fic: butterfly dreams (Inception, gen, g)
title: butterfly dreams
fandom: Inception
characters: Arthur gen; very faint hints of Eames/Arthur
warnings: None.
rating: g.
disclaimer: Not mine, not real, never will be.
notes: Thanks to alex_boylove for the last-minute beta, especially when he has so much other stuff going on. Maybe now I can actually work on the Arthur/Eames movie AU?
summary: Arthur is the anchor, because someone needs to keep the others from drifting away, and it’s impossible to be the anchor when you’re perpetually worried the ground will suddenly shift under your feet.
Arthur read, once, of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who awoke from a dream where he was a butterfly and said, “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
This was far before Arthur ever started working for Cobb - long before he ever met Cobb, before he even comprehended that men like Cobb could and did exist - but he understood the importance of the question, even then.
-
“God, you’re insufferable,” Eames said, barely two hours after meeting Arthur for the first time. He has reiterated the sentiment almost every time they’ve seen each other since. Arthur, apparently, is very insufferable.
It’s hardly the first time anyone has said as such to Arthur; Eames is simply the greatest repeat offender.
(Eames, of course, has too much of a sense of variety, and too great of an appreciation for the art of verbal jabs, to use only a single phrase; he seems to collect insults, cycling through his cache of jeers and complaints with an almost comforting repetition. Occasionally he throws a new one into the mix, but it’s always along the same general theme.)
Arthur stopped being offended by those sorts of comments long before he met Eames, and he can’t foresee that changing now. Why should it? He chose to be this way, after all.
(The years wind on, measured in relative time and ticking watches, and judging by the insults, Arthur never changes. The only thing that does is the tone of Eames’ voice.)
-
Tightly-wound, fussy, anal-retentive, obsessive, unhealthily focused on details, dull, unimaginative, finicky, nit-picking, stick in the mud, stick up his ass, straight-laced, perfectionist, boring, inflexible, demanding...
-
Dependable, assured, confident, precise, thorough, calm, attentive, cautious, careful, prudent...
-
Arthur has never needed to be particularly interesting. Too many interesting people in a single space inevitably leads to varying forms of conflict; uninteresting people are necessary to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Someone, after all, needs to fill in the gaps, to rent the warehouses and do research and strategize, to bring plans from the impossible into reality. Someone needs to rein in Cobb, before he starts floating off without anything to hold him down. Someone needs to say no.
Someone needs to say, “No, inception isn’t possible, and even if it is, it’s a bad idea,” but Arthur has gotten used to being ignored. All he can do is watch as Cobb and Ariadne construct their ever-more-elaborate castle in the air, and hope that the support he’s trying frantically to build beneath it will hold.
They may spend more time in dreams than in reality these days, but somebody still has to remember that when you wake up, one way or another, castles in the air end up on the ground.
-
Arthur’s high school progress reports were always predictable: Arthur is very smart, and his written work is excellent, but I would like it if he spoke up more in class. He would have been more worried about it if he didn’t already know that his teachers didn’t actually care about participation as much as they pretended to. In the end, there were always enough outspoken students who wanted to voice their opinions, and not enough students who could write well-constructed arguments with perfect grammar. As long as Arthur made two comments per week per discussion-centric class, the teachers wouldn’t call on him to answer questions.
The progress reports still came: I would like to hear some of his thoughts in class. Arthur was never bothered. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that teachers always wrote that when they couldn’t remember who the student was beyond the essay grades.
-
Here’s the problem: Cobb and Mal did not actually believe in boundaries. It made their relationship dramatic, tumultuous, and transcendent; they had no secrets from each other, no private corners of the soul.
(Arthur has always thought Mal and Cobb so terribly Shakespearean: two halves of a whole, Mal says, and Arthur thinks, So they loved, as love in twain had the essence but in one; two distincts, division none.)
There are no walls in their minds, not when they have spent so long simply changing gravity. Mal and Cobb have always thought in Möbius strips, thought that they could just push farther and farther and circle back around in the end.
Arthur believes in walls. Arthur believes that when you push a wall hard enough, it doesn’t break: you do.
(Arthur stands at Mal’s grave and thinks: Beauty, truth and rarity, grace in all simplicity, here enclosed in cinders lie. Arthur thinks of star-crossed lovers.)
-
Ariadne spends half an hour telling Arthur about Mal and Cobb, about Cobb’s elevator of memories and a freight train and the first idea Cobb ever incepted, and the price he and Mal paid for reality.
When she’s done, Arthur nods and says, “Thank you,” because it’s easier, and more complete, than saying, I know. He didn’t, after all, know the details, nor about the inception, although he suspects he could have figured out some portions of the latter if he truly put his mind to it. Cobb had said he had completed an inception and then had refused to speak any more on the matter, and there has only really been one subject which Cobb has never discussed with Arthur.
He can’t say he’s truly shocked by any of it. Arthur isn’t blind; he’s just stubborn and wilfully ignorant, too loyal to Cobb, too convinced that he can keep things running smoothly by sheer determination.
Some part of him always knew.
-
As it turns out, the Zhuangzi tale is a common watchword among those who work in the world of the subconscious. “We all find ourselves worrying, at some point, that we still dreaming,” Mal told him his first week, her beautiful eyes dark and solemn, taking a top out of her pocket and spinning it on the tabletop. She and Arthur both watched it topple. “We all worry that we are the butterfly.”
Arthur nodded and did not mention the logical conclusion.
-
Arthur isn’t a gambler. The only games of chance he plays are games where he can count cards, which is possibly one of the less illegal skills in his repertoire. Only people with no relevant skills feel the need to rely on luck; Arthur balks at the very idea.
Which means that very few people understand his totem, at first. It’s a cheap red die, scuffed and worn, casting transparent shadows, when Arthur is all about elegance and opacity. It’s not inherited, and it doesn’t seem to suit him at all.
But Arthur didn’t choose it for aesthetic reasons, or sentimental ones. He chose it because he doesn’t gamble: because no matter how many times he rolls the die, it will always land on the same number. Arthur chose it to remind himself that he never has to follow the whims of chance, as long as he plays with a loaded die.
-
“Were you born wearing a suit?” Eames asks snidely, but his voice is warm underneath the taunt. Arthur appreciates that Eames rarely says what he means, but broadcasts it nonetheless.
“Just the waistcoat,” Arthur responds, thinking of the time when his wardrobe consisted of nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and he was lucky if he made it to the laundromat every other week. He still has a few pairs of jeans and sweatpants in his closet. He could wear them in tomorrow, and stun his coworkers into silence.
He won’t. There is a vast world of difference between who Arthur is today and who he was ten years ago, and ten years before that, and the difference is almost entirely self-made. He learned long ago that he can define himself from the inside out. Eames could, perhaps, appreciate that, Eames of the thousand faces and identity. And yet, what can a man who slips through personalities as easily as changing a tie understand about the connection between one’s inside and one’s outside?
-
In the end, there isn’t that much difference between reality and a dream. You change what you can: yourself, and others. You create, and perceive. You define, and are defined.
-
The rule that nobody ever listens to is, don’t purposely have sex in a dream. So few people follow it that Cobb hardly even mentions it - fair, since it would make him an even bigger hypocrite. Arthur knows without a doubt that Cobb and Mal spent a very informative few weeks seeing the most absurd, gravity-defying positions they could get themselves into.
He wishes he didn’t know this, but sometimes in his line of work he doesn’t get a choice in those matters.
Arthur himself has had sex in a dream exactly once, and he doesn’t plan on repeating the experience. It was perfectly satisfactory, but it held the potential of providing too much confusion between the dream and the surface. Arthur thinks there need to be a few things that everybody saves for reality.
There isn’t so much difference between people and buildings, after all; letting your hands skim over the curves and planes of somebody else’s skin can be just as disorienting as creating a city block entirely from memory. Arthur sees no need for excess confusion.
He carefully defines his boundaries, this is real and this isn’t real, and he hangs on to them, because he has to. When the line between dream and reality is so shaky that it can be nothing more than a matter of perspective, hanging on to his walls and his boundaries is sometimes the only thing he can do.
Arthur is the anchor, because someone needs to keep the others from drifting away, and it’s impossible to be the anchor when you’re perpetually worried the ground will suddenly shift under your feet.
Say: this is real. Say: I am real. Define, and be defined.
-
Arthur has heard the Zhuangzi legend quoted a thousand times, always when someone is caught up in contemplations of reality. Am I a butterfly, or a man?
It’s an important question, one all dreamers are taught to consider carefully, when their lives are so full of carefully crafted facsimiles, and yet the first question Arthur asked upon reading the story went: Was Zhuangzi a butterfly, or was he a man?
Most dreamers overlook it in their haste to apply the analogy to their own lives, but the distinction is crucial. If Zhuangzi really was the butterfly, the world is just a setting for his dream of humankind; everybody living on earth would simply be a projection of an unusually detailed subconscious.
Projections dreaming, and creating projections of their own, who dream, and create projections of their own...
When all is said and done, though, there are only two options. Arthur can spend his life debating philosophical questions out of worry that they have some relevance to his life, anxiously rolling his die and believing that it will tell him the secrets of the universe (it won’t; projections passively obey the mind of the dreamer), or he can simply - stop thinking about it. Stop worrying, and say: it doesn’t matter if this is real or not, because this is my reality.
Say: I impose order when I can, and let the rest sort itself out, because the probabilities of every other die out there don’t matter as long as mine always rolls the same number.
fandom: Inception
characters: Arthur gen; very faint hints of Eames/Arthur
warnings: None.
rating: g.
disclaimer: Not mine, not real, never will be.
notes: Thanks to alex_boylove for the last-minute beta, especially when he has so much other stuff going on. Maybe now I can actually work on the Arthur/Eames movie AU?
summary: Arthur is the anchor, because someone needs to keep the others from drifting away, and it’s impossible to be the anchor when you’re perpetually worried the ground will suddenly shift under your feet.
Arthur read, once, of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who awoke from a dream where he was a butterfly and said, “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
This was far before Arthur ever started working for Cobb - long before he ever met Cobb, before he even comprehended that men like Cobb could and did exist - but he understood the importance of the question, even then.
-
“God, you’re insufferable,” Eames said, barely two hours after meeting Arthur for the first time. He has reiterated the sentiment almost every time they’ve seen each other since. Arthur, apparently, is very insufferable.
It’s hardly the first time anyone has said as such to Arthur; Eames is simply the greatest repeat offender.
(Eames, of course, has too much of a sense of variety, and too great of an appreciation for the art of verbal jabs, to use only a single phrase; he seems to collect insults, cycling through his cache of jeers and complaints with an almost comforting repetition. Occasionally he throws a new one into the mix, but it’s always along the same general theme.)
Arthur stopped being offended by those sorts of comments long before he met Eames, and he can’t foresee that changing now. Why should it? He chose to be this way, after all.
(The years wind on, measured in relative time and ticking watches, and judging by the insults, Arthur never changes. The only thing that does is the tone of Eames’ voice.)
-
Tightly-wound, fussy, anal-retentive, obsessive, unhealthily focused on details, dull, unimaginative, finicky, nit-picking, stick in the mud, stick up his ass, straight-laced, perfectionist, boring, inflexible, demanding...
-
Dependable, assured, confident, precise, thorough, calm, attentive, cautious, careful, prudent...
-
Arthur has never needed to be particularly interesting. Too many interesting people in a single space inevitably leads to varying forms of conflict; uninteresting people are necessary to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Someone, after all, needs to fill in the gaps, to rent the warehouses and do research and strategize, to bring plans from the impossible into reality. Someone needs to rein in Cobb, before he starts floating off without anything to hold him down. Someone needs to say no.
Someone needs to say, “No, inception isn’t possible, and even if it is, it’s a bad idea,” but Arthur has gotten used to being ignored. All he can do is watch as Cobb and Ariadne construct their ever-more-elaborate castle in the air, and hope that the support he’s trying frantically to build beneath it will hold.
They may spend more time in dreams than in reality these days, but somebody still has to remember that when you wake up, one way or another, castles in the air end up on the ground.
-
Arthur’s high school progress reports were always predictable: Arthur is very smart, and his written work is excellent, but I would like it if he spoke up more in class. He would have been more worried about it if he didn’t already know that his teachers didn’t actually care about participation as much as they pretended to. In the end, there were always enough outspoken students who wanted to voice their opinions, and not enough students who could write well-constructed arguments with perfect grammar. As long as Arthur made two comments per week per discussion-centric class, the teachers wouldn’t call on him to answer questions.
The progress reports still came: I would like to hear some of his thoughts in class. Arthur was never bothered. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that teachers always wrote that when they couldn’t remember who the student was beyond the essay grades.
-
Here’s the problem: Cobb and Mal did not actually believe in boundaries. It made their relationship dramatic, tumultuous, and transcendent; they had no secrets from each other, no private corners of the soul.
(Arthur has always thought Mal and Cobb so terribly Shakespearean: two halves of a whole, Mal says, and Arthur thinks, So they loved, as love in twain had the essence but in one; two distincts, division none.)
There are no walls in their minds, not when they have spent so long simply changing gravity. Mal and Cobb have always thought in Möbius strips, thought that they could just push farther and farther and circle back around in the end.
Arthur believes in walls. Arthur believes that when you push a wall hard enough, it doesn’t break: you do.
(Arthur stands at Mal’s grave and thinks: Beauty, truth and rarity, grace in all simplicity, here enclosed in cinders lie. Arthur thinks of star-crossed lovers.)
-
Ariadne spends half an hour telling Arthur about Mal and Cobb, about Cobb’s elevator of memories and a freight train and the first idea Cobb ever incepted, and the price he and Mal paid for reality.
When she’s done, Arthur nods and says, “Thank you,” because it’s easier, and more complete, than saying, I know. He didn’t, after all, know the details, nor about the inception, although he suspects he could have figured out some portions of the latter if he truly put his mind to it. Cobb had said he had completed an inception and then had refused to speak any more on the matter, and there has only really been one subject which Cobb has never discussed with Arthur.
He can’t say he’s truly shocked by any of it. Arthur isn’t blind; he’s just stubborn and wilfully ignorant, too loyal to Cobb, too convinced that he can keep things running smoothly by sheer determination.
Some part of him always knew.
-
As it turns out, the Zhuangzi tale is a common watchword among those who work in the world of the subconscious. “We all find ourselves worrying, at some point, that we still dreaming,” Mal told him his first week, her beautiful eyes dark and solemn, taking a top out of her pocket and spinning it on the tabletop. She and Arthur both watched it topple. “We all worry that we are the butterfly.”
Arthur nodded and did not mention the logical conclusion.
-
Arthur isn’t a gambler. The only games of chance he plays are games where he can count cards, which is possibly one of the less illegal skills in his repertoire. Only people with no relevant skills feel the need to rely on luck; Arthur balks at the very idea.
Which means that very few people understand his totem, at first. It’s a cheap red die, scuffed and worn, casting transparent shadows, when Arthur is all about elegance and opacity. It’s not inherited, and it doesn’t seem to suit him at all.
But Arthur didn’t choose it for aesthetic reasons, or sentimental ones. He chose it because he doesn’t gamble: because no matter how many times he rolls the die, it will always land on the same number. Arthur chose it to remind himself that he never has to follow the whims of chance, as long as he plays with a loaded die.
-
“Were you born wearing a suit?” Eames asks snidely, but his voice is warm underneath the taunt. Arthur appreciates that Eames rarely says what he means, but broadcasts it nonetheless.
“Just the waistcoat,” Arthur responds, thinking of the time when his wardrobe consisted of nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and he was lucky if he made it to the laundromat every other week. He still has a few pairs of jeans and sweatpants in his closet. He could wear them in tomorrow, and stun his coworkers into silence.
He won’t. There is a vast world of difference between who Arthur is today and who he was ten years ago, and ten years before that, and the difference is almost entirely self-made. He learned long ago that he can define himself from the inside out. Eames could, perhaps, appreciate that, Eames of the thousand faces and identity. And yet, what can a man who slips through personalities as easily as changing a tie understand about the connection between one’s inside and one’s outside?
-
In the end, there isn’t that much difference between reality and a dream. You change what you can: yourself, and others. You create, and perceive. You define, and are defined.
-
The rule that nobody ever listens to is, don’t purposely have sex in a dream. So few people follow it that Cobb hardly even mentions it - fair, since it would make him an even bigger hypocrite. Arthur knows without a doubt that Cobb and Mal spent a very informative few weeks seeing the most absurd, gravity-defying positions they could get themselves into.
He wishes he didn’t know this, but sometimes in his line of work he doesn’t get a choice in those matters.
Arthur himself has had sex in a dream exactly once, and he doesn’t plan on repeating the experience. It was perfectly satisfactory, but it held the potential of providing too much confusion between the dream and the surface. Arthur thinks there need to be a few things that everybody saves for reality.
There isn’t so much difference between people and buildings, after all; letting your hands skim over the curves and planes of somebody else’s skin can be just as disorienting as creating a city block entirely from memory. Arthur sees no need for excess confusion.
He carefully defines his boundaries, this is real and this isn’t real, and he hangs on to them, because he has to. When the line between dream and reality is so shaky that it can be nothing more than a matter of perspective, hanging on to his walls and his boundaries is sometimes the only thing he can do.
Arthur is the anchor, because someone needs to keep the others from drifting away, and it’s impossible to be the anchor when you’re perpetually worried the ground will suddenly shift under your feet.
Say: this is real. Say: I am real. Define, and be defined.
-
Arthur has heard the Zhuangzi legend quoted a thousand times, always when someone is caught up in contemplations of reality. Am I a butterfly, or a man?
It’s an important question, one all dreamers are taught to consider carefully, when their lives are so full of carefully crafted facsimiles, and yet the first question Arthur asked upon reading the story went: Was Zhuangzi a butterfly, or was he a man?
Most dreamers overlook it in their haste to apply the analogy to their own lives, but the distinction is crucial. If Zhuangzi really was the butterfly, the world is just a setting for his dream of humankind; everybody living on earth would simply be a projection of an unusually detailed subconscious.
Projections dreaming, and creating projections of their own, who dream, and create projections of their own...
When all is said and done, though, there are only two options. Arthur can spend his life debating philosophical questions out of worry that they have some relevance to his life, anxiously rolling his die and believing that it will tell him the secrets of the universe (it won’t; projections passively obey the mind of the dreamer), or he can simply - stop thinking about it. Stop worrying, and say: it doesn’t matter if this is real or not, because this is my reality.
Say: I impose order when I can, and let the rest sort itself out, because the probabilities of every other die out there don’t matter as long as mine always rolls the same number.