Fic: Chaos Out Of Shape: Prologue (ii)

[speak_me_fair]

prologue ii: {cracked the walls}

They'd been on the station for a whole cycle before Arthur could relax enough to think seriously about working. The post-flight adrenal letdown, combined with his overwhelming sense of guilt, had almost put him on level with Dom for the first few days.

His brain kept telling him that none of it was his fault, that if Dom had not realized how far gone Mal was, there was no way that he could have guessed.

The problem was that all other parts of him; the parts he could usually shut away and lock down; his feelings and his instinct and what he unwillingly conceded was his heart, seemed to be in disagreement with his brain.

Ariadne was asleep, finally, shift-cycle after shift-cycle of intense effort to understand what her new role was, cycles of blazing out her automatic need to have all around her be pleased by her abilities, worn down to a fine sand of exhaustion.

Yusuf was in his skill-bought workshop, creating temp-mods at the speed of an old-world sloth while he made up patches with his borrowed time, buying them all clemency.

Buying Eames the disguises they all needed to keep living.

Dom. Dom was -

Best not to think of that.

Eames. Eames who had promised their souls and -

Arthur pushed his hand between his teeth, bit down a little, thought of the Gates.

He'd seen their beauty every day as a child, towering over him, their texts inscribed with care and maintained against the unending tide of humanity that passed through them - but rather than a welcome home, he had always thought of them as an exit.

They called to him, showing him only what lay beyond and never how to return.

His mother had tried to teach him, had tried to instil the knowledge and wonder that they symbolized in every viewing of their stony magnificence. He couldn't - and wouldn't - see it. He was well educated, but little interested in education that only fed itself.

Gold flecked stone, and something they called ivory, and in calling it that, used the word like a charm-mod.

Ivory, Ivory, the Ivory Gate.

The Horn Gate, and what lay beyond them both.

The Horn Gate, the Onyx sector, the Houses of the Dead.

The Ivory Gate, and above it, impossibly delicate, soared the towers of the Academes.

He thought of the people who had lived there, lived their lives according to the rules and expectations of the Horn Gate, the Ivory Gate, the Towers, the Onyx sector, the Houses.

The people he loved.

Eames and Yusuf, borrowing time for just long enough so that Dom could steal it.

Ariadne, who laughed at her own illusions in the barren green of borrowed fertility, who lent them all joy amidst the dusty residue of grass. Ariadne, stolen from the promises of the Academes, her clothes as richly embroidered as any promises made to the City-Corps, swinging on Eames's holo-arm and stealing kisses from the illusion-lips Arthur would never see, like one of the bees Dom brought into brief mechanical being, when he was feeling relaxed enough to amuse people with his skills.

Ariadne, Gate-child, City-child, Ivory-born solipsist, creating worlds that Arthur would never breathe within.

And Mal, lovely sophisticated Mal, with her dark floating hair and soft face that always seemed so deceptively frail, Mal who was always questing for just that bit more.

Perhaps that was how she had fooled him into thinking she had it all handled, because he saw so much of himself in that questing nature. The difference being that his quest ventured ever out, away, beyond, while hers drew her deeper and deeper inside her self, drawing things towards her rather than taking those few steps beyond the Gates.

Dom had loved her, braver than any of them, he had dared to love her and marry her and give her all of his creations as a melding.

Dominic Cobb, perm-mod creator, valued and sought-after, had given Mal something no-one else could even think of attaining towards - oh, of course he had given her a home, children, possessions, married status, he had given her all the things no-one had ever thought beautiful, brilliant Mallorie Miles could ever have wanted - but he had also given her perm-mod after perm-mod; creator-inventor Dom, he had presented them to her in elaborate beautiful gestures as another, lesser man would have found her old-world jewels, new-world metal.

Dom, who had given Mal so much more, too much more, than mere life could bear within her.

And now they mourned her, each of them in their own way. The guilt was almost insurmountable, and it was crippling Dom, and leaving him little better.

He had more than a few reasons to thank all the deities that he never prayed to for the one thing that kept all of them going for those first few of the space-station's revolutions, the one person that kept them moving, got them to the place they needed to be and then got them accepted. Eames.

Eames who had pulled them when they needed pulling and refused to give up on anyone and managed to drag them into life, or at least a semblance of it.

Or rather, he had dragged Arthur into life. Arthur wouldn't and couldn't speak for Dom, and Ari and Yusuf seemed quite able to keep on living without any sort of help other than the bargains that gave them their staying-allowance.

Ari employed as a tool-designer, a metal-worker, low-grader level and basic. Ariadne, their golden Academe, who had spent her days in the towers, now to be working with tools and welding and molten heat - because she had no perm-mod and in the space-station's eyes very little status.

She hadn't seemed to mind.

Perhaps she was relieved they thought of her as being possessed of any skill at all, here in a world where the impractical application of any knowledge meant nothing to anyone.

Yusuf was a bargain in his own right; Eames's own personal token, his primary bargaining chip.

The Gate-Planet's foremost temp-mod designer, wanted by every outpost station throughout the galaxies, would now and always be recognised for his skills.

Arthur was to be employed among the pilots - instructor, fighter, a point-man of sorts, he supposed, working out strategies and potential for them. Eames had told him to be what they asked for, and they asked for very little, compared to his actual skills, and it was a life he could manage if not endure with any hope...

But Eames, Eames had gone to Dom, Eames had gone to make the Psion-request for a tattoo-naming, had gone to ask Dom to carve Mal's name into his skin in a gesture of ineradicable remembrance; Eames who had decided they all needed an end to their random flickers of inadequacy and guilt.

Eames who would name Mal, and name grief, for the rest of his body's life.

Eames who had known that when he turned on his new, Yusuf-created holos, only Arthur would see what had been done.

Eames would now be bound to Dom, after this strange ritual, would be bound to him now and perhaps for all the time they had before them on this dead, strange station. Eames, concentratedly-determined Eames, who was the reason they had a place to stay and hadn't been space-vacced, Eames who had bargained them places here on a rust-brown nothingness of metallic boron-driven pipework and then -

And then -

I'll take it, darling, my shoulders were made for it.

What was Dom making now, what was he making of Eames, what was their inventor making out of blood and ash and guilt?

Arthur hoped it helped him, helped either of them, somehow.

It was a miserable feeling, this pain. It was hurt and it was insanity and it was overwhelming disappointment in himself, disappointment for not stopping Mal - not stopping Dom - before all of this could happen, before they lost not only each other, but their home, their children, everything.

That was his job, making sure that moment never occurred.

He was supposed to be the planner of the group, the one that saw the truth and life from all angles.

He had failed.

He had failed.

Just as he had never been able to see the beauty of what they called ivory, just as he was wired-up and wired-in and fused and broken into a mould that would never let him see the perfect heights of Eames's best holos, just as he would never be able to take anything Yusuf gave him and appreciate it for its true worth.

He had failed and he was failing and he would fail and -

- and he would fail and fall and they would all fall with him, oh, lights and stars, they would all fall when he failed.

Sleeping Ariadne and absorbed Yusuf; Dom and Eames who were now forcing belief out of old death -

"Arthur."

- and he didn't know what the fuck he could do about it -

"Arthur."

- or even if he should do anything about it -

"Arthur."

"What? Oh... Eames."

"Fucking fuck," Eames said in one of his moments of utter coherency, lights and stars and the lords of all seven hells, how could he possibly be so vapid -

(but you didn't mock him when he stood in the landing bay and bought you in, bought you time, bought you rooms and places and status, did you?)

Arthur reminded himself of that, of what Eames had done out there in the landing bay, promising the space-rats help at any cost. Promising them help because however good they all were, they could not give broken, terrified, destroyed Dom a sanctuary without some kind of base.

He thought of what he was going to give, what they were all going to have to give, and became angry at his own flippancy, and immediately wished he hadn't even travelled down that path of thought, because it led to a thorn-wall, and that wall was too much to think on, it was deception and cost and he couldn't -

"I. Fuck. Too many places. Arthur, sorry."

Eames, wrapped in an old bulk-jacket, which meant his holo-mod was turned off. Eames, discarding the jacket quickly and trying to put it onto Arthur, which. Which. No. He didn't need -

"I bought you a bit of water." Eames sounded as though he were talking to Ari, gentle and patient and kind, and that was just wrong. "Enough for a shower, a wash-up, yeah? Arthur. You're. You. You still. You. Um, there's still - you have blood - you need to shower, okay? You - when we went. Left. You still. Arthur, we were - the Gates, yeah? And you -"

Oh.

Oh.

Of course.

"Yeah... okay. You didn't need -" Arthur looked up at Eames. So close, so real, so much stronger than he ever would have thought. And so ready to do whatever they needed, whatever was needful. But still, he didn't need to -"I'll... I'll do that. Thank you?"

It was a piss-poor thank you after all Eames had done for them, and Arthur knew he had failed again.

Or hadn't, because Eames just gave him a crooked half-assed grin and said, "Hop. Go. Or I can wash your back and use up credits and then there will we -"

"Oh fuck off," Arthur said with enormous relief, and went to use up precisely one hemi-cycle's worth of hot water and get to feel clean.

And when the water went cold, Eames pulled him out from under it and said furious things in Onyx-speech and said while he piled therm-wraps over him -

"You get now, and we don't talk about it. You get now and then you have to hold us up. But now? Right now? Now you don't have to. It's all fine. We're fine. You can have now, promise."

Now? He could have now?

Arthur slumped against Eames, his head bowed and his now-clean body relaxing for the first time in days. He knew his brain was wound up and if he spoke at all it would be nothing but crap and babble and things that he'd regret saying the moment they came out of his mouth.

But now, somehow, he didn't seem to feel the need to speak, didn't feel the need to move, because... well, because Eames had said it was alright. He felt as though someone had stuffed his head in wool, detached and pain-free and incapable of any sort of direction or response.

When Eames pushed him backwards, he went without complaint, hovered over by heat-seeking, heat-engendering, half-sentient blankets and still looking into those strange-hued grey-blue eyes.

He let himself drift.

"I belong to you like this plot of ground, that I planted with flowers, and sweet-smelling herbs," Eames was saying, quiet and far away. "Sweet is its stream, dug by your hand, refreshing in the north wind. A lovely place to wander in, your hand in my hand. Each look with which you look at me sustains me more than food and drink."

Eames was reciting something, and Arthur had no idea what it was, or why he would be doing so, or why it had to be done, or why anyone cared.

He only knew that Eames's hands were warm even over the therm-wraps, that they were hard and callused and comforting. He smelled of blood and ash and sugar-spirits, and the lines around his eyes were kind and tired.

"You get now," he repeated, and put a hand over Arthur's eyes, the skin a little rough and smelling of old water and rust and the acetone rubbings of ancient paint.

It sounded like a promise.

It sounded possible.

And Arthur fell into sleep like damp wadded cloth, grey and dull and unnoticed, and forgot for so long (too long) what he had heard.

Each look with which you look at me sustains me more than food and drink.

But the next time he heard it, it was not Eames who used those words to remind him.

It was Ariadne.

And it was on a planet that might as well have been beyond the Horn-Gate, for it was worse and better than the Houses of the Dead, all at once, and it was -

"Come back to me." Later still than that, later even than Ariadne's strange moment of perfect recall, the words would leave Arthur's throat, his tongue, his lips, and he would know Eames could feel them, breath for breath, vibration given freely to half-dead synapses, and still he would not quite believe it was his voice. "Come back to me. Come home."

"Always," Eames would say then, Eames at the end of the world, at the end of existence, the sound of his usually caressing, language-loving, Onyx-lilted voice made choked and rasping by fear.

His voice was never quite within his control, when he knew Arthur could hear its real tones. And Arthur was never sure what anyone else heard in it.

He only knew what he heard, and that it was true.

At the end of all hope and the end of all existence, Eames would swallow, thick and heavy, the automatic movement audible and all the stranger for it, and repeat the word; cold and clear this time, almost over-enunciating -

"Always."

**

Most of the time, Dom knew where he was.

He knew what he was being paid to do.

He knew the payment that was being extracted from others, so that he could fulfil his purpose.

Dom was not oblivious. Dom knew what was important.

What had been important.

What had to stay important.

He knew that Eames had been, was, forever would be, a Psion.

He knew that Eames was Philippa and James's magician, Mal's friend, her long-ago frère, the man who loved to argue with her no matter what guise he wore.

He knew that no matter how long his days of attempting to solve what had been done to Arthur may have been, they would never make any of it right.

Dom Cobb knew who he was.

Lover, father; husband, creator; inventor, leader.

He was all of those things, had been all those things, and now he was a man who conjured up magic from destroyed parts and hoped they were enough to keep buying him and his time.

He was a man with a perm-mod he refused to illuminate.

He was a man who had given Mal, Mal who was all of his lords and lights and stars and ancient, half-spoken deities, the very things that had destroyed her.

And as he had destroyed her, so she now sought to destroy the world.

Perm-mod after perm-mod, made beautiful in their design for her enjoyment, for her delectation. Again and again, creating one more thing, because she had asked.

But never the time-port, never that hideous, orange-glowing jack. He would never study one of those, brought to him from some poor dead relic of the annihilatory battlefields, never reproduce that particular horror.

Not for Mal, he thought, then and now and in days to come, for linearity had stopped existing. Not the abomination of the time-warping soldiers, not for Mal who loved beauty and grace, not for Mal, to be linked irretrievably to the vagaries of time and war.

And in the end, that had been the only thing she truly craved.

The only thing she had despised in him, that he refused to grant it to her.

"You could do it, Dom, mon amant, you could give me this..."

The words haunted his sleep, haunted his waking, stole time from him as surely as though he had been Psion-chosen, ripping apart boundaries that should always have been stronger than veils.

He focused.

Design this, they said, and he obeyed.

And time passed so quickly, so slowly, it hovered around him, beneath him, above him.

He could never remember who he was working for, when he placed the last little gold wire into its connection.

Mal, Mal, you will love this.

"Good work again, Cobb," said Lukho, and took his creation away.

Ariadne brought him scrap parts, pulled apart and melted down and strung out.

"Can you use these?" she asked.

"How... how long have we been here?" he asked her in return.

"Cycles, revolutions." She shrugged. "Don't worry, Dom. It's fine, you're doing good."

I have lost time, he thought.

He did not care. The only Psion left was Eames, and Eames could have all of that time, if he needed it.

Let Dom go old and grey, let him come to his life's end.

"Barter my soul, barter my time."

He picked up the tiny interface laser, and set to work once more.

Another commission.

Mal, you will love this, I will make it your star, there is a jewel in this one, see?

No. No. That was before.

"Dom, you can't give people time by not using it yourself. Please, mate. You've got to look after yourself better, come back to us a little, yeah?"

He tried. He focused on his surroundings, on his hard bed and the too-thin blankets.

He traded for more, and was rooked, but they all looked so pleased to see him try that it was worth it.

The pipes dripped in a corner of his room. In the sleep-cycles, when the lights darkened, he could see faces there.

He worked with iron and rhodium and silver plated copper now. And there was no-one to love him for it save his own decaying ghost of reality.

"Do you love me, Dominic?"

"Better than stars or water," he always replied.

"And yet you create them for me."

"Your loving them still doesn't make them better than you..."

He could feel her breath on his neck, the warmth of her skin as it pressed against his.

"Why don't you use your perm-mod, my darling, hide yourself from where anyone can find you, work in peace?"

"Dom, what the fuck? Arthur traded you five cred's worth of proper food, what the hell are you trying to do?"

Eames, who would never need another perm-mod.

"Sorry... sorry."

He was so sorry.

"How much time -"

"Ah, Dom, it's not important, you're here now."

Eames, making sure he had more than powerbars and stims and sugar spirits. Eames who sometimes gave him the sleep-syringe, so that he believed in the concept of night and day.

He created.

He built.

Cher, you must not be so alone.

"You left me," Dom said to his workshop.

The twin suns no longer revolved above his head. Metal and old rust-water and the faint humming of pipes consumed his days - oh and they were days, not cycles.

"How many days?" he asked, surfacing.

"I don't know," Arthur said. "Half a year of shifts, perhaps. I'm trying to keep track."

"I'm working."

"I know. You still have to live, Dom. Eat."

"It's going to be something no-one's seen before."

"I know. Stay alive and show us."

The space-station turned.

Eat.

Sleep.

He always listened.

Sometimes, it was Yusuf.

"You need to incorporate this."

"He will never be your equal," Mal murmured in his peripheral hearing, floating and disconnected at the corners of his weary sight.

"Yes," Dom said. "Yes, I know."

He did not thank Yusuf until three full cycles later, and then it was Eames he was talking to, and Eames who agreed to pass on the message.

Dom lay in his bunk and thought Mal, he got up and washed his face and thought Philippa, he drank what passed for coffee and thought James.

He ate. He slept. He started to think of words that were not only about himself.

He thought - we need more than this, the parts aren't enough.

And the space station turned.

And they were safe.

And he could not be touched.

He thought - this time may be passing like nightmare-balances, too swift, too slow, but still it is passing, somehow it is passing, and it is passing me by. I have lost reality, and still I know it has been too long.

And the space station turned.

And Dom created now from nothing more than base metal, and there were no jewels left.

No jewels of the mind, or the heart, or to the touch.

"I love you," Mal said, and she was happy.

He would never make her beauty again, never hold out his creations in his hands to see her gasp and glow with pleasure.

"Six fucking cycles, Dom, you can't do this!" Arthur yelled, and he gave in.

He slept.

He dreamed.

"I love you, she said, and he wept.

"I have lost you," he said.

Ariadne brought him parts, and asked him questions, and he began to be able to answer them.

Yusuf came to him with problems that were strangely easy to solve, even though he could see all the levels of their complexity, even though those levels absorbed him for days, cycles, shift-cycles, whatever it was he was living out.

And the space station turned.

And Ariadne kept asking, and he roused himself to answer.

And Yusuf created puzzles of destruction, and between them, they created beauty.

And Arthur, who could see none of it, was the one who came more often.

And Eames, whose appearance changed so quickly now that it flickered almost fast enough to give glimpses of the time-soldier beneath, came less.

And the space station turned.

"I love you," Mal whispered, dreaming and awake; working and absorbed. She leant upon his shoulder as he talked with Yusuf; took the direction of his gaze away from desperately-learning Ariadne, wallowed away his hearing from Arthur's friendship.

She absorbed him, obsessed him, possessed him; for she was always there, and time had deserted him.

Arthur, trying to keep him tethered to whatever he could find.

Yusuf, throwing him challenges that were so easily defeated.

Ariadne, who needed him, needed his guidance, needed tuition.

Eames, who had nothing to offer him except sugar-spirits and ink-ash love and a promise.

All of them, waiting for him to return from the depths of his fractured, splintered mind.

And there was nothing he could do to save any of them, nothing he could do to help them, nothing he could find in himself that was of worth except one.

Mal, Mal, Mal.

"Je vous en prie. Dominic. I love you."

And the space-station turned.

Cycle after cycle, swallowed in the maw of his despair.

Creator.

Inventor.

Lost.

**




PART I