Fic: Honour Amongst Thieves
Title: Honour Amongst Thieves
Author: black_betty_26
Team: ANGSSSSST
Prompt: Bonds, Devotion
Rating: PG (say what??)
Word count: 1700
Warnings: I wanted to write something really cynical about everyone in the Dreamshare community being heartless criminals, so there's that...but somewhere along the way this became really....romantic? I don't know what happened!! (SHHH! DON'T TELL ANYONE!)
Ending: yeah, kind of warm and schmoopy….Seriously, I don’t know what happened…
Notes: LJ STOP BEING A BITCH AND LET ME POST THIS THING!!! This is a sleepy, maybe slightly rambling answer to a challenge I gave myself while LJ was down, to see if it was possible to write something angsty in less than 1000 words….obviously I failed epically…so, yeah, I don’t really know what this is…......................Sorry?
(ALSO-I HAVE been to Cairo, but I have no 1st hand knowledge of their health care system…apologies is something is glaringly incorrect lol)
Summary: In which Arthur makes a decision, Eames is in trouble, and the taxies in Cairo are falling apart…
_
It begins with a job.
It begins after the Inception, after Dom breezes out of the airport without a look back, after Arthur collects his bags and goes to ground. It begins after his three-month hiatus, after he thinks and thinks and thinks about what to do with his life, about who he is without the dreamshare, about how much of Arthur exists without it. About who he is without the label “Point man.”
It begins when he realizes that the answer to that is: no one.
It begins with a job, one that is difficult enough to require specialized skills. Hobbs tells him to get a Forger, and Hobbs is the new Extractor, is the new boss, and so Arthur pulls up the number for the only man in the business with that particular specialized skill.
But Eames doesn’t answer when Arthur calls. Eames doesn’t answer any of his many hidden phones, in any of his small, secret hideaways. Eames is a ghost in the wind, vaporized, and it’s nothing new. He’s done this before, many times, but Arthur had always been able to track him down before.
Or rather, Eames had always answered when Arthur called. Before. He hadn’t realized until this moment, as the phone rings and rings--Eames had always answered before.
Arthur manages to scrape together information, pulling on loose threads until he follows the weave back to the last job Eames worked, a tidy little extraction completed one month previous, in Cairo.
The job was an easy one, and should have been a quick in and out. Indeed, it seemed as though the team did get out, at least, the chemist for the job, Timmons, is cooking up something new in Rio, from what his sources tell him. Timmons gives him nothing new-he didn’t go into the field with the team, but he had delivered a special sedative and received payment, and had heard the job went off without a hitch.
From Timmons, Arthur follows the trail back to Archibald, a sub-par Extractor he had worked with before he decided, never again. Arthur works with the best, and even Dominic Cobb, haunted by ghosts and wandering a smudged line between fantasy and reality was miles ahead of Terrence Archibald on his best day.
Archibald chats to Arthur easily, offers him a place on his new team, inquires about the heat in Monaco where Arthur is holed up before telling him that yes, the Cairo job went off without a hitch, except for one tiny detail.
Eames had not woken up from the dream.
Archibald had rambled ceaselessly about the insipid and the tedious before he slipped in the fact that his team had left Eames in a hotel room with needle marks in his wrist, his eyes shut and heart murmuring a slow ceaseless beat. They had left him there without a single look over their shoulders, had divided up his share of the money before they separated. Moved on. And Archibald mentioned this to Arthur like he was commenting on the weather.
There will be time for the things he wants to do to Archibald, but first he needs to go to Cairo. He needs to find Eames.
Walking through the sprawling Cairo International Airport, Arthur convinces himself that the reason he is stepping out into the scorching summer heat of Egypt, for a colleague he barely likes, is because Eames is a valuable asset. There are other people in the business that call themselves Forgers, but Eames is the original, and the best. Arthur can think of five jobs off the top of his head that he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish without Eames, the Fischer job topping the list in large capital letters.
There is a very real chance that Eames is dead. That Arthur is too late, and he’s wasted his time by coming all the way here just to find a dead body without a name. Arthur knows this, and identifies the sharp, heavy weight in his stomach and chest as disappointment that the talent and genius of an “original dreamer” is being wasted like this. That Eames went out, not in glorious gunfire and explosion with a smile on his face, but silent and still, quiet. Inhaling the deep, heavy breath of eternal sleep.
Arthur crams himself into a taxi cab that is falling apart, pulls on a torn seatbelt that doesn’t click into place, broken air conditioning forcing him to sweat through his shirtsleeves, knees banging against the driver’s seat with every lurch and swerve of the car, the driver shouting in Arabic and honking his horn as he weaves in and out of traffic.
This ramshackle car takes him to a run down hospital along the bank of the Nile River located conveniently one block away from the majestic Sheraton hotel where Archibald’s team had performed their extraction.
Arthur had called the hotel less then 24 hours ago and had been told that the unidentified man in suite 740 had been taken to the hospital after the police had made their inquiries of the staff. The Manager had seemed more concerned with the continuing investigation (Arthur posing as an investigator from Interpol) than the well being of the mysteriously unwell guest in his hotel. Arthur had hung up on him in disgust.
So here he is. All roads leading to this small hospital room, stained walls and yellow light creeping through a thin muslin curtain hanging over a small window above the bed. And in the bed, connected to wires and the ceaseless beep-beep, click-whir of machines is Eames, eyes closed, beard growing in, seemingly asleep, as Arthur has seen him so many times before.
He stands for a moment, full of a sudden rage that tightens his shoulders, spikes up his spine, reverberates through his fingertips. He tries to get a handle on it, tries to understand where it is coming from, even as it wells up inside of him, and threatens to burst forth.
Arthur doesn’t care about his co-workers. He doesn’t care what happens to them, and this is not the first time something like this has happened to someone in the dreamshare community. In fact, it is less a community, and more a handful of thieving, backstabbing, conniving, brilliant assholes that draw a thick bottom line at money, and getting out alive.
The last thread of dignity and loyalty frayed when Mal Cobb fluttered out of a hotel window and ruptured into a million pieces on a concrete sidewalk. It broke completely when Dom Cobb left an airport in Los Angeles, left the dreamshare, left Arthur behind without a second thought.
So why does looking at Eames now, smaller and more vulnerable than Arthur’s ever seen him, lying in a hospital bed alone and alienated, no family, no visitors, no loyal friends at his side, why does this anger Arthur, and why does it make him feel so very sad?
In an all-encompassing moment Arthur realizes two things. The first is that he is done with the dreamshare. He’s done with the endless strings of late nights, and mind-lacerating boredom, crunching numbers and compiling files and watching marks as they live their silly little lives. He’s done with revenge plots and bullets with his name on them, and torture for ultimately pointless information. He’s done with listening to all of his co-workers prattle on about themselves, and their prowess, and their gossip, done with watching his back so that something like this, like what happened to Eames, doesn’t happen to him. Or worse.
He’s done. He’s out. And if that means that the legend of Arthur, the Point man, dwindles and recedes, and eventually vanishes into nothing, so be it. There is more to life than this, a moldy hospital room, lonely and alone at the end of days. There has to be more to life than this.
The second thing he realizes is that there is a reason he has come to this conclusion, in this sharp, clarifying moment. There is a reason he feels this heavy pit in his stomach. There is a reason that he cares.
It’s Eames.
And if there was a scrap of dignity and loyalty left in the business, it had to be Eames, who said he’d sell you out, but always stuck around to make sure you remained alive. Eames who pretended not to care, but did. Eames who emerged from his secret hiding places to remember his birthday, and who called the night of Mal’s funeral and listened to Arthur breath over the phone until he fell asleep. Eames who deserves this less then maybe anyone Arthur knows.
And if there’s more to life than this, maybe for Arthur, it’s Eames.
Eames isn’t perfect. He is far from perfect. Both Eames and Arthur have done things no one should be proud of. Hard and cruel things. They’ve stole secrets and lies and beautiful blooming ideas. They've stabbed and shot and garroted their way through half the world. They are no better then anyone else in the dreamshare, those heartless bastards, but they are different in one significant way. Of all the things they’ve done, they’ve never done them to each other.
Arthur sits at the bedside and opens a silver case. Arthur spirals down into the colourful mass of dreams residing in Eames, finds him lost in a canvas of his own creation, a small girl, the daughter of a politician, who doesn’t want to wake up. Arthur rocks her gently, breathing calm and soft secrets into her ear, before pushing her off the roof of a 20-story building.
Arthur opens his eyes to see Eames watching him, a subtle smile on his sunken face.
“You came.” He says, as if he knew Arthur would all along.
“I was thinking of taking a vacation.” Arthur says, coiling plastic tubing and tucking it away. Eames grasps onto his wrist, and they pause together, air thick and mellow, taking each other in, their intentions, their sudden layered history, and the promise of what is to come.
Eames smiles.
“You read my mind.”
It begins with one job and ends with another. This time, the job is escape and freedom. Watching someone else’s back as well as your own. Caring about more then one person, living a life of two instead of one. This time, the challenge is to live. To live outside of living nightmares and constructed dreams. To be alive. Together.
Author: black_betty_26
Team: ANGSSSSST
Prompt: Bonds, Devotion
Rating: PG (say what??)
Word count: 1700
Warnings: I wanted to write something really cynical about everyone in the Dreamshare community being heartless criminals, so there's that...but somewhere along the way this became really....romantic? I don't know what happened!! (SHHH! DON'T TELL ANYONE!)
Ending: yeah, kind of warm and schmoopy….Seriously, I don’t know what happened…
Notes: LJ STOP BEING A BITCH AND LET ME POST THIS THING!!! This is a sleepy, maybe slightly rambling answer to a challenge I gave myself while LJ was down, to see if it was possible to write something angsty in less than 1000 words….obviously I failed epically…so, yeah, I don’t really know what this is…......................Sorry?
(ALSO-I HAVE been to Cairo, but I have no 1st hand knowledge of their health care system…apologies is something is glaringly incorrect lol)
Summary: In which Arthur makes a decision, Eames is in trouble, and the taxies in Cairo are falling apart…
_
It begins with a job.
It begins after the Inception, after Dom breezes out of the airport without a look back, after Arthur collects his bags and goes to ground. It begins after his three-month hiatus, after he thinks and thinks and thinks about what to do with his life, about who he is without the dreamshare, about how much of Arthur exists without it. About who he is without the label “Point man.”
It begins when he realizes that the answer to that is: no one.
It begins with a job, one that is difficult enough to require specialized skills. Hobbs tells him to get a Forger, and Hobbs is the new Extractor, is the new boss, and so Arthur pulls up the number for the only man in the business with that particular specialized skill.
But Eames doesn’t answer when Arthur calls. Eames doesn’t answer any of his many hidden phones, in any of his small, secret hideaways. Eames is a ghost in the wind, vaporized, and it’s nothing new. He’s done this before, many times, but Arthur had always been able to track him down before.
Or rather, Eames had always answered when Arthur called. Before. He hadn’t realized until this moment, as the phone rings and rings--Eames had always answered before.
Arthur manages to scrape together information, pulling on loose threads until he follows the weave back to the last job Eames worked, a tidy little extraction completed one month previous, in Cairo.
The job was an easy one, and should have been a quick in and out. Indeed, it seemed as though the team did get out, at least, the chemist for the job, Timmons, is cooking up something new in Rio, from what his sources tell him. Timmons gives him nothing new-he didn’t go into the field with the team, but he had delivered a special sedative and received payment, and had heard the job went off without a hitch.
From Timmons, Arthur follows the trail back to Archibald, a sub-par Extractor he had worked with before he decided, never again. Arthur works with the best, and even Dominic Cobb, haunted by ghosts and wandering a smudged line between fantasy and reality was miles ahead of Terrence Archibald on his best day.
Archibald chats to Arthur easily, offers him a place on his new team, inquires about the heat in Monaco where Arthur is holed up before telling him that yes, the Cairo job went off without a hitch, except for one tiny detail.
Eames had not woken up from the dream.
Archibald had rambled ceaselessly about the insipid and the tedious before he slipped in the fact that his team had left Eames in a hotel room with needle marks in his wrist, his eyes shut and heart murmuring a slow ceaseless beat. They had left him there without a single look over their shoulders, had divided up his share of the money before they separated. Moved on. And Archibald mentioned this to Arthur like he was commenting on the weather.
There will be time for the things he wants to do to Archibald, but first he needs to go to Cairo. He needs to find Eames.
Walking through the sprawling Cairo International Airport, Arthur convinces himself that the reason he is stepping out into the scorching summer heat of Egypt, for a colleague he barely likes, is because Eames is a valuable asset. There are other people in the business that call themselves Forgers, but Eames is the original, and the best. Arthur can think of five jobs off the top of his head that he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish without Eames, the Fischer job topping the list in large capital letters.
There is a very real chance that Eames is dead. That Arthur is too late, and he’s wasted his time by coming all the way here just to find a dead body without a name. Arthur knows this, and identifies the sharp, heavy weight in his stomach and chest as disappointment that the talent and genius of an “original dreamer” is being wasted like this. That Eames went out, not in glorious gunfire and explosion with a smile on his face, but silent and still, quiet. Inhaling the deep, heavy breath of eternal sleep.
Arthur crams himself into a taxi cab that is falling apart, pulls on a torn seatbelt that doesn’t click into place, broken air conditioning forcing him to sweat through his shirtsleeves, knees banging against the driver’s seat with every lurch and swerve of the car, the driver shouting in Arabic and honking his horn as he weaves in and out of traffic.
This ramshackle car takes him to a run down hospital along the bank of the Nile River located conveniently one block away from the majestic Sheraton hotel where Archibald’s team had performed their extraction.
Arthur had called the hotel less then 24 hours ago and had been told that the unidentified man in suite 740 had been taken to the hospital after the police had made their inquiries of the staff. The Manager had seemed more concerned with the continuing investigation (Arthur posing as an investigator from Interpol) than the well being of the mysteriously unwell guest in his hotel. Arthur had hung up on him in disgust.
So here he is. All roads leading to this small hospital room, stained walls and yellow light creeping through a thin muslin curtain hanging over a small window above the bed. And in the bed, connected to wires and the ceaseless beep-beep, click-whir of machines is Eames, eyes closed, beard growing in, seemingly asleep, as Arthur has seen him so many times before.
He stands for a moment, full of a sudden rage that tightens his shoulders, spikes up his spine, reverberates through his fingertips. He tries to get a handle on it, tries to understand where it is coming from, even as it wells up inside of him, and threatens to burst forth.
Arthur doesn’t care about his co-workers. He doesn’t care what happens to them, and this is not the first time something like this has happened to someone in the dreamshare community. In fact, it is less a community, and more a handful of thieving, backstabbing, conniving, brilliant assholes that draw a thick bottom line at money, and getting out alive.
The last thread of dignity and loyalty frayed when Mal Cobb fluttered out of a hotel window and ruptured into a million pieces on a concrete sidewalk. It broke completely when Dom Cobb left an airport in Los Angeles, left the dreamshare, left Arthur behind without a second thought.
So why does looking at Eames now, smaller and more vulnerable than Arthur’s ever seen him, lying in a hospital bed alone and alienated, no family, no visitors, no loyal friends at his side, why does this anger Arthur, and why does it make him feel so very sad?
In an all-encompassing moment Arthur realizes two things. The first is that he is done with the dreamshare. He’s done with the endless strings of late nights, and mind-lacerating boredom, crunching numbers and compiling files and watching marks as they live their silly little lives. He’s done with revenge plots and bullets with his name on them, and torture for ultimately pointless information. He’s done with listening to all of his co-workers prattle on about themselves, and their prowess, and their gossip, done with watching his back so that something like this, like what happened to Eames, doesn’t happen to him. Or worse.
He’s done. He’s out. And if that means that the legend of Arthur, the Point man, dwindles and recedes, and eventually vanishes into nothing, so be it. There is more to life than this, a moldy hospital room, lonely and alone at the end of days. There has to be more to life than this.
The second thing he realizes is that there is a reason he has come to this conclusion, in this sharp, clarifying moment. There is a reason he feels this heavy pit in his stomach. There is a reason that he cares.
It’s Eames.
And if there was a scrap of dignity and loyalty left in the business, it had to be Eames, who said he’d sell you out, but always stuck around to make sure you remained alive. Eames who pretended not to care, but did. Eames who emerged from his secret hiding places to remember his birthday, and who called the night of Mal’s funeral and listened to Arthur breath over the phone until he fell asleep. Eames who deserves this less then maybe anyone Arthur knows.
And if there’s more to life than this, maybe for Arthur, it’s Eames.
Eames isn’t perfect. He is far from perfect. Both Eames and Arthur have done things no one should be proud of. Hard and cruel things. They’ve stole secrets and lies and beautiful blooming ideas. They've stabbed and shot and garroted their way through half the world. They are no better then anyone else in the dreamshare, those heartless bastards, but they are different in one significant way. Of all the things they’ve done, they’ve never done them to each other.
Arthur sits at the bedside and opens a silver case. Arthur spirals down into the colourful mass of dreams residing in Eames, finds him lost in a canvas of his own creation, a small girl, the daughter of a politician, who doesn’t want to wake up. Arthur rocks her gently, breathing calm and soft secrets into her ear, before pushing her off the roof of a 20-story building.
Arthur opens his eyes to see Eames watching him, a subtle smile on his sunken face.
“You came.” He says, as if he knew Arthur would all along.
“I was thinking of taking a vacation.” Arthur says, coiling plastic tubing and tucking it away. Eames grasps onto his wrist, and they pause together, air thick and mellow, taking each other in, their intentions, their sudden layered history, and the promise of what is to come.
Eames smiles.
“You read my mind.”
It begins with one job and ends with another. This time, the job is escape and freedom. Watching someone else’s back as well as your own. Caring about more then one person, living a life of two instead of one. This time, the challenge is to live. To live outside of living nightmares and constructed dreams. To be alive. Together.