[fic]: somewhere there's a room for each of us to grow (arthur/eames)

[alice_1005]

Title: somewhere there's a room for each of us to grow

Fandom: inception; arthur/eames

Summary: Arthur and Eames and the years that span between them.

 i. initiation

Two days into a job Arthur already deeply regrets agreeing to, Cobb gestures to the man beside him in a dim alleyway in the pouring rain in one of the less populous port cities in Vietnam and says, by way of introduction, “We need a forger. Eames is the best.”

His tone doesn’t allow any interrogation on either front. Cobb has a way of speaking, of stating things he merely believed as though they're incontrovertible facts everyone else wastes time by not immediately accepting.

It grates at Arthur, now, as does the wet and unflinching stone against his back, the feeling of hair product spreading in the damp heat, dripping down the back of his neck. He swipes the back of his hand against his forehead. Sweat tackier, thicker than the rain, but it’s ineffectual; all he feels is wet.

Next to Cobb stands Eames. He’s not what Arthur expected, though he tried not to expect much. Cobb spoke with his typical authority but he was as new to this sort of work as Arthur was. Eames certainly looks self-assured, though that meant little to Arthur, who trusts rarely and has no patience for those who trust themselves too much.

Forger he may be, Eames hardly blends in. He’s wearing something stunningly ugly: a silk shirt with a sort of argyle pattern in shades of purple that don’t complement each other at all, tucked loosely into pinstriped grey culottes. Arthur is so stuck staring at the picture Eames makes that he almost misses the funny look Eames is giving him. One Arthur can’t read but immediately dislikes. Eames is squinting, maybe merely as a result of the rain tracking tiny rivulets down his forehead—but it seems more intent. He’s looking Arthur up and down. His mouth quirks with some private judgement Arthur can’t discern.

Arthur knows what people in dreamshare say about him. That he’s bound to follow wherever it is the Cobbs go. Talented, certainly; he wouldn’t be who he was without gaining a reputation that precedes him. But there’s something the Cobbs have that Arthur knows he lacks. A singular ingenuity of creation, of conception. A spark of light that Arthur is much more adept at defining the boundaries of than creating himself.

He wonders if that’s what Eames is assessing. That Arthur—increasingly soaked as they stare at each other and the silent seconds tick by—might only be caught in the web of grander things.

If Eames is doubting Arthur’s reported abilities, he doesn’t let on. The smile he gives him is thin, wan; it doesn’t reach his eyes. But Eames extends his hand to Arthur with marked sincerity. He reaches between them slowly and deliberately, as if not to cause alarm.

Arthur accepts. Theirs is hardly a world of polite professionalism—though he tries. The firmness of Eames’ grip doesn’t surprise him, but Arthur squeezes back more tightly than he thought he might. Eames’ fingers are thick and damp with raindrops.

“Arthur." Voice warm and rich in the dark. “I’ve heard of you, of course.”

-

“So how did Cobb get you mixed up in all this?”

The lazy sprawl of Eames’ words is becoming more familiar, but Arthur bristles at how presumptuous he sounds.

“It wasn't Cobb,” he says flatly.

They’ve relocated. They only went to Vietnam at Cobb’s insistence; his repeated refrain was that Eames was someone you sought out yourself if you wanted him. It’s pointless trying to get him to come to you, he’d told Arthur, he’d never show up. These secondhand insights Cobb repeated breathlessly, as though he could make the knowledge his own by recounting it intently enough.

Arthur said nothing. He thought—not for the first time—that Cobb gave away his trust too easily. More trust than Arthur afforded anyone they were likely to work with.

Apart, of course, from Mal.

It’s their third day in Jakarta, their base of operations. So far, it isn’t going anywhere near as smoothly as Arthur had hoped. He's trying to reorganise the documents on the table in front of him. He’d been at it for long, fruitless minutes already when Eames showed up—Eames with his annoying, newly-established tendency for asking Arthur questions that have nothing to do with the job. More questions than anyone usually dares pose Arthur at all.

Arthur tries to ignore him. He shuffles some schematics around he thinks aren't as useful as he thought they'd be; reminds himself to check the municipal records for an update. He'll have to start over on part of the planning.

It's possible he's reorganising a little too aggressively. The bundle of paper in Arthur’s hands almost smacks against the wood when he puts it to the side.

“I see.” It’s clear Eames won’t drop it. Already, it irritates Arthur: the clear and undeniable weight of the way Eames seeks to understand everyone he comes across. Arthur doesn't like being anyone’s object of study.

Eames keeps prodding. “You’re here because of Mrs. Cobb, then.”

“Her name is Mal,” Arthur snaps with far more annoyance than he meant to show.

Mal is still en route. Arthur’s spending a not-insignificant amount of time missing her: the calm she brought to their proceedings, her approach to everything so unlike Arthur’s own—though she was equally capable of shaping the world to her will. Cobb listened to her like he wouldn’t to anyone else, even as he put his life more fully in Arthur’s hands. Mal made Cobb that much more bearable; she dulled the jagged edges of his worst instincts. In Arthur, she brought out a commitment no one else ever had. He doesn’t think anyone else in the world could have lured him so easily into what he’s now enmeshed in.

Still, it was a mistake to correct Eames in a way that let him misread Arthur’s affection for her. When Arthur looks back at him, he’s smirking. “I think I understand.”

Giving up on being tactful, Arthur slams his moleskin down on the desk. “You don't.”

Arthur doesn't know why it's the last straw. It shouldn't matter to him at all, what Eames thinks. This is one job. One of many, whose indignities he suffers through for the faith Mal places in him.

Mal arrives that evening just in time for the setting sun. She drifts into the warehouse backlit by it, long beams from the ceiling; the roof not fully intact and liable to let in more light than it should. Cobb kisses her with a restraint that bears some hint of shame. It’s still new to him: the border they’ve crossed into a new world of dreamshare. No longer something wholly under the auspices of architecture, the way Mal used to describe it to Arthur when she was first trying to draw him into it. These days, they build dreams to steal.

Mal hugs Arthur when she greets him. She’s the only one who ever does. She whispers, contente de te voir in Arthur’s ear and he tries to remember how long it had been since the last time. She didn’t come on every job with them; she’d missed the last two, maybe three; long months of only Dominic Cobb’s voice in his ears. Arthur closes his eyes against the side of Mal’s face. He breathes in her perfume.

Breaking away, Mal smiles, she thumbs Arthur’s cheek. Frowns at the prominence of bone, asks him if he’s eating enough. He isn’t. On jobs like this, he never did.

In the corner of his eye, Arthur sees Eames watching them. Now there was no missing the understanding on his face.

Once the sun has long since set, Eames comes back over to Arthur in the still darkness of the warehouse, emptied of everyone else.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Arthur’s ears catch on the newness of hearing that from Eames. “She is quite lovely. But you—”

“I’m not in love with her.”

Eames pauses. He says, “No.” He looks at Arthur very pointedly.

Arthur supposes Eames has had to make assumptions about others that were more of a leap.

-

Infuriatingly, Eames is brilliant. His transformation in the dream is so complete and convincing Arthur would mistake him for a projection of his mind: something so innate to the dream that it could only stem from his own subconscious. Were it not for the fact that when Eames looks at Arthur down below, even while wearing someone else’s skin, something in his expression is already familiar.

Once they’ve resurfaced, Cobb’s the one who can’t stop staring at Arthur. “You see?” he asks him, over and over.

He doesn’t smile. He almost never does when he’s giving orders to follow. Or in this case, reaffirming them.

Arthur isn’t above giving credit where it’s due. He tries to sound like that’s all it is; a mere distant statement of fact, the way Cobb would say it.

“Yeah. He’s good.”

Eames’ turn to look at him, now, Cobb’s leadership forgotten. Eames smiles at Arthur like he knows him far better than he does. “Arthur, I didn’t have you down as hard to impress.”

“Ha,” Arthur says listlessly. He thinks Cobb’s trying not to laugh.

With an odd embarrassment, Arthur looks away. He can feel Eames’ eyes stay on him after he does.

-

Cobb is proven right on both counts. The job does need a forger, and Eames—Arthur isn’t really prepared to call him the best; determined not to rely on anyone’s reputation but his own— but Eames is very good. He leaves the mark completely convinced, adopting a role readily accepted as reality. As much so as the structures Mal had built to house it.

Arthur thanks Eames like he thanks everyone. Short, pointed, with a firm handshake and a half-promise they’d be in touch if more work arose.

But Arthur has a feeling it won’t. Not for a while. The past few weeks—he’s caught Cobb looking after Mal more and more, his face twisting with fear or with resignation. When Cobb got like that he never said anything about it to Arthur, and neither did Mal. They went quiet, maudlin; they might disappear on him for months, drawn back into their own world; not a dream but a realm with boundaries Arthur was firmly outside of.

Eames had watched them all for weeks. Nearly as much as he watched the mark.

After a slow nod, Eames glances over to their side where the Cobbs are half-huddled together. Trading low, indecipherable murmurs about what awaits them back home.

A slight bodily shift of Eames readying himself to leave. “I suppose I’ll see you around, then.”

Arthur smiles. “I wouldn’t count on it, Mr. Eames.”

-

Arthur’s suspicions are confirmed. Some of them, at least. That particular phone doesn’t ring for a long while. Arthur’s worked enough with the Cobbs now that he can easily gain opportunities to work for others. He does. But it’s not the same; always more routine, formulaic, than the light he would watch them make together.

He thinks that’s what Mal meant to describe, those first few times when she grabbed Arthur’s arm in the straight lines of empty corridors of l'École d'Architecture and spoke to him breathlessly in shadowed corners, telling him of unbelievable things. The first time she took him under. Above them, Cobb would stay behind, standing stiffly to the side every time they resurfaced. He was watchful, wary, maybe even jealous in a way he had no need to be. Cobb never really made much effort to understand Arthur, until he decided he needed to use him.

The months get duller, a long unending stretch in front of him. Mal still calls, just to check in. She doesn’t invite Arthur to their flat in Paris. She says they’ve gone somewhere else anyway: to Nantes, Sevilla, Porto; she lists a litany of cities down the phone. She tells Arthur with delight about all the buildings and bridges and public squares they’re visiting for inspiration and Arthur misses her more than he lets her know.

Boredom brings out unexpected things in him. At a deserted cards table in one of the most upscale casinos Las Vegas has to offer, surface strewn with the detritus of wasted bets, Arthur sits twirling a die between his fingers.

“Arthur, I didn’t know you had it in you. Although you’ll need more than one weighted die.”

Arthur looks up sharply. The unexpected sight of Eames doesn’t really shock him as much as it should—though when Arthur tries to think of what jobs he knows of currently in neighbouring states he comes up short. Eames might be here for pleasure, he supposes; if he’s a gambler it wouldn’t surprise Arthur at all. Though Monaco might be more to his tastes.

Then again, Arthur glances at Eames’ outfit and thinks, maybe not.

Eames smiles down at him, Cheshire-slow like he’s only just blinked into being. He gestures to the red die Arthur’s holding. “I don’t dare to doubt your abilities to pull off equally impressive heists topside as you do below, but I think you’ll need a bit more than that.”

“It’s not—”

Arthur stops. Eames isn’t serious, of course. He drops it.

He surprises himself by telling Eames the truth. “It’s something to remind me I’m awake.”

A spark of interest lights Eames’ eyes. “Go on.”

“It’s weighted. No one else knows how it feels; they couldn’t make it up for me. It means I know no one else has put me under. When I roll it, it comes up the same number every time.” Arthur pauses. He hasn’t yet learned how to sit still under Eames’ expectant gaze. “It was Mal’s idea.” Arthur sounds defensive, almost. Like he needs the excuse.

“Oh well, by all means.”

Eames sits down across from him and Arthur forces himself not to stiffen at it. He looks down at the vinyl table as he speaks again. “She’s good at that. Figuring things out.”

With a puff of some awful, gaudy cigar he’s pulled from his pocket, Eames glances around them, fingers twitching. “I thought that was more your department?”

Looking back at Arthur, Eames grins widely, easy and fake. His fingers card across the stray chips on the table between them. Arthur twists the little die in his hand, over and over again.

-

Eames doesn’t disappear. He stays by Arthur’s side in that casino that whole night, long hours in a wide, windowless place. It reminds Arthur of work. Somewhere deprived of day or night, devoid of real sleep. Eames coaxes him into trying a few slot machines where Arthur loses terribly, repeatedly, so much so Eames takes pity on him. He shoves stacks of chips at Arthur that he doesn’t take. His half-smile lit by the harsh fluorescent glow of dozens of identical screens, starkly shadowing the divots in his jaw, around his mouth—Eames tells Arthur, “I suppose it’s for the best you don’t really get by on luck, doing what you do.”

Arthur thinks—no, he doesn’t, he plans for everything, every last step. He could never be any other way.

Eames barely asks him any questions at all, this time. Arthur would feel grateful for it—but the sudden lack of Eames’ interrogations is as frustrating as their previous abundance. It feels like Eames has decided he already knows everything about Arthur he might need to.

Bereft of a mark whose psychology he can analyse, Eames fills any potential silence with his own recounted words on himself. Though he doesn’t offer the slightest hint of biographical detail. By then Arthur has already tried to find information on Eames’ origins in dreamshare and come up short. He wonders if Eames knows.

Instead, he tells Arthur stories; long and meandering tales about work, jobs Eames regrets taking, people he won’t ever work with again. It's a long list. Arthur is privately glad of it; that Eames shares some of Arthur's own cynicism, his judgement even for those he operated alongside. Arthur doesn’t consider Mal naïve—but she believes in things he can’t, drawing joys from dreamshare Arthur couldn’t really anymore.

But Eames reveals he might share some of that with Mal; that awed appreciation of what dreams let him do. Eames asks Arthur if he’s ever thought of what it’s like to be a forger. Before he can respond, Eames explains at length—what it is you have to achieve, down below, to make someone really believe you’re someone else.

When Eames speaks about taking on other skins within dreams he sounds prideful. Yet not arrogant. Smiles smaller, dimmer than Arthur’s yet seen them, more sincere for it. Eames leans in very close as he speaks. Voice pitched so low that Arthur has to lean in, too.

Eventually they exit into the sweltering moonlit desert. Eames lets on that he’s needed somewhere else; he’s starting a job in Colorado in a few days. Somewhere picturesque, remote. Eames thinks they might be working in a cabin, hidden in the depths of snow-covered woods.

"Or maybe I’m making that up, running into you." Eames looks at Arthur’s hair deliberately and he wonders if the product is frizzing. "You don’t seem much for this sort of climate."

Arthur shakes his head. He’s not wearing a tailored suit—but nor is he dressed for relaxation. Or for heat.

After leading them both to an adjoining alleyway, Eames hails a cab. Arthur stands very still at a distance from the wall and tries not to think about what he might say if Eames asks him to get into it with him.

He doesn’t, in the end. Eames glances behind him, gives Arthur a little wave. Asks in a flat voice, "’I'm sure we’ll run into each other again, yeah?"

He’s gone before Arthur has a chance to find out his response.

-

They don't work together for seven months. Arthur only works two jobs in that time. Neither involve the Cobbs, both run long and difficult. As he works them, Arthur forgets the rest of himself, forgets what it felt like to do anything other than respond directly to what others are asking of him. He doesn't sleep. He lies in a hotel room bed night after night and stares unblinkingly at the dark ceiling above him. He holds his still-new totem and thinks it a cruel mockery of its purpose, the idea he'd ever need to affirm that he wasn't unbearingly, ceaselessly awake.

It's a strange thing, only sleeping artificially. Arthur would never let on, but it's starting to get to him, a little. He finds himself at odds down below, seeing things that can't be there. What's already unreal begins to loosen at the seams. Once or twice, he catches himself watching the back of a uniquely garish outfit disappear around a corner, just out of sight. He'll stop and think he recognises a knowing smirk a projection is wearing. When things go wrong, when there’s gunfire or explosions around them, he thinks he can hear a voice he knows nestled in the chaos.

Arthur has worked harder jobs, more dangerous jobs; jobs where he genuinely had a reason to fear for his life. But he’s never been more relieved than when these are over.

The next time he sees Eames it's like he made him up. He's so disarmingly similar to what Arthur had secretly been imagining that it feels like he must have stepped directly out of his mind.

Eames is fiddling with something in his lap. Not atypical. But not a cigarette this time. Arthur watches him lift a red poker chip idly to his mouth. His lips skim the surface of it, face creasing in concentration as he studies the pile of documents in front of him. Eames never really looked like he was working, even when he was. There was always some idleness to him—visible now in the louche spread of his legs, the way he won’t stop tapping the chip against his teeth.

Arthur knows where he’s seen it before.

 

 

ii. sea change

A few years following their first success selling stolen secrets from someone’s mind, Mal and Cobb buy a house in Los Angeles.

They retain their Parisian flat. Arthur acquires one himself: a small space on the fifth floor of a modest building in the 5ème arrondissement, a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg, with old windows overlooking a little courtyard and beyond that, a church. Not a very interesting one in terms of architecture, according to Mal—but Arthur focuses only on his interiors. The flat he buys is empty but for parquet floors in desperate need of refurbishment: paint chipped at the edges, baseboards wearing away to expose copper wiring beneath, hardly visible under a thick sheen of dust.

For Arthur, his new home presents an unending list of tasks he sets about with relish. He bestows all of his practised determination on the first purchase he’d ever made with this much substance.

It's slow, the Cobbs’ supposed move across the Atlantic. It never really arrives. It turns into a drawn-out, years-long process that affords Arthur more borrowed time in their orbit. The more he makes a home for himself, the more Mal shows up inside of it, carrying sketches drawn by her and Cobb both. She tells Arthur they have things they want to build themselves, out in America. In that wide open space. In the real world.

Mal visits him all the time, once Arthur has furniture and functioning electricity. Sometimes she brings Cobb with her; normally, she comes alone. They’re all still working jobs together, in that suspended time. They work all over the world—but Mal’s getting older. She’s starting to plan for more worldly things. She talks to Arthur sometimes about children. She trails a finger around the rim of the wineglass she stares solidly into, smiling with an awe too private to meet Arthur’s gaze.

Listening to Mal talk like this makes Arthur’s chest feel too-tight. He wants Mal to be happy. He wants everything in his life to stay still.

In dreamshare, their lives begin to feel routine. No longer so rough at the edges with newness, nauseous waves of uncertainty Arthur trampled down until they didn’t exist anymore. The longer Arthur works point on jobs the better he gets at identifying what to do, what to avoid. Who to avoid.

Who to seek out.

Arthur has never met another forger as capable as Eames, though by then he’s worked with several—a few even respectable. Still, it’s hardly ever his decision who takes any particular role. Arthur does what he’s told; he takes the lines of what the extractor asks him to achieve and he executes them. It means he doesn’t work with Eames as often as he might privately hope.

When Arthur works with the Cobbs, though, they seem inclined to call on Eames. By then, they make something of a reliable grouping, limited more by the fact not every job needs a forger than anything else. Arthur’s always sure where Eames is living and it’s never anywhere remotely nearby. Never in Europe. Eames favours the more far-flung reaches of the globe, sticky and hot and tucked away. Yet he still seems to be in Paris semi-frequently—enough so that Mal starts getting ideas.

Tonight, they’re sitting together in a sprawling restaurant instead of at Arthur’s tiny, darkly-stained oak dining table. Celebrating a fresh accomplishment as they did when it was hard-won enough to merit it. Room lit from a spread of small chandeliers above them, table cleared but for wine and coffee. Eames is making Mal laugh. He’s been making her laugh all night. So much so that Cobb seems to grimace a little; keeps shooting quick glances at them with a furrowed mouth. Arthur doesn’t think they notice.

Mal wore her fondness openly, without any shame. She never felt the need to hide the softer parts of her—things Arthur himself might try to bury from anyone who suspected their existence in him. Most didn’t.

After a while, Cobb makes his excuses. They’re not far from the home he still keeps with Mal, he tells her he’ll see her back there, smoothing her hair off of her face, kissing the smiling mouth she tilts up to him. Eames doesn’t look at them, then. He stares down at his hands, fiddling with something Arthur can’t see under the table. Murmuring his own apologies, he pulls a cigarette from his pocket.

Arthur’s eyes follow Eames as he threads his way through innumerable bodies moving through the room. Staff and customers entering and exiting alike, joining others or leaving them, their voices or silences blending into the cacophony of undeniably real and vivid life.

Sometimes, in dreams, Arthur listens very carefully. He sits amongst spaces filled with hundreds of projections whose murmurs only skim the surface of words, letting them coalesce dully into his ears until they don't sound anything like conversation at all. Arthur wonders if their marks ever feel unsettled by it, if only on some dream-deep level they didn’t recognise. Lonely.

Eames stays outside as he smokes. He lingers just in the doorway under an awning for the outdoor seating space, sheltered from that evening’s warm spitting rain.

A sound echoes dimly in the back of Arthur’s mind. He realises Mal’s clearing her throat softly, trying to get his attention. He hasn’t taken note of how long he’d been staring, and he looks back abruptly, caught off-guard.

Mal smiles at him in the slow and lovely way only she could ever pull off. Her warm face let light into it. “Mon chéri,” she tells him gently, “tu t'égares.”

Arthur reddens. He stares fixedly at the stiff white tablecloth. He wills, with a futile forcefulness, for his heartbeat in his ears to settle. It shouldn’t feel like this; it’s only Mal. Mal, the romantic. She always believed in overwhelming things.

Still, Arthur feels known to her in that moment, bound together as much as the twisting metal of the candle holders on the table between them. Mal reaches over to lay her hand over his own and Arthur thinks about what she means—about losing himself. In dreams, in the abyss, the mazes they built together. In the cobblestoned streets of Paris, walking and waiting for the dark that never really fully arrived, kept at bay by all the lights and life of the city glittering around them. In the lull of Eames’ voice in his ears, hovering too-close like he always did when they went out to celebrate a job’s success, trying something without really trying.

In the months after Mal’s death, it will become impossible to really remember her. To dream about her. Every moment of memory will turn stained and torn with grief. Arthur will try to remember how it felt to be around her, instead. How it felt to sit under a canopy of dim and clustered lights and hold her hand. To say nothing, to let her understand.

-

Eames starts to call him.

Disquieting enough that he even knows how. Arthur had always been the one to call Eames, from the beginning. He paid little mind to Cobb’s insistence there was anything special about recruiting him. If Eames wanted to work on jobs Arthur was working, he could wait for his call. And he did.

Typically, Arthur used a new burner for every job—but for a while now he’d taken to keeping a second with him. One unused since his last job with the Cobbs, which had also been accompanied by Eames.

But that had been over a year ago. They had finally done as Mal promised they would; made it out to California together, their continent of residence now swapped with Arthur’s own, as though they were passing each other in different directions on a parallel track. Not that Arthur felt the vibrant expanse of Pasadena was much like his own upbringing in Duluth, Minnesota.

Fourteen months into the Cobbs’ absence from dreamshare, Arthur lies still on his back in another anonymous hotel room, not sleeping and not expecting the phone set neatly on the bedside table beside him to ring, when it does.

Arthur flips the tiny square of weak light open and holds it to his ear, breath caught. Eames only greets him with, “Arthur.” He doesn’t sound like he’s in danger, or concerned. He doesn’t sound bored, either, the way Arthur might have expected him to; like Arthur was only the last on a long line of people Eames might think to call first. Eames sounds like he’s casually resuming a conversation that only just finished—although they haven’t seen each other since a brief overlap six months ago. A short job, only three weeks: Arthur spent much of it avoiding Eames, the stare he could feel boring into the back of his skull, the questions he didn’t want to answer about when he’d last heard from Mal, from Cobb—

When he was going out there to see their baby.

Arthur first asks with some trepidation, “Where are you?”

“Fuck if I know.” Eames pauses. “Tokyo.”

“You’re working with Robinson?”

“Arthur, your constant surveillance could give a man ideas.”

“Shut up.” Something tightly-wound goes slack in Arthur’s chest. He leans back against the ridiculously large pillow this hotel bed is adorned with, settling in. “I heard around that he was asking for a forger. And I heard he wasn’t getting anywhere, because—”

“He’s insane,” Eames says flatly down the line. “I’m well aware. Makes Cobb look psychologically well adjusted. And you know I don’t say that lightly.”

“So?”

“So I owed someone a favour.”

Eames sighs, low and long. It lingers in Arthur’s ears.

“Arthur, never let me be in your debt.”

He allows himself a smile where Eames can’t see it. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I like my debtors a little more reliable than you, Mr. Eames.”

Eames huffs. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Arthur doesn’t say goodnight. He listens to the near-silence on the other end of the phone, thousands of miles away. He tries to picture the hotel room Eames must be in right now, how different it is to his own—or maybe they’re all the same, really. Arthur looks out the window at the glittering, faraway skyline of the city beyond and thinks it could be anywhere in the world.

-

Arthur does visit the Cobbs. Of course he does. Just because he doesn’t want to answer Eames’ questions about it, just because he’d put it off longer than Mal told him he needed to—it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to. Only fear holds him back. Arthur paces the long-since carefully varnished floors of his apartment with a real landline cradled to his ear and he tells Mal, halting and in need of assurance, I don’t want to get in the way.

Even through the vast distance between them, Arthur can perfectly envision Mal shaking her head slowly. Thinking about how far away she is makes him ache, makes his throat clog with a self-directed bitterness that he’s been hiding from her all this time.

At their sunlit doorstep Mal smiles more brightly than Arthur could have ever remembered, or dreamed. She makes him hold Philipa almost immediately, she wraps her arms around them both, she touches her daughter’s forehead but her eyes stay on Arthur as she whispers, tu m’as manqué.

 

 

iii. upheaval

Four years after the Cobbs abandon the world they brought Arthur into, Eames decides to quit smoking on a job in Rio. It makes him insufferable—moreso than Arthur has ever experienced. Eames seems to be everywhere when Arthur needs him gone and nowhere to be found when Arthur needs to know where he is. Eames is like that, sometimes; flitting in and out of spaces more than any of the others they worked with ever did. He has the excuse, after all, that it’s his work. Studying the mark.

Arthur doesn't doubt Eames’ long absences are genuinely justified by the nature of the job, but they irk at him nonetheless. Eames’ resurfacings are often random, unpredictable. Nothing Arthur enjoys dealing with in his line of work.

During this job, they take on an almost comical absurdity. Eames would show up two days after the rest of the team with a visibly dishevelled appearance. He’d tell long stories about a tail he’d had to spend days shaking. He’d come in some dreary suit he’d never worn before: the kind Arthur would, maybe, but far too normal and unobtrusive on his frame. Something glaring about it, where his typical ostentatious fare had long since blended into the background. He’d take pains to describe near-misses in breaks of his cover that couldn’t really be true—or at least as frequent as he makes them out to be. After all, Eames is a professional. For all he pretends otherwise, he pushes buttons mostly because Arthur made it so obvious they were there for pushing.

He’s taken to chewing on toothpicks. At first, Arthur had allowed himself some private moments of amusement at the way they made Eames look. Little slivers of wood twitching against Eames’ absurdly plush lips and his broad jawline. Like he was some laconic cowboy of the American West instead of what he was: Eames. Not quite the other stereotype he calls to mind, either: that of some toff public schoolboy—but certainly and undeniably un-American.

This afternoon, Eames has clearly tired of one such toothpick and snapped it in half; his fingers as bereft of cigarettes as his mouth. The sound is unexpectedly loud. It’s too much for Arthur in that moment, in that small and silent space he tried to cultivate as strictly as he did everything else.

“Does that really help?”

Arthur knows exactly how irritated he sounds. Long habituated, Eames’s response is breezy and unbothered.

“Yes, in fact.”

Arthur huffs a little, without meaning to. He looks back at his notebook, realises he’s writing something incomprehensible and crosses it out. The ink in these pens can be erased, but he doesn’t want to give Eames the satisfaction of seeing him do it.

It’s sweltering inside. Arthur wipes at his forehead and thinks Eames carries some sticky heat with him. It’s clearly his preferred climate—something unchanged in all the years they’ve known each other. Another item in the long list of what sets them apart.

“Arthur.” Eames speaks suddenly and quietly from where he’s come over to stand just behind Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur fights the absurd impulse to hold an arm over his notes, like they aren’t working this job together. Like Eames is some interloper, a stranger.

“Yes?”

A pause. Placatingly, “I am sorry I snapped a toothpick in your direction.”

Arthur represses any audible insincerity. “Thank you.”

“If I may go so far as to suggest, however, you seem a little tense.”

“I’m working.”

A silence follows that Arthur knows not to trust will last. The first thing to break it isn’t Eames’ voice but his fingers. Coming up to tap in an idle, jarring motion on the table, just to the side of the spread of Arthur’s orderly notes. Back still to him, Arthur says flatly and without much hope, “Go do that somewhere else.”

“Actually,” there’s a lilting, suggestive quality to how Eames responds that immediately makes Arthur uneasy, “that was what I had in mind.”

Arthur swallows. He turns around. Eames is staring down at him, face blank but for the openness of his expectation. His mouth purses slightly. “I thought you could accompany me. Take a break, as you’re so known for doing.”

“That’s not—we have five days left.”

“And I’m sure your meticulous diagrams will keep for that time.”

“I mean we don’t have time. For any—”

“Arthur.” Softer, now, bending in. Eames’ face is close, as though curtaining the sound of his voice from the warehouse’s other occupants: the extractor paying them little attention as she studies her own notebooks, the architect building schematics while listening to music through headphones. It’s a needless gesture—Arthur thinks they must have long since learned to tune out their constant baseline of bickering. Yet he’s suddenly unsettled by it; the thought of what others might see when they watch him with Eames.

Tilting his chin up, Arthur sets his jaw like he’s facing down a challenge. The smile that plays across Eames’ lips is undeniably genuine.

He’s still speaking softly. “I think you can spare a few hours. Might even be good for you. You don’t seem to be getting on much with this.” Eames gestures at the table with a loose wave of his hand. Arthur thinks he’s kept it tidy; there’s no visual evidence he’s hit any kind of wall with his work. Except for the signs Arthur knows he carries in his own body: the repeated crossing out of his own penwork, the tightness to his neck and shoulders that Eames must have been watching, all this time, fiddling with his toothpick until it broke.

Arthur lifts an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to stop working to be more productive?”

“That’s generally the idea, yes.”

When Arthur fails to respond immediately Eames seizes on it. Backing away, reaching for the thin jacket hooked over the back of Arthur’s chair, holding it out to him with a firmness that left no room to argue anymore.

He’s still smiling. “Come on. You can come back after and stay late.”

Arthur expects the others to take note of their joint departure. That they barely glance up makes him flush, quickening his pace as he follows Eames beyond the warehouse limits.

-

Arthur follows Eames wordlessly through busy streets teeming with the late afternoon rush of people. Even approaching evening, the sun stays much more intense than Arthur likes. Bright beams bear down on him until he has to squint, lifting a hand to his eyes ineffectually. Always unexpectedly difficult, keeping track of Eames. Never looking anything like anyone around him, but moving as fluidly as he always does, anywhere.

Eames seems to know where he’s leading him. Arthur doesn’t think to ask. Just the thought embarrasses him: the idea of yelling questioningly at Eames over the din of traffic and street vendors. Like he’s helpless to manoeuvre alone.

Eventually Eames comes to an abrupt stop in front of a wooden awning. Fanned with palm trees, strings of lights in gaudy primary colours, glaring even in the full sunshine. Eames glances behind him. He nods at Arthur, inclining his head to the side. To a little stone path lined with yet more foliage—leading to what Arthur can see is an outdoor seating area. It backs onto a sprawling bar, so packed and loud within he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to hear Eames speak.

They sit inside. Their booth is cramped, knees nearly touching. The wood of it isn’t varnished and it seems weathered, rough at the edges as Arthur rubs his thumb unthinkingly and repetitively where Eames can’t see. The table bears a decorative, collaged surface: innumerable overlapping vinyl decals, tourist photos, various fading and outdated menus. All spread out under a thin topsheet of glass, neatly sealed beneath.

A sense of unreality swirls around them with every passing moment. Arthur retraces every step of that day in his mind over and over, so he knows this isn’t a dream. It’s been years since he’s been somewhere like this with Eames. He knew he should avoid it.

That certainty Arthur had learned to lean on very quickly seems less apparent now.

Eames orders a purple cocktail with a sprig of white flowers in it. Showy and ornamental, they stretch to twice the height of the glass. Arthur raises his eyebrow when it comes over, but says nothing. He’s only surprised he can’t smell it. He presses his fingertips into the condensing droplets on the gold foil wrapping around his own beer.

“How long since you’ve heard from them?”

Eames doesn’t need to be more specific. Arthur sips his beer and doesn’t meet the intensity of Eames’ stare.

After a long moment he admits, “It’s been a while.”

He’s been trying not to worry about it. He’s busy with work, and Mal’s occupied with her family. A higher calling than the one she had drawn Arthur into. The one he feels restricted to, now.

There was little for Arthur in between jobs. By then—he’d decorated his apartment exactly how he wanted it to, putting all the money he made in dreamshare to good use. He hung carefully-chosen prints on the wall; stocked the cupboards with high-quality blends from the best tea shops in Paris; sourced area rugs from all over the world with captivating, intricate designs. Sometimes, Arthur would look at them and he’d think of Eames. Wondering when he had last been to India, or Turkey, or Morocco.

It took dedication, carving out such a space, one that could only and did only belong to himself. But that’s all it is, in the end. Just a space Arthur inhabits when he isn’t working—and he works almost all the time, these days.

Eames glances away into the heaving interior of the bar. He sips. “Mm. I tried, you know. I had their number out there and I thought…well, I didn’t think it would be too much of an imposition. But I suppose I was mistaken, because,” looking back at Arthur, face pinched, “her delightful husband answered the phone and nearly ordered me not to call again.”

“He can be a little abrupt.”

“Unlike yourself?”

Eames' smile is warmer than his words. He twirls the little stick of flowers between his thick fingers.

Arthur looks down at vibrant images under the glass as Eames speaks again, quieter. “I am worried, you know.”

That lifts Arthur’s gaze. Brow furrowing, he speaks the way he does when he’s giving instructions on a job. Setting out a shared vision for others to readily adopt. “Eames. They’re fine. They’re just busy. They have kids.”

Eames shakes his head very slightly. “I don’t think it’s that.”

“What else could it be?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I only know that—Cobb really didn’t want to speak to me.”

Arthur frowns. He tries to get Eames to meet his eyes again—but he won’t. Eames is looking everywhere else; at their drinks, the colourful table, the throng beyond them. He narrows his eyes like he’s searching for something and Arthur wonders what it could be. He wonders what kinds of things Eames sees when he looks at people, individually or together. How Eames always manages to blend into them seamlessly even with all the ways he stands out. Arthur wonders what they should think of each other, now. Joined by a shared sentiment of unease for someone that matters to them both. By their mutual involvement in a world neither could depart from easily.

Before he can stop himself, Arthur reaches out across the table and clasps a hand over Eames’ shoulder.

Nearly a decade since they met—but Arthur can’t remember ever really touching Eames this deliberately before. Eames looks back at him instantly, as if he’d yanked his strings.

Newness unsettles Arthur. It threatens him, stifling his throat. Arthur swallows against the intense way Eames looks back. Thinking and discarding a million expressions of gratitude—that Eames told him this, that he wheedled and insisted until he managed to take Arthur here in the first place—away from an inescapable world.

But Arthur can’t bring himself to meet the full possibilities of where he could follow Eames that night. Both of them know it.

Eames studies Arthur’s face. He doesn’t look like he’s breathing. His lips are slightly parted in a way that makes Arthur flush to witness. He stares back at him for a long time—long enough Arthur realises he can’t hear any music or shouting or laughter anymore. Like the moment in a dream when a mark suspected what was happening, and all the materialised projections and constructed sounds around them suddenly ceased.

Arthur doesn’t know how long the moment lasts, but eventually it breaks. A flood of noise rushes back into Arthur’s ears as Eames gently shrugs his hand off of his shoulder, casting his gaze around the room again. Eames nods. A firm, responsive movement like Arthur had said something—when in reality he’d said nothing at all.

—

Back in his apartment, Arthur tries to put Eames’ worry out of his mind. He makes a start on some nonfiction books he’s been meaning to get around to for years. He orders, and builds, a midcentury-style cabinet for the television he never turns on. He goes for long walks in the approaching Parisian winter. Relishing the return of the cold, the feeling of bitter wind burning his cheeks, the visible huff of his breath spiralling into the darkness left by the early-setting sun.

He manages to keep himself distracted for just over two weeks before he picks up his landline and dials a number Mal almost always answers herself.

She doesn’t, this time. Cobb’s greeting is low, harried. Something in it prickling goosebumps immediately on the back of Arthur’s neck.

He asks, “Is everything all right?”

A protracted silence follows. Wary tone when Cobb eventually responds, “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Eames mentioned—”

“You’re working with Eames?”

That catches Arthur off-guard. “I was. Three weeks ago, we finished the job. What does that matter?”

“I’m just surprised. I never thought you really enjoyed working with him.”

Arthur bites back any response. He twirls his finger around the cord of the receiver. Eventually he allows, “He’s talented.”

Cobb huffs. “Yeah.”

“Look, Cobb, I really didn’t call to—”

“Everything’s fine.” Too firm. Arthur’s stomach swells with an expansive dread, shifting him off-balance. Breath harshening as he opens his mouth to ask after Mal and Cobb preempts it—

”I’ll get Mal to call you soon. I know she misses you.”

The flatness of Cobb’s voice does nothing to alleviate Arthur’s concern. But Cobb doesn’t want to hear it, ending the call with little fanfare. Arthur sits still for a long time. Staring down at the floorboards he fixed himself, their patterns starting to swim in his vision the longer he looks.

—

Mal does call soon, at least. She rings Arthur the very next day—but she doesn’t really say hello.

Arthur answers the phone while lying on his sofa, almost cradling it between his neck and his ear. He tries to sit upright. Struggles, his back too-stiff with constraining tension. Arthur turns his cheek against cold plastic until the edges of it dig into his jaw.

So many months spent working. Spent away—from this nominal home Arthur keeps and rarely returns to, from the real, family home he’s been invited to frequently and visited only sporadically. Fingers curled tightly as he waits for Mal to speak, Arthur tries to remember his last visit. Everything he'd said to her during it.

In this moment, down the line, Mal says only, “Do you remember what it’s like?”

A foreboding coldness drips down Arthur’s spine. He’s never heard Mal’s voice like this—so closed-off, brittle. As if she’s barely there at all. Barely even awake.

Already dreading her response, Arthur asks her, “Remember what?”

A pause. “Reality.”

Arthur’s breath sticks in his throat. His heart thumps dully in his ears. “Mal.” Desperation edging into his voice, “Mal, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Have you been—”

“Dreaming?”

Mal laughs so bitterly that Arthur feels sick.

“I thought you gave it up,” he whispers, “For your children. You walked away from it, I thought—”

That animates her. Interrupting, Mal sounds suddenly much more present as she pleads with him. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Il ne me croit pas, mais j'en suis sûre—”

Something cuts her off. It's Cobb—Arthur can hear raised voices in the background, the scattered sounds of their retreating into a revisited argument. He listens to a door slam, distantly, before the line fills with Cobb's ragged breathing.

“Arthur?”

For a few moments Arthur can’t speak. Can’t decide what to say, what combination of words might possibly allay what he fears. He fixates on establishing the facts. “How long has she been like this?”

Every second that ticks by without a response spreads engulfing dread more thickly in Arthur’s stomach.

“A while.”

Arthur clings to the familiarity of frustration. “Cobb, you should have—”

“I’m handling it.”

“How?

“I’m handling it,” is all Cobb says. He cuts the call.

—

Arthur doesn’t sleep. For days, he lies awake, he tries to plan. He tries to remember everything he’s ever learned about dreams. Everything Mal ever told him—or he learned from someone else. He keeps getting caught on one oft-repeated mantra: that death is the only way to wake up. He stops himself from thinking about any of it. He starts again. Tosses his totem, rolling the die over his own bedside table so many times he thinks it’s useless, anyway, that his obsessive perception is fraying at the seams. He calls Mal back, over and over, but the phone never picks up.

—

On the fifth day of a self-imposed vigil, his phone rings again in the middle of the night. Already lying awake, Arthur stares at his bedside table, at the die he hasn’t bothered to touch in days. He listens to it ring. Watching the little red light blink without answering it. He waits so long it stops. It starts to ring again.

Arthur’s hand shakes almost too much to lift it from the receiver.

—

At his front door, Eames is saying his name. Sharply, unsolicited. Arthur isn’t ready to listen.

Arthur doesn’t know how long it’s been since Cobb called him. It can’t have been more than a few days—but he can’t remember them at all. His mind blurs them like he’s trying to remember a dream. Arthur knows he spent that time alone—interrupted eventually by the unbroken trilling of his doorbell. The sound went on for a long time. For over an hour, Eames told him when he finally answered—although that can’t be true. But he’s here, now, he’s in Arthur’s hallway, he’s trying to say something Arthur can’t hear.

Eames grasps Arthur’s shoulder firmly. He steps closer, close enough Arthur can smell the not-faint lingering stench of cigarettes, though Eames gave up smoking months ago, he knows that—

“You have to stop,” Eames tells him. Voice low, mouth tilted almost into his hairline. He’s hardly that much taller—but it seems to Arthur like he’s shrinking away, leaving a space for Eames to cram himself into.

“Stop what?” Arthur’s throat hurts with the effort it takes to speak and not cry.

With his other hand, Eames rubs the pad of his thumb roughly against Arthur’s eyes, his cheek. Brushing away nothing. His hand tightens on his shoulder in a vice-grip. He looks seized with the importance of something, like it’s absolutely essential that Arthur listen to him.

And yet, he says nothing. He stares at Arthur like he can hear him think.

Arthur knows that’s part of Eames’ job, maybe the only part that really matters in the end. He can’t slip into skins he doesn’t understand as intimately as his own. Eames watches, and waits, silent and slow in that long build of dawning comprehension, of getting right down to the bottom of someone. Arthur doesn’t have to do that, not like him. He needs a cursory understanding of all the parties involved in the jobs he takes to do his work, to protect the best interests of the extractor. But Arthur thinks more in probabilities than in people, and he’d never had a real gift for seeing right down to the core of someone—the way Eames makes look effortless but he knows isn’t, and he’s not the only one who could; Mal—

Tears prick with a shuddering lurch of his breath. Eames wipes them before they fall.

“There,” he says, very quietly.

—

Eames stays in his apartment for a long time. At least days and maybe even weeks; Arthur would have to take him at his word—although he’ll never ask. He’ll never want to speak about this again, to acknowledge what it felt like. A world ripped away from him, yanked out from under his feet.

When Arthur was still acclimatising himself to waking within dreams, sometimes the sudden sense of unreality would pull him up. He'd think too closely about what couldn't be real. Like the impossible staircases Mal had shown him how to build. Arthur would map the lines of them, learning their unfeasible edges, he'd trace their steps—but the moment would arrive when he looked at them too closely. His foot would slip. Plunged, suddenly, into an inescapable abyss.

—

Cobb calls again eventually. From a hotel not unlike the one he'd lost Mal in. Arthur thought he might avoid them for the foreseeable future—but he recognises the sound of self-punishment in Cobb’s voice. Rougher than Arthur's ever heard it. Cobb always acted so sure of himself, even when he wasn't. Arthur might have been able to read into the gaps in Cobb’s knowledge and authority—but few else bothered to, if they even could. Most of the men Cobb met, in reality and in dreams, bought every world he said.

For the first time with Cobb, Arthur lets himself be as fully convinced.

After he hangs up, he starts packing the bag he normally takes on jobs. He can tell Eames knows he's doing it—even though he never came into the bedroom. But he’d been listening. Of course he had. And even if Arthur had said little, he knows Eames would have marked a shift in his voice. A conviction returning to him, snapping him on a set path, lifted away at last from long and drifting weeks.

At the door, Eames stops him with a hand on his shoulder. This time, the touch is gentle, the firmness of his intent readable only in the sharp, concerned lines of his expression.

Arthur stares at him. He thinks, belatedly, that he never gave Eames a spare key. He's never made one. Eames must have been using Arthur's own all this time, disappearing to grocery stores for ingredients for meals Arthur doesn't remember eating.

Eames clears his throat. “Where are you going?”

Arthur shrugs his hand off easily. “Cobb has something.”

Eames doesn't look surprised. He almost smiles, but it's not real at all. Arthur hasn't seen the expression in years, since the first time Cobb had introduced them. Eames’ mouth quirks like it did then, too, with judgement of them both. “Not really the best time for all that, is it?”

“Eames. You know he can’t—he can’t go home.”

Something simmers in Eames’ eyes. He speaks very deliberately. “You can.”

It unsettles Arthur—that Eames sounds that certain of something Arthur doesn't know if he believes at all.

Eames presses. He appeals, he says his name—but Arthur's already turning away. Hesitating a few moments before he takes his key from the hook by the door. Slipping it into the pocket of his suit-jacket, not looking back, saying only, “I have to go.”

—

Cobb’s grief swallows him up until there’s almost nothing left. Nothing of the man Mal married, at least. Arthur sees instead a fully-fledged transformation into what Cobb had previously only partly embraced: his role as an extractor in others’ minds. If every job before was bookended with minor fits of guilt, punctuated with occasional long stretches where the couple retreated completely—now, Cobb has nothing else in his life but what he takes from others.

Except for Arthur. Wherever Cobb goes, along whatever desperate, risky jobs Cobb takes in a likely-futile effort to see his own children again one day. Arthur follows Cobb more resolutely than he ever did—but he doesn’t do it for him.

Years ago, Mal had shown Arthur something unforgettable. Bereft of her forever, Arthur sits still on long tarmacs, in sleek train carriages and shabby warehouses, and he asks himself if he’d ever made his gratitude clear enough to her. Mal had seen a world without limits, only unblemished, sheer potential where untraversable edges would exist in reality. She’d pulled Arthur into it as an act of her affection. She saw something in him no one else ever had: that Arthur, so wholly defined in so many ways, might enjoy this—to inhabit a space where nothing could be relied on at all. Where all the rules of reality had to be unlearned, abandoned to the sense that anything could happen.

Arthur can’t remember the last time he felt like that, before Mal’s efforts. That he didn’t know exactly what lay in wait for him, that he wasn’t travelling a predetermined route.

Now—that long-abandoned feeling of inevitability renews itself. The dawn of possibility is far behind. Untouchable, a light Mal’s death shut off from him forever. Arthur stays steadfast by Cobb’s side because he feels he has no choice but to do the only thing he still can for her.

 

 

iv. adaptation

Over a year spent following Cobb around the globe, down every desperate, profitless path he could take them on, before Cobb suggests working with Eames. Only for a job Arthur insists is unachievable from the outset—yet the significance of its stakes denies Cobb such incredulity. Against all odds, Cobb has to believe it: that he can achieve something world-altering enough to allow him back into his children’s lives. As that cherished endpoint becomes more realisable in his mind, for the first time since her death, Cobb reaches out to someone in dreamshare for whom Mal means more than merely a bad omen.

Briefly, Cobb leaves Arthur alone. Departing Paris for far-off, warmer climates, smoothly announcing his intention to bring Eames back with him. Arthur doesn’t do any work the rest of the afternoon. He should—he has a lot to accomplish. Mostly the standard, painstaking research Arthur pours into any of their marks—but this job isn’t standard at all. Achieving the inception Cobb’s proposing will force Arthur to set long-learned rules aside. Dreamshare, but not as he’d spent years meticulously training himself for it. This time, Arthur will have to push himself beyond anything he’s ever done before.

And yet—Arthur puts it all to the side in order to give himself his first real afternoon off in months. He’d snatched some moments of refuge from Cobb, during their long interim of forced proximity. Spent some weeks here and there in a country Cobb couldn’t enter anymore. Still his efforts only ever briefly paused the world Arthur would be pulled back into at a moment’s notice. Right at the harried rush of Cobb’s voice on the phone, somehow managing to sound exactly as desperate and exactly as composed as the last time he had called Arthur with some new and promising scheme that would never get him where he wanted to go.

This time feels different. Already, Arthur is letting himself be lulled by the sincerity of Cobb’s conviction. He tells himself that’s what’s dulling his mind—the emerging possibility of freedom for them both. He sits in an unremarkable brasserie, alone, a St. Germain Spritz in front of him he doesn’t really drink. He’s never been very partial to cocktails. He doesn’t know why he ordered it. Within hours, the bar around him is loud enough that he can’t hear himself think.

Arthur leaves. He picks a direction and walks. On the Rue des Arènes, he follows a narrow pavement that marks a winding path against the short, weathered stone walls of a public garden housing the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. He walks until he starts to see signs for the Jardin de Luxembourg—and he changes course. He rides a rattling métro carriage all the way to the other side of the city, observing how the intermittent glow of white, circular lights interrupts the darkness of the subway tunnel. Coming out in La Défense, Arthur walks within the spreading shadows of sleek skyscrapers that don’t fit in with the rest of the city at all. As though sprung-up out of nowhere; towering flowers formed from metal and glass. Arthur studies them glinting under the setting sun—and he thinks about other worlds. Real and created. He imagines dingy, dark rooms in far-off continents, their air thick with stifling heat. He sees familiar fingers fiddling on mussed and dirty casino tables. Before setting down their spoils, drawn back to something inescapable.

-

Arthur comes in late, the morning Eames arrives. He expects Cobb to be irritated—but he’s still subsuming all other emotions beneath his fresh and undefeatable conviction. He barely nods in Arthur’s direction. Merely waves a hand towards a table he’s cleared. He’s crouching over Ariadne, already under. It makes Arthur feel faintly nauseous to look at her. The total slackness of her face, Cobb’s own scrunched and focused as he watches her dream. Calculating. Eager. As though he’d somehow forgotten it: the yawning ache from recent reminders of just how far down it was possible to go.

From the moment he pushed open the workshop door, Arthur has felt Eames’ eyes tracking him around the bright and airy space. A pulling tide he can merely delay. Right up until the moment he gives up, gives in; lifts his face to where he knows Eames will be waiting. Hovering over spread-out stacks of photos on a table only a few feet from Arthur’s own. The disingenuity of Eames’ smile is expected—but it hurts. Sharp, pricking pangs as Eames greets Arthur flatly. Saying it’s been a while, hasn’t it; hands half-stuck in the pocket of his pleated pants before he turns to his materials again. At Eames’ retreated back, Arthur stares. Breath caught. Culpability still spearing deeply into his skin. Long, uncomfortable moments slip through their silence as Arthur finds there’s nothing he feels able to say.

-

Ariadne’s hair falls into her face as she bends over her schematics. She doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it; she hardly seems to notice. Her eyes are fixed and intent as she trails her pencil over marks only she understands.

Eames has been with them for two days. Tomorrow, he leaves for Sydney to research his future forgery close up. Today, he’s in Arthur’s reach. Coming up behind the back of his chair, telling him quietly, “She’s not much into men, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” He was. Arthur’s worried about Cobb; what he might try with some new wide-eyed protegée, someone bright and young and earnest who could sit very still and listen to Cobb explaining how he didn’t kill his wife.

Arthur turns his head. Eames smiles at him, tightly. On anyone else it might be mocking, but the amusement he so often gets from Arthur lacks any edge to it. Most of the time.

Still, it irks. Arthur’s pen has gone dry. He gives it a futile little shake before it makes him feel ridiculous, observed as he still is. He has some refill ink somewhere—these were expensive, designed to last—but he projects his annoyance elsewhere with a sharp little nod in Eames’ direction. “If you’re not going to do anything with it, give me that.”

Eames raises an eyebrow, but he wordlessly passes over the needlessly ostentatious fountain pen he’d been holding.

Arthur mutters a thanks. He turns his eyes back to his work. The spread of notes in his journal seems suddenly byzantine, even though he can remember every step of how he’d set out to organise them.

He knows why that is. He waits a long moment, in vain. Eames is still watching him when he looks back up.

“Are you going to go do any work?”

Eames doesn’t answer him at first. For an infuriatingly long stretch, he says nothing at all. Then he says only, “Arthur.” Slowly, pointedly; the syllables swirling in his mouth. He touches Arthur’s wrist, lightly, the tips of his fingers resting just beneath the cuff of his sleeve. Not rolled up, even at this hour: Arthur feels suddenly foolish, the sharp and unwelcome stab of self-ridicule.

None of it warranted by Eames’ expression. He isn’t looking at Arthur with any judgement. His face is now completely, carefully neutral, and Arthur has nothing to do but stare back at him. Eames hasn’t shaved for a day, maybe. This close, he smells of bitter coffee dregs, of ink.

Eames leaves his fingers held in place. Arthur sits immobilised. Chastened by whatever Eames won’t say outright. He doesn’t seem to think he needs to say anything. Eventually—he pulls away. Turns around, picking his bag up off the chair. He leaves without saying another word, though the sound of his voice stays after him.

—

If he had allowed himself to wonder how Eames might treat him again, Arthur might have expected open hostility—or at the very least, the signs of slowly-brimmed resentment. Instead, Eames surprises him with a remade lightness. Over weeks in that wide warehouse, Eames is optimistic about their plan; bordering on sanguine. Still he delights in taking every chance he gets to point out how Arthur’s not living up to the magnitude of their present moment. Making Arthur lose track of how many times he sees Ariadne duck her head to hide a grin behind the curtain of her hair. Eames pokes and prods at him, flashing tight smiles for every reaction he brings out. Arthur gives him as little as he can. Merely affording Eames silent glares, narrowed eyes: signs of irritation he can’t repress—but he keeps the rest of himself in check. Arthur doesn’t say anything real to Eames, those weeks. He doesn’t thank him for the vigil he kept over him after Mal died. He doesn’t apologise for how suddenly he’d walked away. He doesn’t ask why Eames bothered at all, when he must have known Arthur would only ever turn his back to it.

—

The night before they board their flight to Sydney, Arthur stays late. He’d thought the others might, but if anything they depart early, leaving Arthur alone. Mostly.

Eames isn’t jetsetting off to Sydney and back alone anymore. He hasn’t been for weeks. Yet the exhaustion it’s embedded will take a long time to fade. Arthur maps the depth of creases under Eames’ eyes, thinking he might have surpassed him with the number of espressos he’s drunk today. Where caffeine overconsumption might leave Arthur too-jittery, Eames seems flattened out with it. A gauze over him, moving as though underwater when he comes to stand by Arthur’s desk and pointedly shuts off its little lamp. The last source of light in the whole warehouse, leaving them enveloped, suddenly, in darkness.

Arthur sits still. He adjusts. He stares at what’s in front of him until he can make out the outlines of his notebooks, though not the words within. Eames stops him from trying, anyway, carefully shutting what he must hardly be able to see himself.

In the dark his voice sounds louder than it normally does. “You think Cobb will do it, then?”

Arthur demures. “You don’t?”

“Ah, Arthur.” Arthur doesn’t need to see to know the way Eames’ absurdly plush lips are quirking. “That’s not fair. I asked first.”

The chair makes an unpleasant scraping sound of metal on concrete. Arthur feels for his jacket hung on the back, wondering if it’s too late now to get any buses, certain it’s too late for the métro—or maybe he might walk, not to his own apartment but to another nameless hotel he’s been staying in for weeks. Arthur hasn’t been to his apartment in a long time.

Arthur moves towards the warehouse door slowly enough to allow Eames to follow him. He’s departed in total darkness enough times; he can trace the steps in his mind. Eames is left to follow the sounds of Arthur’s footsteps, the weight of his body in front of him.

Outside, Eames lingers as Arthur locks up. He puts his hands in his trouser pockets and stares, expectant, face furrowed like he’s preoccupied working their odds out himself. Arthur tells Eames as he slots the heavy lock into place, “I think Cobb thinks he can.”

“So that’s enough?”

“It might have to be.” Arthur brushes his palms over the front of his trousers. He pulls the zipper on his jacket a little higher. Warmer fabric than he needs for Paris in April, maybe, but these days he’s more reluctant to part with worn comforts.

Eames keeps nudging. “So you do, then. You think this will work.”

Arthur huffs. “What does it matter?”

“Arthur, darling. You and I both know you take your work a little seriously.”

At the petname Arthur flushes. He waits for a swell of irritation that doesn’t come. He thinks Eames can call him anything he wants and Arthur will always know the things he really means, or doesn’t.

When Arthur moves away from the door, Eames follows. Stepping in sync down a dark and empty street. A long silence builds around them before Arthur finally admits, “Yeah. I think it’ll work.”

Eames looks a little amused. “Wasn’t so hard, after all, was it?”

“Your turn.”

“Oh, we’ve no chance, of course.” Breezy, hands in his pockets.

Arthur doesn’t take offense. He keeps his voice very dry. “You’re just along for the ride?”

“Mm. Well, I’m still expecting you to kill Cobb one day, and I’d like to see it.”

Rounding a corner, Arthur stops. A few steps pass him by before Eames notices, glances back. Turns around. Facing each other in the shadows, Eames looks at Arthur like he’s waiting for something.

Arthur thinks about other alleyways, far removed in time and distance both. He asks, “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Not really.” Eames says it shrugging, pulling out a cigarette. First Arthur’s seen of them; he wonders if Eames has been saving them for what amounts to his evenings after work. A flickering spark in the dark. Shaking the tips of his fingers out, Eames lifts his gaze. “Suppose I’ll remember, on the way.”

Arthur lets himself smile. “Good luck.”

—

On their final flight to Los Angeles, the staging ground for what they’ve been plotting for weeks, Arthur watches Eames set their plan of action in motion. He’s dressed down, for once. As much as Eames gets, anyway; the inside of his blazer he shrugs off in the aisle is a deep, dark red. Ill-suited to the brown corduroy of his collared shirt—though all one colour; mercifully unpatterned.

Arthur takes what he can get. He watches the smooth fluidity with which Eames pickpockets their mark. Before he slumps down behind Cobb’s seat carelessly, glancing out the plane window as though he expects to see anything but empty tarmac. Arthur wonders if he’s nervous. If he’s really so blasé as he makes out about Cobb’s chances. He doesn’t think so. There may be little fondness between the two of them—but in the spacious stretch of that private plane cabin, Arthur studies Eames and thinks about the last time he saw him make Mal laugh. He’d been teasing her, himself; showing off his awful French. Mal glittered with the radiance of her joy. Her head thrown back, wide-open mouth baring the tiny, gleaming points of her teeth. The restaurant had been dim. Or was it the Cobbs’ own residence?

Trying to sketch in the edges of that memory makes Arthur’s skin prick-flush with sweat. Since the night Mal plunged herself from a hotel balcony, a door had slowly barricaded itself in his mind. Sealing away what had immediately become too painful to bear revisiting. For the first time, Arthur understood why Cobb cautioned so forcefully against using real remembrances when building the world of a dream. It would have been sickeningly easy—to construct a space where Arthur hadn’t lost her. To crawl inside of it, dead to the real world he hardly felt part of anymore. What good was it, Arthur wondered, to hold reality in higher esteem when no one in it really knew him anymore?

But maybe—

It had been the Cobbs’. During an early summer evening, sunlight fading before the blooming warmth did. In the Cobbs’ little courtyard garden, Eames had rolled up his sleeves, grinning wide and crooked across a wrought-iron table. Mal met him as openly as he showed himself off to her. She wiped her eyes, she reprimanded him insincerely, she smiled sidelong at Arthur. They were drinking cocktails made with elderflower from her own garden. Wide bushes lattice-dotted with creamy white flowers that Mal plucked half-clean herself, rolling the floral flesh between her long and elegant fingers, coaxing Arthur’s assistance in the kitchen until the daylight hours whiled away. Until Eames arrived to join them for an outdoor meal. By the evening’s end, Arthur felt he’d overindulged. Plates picked clean between them, sticky residue trapped in tall flutes Mal had made them garnish with fresh stems—Arthur began to stare at Eames very blatantly. His vision, somewhat blurred, still took in the contours of how Eames looked back. Fondly, borderline tender. Saying something Arthur couldn’t hear, only the shape of words swimming in his ears. Eames reached across the table and laid his hand over Arthur’s own. In spite of every competing instinct, Arthur let contentment keep him very still.

Mal wasn’t laughing anymore. Yet she kept smiling—more faintly, burying her chin in her palm. Her elbows on the table, her soft eyes sweeping between them both. She spoke very quietly. She said something Arthur can’t remember at all.

—

Once they’re all asleep, it doesn’t take long for everything to go catastrophically wrong. One level down, palms slick with sweat and raindrops, Arthur turns a car wheel sharply. In the backseat of his invented taxi lies a bloodied, still-breathing body. Wounded by weapons Arthur didn’t see coming.

Arthur knows himself—his abilities; his shortcomings. He doesn’t know how he could have missed it: the level of subspace security they’ve been confronted with.

At his oversight Cobb’s anger is pure and unrestrained. Mouth sputtering with raw and vivid recrimination. Arthur finds it something of an unlikely relief. He’s spent months watching Cobb waste away, shrouding himself in his grief and his Sisphyean efforts. Now, crouched on a dirty parking lot floor, palm braced over slowly-spreading bloodstains—Arthur watches Cobb scream at him and thinks that when this is all over, he won’t owe Cobb anything.

Arthur doesn’t get any thrill from the sound of gunfire. He never did. Even when he was young enough to be stupider, when the whole world of dreaming felt blithely untethered from reality instead of the only existence he’d come to embrace. Arthur knows others took more base pleasures from it. Eames would goad him, sometimes. Saying things like, but surely you must have given it a go while describing all the fantastical stunts he got up to, the first times he walked within that unconstructed space. To Arthur, it mostly sounded like Eames had devoted unsustainable effort to recreating some of his favourite movie scenes.

Yet for someone who prides himself on being level headed, Eames has a remarkable way of showing Arthur up in that regard. Often when he least expects it. This time, Arthur’s so frustrated he’s cursing to himself, lowering an imagined gun that isn’t dispatching security as seamlessly as he aims to. Until the moment Eames materalises at his side, hoisting an RPG that neatly accomplishes what Arthur hadn’t.

It chastens him. Eames can have that effect—although Arthur had finally started to feel it more sympathetic than it seemed. Eames endeavoured to bring to the surface what Arthur kept buried deep. He tried, at length, to demonstrate his boundaries as meaningless and traversable—even as strictly as Arthur set their edges. Eames told Arthur to let himself go home. To dream bigger.

Time below moves with an unreal pace. Two levels down, Arthur doesn’t really remember how he gets to this: crouching above Eames, spread out on a hotel room floor. Limbs lax amongst the straight and narrow lines of the patterned carpet. Eyes stuck unwaveringly to Arthur’s fingers as he rapidly wraps thin wires around Eames’ wrist. They’ve never been in a hotel room together before. Compounding gravity might be making Eames’ voice sound as low as it does. Hushed, as if trading a secret, while he murmurs warnings of danger Arthur knows perfectly well awaits him. Arthur’s responding reassurance slows the pulse he’s measuring. Solid beneath the tips of his fingers, poised against the warm and unknown expanse of Eames’ inner wrist. Gently piercing the flesh, Arthur pushes him down deeper.

—

Dream logic: Arthur resurfaces underwater. He moves up through the levels they’ve built until he’s only one step below consciousness—strapped into a slowly-sinking car with the rest of his team. Unfastening himself, Arthur reaches for Eames. He pulls frantically at the fabric of his striped shirt. Flowing currents lift up Eames’ tie, medallion pattern undulating against his neck, his covered face. But he wakes. He manoeuvres himself rapidly out the door of their submerging would-be coffin.

Arthur turns his attention to Ariadne. Focusing on getting her a last gulp from their air tank, gesturing to confirm she remembers how to swim up. She’s so much newer to this than any of them. Arthur studies the tendrils of her hair swirling under rippling light and for a brief moment, he lets amazement at what they’ve all accomplished burn in his chest.

Only Cobb remains unresponsive. Still deep in dream-sleep, as though he’d intended all along to drown like that: face-down on the shores of his own subconscious. Arthur shoves him, repeatedly. He makes a worthy effort. Wrenching ineffectually at a sinking anchor, months—years—of bottled frustration form muffled sounds that don’t escape Arthur’s throat. Lips squeezed shut, he turns away.

—

Arthur was wrong.

He told Cobb inception wasn’t possible. He told Ariadne Cobb had surely lost himself achieving it. He told Eames—

Or maybe his mistake was not telling Eames enough.

They wake. All of them. The real world resumed, wide swathes of Californian desert unveiling themselves miles below the body of the plane. Until overtaken by sprawling lines of low-rise buildings, broken up by boundless strips of grey. Closer to landing, the plane tilts. In a straight line of oval windows, the open expanse of the Pacific ocean pushes itself into their shared horizon. Arthur looks at Cobs. Across the span of the cabin, Cobb meets his eyes with unmitigated awe. A slowly-dawning certainty of their success. Despite everything he’s put him through, Arthur smiles. In that one breathless moment—heart pounding in his ears with the rush of returned consciousness, their unbelievable achievement—it’s easier than Arthur anticipated to let go of his resentments. Leaving them to sink deeper into dream rivers. Confined to that still-submerging car.

Feet on firmer ground, Arthur plans for newer things.

 

 

v. admission

First, Arthur checks himself into a hotel. Boutique, beautiful, bordering the beach. In Santa Monica, Arthur learns to live with the heat. Not yet so unbearable in early spring—still Arthur keeps his balcony shutters wide open late into the night. Letting in what cool air he can, staring out at the glowing moon that hangs lowly over placid waves. Salt breeze drifting in, no curtains to rustle; settling instead into his sheets in a fine mist. From the bed, cheek pressed to the fine cotton of his pillowcase, Arthur lets the soft sounds of the ocean lull him into a long and dreamless sleep.

A few days pass in much the same way. But the moment Arthur feels able to do so—he boards another plane.

Crossing the globe again so soon after the last time leaves Arthur feeling deeply unacclimated to any particular timezone. Nor is he accustomed to the wet, clinging stickiness that engulfs him the moment steps beyond the airport’s air conditioning. Air thick and oppressively humid, threatening to break at any moment. In a slowly-moving line for remarkably few taxis, the rain begins to pour.

It takes Arthur a frustrating amount of time to get where he's going: a low-lit hallway, where his hair drips steadily onto a little mat as he stands in front of a door he's never seen. In the time between his knock and the door opening, Arthur tries to comb his hair into decent shape with his fingers.

He fails. Taking in his dishevelled appearance, the first words out of Eames’ mouth are, “You seem ill-prepared for the climate.”

Arthur tries to determine if Eames is surprised. He might be; his eyes are wide—but only for a fleeting moment. Face smoothly rearranging itself, settling into something Arthur thinks might be akin to relief. A long wait, at last alleviated. Something Arthur’s been making Eames endure since the last hallway he left him in.

Fear of that magnitude threatens to fill Arthur’s lungs. He swallows, tramping it down enough to ask flatly, “You get a lot of monsoons in England?”

Eames barks a laugh. “Arthur, please. You know I wouldn’t be caught dead living in England.”

Arthur does. He knows exactly where Eames has lived, all the years they’ve known each other, and a few years before that. He doesn’t give that fact much consideration. It’s his job to know these kinds of things.

It’s a mantra that loses some effectiveness standing here, now, having followed Eames halfway around the world.

Yet for now—Eames doesn’t press. Stepping aside, gesturing for Arthur to come in, expression now devoid of any remnants of disbelief. “I am curious,” he starts to say, lurching Arthur’s gut with the knowledge he’ll have to explain himself eventually, “about what brings you this far. But first, I thought I’d offer you something.”

Arthur’s face is hot and his stomach uneven as he watches Eames pad around what must be his apartment. Not just some bolthole or hideaway he stakes out in for a few months after a job but something more fixed. Permanent.

The space they’re standing in is warmly-lit, chiefly from a rattan floor lamp just beside the front door. It’s open-plan, though not particularly large. Its wooden floors seem dusty in the corners, a bed at the far end is half-hidden by a divider Arthur thinks is bamboo—just like the unit an old, CRT television sits on. A battered, but admittedly cosy-looking, deep blue sofa in front of it. There are bookcases—short ones, built from darker wood. They’re overflowing; immediately recognisable as lacking a cohesive structure for the works within. On top of them, Arthur recognises a few knicknacks—not the objects themselves, but their origin. He knows one little vase is Indian, he thinks some obviously handmade pottery might be from Mexico, where Arthur knows Eames worked four jobs ago, and there’s a cracked mug he thinks might even be—

“Is that from Mal?”

Arthur’s been scanning the room so intently he hadn’t noticed Eames leaving it. It must have been for the bathroom; Eames returns to him now holding out a towel. Folded and fresh, its pattern colourful and geometric.

Dumbly, Arthur stares at Eames’ offering while he looks over his shoulder. The mug that Arthur pointed out is visibly worn. It’s chipped, the handle snapped off—but the floral pattern has stayed mostly complete on the ceramic. Sunflowers. Mal’s favourite.

“Ah,” Eames says. Softer. “Yes. Yes, it is. Not much use as a mug anymore, I’m afraid, but you know.”

When Arthur thinks of the immediate aftermath of Mal’s death, he thinks chiefly of the abyss it left for Cobb to throw himself into. Away from his children, off the grid: Arthur knows it was hardly Cobb’s choice—but he’s always mused, privately, that some part of Cobb was a little too quick to embrace the life he asked Arthur to live with him. It always worried Arthur—those first few times he called Mal at her family home and she admitted that she and Cobb still dreamed. It was one of the only things Arthur ever really fought about with her: short, sharp exchanges that left a pit in his stomach and Mal slamming down the phone. Followed by weeks, sometimes, of silence.

Arthur thinks Cobb should’ve known to leave it all behind—for his children, for his new life with his new family. Mal was an adult, she could make her own choices. But they should’ve kept their children far away from something they couldn't really control. If they had, maybe she’d still be alive.

That’s what Arthur thinks about, when he thinks of what Mal left behind. The profound ache of his loss marred by nagging bitterness and a poisoning, slowly-spreading resentment of her widower. Whose grief might have surpassed Arthur’s own—but whose dark silences, and refusals to elaborate on what Arthur now knew to be Cobb’s own complicity, had permanently tainted Arthur’s ability to feel for Cobb in turn.

He hadn’t given enough consideration to what Eames felt. He always thought—Eames came to Paris for Arthur alone. Now, the gauze of that initial overwhelming grief abated, Arthur can readily accept that Eames mourned, too. That he might miss Mal deeply, even if she hadn’t been to him what she was to Arthur. But she was like that, wasn’t she? She was something different to everyone.

For Eames, Arthur sees Mal now in the clearly carefully kept vestige of something that no longer serves its original purpose. Something that sits still and unusable instead, a little testament to what was no longer in their reach.

“I didn’t know,” Arthur says. His voice sounds stiff. He’s still staring at the stupid towel, realising Eames means for him to take it from his outstretched grip. He does.

Eames smiles at him. Sympathy tinged by sorrow, undeniably caring. Arthur’s hands tighten on the fabric.

“Your hair’s somewhat disarming when the product in it melts,” Eames tells him. “And you must be tired, coming all the way from wherever you came.”

Arthur opens his mouth to lie it hadn’t been very far at all, but he shuts it before he speaks. There’s no use. He’s here, after all. Wherever he came from, he came here. To Eames.

Eames doesn’t seem to be expecting a response. He nods behind him at the half-open door to the bathroom. “I left some clothes in there. Well I—I did my best, but,” his mouth quirks, “see how you get on with them.”

Mutely, Arthur nods. Stepping past Eames, his legs feel off-balance. Like he’s walking on the moon. Or in a dream.

In the shower, he tries to think of what to say. He’s used to planning. He’s good at coming up with strategies. People put their life in his hands all the time, after all. Including Eames.

He can’t settle on anything. None of it feels like the right thing to say. Arthur shuts off the water and towels at his hair and resigns himself, half-heartedly, to seeing how much Eames even wants to talk when he gets out. Maybe he’ll let him off, let him sleep first. Maybe in the morning, it’ll be clearer, Arthur’s own actions more explicable to himself in the dawn of a new day.

Arthur feared the clothes left out for him might be some terrifying, garish spectacle: Eames having a little fun at the expense of his unexpected guest. Instead, he’s struck by how mundane they are. Civilian. Not at all what Arthur pictures when he pictures Eames at rest. He’s given Arthur some dark sweats— incredibly soft, as though rarely worn, and truthfully he can’t really imagine Eames in them. Along a band graphic t-shirt that by contrast is clearly well-worn, bearing an almost entirely faded logo for Duran Duran.

“Did you lose a bet?”

Eames is sitting on the couch when Arthur comes back in. He’s drinking tea, something herbal and dark without any milk. Arthur notes an additional mug out on the coffee table in front of him. Eames glances up. “Ah,” he says, “I thought you’d enjoy that. Not the faintest idea where I got it, of course. But it’s soft, isn’t it?”

It’s almost hanging off Arthur’s shoulders. He thinks Eames is trying not to smile too much at the sight. “Sure.”

Arthur’s hair is towelled, but still wet. His feet are bare. He feels naked, coming over to sit next to Eames on his couch. As comfortable as it looked, but maybe even older; Arthur thinks he might actually just be sinking down past some internal structure that isn’t there anymore.

It’s an effort to reach out from where he’s sunken to take the mug Eames has left for him. Arthur thinks he’s seen the square white and blue coasters before, somewhere in Japan. He sips. He studies the contents of his mug and wonders if he’s ever told Eames rooibos is his favourite. “Thank you.”

“Least I could do, after all your effort. Getting here, I mean.”

Faint and panicky stirrings of nausea brew in Arthur at the prospect of explaining himself, at last. He decides to bite the bullet. “Listen, Eames—”

Arthur looks over, and stops. Eames’ face is open and expectant, but suddenly Arthur has no words to meet it. He swallows ineffectually against the dryness of his throat.

“Listen,” he tries again, scratchier than the last time. He clears his throat again. He’s terrified he might start blushing.

“I am,” Eames says very patiently. Too blankly to be kind—though not mocking, either.

“Okay,” Arthur says. “That’s good.”

“Arthur.”

“Look, I just—”

“Arthur.”

“You don’t know everything,” Arthur insists. He doesn’t know why he says it. He just does.

“No,” Eames allows easily. “But neither do you.”

Arthur is blushing, now. Face flushed with a sense of his own foolishness as he says weakly, “I’m supposed to.”

Eames grins more broadly than he has all night. “Arthur.” He practically drawls it. “Now where's the fun in that?”

He sets his mug down on the table. The sound of it clinking against the coaster seems very loud to Arthur’s ears—before they fill with the noise of roaring blood. Slowing, turning sluggish, Eames’ thick fingers at his jaw. Coaxing him. Opening him up. Arthur stays suspended as Eames leans in. He does it carefully, in drawn-out stages, thumb rubbing into the skin. Waiting for Arthur to run away.

He doesn’t, this time. He closes his eyes. Mouth parted on a forward leap, he breathes.

—

Arthur doesn’t know what time it is. Eames must own a clock somewhere, but he hasn’t seen one. He lies very still against faded silk sheets and tries to relax into the line of kisses Eames is pressing into his throat.

Perhaps unsuccessfully. Eames lifts his head. His eyes lidded and dark, his hand coming to stroke over Arthur’s forehead, half-twirling a loose strand of hair around a finger. “Arthur,” Eames breathes. Letting the syllables slip steadily from flushed and bitten lips. His other hand splays, burning, over Arthur’s chest. “Stop,” he tells him. He says it gently.

Arthur shuts his eyes as warm lips descend on his neck again. He doesn’t pretend not to understand. Arching, he mumbles, “I’m trying.”

Eames huffs into his skin. “Try harder.”

An abrupt withdrawal. Eames shifts along the edge of the bed, digging through a bedside table. Arthur spends a moment admiring it: one of the few modern-looking pieces of furniture in Eames’ small and cluttered space. Wooden like most else here, but more eye-catchingly shaped: a squat rectangle sitting on widely splayed legs. Spaced far apart, they cast a dramatic silhouette within the shadows. Eames catches Arthur's stare. He smiles, muttering quietly, “Thought you’d like this.”

Arthur lifts an eyebrow. “You thought I’d see it?”

Holding his retrieved objects, Eames comes back. He stretches himself alongside Arthur fully, eager, broad hand on his cheek, fitting their mouths together again. Arthur's learning that it's incredibly easy to kiss Eames. To melt into it, allowing reality to blur and dissolve around them as it normally did from the flood of an IV line. Sensations limited to the feeling of Eames' absurdly plush lips finally moving against Arthur's own. Eames’ tongue slipping into his mouth insistently, no hesitation to it at all. As though they've done this before. As though they've been at it for years. Arthur thinks about the long-lasting effort he put into not kissing Eames and struggles to remember a single reason why.

The thought stills him, suddenly. Leaves him frozen against Eames’ soft lips, his warm body. Gradually, Eames notices. Pulling back, brow furrowing, hand still tight to Arthur’s cheek. He says his name. Concern harshening the sound while the pad of his thumb sweeps a wide arc over Arthur's face.

Arthur swallows around a fear he can't convey aloud. He manages merely to ask Eames to wait a moment.

Bent over his clothes on the wooden floor, Arthur digs within baggy fabrics until he lifts his totem from the pockets of the sweats Eames gave him. Eames says nothing—but Arthur feels his stare bore into the back of his skull as he tosses the die.

From this angle, Eames can't see it. But he must know the number Arthur needs—even if he’s never shared it. Eames is very observant. Arthur is a creature of oft-repeated habits. They’ve spent hours—years—wandering dreams together.

Relief slackens Arthur’s shoulders in a long breath. Leaning back, he falls without looking into a wide expanse of heated skin. Eames’ lips at his shoulder now, hand curling possessively over his hip. Voice rough as he asks, “Alright?”

“Yeah.”

Eames runs a hand over his stomach. Fingers wide, as if trying to cover the breadth of his body in their span. He kisses the yielding flesh where Arthur’s shoulder meets his neck. Lowly, Eames tells him, “I dreamt about it too, you know.”

There are things Arthur isn’t ready to admit. But he can do this—turn around, coax Eames into position like he hasn't tried to yet. Eames complies immediately, laying slack against the pillows Arthur inclines him towards. Still. Relaxed. Waiting. Arthur moves so he's straddling him, his turn to lay open palms on Eames’ chest. Gazing down at him, trying to steady his breathing, he reaches for sure statements. “We don’t dream.”

Eames’ mouth quirks. He stretches an arm above his head. Aping at impassiveness, as though Arthur can’t feel him fully hard against his thigh. “Speak for yourself,” he says bluntly.

Arthur can feel himself frowning. It breaks something in Eames’ affected composure—his hand reaches up to rub over it. Smiling to himself, like he’s always wanted to outline the shape of Arthur’s discontent under his fingertips. Arthur tries not to frown more deeply—but he can’t quell his curiosity. He asks Eames if he’s serious. If he really manages, still, to dream unaided.

It's not a discussion Eames wants to entertain right now. He turns Arthur over again on the mattress with sure, solid movements. Starting to rock against him, not gently; hard line of his cock pressing into Arthur's stomach. Without looking, his hand sweeps over the mattress for his earlier acquisitions. Arthur watches Eames slick his fingers and wills himself not to resist what he doesn’t want to. Not anymore.

Eames descends over him with his entire body. Mouth brushing over the jutting bone of Arthur's hip as he moves his fingers inside of him. Measured, steady; moreso than Arthur might have expected. Almost infuriating—how patient and meticulous Eames could be when he decided to put effort into it. Though he's not quite slow. Always responsive, picking up on Arthur's sounds. The hitch of his breathing. Learning what spots draw the most insistent moans, where Eames can press his fingers firm and deep. Unabated. Arthur can't see his eyes—but he can imagine them. Dark, maybe even awed. Slipping shut as Eames’ head dips lower still, trailing his lips over flushed flesh. On Arthur's abdomen, Eames nuzzles his nose into wiry hair. His hot, damp breath soaks over the sweaty skin. Leaving Arthur with barely a moment to gasp before the soft wet heat of Eames’ mouth envelopes his dick.

He doesn't still his fingers. If anything, he remains focused mostly on maintaining their movement. Eames swipes his tongue around Arthur's cock only idly. Long, lazy strokes along his shaft before he pulls back slightly, closing his lips around the head with light sucks. Still fucking his fingers into Arthur with his same unvarying pace. A practiced realisation of long, waiting years.

Arthur reaches down into sweat-damp hair. Stroking through it, making Eames lift his gaze, his mouth still wrapped around Arthur. Looking down at the picture he makes, Arthur thinks he might not have delayed this quite so long as he did if he knew it would be like this.

Although—on some level, he must have known how good this would be. He must have heard the things Eames promised him. He just needed to listen.

A brief and smarting bodily separation as Eames readies himself. Getting on the condom, running his fingers over the taut muscle of Arthur’s inner thigh. Hoarsely, Eames instructs him, “Lift up a bit.”

Arthur complies. In his vacated space, Eames lies down. Splaying himself out on his back, hand lazily fisting his own cock. Arthur stares. His eyes sweep scattered lines over innumerable tattoos. His mouth has gone very dry. Eames is reaching for him, pulling at his hip, murmuring low and ceaseless, come on, darling.

It’s easier this way to take him inside. Sinking down onto Eames, Arthur watches his eyelids flutter. A deep groan pushes itself up the arched line of his throat. Eames' callused hands seem to be everywhere: at the small of Arthur's back, over his hips, his bent thighs. Tracing short and unfinished paths—before settling in a firm grip, leaving Arthur to bear down at his own pace but digging responding marks into his flesh. Mounting pleasure unknots the tension Arthur's been carrying in his shoulders for what feels like a very long time. It forces out rough breaths, his chest rising and falling in an uneven pitch as he adjusts to the feeling of Eames inside of him. Arthur’s otherwise silent—not out of a desire to stifle himself, but merely as a marker of the intensity of his feeling. Something sweeping through him that chokes off any sound he could make. Breath caught, suspended in aching freefall, Arthur moves.

-

Arthur doesn't expect Eames to push him away afterwards, and he doesn't. There's been enough of that.

On the pillow across from him, bathed only in the glow of a bedside table lamp, Eames turns his head to venture quietly, “She would want this, you know.”

Thinking of Mal in this moment makes Arthur’s chest ache, sharp and immediate. Harshening his voice more than he intends when he says, “Eames.”

Apparent recrimination widens Eames’ eyes. He moves closer on the mattress, cupping Arthur’s shoulder. “No, I—that wasn’t some horrible line.”

Yet his fear of reprisal departs him as quickly as it came. Certain, pointed, he moves his hand to Arthur’s cheek. “She loved you very much,” he murmurs. “I could always—she knew how you worked.”

Spikes of grief pierce deeper into Arthur. Trying to veer away, he asks very deliberately, “And so do you?”

The swooping affection of Eames’ smile settles him slightly. “I try.”

His fingers come to stroke over Arthur’s forehead. He squeezes his eyes shut tight in response, as though afraid of what might escape. Though there’s no need. It’s only Eames.

Eames, who still deserves to hear whatever concession Arthur can offer, after over a year of unmerited radio silence. Who deserves any honesty Arthur can confess to him within this newly-shared bed. Eames’ thumb still swiping soothingly across his brow, Arthur says slowly, like he’s only just realising it, “Mal would want me to want something for myself.”

When he opens his eyes, Eames’ expression is reassuringly light. He tilts Arthur’s chin up. Bringing their lips together, he murmurs into Arthur’s mouth, “No time like the present.”

Arthur lets himself linger in the languidness of postcoital kissing with Eames for a long, unmeasured stretch of time. Unsure how long it lasts before they resettle themselves against the sheets. Under Eames' gaze, Arthur pulls at the covers' edges to expose more of the tattoos he hasn’t finished examining.

Sated, watching Arthur’s fingers trace studiously over his skin, Eames asks him something. “You haven’t been back there since you left, have you?”

Almost unnecessary to admit it aloud—but Arthur does. “No.”

Squinting, he shifts Eames more onto his side, frowning at a particularly regrettable design on the back of his thigh. Eames mutters half-heartedly about having them removed, someday. His fingers thread into Arthur’s hair, tugging his eyes back up to him.

Arthur knows what Eames wants him to hear. Stalling, he asks casually, “Why, did you leave something on?”

At least Eames offers him a crooked grin. “I was an impeccable houseguest.” Abruptly, it drops. He rubs his thumb over Arthur’s lips. Serious, pointed, “I think you should go.”

Arthur’s breath hitches. Still wondering—how to let himself have this. He asks cautiously, “What, and bring you?”

Eames shakes his head. “No. I think you should go alone.” He’s still caressing Arthur’s face. Flatly, honestly, Eames makes another promise. “But I’ll visit.”

He doesn’t push him any further than Arthur’s already pushed himself. He leaves it at that—something to mull over as Eames crowds in again, warm and close, taking Arthur’s bottom lip between his teeth. Hand sweeping over his shoulder blade, murmuring the things he thinks Arthur can stand to hear. Arthur listens to every word. He kisses Eames back, still greedy for it, he digs his fingers into the marks on Eames' skin he's learning to imagine even with his eyes shut. With so much left in front of him, Arthur plans to take his time.