Anabasis: Part II: 6
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...
-
Cobb left Eames and Fischer to it, and pulled off the ski mask, breathing a sigh of relief. The material had been hot and for a single claustrophobic moment, he’d thought he smelled a hint of smoke and ash in the air. He bulled past the feeling as he always did; by sheer force of will, by reminding himself it wasn’t real.
It did nothing when his mind was set on snapping him back to those few moments, again and again. He went over to where Ariadne was watching Saito. She’d brought him a glass of water; Saito took a weak sip and refused the rest. She went to set it aside.
“How’s he doing?” he asked her. He didn’t need to say who. Her eyes flicked towards where Saito was propped against the table.
“He’s in a lot of pain,” she said quietly. She looked a lot less shaken than he thought she’d be, and Cobb added another point to his mental tally. Whatever else could be said of her, Ariadne had guts.
Hadn’t he figured that a long time ago?
“When we take you down to the next level, the pain will be less intense,” Cobb told Saito, who nodded weakly. It was the most he could do. None of them had thought of even equipping the warehouse with anything for first-aid. Stupid, Cobb thought fiercely. It had been utterly reckless. So much for Saito saying that his sources had mentioned Cobb used to be less prudent. He still wasn’t cautious enough.
That was usually what Arthur did.
Cobb took a deep breath, forced himself not to think about it. That wasn’t going to help Saito right now. (Nothing was going to help Saito.)
“What happens if he dies?” Ariadne asked him, her voice hushed.
“He’ll drop out of the dream,” Cobb said, just as softly, so Saito couldn’t hear it. “He’ll be trapped in Limbo for a whole lifetime…maybe longer.”
“What will that do to him?”
Cobb glanced away from Saito, at Ariadne. She met his eyes, waiting for an answer. “When he wakes…if he wakes…his mind could be completely gone.”
“When…when we wake…” Saito managed, interrupted by a weak cough, “…I will still…honour our…agreement…”
“You see, Mr Saito,” Cobb said, his voice revealing nothing but a clinical dispassion, “When you wake up, you won’t even remember that we had an agreement. Limbo will have become your reality. You’ll be lost there so long that you’ll become an old man…”
“Filled…with regret?”
“Waiting to die alone. Yes.”
“Then…I will take the chance…and come back. And we will be young men together.”
Ariadne tugged lightly at his shoulder. Cobb turned away before his hands could start to form helpless fists at his side, before he could say that Saito didn’t know anything about Limbo, didn’t know anything about how dangerous it truly was.
Before he could begin to admit that he’d lost before they’d even begun.
The aim of the Fischer job was inception: to plant the seed of an idea in Robert Fischer’s mind, to watch it grow, bloom and flower - to watch Fischer split his father’s company.
The aim of Cobb’s job was to get the files he needed. The aim of Cobb’s job was to finally go home. He realised he’d never truly gone home, not even after the Algol job had ended.
Alright, Cobb thought wearily, maybe he still didn’t know his terms of victory. But that sounded awfully close to one of them.
He let Ariadne pull him aside, away from Saito.
-
“When were you trapped in Limbo?” she wanted to know.
Cobb didn’t say anything.
“Cobb, you might have the rest of the team convinced to carry on with this job. But they don’t know the truth. They don’t know what I do.”
“What truth?” Cobb asked.
“The truth that at any minute, you could set any of these buildings on fire,” she said, so matter-of-factly that his protests died before he could even voice them, “And we’d be trapped inside and burn to death. The truth that Arthur is bursting up through your subconscious, and you can’t stop him. The truth that as we go deeper into Fischer, we’re also going deeper into you…and I’m not sure we’re going to like what we find there.”
Can’t or won’t? Some part of Cobb wondered. He ignored it, feeling the weight of Ariadne’s gaze on him.
“This isn’t just about Fischer. It’s about you,” Ariadne continued. “Tell me about you and Arthur. What Algol was really about. How you ended up trapped in Limbo.”
Cobb weighed the options, wondered if he should tell her to bugger off. Except that if he’d truly wanted to keep Ariadne out, he’d missed it a few choices back, especially when she’d been running through his mind. He watched her, her gaze steady and implacable, her arms folded across her chest. He knew she wasn’t going to back down, that he wouldn’t be able to keep her in the dark forever.
In that way, he thought, she was almost like Mal. Maybe that was why he kept running, or Mal would have it out of him, sooner or later.
“Extraction,” Cobb said. He gave the ghost of a smile, pale and hollow, as Ariadne nodded and waited impatiently for him to carry on. “Not many people know about extraction. Oh, of course they know it’s possible, but that’s about it. Most people aren’t aware of how the details, how extraction really works. The government likes it that way. It controls most of the avenues to getting a license, and conducts extensive background checks on applicants. There’s an international organisation keeping an eye on extractors too. There’s a professional code of conduct, like your average accountant. The sale of somnacin is heavily monitored and can only be conducted between licensed individuals. The transaction records are often checked.”
“Why?”
“If an extractor - just the general term used for those of us in this line of work - starts buying large quantities of somnacin, their alarm bells start going off. Maybe he’s stockpiling. Maybe he’s selling it, illegally. That’s when they find you and start asking some questions.”
“Alright,” Ariadne said. She waited to see how this linked to Algol.
“Arthur, Mal…they were all licensed. So was I,” Cobb added, quickly. “I wasn’t being evasive when I told you extraction isn’t strictly legal. The laws concerning extraction are ill-defined at best. It’s mostly new territory and very hard to prove. Now, the solid bits of regulation that we do have are controls over just who can access dreamsharing technology. They control things like who gets access to a PASIV, who can produce, sell, and purchase somnacin.”
“And your license lets you do all of that.”
“Well, not producing somnacin,” Cobb said, “But the idea’s there. So the thing is, there is a legal market for extractors. Some of them hire themselves out in entertainment: recreation for the very rich and famous. I’m sure you can figure out how and why.”
She did.
“And there are other things. Things like teaching someone’s subconscious to defend itself against an extractor. And of course, there’s working as police consultants.”
“But you said extraction isn’t exactly illegal.”
“Exactly,” Cobb replied. He glanced at the windows, and motioned for her to keep walking, to move further away from them. Ariadne followed him. He didn’t seem to have any place in mind, just kept walking aimlessly through the warehouse, giving the windows a respectful berth. “Mostly because it’s impossible to prove in court. Somnacin doesn’t tend to linger long in a person’s system, at least if your extractor is any good. Oh, the companies are trying to insert chemical traces into the compounds, but you’d be better off asking Yusuf about that. It isn’t going well for them at the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for crimes to be committed, crimes involving dreamsharing. That’s where we came in.” He paused at a bench beside the windows on the opposite side of the warehouse, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets like he didn’t quite know what to do with them.
“What did you do?”
Cobb shrugged. “Get called in and paid for being consulted on anything that looked like it involved extraction…or rogue extractors. They couldn’t charge them with extraction, but they could be charged with a great deal of other things. Battery, breaking and entering…kidnapping…depending on what they did, there was a great deal of things they could be charged for. And if you were lucky and had proof that they used a PASIV then or had a PASIV? They could be held up for going against the professional code of conduct, unlawful possession of a PASIV if the person didn’t have a license…even unlawful possession of the compounds.”
She waited. When Cobb said nothing, Ariadne prodded. “Cobb. Algol?”
“Right,” Cobb said. “Algol. Algol was just another of those cases. We’d made a name for ourselves. Of course, the police sometimes had people they sent for training in counter-extraction, but the point was, we had that training, we were available, and we were good. They knew that. They didn’t see the point in wasting their resources. The thing about Algol was, he was good. Frighteningly good. He was always one step ahead of them. There was a whole chain of cases before we came in. Before that, the cops had thought he was just a serial killer.”
“Serial killer?” Ariadne recalled what Eames had told her, a while ago. “Eames said Algol was a sociopath. He…kept bringing people under, and breaking them.”
“That’s as good a description as any, I suppose,” Cobb accepted. “You see, the thing was, none of them really pieced together exactly what to pin down on Algol until they had a lucky break. The medical examiner found some anomalies in the brain chemistry of the victim, and was sharp enough to link that to repeated use of somnacin. Algol had been good, but he wasn’t perfect. From there, they managed to figure dreamsharing technology had been involved, and that was where we came in. When they finally figured what could be attributed to him…they had a frightening pattern. Someone who played with his victims, who knew them well enough to slip into their homes, and who managed to put them under again and again without leaving a trace. The tell-tale was the altered brain patterns, and once Newman alerted the cops as to what to look out for, things started to come together. Algol didn’t always kill. Some of his victims simply snapped, suddenly went insane and were sent to an asylum. Two of them committed suicide on their own.”
“That’s why he was named Algol?”
“Actually, I don’t know. Someone used that label when dealing with his string of cases, and the media picked up on it. Probably because Algol was very good at slipping through all sorts of security without leaving a trace. Or at least, he left little enough for the crime labs to pick up on.”
Algol, Ariadne thought. The Demon Star. The ghoul. She shivered a little, thinking about the faceless, inexorable figure, slipping into someone’s house and putting them under. Except that the figure wasn’t faceless, and hadn’t been. It had been Arthur.
“They did a bit of investigation on that lead, and found they had enough to get us in on it. That’s one more thing about being a licensed extractor that isn’t the same as being another professional, like an accountant or something. Malpractice gets you dragged before the licensing body, but because of all the potential abuses of the technology…” Cobb shrugged. “There’s a responsibility on the part of the licensed extractors to cooperate to bring the rogue in.” He glanced at her, his face mostly in shadow, except for the shafts of light that flooded in through the window beyond him. His eyes were hard. “What he did made Algol a rogue. If Arthur and I hadn’t done anything…well, we’d be just as liable for malpractice, violation of professional ethics…”
“And…this isn’t? Isn’t a violation of professional ethics, I mean?”
“Well,” Cobb admitted, “If they knew, they wouldn’t approve, yes. But I’m not licensed anymore, so I don’t…” he paused. His mind completed the rest of the sentence for him. I don’t have anything to lose. He didn’t say it aloud, didn’t complete what must be a portrait of a dangerous, desperate, possibly-innocent fugitive. Ariadne got the hint. He cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he continued, going back to the question at hand. “There wasn’t a way we could have sat that one out, back then. And working consultancy…well, it paid. That was the important part. As for Algol, the aspects like espionage were classified. We didn’t know anything except that Algol had been linked to those, and that he’d made a few hits in different states. But it was enough to get the Feds involved. Our job, you understand, was strictly to give them the perspective from people who actually knew what we were doing when it came to a PASIV.”
“And then you caught him. Algol.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Cobb said. “He was as good as they said he was, always one step ahead of us. He got better at hiding the traces too, and sometimes, we’d come up absolutely empty. They’d refer his victims to a psychiatrist who worked with dreamsharing - Dr Caine. There wasn’t much else he could do. It was clear Algol was playing with us. That was about the time I thought of a plan. Jake and Edwin, the two feds on the case, decided to run with it. It was all about making Algol come out, making him play on our terms instead of his. And this time, we’d be ready.”
Ariadne suddenly felt cold. Somehow, it all made sense now, the burning apartment at the very bottom of Cobb’s mind, the haunted aspect to him, the part of him that seemed irredeemably broken and haunted and lost. “Bait,” she said, then. “You were bait.”
Cobb nodded grimly. “We played to his ego,” he said. “I made myself an appealing target. Algol had taken down one or two extractors: Earl and Riley. He’d never gone against the best. He’d never gone against an architect. That was exactly what we did. Arthur…” he swallowed. “Arthur had thought it was a bad idea. He wanted to do it. Maybe he was offering me a way out, there and then, but…”
“But you didn’t take it,” Ariadne completed. It didn’t make sense though, a part of her still thought. Cobb was frowning, as if there was a puzzle which couldn’t quite fit, and then he shrugged, evidently dismissing it.
“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t. Will wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be a convincing target, and Arthur…I needed Arthur to be the one to close the trap on Algol. He’s…he was one of the best at what he did. But he wasn’t creative. He didn’t have that…inspiration that a good architect needed to draw on. I had it, enough to make me a more realistic target. To dare Algol to take on one of the best extractors, someone who was used to controlling and actively creating the dream…well, that was something else.”
“And he took the bait, right? That’s why you found out it was Arthur.”
Cobb nodded. “He did,” he said. His eyes had gone distant again. He glanced back over his shoulder for a moment, as if trying to peer out the translucent glass panes of the window. “I moved out. I didn’t want to put Mal or the children at risk. We set up a rotating watch. The plan was to ambush Algol at the point of entry. If we failed, I would take him and subdue him in the dream. It’s much harder to fool an extractor than someone who hasn’t been trained to recall his dreams. And I had my totem. Mal’d come it with it a few months ago, when I’d been exploring the idea of dreams within dreams. Algol wouldn’t have known about that. There was no way he could. It was risky, of course. But we were running out of options, so we ran the set-up.”
“But Algol was Arthur,” Ariadne said slowly, “Which meant it didn’t matter. He knew your plan and all the weaknesses in it.”
“Exactly.” Here Cobb hesitated for a while, before he continued, haltingly, “I couldn’t remember much of…what happened. It was all in here,” he tapped his temple with a finger, “All mixed around. Limbo made it worse, in a way. I couldn’t quite say when what happened. From what I remember, Arthur knocked on the door. He sounded hurried. Worried. He told me there was a change of plans. Something had come up, we needed to move. I opened the door - and he said, “Sorry,” and hit me, hard, with…something. He might have drugged me then, to put me out. The next thing I remembered, it was a layer down, I was screaming, and…my totem was gone.”
Ariadne swallowed. She wasn’t sure what to say to that. But now Cobb continued, almost as if he was talking to himself. As if she wasn’t quite there anymore…or as if he wasn’t quite here, lost in some kind of memory.
“I don’t remember much of that either. He tried breaking me. He tried seeing how much pain he could cause, how much he could make me forget. After a while, I wasn’t sure anymore. It must have been a dream, because if I died…I didn’t remember it. I’d wake up, and probably get put under again. And then he’d repeat it. I kept…asking him. What the fuck was going on, what the hell he was doing. He never apologised again, just kept asking me how long I thought I could hold on. Acting like it wasn’t personal. He was…detached. Maybe that hurt a lot more than the fact that he was Algol. He was the one who broke through our set-up.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said.
Cobb laughed. It was resigned, a little harsh, a little bitter. “I know,” he said, softly. “Just another of those things that doesn’t make so much sense.”
-
This is how it feels to be Dominic Cobb right now:
You can feel the heat of the flames on your skin. You can smell smoke, curling in your lungs, acrid on the tip of your tongue. You inhale, choke, and cough. Your eyes are already beginning to water from the coarse black-grey smoke. The smoke is dangerous, you remember. Smoke inhalation can kill - but it isn’t the smoke that feels like it will kill you right now, settling like a festering cancer in your lungs. It isn’t the smoke that makes you curl your shaking hands into fists by your side (they still tremble.) It isn’t the smoke that presses red-hot and dull against your skull.
It’s this: the sharp knowledge of betrayal. The knowledge that you never really knew your point man, your friend, your brother. You only thought you did. The knowledge that it is Arthur who turned on you, Arthur who tortured you, Arthur who betrayed you - Arthur is Algol, the sociopath you’ve been hunting for so long, and Arthur is a lie and a man you’ve never really known at all. This is what threatens to break you: the knowledge that you are already broken. The knowledge that there’s something inside of you that’s broken, something only Arthur could break. Something you don’t quite have words for, and even if you did, you wouldn’t quite know where to start, or how to even begin to fix it.
You dimly realise that the noise you’ve been hearing is yelling. You’re not sure who is yelling, if it’s you or Arthur. You wonder if it even matters. (It doesn’t.) It’s like a thin, gauzy veil has dropped between you and the world: you’re perceiving, you’re taking in things, but they aren’t real, they aren’t immediate. Only the knowledge that burns in your lungs is, only the knowledge that comes out in choking coughs is real. You can’t even tell if you’re angry or afraid or both - and viciously satisfied yet strangely hurt by the pain and confusion on his face when he grabs your shoulder, trying to shake you out of this daze.
You flinch and pull away; your reflexive uppercut catches him on the chin. He staggers backwards, head snapped back from your blow, hand tracing his jaw. You hit him hard and in the wrong way. Your knuckles hurt. You rub them absently. Blood drips. You’ve split your knuckle.
He manages to get you out of the unit a few minutes before it goes, a carpet of flame springing up in orange-yellow fibres all over your vision. His voice is dead, cold and quiet when he says into your ear, loud and clear that he’s going back for Jake.
What, you want to ask, so you can kill him too? He’s already shot Edwin. No, another part of you wants to scream, (and this is the most cruel thing of all) because part of you still cares. The unit - the whole building - is a deathtrap. But your throat locks up, and you can’t say anything. You don’t even know if you want to.
He turns. The flames close in over him. The building collapses. This is a matter of long minutes, but in your mind, this will forever be immediate and consecutive.
You realise, later, the cry has been torn from your raw throat, in between the coughing that can’t stop. You’re shaking, and you’re not sure if you can stop. You did this to him, you know, with the same unyielding certainty that your totem is gone. Lost. With the same knowledge that Arthur is Algol. Was Algol. Algol - Arthur - they’re both dead now. You stood there and watched him walk right to his death. Your head rings with a silent scream, either denial, or hatred or confusion and you’re not sure which. Maybe it’s both. You don’t care.
You as good as killed him and you know it.
You don’t remember what happens next. How long you spent staring at the building, until you’re riding an ambulance to the hospital. You’ve gone perfectly numb now: there’s a thin layer of glass separating you from the world and everything just glides off it. You don’t prod it, daren’t crack it.
If you do, you might break.
Later, someone will pass you the only object that survived the fire, lying discarded a distance away from the building, a small, scarlet, plastic die. Unyielding. Absolutely certain.
You will pocket it.
This is how it feels to be Dominic Cobb, right now.
-
Cobb couldn’t speak of it - all of it - to Ariadne. He wasn’t sure how to explain it. So he fell back to surgically precise descriptions, and the bare minimum. “I came to when the apartment was on fire. The whole building wasn’t tall in the first place, maybe five floors. The whole thing was beginning to burn. I saw…” he paused. “I saw Arthur shoot Edwin. That sealed it for me. That was…that was before I lost consciousness, in the struggle. Then I came to and found the whole apartment on fire. Edwin was already gone by then. Arthur came in. He told me to get the hell out of there. He’d see to Jake. I asked him what he was playing at. He got me out of that apartment, maybe ten minutes before it went. Maybe less. He told me he was going to see to Jake. I wasn’t thinking by then. I stood there, watched him go in. Didn’t say a word. He didn’t come out.”
He didn’t look at Ariadne. He wasn’t sure what expression he’d see on her face, and wasn’t certain he wanted to know.
“Someone called the ambulance. I was warded for some burns and smoke inhalation. After the fire, they told me. The last person out had been Jake. The only thing they found left that had survived the fire, because it’d been found on the pavement outside. I went home. Mal was…” he shrugged. “I…wasn’t ready. She tried taking me to the same doctor who dealt with all of Algol’s victims. She was the only one who thought I wasn’t Algol.”
“But you weren’t. It was…Arthur.”
“It was my word against the evidence, and Algol was too big a case. They needed someone to hang the charges on,” Cobb said quietly. “Jake hadn’t run into Arthur. The only person the evidence fit was me. I’d pretended to be in trouble. And when they’d burst in, I’d killed Edwin. They couldn’t be sure if Arthur was my accomplice or victim.” He said nothing for a few moments, before he continued, too quickly, “That was where Limbo came in. I went under, and then under again. Deeper than I’d gone before. I figured that I couldn’t quite remember what happened that night, but that was because…my mind wasn’t ready for it. It didn’t mean the memories weren’t there. I tried to perform an extraction on myself. I turned to dreaming. It was the only way.”
“But you went too deep,” Ariadne guessed. “And then you found yourself in Limbo.”
Cobb nodded. “I didn’t managed to get the memories,” he said at last. “But that wasn’t for trying. Limbo…if you remember how dreams are, how it’s like to twist and shape a dream to whatever you want it to be…Limbo was ten times that. It took all my memories, as fragmented as they were, all my need to remember what happened, and let me relive it, again and again and again. And then somewhere in the middle of all that…it stopped being what I needed, and started being what I wanted. I wanted to believe Arthur was not Algol. I wanted to believe Algol had never happened. I had it. It was the perfect reality. Not perfect, but close to it. After a while, it got harder to remember that it was a dream. I had Arthur’s totem, but I didn’t know how it worked. I hadn’t even thought of replacing mine, just went straight into dreamsharing as if nothing had changed. But something had. Limbo…limbo’s more dangerous than any other dream. Sometimes, things are so…” he shrugged. “Limbo makes it easy for you to want to accept it as reality,” he said, after a while. “Maybe it would have become impossible for me to live that way, because it wasn’t real. But after a while, things started to blur together.”
“How did you wake up?”
“Mal,” Cobb explained. “She found me. She went down, through the layers. She realised something was wrong when the dose wore off but I didn’t wake up, and went straight into my mind. She…let me remember that the world wasn’t real, and…” he shrugged again, helplessly. “I took some convincing,” he said finally. “Even after I knew it wasn’t real…I think…well, you have to want to wake up. It’s the obvious choice, but at that point in time…In any case, nearly fifty years had passed down there. Maybe seventy. I lost track of the time. It wasn’t easy, waking up. Realising that the past seventy years, fifty years…whatever they were, they were a lie. Waking up to realise I was a person of interest, that the Feds thought I was Algol…It wasn’t a case I was likely to win. So I consulted my attorney. The only hope for it was to run, and to run before they slapped the APB down on me. So I did just that. And…I’ve been running ever since.”
“But you don’t believe Arthur did it,” Ariadne said, slowly. It was the only thing that made sense. “I mean, you don’t believe he’s Algol either, do you?”
Cobb shrugged, his face devoid of expression. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said quietly. “That’s why I need Saito’s access to the evidence. Evidence isn’t like memory. It can’t be contaminated by continued use of a PASIV. It’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Ariadne wanted to know. “Evidence is only as good as how you interpret it. Are you sure it isn’t going to tell you only what you want to hear?”
Cobb’s mouth tightened. “I’m sure,” he said, after a pause. “It’s the best I’ll get.”
“Arthur made his choice, Cobb,” Ariadne said gently. Some inconsistencies still nagged at her, but she pushed them away for now. “He changed his mind at the end. He got you out of that building. He chose to go back in, to try and get Jake.”
Cobb didn’t say anything. His shoulders straightened in a taut line.
“Your guilt defines him,” Ariadne continued. “It’s what gives him strength. If we’re going to succeed, you need to forgive yourself. Let go of your guilt. You’re going to have to confront him. And you don’t have to do it alone, but you’ve got to do it, one way or another.”
“You don’t - “
“I’m not doing it for you,” Ariadne interrupted, perhaps misinterpreting his statement. “I’m doing it for the others. Because they have no idea what risks they’ve taken going in here with you.”
She saw Cobb’s eyes narrow in recognition. She didn’t say it aloud, because she wasn’t certain if she wanted to give Cobb’s subconscious ideas, but Arthur could end up appearing any moment. Could take out a member of their team, and send that person straight to Limbo. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of being trapped there at all.
Cobb shook his head, frustrated - then he frowned. “Wait,” he told her, holding out a hand. They listened. Cobb thought he heard something - was it gunfire? Carefully, he peered out the window. He couldn’t catch sight of anything, not even muzzle flash, but he thought something - several someones, rather, was out there.
Fischer’s projections had started to close in on them. “Yusuf!” he called, urgently. It was time to move.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5 | 6
Part III: Eidolon
7
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...
-
Cobb left Eames and Fischer to it, and pulled off the ski mask, breathing a sigh of relief. The material had been hot and for a single claustrophobic moment, he’d thought he smelled a hint of smoke and ash in the air. He bulled past the feeling as he always did; by sheer force of will, by reminding himself it wasn’t real.
It did nothing when his mind was set on snapping him back to those few moments, again and again. He went over to where Ariadne was watching Saito. She’d brought him a glass of water; Saito took a weak sip and refused the rest. She went to set it aside.
“How’s he doing?” he asked her. He didn’t need to say who. Her eyes flicked towards where Saito was propped against the table.
“He’s in a lot of pain,” she said quietly. She looked a lot less shaken than he thought she’d be, and Cobb added another point to his mental tally. Whatever else could be said of her, Ariadne had guts.
Hadn’t he figured that a long time ago?
“When we take you down to the next level, the pain will be less intense,” Cobb told Saito, who nodded weakly. It was the most he could do. None of them had thought of even equipping the warehouse with anything for first-aid. Stupid, Cobb thought fiercely. It had been utterly reckless. So much for Saito saying that his sources had mentioned Cobb used to be less prudent. He still wasn’t cautious enough.
That was usually what Arthur did.
Cobb took a deep breath, forced himself not to think about it. That wasn’t going to help Saito right now. (Nothing was going to help Saito.)
“What happens if he dies?” Ariadne asked him, her voice hushed.
“He’ll drop out of the dream,” Cobb said, just as softly, so Saito couldn’t hear it. “He’ll be trapped in Limbo for a whole lifetime…maybe longer.”
“What will that do to him?”
Cobb glanced away from Saito, at Ariadne. She met his eyes, waiting for an answer. “When he wakes…if he wakes…his mind could be completely gone.”
“When…when we wake…” Saito managed, interrupted by a weak cough, “…I will still…honour our…agreement…”
“You see, Mr Saito,” Cobb said, his voice revealing nothing but a clinical dispassion, “When you wake up, you won’t even remember that we had an agreement. Limbo will have become your reality. You’ll be lost there so long that you’ll become an old man…”
“Filled…with regret?”
“Waiting to die alone. Yes.”
“Then…I will take the chance…and come back. And we will be young men together.”
Ariadne tugged lightly at his shoulder. Cobb turned away before his hands could start to form helpless fists at his side, before he could say that Saito didn’t know anything about Limbo, didn’t know anything about how dangerous it truly was.
Before he could begin to admit that he’d lost before they’d even begun.
The aim of the Fischer job was inception: to plant the seed of an idea in Robert Fischer’s mind, to watch it grow, bloom and flower - to watch Fischer split his father’s company.
The aim of Cobb’s job was to get the files he needed. The aim of Cobb’s job was to finally go home. He realised he’d never truly gone home, not even after the Algol job had ended.
Alright, Cobb thought wearily, maybe he still didn’t know his terms of victory. But that sounded awfully close to one of them.
He let Ariadne pull him aside, away from Saito.
-
“When were you trapped in Limbo?” she wanted to know.
Cobb didn’t say anything.
“Cobb, you might have the rest of the team convinced to carry on with this job. But they don’t know the truth. They don’t know what I do.”
“What truth?” Cobb asked.
“The truth that at any minute, you could set any of these buildings on fire,” she said, so matter-of-factly that his protests died before he could even voice them, “And we’d be trapped inside and burn to death. The truth that Arthur is bursting up through your subconscious, and you can’t stop him. The truth that as we go deeper into Fischer, we’re also going deeper into you…and I’m not sure we’re going to like what we find there.”
Can’t or won’t? Some part of Cobb wondered. He ignored it, feeling the weight of Ariadne’s gaze on him.
“This isn’t just about Fischer. It’s about you,” Ariadne continued. “Tell me about you and Arthur. What Algol was really about. How you ended up trapped in Limbo.”
Cobb weighed the options, wondered if he should tell her to bugger off. Except that if he’d truly wanted to keep Ariadne out, he’d missed it a few choices back, especially when she’d been running through his mind. He watched her, her gaze steady and implacable, her arms folded across her chest. He knew she wasn’t going to back down, that he wouldn’t be able to keep her in the dark forever.
In that way, he thought, she was almost like Mal. Maybe that was why he kept running, or Mal would have it out of him, sooner or later.
“Extraction,” Cobb said. He gave the ghost of a smile, pale and hollow, as Ariadne nodded and waited impatiently for him to carry on. “Not many people know about extraction. Oh, of course they know it’s possible, but that’s about it. Most people aren’t aware of how the details, how extraction really works. The government likes it that way. It controls most of the avenues to getting a license, and conducts extensive background checks on applicants. There’s an international organisation keeping an eye on extractors too. There’s a professional code of conduct, like your average accountant. The sale of somnacin is heavily monitored and can only be conducted between licensed individuals. The transaction records are often checked.”
“Why?”
“If an extractor - just the general term used for those of us in this line of work - starts buying large quantities of somnacin, their alarm bells start going off. Maybe he’s stockpiling. Maybe he’s selling it, illegally. That’s when they find you and start asking some questions.”
“Alright,” Ariadne said. She waited to see how this linked to Algol.
“Arthur, Mal…they were all licensed. So was I,” Cobb added, quickly. “I wasn’t being evasive when I told you extraction isn’t strictly legal. The laws concerning extraction are ill-defined at best. It’s mostly new territory and very hard to prove. Now, the solid bits of regulation that we do have are controls over just who can access dreamsharing technology. They control things like who gets access to a PASIV, who can produce, sell, and purchase somnacin.”
“And your license lets you do all of that.”
“Well, not producing somnacin,” Cobb said, “But the idea’s there. So the thing is, there is a legal market for extractors. Some of them hire themselves out in entertainment: recreation for the very rich and famous. I’m sure you can figure out how and why.”
She did.
“And there are other things. Things like teaching someone’s subconscious to defend itself against an extractor. And of course, there’s working as police consultants.”
“But you said extraction isn’t exactly illegal.”
“Exactly,” Cobb replied. He glanced at the windows, and motioned for her to keep walking, to move further away from them. Ariadne followed him. He didn’t seem to have any place in mind, just kept walking aimlessly through the warehouse, giving the windows a respectful berth. “Mostly because it’s impossible to prove in court. Somnacin doesn’t tend to linger long in a person’s system, at least if your extractor is any good. Oh, the companies are trying to insert chemical traces into the compounds, but you’d be better off asking Yusuf about that. It isn’t going well for them at the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for crimes to be committed, crimes involving dreamsharing. That’s where we came in.” He paused at a bench beside the windows on the opposite side of the warehouse, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets like he didn’t quite know what to do with them.
“What did you do?”
Cobb shrugged. “Get called in and paid for being consulted on anything that looked like it involved extraction…or rogue extractors. They couldn’t charge them with extraction, but they could be charged with a great deal of other things. Battery, breaking and entering…kidnapping…depending on what they did, there was a great deal of things they could be charged for. And if you were lucky and had proof that they used a PASIV then or had a PASIV? They could be held up for going against the professional code of conduct, unlawful possession of a PASIV if the person didn’t have a license…even unlawful possession of the compounds.”
She waited. When Cobb said nothing, Ariadne prodded. “Cobb. Algol?”
“Right,” Cobb said. “Algol. Algol was just another of those cases. We’d made a name for ourselves. Of course, the police sometimes had people they sent for training in counter-extraction, but the point was, we had that training, we were available, and we were good. They knew that. They didn’t see the point in wasting their resources. The thing about Algol was, he was good. Frighteningly good. He was always one step ahead of them. There was a whole chain of cases before we came in. Before that, the cops had thought he was just a serial killer.”
“Serial killer?” Ariadne recalled what Eames had told her, a while ago. “Eames said Algol was a sociopath. He…kept bringing people under, and breaking them.”
“That’s as good a description as any, I suppose,” Cobb accepted. “You see, the thing was, none of them really pieced together exactly what to pin down on Algol until they had a lucky break. The medical examiner found some anomalies in the brain chemistry of the victim, and was sharp enough to link that to repeated use of somnacin. Algol had been good, but he wasn’t perfect. From there, they managed to figure dreamsharing technology had been involved, and that was where we came in. When they finally figured what could be attributed to him…they had a frightening pattern. Someone who played with his victims, who knew them well enough to slip into their homes, and who managed to put them under again and again without leaving a trace. The tell-tale was the altered brain patterns, and once Newman alerted the cops as to what to look out for, things started to come together. Algol didn’t always kill. Some of his victims simply snapped, suddenly went insane and were sent to an asylum. Two of them committed suicide on their own.”
“That’s why he was named Algol?”
“Actually, I don’t know. Someone used that label when dealing with his string of cases, and the media picked up on it. Probably because Algol was very good at slipping through all sorts of security without leaving a trace. Or at least, he left little enough for the crime labs to pick up on.”
Algol, Ariadne thought. The Demon Star. The ghoul. She shivered a little, thinking about the faceless, inexorable figure, slipping into someone’s house and putting them under. Except that the figure wasn’t faceless, and hadn’t been. It had been Arthur.
“They did a bit of investigation on that lead, and found they had enough to get us in on it. That’s one more thing about being a licensed extractor that isn’t the same as being another professional, like an accountant or something. Malpractice gets you dragged before the licensing body, but because of all the potential abuses of the technology…” Cobb shrugged. “There’s a responsibility on the part of the licensed extractors to cooperate to bring the rogue in.” He glanced at her, his face mostly in shadow, except for the shafts of light that flooded in through the window beyond him. His eyes were hard. “What he did made Algol a rogue. If Arthur and I hadn’t done anything…well, we’d be just as liable for malpractice, violation of professional ethics…”
“And…this isn’t? Isn’t a violation of professional ethics, I mean?”
“Well,” Cobb admitted, “If they knew, they wouldn’t approve, yes. But I’m not licensed anymore, so I don’t…” he paused. His mind completed the rest of the sentence for him. I don’t have anything to lose. He didn’t say it aloud, didn’t complete what must be a portrait of a dangerous, desperate, possibly-innocent fugitive. Ariadne got the hint. He cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he continued, going back to the question at hand. “There wasn’t a way we could have sat that one out, back then. And working consultancy…well, it paid. That was the important part. As for Algol, the aspects like espionage were classified. We didn’t know anything except that Algol had been linked to those, and that he’d made a few hits in different states. But it was enough to get the Feds involved. Our job, you understand, was strictly to give them the perspective from people who actually knew what we were doing when it came to a PASIV.”
“And then you caught him. Algol.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Cobb said. “He was as good as they said he was, always one step ahead of us. He got better at hiding the traces too, and sometimes, we’d come up absolutely empty. They’d refer his victims to a psychiatrist who worked with dreamsharing - Dr Caine. There wasn’t much else he could do. It was clear Algol was playing with us. That was about the time I thought of a plan. Jake and Edwin, the two feds on the case, decided to run with it. It was all about making Algol come out, making him play on our terms instead of his. And this time, we’d be ready.”
Ariadne suddenly felt cold. Somehow, it all made sense now, the burning apartment at the very bottom of Cobb’s mind, the haunted aspect to him, the part of him that seemed irredeemably broken and haunted and lost. “Bait,” she said, then. “You were bait.”
Cobb nodded grimly. “We played to his ego,” he said. “I made myself an appealing target. Algol had taken down one or two extractors: Earl and Riley. He’d never gone against the best. He’d never gone against an architect. That was exactly what we did. Arthur…” he swallowed. “Arthur had thought it was a bad idea. He wanted to do it. Maybe he was offering me a way out, there and then, but…”
“But you didn’t take it,” Ariadne completed. It didn’t make sense though, a part of her still thought. Cobb was frowning, as if there was a puzzle which couldn’t quite fit, and then he shrugged, evidently dismissing it.
“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t. Will wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be a convincing target, and Arthur…I needed Arthur to be the one to close the trap on Algol. He’s…he was one of the best at what he did. But he wasn’t creative. He didn’t have that…inspiration that a good architect needed to draw on. I had it, enough to make me a more realistic target. To dare Algol to take on one of the best extractors, someone who was used to controlling and actively creating the dream…well, that was something else.”
“And he took the bait, right? That’s why you found out it was Arthur.”
Cobb nodded. “He did,” he said. His eyes had gone distant again. He glanced back over his shoulder for a moment, as if trying to peer out the translucent glass panes of the window. “I moved out. I didn’t want to put Mal or the children at risk. We set up a rotating watch. The plan was to ambush Algol at the point of entry. If we failed, I would take him and subdue him in the dream. It’s much harder to fool an extractor than someone who hasn’t been trained to recall his dreams. And I had my totem. Mal’d come it with it a few months ago, when I’d been exploring the idea of dreams within dreams. Algol wouldn’t have known about that. There was no way he could. It was risky, of course. But we were running out of options, so we ran the set-up.”
“But Algol was Arthur,” Ariadne said slowly, “Which meant it didn’t matter. He knew your plan and all the weaknesses in it.”
“Exactly.” Here Cobb hesitated for a while, before he continued, haltingly, “I couldn’t remember much of…what happened. It was all in here,” he tapped his temple with a finger, “All mixed around. Limbo made it worse, in a way. I couldn’t quite say when what happened. From what I remember, Arthur knocked on the door. He sounded hurried. Worried. He told me there was a change of plans. Something had come up, we needed to move. I opened the door - and he said, “Sorry,” and hit me, hard, with…something. He might have drugged me then, to put me out. The next thing I remembered, it was a layer down, I was screaming, and…my totem was gone.”
Ariadne swallowed. She wasn’t sure what to say to that. But now Cobb continued, almost as if he was talking to himself. As if she wasn’t quite there anymore…or as if he wasn’t quite here, lost in some kind of memory.
“I don’t remember much of that either. He tried breaking me. He tried seeing how much pain he could cause, how much he could make me forget. After a while, I wasn’t sure anymore. It must have been a dream, because if I died…I didn’t remember it. I’d wake up, and probably get put under again. And then he’d repeat it. I kept…asking him. What the fuck was going on, what the hell he was doing. He never apologised again, just kept asking me how long I thought I could hold on. Acting like it wasn’t personal. He was…detached. Maybe that hurt a lot more than the fact that he was Algol. He was the one who broke through our set-up.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said.
Cobb laughed. It was resigned, a little harsh, a little bitter. “I know,” he said, softly. “Just another of those things that doesn’t make so much sense.”
-
This is how it feels to be Dominic Cobb right now:
You can feel the heat of the flames on your skin. You can smell smoke, curling in your lungs, acrid on the tip of your tongue. You inhale, choke, and cough. Your eyes are already beginning to water from the coarse black-grey smoke. The smoke is dangerous, you remember. Smoke inhalation can kill - but it isn’t the smoke that feels like it will kill you right now, settling like a festering cancer in your lungs. It isn’t the smoke that makes you curl your shaking hands into fists by your side (they still tremble.) It isn’t the smoke that presses red-hot and dull against your skull.
It’s this: the sharp knowledge of betrayal. The knowledge that you never really knew your point man, your friend, your brother. You only thought you did. The knowledge that it is Arthur who turned on you, Arthur who tortured you, Arthur who betrayed you - Arthur is Algol, the sociopath you’ve been hunting for so long, and Arthur is a lie and a man you’ve never really known at all. This is what threatens to break you: the knowledge that you are already broken. The knowledge that there’s something inside of you that’s broken, something only Arthur could break. Something you don’t quite have words for, and even if you did, you wouldn’t quite know where to start, or how to even begin to fix it.
You dimly realise that the noise you’ve been hearing is yelling. You’re not sure who is yelling, if it’s you or Arthur. You wonder if it even matters. (It doesn’t.) It’s like a thin, gauzy veil has dropped between you and the world: you’re perceiving, you’re taking in things, but they aren’t real, they aren’t immediate. Only the knowledge that burns in your lungs is, only the knowledge that comes out in choking coughs is real. You can’t even tell if you’re angry or afraid or both - and viciously satisfied yet strangely hurt by the pain and confusion on his face when he grabs your shoulder, trying to shake you out of this daze.
You flinch and pull away; your reflexive uppercut catches him on the chin. He staggers backwards, head snapped back from your blow, hand tracing his jaw. You hit him hard and in the wrong way. Your knuckles hurt. You rub them absently. Blood drips. You’ve split your knuckle.
He manages to get you out of the unit a few minutes before it goes, a carpet of flame springing up in orange-yellow fibres all over your vision. His voice is dead, cold and quiet when he says into your ear, loud and clear that he’s going back for Jake.
What, you want to ask, so you can kill him too? He’s already shot Edwin. No, another part of you wants to scream, (and this is the most cruel thing of all) because part of you still cares. The unit - the whole building - is a deathtrap. But your throat locks up, and you can’t say anything. You don’t even know if you want to.
He turns. The flames close in over him. The building collapses. This is a matter of long minutes, but in your mind, this will forever be immediate and consecutive.
You realise, later, the cry has been torn from your raw throat, in between the coughing that can’t stop. You’re shaking, and you’re not sure if you can stop. You did this to him, you know, with the same unyielding certainty that your totem is gone. Lost. With the same knowledge that Arthur is Algol. Was Algol. Algol - Arthur - they’re both dead now. You stood there and watched him walk right to his death. Your head rings with a silent scream, either denial, or hatred or confusion and you’re not sure which. Maybe it’s both. You don’t care.
You as good as killed him and you know it.
You don’t remember what happens next. How long you spent staring at the building, until you’re riding an ambulance to the hospital. You’ve gone perfectly numb now: there’s a thin layer of glass separating you from the world and everything just glides off it. You don’t prod it, daren’t crack it.
If you do, you might break.
Later, someone will pass you the only object that survived the fire, lying discarded a distance away from the building, a small, scarlet, plastic die. Unyielding. Absolutely certain.
You will pocket it.
This is how it feels to be Dominic Cobb, right now.
-
Cobb couldn’t speak of it - all of it - to Ariadne. He wasn’t sure how to explain it. So he fell back to surgically precise descriptions, and the bare minimum. “I came to when the apartment was on fire. The whole building wasn’t tall in the first place, maybe five floors. The whole thing was beginning to burn. I saw…” he paused. “I saw Arthur shoot Edwin. That sealed it for me. That was…that was before I lost consciousness, in the struggle. Then I came to and found the whole apartment on fire. Edwin was already gone by then. Arthur came in. He told me to get the hell out of there. He’d see to Jake. I asked him what he was playing at. He got me out of that apartment, maybe ten minutes before it went. Maybe less. He told me he was going to see to Jake. I wasn’t thinking by then. I stood there, watched him go in. Didn’t say a word. He didn’t come out.”
He didn’t look at Ariadne. He wasn’t sure what expression he’d see on her face, and wasn’t certain he wanted to know.
“Someone called the ambulance. I was warded for some burns and smoke inhalation. After the fire, they told me. The last person out had been Jake. The only thing they found left that had survived the fire, because it’d been found on the pavement outside. I went home. Mal was…” he shrugged. “I…wasn’t ready. She tried taking me to the same doctor who dealt with all of Algol’s victims. She was the only one who thought I wasn’t Algol.”
“But you weren’t. It was…Arthur.”
“It was my word against the evidence, and Algol was too big a case. They needed someone to hang the charges on,” Cobb said quietly. “Jake hadn’t run into Arthur. The only person the evidence fit was me. I’d pretended to be in trouble. And when they’d burst in, I’d killed Edwin. They couldn’t be sure if Arthur was my accomplice or victim.” He said nothing for a few moments, before he continued, too quickly, “That was where Limbo came in. I went under, and then under again. Deeper than I’d gone before. I figured that I couldn’t quite remember what happened that night, but that was because…my mind wasn’t ready for it. It didn’t mean the memories weren’t there. I tried to perform an extraction on myself. I turned to dreaming. It was the only way.”
“But you went too deep,” Ariadne guessed. “And then you found yourself in Limbo.”
Cobb nodded. “I didn’t managed to get the memories,” he said at last. “But that wasn’t for trying. Limbo…if you remember how dreams are, how it’s like to twist and shape a dream to whatever you want it to be…Limbo was ten times that. It took all my memories, as fragmented as they were, all my need to remember what happened, and let me relive it, again and again and again. And then somewhere in the middle of all that…it stopped being what I needed, and started being what I wanted. I wanted to believe Arthur was not Algol. I wanted to believe Algol had never happened. I had it. It was the perfect reality. Not perfect, but close to it. After a while, it got harder to remember that it was a dream. I had Arthur’s totem, but I didn’t know how it worked. I hadn’t even thought of replacing mine, just went straight into dreamsharing as if nothing had changed. But something had. Limbo…limbo’s more dangerous than any other dream. Sometimes, things are so…” he shrugged. “Limbo makes it easy for you to want to accept it as reality,” he said, after a while. “Maybe it would have become impossible for me to live that way, because it wasn’t real. But after a while, things started to blur together.”
“How did you wake up?”
“Mal,” Cobb explained. “She found me. She went down, through the layers. She realised something was wrong when the dose wore off but I didn’t wake up, and went straight into my mind. She…let me remember that the world wasn’t real, and…” he shrugged again, helplessly. “I took some convincing,” he said finally. “Even after I knew it wasn’t real…I think…well, you have to want to wake up. It’s the obvious choice, but at that point in time…In any case, nearly fifty years had passed down there. Maybe seventy. I lost track of the time. It wasn’t easy, waking up. Realising that the past seventy years, fifty years…whatever they were, they were a lie. Waking up to realise I was a person of interest, that the Feds thought I was Algol…It wasn’t a case I was likely to win. So I consulted my attorney. The only hope for it was to run, and to run before they slapped the APB down on me. So I did just that. And…I’ve been running ever since.”
“But you don’t believe Arthur did it,” Ariadne said, slowly. It was the only thing that made sense. “I mean, you don’t believe he’s Algol either, do you?”
Cobb shrugged, his face devoid of expression. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said quietly. “That’s why I need Saito’s access to the evidence. Evidence isn’t like memory. It can’t be contaminated by continued use of a PASIV. It’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Ariadne wanted to know. “Evidence is only as good as how you interpret it. Are you sure it isn’t going to tell you only what you want to hear?”
Cobb’s mouth tightened. “I’m sure,” he said, after a pause. “It’s the best I’ll get.”
“Arthur made his choice, Cobb,” Ariadne said gently. Some inconsistencies still nagged at her, but she pushed them away for now. “He changed his mind at the end. He got you out of that building. He chose to go back in, to try and get Jake.”
Cobb didn’t say anything. His shoulders straightened in a taut line.
“Your guilt defines him,” Ariadne continued. “It’s what gives him strength. If we’re going to succeed, you need to forgive yourself. Let go of your guilt. You’re going to have to confront him. And you don’t have to do it alone, but you’ve got to do it, one way or another.”
“You don’t - “
“I’m not doing it for you,” Ariadne interrupted, perhaps misinterpreting his statement. “I’m doing it for the others. Because they have no idea what risks they’ve taken going in here with you.”
She saw Cobb’s eyes narrow in recognition. She didn’t say it aloud, because she wasn’t certain if she wanted to give Cobb’s subconscious ideas, but Arthur could end up appearing any moment. Could take out a member of their team, and send that person straight to Limbo. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of being trapped there at all.
Cobb shook his head, frustrated - then he frowned. “Wait,” he told her, holding out a hand. They listened. Cobb thought he heard something - was it gunfire? Carefully, he peered out the window. He couldn’t catch sight of anything, not even muzzle flash, but he thought something - several someones, rather, was out there.
Fischer’s projections had started to close in on them. “Yusuf!” he called, urgently. It was time to move.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5 | 6
Part III: Eidolon
7