Anabasis: Part II: 4
Title: Anabasis
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
Part II: Inception
Ariadne had been using one of the workbenches in the warehouse, late at night, when she heard the sound. She frowned and checked the brass bishop she’d been working on. The weighting was fine, she thought. It stopped rolling, which was the important thing. Eames had been rather flippant about the whole idea of a totem, but had said Cobb suggested she use one. Ariadne hadn’t seen the harm in that.
She slipped the bishop in her pocket and stood up, stretching. She’d been bent over the workbench for a while, and now her shoulders ached. She followed the sound, walking in the general direction it had come from, until she saw a dim light in one of the work areas.
She paused in the doorway when she finally saw who it was. Cobb was bent over a table, working on a PASIV. He glanced up furtively. For a moment, he looked almost panicked, but then he snapped the PASIV shut, and his expression turned perfectly bland. “Were you going under on your own?” she asked.
“No, no,” Cobb said, quickly. “I was just running some experiments. I didn’t realise anyone else was here.”
“Yeah,” Ariadne said, “I was just - I was working on my totem, actually.” She fished into her pocket and pulled out the brass bishop, letting him see it.
“Here,” he offered, “Let me take a look.” He took a step towards her, reaching for her totem, and Ariadne took a step back, fingers closing around the bishop, shaking her head.
Cobb gave a small smile. It was barely there. “So you’re learning,” he stated, nodding in approval.
“An elegant solution for keeping track of reality,” Ariadne said, turning the bishop over and over in her hand. She pocketed it. “Was it your idea?”
“No,” Cobb said, with a shake of his head. “It was Mal’s.”
“Mal?”
Cobb’s jaw tightened. “My wife,” he said, carefully. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic die. It was a translucent red, and Ariadne glanced at it curiously but knew better than to reach out for it. “This one was…Arthur’s. In a dream…” he shrugged, and didn’t go on.
“Eames told me,” Ariadne said. “About Arthur.”
Cobb went very still. His expression had gone completely unreadable and his light blue eyes were distant. It was as if he was looking at her, but not quite registering her presence. Then he blinked, and he was there again. “I see,” he said, neutrally. “And how are the mazes coming along?”
She ignored his attempt at a diversion. “The…projection I saw in your head,” Ariadne asked, on a hunch. “Was he Arthur?”
Cobb turned to walk away, without a word, leaving the PASIV lying on the table.
“Cobb!” she called after him. “He shot me. You could at least give me some kind of an answer!”
Cobb turned. “Yes,” he said, fiercely. “He is.”
This time, she didn’t stop him when he stalked out of the workshop.
-
Over the next few weeks, Ariadne laboured on designing the levels that Yusuf and Eames would dream. The final level - the one that Cobb would dream - was the trickiest. She had input from Yusuf and Eames, but she had no idea if she was really getting it all right. Eames had conceded he wasn’t much of an architect, and Yusuf had shrugged and cheerfully reminded her that he didn’t often go out into the field.
So when Cobb came by to check on her progress, she lifted the small scale-model of the maze she’d made for his level so he could see it, and told him she had some questions about the design.
Cobb’s eyes widened as he glanced at the maze and then quickly looked away. “No, no!” He exclaimed, and then more calmly, “Don’t show me any specifics.” He didn’t glance back until she’d carefully set the model down, and then slid it out of sight, behind a short stack of papers. One or two of them fluttered down to the ground, and Ariadne stooped to pick them up and set them back.
“Why not?” she wanted to know.
“Only the dreamer needs to know the layout,” Cobb said quickly. His eyes slid past her, then focused back on her. By now, Ariadne thought she had begun to figure out when Cobb was being evasive. This was one of the times.
“But you’re dreaming this level,” she said, slowly.
“Yeah, but well…that’s different. I’ll learn the level a few days before the job.”
“Why is it so important that you don’t know the layout?”
Cobb exhaled in frustration, running a hand roughly through his hair. “Look,” he said, after a while. “In case any of us brings our projections in there, alright? We don’t want them knowing the specifics of the maze.”
“This is about Arthur, isn’t it?” Ariadne realised, and watched as he stiffened, and then his face took on the distant, shuttered expression that she’d begun to associate with any discussion or acknowledgement of his issues. “You’re afraid you’ll bring him in.” She remembered the way Eames had frowned slightly when she’d related her experience in Cobb’s dream, and then went on, “You can’t keep him out, can you?” Intuition said she was right; Cobb’s reaction confirmed it.
The table screeched against the floor as Cobb leaned too hard on it. He didn’t glance down at all. He gripped the edge of the table, white-knuckled. “Right,” he said, tightly.
“That’s why you can’t build,” Ariadne realised. “He knows what you know. He’d…sabotage the whole operation. Like what he did all those yea - “
“Stop talking,” Cobb said, through gritted teeth. His eyes were cold and hard. “You know nothing.” Abruptly, Ariadne was acutely aware of the fact that Cobb was dangerous. He wasn’t just the best at what he did because of his extensive experience. That was just one part of it. There was a single-minded focus to him, cold and calculating, and illegal meant nothing in the face of that implacable determination.
She must have taken a step back, or Cobb realised it, somehow, because he exhaled sharply, forced himself to relax, and said, “Sorry.” He sounded a little grudging about it.
“You were close, weren’t you?” Ariadne breathed, pushing on because she’d all but said it. “That’s why you don’t use another point man. Because Arthur’s stuck in your head, and you can’t let him go. ‘Like brothers’, Eames said. They never knew why - why he…did what he did, only that Arthur died in the end. But you cared. That’s why it’s so personal. That’s why he’s still there, isn’t it?”
Cobb said nothing.
“Do the others know?”
“No,” he said. He picked up one of the nearby manuals on the table and rifled through it disinterestedly. He didn’t look at her. “They don’t.”
“You’ve got to warn them. If it’s getting worse…”
Cobb snapped the book shut forcefully and slammed it down on the table. “No one said it’s getting worse,” he said, sharply. “Look, I just need to…” he paused. He wanted to say, I just need to get home, except it wasn’t true. It wasn’t so much about getting home. It was about closure. He didn’t know if he could go home, even with his charges cleared, if he didn’t know the answers.
He couldn’t imagine returning to his house, and pretending everything would go on as it had before…before all of this. Before he left. Facing Mal, and the inevitable questions that he’d never really answered and the feeling that everything was falling to pieces, no matter how hard it was to put things back together.
Ariadne caught his hesitation. “You just need to…?”
“Go home,” Cobb said, shortly, “That’s all I care about right now.”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“Because,” Cobb said, clinically, “They think I’m Algol. They think I killed Arthur, and a police officer. They think I’m responsible for a variety of crimes, including murder, some forms of torture, and espionage.”
His expression, as he said it, was completely shuttered, completely devoid of anything. That, more than his anger, Ariadne thought, was the frightening thing. In that moment, she could have believed that Cobb did kill Arthur. She bit her lip. The question was on the tip of her tongue, and yet it wasn’t a question she could just ask.
“Thank you,” Cobb said, then. He turned to leave, and paused when she spoke.
“For what?” Ariadne asked, confused.
Cobb glanced back at her, head bowed slightly. In that moment, he looked very small, very tired, and very sad. “For not asking whether I did,” he said, quietly.
He left.
-
So this, then, is Cobb and Arthur:
Separately, they are both one of the greats - one of the names that all extractors find themselves grudgingly agreeing on. These men are some of the best. There is no contest about that.
But together -
Together, they are legend.
They’re the best team around, the one that no extractor quite wants to find himself up against, if he can help it. And when Eames is on board, they’re unstoppable. But even when it’s just the two of them, they’re more than just dangerous. No two extractors have worked together quite so closely or quite so often. Cobb-and-Arthur, Arthur-and-Cobb, the order doesn’t matter. Countless jobs, all worked together, and a deep and abiding friendship have joined their two names into one. They’re closer than brothers. They know each other with the utter confidence and instinctive intimacy that only sharing innumerable dreams can bring.
They’re two complementary halves of the same being. How Cobb’s cunning is bolstered by Arthur’s tenacity, or how Arthur’s caution is balanced by Cobb’s sheer daring and willingness to take heart-stopping risks - or even the way the two of them don’t need words to communicate - these are all the subject of vaguely incredulous conversations. The cynics laugh and wonder how long such a partnership can last. It’s been the subject of many a bet. Extractors don’t tend to work together in fixed teams, and never for such a long period of time.
But this is Cobb-and-Arthur. Arthur-and-Cobb. They’ve got this little habit of subverting the odds.
In the end, this is what most of them say:
It seems impossible that Cobb and Arthur would ever split up. They fit each other too well for that. And they’d never turn on each other, the way so many black market extractors do. They’re far too loyal to each other for that.
They’re the team. And though neither of them will ever quite say it, they both think they’ll always be.
-
“You’re planning something big,” Arthur said easily, leaning back against the office desk. Cobb wanted to tell him that he’d knock the papers off if he sat back too far, but the words caught in his throat.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Need my help?”
Cobb shoved his hands in his jacket pocket. “You know I can’t do that,” he said, quietly. “I can’t screw this one up. It’s my last and best chance.”
“Still think I did it?”
Cobb closed his eyes, so he didn’t have to look at reproachful brown eyes. But Arthur was still there, still looking sad and resigned when he opened them again.
“I don’t know what to think,” Cobb said. “That’s why I’m doing this.” He paused, before he added, “I shouldn’t trust you, you know. Not after what you did to me. It keeps…eating at me. Like a voice, whispering, clear as a bell. That I can’t trust you.”
“And?”
“I still do.” Cobb admitted. “I still trust you. I don’t know why.”
Arthur snorted, and straightened up. “Probably because I saved your sorry ass a bunch of times during the Collins job. And I’m not even counting the mess with Morgan. Or the time you nearly bought it handling Smith’s projections.”
Arthur’s words threw him a kind of lifeline. Cobb grabbed it tight and held on and didn’t let go. He buried the old pain, the old confusion, the old doubt and played the Cobb-and-Arthur game. Here, in the memory of their old office, talking to the memory-of-a-man, it was too easy to bury his head in the sand and just pretend. As long as it lasted, he could almost make himself believe nothing had changed. Things were going to fall into place. To make sense, after so long of just running and hiding.
As long as it lasted.
“Right,” he said skeptically, “And who was it who got me into that mess in the first place?”
“You blundered right into the group of them,” Arthur countered, “And I got you out.”
“Evans.”
“Doesn’t count. Still makes it seven times in my favour.”
“Algol made us even,” Cobb said, darkly, before he could stop himself.
Arthur’s mouth tightened. He said nothing. All at once, Cobb was suddenly very aware of the fact that he thought he could smell something burning, outside the window. He didn’t turn to look. He knew what he would see. He didn’t want to see it.
“It did,” Arthur said, quietly. “You killed me. We’re even.”
Cobb’s jaw clenched. He didn’t look away. Neither did Arthur. “I know,” Cobb said, feeling the quick stab of pain. “I know.”
“Last time pays for all.”
Cobb nodded slowly. Weariness, guilt, the tentative beginnings of some kind of decision: they settled into the pit of his stomach, heavy and leaden. “Terms?”
“You don’t know your conditions of victory,” Arthur said. The corners of his mouth quirked in a gentle smile. “Do you?”
“Neither do you.”
“I know enough.”
“You know as much as I do,” Cobb pointed out.
Arthur shrugged. “It’ll have to be enough.”
“That’s my line.”
It was too late by now. The joking statement fell flat and an awkward silence followed on its heels. That was the problem. He could pretend everything was still working, but it was harder to give himself over to the illusion. To maintain it. It was starting to fall apart in various ways, to come apart at the seams.
Sometimes, even the Cobb-and-Arthur game wasn’t enough.
Arthur was the one who spoke up, first. “You can’t keep me out forever, you know. I’ll figure it out soon enough.”
“I don’t have to keep you out forever,” Cobb said, quietly. “Just long enough.”
“You already know the answer,” Arthur said, just as quietly. “Or part of it. Saito can’t tell you much more than what you already know.”
“I’m not going back there,” Cobb snapped, and then he realised he was all but shouting, hands balled into fists by his side. It was a safe buried deep within his mind that he didn’t dare to crack open, answers he couldn’t stand not knowing, but couldn’t live with knowing.
“It frightens you, doesn’t it? That glimpse you got when you opened that safe,” Arthur asked. There was a sympathy in his eyes that was almost kind.
Cobb wondered how he’d ever reconciled the memories together. Arthur-laughing, Arthur-making-deadpan-remarks, Arthur-focused-and-on-the-job, Arthur-worried, Arthur-the-traitor, Arthur-who-was-Algol-
The same man who was his friend, his brother.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t ever quite bring himself to believe. He didn’t know what to do. What to think. It was the puzzle, the Gordian knot embedded, uncomfortably hard in the corner of his mind.
“No,” Cobb said, aloud, in response to Arthur’s question.
They both knew he was lying.
-
This is Ariadne:
She’s the top of most of her classes, and near the top of the class for the rest. She’s gifted, with the same effortless inspiration that Cobb has. Once had. She’s Miles’ most promising student, but that isn’t why he recommends her.
He recommends her because Ariadne is curious. She’s as doggedly persistent as a terrier, and once she’s gotten a tantalising hint of something she doesn’t quite get, she grabs it between her teeth and shakes it until all the answers fly out.
Because sometimes, even an old man who should know better than to hope for the impossible can’t help but hope that maybe his student can do what his daughter can’t. Maybe she can find out what is wrong, what that cancer growing in the corner of Cobb’s mind is.
Maybe.
It’s always the questions that drive her. The ones that she doesn’t know the answer to. More often than not, Ariadne is so caught up in the search and the questions that she doesn’t realise that not everyone likes to be understood. Some people have secrets, and not everyone enjoys prying. And that’s another thing about her: the brush-offs, the brusque requests for her to mind her own business don’t affect her. She’s determined, persistent, and more importantly, she isn’t proud. Failure’s just another opportunity. She doesn’t mind falling once or twice or even ten times, because she’ll always pick herself up and try again.
So all of Cobb’s attempts to close the door on her questions aren’t in any way discouraging. They only serve to make her all the more curious as to what he’s trying to hide, and in all fairness, maybe she wouldn’t have been so persistent, except that she can’t help but remember exactly how he froze up when they were both in his mind and when that projection - Arthur, his name was, Eames had said - had shot her.
There’s something indescribably damaged about Cobb, as if he isn’t entirely there, and Ariadne isn’t even sure about this job, sometimes, except that she’s quite sure that Miles would not have even brought up the matter of the job if Cobb had been truly unhinged.
That is the last piece that slides neatly into the complex tangle of shapes that form Ariadne: for all that can be said, she’s nice. She’s kind. At the end, it isn’t just curiosity which makes her come back, which makes her keep asking Cobb all those questions, trying…trying to understand. The puzzle he presents is a frustrating itch she can’t quite scratch. But that isn’t it.
It’s in the way Cobb moves, the way he sometimes jumps at loud noises, hand reaching for - something, before his face clears and then he’s back here with them; pure, intent, focus.
It’s in the way Cobb startles when she approaches and she’s quite sure she hasn’t made much of a sound in the darkened warehouse, when she comes back at night to see if he’s still there. More often than not, he’s setting up or keeping away the PASIV and no matter how silent she thinks she has been, he hears her coming and startles anyway. She wonders if she would catch him going under if she varied her routine a little, or if she kept at it. She wonders about the nature of the experiments he’s running, because Yusuf seems to know nothing about them and says that the chemical tests are all complete.
So this is Ariadne. It isn’t just the enigma Cobb is. It’s all the little signs that tug at her, the ones that insist that something is wrong, that Cobb needs some kind of help, and no one else seems inclined to give it. She doesn’t fancy herself some kind of knight in shining armour, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else who sees the problem or who’s caught the vague hints that something is very wrong with Cobb.
It is this, at the root of her native curiosity that sends her into the warehouse, night after night, until one day, she enters and Cobb has already gone under. He reclines back in the lawn chair, eyes closed, and in sleep, he looks strangely peaceful. He doesn’t look quite like himself when he’s under, she thinks. The lines have eased, and the hard, wary air that he carries tight against his skin and the way he seems so much older than he really is (how old can he be? Thirty? Thirty-four?) - all of them are muted by slumber.
She doesn’t quite feel guilty when she sits down next to him and pulls out another line. She knows how to work a PASIV by now, and it’s terribly easy to lie back and relax…
And maybe she’ll find some answers in the depths of Cobb’s mind.
-
“Back again?” Arthur asked, looking up from the dossier he was flipping through. He sat on top of the office desk, papers pushed carelessly to the side.
Cobb shrugged, as casually as he could manage. “Thought you’d have known better than to ask by now,” he said.
Arthur acknowledged it with a nod. “Mirfak’s good, isn’t he? Maybe better than I was.”
“No,” Cobb said, softly. “You were the best.” He didn’t ask how Arthur had known. He didn’t ask the far more important question, which was how much Arthur knew. How much he couldn’t keep from Arthur.
Arthur’s mouth quirked in a small smile. “Thanks.” He frowned down at the dossier again, absently flipping through the pages again. Cobb thought he could see annotations in blue and red ink all over and suspected they closely matched the ones he’d made on the actual, physical copy. “Any idea when the job’s going to start?”
Cobb stiffened slightly. “You know I can’t tell you that,” he said regretfully.
Arthur smiled crookedly. “Yeah, I know,” he said, “Was worth a shot.” He finally stopped at a folded page, and carefully straightened it out. “You know someone’s made a mistake, right?”
Cobb frowned, taking a step forward. “Where?” he wanted to know. He craned his neck, trying to peer at the page that Arthur had marked, until Arthur took pity on him and turned the dossier over so he could get a better look.
“The commotion during the board meeting at Sydney. Maurice Fischer threatened to disinherit his son in front of the entire board.”
“And?”
“There aren’t that many incidents as prominent as that one, but most CEOs do like to keep those things behind closed doors. But if you extrapolate…” Arthur shrugged. “You’ve probably seen suggestions of alienation between Maurice and his son. How’re you going to work on a relationship that stressed?”
“But that’s the only way it’ll stick,” Cobb pointed out, side-stepping the question. “We all long for reconciliation. Catharsis. Positive emotion always trumps negative emotion.”
Arthur stared at him, expressionlessly. “Does it?” he asked.
Cobb hesitated. “Yes,” he finally said. He closed his eyes. “It does.”
“Doesn’t change the fact you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to pull it off.”
“Inception’s not about specificity. It’s about getting as much information as we can use. When we go down there, we’re going to have to adapt to whatever we find in Fischer’s mind.”
“That’s your plan?” Arthur asked, sounding just a little appalled. He raised an eyebrow, eyeing Cobb skeptically.
Cobb shrugged. “It’s been better than some of our other plans.”
“Hard to top ‘Kill it, Arthur!’ and ‘Flirt with anything that moves,’”
Cobb’s bark of sudden laughter only surprised himself. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“No,” Arthur said wryly, “We went back to Plan B which was ‘Shoot anything that moves’, and then back to Plan C which was ‘Get the hell out of there!’”
“Good times,” Cobb said aloud, and without quite meaning to, he found himself moving up to sit on the desk. Arthur shifted over to make room.
“Yeah, they were, weren’t they? Thought you always told me to get off your desk,” he said, teasing, dark eyes alight with bright humour. “You sure complained about it.”
“Yeah well,” Cobb shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned, “You know how many times we say we won’t do something, and then end up doing it anyway?”
“Yeah?”
“There you have it,” Cobb said.
Arthur shot him an amused look. “Far as I remember, that was mostly you.”
“Arthur, don’t get me started,” Cobb threatened lightly. His voice faltered as he remembered exactly what the most prominent example was. “Okay, look. I just came here…to talk. Can we…just do that?”
Arthur shrugged carelessly. He glanced at Cobb’s hand resting on the table, moved his hand over and pressed it lightly for a moment. Cobb swallowed. A memory, he knew. Nothing but a memory.
It was real. Still real.
“Yeah,” he said, with the easy smile that Cobb could trace, even with eyes closed. “We can do that.”
-
Ariadne wasn’t sure what she expected to find in Cobb’s mind. The last time, she’d been the dreamer and it was his projections that had populated her simulacrum of Paris. This time, she found herself in an old and rickety lift. She reached out to touch the doors briefly, and her fingers scraped against the rusted iron grilles. The lift wasn’t one of the cool and enclosed steel boxes that were in almost any skyscraper. This one had walls of wire mesh, and past the mesh, she saw nothing but the darkness of the elevator shaft.
She shivered a little. The lift reminded her too much of a cage, and the darkness was almost oppressing. Instead, she glanced at the operating panel, and realised that the lift was actually descending, although not without a few jerks and jolts. As the lift descended past layers, the corresponding button lit up, and when Ariadne stared past the grilles and out at what looked like a bar of some kind (was that Cobb, sitting with…someone?), she realised that each level must have been…a memory.
Cobb had built an entire dream of memories.
The lift ground to a halt - all Ariadne could see was some kind of carpeted corridor. She considered for a moment, shrugged, and then worked open the grilles. The rusted metal protested, but she finally managed to get them open and stepped forward, down the corridor. Maybe Cobb was at the end of it. There was a wooden door, left ajar, and past that, she could see a bit of light.
Ariadne made her way down the corridor, carefully. Windows lined it, and when she paused and glanced out of one, she could see a busy street below, with projections and cars. This layer was some kind of building, then, and yet at the same time, it was self-contained. The lift hadn’t taken her past any of the upper levels of the building. It was one thing, knowing that Cobb had been an architect. It was another thing to stand in a dream he’d built and realise that Cobb had been frighteningly good. A soft murmur from beyond the door caught her attention, and she continued down the hallway.
She made her way to the door, and paused at the threshold. The door was left entirely open, and she was able to glance into the room beyond. The blinds had not been drawn across the large window, and glancing outside, she could see it was early evening. The sun was setting, splashing orange-pink shadows across everything. That room, Ariadne realised, was almost definitely an office. There was a large desk in the centre, with files and papers, and shelves left neat against the wall, filled with books. Some sheets had been pinned to the walls, liberally scribbled on in blue marker.
But none of these quite drew her attention, and Ariadne sucked in a breath as she saw the two figures, shoulders almost touching, glancing out of the window. Their backs were turned to her. She recognised the first, his hair a dark blond in the fading light. She bit her lip, frowning, and unconsciously took a step back. The second had shot her, the last time they met.
Briefly, Cobb’s hand moved up, to rest lightly on Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur leaned inwards, shifting a little closer towards him. “Nice sunset,” Arthur spoke up, quietly. Ariadne had to strain to catch his words.
She swallowed. She thought she understood, now.
“Thank you,” Cobb said, just as softly. Ariadne took a step forward. She thought she had been quiet enough, but still, Cobb picked up on her presence. He disentangled himself with surprising quickness, both of them spinning around to glance at her. Cobb glared at her, eyes narrowed with a sharp fury. “You shouldn’t be here,” he snapped, taking a step forward. He cast Arthur a sidelong glance, and then strode towards her in a few quick steps. He all but hauled her roughly down the corridor and shoved her into the lift, got in behind her and slammed the grilles shut.
He didn’t turn to see if Arthur had followed them. Arthur hadn’t.
Cobb jabbed violently at one of the buttons and the lift began to rise.
“I just wanted to see what tests you were doing on your own every night,” Ariadne said, her voice wavering a little in the face of Cobb’s anger.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Cobb retorted softly, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead. He didn’t look at her.
“This has everything to do with me,” she shot back, “You’ve asked me to share dreams with you.”
“Not these,” Cobb said. His voice cracked a little, but Ariadne said nothing and pretended she hadn’t noticed. “These are my dreams.”
The lift finally brought them up, to the bar that Ariadne had remembered. Cobb pulled open the rusted grilles, and took a step forward, but went no further. She thought she heard music, maybe an acoustic guitar, and realised it was from Cobb’s memory of the bar, just like the hints of cigarette smoke in the air and the dimmed lights. There was a performer, seated on a stool, strumming his acoustic guitar and crooning into a mike.
It’s late in the evening; she’s wondering what clothes to wear…
She followed the line of Cobb’s wistful gaze, towards two figures seated at the bar. She didn’t need to look to know who they were. To realise they were both Cobb’s projections. The Cobb at the bar laughed carelessly. He didn’t look at them, didn’t glance around him. This was who Cobb had been, she realised, trying to get past how strange it seemed. That Cobb was centred, perfectly comfortable with himself, didn’t have that damaged, weary air to him.
He said something brief to the projection seated next to him - they clasped forearms briefly, and then both of them went back to their drinks. Arthur smirked at something the Cobb projection said. Their sleeves were carelessly rolled up to the elbow, and watching them, the first word that came to Ariadne’s mind was carefree. Hearing Eames say, ‘They were like brothers,’ was completely different from watching their interactions in Cobb’s memories. It was like saying that Eames was British. It was a fact. It was true. And yet, that statement completely missed out on so much more, the many subtleties underlying how Cobb and Arthur had been.
“Where is this place?”
“Bar,” Cobb said, quietly. “We used to come here a lot. Especially after a case, or after work.”
It was perfectly obvious who the ‘we’ had been.
“Why - how do you do this do yourself?” she asked, feeling for the empty look in Cobb’s eyes that she didn’t quite know how to deal with.
Cobb ignored her question, slipping his hands into his pockets as he leaned against the grille. Finally, he said, “It’s the only way I can still dream.” It was an evasion, one that Ariadne didn’t quite have the heart to call him on.
Instead, she asked, “Why is it so important to dream?”
Cobb finally glanced at her. It was a long, slow look, as if he was measuring her. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, a little haltingly, “You do something. You think you’ve screwed up. The more you think about it…the more you can’t be sure. Maybe you’ve thrown away…you’ve thrown away what matters most. All for one moment of stupidity. Dreams…they help you put back the pieces. And you think maybe, if you can find a way…maybe they can help you find out the truth. Or to live with yourself, a little better.” His pale blue gaze was searching, almost questioning. The kind of look that one could fall through, and just keep falling into…the unknown.
Ariadne nodded, even though she wasn’t entirely certain what he was getting at.
Finally, Cobb cast one last look back at the two conversing figures. “Let’s go,” he said, brusquely, and he pulled the grilles shut before searching for another floor and pushing the button. With a worrying clank, the lift began to rise.
“These aren’t dreams, are they?” Ariadne said, after the lift had completely left the bar behind. “These are memories. And you said never to use memories.”
“I know I did,” Cobb said. His tone said he didn’t want to continue talking about this. Ariadne ignored it.
“You’re trying to keep him alive. You can’t let him go,” she said, marvelling as the last pieces slipped into place. “Don’t you think - “
“You don’t understand,” Cobb cut in, curtly. “These are the memories that I have to remember. Things that I can’t forget. Moments that I have to make sense of.”
“Why? And what’s down there?”
He caught her wrist as she reached to press the basement button.
“Listen,” Cobb said, “There’s only one thing you need to understand about me.” He knew which level they were at, which layer of memory the lift had brought them to. He worked the controls to bring the lift to a shuddering halt, and then slid open the grilles. He didn’t invite her to follow him, but Ariadne followed him anyway, out of the lift and down the corridor. He didn’t say anything to dissuade her. She probably would have followed him even if he had.
They walked down another corridor. Ariadne would have paused to glance at the paintings and the soft yellow wallpaper, except that Cobb showed no signs of stopping. He kept walking, until the corridor opened up to a living room, and the front porch beyond. Ariadne frowned; there were two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on the tiled floor, a set of paints and paper shared between them. A slender, beautiful lady sat just behind them, watching them. They were all splattered with paint. The girl piped up, “Mama! His pony is weird.”
“Is not!” The boy protested. He was younger, with pale blond hair that must have come directly from Cobb.
“Is too!”
“It’s a lovely pony,” the woman said soothingly, in lightly-accented English, and the boy stuck his tongue out at his sister. “Why don’t you try drawing something else?”
“You draw something too!” the girl demanded, and the woman laughed and acquiesced, reaching over with the paint brush, dipping it into bright green and splattering it in neat strokes across the page. Ariadne glanced at Cobb. He was watching them, frowning. There was a different kind of longing on his face; a little softer, a little more regretful.
“Who are they?” she asked quietly, even though she thought she knew the answer.
“That’s Mal,” Cobb said. “My wife.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Cobb smiled reluctantly. “Yeah,” he agreed, his tone wistful. “In every way that mattered.”
Ariadne cast about for something else, something to break the soft reverie that Cobb seemed to be immersed in. “And are those your children?”
“Yeah. That’s my son, James. And that one there, she’s my daughter, Philippa.”
Philippa squealed as James splattered some paint on her, and then the war was on. She left blue handprints on his shirt and soon, Mal’s cheek bore two yellow fingerprints. She tried to be stern, but it didn’t last long before she was laughing too.
“But,” Ariadne said slowly, trying to make sense of this, “If you have a wife, a family - “
“ - Why did I leave?” Cobb asked, cutting in. He’d deliberately misinterpreted her question, she knew. “The charges were heavy. All evidence pointed to me being the one who did it. Ballistics, traces…an officer had been killed, and they wanted answers. I could have tried to contest it in court, of course. My chances weren’t good. Algol…it was a federal case. Espionage. Torture. Murder.”
“So you fled? And you’ve been…doing all of this, ever since?”
“You mean extraction?”
Ariadne nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Do they know where you are? What you’re doing? Or…what happened?”
Cobb shrugged noncommittally. “Mal knows a little,” he finally said. “Sometimes…sometimes, they’re better off not knowing.”
“But it isn’t just about the charges, is it?” Ariadne guessed. Another piece slid into place as Cobb glanced at her, sharply. “Saito was saying something about information. He knows what happened that night.”
“It isn’t,” Cobb agreed, watching the figures in the living room. Mal sent Philippa and James to wash up and started to clean up the mess of paint and paper. He watched, throat tight, as his projection of himself entered. As he spoke with Mal. As their voices got louder and louder, until they were almost shouting at each other. “Sometimes…you have to want to go home. Back to that peaceful little house, the one with the yellow-cream wallpaper, and white-plaster walls in some places…flowers…Sometimes, you don’t want to. The walls are there, tight, they’ll close in on you and you have no way of knowing exactly what to do. It’s a prison. The bars are different, but they’re still there. And then, sometimes, the only hope you have - the only thing you can think of doing is to run. And keep running.”
He watched the projection pick up his bags and leave, watched Mal sit there, quietly, broken and alone. He watched the tears slide down her cheeks. He could walk up to them, touch them, wet against her skin. He couldn’t take them away. He didn’t know what else there was, except for guilt, and the need to be right. To know he had been right. He listened to her hushed sobs, watched her pull herself together the way she always did. In some ways, Mal was always far stronger than he had been. Her shoulders trembled a little. She picked up a paintbrush and shoved it into a holder with a little more force than necessary.
“Damn you, Dom,” she whispered, and then got to work cleaning up.
“But why?” Ariadne asked, confused.
Cobb didn’t answer her. He watched the projection of his wife, evidently lost in thought, or at least lost in memory. An idea came to Ariadne then, an impulsive thought. She might have felt a little guilty, but at the moment, all she knew was that there was something missing. That things didn’t quite make sense. And that there was something that Cobb was trying to hide.
She turned, and ran back down the corridor and all but hurled herself into the lift. It took her a few moments to slam the grille shut, and then to cast about for the lowest floor and hit the button. If Cobb heard her, she didn’t know. The lift started to descend, and she exhaled sharply, adrenaline still surging in her veins.
She did it. She did it.
The only question now was what lay down there.
-
The lift descended, slow and rattling, and Ariadne wondered if Cobb had any other way to follow her, or if he had to wait for the lift. She caught a cry of pain, and saw Arthur standing over Cobb, gun pointed right at Cobb. Cobb’s knee was bleeding and his face was a mask of pain and anger. He said something, but Ariadne didn’t catch it as Arthur lashed out and his foot caught Cobb, right on his injury. Cobb collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and then the lift took her right past them.
Ariadne took a deep breath. It was one thing to know that Arthur had turned on Cobb, had hurt him and enjoyed it. It was another thing to catch a glimpse of it in Cobb’s memories.
As the lift neared the bottom of the shaft, the first thing that Ariadne picked up on was the smell of smoke, thick and heavy. She coughed, wrinkling her nose. There was a dull heat in the air, not terribly hot, but enough that she knew it wasn’t something normal, like a hot day. Something was burning.
And then the lift came to a halt, and she squinted a little. Her eyes were beginning to water, stung and irritated by the smoke and she managed to work the grille open. She took one step forward. It looked like the small living room of an apartment, she thought, only that she couldn’t make out very many things. It was spartan, the kind which looked as if someone hadn’t really lived in it. She wondered whose apartment it was, and took another step forward, glancing all around her. She thought she caught a hint of fire down a side-corridor.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Arthur said, stepping clear of the smoke. His arms were folded across his chest and he shot her a disapproving look. He didn’t seem to be armed, but Ariadne figured that really didn’t count for much.
“I need to understand,” she said, watching him carefully. She felt a prickle of fear. The last time they’d met, he’d shot her. Somehow, Ariadne didn’t think he’d hesitate to hurt her again this time.
He favoured her with a lazy smile. “Do you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Her protest died on her lips. She didn’t need to understand. But she wanted too, so badly. She wanted the puzzle that was Dominic Cobb to make sense. She wanted to help, because it was tearing him up and no one else seemed to be able to.
“Yes.”
He slipped his hands into the pockets of his brown canvas jacket, and Ariadne relaxed slightly. “Why?” Arthur wanted to know.
“I…I need to,” she said, frustrated at her inability to explain. Could curiosity even be explained? The burning, itching urge to know what was going on? “I want…I want to know. I want it all to make sense.”
“You’re like Cobb,” he said.
“Sorry?”
Arthur shrugged lightly. “You want to understand?” he said at last, his expression unreadable. “Okay, think about this. If I say to you that Miles used to be a murderer, maybe some kind of serial rapist…”
“That’s impossible,” Ariadne said, flatly. Miles was a firm teacher, but she couldn’t imagine the gentle old man being anything along the lines of what Arthur had described. Maybe that was the point of the example.
“Is it?” Arthur asked. She couldn’t quite place the eerie smile playing along the edges of his lips. It was more a flash of teeth than anything else, and his eyes didn’t quite hold a hint of any warmth. Dangerous, she reminded herself. She involuntarily took a step back, and he noticed and smirked. He was capable of killing her. She didn’t know why he seemed content to toy with her, to answer her questions…for now. “Everything points to Miles being the one who did it.”
“So the evidence was wrong.”
“You think so?”
“Okay,” Ariadne said, trying another tack. “So you’re saying that Cobb can’t come to terms with the fact...with the fact that you did it. He thinks the evidence is wrong.”
“What I’m saying,” Arthur said, patiently, “Is that you don’t even really know Cobb, do you? He’s the slightly crazy but brilliant man who picked you at Miles’ recommendation and offered you a job. And here you are, trying to figure him out. To satisfy your own curiosity.”
“And?” Ariadne asked. She refused to feel ashamed or even guilty.
“So there’s this person. You know him, as well as you know yourself. The two of you are close. So close. He couldn’t possibly be a serial killer. But he is. And the evidence? The evidence is that he tortured you. You remember it. Every moment of it. The truth died there, that day.” He glanced around them, gesturing vaguely at the apartment. Ariadne was coughing again as the smoke got thicker, and flames curled into the living room. She caught the faint sheen of sweat on Arthur’s forehead, from the increasing heat. “The only thing you can go on…is that he tortured you. Is that he admitted as much. Would you still say it’s impossible?”
His dark eyes bored into her, questioning. Behind him, the flames grew, casting an unsteady light over his features. His shadow wavered.
“I…” Ariadne swallowed. “I don’t…”
“You can’t believe,” Arthur continued. “You must believe. You can’t. You must. And what do you do when there’s no one to turn to, when that beautiful, lovely, gentle wife of yours wants you to let her in? To go inside your head, to see what you saw?”
“You run away,” Ariadne guessed. She glanced at Arthur for confirmation, but he remained expressionless. “Into dreams, living memory after memory…”
Arthur shook his head, but said, “And soon, you can’t tell what’s real anymore.You can’t trust yourself. You can’t trust the only evidence you have. It becomes an obsession. The only way to have it all make sense. An obsession far more powerful than your curiosity.”
“But why?” Ariadne demanded, frustrated. “Why is it so important for Cobb to know?”
Arthur shook his head pityingly. “You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, amused. “What it’s like to trust someone utterly, with no reservations. To know someone so well, as if they were just part of you. You don’t need words between the two of you. And then - “
“Betrayal.”
Ariadne half-turned to see Cobb, standing right at the entrance of the lift. She couldn’t quite make out the grim expression on his face. “Ariadne,” he continued, “Step away from him.”
She hesitated.
“Now!” Cobb demanded, his voice cracking, as sharp as a whip. Immediately, reflexively, Ariadne stepped back, heading back towards the lift. Towards where Cobb stood.
Arthur didn’t follow her. Instead, he hooked his thumbs behind his belt and said, casually, “Cobb. I haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
Cobb glanced at the flames and his lips tightened. His breathing went deep, and his gaze was unfocused. For a moment, he seemed utterly unresponsive, and Ariadne moved towards him. “Cobb?” she called. “Cobb!”
It jolted him out of whatever daze he had been lost in.
“No,” Cobb said at last. “Not for a while.” To Ariadne, he said, “Get into the lift.” There was an urgency in his voice, a tone that said he would drag her in himself if she didn’t move, and Ariadne didn’t argue with him. She stepped in.
“You can’t run away forever, Cobb,” Arthur said, peaceably. Perhaps, Ariadne thought, that was the most frightening part. His eyes were almost empty, and the pleasant smile on his face…it was just an expression. There was no mirth in it, no warmth. He said it like he was stating a fact. Behind him, the flames burned, curling upwards, growing larger and larger. Arthur paid them no heed. “Everything ends.”
“I know,” Cobb said.
He yanked the grilles shut with a screech of protesting metal, and hit the button. As the lift moved upwards, the last thing Ariadne saw was Arthur, and fire.
And then, the world ended.
-
Ariadne’s eyes snapped open and she pulled the line from her hand, immediately tossing it aside and applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Next to her, Cobb sat up and began doing the same. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t glance at her.
In the end, it was Ariadne who spoke first, right after Cobb had cast the die onto the table and checked it.
“I don’t get it,” Ariadne said, flatly. “Arthur betrayed you. Set you up. He...did to you exactly what he did to the others as Algol. I…I saw what he was doing. Why are you still…” she struggled to find the words. “Why do you still…keep his totem? After what he did to you?”
Although it was too dim to make out much else, Cobb’s smile was sad and distant, almost wistful. “Yeah,” he said, slowly. He slipped the die back into his pocket. “I kept his die. But…tell me. Do you really stop loving…” he paused, looking faintly surprised, and then repeated, “Do you really stop loving someone, just because they’ve betrayed you? It doesn’t work that way, does it? That’s what makes the betrayal stick and hurt so much. Because you loved them, you trusted them…and you don’t understand why.”
“I don’t get it,” Ariadne said, slowly.
Cobb shrugged. He’d turned his back to her as he cleaned the needles and coiled the lines back into the PASIV and snapped it shut. “What’s there to understand?” he asked, a little bitterly.
“Arthur. You said…you said you loved him.”
Cobb exhaled, the tense lines of his shoulders relaxing. He didn’t turn to face her, choosing instead to fiddle with the PASIV. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I did.”
“But you’re married. What about Mal?”
“You know,” Cobb said, “Love’s a funny thing, sometimes. It makes you do crazy things. I was this exchange student in Paris? There was this girl. Beautiful, especially when she laughed. I ran down a street in autumn, chasing her scarf for her. I still remember it. It was a tightly-woven silk scarf. Very bright red.”
“What happened?” Ariadne wanted to know.
Cobb half-turned, to glance at her. She could barely make out the wistful smile on his profile. “I married her,” he said, eventually. “But if I hadn’t run down that street because the scarf caught my eye, if I hadn’t decided to take a different route to college that day, I wouldn’t have met her. If I hadn’t decided to go on exchange to Paris…” his voice trailed off; he stared into the distance, pensive.
Ariadne cleared her throat.
“It’s a funny thought, really, that we’re all just waiting for that someone out there to complete us, in places we never even knew we were missing. And when we find that someone…” he shrugged.
“Why?” Ariadne asked, when it became evident Cobb wasn’t going to say anything else. She wanted to add, ‘What does that have to do with Mal?’ but tried to be patient.
“Loving someone, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. You have to want to make it work,” Cobb explained. “It isn’t something you can say, or define or decide. Sometimes, it hits you.” He brought his hands together in a sharp clap. The sound cut through the silence of the warehouse, and Ariadne started. “Just like that. Sometimes, it sneaks up on you. You wake up in the morning, or maybe you’re watching him leave and you realise: you love. You already did, and you don’t even know when you started to.”
“Is that what happened with Mal?”
Cobb nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “You wake up one morning and think: this is the one. This is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with. Sometimes, you’re wrong. But you have to want to make it work. Wanting, loving someone…it’s just the beginning.”
Ariadne had the distinct feeling Cobb wasn’t quite talking to her anymore. She thought back to the projection of Mal, sitting on the floor of the living room, thrusting a paintbrush into a tin holder, and swallowed. She thought she knew what Cobb was getting at.
“Arthur,” Cobb said, after a while. “That was what you asked. I’d have taken a bullet for him, stepped out in front of a car for him. He’d have done the same for me.”
“Like brothers.”
“Love isn’t the same as sex, Ariadne,” Cobb said, very dryly. “Oh, there’s probably a reason it’s called making love to someone, but it isn’t always the same thing. You can’t always start to segregate it, to say, ‘That’s brotherly,’ or ‘That’s romantic,’ because…because…how do you ever tell? Sooner or later…the differences fall away. It’s not about words anymore, and when the two of you connect…it stops mattering. It just is.”
He glanced at her, face shadowed, willing her to understand, and Ariadne nodded slowly. Maybe she didn’t quite get it. She thought she did. Just a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said, eventually. She couldn’t think of what else to say.
Cobb shrugged. “Don’t be,” he said, quietly. “So am I.”
They started and glanced up as the warehouse doors opened, and Saito came in. “It’s time,” he called out, flicking on the lights. Ariadne blinked at the sudden influx of illumination. “Maurice Fischer just died in Sydney.”
“When’s the funeral?” Cobb asked. The raw edge had disappeared from his voice; he was every inch the professional extractor once again.
“Thursday,” Saito said, “Los Angeles.”
Cobb frowned and thought it through. “Then we need to move,” he decided, “I give Robert no later than Tuesday to accompany the body.”
He turned to pick up the PASIV - and Ariadne caught his hand by the wrist. He glanced at her, and she let go. “Cobb,” she said, her voice low but fierce, “I’m coming with you.”
Immediately, Cobb shook his head. “No, you aren’t,” he whispered. “I promised Miles.”
“The team needs someone who understands what you’re struggling with,” she retorted, “And if you can’t keep Arthur out, you’ll be taking an unnecessary risk by dreaming the third level. If you know the design, he does too. Do you think you can stop him?”
For a while, Cobb said nothing, and Ariadne met his troubled gaze stubbornly, refusing to look away. Abruptly, he gave in. “Get us another seat on the plane,” he called out to Saito.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
Part II: Inception
Ariadne had been using one of the workbenches in the warehouse, late at night, when she heard the sound. She frowned and checked the brass bishop she’d been working on. The weighting was fine, she thought. It stopped rolling, which was the important thing. Eames had been rather flippant about the whole idea of a totem, but had said Cobb suggested she use one. Ariadne hadn’t seen the harm in that.
She slipped the bishop in her pocket and stood up, stretching. She’d been bent over the workbench for a while, and now her shoulders ached. She followed the sound, walking in the general direction it had come from, until she saw a dim light in one of the work areas.
She paused in the doorway when she finally saw who it was. Cobb was bent over a table, working on a PASIV. He glanced up furtively. For a moment, he looked almost panicked, but then he snapped the PASIV shut, and his expression turned perfectly bland. “Were you going under on your own?” she asked.
“No, no,” Cobb said, quickly. “I was just running some experiments. I didn’t realise anyone else was here.”
“Yeah,” Ariadne said, “I was just - I was working on my totem, actually.” She fished into her pocket and pulled out the brass bishop, letting him see it.
“Here,” he offered, “Let me take a look.” He took a step towards her, reaching for her totem, and Ariadne took a step back, fingers closing around the bishop, shaking her head.
Cobb gave a small smile. It was barely there. “So you’re learning,” he stated, nodding in approval.
“An elegant solution for keeping track of reality,” Ariadne said, turning the bishop over and over in her hand. She pocketed it. “Was it your idea?”
“No,” Cobb said, with a shake of his head. “It was Mal’s.”
“Mal?”
Cobb’s jaw tightened. “My wife,” he said, carefully. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic die. It was a translucent red, and Ariadne glanced at it curiously but knew better than to reach out for it. “This one was…Arthur’s. In a dream…” he shrugged, and didn’t go on.
“Eames told me,” Ariadne said. “About Arthur.”
Cobb went very still. His expression had gone completely unreadable and his light blue eyes were distant. It was as if he was looking at her, but not quite registering her presence. Then he blinked, and he was there again. “I see,” he said, neutrally. “And how are the mazes coming along?”
She ignored his attempt at a diversion. “The…projection I saw in your head,” Ariadne asked, on a hunch. “Was he Arthur?”
Cobb turned to walk away, without a word, leaving the PASIV lying on the table.
“Cobb!” she called after him. “He shot me. You could at least give me some kind of an answer!”
Cobb turned. “Yes,” he said, fiercely. “He is.”
This time, she didn’t stop him when he stalked out of the workshop.
-
Over the next few weeks, Ariadne laboured on designing the levels that Yusuf and Eames would dream. The final level - the one that Cobb would dream - was the trickiest. She had input from Yusuf and Eames, but she had no idea if she was really getting it all right. Eames had conceded he wasn’t much of an architect, and Yusuf had shrugged and cheerfully reminded her that he didn’t often go out into the field.
So when Cobb came by to check on her progress, she lifted the small scale-model of the maze she’d made for his level so he could see it, and told him she had some questions about the design.
Cobb’s eyes widened as he glanced at the maze and then quickly looked away. “No, no!” He exclaimed, and then more calmly, “Don’t show me any specifics.” He didn’t glance back until she’d carefully set the model down, and then slid it out of sight, behind a short stack of papers. One or two of them fluttered down to the ground, and Ariadne stooped to pick them up and set them back.
“Why not?” she wanted to know.
“Only the dreamer needs to know the layout,” Cobb said quickly. His eyes slid past her, then focused back on her. By now, Ariadne thought she had begun to figure out when Cobb was being evasive. This was one of the times.
“But you’re dreaming this level,” she said, slowly.
“Yeah, but well…that’s different. I’ll learn the level a few days before the job.”
“Why is it so important that you don’t know the layout?”
Cobb exhaled in frustration, running a hand roughly through his hair. “Look,” he said, after a while. “In case any of us brings our projections in there, alright? We don’t want them knowing the specifics of the maze.”
“This is about Arthur, isn’t it?” Ariadne realised, and watched as he stiffened, and then his face took on the distant, shuttered expression that she’d begun to associate with any discussion or acknowledgement of his issues. “You’re afraid you’ll bring him in.” She remembered the way Eames had frowned slightly when she’d related her experience in Cobb’s dream, and then went on, “You can’t keep him out, can you?” Intuition said she was right; Cobb’s reaction confirmed it.
The table screeched against the floor as Cobb leaned too hard on it. He didn’t glance down at all. He gripped the edge of the table, white-knuckled. “Right,” he said, tightly.
“That’s why you can’t build,” Ariadne realised. “He knows what you know. He’d…sabotage the whole operation. Like what he did all those yea - “
“Stop talking,” Cobb said, through gritted teeth. His eyes were cold and hard. “You know nothing.” Abruptly, Ariadne was acutely aware of the fact that Cobb was dangerous. He wasn’t just the best at what he did because of his extensive experience. That was just one part of it. There was a single-minded focus to him, cold and calculating, and illegal meant nothing in the face of that implacable determination.
She must have taken a step back, or Cobb realised it, somehow, because he exhaled sharply, forced himself to relax, and said, “Sorry.” He sounded a little grudging about it.
“You were close, weren’t you?” Ariadne breathed, pushing on because she’d all but said it. “That’s why you don’t use another point man. Because Arthur’s stuck in your head, and you can’t let him go. ‘Like brothers’, Eames said. They never knew why - why he…did what he did, only that Arthur died in the end. But you cared. That’s why it’s so personal. That’s why he’s still there, isn’t it?”
Cobb said nothing.
“Do the others know?”
“No,” he said. He picked up one of the nearby manuals on the table and rifled through it disinterestedly. He didn’t look at her. “They don’t.”
“You’ve got to warn them. If it’s getting worse…”
Cobb snapped the book shut forcefully and slammed it down on the table. “No one said it’s getting worse,” he said, sharply. “Look, I just need to…” he paused. He wanted to say, I just need to get home, except it wasn’t true. It wasn’t so much about getting home. It was about closure. He didn’t know if he could go home, even with his charges cleared, if he didn’t know the answers.
He couldn’t imagine returning to his house, and pretending everything would go on as it had before…before all of this. Before he left. Facing Mal, and the inevitable questions that he’d never really answered and the feeling that everything was falling to pieces, no matter how hard it was to put things back together.
Ariadne caught his hesitation. “You just need to…?”
“Go home,” Cobb said, shortly, “That’s all I care about right now.”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“Because,” Cobb said, clinically, “They think I’m Algol. They think I killed Arthur, and a police officer. They think I’m responsible for a variety of crimes, including murder, some forms of torture, and espionage.”
His expression, as he said it, was completely shuttered, completely devoid of anything. That, more than his anger, Ariadne thought, was the frightening thing. In that moment, she could have believed that Cobb did kill Arthur. She bit her lip. The question was on the tip of her tongue, and yet it wasn’t a question she could just ask.
“Thank you,” Cobb said, then. He turned to leave, and paused when she spoke.
“For what?” Ariadne asked, confused.
Cobb glanced back at her, head bowed slightly. In that moment, he looked very small, very tired, and very sad. “For not asking whether I did,” he said, quietly.
He left.
-
So this, then, is Cobb and Arthur:
Separately, they are both one of the greats - one of the names that all extractors find themselves grudgingly agreeing on. These men are some of the best. There is no contest about that.
But together -
Together, they are legend.
They’re the best team around, the one that no extractor quite wants to find himself up against, if he can help it. And when Eames is on board, they’re unstoppable. But even when it’s just the two of them, they’re more than just dangerous. No two extractors have worked together quite so closely or quite so often. Cobb-and-Arthur, Arthur-and-Cobb, the order doesn’t matter. Countless jobs, all worked together, and a deep and abiding friendship have joined their two names into one. They’re closer than brothers. They know each other with the utter confidence and instinctive intimacy that only sharing innumerable dreams can bring.
They’re two complementary halves of the same being. How Cobb’s cunning is bolstered by Arthur’s tenacity, or how Arthur’s caution is balanced by Cobb’s sheer daring and willingness to take heart-stopping risks - or even the way the two of them don’t need words to communicate - these are all the subject of vaguely incredulous conversations. The cynics laugh and wonder how long such a partnership can last. It’s been the subject of many a bet. Extractors don’t tend to work together in fixed teams, and never for such a long period of time.
But this is Cobb-and-Arthur. Arthur-and-Cobb. They’ve got this little habit of subverting the odds.
In the end, this is what most of them say:
It seems impossible that Cobb and Arthur would ever split up. They fit each other too well for that. And they’d never turn on each other, the way so many black market extractors do. They’re far too loyal to each other for that.
They’re the team. And though neither of them will ever quite say it, they both think they’ll always be.
-
“You’re planning something big,” Arthur said easily, leaning back against the office desk. Cobb wanted to tell him that he’d knock the papers off if he sat back too far, but the words caught in his throat.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Need my help?”
Cobb shoved his hands in his jacket pocket. “You know I can’t do that,” he said, quietly. “I can’t screw this one up. It’s my last and best chance.”
“Still think I did it?”
Cobb closed his eyes, so he didn’t have to look at reproachful brown eyes. But Arthur was still there, still looking sad and resigned when he opened them again.
“I don’t know what to think,” Cobb said. “That’s why I’m doing this.” He paused, before he added, “I shouldn’t trust you, you know. Not after what you did to me. It keeps…eating at me. Like a voice, whispering, clear as a bell. That I can’t trust you.”
“And?”
“I still do.” Cobb admitted. “I still trust you. I don’t know why.”
Arthur snorted, and straightened up. “Probably because I saved your sorry ass a bunch of times during the Collins job. And I’m not even counting the mess with Morgan. Or the time you nearly bought it handling Smith’s projections.”
Arthur’s words threw him a kind of lifeline. Cobb grabbed it tight and held on and didn’t let go. He buried the old pain, the old confusion, the old doubt and played the Cobb-and-Arthur game. Here, in the memory of their old office, talking to the memory-of-a-man, it was too easy to bury his head in the sand and just pretend. As long as it lasted, he could almost make himself believe nothing had changed. Things were going to fall into place. To make sense, after so long of just running and hiding.
As long as it lasted.
“Right,” he said skeptically, “And who was it who got me into that mess in the first place?”
“You blundered right into the group of them,” Arthur countered, “And I got you out.”
“Evans.”
“Doesn’t count. Still makes it seven times in my favour.”
“Algol made us even,” Cobb said, darkly, before he could stop himself.
Arthur’s mouth tightened. He said nothing. All at once, Cobb was suddenly very aware of the fact that he thought he could smell something burning, outside the window. He didn’t turn to look. He knew what he would see. He didn’t want to see it.
“It did,” Arthur said, quietly. “You killed me. We’re even.”
Cobb’s jaw clenched. He didn’t look away. Neither did Arthur. “I know,” Cobb said, feeling the quick stab of pain. “I know.”
“Last time pays for all.”
Cobb nodded slowly. Weariness, guilt, the tentative beginnings of some kind of decision: they settled into the pit of his stomach, heavy and leaden. “Terms?”
“You don’t know your conditions of victory,” Arthur said. The corners of his mouth quirked in a gentle smile. “Do you?”
“Neither do you.”
“I know enough.”
“You know as much as I do,” Cobb pointed out.
Arthur shrugged. “It’ll have to be enough.”
“That’s my line.”
It was too late by now. The joking statement fell flat and an awkward silence followed on its heels. That was the problem. He could pretend everything was still working, but it was harder to give himself over to the illusion. To maintain it. It was starting to fall apart in various ways, to come apart at the seams.
Sometimes, even the Cobb-and-Arthur game wasn’t enough.
Arthur was the one who spoke up, first. “You can’t keep me out forever, you know. I’ll figure it out soon enough.”
“I don’t have to keep you out forever,” Cobb said, quietly. “Just long enough.”
“You already know the answer,” Arthur said, just as quietly. “Or part of it. Saito can’t tell you much more than what you already know.”
“I’m not going back there,” Cobb snapped, and then he realised he was all but shouting, hands balled into fists by his side. It was a safe buried deep within his mind that he didn’t dare to crack open, answers he couldn’t stand not knowing, but couldn’t live with knowing.
“It frightens you, doesn’t it? That glimpse you got when you opened that safe,” Arthur asked. There was a sympathy in his eyes that was almost kind.
Cobb wondered how he’d ever reconciled the memories together. Arthur-laughing, Arthur-making-deadpan-remarks, Arthur-focused-and-on-the-job, Arthur-worried, Arthur-the-traitor, Arthur-who-was-Algol-
The same man who was his friend, his brother.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t ever quite bring himself to believe. He didn’t know what to do. What to think. It was the puzzle, the Gordian knot embedded, uncomfortably hard in the corner of his mind.
“No,” Cobb said, aloud, in response to Arthur’s question.
They both knew he was lying.
-
This is Ariadne:
She’s the top of most of her classes, and near the top of the class for the rest. She’s gifted, with the same effortless inspiration that Cobb has. Once had. She’s Miles’ most promising student, but that isn’t why he recommends her.
He recommends her because Ariadne is curious. She’s as doggedly persistent as a terrier, and once she’s gotten a tantalising hint of something she doesn’t quite get, she grabs it between her teeth and shakes it until all the answers fly out.
Because sometimes, even an old man who should know better than to hope for the impossible can’t help but hope that maybe his student can do what his daughter can’t. Maybe she can find out what is wrong, what that cancer growing in the corner of Cobb’s mind is.
Maybe.
It’s always the questions that drive her. The ones that she doesn’t know the answer to. More often than not, Ariadne is so caught up in the search and the questions that she doesn’t realise that not everyone likes to be understood. Some people have secrets, and not everyone enjoys prying. And that’s another thing about her: the brush-offs, the brusque requests for her to mind her own business don’t affect her. She’s determined, persistent, and more importantly, she isn’t proud. Failure’s just another opportunity. She doesn’t mind falling once or twice or even ten times, because she’ll always pick herself up and try again.
So all of Cobb’s attempts to close the door on her questions aren’t in any way discouraging. They only serve to make her all the more curious as to what he’s trying to hide, and in all fairness, maybe she wouldn’t have been so persistent, except that she can’t help but remember exactly how he froze up when they were both in his mind and when that projection - Arthur, his name was, Eames had said - had shot her.
There’s something indescribably damaged about Cobb, as if he isn’t entirely there, and Ariadne isn’t even sure about this job, sometimes, except that she’s quite sure that Miles would not have even brought up the matter of the job if Cobb had been truly unhinged.
That is the last piece that slides neatly into the complex tangle of shapes that form Ariadne: for all that can be said, she’s nice. She’s kind. At the end, it isn’t just curiosity which makes her come back, which makes her keep asking Cobb all those questions, trying…trying to understand. The puzzle he presents is a frustrating itch she can’t quite scratch. But that isn’t it.
It’s in the way Cobb moves, the way he sometimes jumps at loud noises, hand reaching for - something, before his face clears and then he’s back here with them; pure, intent, focus.
It’s in the way Cobb startles when she approaches and she’s quite sure she hasn’t made much of a sound in the darkened warehouse, when she comes back at night to see if he’s still there. More often than not, he’s setting up or keeping away the PASIV and no matter how silent she thinks she has been, he hears her coming and startles anyway. She wonders if she would catch him going under if she varied her routine a little, or if she kept at it. She wonders about the nature of the experiments he’s running, because Yusuf seems to know nothing about them and says that the chemical tests are all complete.
So this is Ariadne. It isn’t just the enigma Cobb is. It’s all the little signs that tug at her, the ones that insist that something is wrong, that Cobb needs some kind of help, and no one else seems inclined to give it. She doesn’t fancy herself some kind of knight in shining armour, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else who sees the problem or who’s caught the vague hints that something is very wrong with Cobb.
It is this, at the root of her native curiosity that sends her into the warehouse, night after night, until one day, she enters and Cobb has already gone under. He reclines back in the lawn chair, eyes closed, and in sleep, he looks strangely peaceful. He doesn’t look quite like himself when he’s under, she thinks. The lines have eased, and the hard, wary air that he carries tight against his skin and the way he seems so much older than he really is (how old can he be? Thirty? Thirty-four?) - all of them are muted by slumber.
She doesn’t quite feel guilty when she sits down next to him and pulls out another line. She knows how to work a PASIV by now, and it’s terribly easy to lie back and relax…
And maybe she’ll find some answers in the depths of Cobb’s mind.
-
“Back again?” Arthur asked, looking up from the dossier he was flipping through. He sat on top of the office desk, papers pushed carelessly to the side.
Cobb shrugged, as casually as he could manage. “Thought you’d have known better than to ask by now,” he said.
Arthur acknowledged it with a nod. “Mirfak’s good, isn’t he? Maybe better than I was.”
“No,” Cobb said, softly. “You were the best.” He didn’t ask how Arthur had known. He didn’t ask the far more important question, which was how much Arthur knew. How much he couldn’t keep from Arthur.
Arthur’s mouth quirked in a small smile. “Thanks.” He frowned down at the dossier again, absently flipping through the pages again. Cobb thought he could see annotations in blue and red ink all over and suspected they closely matched the ones he’d made on the actual, physical copy. “Any idea when the job’s going to start?”
Cobb stiffened slightly. “You know I can’t tell you that,” he said regretfully.
Arthur smiled crookedly. “Yeah, I know,” he said, “Was worth a shot.” He finally stopped at a folded page, and carefully straightened it out. “You know someone’s made a mistake, right?”
Cobb frowned, taking a step forward. “Where?” he wanted to know. He craned his neck, trying to peer at the page that Arthur had marked, until Arthur took pity on him and turned the dossier over so he could get a better look.
“The commotion during the board meeting at Sydney. Maurice Fischer threatened to disinherit his son in front of the entire board.”
“And?”
“There aren’t that many incidents as prominent as that one, but most CEOs do like to keep those things behind closed doors. But if you extrapolate…” Arthur shrugged. “You’ve probably seen suggestions of alienation between Maurice and his son. How’re you going to work on a relationship that stressed?”
“But that’s the only way it’ll stick,” Cobb pointed out, side-stepping the question. “We all long for reconciliation. Catharsis. Positive emotion always trumps negative emotion.”
Arthur stared at him, expressionlessly. “Does it?” he asked.
Cobb hesitated. “Yes,” he finally said. He closed his eyes. “It does.”
“Doesn’t change the fact you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to pull it off.”
“Inception’s not about specificity. It’s about getting as much information as we can use. When we go down there, we’re going to have to adapt to whatever we find in Fischer’s mind.”
“That’s your plan?” Arthur asked, sounding just a little appalled. He raised an eyebrow, eyeing Cobb skeptically.
Cobb shrugged. “It’s been better than some of our other plans.”
“Hard to top ‘Kill it, Arthur!’ and ‘Flirt with anything that moves,’”
Cobb’s bark of sudden laughter only surprised himself. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“No,” Arthur said wryly, “We went back to Plan B which was ‘Shoot anything that moves’, and then back to Plan C which was ‘Get the hell out of there!’”
“Good times,” Cobb said aloud, and without quite meaning to, he found himself moving up to sit on the desk. Arthur shifted over to make room.
“Yeah, they were, weren’t they? Thought you always told me to get off your desk,” he said, teasing, dark eyes alight with bright humour. “You sure complained about it.”
“Yeah well,” Cobb shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned, “You know how many times we say we won’t do something, and then end up doing it anyway?”
“Yeah?”
“There you have it,” Cobb said.
Arthur shot him an amused look. “Far as I remember, that was mostly you.”
“Arthur, don’t get me started,” Cobb threatened lightly. His voice faltered as he remembered exactly what the most prominent example was. “Okay, look. I just came here…to talk. Can we…just do that?”
Arthur shrugged carelessly. He glanced at Cobb’s hand resting on the table, moved his hand over and pressed it lightly for a moment. Cobb swallowed. A memory, he knew. Nothing but a memory.
It was real. Still real.
“Yeah,” he said, with the easy smile that Cobb could trace, even with eyes closed. “We can do that.”
-
Ariadne wasn’t sure what she expected to find in Cobb’s mind. The last time, she’d been the dreamer and it was his projections that had populated her simulacrum of Paris. This time, she found herself in an old and rickety lift. She reached out to touch the doors briefly, and her fingers scraped against the rusted iron grilles. The lift wasn’t one of the cool and enclosed steel boxes that were in almost any skyscraper. This one had walls of wire mesh, and past the mesh, she saw nothing but the darkness of the elevator shaft.
She shivered a little. The lift reminded her too much of a cage, and the darkness was almost oppressing. Instead, she glanced at the operating panel, and realised that the lift was actually descending, although not without a few jerks and jolts. As the lift descended past layers, the corresponding button lit up, and when Ariadne stared past the grilles and out at what looked like a bar of some kind (was that Cobb, sitting with…someone?), she realised that each level must have been…a memory.
Cobb had built an entire dream of memories.
The lift ground to a halt - all Ariadne could see was some kind of carpeted corridor. She considered for a moment, shrugged, and then worked open the grilles. The rusted metal protested, but she finally managed to get them open and stepped forward, down the corridor. Maybe Cobb was at the end of it. There was a wooden door, left ajar, and past that, she could see a bit of light.
Ariadne made her way down the corridor, carefully. Windows lined it, and when she paused and glanced out of one, she could see a busy street below, with projections and cars. This layer was some kind of building, then, and yet at the same time, it was self-contained. The lift hadn’t taken her past any of the upper levels of the building. It was one thing, knowing that Cobb had been an architect. It was another thing to stand in a dream he’d built and realise that Cobb had been frighteningly good. A soft murmur from beyond the door caught her attention, and she continued down the hallway.
She made her way to the door, and paused at the threshold. The door was left entirely open, and she was able to glance into the room beyond. The blinds had not been drawn across the large window, and glancing outside, she could see it was early evening. The sun was setting, splashing orange-pink shadows across everything. That room, Ariadne realised, was almost definitely an office. There was a large desk in the centre, with files and papers, and shelves left neat against the wall, filled with books. Some sheets had been pinned to the walls, liberally scribbled on in blue marker.
But none of these quite drew her attention, and Ariadne sucked in a breath as she saw the two figures, shoulders almost touching, glancing out of the window. Their backs were turned to her. She recognised the first, his hair a dark blond in the fading light. She bit her lip, frowning, and unconsciously took a step back. The second had shot her, the last time they met.
Briefly, Cobb’s hand moved up, to rest lightly on Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur leaned inwards, shifting a little closer towards him. “Nice sunset,” Arthur spoke up, quietly. Ariadne had to strain to catch his words.
She swallowed. She thought she understood, now.
“Thank you,” Cobb said, just as softly. Ariadne took a step forward. She thought she had been quiet enough, but still, Cobb picked up on her presence. He disentangled himself with surprising quickness, both of them spinning around to glance at her. Cobb glared at her, eyes narrowed with a sharp fury. “You shouldn’t be here,” he snapped, taking a step forward. He cast Arthur a sidelong glance, and then strode towards her in a few quick steps. He all but hauled her roughly down the corridor and shoved her into the lift, got in behind her and slammed the grilles shut.
He didn’t turn to see if Arthur had followed them. Arthur hadn’t.
Cobb jabbed violently at one of the buttons and the lift began to rise.
“I just wanted to see what tests you were doing on your own every night,” Ariadne said, her voice wavering a little in the face of Cobb’s anger.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Cobb retorted softly, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead. He didn’t look at her.
“This has everything to do with me,” she shot back, “You’ve asked me to share dreams with you.”
“Not these,” Cobb said. His voice cracked a little, but Ariadne said nothing and pretended she hadn’t noticed. “These are my dreams.”
The lift finally brought them up, to the bar that Ariadne had remembered. Cobb pulled open the rusted grilles, and took a step forward, but went no further. She thought she heard music, maybe an acoustic guitar, and realised it was from Cobb’s memory of the bar, just like the hints of cigarette smoke in the air and the dimmed lights. There was a performer, seated on a stool, strumming his acoustic guitar and crooning into a mike.
It’s late in the evening; she’s wondering what clothes to wear…
She followed the line of Cobb’s wistful gaze, towards two figures seated at the bar. She didn’t need to look to know who they were. To realise they were both Cobb’s projections. The Cobb at the bar laughed carelessly. He didn’t look at them, didn’t glance around him. This was who Cobb had been, she realised, trying to get past how strange it seemed. That Cobb was centred, perfectly comfortable with himself, didn’t have that damaged, weary air to him.
He said something brief to the projection seated next to him - they clasped forearms briefly, and then both of them went back to their drinks. Arthur smirked at something the Cobb projection said. Their sleeves were carelessly rolled up to the elbow, and watching them, the first word that came to Ariadne’s mind was carefree. Hearing Eames say, ‘They were like brothers,’ was completely different from watching their interactions in Cobb’s memories. It was like saying that Eames was British. It was a fact. It was true. And yet, that statement completely missed out on so much more, the many subtleties underlying how Cobb and Arthur had been.
“Where is this place?”
“Bar,” Cobb said, quietly. “We used to come here a lot. Especially after a case, or after work.”
It was perfectly obvious who the ‘we’ had been.
“Why - how do you do this do yourself?” she asked, feeling for the empty look in Cobb’s eyes that she didn’t quite know how to deal with.
Cobb ignored her question, slipping his hands into his pockets as he leaned against the grille. Finally, he said, “It’s the only way I can still dream.” It was an evasion, one that Ariadne didn’t quite have the heart to call him on.
Instead, she asked, “Why is it so important to dream?”
Cobb finally glanced at her. It was a long, slow look, as if he was measuring her. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, a little haltingly, “You do something. You think you’ve screwed up. The more you think about it…the more you can’t be sure. Maybe you’ve thrown away…you’ve thrown away what matters most. All for one moment of stupidity. Dreams…they help you put back the pieces. And you think maybe, if you can find a way…maybe they can help you find out the truth. Or to live with yourself, a little better.” His pale blue gaze was searching, almost questioning. The kind of look that one could fall through, and just keep falling into…the unknown.
Ariadne nodded, even though she wasn’t entirely certain what he was getting at.
Finally, Cobb cast one last look back at the two conversing figures. “Let’s go,” he said, brusquely, and he pulled the grilles shut before searching for another floor and pushing the button. With a worrying clank, the lift began to rise.
“These aren’t dreams, are they?” Ariadne said, after the lift had completely left the bar behind. “These are memories. And you said never to use memories.”
“I know I did,” Cobb said. His tone said he didn’t want to continue talking about this. Ariadne ignored it.
“You’re trying to keep him alive. You can’t let him go,” she said, marvelling as the last pieces slipped into place. “Don’t you think - “
“You don’t understand,” Cobb cut in, curtly. “These are the memories that I have to remember. Things that I can’t forget. Moments that I have to make sense of.”
“Why? And what’s down there?”
He caught her wrist as she reached to press the basement button.
“Listen,” Cobb said, “There’s only one thing you need to understand about me.” He knew which level they were at, which layer of memory the lift had brought them to. He worked the controls to bring the lift to a shuddering halt, and then slid open the grilles. He didn’t invite her to follow him, but Ariadne followed him anyway, out of the lift and down the corridor. He didn’t say anything to dissuade her. She probably would have followed him even if he had.
They walked down another corridor. Ariadne would have paused to glance at the paintings and the soft yellow wallpaper, except that Cobb showed no signs of stopping. He kept walking, until the corridor opened up to a living room, and the front porch beyond. Ariadne frowned; there were two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on the tiled floor, a set of paints and paper shared between them. A slender, beautiful lady sat just behind them, watching them. They were all splattered with paint. The girl piped up, “Mama! His pony is weird.”
“Is not!” The boy protested. He was younger, with pale blond hair that must have come directly from Cobb.
“Is too!”
“It’s a lovely pony,” the woman said soothingly, in lightly-accented English, and the boy stuck his tongue out at his sister. “Why don’t you try drawing something else?”
“You draw something too!” the girl demanded, and the woman laughed and acquiesced, reaching over with the paint brush, dipping it into bright green and splattering it in neat strokes across the page. Ariadne glanced at Cobb. He was watching them, frowning. There was a different kind of longing on his face; a little softer, a little more regretful.
“Who are they?” she asked quietly, even though she thought she knew the answer.
“That’s Mal,” Cobb said. “My wife.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Cobb smiled reluctantly. “Yeah,” he agreed, his tone wistful. “In every way that mattered.”
Ariadne cast about for something else, something to break the soft reverie that Cobb seemed to be immersed in. “And are those your children?”
“Yeah. That’s my son, James. And that one there, she’s my daughter, Philippa.”
Philippa squealed as James splattered some paint on her, and then the war was on. She left blue handprints on his shirt and soon, Mal’s cheek bore two yellow fingerprints. She tried to be stern, but it didn’t last long before she was laughing too.
“But,” Ariadne said slowly, trying to make sense of this, “If you have a wife, a family - “
“ - Why did I leave?” Cobb asked, cutting in. He’d deliberately misinterpreted her question, she knew. “The charges were heavy. All evidence pointed to me being the one who did it. Ballistics, traces…an officer had been killed, and they wanted answers. I could have tried to contest it in court, of course. My chances weren’t good. Algol…it was a federal case. Espionage. Torture. Murder.”
“So you fled? And you’ve been…doing all of this, ever since?”
“You mean extraction?”
Ariadne nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Do they know where you are? What you’re doing? Or…what happened?”
Cobb shrugged noncommittally. “Mal knows a little,” he finally said. “Sometimes…sometimes, they’re better off not knowing.”
“But it isn’t just about the charges, is it?” Ariadne guessed. Another piece slid into place as Cobb glanced at her, sharply. “Saito was saying something about information. He knows what happened that night.”
“It isn’t,” Cobb agreed, watching the figures in the living room. Mal sent Philippa and James to wash up and started to clean up the mess of paint and paper. He watched, throat tight, as his projection of himself entered. As he spoke with Mal. As their voices got louder and louder, until they were almost shouting at each other. “Sometimes…you have to want to go home. Back to that peaceful little house, the one with the yellow-cream wallpaper, and white-plaster walls in some places…flowers…Sometimes, you don’t want to. The walls are there, tight, they’ll close in on you and you have no way of knowing exactly what to do. It’s a prison. The bars are different, but they’re still there. And then, sometimes, the only hope you have - the only thing you can think of doing is to run. And keep running.”
He watched the projection pick up his bags and leave, watched Mal sit there, quietly, broken and alone. He watched the tears slide down her cheeks. He could walk up to them, touch them, wet against her skin. He couldn’t take them away. He didn’t know what else there was, except for guilt, and the need to be right. To know he had been right. He listened to her hushed sobs, watched her pull herself together the way she always did. In some ways, Mal was always far stronger than he had been. Her shoulders trembled a little. She picked up a paintbrush and shoved it into a holder with a little more force than necessary.
“Damn you, Dom,” she whispered, and then got to work cleaning up.
“But why?” Ariadne asked, confused.
Cobb didn’t answer her. He watched the projection of his wife, evidently lost in thought, or at least lost in memory. An idea came to Ariadne then, an impulsive thought. She might have felt a little guilty, but at the moment, all she knew was that there was something missing. That things didn’t quite make sense. And that there was something that Cobb was trying to hide.
She turned, and ran back down the corridor and all but hurled herself into the lift. It took her a few moments to slam the grille shut, and then to cast about for the lowest floor and hit the button. If Cobb heard her, she didn’t know. The lift started to descend, and she exhaled sharply, adrenaline still surging in her veins.
She did it. She did it.
The only question now was what lay down there.
-
The lift descended, slow and rattling, and Ariadne wondered if Cobb had any other way to follow her, or if he had to wait for the lift. She caught a cry of pain, and saw Arthur standing over Cobb, gun pointed right at Cobb. Cobb’s knee was bleeding and his face was a mask of pain and anger. He said something, but Ariadne didn’t catch it as Arthur lashed out and his foot caught Cobb, right on his injury. Cobb collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and then the lift took her right past them.
Ariadne took a deep breath. It was one thing to know that Arthur had turned on Cobb, had hurt him and enjoyed it. It was another thing to catch a glimpse of it in Cobb’s memories.
As the lift neared the bottom of the shaft, the first thing that Ariadne picked up on was the smell of smoke, thick and heavy. She coughed, wrinkling her nose. There was a dull heat in the air, not terribly hot, but enough that she knew it wasn’t something normal, like a hot day. Something was burning.
And then the lift came to a halt, and she squinted a little. Her eyes were beginning to water, stung and irritated by the smoke and she managed to work the grille open. She took one step forward. It looked like the small living room of an apartment, she thought, only that she couldn’t make out very many things. It was spartan, the kind which looked as if someone hadn’t really lived in it. She wondered whose apartment it was, and took another step forward, glancing all around her. She thought she caught a hint of fire down a side-corridor.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Arthur said, stepping clear of the smoke. His arms were folded across his chest and he shot her a disapproving look. He didn’t seem to be armed, but Ariadne figured that really didn’t count for much.
“I need to understand,” she said, watching him carefully. She felt a prickle of fear. The last time they’d met, he’d shot her. Somehow, Ariadne didn’t think he’d hesitate to hurt her again this time.
He favoured her with a lazy smile. “Do you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Her protest died on her lips. She didn’t need to understand. But she wanted too, so badly. She wanted the puzzle that was Dominic Cobb to make sense. She wanted to help, because it was tearing him up and no one else seemed to be able to.
“Yes.”
He slipped his hands into the pockets of his brown canvas jacket, and Ariadne relaxed slightly. “Why?” Arthur wanted to know.
“I…I need to,” she said, frustrated at her inability to explain. Could curiosity even be explained? The burning, itching urge to know what was going on? “I want…I want to know. I want it all to make sense.”
“You’re like Cobb,” he said.
“Sorry?”
Arthur shrugged lightly. “You want to understand?” he said at last, his expression unreadable. “Okay, think about this. If I say to you that Miles used to be a murderer, maybe some kind of serial rapist…”
“That’s impossible,” Ariadne said, flatly. Miles was a firm teacher, but she couldn’t imagine the gentle old man being anything along the lines of what Arthur had described. Maybe that was the point of the example.
“Is it?” Arthur asked. She couldn’t quite place the eerie smile playing along the edges of his lips. It was more a flash of teeth than anything else, and his eyes didn’t quite hold a hint of any warmth. Dangerous, she reminded herself. She involuntarily took a step back, and he noticed and smirked. He was capable of killing her. She didn’t know why he seemed content to toy with her, to answer her questions…for now. “Everything points to Miles being the one who did it.”
“So the evidence was wrong.”
“You think so?”
“Okay,” Ariadne said, trying another tack. “So you’re saying that Cobb can’t come to terms with the fact...with the fact that you did it. He thinks the evidence is wrong.”
“What I’m saying,” Arthur said, patiently, “Is that you don’t even really know Cobb, do you? He’s the slightly crazy but brilliant man who picked you at Miles’ recommendation and offered you a job. And here you are, trying to figure him out. To satisfy your own curiosity.”
“And?” Ariadne asked. She refused to feel ashamed or even guilty.
“So there’s this person. You know him, as well as you know yourself. The two of you are close. So close. He couldn’t possibly be a serial killer. But he is. And the evidence? The evidence is that he tortured you. You remember it. Every moment of it. The truth died there, that day.” He glanced around them, gesturing vaguely at the apartment. Ariadne was coughing again as the smoke got thicker, and flames curled into the living room. She caught the faint sheen of sweat on Arthur’s forehead, from the increasing heat. “The only thing you can go on…is that he tortured you. Is that he admitted as much. Would you still say it’s impossible?”
His dark eyes bored into her, questioning. Behind him, the flames grew, casting an unsteady light over his features. His shadow wavered.
“I…” Ariadne swallowed. “I don’t…”
“You can’t believe,” Arthur continued. “You must believe. You can’t. You must. And what do you do when there’s no one to turn to, when that beautiful, lovely, gentle wife of yours wants you to let her in? To go inside your head, to see what you saw?”
“You run away,” Ariadne guessed. She glanced at Arthur for confirmation, but he remained expressionless. “Into dreams, living memory after memory…”
Arthur shook his head, but said, “And soon, you can’t tell what’s real anymore.You can’t trust yourself. You can’t trust the only evidence you have. It becomes an obsession. The only way to have it all make sense. An obsession far more powerful than your curiosity.”
“But why?” Ariadne demanded, frustrated. “Why is it so important for Cobb to know?”
Arthur shook his head pityingly. “You don’t get it, do you?” he asked, amused. “What it’s like to trust someone utterly, with no reservations. To know someone so well, as if they were just part of you. You don’t need words between the two of you. And then - “
“Betrayal.”
Ariadne half-turned to see Cobb, standing right at the entrance of the lift. She couldn’t quite make out the grim expression on his face. “Ariadne,” he continued, “Step away from him.”
She hesitated.
“Now!” Cobb demanded, his voice cracking, as sharp as a whip. Immediately, reflexively, Ariadne stepped back, heading back towards the lift. Towards where Cobb stood.
Arthur didn’t follow her. Instead, he hooked his thumbs behind his belt and said, casually, “Cobb. I haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
Cobb glanced at the flames and his lips tightened. His breathing went deep, and his gaze was unfocused. For a moment, he seemed utterly unresponsive, and Ariadne moved towards him. “Cobb?” she called. “Cobb!”
It jolted him out of whatever daze he had been lost in.
“No,” Cobb said at last. “Not for a while.” To Ariadne, he said, “Get into the lift.” There was an urgency in his voice, a tone that said he would drag her in himself if she didn’t move, and Ariadne didn’t argue with him. She stepped in.
“You can’t run away forever, Cobb,” Arthur said, peaceably. Perhaps, Ariadne thought, that was the most frightening part. His eyes were almost empty, and the pleasant smile on his face…it was just an expression. There was no mirth in it, no warmth. He said it like he was stating a fact. Behind him, the flames burned, curling upwards, growing larger and larger. Arthur paid them no heed. “Everything ends.”
“I know,” Cobb said.
He yanked the grilles shut with a screech of protesting metal, and hit the button. As the lift moved upwards, the last thing Ariadne saw was Arthur, and fire.
And then, the world ended.
-
Ariadne’s eyes snapped open and she pulled the line from her hand, immediately tossing it aside and applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Next to her, Cobb sat up and began doing the same. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t glance at her.
In the end, it was Ariadne who spoke first, right after Cobb had cast the die onto the table and checked it.
“I don’t get it,” Ariadne said, flatly. “Arthur betrayed you. Set you up. He...did to you exactly what he did to the others as Algol. I…I saw what he was doing. Why are you still…” she struggled to find the words. “Why do you still…keep his totem? After what he did to you?”
Although it was too dim to make out much else, Cobb’s smile was sad and distant, almost wistful. “Yeah,” he said, slowly. He slipped the die back into his pocket. “I kept his die. But…tell me. Do you really stop loving…” he paused, looking faintly surprised, and then repeated, “Do you really stop loving someone, just because they’ve betrayed you? It doesn’t work that way, does it? That’s what makes the betrayal stick and hurt so much. Because you loved them, you trusted them…and you don’t understand why.”
“I don’t get it,” Ariadne said, slowly.
Cobb shrugged. He’d turned his back to her as he cleaned the needles and coiled the lines back into the PASIV and snapped it shut. “What’s there to understand?” he asked, a little bitterly.
“Arthur. You said…you said you loved him.”
Cobb exhaled, the tense lines of his shoulders relaxing. He didn’t turn to face her, choosing instead to fiddle with the PASIV. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I did.”
“But you’re married. What about Mal?”
“You know,” Cobb said, “Love’s a funny thing, sometimes. It makes you do crazy things. I was this exchange student in Paris? There was this girl. Beautiful, especially when she laughed. I ran down a street in autumn, chasing her scarf for her. I still remember it. It was a tightly-woven silk scarf. Very bright red.”
“What happened?” Ariadne wanted to know.
Cobb half-turned, to glance at her. She could barely make out the wistful smile on his profile. “I married her,” he said, eventually. “But if I hadn’t run down that street because the scarf caught my eye, if I hadn’t decided to take a different route to college that day, I wouldn’t have met her. If I hadn’t decided to go on exchange to Paris…” his voice trailed off; he stared into the distance, pensive.
Ariadne cleared her throat.
“It’s a funny thought, really, that we’re all just waiting for that someone out there to complete us, in places we never even knew we were missing. And when we find that someone…” he shrugged.
“Why?” Ariadne asked, when it became evident Cobb wasn’t going to say anything else. She wanted to add, ‘What does that have to do with Mal?’ but tried to be patient.
“Loving someone, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. You have to want to make it work,” Cobb explained. “It isn’t something you can say, or define or decide. Sometimes, it hits you.” He brought his hands together in a sharp clap. The sound cut through the silence of the warehouse, and Ariadne started. “Just like that. Sometimes, it sneaks up on you. You wake up in the morning, or maybe you’re watching him leave and you realise: you love. You already did, and you don’t even know when you started to.”
“Is that what happened with Mal?”
Cobb nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “You wake up one morning and think: this is the one. This is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with. Sometimes, you’re wrong. But you have to want to make it work. Wanting, loving someone…it’s just the beginning.”
Ariadne had the distinct feeling Cobb wasn’t quite talking to her anymore. She thought back to the projection of Mal, sitting on the floor of the living room, thrusting a paintbrush into a tin holder, and swallowed. She thought she knew what Cobb was getting at.
“Arthur,” Cobb said, after a while. “That was what you asked. I’d have taken a bullet for him, stepped out in front of a car for him. He’d have done the same for me.”
“Like brothers.”
“Love isn’t the same as sex, Ariadne,” Cobb said, very dryly. “Oh, there’s probably a reason it’s called making love to someone, but it isn’t always the same thing. You can’t always start to segregate it, to say, ‘That’s brotherly,’ or ‘That’s romantic,’ because…because…how do you ever tell? Sooner or later…the differences fall away. It’s not about words anymore, and when the two of you connect…it stops mattering. It just is.”
He glanced at her, face shadowed, willing her to understand, and Ariadne nodded slowly. Maybe she didn’t quite get it. She thought she did. Just a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said, eventually. She couldn’t think of what else to say.
Cobb shrugged. “Don’t be,” he said, quietly. “So am I.”
They started and glanced up as the warehouse doors opened, and Saito came in. “It’s time,” he called out, flicking on the lights. Ariadne blinked at the sudden influx of illumination. “Maurice Fischer just died in Sydney.”
“When’s the funeral?” Cobb asked. The raw edge had disappeared from his voice; he was every inch the professional extractor once again.
“Thursday,” Saito said, “Los Angeles.”
Cobb frowned and thought it through. “Then we need to move,” he decided, “I give Robert no later than Tuesday to accompany the body.”
He turned to pick up the PASIV - and Ariadne caught his hand by the wrist. He glanced at her, and she let go. “Cobb,” she said, her voice low but fierce, “I’m coming with you.”
Immediately, Cobb shook his head. “No, you aren’t,” he whispered. “I promised Miles.”
“The team needs someone who understands what you’re struggling with,” she retorted, “And if you can’t keep Arthur out, you’ll be taking an unnecessary risk by dreaming the third level. If you know the design, he does too. Do you think you can stop him?”
For a while, Cobb said nothing, and Ariadne met his troubled gaze stubbornly, refusing to look away. Abruptly, he gave in. “Get us another seat on the plane,” he called out to Saito.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5