rapacityinblue (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rapacityinblue) wrote2012-01-09 12:30 pm
rapacityinblue) wrote2012-01-09 12:30 pm
Entry tags:
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Title: The Art of Alone
Fandom: Inception
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: Eames realizes there's something odd about Arthur.
Pairing: Gen, Arthur/Eames implied
Word Count: ~3500
Warnings: None
Notes: 500 Themes #18: Alone in A Crowd. This started as an idea I've wanted to play with for a while (that Arthur has no projections or his projections are strange) but unfortunately turned into a rambling and directionless Nano-inspired word mine. Fits into the Inception Epic Timeline
He’s never really thought about it, that they’re always in Arthur’s mind when they dream; that every job he’s worked with Cobb they’ve prepped for in the lobbies of five-star hotels, amidst the elegant skyscrapers of a hundred assorted Wall Streets. Eames is not the sort of man who takes much for granted, but he’s never thought to question this. Never thought to question why Arthur, who is without doubt the most predictable man he’s ever met (he’d outright say boring if that stick up the point man’s arse didn’t make him so very fun to torment), has stretch after stretch of perfectly adequate and completely abandoned dreamspace in which to scheme.
Sometimes, in the evenings when he’s returning to his hotel, it’s hard to remember if this is reality or the damn job again -- a conundrum, he supposes, that would be more easily resolved if he chose to stay at a less ostentatious hotel. It might be more comfortable, but he had the money, after all, and there was something so reassuring in the routine, the predictably bourgeoisie. Ah, perhaps that was what Arthur saw in it.
And there was the man himself, of course, who would never be caught staying anywhere as gauche as a chain hotel, hole in the wall or, God forbid, the dreaded Holiday Inn. Eames could stay in one of the multitude of lodgings Vegas provided that was more his style, but then he’d be far away from the team. No, he’d be far away from Arthur, and that was a thought Eames found truly unacceptable.
He couldn’t help it that the point man puzzled him. That was all it had been, at first, all he’d allowed it to be. People were puzzles and Arthur, bless his twisted little soul, was the Sunday Times Crossword of them all. He tossed out cryptic, obscure clues and expected you to weave together something complicated and intricate out of them, because of course he could do it, why couldn’t you? And then he sat there with that puzzled frown on his face, what Eames silently referred to as his “hurt puppy look,” his forehead all folded up and his lips pushed out.
Imagine Eames’s surprise to discover that, like the Sunday Times Crossword, Arthur could be solved. And once you’d done it enough times, you started to notice the way they reused the clues. It became almost, god help him, predictable. And that, more than anything, was what drew him back. It didn’t make sense, and he knew he couldn’t have sussed the point man out. Not completely. Arthur would never allow that to happen. He’d never allow anyone that close to him -- not even Dom, and maybe Mal, but she was dead, and couldn’t tell anyone now even if she did know his secrets.
Eames was missing something. He hated being incomplete.
And so here he was, in Vegas, dashing through the lobby of the Luxor because he always seemed terribly pressed for time, even when he had nowhere in particular to be, thinking about how he could never quite be sure if he was at work or running wild through Arthur’s brain, and then it occurred to him, this couldn’t be for the job. Because he had never been in Arthur’s head in a dreamscape populated by projections.
A pattern was emerging, but Eames liked to be complete about things, so he made a list. Every time, from the beginning of their acquaintance, that he’d gone under with Arthur. Every time Arthur had been the dreamer. He’d never been the subject. He’d never accidentally brought a projection into someone else’s dream.
Eames carried the list around with him for days, pulling it from his pocket with his totem, turning it over in his fingers the same way he turned the poker chip. He carted it to the Bellagio suite they were using for a work space, toted it across the floors of every casino in town (a splendid thing about Vegas; there were many, many casinos), he almost shredded it, rolling it between his fingers as he rolled cigarettes. He kept it on his person at all times, his mind straying back to the puzzle, picking at it in between test runs of his latest forgery, mulling through it as he looked over the dossier Arthur handed him (ever-so-coolly, always) over his shoulder.
He was possessed by the idea. He was going slowly insane.
It was late, long after the rest of the team had abandoned the suite. Arthur was there, of course, because Arthur was actually staying in the Bellagio and had the freedom to come and go as he pleased, and because Arthur was a workaholic, a freak, if you would (and oh, Eames did), and Arthur had a bee in his bonnet about not finding something, which meant that he couldn’t leave it alone. Eames had seen him like this before, seen him worry at a problem until it gave way -- until it curled up and died under his attentions.
“Why don’t you work on something else,” Eames suggested, oh so slyly, because he was a clever beast and Arthur would never see it coming. “Ariadne asked you to look at that layout again, didn’t she?”
Cue the puppy look: Eames thought that if he ever lost the delight of seeing Arthur’s face smoosh up that way, he would rather just die. There would be no living in a world without Arthur’s consternation. “I’d need to go under for that,” Arthur said. Arthur, ever the perfectionist, always carefully within the rules, would never go under alone.
“I’m here,” Eames pointed out. “I’ll keep an eye on you.” He did his best to make his voice low, soothing, like he was luring a timid deer to him. A timid, very frowny deer. But to him Arthur came, looking first surprised, then suspicious, but finally eager with his ears perked forward toward the metaphorical salt lick Eames was offering.
“Thank you, Eames,” He said politely, but like he couldn’t quite figure out what the Forger was up to. Which was fine. Eames projected calm and innocence and thumbed the list in his pocket; nothing here, Arthur, don’t you worry about me.
He did his best not to leap about as Arthur slipped the cannula into his wrist.
The next minute was, bar none, not even while he’d waited for Fischer to open up the safe room, the longest Eames had ever lived through. He waited impatiently for Arthur to establish the layout of the dream, allowing extra time since it was still Ariadne’s work and he wasn’t completely familiar with it. He watched the second hand of the clock tick down until finally, he couldn’t wait any longer, and he uncoiled a second line from the PASIV to join him.
Arthur’s first reaction, when he appeared in the dreamscape, was surprise. His second was concern, and he said, “What’s wrong?”
“Terrible. Absolutely terrible. I’ll tell you all about it later,” Eames said gleefully, and he looked around the level.
It was a supermarket, and to properly test the flow of the aisles as Ariadne wanted, they needed people. A mother pushing a carriage, a young couple shopping, a woman single woman buying ice creams and magazines -- it was all so pedestrian. “Arthur, I’m admit, I’m rather disappointed,” Eames said, and Arthur’s eyes narrowed.
Every projection in the store turned, as one, to stare at him, and Eames stopped to wonder if a battle axe, a bloody battle axe, was really an appropriate teething tool for a child that age.
The projections, to a one, had an empty, sort of dead look in their eyes, and they moved toward him in unison. Not like people, but like wind up toys, or those figures on a foozeball table -- like Arthur controlled them all with one stick, and like they only had the most limited range of motion. He chuckled nervously and slipped two fingers under his collar (which in Arthur’s dream, he noticed, was a lovely, muted dove gray) and tugged for a little more air, because it suddenly felt like there was far too little in this world. He’d set three minutes on his line, enough to be awake and out of the room before Arthur (who he could only imagine would be quite furious at this double breach of trust) could wake. With the compound they were using, it gave him roughly forty-five minutes under.
Forty-five minutes wasn’t really a lot of time, considering. He could survive almost anything for forty-five minutes. Really, how bad could it be?
“Christ,” was all he said time to say as the projections took another lurching, unified step toward him. “You really don’t have any imagination, do you?”
Arthur, he noticed, didn’t look particularly gleeful a the shoppers tore him apart -- certainly nothing like what he thought would be reflected by Arthur’s projection’s zest and undisguised joy. If anything, the point man just seemed puzzled.
His perplexed expression failed to give Eames any of the pleasure it usually inspired.
As deaths went, “angry mob” wasn’t particularly inspired. Compared to what they’d been through, it barely even shook him -- although he had to admit, that particular homage to the age-old American/British rivalry of “Gentleman, thaw your chickens,” wasn’t the sort of thing Eames ever wanted to see again. Really, if he had the choice to discard the memory right now, he rather thought he would. Still, it hadn’t been anything that awful, and there wasn’t any particular reason he couldn’t be on his way, out the door before Arthur woke, exactly as he’d planned.
He sat, gripping the arms of his recliner, his breathing heavy and labored, and the last minute while he waited for the point man to wait was definitely winning the battle for ‘longest minute of his life.’ He congratulated its successor of four minutes previous for a well fought campaign. There was always next time.
Arthur, as always, seemed perfectly calm as he woke, and Eames didn’t need to look at the clock to know that he hadn’t killed himself to come out of the dream early. He’d actually stayed behind in the wreckage created by his projections and -- what? Probably tried to smooth out the path through the dairy aisles that had been vexing Ariadne. That was his Arthur, always getting the job done.
“Don’t ever enter my dreams uninvited again,” the point man said calmly, withdrawing the IV from his arm and coiling the line neatly back into the PASIV case. Eames almost laughed, painfully, because he could very much assure Arthur that it wouldn’t be a problem.
“What are you?” he asked instead, his voice rising high and almost panicked, and Arthur seemed -- what? Almost disappointed as he clicked the case closed.
“I did tell you you wouldn’t like my subconscious,” he said, alluding to a conversation several years past, and Eames had to dig through heaps of memories to even know what he was referencing. By the time he’d caught up, Arthur’s station was clean. “Good night, Mr. Eames,” he said finally, his eyes still dark with that emotion Eames couldn’t identify. He left the suite.
Eames lingered longer than was strictly necessary, pulling his list from his pockets and tearing it into neat, equal pieces. He pulled a lighter from his jacket and proceeded to set the remnants of the list on fire, telling himself that he was being thorough and not simply buying time.
He forced himself to take the walk to Arthur’s room, one foot in front of the next, three stories down and through miles of hallway. It’s not too late, screamed a voice that he thought was what was left of his sanity. You can still run. But instead, he raised a hand to knock on Arthur’s door.
It wasn’t exactly disappointment that lurked behind the point man’s eyes, though that was a part of it. Disappointment, though Eames didn’t know which of the hurdles he’d failed to clear. That was a lie; he knew exactly all of them, he just didn’t know which would inspire this reaction in Arthur. Disappointment and -- hurt?
“I’m sorry for entering your dream uninvited,” he said finally, because Arthur was waiting for him to say something and it was all he could think of. “Especially when I was supposed to be keeping watch for you.”
“Why don’t you come in,” Arthur said flatly, not much of an invitation, and he left the door to the hotel room open as he walked away.
Eames entered a room appropriately lush for all things bearing the name Bellagio and saw that Arthur was at the minibar, mixing himself a rather strong cocktail that seemed to use no less than three of the tiny glass bottles. He wisely held back on the urge to comment on the wisdom of mixing base grains that way, as he felt the advice, as well meaning as it was, would only serve to anger the point man in this instance. Instead, he said, “Is any of that for me?” which was only marginally better. Arthur split the evil concoction between two glasses, added a hefty pour of orange juice to each glass, and offered one to him. “Interesting,” Eames said carefully as he tasted it.
“It’s your fault,” Arthur said calmly, and he must have read some sort of confusion in Eames’s face, because he elaborated, “I drank the rest before you got here. This is all that’s left. It’s your fault.”
“You drank through the minibar?” Eames asked rather incredulously, trying to square the amount he imagined the Bellagio kept stocked with the time he’d dragged his feet getting here and Arthur’s slight stature. “Tonight?”
“No, not tonight,” Arthur snapped, and he felt some of the weight fall from his shoulders. He hadn’t thought it was possible, though if anyone was capable of superhuman feats -- even the feat of alcohol consumption -- it was certainly Arthur. “This whole week. You’re so frustrating.”
If the minibar wasn’t being restocked, that meant Arthur had forgone housekeeping services, an entirely new concept to boggle -- though really, the thought that the point man was just this neat was slightly easier to accept than the idea that he’d drunk an entire mini bar in just under thirty minutes. And when he thought about it, it made sense; Arthur was too cautious to risk such an obvious hole in their security.
“Arthur,” he said carefully, “Are you drunk?”
“Not yet, although I certainly hope to become so,” Arthur snapped, with an edge to his voice that implied he expected Eames to catch up, and quickly. “I didn’t know you’d follow me,” he added, his tone slightly more contemplative. “We may have to call for a restock.”
“When we do, see if they can help me understand what’s going on,” Eames muttered, and took a bracing shot of the awful concoction Arthur had prepared for him.
“You’re the one who says I have no imagination,” Arthur told him, matching him gulp for gulp. Someone of his slender frame should look like they were working to swallow a drink that strong, Eames thought, but Arthur gave no indication of the burn of the alcohol as he set his glass back down.
“Well yes, but I didn’t mean --” He didn’t really know what he’d meant, so he raised the glass to his lips and pulled a face as he took another swallow.
“I have no projections.” The point man said it matter-of-factly as he continued to drink.
Eames tried to envision that, tried to put it into context with what he understood of dreamsharing. “Is that even possible?” he asked, although obviously it was, as Arthur sat before him, the liquid level slowly dropping lower in his rocks glass. He answered Eames’s question with a look that seemed to go very much along Eames’s own thoughts, and Eames quickly added, “Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You wanted to know badly enough to put me under. You might as well listen now,” Arthur’s voice was sharp and Eames felt the simultaneous urge to shrink down and sit straighter in his chair. Arthur often had that effect on people. It wasn’t just his research skill that made him an excellent point man. In his own way, he was as good as Eames at handling people.
Better, maybe, because he wasn’t bollocksing it all up by diving into people’s dreams uninvited and poking around the recesses of their subconscious.
“You mean you’ve never--” he said, and Arthur interrupted snappishly, “Of course I have.”
He cleared his throat and continued, “I have subconscious projections in my dreams the way anyone else does, when their subconscious has a message it wishes to communicate. My projections are usually specific people, present to complete specific tasks in a dream.” Arthur seemed to become looser and more fluid the more he drank, which was funny. Eames felt like he was growing clumsier and awkward. “But I cannot fill a dreamscape with half-remembered faces the way you or Dom does.”
Eames thought of the dreamscapes he’d been in, not just with Arthur, but throughout his career. Malls crammed full of holiday shoppers, restaurants bustling with customers and servers -- they’d used a crowded theater once, letting their projections cram the aisles to keep the mark’s at bay. Thought of how much he could learn from a mark just by watching his projections in an environment they controlled, thought of the constant give and take that allowed him to gauge whether a mark was receptive to his forgery. He put it together with what he knew of Arthur. How long it had taken him to read the point man’s tells -- how many years it had taken him to focus on this particular aspect of Arthur’s personality. It was the puzzle he couldn’t put together until all the pieces were laid out face up, and on some level it made sense, that someone as controlled and staid above would carry it with him below.
“It’s useful for the job,” Arthur said flatly, and it was. Arthur could dream a world to perfection, give them the perfect quiet lobby or street corner on which to meet. No one -- no one sane -- would question the excellence with which Arthur performed his duties. “Congratulations,” the point man said, with a dull and bitter tone to his voice that Eames hadn’t heard before. He found he truly disliked it. “It looks like you were right about me, Mr. Eames.”
“I don’t think I was,” he said finally, which did little to cheer Arthur up. Ah. The point man was one of those --a maudlin drunk. Somehow, strangely, that revelation was not the largest of the evening. They sat in silence for a long while, Arthur rising to refill his drink and Eames turning his crystal cut tumbler between his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.
It seemed to be the thing to say, and maybe it was the right thing. Not having the words for a situation -- it wasn’t something Eames was used to. Not a position that he usually found himself in, and not one he was anxious to adjust to. But Arthur was slowly relaxing, unwinding from around his glass, and the air in the room seemed slightly, slightly, less heavy.
“Try not to let it happen again,” was Arthur’s response, and though his voice was as dry as ever, but Eames knew him well enough to think that he heard some amusement layered underneath it. Right or not, he knew a dismissal and that one was as clear as day, so he stood, one hand out to brace on the back of the chair.
“Goodnight, Arthur,” he enunciated clearly, rather dismayed with how the room tilted around him. Arthur had drunk twice what he had and the point man hardly looked mussed.
“You’ll never make it back to the Luxor like that.” Now Arthur was definitely amused, moving smoothly past him with absolutely unfair grace. “Stay on the couch, Mr. Eames.”
He should argue. It was the proper thing to do, but Eames had never been a very proper man, and a night spent with Arthur (even if that night was spent lying in the next room of his suite on his couch) was not a night to be wasted. He was moderately sure, as the point man placed a hotel blanket and pillow beside him, that this was not all a clever ploy to get close enough in to shoot him.
“Good night,” he said stupidly, and he received a tight smile from the point man. It didn’t reach his eyes or his dimples, but it was more real than any other expression Eames had ever seen on his face. Or maybe that was the booze talking.
“Good night, Eames,” Arthur said into the dark of the room, his hand still lingering over the light switch, and then all Eames heard was the sound of his own breath and the gentle shush of silk against wood as Arthur hung his suit. He lay in the dark, his eyes open but seeing nothing, and finally he heard nothing at all.
Fandom: Inception
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: Eames realizes there's something odd about Arthur.
Pairing: Gen, Arthur/Eames implied
Word Count: ~3500
Warnings: None
Notes: 500 Themes #18: Alone in A Crowd. This started as an idea I've wanted to play with for a while (that Arthur has no projections or his projections are strange) but unfortunately turned into a rambling and directionless Nano-inspired word mine. Fits into the Inception Epic Timeline
He’s never really thought about it, that they’re always in Arthur’s mind when they dream; that every job he’s worked with Cobb they’ve prepped for in the lobbies of five-star hotels, amidst the elegant skyscrapers of a hundred assorted Wall Streets. Eames is not the sort of man who takes much for granted, but he’s never thought to question this. Never thought to question why Arthur, who is without doubt the most predictable man he’s ever met (he’d outright say boring if that stick up the point man’s arse didn’t make him so very fun to torment), has stretch after stretch of perfectly adequate and completely abandoned dreamspace in which to scheme.
Sometimes, in the evenings when he’s returning to his hotel, it’s hard to remember if this is reality or the damn job again -- a conundrum, he supposes, that would be more easily resolved if he chose to stay at a less ostentatious hotel. It might be more comfortable, but he had the money, after all, and there was something so reassuring in the routine, the predictably bourgeoisie. Ah, perhaps that was what Arthur saw in it.
And there was the man himself, of course, who would never be caught staying anywhere as gauche as a chain hotel, hole in the wall or, God forbid, the dreaded Holiday Inn. Eames could stay in one of the multitude of lodgings Vegas provided that was more his style, but then he’d be far away from the team. No, he’d be far away from Arthur, and that was a thought Eames found truly unacceptable.
He couldn’t help it that the point man puzzled him. That was all it had been, at first, all he’d allowed it to be. People were puzzles and Arthur, bless his twisted little soul, was the Sunday Times Crossword of them all. He tossed out cryptic, obscure clues and expected you to weave together something complicated and intricate out of them, because of course he could do it, why couldn’t you? And then he sat there with that puzzled frown on his face, what Eames silently referred to as his “hurt puppy look,” his forehead all folded up and his lips pushed out.
Imagine Eames’s surprise to discover that, like the Sunday Times Crossword, Arthur could be solved. And once you’d done it enough times, you started to notice the way they reused the clues. It became almost, god help him, predictable. And that, more than anything, was what drew him back. It didn’t make sense, and he knew he couldn’t have sussed the point man out. Not completely. Arthur would never allow that to happen. He’d never allow anyone that close to him -- not even Dom, and maybe Mal, but she was dead, and couldn’t tell anyone now even if she did know his secrets.
Eames was missing something. He hated being incomplete.
And so here he was, in Vegas, dashing through the lobby of the Luxor because he always seemed terribly pressed for time, even when he had nowhere in particular to be, thinking about how he could never quite be sure if he was at work or running wild through Arthur’s brain, and then it occurred to him, this couldn’t be for the job. Because he had never been in Arthur’s head in a dreamscape populated by projections.
A pattern was emerging, but Eames liked to be complete about things, so he made a list. Every time, from the beginning of their acquaintance, that he’d gone under with Arthur. Every time Arthur had been the dreamer. He’d never been the subject. He’d never accidentally brought a projection into someone else’s dream.
Eames carried the list around with him for days, pulling it from his pocket with his totem, turning it over in his fingers the same way he turned the poker chip. He carted it to the Bellagio suite they were using for a work space, toted it across the floors of every casino in town (a splendid thing about Vegas; there were many, many casinos), he almost shredded it, rolling it between his fingers as he rolled cigarettes. He kept it on his person at all times, his mind straying back to the puzzle, picking at it in between test runs of his latest forgery, mulling through it as he looked over the dossier Arthur handed him (ever-so-coolly, always) over his shoulder.
He was possessed by the idea. He was going slowly insane.
It was late, long after the rest of the team had abandoned the suite. Arthur was there, of course, because Arthur was actually staying in the Bellagio and had the freedom to come and go as he pleased, and because Arthur was a workaholic, a freak, if you would (and oh, Eames did), and Arthur had a bee in his bonnet about not finding something, which meant that he couldn’t leave it alone. Eames had seen him like this before, seen him worry at a problem until it gave way -- until it curled up and died under his attentions.
“Why don’t you work on something else,” Eames suggested, oh so slyly, because he was a clever beast and Arthur would never see it coming. “Ariadne asked you to look at that layout again, didn’t she?”
Cue the puppy look: Eames thought that if he ever lost the delight of seeing Arthur’s face smoosh up that way, he would rather just die. There would be no living in a world without Arthur’s consternation. “I’d need to go under for that,” Arthur said. Arthur, ever the perfectionist, always carefully within the rules, would never go under alone.
“I’m here,” Eames pointed out. “I’ll keep an eye on you.” He did his best to make his voice low, soothing, like he was luring a timid deer to him. A timid, very frowny deer. But to him Arthur came, looking first surprised, then suspicious, but finally eager with his ears perked forward toward the metaphorical salt lick Eames was offering.
“Thank you, Eames,” He said politely, but like he couldn’t quite figure out what the Forger was up to. Which was fine. Eames projected calm and innocence and thumbed the list in his pocket; nothing here, Arthur, don’t you worry about me.
He did his best not to leap about as Arthur slipped the cannula into his wrist.
The next minute was, bar none, not even while he’d waited for Fischer to open up the safe room, the longest Eames had ever lived through. He waited impatiently for Arthur to establish the layout of the dream, allowing extra time since it was still Ariadne’s work and he wasn’t completely familiar with it. He watched the second hand of the clock tick down until finally, he couldn’t wait any longer, and he uncoiled a second line from the PASIV to join him.
Arthur’s first reaction, when he appeared in the dreamscape, was surprise. His second was concern, and he said, “What’s wrong?”
“Terrible. Absolutely terrible. I’ll tell you all about it later,” Eames said gleefully, and he looked around the level.
It was a supermarket, and to properly test the flow of the aisles as Ariadne wanted, they needed people. A mother pushing a carriage, a young couple shopping, a woman single woman buying ice creams and magazines -- it was all so pedestrian. “Arthur, I’m admit, I’m rather disappointed,” Eames said, and Arthur’s eyes narrowed.
Every projection in the store turned, as one, to stare at him, and Eames stopped to wonder if a battle axe, a bloody battle axe, was really an appropriate teething tool for a child that age.
The projections, to a one, had an empty, sort of dead look in their eyes, and they moved toward him in unison. Not like people, but like wind up toys, or those figures on a foozeball table -- like Arthur controlled them all with one stick, and like they only had the most limited range of motion. He chuckled nervously and slipped two fingers under his collar (which in Arthur’s dream, he noticed, was a lovely, muted dove gray) and tugged for a little more air, because it suddenly felt like there was far too little in this world. He’d set three minutes on his line, enough to be awake and out of the room before Arthur (who he could only imagine would be quite furious at this double breach of trust) could wake. With the compound they were using, it gave him roughly forty-five minutes under.
Forty-five minutes wasn’t really a lot of time, considering. He could survive almost anything for forty-five minutes. Really, how bad could it be?
“Christ,” was all he said time to say as the projections took another lurching, unified step toward him. “You really don’t have any imagination, do you?”
Arthur, he noticed, didn’t look particularly gleeful a the shoppers tore him apart -- certainly nothing like what he thought would be reflected by Arthur’s projection’s zest and undisguised joy. If anything, the point man just seemed puzzled.
His perplexed expression failed to give Eames any of the pleasure it usually inspired.
As deaths went, “angry mob” wasn’t particularly inspired. Compared to what they’d been through, it barely even shook him -- although he had to admit, that particular homage to the age-old American/British rivalry of “Gentleman, thaw your chickens,” wasn’t the sort of thing Eames ever wanted to see again. Really, if he had the choice to discard the memory right now, he rather thought he would. Still, it hadn’t been anything that awful, and there wasn’t any particular reason he couldn’t be on his way, out the door before Arthur woke, exactly as he’d planned.
He sat, gripping the arms of his recliner, his breathing heavy and labored, and the last minute while he waited for the point man to wait was definitely winning the battle for ‘longest minute of his life.’ He congratulated its successor of four minutes previous for a well fought campaign. There was always next time.
Arthur, as always, seemed perfectly calm as he woke, and Eames didn’t need to look at the clock to know that he hadn’t killed himself to come out of the dream early. He’d actually stayed behind in the wreckage created by his projections and -- what? Probably tried to smooth out the path through the dairy aisles that had been vexing Ariadne. That was his Arthur, always getting the job done.
“Don’t ever enter my dreams uninvited again,” the point man said calmly, withdrawing the IV from his arm and coiling the line neatly back into the PASIV case. Eames almost laughed, painfully, because he could very much assure Arthur that it wouldn’t be a problem.
“What are you?” he asked instead, his voice rising high and almost panicked, and Arthur seemed -- what? Almost disappointed as he clicked the case closed.
“I did tell you you wouldn’t like my subconscious,” he said, alluding to a conversation several years past, and Eames had to dig through heaps of memories to even know what he was referencing. By the time he’d caught up, Arthur’s station was clean. “Good night, Mr. Eames,” he said finally, his eyes still dark with that emotion Eames couldn’t identify. He left the suite.
Eames lingered longer than was strictly necessary, pulling his list from his pockets and tearing it into neat, equal pieces. He pulled a lighter from his jacket and proceeded to set the remnants of the list on fire, telling himself that he was being thorough and not simply buying time.
He forced himself to take the walk to Arthur’s room, one foot in front of the next, three stories down and through miles of hallway. It’s not too late, screamed a voice that he thought was what was left of his sanity. You can still run. But instead, he raised a hand to knock on Arthur’s door.
It wasn’t exactly disappointment that lurked behind the point man’s eyes, though that was a part of it. Disappointment, though Eames didn’t know which of the hurdles he’d failed to clear. That was a lie; he knew exactly all of them, he just didn’t know which would inspire this reaction in Arthur. Disappointment and -- hurt?
“I’m sorry for entering your dream uninvited,” he said finally, because Arthur was waiting for him to say something and it was all he could think of. “Especially when I was supposed to be keeping watch for you.”
“Why don’t you come in,” Arthur said flatly, not much of an invitation, and he left the door to the hotel room open as he walked away.
Eames entered a room appropriately lush for all things bearing the name Bellagio and saw that Arthur was at the minibar, mixing himself a rather strong cocktail that seemed to use no less than three of the tiny glass bottles. He wisely held back on the urge to comment on the wisdom of mixing base grains that way, as he felt the advice, as well meaning as it was, would only serve to anger the point man in this instance. Instead, he said, “Is any of that for me?” which was only marginally better. Arthur split the evil concoction between two glasses, added a hefty pour of orange juice to each glass, and offered one to him. “Interesting,” Eames said carefully as he tasted it.
“It’s your fault,” Arthur said calmly, and he must have read some sort of confusion in Eames’s face, because he elaborated, “I drank the rest before you got here. This is all that’s left. It’s your fault.”
“You drank through the minibar?” Eames asked rather incredulously, trying to square the amount he imagined the Bellagio kept stocked with the time he’d dragged his feet getting here and Arthur’s slight stature. “Tonight?”
“No, not tonight,” Arthur snapped, and he felt some of the weight fall from his shoulders. He hadn’t thought it was possible, though if anyone was capable of superhuman feats -- even the feat of alcohol consumption -- it was certainly Arthur. “This whole week. You’re so frustrating.”
If the minibar wasn’t being restocked, that meant Arthur had forgone housekeeping services, an entirely new concept to boggle -- though really, the thought that the point man was just this neat was slightly easier to accept than the idea that he’d drunk an entire mini bar in just under thirty minutes. And when he thought about it, it made sense; Arthur was too cautious to risk such an obvious hole in their security.
“Arthur,” he said carefully, “Are you drunk?”
“Not yet, although I certainly hope to become so,” Arthur snapped, with an edge to his voice that implied he expected Eames to catch up, and quickly. “I didn’t know you’d follow me,” he added, his tone slightly more contemplative. “We may have to call for a restock.”
“When we do, see if they can help me understand what’s going on,” Eames muttered, and took a bracing shot of the awful concoction Arthur had prepared for him.
“You’re the one who says I have no imagination,” Arthur told him, matching him gulp for gulp. Someone of his slender frame should look like they were working to swallow a drink that strong, Eames thought, but Arthur gave no indication of the burn of the alcohol as he set his glass back down.
“Well yes, but I didn’t mean --” He didn’t really know what he’d meant, so he raised the glass to his lips and pulled a face as he took another swallow.
“I have no projections.” The point man said it matter-of-factly as he continued to drink.
Eames tried to envision that, tried to put it into context with what he understood of dreamsharing. “Is that even possible?” he asked, although obviously it was, as Arthur sat before him, the liquid level slowly dropping lower in his rocks glass. He answered Eames’s question with a look that seemed to go very much along Eames’s own thoughts, and Eames quickly added, “Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You wanted to know badly enough to put me under. You might as well listen now,” Arthur’s voice was sharp and Eames felt the simultaneous urge to shrink down and sit straighter in his chair. Arthur often had that effect on people. It wasn’t just his research skill that made him an excellent point man. In his own way, he was as good as Eames at handling people.
Better, maybe, because he wasn’t bollocksing it all up by diving into people’s dreams uninvited and poking around the recesses of their subconscious.
“You mean you’ve never--” he said, and Arthur interrupted snappishly, “Of course I have.”
He cleared his throat and continued, “I have subconscious projections in my dreams the way anyone else does, when their subconscious has a message it wishes to communicate. My projections are usually specific people, present to complete specific tasks in a dream.” Arthur seemed to become looser and more fluid the more he drank, which was funny. Eames felt like he was growing clumsier and awkward. “But I cannot fill a dreamscape with half-remembered faces the way you or Dom does.”
Eames thought of the dreamscapes he’d been in, not just with Arthur, but throughout his career. Malls crammed full of holiday shoppers, restaurants bustling with customers and servers -- they’d used a crowded theater once, letting their projections cram the aisles to keep the mark’s at bay. Thought of how much he could learn from a mark just by watching his projections in an environment they controlled, thought of the constant give and take that allowed him to gauge whether a mark was receptive to his forgery. He put it together with what he knew of Arthur. How long it had taken him to read the point man’s tells -- how many years it had taken him to focus on this particular aspect of Arthur’s personality. It was the puzzle he couldn’t put together until all the pieces were laid out face up, and on some level it made sense, that someone as controlled and staid above would carry it with him below.
“It’s useful for the job,” Arthur said flatly, and it was. Arthur could dream a world to perfection, give them the perfect quiet lobby or street corner on which to meet. No one -- no one sane -- would question the excellence with which Arthur performed his duties. “Congratulations,” the point man said, with a dull and bitter tone to his voice that Eames hadn’t heard before. He found he truly disliked it. “It looks like you were right about me, Mr. Eames.”
“I don’t think I was,” he said finally, which did little to cheer Arthur up. Ah. The point man was one of those --a maudlin drunk. Somehow, strangely, that revelation was not the largest of the evening. They sat in silence for a long while, Arthur rising to refill his drink and Eames turning his crystal cut tumbler between his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.
It seemed to be the thing to say, and maybe it was the right thing. Not having the words for a situation -- it wasn’t something Eames was used to. Not a position that he usually found himself in, and not one he was anxious to adjust to. But Arthur was slowly relaxing, unwinding from around his glass, and the air in the room seemed slightly, slightly, less heavy.
“Try not to let it happen again,” was Arthur’s response, and though his voice was as dry as ever, but Eames knew him well enough to think that he heard some amusement layered underneath it. Right or not, he knew a dismissal and that one was as clear as day, so he stood, one hand out to brace on the back of the chair.
“Goodnight, Arthur,” he enunciated clearly, rather dismayed with how the room tilted around him. Arthur had drunk twice what he had and the point man hardly looked mussed.
“You’ll never make it back to the Luxor like that.” Now Arthur was definitely amused, moving smoothly past him with absolutely unfair grace. “Stay on the couch, Mr. Eames.”
He should argue. It was the proper thing to do, but Eames had never been a very proper man, and a night spent with Arthur (even if that night was spent lying in the next room of his suite on his couch) was not a night to be wasted. He was moderately sure, as the point man placed a hotel blanket and pillow beside him, that this was not all a clever ploy to get close enough in to shoot him.
“Good night,” he said stupidly, and he received a tight smile from the point man. It didn’t reach his eyes or his dimples, but it was more real than any other expression Eames had ever seen on his face. Or maybe that was the booze talking.
“Good night, Eames,” Arthur said into the dark of the room, his hand still lingering over the light switch, and then all Eames heard was the sound of his own breath and the gentle shush of silk against wood as Arthur hung his suit. He lay in the dark, his eyes open but seeing nothing, and finally he heard nothing at all.
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OH I LOVE IT *___*
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