm sure you won't mind." A woman's name, thinks Arthur, and can't bring it to mind either. But Eames nodded, said yes when he was told it.

"You're not half bad at this," said Eames. "You ought to consider making a career of it."

"So the next time someone goes in," asked Arthur, "your subconscious will know how to fend off a full-frontal offensive like that?"

"More or less," said Eames. "If that's the way the extraction attempt seems to be going, that's the way the militarization will respond. I mean, that's what it appears to be doing, because neither Fatima nor I have the faintest idea how this really works or why it does what it does."

"Does it have anything to do with forging?" asked Arthur. "Extended practice, primed pathways."

"Right, that's her guess," said Eames, "but of course that's only the conjecture closest at hand. Probably in this line of work, there will never actually be a point where we know all there is to know."

"Like all other worthwhile lines of work," said Arthur. "I think I might be a little jealous. If I take some classes on basic forging from you, do you think my subconscious will pick up on this whole adaptation mechanism? Or hey, maybe Fatima's experimenting on you and she's just not telling you about it. Have you considered that?"

"Your militarization is more than adequate, I'm sure you realize," said Eames, as he rummaged in the clean-up kit. "In fact, it could stand to tone down the vicious relish a notch or two. That time with the practice run in Chennai when the sedative accidentally neutralized your suppression of the--"

"What are you doing?" asked Arthur, craning his neck to peer over Eames's shoulder. "Are you-- shit, fuck, that's cold, why are you-- are you flushing the line, Eames? Why are you flushing the line?"

"Well," said Eames. "That's enough fun for today, isn't it?"

He didn't turn to give the answer, the set of his back brittle as he adjusted the saline flow. The details are unclear, but on the one hand, it was before the advent of Somnacin. Arthur glanced at the inside of his own elbow, covered beneath his shirt sleeve. Caught somewhere between annoyance and gratitude. An old, familiar place to be held, when it came to him and Eames.

"Come on, I've only been down three times," said Arthur, keeping the words as light as he could. "What's the problem? I want another go, and you said so yourself, the extrapolation is based on attacks your subconscious has already fended off. The more data it has to work from, the better it'll function. It's like building up your immune system. Get us under again, will you, this is good for you--"

"Good for me," echoed Eames.

In the pale light through the blinds there on his living room floor with the tubing coiled around his fingers, he looked so afraid that all Arthur could think was, please don't run. And yet; what would you be so afraid of, if you knew you could run whenever you wanted? Are you afraid because you're going to stay?

"Okay," said Arthur, "you're right," slumping in a simulacrum of defeat, though it didn't feel a bit like losing.

"You ought to," began Eames, "you really ought to know better."

"I really ought to a lot of things," said Arthur.

"Listen, what I think is," said Eames, like it took effort just to dislodge the words from his throat, "you might want to take a break."

"From what?" asked Arthur. "From this? What are you-- dreaming, you mean?"

Eames toyed with the IV line, pressing nicks into the plastic with the edge of his thumbnail. Of course that was what he meant. Might want to take a break, or in layman's terms -- via the mouth of anyone less consumed with the constant need for prevarication -- take a break, you goddamn wreck, I don't know what the hell is the matter with you.

"I appreciate your concern," said Arthur, decent enough to put him out of his misery. "But see, Eames-- it's just that sometimes, with the way that things are, the cure ends up hurting more than the disease. It's no one's doing, really. Just the way that things are."

"What disease," demanded Eames.

What disease-- that shut him up. Arthur's turn to fixate on the tubing, gingerly worrying the entrance site on his ankle beneath the mound of tape and dressing, intent like he hadn't heard Eames ask anything at all. The answer was much too obvious to give, an embarrassment to even try to put into words. Something rendered laughable in the saying of it. Life, I meant, Eames. Of course that was what I meant.

Dreaming, the cure for life, thought Arthur. Isn't that inane? But you know what I mean by it; I mean the only thing it can mean, Eames. The way we live life, the way we drag ourselves through it, second by excruciating second, sixty minutes to an hour, plodding like a pack mule, our heads down. I don't care for it-- do you? I don't think anyone does. And if a stiff arm and some bruising is the price for being allowed to wrench myself away from that, I think it's as good a deal as any. I'd much rather bleed a little.

"Do you know," he asked instead, "what happened to Dreamer Zero?"

"It's all hearsay," said Eames. "Not exactly worth our time."

"I heard that he died," said Arthur. "But then again, I suppose any other end to the story would be disappointing."

+

Maybe if we were allowed to look behind us once in a while, we wouldn't be so fascinated with our own tracks. But here we are, sad as sharks, grazing the ocean floor one inch at a time. Like Lot's wife with the sound of fire and brimstone in her ears. As he slows the bike to a stop and the sand gives way to an anemic cluster of half-hearted buildings, Arthur knows that's why he never asked Eames about that city, that woman, whatever and whoever they might have been. His hometown, his mother's maiden name, his tender schoolboy love, what the fuck did it matter? That was life, and dreaming -- yes, say it again, like it wasn't mortifying enough the first time around -- was the cure. It always was.

[next part]