The Griefless Ghost

Pairing: Arthur/Eames, minor Cobb/Saito

Kinkmeme prompt: Arthur is secretly battling depression. In his dreams, he starts to encounter a projection of Eames (for whom he has a secret crush) that routinely verbally/physically/sexually attacks him, to the point where Arthur starts believing he deserves it. Eventually the real Eames witnesses one of these dreams, and shakes some sense into him (preferably literally, and with comfort sexing :D).

Warnings: Contains explicit. Don't ask what explicit, because it's explicit everything. Noncon, con, dream theory, and sickening domestic bliss.

But seriously, there's some disturbing stuff here. I'll just say, the first time you get yucked out? Seriously disturbed? It's not going to be the first part, or the worst. So caveat emptor, that sort of thing.

The first time he met the projection, he dropped his coffee.

Arthur liked his coffee hot in dreams in the summer. Usually he went to sleep in some small room with the air conditioner blasting so hard that it rippled over his clothes, and it was icy in his dreams. Sometimes even snowing. And then he'd conjure up a steaming mug in his hands, or it would be there when he started off, and he'd sip it, doing something languid and silly like watching paradoxical vistas stretch out in front of him while listening to music from a half-remembered past.

It made a splotch on his pants. Arthur was wearing a suit, and he bit back a howl of agony. The projection seated itself demurely across him, and purred, a dark gleam in his eyes, "All fine, darling? Want me to take them off for you?"

"No." Arthur snapped, aware he was blushing. "Why the hell are you here? Go away."

"That's a terrible thing to say to me." the projection said, smiling. Full lips stretched on white, even teeth. Arthur found himself unable to look away. "I might start thinking you didn't like me, secretly."

"Um." Arthur said. Not one of his best moments.

"Might start thinking..." Eames said. "You have some very funny thoughts in your head, Arthur." God, he'd replicated him completely, and Arthur tried not to think about how much he'd examined Eames to have such a complete copy. That accent. Fuck. Ah-thuh. He'd die.

"Go away." Arthur said, trembling.

"You're worried about Mal." Eames said, before Arthur shot both the projection and himself, two neat blasts with a deft spin of the gun in between, and he woke up, gasping and too cold, phantom heat lingering on his thigh.

You're worried about Mal.

What the hell had Eames- his subconscious projecting as Eames- been referring to? Cobb's dilemma, his utter inability to enter dreams with his dead wife stalking him, his subconscious projecting unspeakable guilt? Their endangered job, the safety of his friend?

If only it were so innocent.

No. As the day grew longer and Arthur sat in front of his computer, words blurring in front of his eyes but unable to concentrate, he became more and more sure that it was the other thing that had been referred to. The dark, dark thought that had taken root when Eames had said 'funny thoughts'- or even before, when he'd first seen his projection, his subconscious had, perhaps, been already been at work, planting that seed, the thought that-

He looked so real, no one would ever find out, Arthur being so meticulous, he could indulge himself with an illusion-

...What Cobb was doing. What was destroying Cobb.

You're worried about Mal.

Yes, he was- not denying Mal was one of the most horrible acts of self-destruction Arthur had ever witnessed in a person. Although his brain kept telling him that it wasn't the same, Eames was just some crush, not a dead wife, it would be okay to, to-

It also disturbed him, how much he wanted it. He was out of sorts these days, tending to fall to listless contemplation of- things, various things, stupid things.

He'd think about his mother's funeral, the way she'd been splayed out in her finery, the way he'd thought about the time he'd told her that he'd make them all rich. He'd tried, but it was too late- by the time he'd learned out to slide in and out of people's dreams and steal their secrets, by the time he'd learned how to wear the most expensive suits and taste the most expensive wine and chat up to rich, influential businessmen, it had been too late, she was dead and gone.

He'd think about the best friend he'd had when they was young, they'd promised they were soulmates even though he was gay and she knew she was gay, and they'd both gone to New York and she'd ended up a hooker. He didn't know what happened to her. He could find out. He hadn't.

He'd think about the way Cobb hunched over his letters sometimes, crossing out 'sorry's and 'good-bye's and 'I promise I'll come back' in his letters, because one way or the other, they were all lies.

He thought far too much, these days.

He'd tried taking meds, but Arthur didn't like meds. The sedatives they had to take on a regular basis were bad enough, and if he had to ask for a higher dosage there would be a lot of paperwork he didn't feel like going through. Rehab records? Nil. Criminal record? Nil. Tox screen? They used compounds too subtle to leave marks like that. What's wrong with you? I have this job, I built up an immunity because I take these chemicals to share dreams.

Hah.

It wasn't Cobb's fault that he didn't notice. After all, Arthur wasn't exactly fucking up more than usual- he rarely did, it was that, just, something had changed.

Not Eames, though.

Arthur tried to ignore how alive he felt when they worked with Eames, which was more often, these days. Eames had horrible clothes and a brilliant smile and a sexy accent and constantly smelled of stale cigarettes and faint cologne and leather. Eames talked to him like he enjoyed doing it, calling him all sorts of ridiculous names, and really, what could a man do?

Definitely not fuck a projection, Arthur told himself sternly, and went back to work.

The first time the projection punched him, he was so startled that he didn't fight back.

"You stupid shit," it snarled, and it was so hard to remember that it wasn't really Eames. He'd seen Eames get angry before, just once, and it was entirely based on this experience that his subconscious painted his furious colleague. Arthur touched his bruising cheek and looked up, stunned. Eames was never really nice in his dreams, there was a kind of an undertone in his mocking that wasn't there in real life, the one that said 'Well, aren't you funny and despicable', but he'd never- ever-

"We could have died," Eames said, and there was something wild and untameable on his face, the one that his dad used to wear when he was advancing on his mom and saying, I'm going to beat the fucking shit out of you. "We trusted you, we trusted you to do the job properly, Cobb trusted you, I did, so did Ariadne and Yusuf and Saito, but you fucked up."

Arthur shook. In real life, he might have- done anything, stood up, for a start, he could have punched him back, he might have shouted, he might have protested, but he was in a dream, he wasn't obligated to any of those things. He could just sit down. He could take it. The freedom was breathtaking.

"Go on," he said, so quietly that it was barely there, a space of sound just in front of his mouth, going no further.

"You know it's not really Cobb's fault for lying," Eames went on, his face contorting wildly, crouching down and grabbing his chin hard, forcing Arthur to meet his eyes. "He just wanted to get back to his family- and you're resenting him for it!" It barked off a laugh, a bitter, sullen one, and Eames-eyes narrowed with hatred. "Just because you screwed up your own life doesn't mean you have to hate Cobb for wanting his back."

Arthur tilted his head back and felt dizzy with all this emotion. "I didn't," he said, an obligatory protest, but Eames was shouting, and it was Cobb's intonation and emotion in Eames' voice now, "It's your fault! It was your responsibility!-"

He thought he couldn't listen anymore, and thought, any moment now, I'm going to stand up and shoot myself, wake up and get to work...

He was surprised by how long he could listen to it. It was only when Cobb shook him that he woke up, surprised to find that it was already morning, and he was in their house. Cobb was back, he had stayed for the night, and it was time to move on with his life.

"Where's Eames?"

Cobb blinked. "He's gone to visit a contact in Chicago. He told us. Remember?"

He did. Arthur shook away the memory of Eames screaming in Cobb's voice and the phantom pain on his cheek, and sat up.

"I'm sorry about- Fischer." he blurted out. He realized he was shaking, a little, like he had when he was young and listening to two adults screaming at each other. He'd hated strife. "I'm sorry I couldn't-"

"It's fine, it's fine. It wasn't your fault." Cobb said instantly, sitting down, his face intent (Eames said, somewhere at the back of his head: he wouldn't be saying that if we'd failed, he'd be killing you in Limbo like you should be, and I'd be joining him, it was your mistake that would have landed us there). "It's me who should apologize- I was selfish-"

Even when Cobb put his arm around his shoulder and dragged him off to the local IHOP for pancakes and a lapful of happy children, he couldn't help but feel he'd rather remain in the nightmare, where Eames at least would tell him the truth about things.

He got out of the country. Eames had gone back to Kenya, so he went to Spain and found some ratty apartment where people wouldn't question a man who slept all the time at home. He got plenty of job offers, but he turned them down. He put his suits in storage.

His dreams consumed his life now.

Arthur had never been too enraptured by dreaming. It was easy to fall in love with the power of construction and destruction, a world where he could fly and raise and dominate, but it just hadn't seemed that interesting. It was a world with new rules, that was all.

He still hadn't changed his mind. Dreams were still just dreams. When you woke up, they faded away, albeit well-remembered with a trained mind. The real world just stayed there, waiting for him to come back and make himself miserable. The real world was what counted.

At least, it had used to count.

He kept going back. Arthur had quite a lot of money at hand, with more pouring in from healthy investments, and Saito would whimsically send him a check every now and then. He checked his inbox once a month, wearing a ratty T-shirt he wouldn't have been seen dead in just six months ago, slogging through the spam and well-wishes alike. Cobb's concerned emails petered away slowly, although he doggedly persisted at least once every two weeks. He was a good friend. Arthur didn't deserve him.

From Eames, of course, there was nothing.

But it didn't seem to matter. He was waiting there every time he went to sleep.

"You're not eating very well," Eames observed, plugged to the hilt and running a hand over his back. Arthur heaved. "You're getting too skinny."

"Stay- same- in dreams." Arthur whispered. Eames' concern, he thought, was terribly touching.

"I'm your fucking subconscious." Eames said, and the way he cursed was beautiful. Arthur would touch him, but he didn't dare. "I can see your mirror, you know."

"Too- bad."

A tiny little movement, and his entire body flared, one hot long streak of electricity arcing up his spine. Eames-the-projection could stay like that forever and show not the least disturbance on his face, but Arthur- Arthur had no such control. He spasmed, arched his back so hard it felt like it would snap, and came.

He was instantly aware of the hard, businesslike pressure on his neck, even as he bled out his pleasure onto his stomach and thighs. "I told you not to." Eames said, showing his teeth. Arthur sagged, and thought of Eames, the real Eames, telling him that he had no imagination. Idiot, he thought. If only he knew. That he could imagine him like this-

"I'm sorry," he said. "I tried, I tried-"

He was aware that there was no passion in his pleas, that even as he felt himself grow dizzy and desperate with each surge of pressure, he seemed to feel nothing at all, while physically he was flailing and begging, perhaps even crying.

With casual cruelty, Eames pulled out. When they'd started off they'd used spittle, but now it was completely dry, completely. Even his dreams were not his, they belonged to his projection. He wanted to laugh hysterically, but it just hurt too much, and he screamed instead.

There was blood.

"I think you're not sorry enough." the projection said, and there was glee in its voice, almost innocent, like a child that had found a worm and was wondering, do they really turn into two when you cut them up? "I think... I think you need to hurt."

Yes, Arthur thought dimly, and moaned faintly. It hurt. Yes.

"You should turn over for this, darling." Eames said, practically purring, and without a thought Arthur flipped over, ignoring the blazing agony. He was then aware of a second pressure at his anus, and he opened his eyes wide again.

"Fuck," he said, without thinking.

"Oh, you're alive." Eames said, smiling wide, looking happy and handsome even with a smear of blood on his cheek. How did that get there? Arthur thought, and felt marks all over his body, and ceased to wonder. "I love you like this, Arthur. Alive. But these days..."

The gun went in. Arthur made a sound, not at all a scream, more like a burble. He would arch up, but it hurt too much. It hurt too much without moving, either, but Arthur was still, indecisive, in pain, and feeling- yes, alive. Eames was right. Eames seemed to be right about everything.

"...These days, it takes more to wake you up, hmm?"

"What..." Arthur said. It was sliding in, too cold and too hard, and it hurt unbelievably, but- it was a bit easier. Yes. It really was. Easier. The pain hadn't let down, but it was somehow better. "Wake?..."

Eames laughed at him. "Arthur, darling, you're dead."

He shot him.

The pain was incredible.

He woke up.

The first time the projection fucked him, it hadn't been unexpected at all.

He hadn't known that lube would become a luxury soon enough, and thought it painful, every thrust in that turned pain into pleasure at the flip of a coin and back again. But he knew that he'd wanted this, had even invited this, by deliberately researching sodomy. Of course his projection had snatched it up and used it against him. It was, to a very large degree, what Arthur had wanted.

They did it in a bed- another thing that would become a luxury. His knees hurt, and his elbows, as the projection drove in, its weight hot and heavy against his back. Back then he'd still made a conscientious effort to draw the line between Eames, human being, who was a brash but good-natured and intelligent man who surely would be horrified if he knew what fantasies Arthur was imposing on his image, and the projection (or, the Projection, in capitals, as he'd referred to it before he stopped being squeamish and started calling it Eames, like he should have from the beginning, because it made things- better).

So it had been the projection fucking him. Arthur, getting quite high on the feeling of living, even though it was dream. He ran out of chemicals, eventually, but he had no end of people who owed him favors- it was one of the things he didn't have to worry about at all. Yusuf, thinking he probably needed them for work, sent a steady supply at a relatively cheap price. Arthur even began to lose his guilt over the deception as time went by.

And if the sex got more brutal as it did, if the phantom pain in his ass and face and back lingered for hours on end in reality after particularly vicious encounters, even if Eames started to get inventive with the casual cruelty that was the everyday component of their fornication, then- what did it matter?

Arthur felt alive.

One day, the phone rang.

Arthur was sleeping naturally when it did, lucky for the caller. It woke him up within two rings, because extractors tended to sleep fitfully without drugs.

"Wazzit." he mumbled into the phone. It would be his first time talking to a real human being in several weeks.

"Darling, Milan is superb at this time of the year."

The last time he'd heard Eames' voice was when he'd been whispering in his ear about whores and dead best friends and fucking, and he'd been mindlessly writhing on an entire hand pushed inside him with little regard, throwing his head back and screaming silently into a night sky filled with sakura petals (His Eames, was quite the romantic.)

No, the last time had been when Eames had leaned over after they separated at the airport, goodness, nearly sixteen months, now, and said, smiling-

He could not remember.

But yes he could, in fact, the memory hit him quick and light, and it all came back, Eames-in-reality. He remembered as one would a stranger. Eames-in-reality. Goodness. It had been a while. Eames, in that horrible tweed jacket, touching him lightly on the shoulder, winking, and going, "Spiced it up a little, yeah? Dream a little bigger, darling-" before the cab whisked him away, Arthur left behind with his hand half-raised in a goodbye.'

No, that was not true, the last time he'd been kneeling on a sidewalk- fucking himself on an imagination- blossoms like froth in the sky-

"-thur? Arthur? You there?"

"A minute." Arthur gasped, and dashed away, leaving the receiver on the dusty tabletop. His totem, his totem, he knew it was near, he'd put it somewhere accessible and had just forgotten it. It was red, there was not much in the apartment that was red, he knew it was here-

He checked the kitchen, the bathroom, his bedroom, and finally found it behind the small mirror propped on his desk. He tossed it, trembling, wondering if he hadn't forgotten which numbers meant dream and which meant reality, because he hadn't used it for over a year. But he remembered, remembered, it came down on a three. It was real. Real.

He tossed again, just to be sure, and tottered back to the phone.

"-minus one hundred twelve, minus one hundred thirteen, minus one hundred fourteen-"

"Eames?" Arthur gasped into the phone, out of breath.

"You said a minute. You took two minutes and fifty four seconds." Eames chirped from the other end. "Cobb said you were honest when we first met, imagine."

With shaking hands, Arthur tossed, just one more time. It clattered to a three. He sighed deeply.

Eames hesitated on the other end. "Arthur," he said slowly. "What's- is something wrong?"

(Just twelve hours ago, Eames had been laughing at him on the sidewalk, his eyes like pits, as Arthur knelt on the gravel and ignored the stares of his other projections as Eames fisted him, every knuckle bumping against hot, sensitive muscle.)

"No." Arthur said. "What about Milan, Mr. Eames?"

"Saito wants us." Eames said. "As in, us, all of us. He says he hasn't found any other team that works quite as well. We're all getting back together, darling, just like a family reunion."

He'd forgotten such a lot of things about Eames' voice. As memory had faded away, his subconscious had filled in the blank spaces, and there were- differences. For instance, he'd forgotten the way only Eames pronounced Saito's name the way it should be, in Japanese, Sah-ee-to, not Say-to, like they'd all fallen in the habit of calling him. And the way his voice throbbed on a cheap phone. The way he could hear a smile in the voice. (He'd forgotten about the smile in the voice.)

"Well, yes?" Eames prodded, impatient, from the other side. "Saito will have your guts for garters if you say no, you're aware? The man's wonderful."

"Time and place." Arthur said.

After he put down the phone, he'd try to remember what precisely he'd been thinking and feeling when he'd said yes, I'll come. He couldn't come up with an explanation for his acceptance except the simple fact, it had been Eames who had been on the other side. That was all.

Something was leaping up in his chest, even more powerfully uplifting than the dreams had been at first.

Alive.

He had about two weeks and half left before they met. He used the time wisely.

Although he had received no information about the mark, there was more than a year's major news he had to catch up on. He had, of course, kept track of the basic developments, but without much interest and very little reading between the lines. He reviewed the stock market, recent turbulences in the business world, and spent extensive time on politics. When he was certain he had a firm grasp on what was going on, he switched over to less serious matters, reading through summaries of recently released movies and novels, magazines, (and set a few minutes aside each day for the fashion section). He found out about the newest line of crocs, which he wished he had not.

He hadn't cared about his appearance for over a year now, and his neighbors probably knew him as the slummy white guy who was probably hiding from the authorities, not that they cared. But the thought of meeting his coworkers again galvanized him, and he set to work in restoring himself as fast as possible, marveling at how fast time seemed to pass now he had something to do. He exercised. He ate two full meals a day, puked, and managed to keep it down the next day on. On the thirteenth day, he took it up to three.

He reacquainted himself with a gun, escaping down to some lower levels to practice. He'd been an excellent shooter, now he was an adequate one. He struggled with his aim, and integrated it into his exercises. Although he knew he wouldn't find much excitement in reality, it was the muscle memory that would matter in the dream, and that was what he'd lost. Actual strength and speed mattered less than the illusion of proficiency with his own body, which he had to build up again.

For professional reasons, of course, too, naturally, he had to regain a healthy image. There was only so much weight he could gain back in the time he had, but he'd always been skinny, and it had been more than a year since he'd seen them. They would all have changed.

He sold his apartment with three days to go, and went shopping.

Most of his old clothes didn't fit him anymore. He'd gotten thinner, and of course still fit into them, but they were professionally tailored suits- even after a year of decadence and horrid T-shirts, he could still feel the difference in the cut and line, the way they curved too broadly against his shoulders and around his waist. Trousers were the worst; one of them actually slipped off his hips. Disgruntled, he went, of course, to Milan.

He kept track of the money he spent, of course, but it still ended up being quite a lot, even though he'd just purchased a basic wardrobe that he could rotate around for a week. His shoes still fit, of course, but they were- rather Out.

And ties. He just couldn't resist.

Eames had to admit that he had misgivings about this.

For one thing, Saito. This was Saito. The last time he'd offered them a job, he'd wanted them for inception. Inception. The sodding myth of subconscious security. They'd done it, but that wasn't the point- the point was, 'Saito' translated into 'jobs we should not get involved in, ever.'

For another thing, Cobb. He'd been good when Eames worked with him. Undeniably the best. Excellent leadership. Good instincts, good ideas and reflexes. But- the kind of instability that had brought the operation down on their heads to begin with? Not good. Say he settled down with his kids, who was to say the problem hadn't gone away? Trauma didn't just disappear because you got your kids back. And he was bound to have gotten rusty.

And it would be a bad idea to involve Ariadne. She'd done a few quiet jobs, mostly involved with people Cobb had introduced her to (i.e. softies whom Cobb was sure wouldn't cheat her), and never mind the fact that she had enormous talent, Eames didn't think it was sensible to involve her in all this. She was an adult now, Eames understood that, but- still.

And well. The cincher. Here he came in now.

Eames crossed his legs. Quickly.

He hadn't lost that wiry strength, or that swift, keen way of moving, every contour of him screaming efficient and expensive. He hadn't lost that way of smiling, just the tips of his mouth and his eyes. He hadn't lost that way of reaching out and squeezing hot fingers around his heart (that stupid thing) without even talking at him, without even looking at him.

Not to say, Eames reflected, dangling a glass of wine in his hand and waiting for Arthur to finish his rounds and, well, just glance at him, just once, for god's sake- not to say that he hadn't changed. He was much thinner than Eames remembered him, and Eames remembered him very well. Something had changed in his face, too, there was just something gone that there had been before, although he couldn't quite call to mind what it was. He was still smiling, but there was something absent about it, a perfunctory contortion of facial muscles while the mind was lingering somewhere else.

He drank the wine. It was good wine. Of course it was, it was Saito's restaurant. Man had taste.

Said man caught his eyes, and had the audacity and give him a small, tight-lipped, smug I'm-the-richest-person-in-this-room smile, and his eyes flicked once at Arthur, now engaged in a lively conversation with Ariadne that seemed to involve four limbs and a lot of touching, and back again. His smile got a fraction wider.

Eames growled into his glass.

His mood didn't get any better when he realized that he would be the last person Arthur would approach. Fine, they'd never been on the best of terms, but this open antagonism- it was frustrating, that was all.

That was the fourth reason this job was a terrible idea.

His palms were sweaty by the time Arthur came by. He tried to wipe it off inconspicuously on the wine glass, but didn't quite succeed. So when Arthur offered him his hand, he didn't take it but stared it down, putting on his most dispassionate face. "Lovely to see you." he said. "This job is going to be a real pleasure." It came out a great deal more sarcastic than humorous, as he'd meant.

For some reason, Arthur's face went completely expressionless, which was a degree more frightening than anger (but not as much as hurt). Everything simply bled away. His hand dropped.

"Nice to meet you too, Mr. Eames." Arthur said-

There! There was something frightening in his gaze just then, something nearly desperate, nearly pleading-

He blinked.

"As long as you do your job properly." Eames said, smiling, trying to convey, I don't have a problem with you, let's have a good work experience, or whatever they call it. Arthur's shoulders moved in what may have been a shrug (or a flinch) and he nodded, one jerky, un-Arthurlike inelegant motion, and hurried away, back to talk to Cobb.

Eames watched him go with a raised eyebrow.

The meal was excellent- some fusion-specialty, sushi and pasta. He got a perfunctory look at the menu, all scarlet and black and rice paper, graceful kana and Italian and very little English lining it (no prices, of course- Saito would never own a restaurant where they just put the price on the menu, because it was a given that it wouldn't matter to the sort of clientele who came here in the first place), but Saito recommended him the cold papardelle al granchio sauce with hamachi, 'since you like crab so much, Mr. Eames.', so that was what he ate (To Cobb: 'Fugu, to commemorate our near-death experience'*).

After the plates had been taken away, Cobb leaned back, reluctantly pushing away his sated-cat look to replace it with his business face. "Now," he said, clearing his throat.

"Not here, I'm afraid." Saito said smoothly, patting down his front with a monogrammed handkerchief, not that anything was on his suit. "We will be discussing this upstairs."

They took the elevators to the top floor.

The files were all placed on the table when they filed in. Eames blinked as his foot hit the floor of the corridor leading to the room. It made a distinctly hollow, metallic sound under the rich carpet.

He took a look at the windows.

We're in a plane, he thought. On the fucking roof. Only Saito.

He wasn't the only one who'd noticed. Cobb raised his eyebrows as soon as he came in, and slowed noticeably on the junction, his foot testing it. Then he looked at the window, just as he'd done. Their eyes met. Eames waggled his eyebrows.

Cobb smiled. He had a much brighter smile, Eames noted, and forgave him a little for having been such an utter prick to Arthur in their last job all together.

He was too soft.

"I find it easier, you see, to transport and debrief at the same time." Saito said, smiling in that very specific way he had, just a hint of teeth. "Also, I tend to find that aerial transportation, well, potentially brings out goodwill in some."

"All that gravity." Yusuf said.

"Precisely." Saito said grandly.

Ariadne was already flicking through the files. She looked dismayed, and Eames opened his own. He was first met with a page full of colored photos, six of them. The same person. The earliest looked to be when she was nine, the last about twenty.

Next page was full of basic information on her. The next four after that, a brief history. And then-

Eames sucked in a breath. Doctor's report. Rape. And retrograde amnesia.

"Poor girl." Ariadne murmured.

Cobb's eyes flicked up from the file to meet Saito's eyes, and then quickly flickered back again. Saito was watching Cobb, looking a bit like a relentless cat. "Problem, Mister Cobb?" he said, a little slowly.

"Not at all." Cobb said, not looking at him.

Oh- right. Cobb had a daughter. This had to sting a little. Eames dragged his eyes down.

Saito started. "The story not mentioned in the file." he said, "Is that the culprit was actually caught. He was even briefly called up- there was strong evidence against him, even without the girl's testimony. In the end, however, he was let go."

"Money?" Ariadne said.

"Yes." Saito said. "Mine."

"Ah." Ariadne said. There was a short silence in which everyone pretended it wasn't silent by being, well, absolutely silent. Saito had that effect.

"That was two years ago." Saito said. "Roughly. He was a good partner then, even with his predilection towards, ah, younger partners. She was seventeen. It was advantageous to let our contract continue, so he went free."

"But not anymore." Arthur said, his voice very quiet. He did not look at anyone.

"Not anymore." Saito said. "He has, in fact, offered a great insult to me by setting up his own sector in our prime field."

Poor bastard.

"You want him to go down in flames." Cobb murmured, fiddling with his sleeves.

"Flames, yes." Saito said, and he even smiled a little, as if savoring the word. "He is not the first threat, but I do hope it will be the last, for at least the few months that will be needed for my company- companies- to complete our latest project, which will be first in the long line of a stream of innovations that... will make a few ripples. I'd say."

Eames saw Ariadne rolling her eyes. If they were down in many dream levels as Saito had plans, they'd be tearing down the layer between human subconscious and Brahman.

"You want us to drag something out of the subconscious that doesn't want to be dragged out." Cobb said. Without a word, he'd automatically assumed the role of leader- and no one protested, of course, least of all Eames. "It'll kick and scream. And, this psych report, she's mentally unbalanced-"

"A teensy bit." Saito drawled.

"Yeah." Cobb said, his eyebrows rising a little. "You do know, schizophrenics have what we call overpopulation? That means, more chaos in the brain, the subconscious, numerous manifestations. More projections. Vicious ones. Quick on the uptake."

"I'm sure you'll charm them over quite well, Mr. Cobb." Saito said.

There was a brief clash of wills, alpha male against alpha male. Eames, on a whim, looked at Arthur, thought he might catch his eye and give him a brief grin that would say, bosses, eh?

But Arthur was already looking at him, and Eames felt his smile die on his lips as he saw the expression on his face-

"We'll need to work out the fee." Cobb was saying, "And get more information, of course- starting with her real name."

"Naturally, naturally." Saito sounded pleased.

Arthur looked away. His adam's apple bobbed, and his fingers darted up to adjust his tie, stopped midway, and dropped back down.

Strange.

Milan to Tokyo was a 12 hour flight.

They talked strategy as they went, finding themselves falling back into familiar patterns, linking themselves to each other.

"One good thing is that we don't have a time limit. Plenty of time for research. Practice."

"You do, in fact, have a time limit. I want you ready within seven days."

"That's an outrage."

"Pity you're the employee, Mr. Cobb."

"It's a bit like inception. It's certainly not extracting. We're giving an idea that she should remember."

"There's no such thing as 'remembrance' in the subconscious. There's only-"

"Don't you dare give me the pipes and stopcocks simile again, Eames."

"How do we channel catharsis into this?"

"No, don't think of it as inception, it'll screw up everything. Start from the beginning-"

"We're trying to change her perception of something, of course it's inception."

"Why does it have to be subconscious? External factors could work just as well. Show her a videotape of an eerily familiar encounter, something like that-"

"Because we're extractors. The term means that we work within the subconscious."

"Oh no, Mr. Cobb. I am amenable to... creative propositions."

"..."

"As I said, pipes and stopcocks, if there's a block, ahem, ahem-"

"You're such a child."

"I was merely pointing out the clever, ah, rhyme-"

"No, he's right, it's very simple, after all. We just go in there and tear down the walls."

"It's going to be immensely hard- dreamscape isn't physical. What we need is her help in tearing them down. Ultimately, we're just observers."

"Ah ha! So it is inception."

"We're risking Limbo again?"

"No, I think we can work with two levels, it's not exactly planting, after all-"

"We need to convince her that she wants that wall down."

The nice thing? They'd get plenty of tries.

"I own the asylum, of course." said Saito.

"We want her in better surroundings." Ariadne said at once. "A base of operations, a, I don't know,"

"I am not, of course, relocating to a warehouse." Saito said.

They got a hotel.

Ariadne went, with one of Saito's men, to get their mark. Yusuf started setting up his lab in an adjacent suite- Saito told him to 'prepare for a variety of situations'.

"We must, of course, talk to her parents." Cobb said, striding back and forth. By the time they left they'd need a new carpet. "I doubt we'll find anything new on her- thanks to the extensive research already done-" (Saito smiled, raised his glass, nodded, and went back to his dossier) "But childhood relics, toys, important relatives- personal things. We want to really get to her."

"I can send a man." said Saito.

"No, it's fine, Arthur speaks Japanese." Cobb said. "Arthur, are you-"

"Of course." he said, hand moving up to fiddle with his tie, stopping midway, then dropping. "I'll go-"

"With Eames." Cobb said distractedly. "They live quite near, I think you can get the job done within six hours-"

"Wait," Arthur said, having gone quite pale. "Cobb, I can do this on my own-" then his voice sort of choked off, and he twitched a little. Eames tried not to feel hurt.

Cobb didn't quite notice the level of Arthur's agitation, and merely raised an eyebrow at him. "It is always better to travel in pairs, Arthur-"

"It's not a high-security job." Arthur said, a little more vehemently than the situation warranted. "I'm not going to get shot."

"You might get lost, darling." Eames objected.

"I'm the one whospeaks Japanese." Arthur said vengefully.

Saito had been watching the with an arched brow, dossier forgotten. "No, in fact, I believe it would be a good idea." he said. "After all, it would not be outside your experience to have met obstacles that you had not foreseen."

Arthur, for some reason, flinched at that.

"I think that's settled." Eames said, standing up. Arthur followed suit, much more slowly. He did not meet Eames' eyes. "Let's get this done, then?"

"She was seventeen... typical time for schizophrenia to set in."

Arthur was silent, running his hands over the walls, looking- somehow- diminished in the room. It was the room of a young child, perhaps thirteen or twelve, not seventeen. The curtains were frilled cheaply at the hems, and the wallpaper was a simple dotted affair, brown and white. The furniture was uniformly a yellowed white.

Arthur looked terribly tired as he stared around, looking lost and unhappy.

"You okay?" Eames said nonchalantly, moving a foot closer to him, pretending to examine the bedside table. There was little on it. A lamp and a music box. Eames tucked it away in memory all the same- these would come in handy. He took a picture of them, too, as Ariadne might want to know. Arthur did not answer. "Hey."

He touched Arthur's elbow tentatively, wondering if he would be murdered for daring to sully the fabric of that terrifically expensive Armani suit.

Instead, Arthur jumped practically a foot, spun around, and nearly toppled. It took him several seconds to catch his footing with the aid of the desk, and when he finally did, he stood there, swaying a little.

"What the hell." Eames said, and then wished he hadn't, because the moment he spoke Arthur fixed his eyes on him- a bit like a predator focusing on a noise, except not at all. Not at all like a predator. "Arthur. Arthur-"

"I- jet lag." Arthur said.

"Well yeah." Eames said, disconcerted. "If you were tired, you should have said- this isn't an urgent mission, Cobb would have let you get some rest-"

Wait, he thought, that's not what I should have said, I should have questioned him on it-

But the moment was over, Arthur was back to his unruffled self, all vulnerability carefully folded down and tucked away. Even the way he stood was different. His spine could have been used as an index for heterosexuality. "We should look at her books." he said, as if nothing had happened. "She looks to be an avid reader."

She was. Eames flipped through the English books for a few minutes, but they were all easy books, used more for learning the language rather than for enjoyment. There was a dog eared The Red and the Black, heavily annotated up to the fortieth page. Eames grinned as he pushed it back in, reminded of his own English textbooks.

He watched Arthur flip through the Japanese tomes, wondering how proficient he was in the language, exactly. Enough to get by? Excellent? He thought about asking, but didn't.

"She was fond of mythology when she was young." Arthur murmured, not looking at him. "Classical figures; Izanagi, Benten, Susano, Amaterasu- then she moved on..." his hand deftly plucked another book from the upper shelf, "To world mythology... especially the Greek pantheon. She was quite a reader."

"Uh-huh."

"At age, fifteen, I'd say, she'd moved on to more eclectic-"

"How can you tell what age she was at, anyway?"

"She never removed the stickers from the back when she bought them." Arthur said. "I'm placing them by date, look." (He still was not meeting Eames' eyes.)

"Ah." Eames said, looking at him intently. "Clever. Go on."

"Funny thing is, she never reads anything on romance." Arthur said. "Not a single book on it."

"Asexual?"

"That's an extreme conclusion to draw, but..." Arthur looked tense. Eames had to smile- he was so... conservative. He'd probably never had rough sex in his entire life. "I think we're going to have to draw her out with... more childlike things. As we see, mythology. She has a weakness- or had a weakness- for art-"

They had to take some of the books, in the end.

"You bring them back?" asked the mother anxiously, in broken English. She looked far older than the file proclaimed her to be, her hair shot liberally with gray, frown lines heavy around her mouth.

Arthur said something in Japanese. Eames hovered impatiently, holding the sack in his arms, waiting for them to finish their conversation...

...and thinking. Arthur was being incredibly jumpy. To a lot of people, he'd seem his usual poised, gelled and expensive self, but Eames was positive that he'd kept the memory of old Arthur sharp, and something had definitely changed. The way he held his shoulders, a fraction too hunched in, the too-wary dart of his eyes.

Possibilities raced through his head. Job gone wrong? Torture? Someone die near him, in reality? None of the possibilities appealed to him at all- they worried him, deeply, and he hoped whatever it was, it wasn't anything serious, because if it was-

If it was, well-

He'd definitely need to talk to Cobb about this if it got worse.

They got back almost as the same time as Ariadne- the mark- or subject, rather, Eames supposed, was drugged to the teeth. Ariadne looked the worse for wear- there was a scratch mark on her cheek, and her hair had been firmly tied back.

"She's a little violent." she said.

"Isn't this a bomb." Eames said cheerfully, eyes seeking out Cobb. Arthur, next to him, was definitely drooping, this time with genuine exhaustion. "Cobb, I'm knackered- I'll just choose a bed, shall I?"

Cobb, without looking up from his file, waved his hand at him to go on.

The rooms were all interconnected, and without quite planning it, Eames found himself in a room adjacent to Arthur's. Arthur firmly closed the door in between, leaving Eames to stare at it and feeling bizarrely hurt by the click, and unpacked. Eames listened to the quick, efficient buzz of zippers being undone, the clack of coat hangers being pushed aside to make way for clothes, the opening and shutting of drawers as Arthur settled in. Eames did not do the same but simply stripped and sank into his bed, thinking vaguely about... things.

He felt fast asleep, and did not dream, of course, but before he did what he thought, mostly, was a half-fogged notion of something is... wrong.

Although he felt like he'd been blown to hell, and his muscles settled in to the mattress like they never wanted to straighten out again, he didn't go to sleep for another hour, at least.

In a way, it was soothing.

In his... dreams- yes, they were dreams, Arthur was unsettled to find that he was having difficulty referring to them as dreams, he'd never seen Eames sleep. Close his eyes, stretch back and relax while Arthur laid his head on his bare stomach, while Eames idly dragged a knife along the back of his neck- but never sleep.

The man was in the next room, and after ten minutes of trying to relax, he'd found that he could hear him breathing. All the way here. He started wondering all the inane things, can all people hear him, is it something about this hotel that amplifies sound, don't guests complain, is it just me- and then he started thinking, he doesn't exactly snore, he just sort of breathes very heavily, he doesn't move around a lot, I wonder what position he's in-

And then he stopped thinking at all, and just started listening to his breathing.

When he awoke, Arthur did so with a spooked sense that he might have dropped off to sleep and dreamt of continuing to listen to Eames' breathing- either that, or he'd been awake much longer than he remembered.

Cobb waylaid them all at breakfast, with the manic look of a man who has too long been denied the job he loved, and had spent the night up taking the data apart and back into a well-detailed plan. He launched into it right away, but Arthur rather thought he and Saito were the only ones coherent enough to pay attention.

"Cobb, for god's sake, we don't have a plan until we get into the girl's head and see what's there, for fuck's sake." Ariadne grouched into her salad.

It was true, they found out, when they hooked themselves up onto the device and dived under.

Really, dived under.

Arthur oriented himself correctly, blinking hazily, and swam up towards the light. It was there, surely, he could even see the waves breaking over the surface above, but he never seemed to get nearer. He tried not to panic, but in his state it was even impossible to remember that this was a dream, and obviously he could not toss his totem to make sure.

Time warped around him, and it could have been two minutes or fifteen when the sharks appeared.

They boiled out of the darkness, dozens of sleek gray predators. Arthur was suddenly aware that he was trailing blood, and it most unrealistically had drawn a trail through the languid waters, almost a straight line from the depths to his body. He watched with mute horror, his arms working to move but not being able to move at all, and the first shark caught him by the foot.

His scream of pain was lost when the fifth clamped its horrifying jaws over his head.

"Holy fuck," Eames blurted when he awoke, and ripped the IV from his wrist. Arthur was already awake, looking stoned as he stared up at the ceiling, his left hand absently kneading his right forearm. Ariadne was still under, jerking in her sleep. Yusuf's chair was empty, Eames could hear him in the next room, throwing up.

Saito's eyes were open, but aside from that he gave no indication of being conscious. Cobb met Eames' eyes, and they both looked at the sleeping Japanese girl, and then back at each other. Cobb shrugged.

"All fine?" he said loudly.

Yusuf vomited eloquently in the bathroom. The toilet flushed.

Ariadne held on for another grim minute before she too awoke, looking distinctly pale. "Merde," she said, rubbing her eyes. "Holy fucking shit. I couldn't change things there! Every time I did, she warped it right back at me!"

"Quite an experience." Saito agreed peacefully, still not moving.

"She wasn't warping it back, precisely." Arthur said. "The chaos in her brain is simply too overwhelming for anyone to impose order upon. Especially since we've kept her sedated for quite a while, now, she must have turned her efforts inwards."

"What now?" Eames said.

"We go back." Cobb answered, rubbing his eyes.

"Not me!" Yusuf yelled. "When you figure out how to stabilize things in there in the first place so we can get even deeper- then you call me!"

Arthur had been avoiding being in the same room alone as Cobb since he'd arrived, and had succeeded so far. After being crammed in Saito's plane and then being sent off to Hisori's house, he'd gone to sleep right away. They'd started on Hisori today morning, and so far it had been fine.

But after the second go, after they'd come out all a little shaken (it was a collapsing building, the walls pasted over with old Bauhaus, with no paradoxes but just too much damned space) and decided to take a break, Cobb managed to corner him in his suite.

"Where have you been?" he said.

It wasn't the first time he'd asked- in the Milan restaurant, he'd briefly peppered him with questions before having been drawn away smoothly by an intent-looking Saito. This time, though, he wouldn't be dissuaded that easily.

"I was very busy." Arthur said, thinking that it wasn't untrue. His mind flashed back, not of his own will, back to memories of drawn-out sighs and bumps of unfamiliar muscle and dreams that had become longer and more powerful than the small, petty reality he lived in. Cobb would never understand. Not after Mal. It wasn't the same thing, not at all. "After you went back, I... got a job, and you know how it is, one leads to another- I was on the run for a few months for a time..."

"I asked around." Cobb said. "No one told me any news about you, and there wasn't anyone saying they'd hired you- and you didn't email me back for months at an end, or call-"

He hadn't- realized. He thought of those few perfunctory responses he'd bothered to send, back in that ratty apartment in Spain, and didn't know what he should feel- relief, that those few emails would provide him the basis upon which he would build his lies (lies that he'd actually existed during the vacancy of his life, that he hadn't been a virtual corpse), or guilt, that he could feel relief at all, when Cobb had obviously worried so much about him. And he couldn't deny that he felt touched, too, that Cobb had.

Those thoughts flashed by in an instance, and he had another reply at his lips, quick enough to break Cobb off. "I was going under an alias- you'd just gotten back home, I thought it would be safer for me to disappear as well. We always worked together."

Cobb was still frowning, so Arthur darted in another word- one sure to make some progress- "And you- Dom, you had your family, you were settling in- so well- I didn't know if I had... if you had any space left."

To his surprise, it wasn't hard to sound just the right measure of sacrificial, vulnerable, and good-natured. In fact, a feeling welled up in him so strong that he realized, or wondered if, part of the reason he'd faded away was precisely that. He hadn't quite thought of it that way until now. He took several deep breaths.

Cobb's face was working, the hardness shifting away to that old warmth, like the first day Cobb had stopped to really look at the hunched-over kid reading Aeschlyus in the subway, and had offered him a job. "That's nonsense," he said with such conviction- Arthur was reminded, bizarrely, of Mal before she went mad (but he tried not to think of Mal, for more reasons than one) when she'd been pregnant with Phillipa and had treated him as an elder son. "You know you're always welcome- if I'd known that was the problem-"

"I know, I know." Arthur said, "But you know, it just happened, I said, one job into another, and pretty soon I just... started thinking-"

Cobb's face moved, like he was going to smile but not quite. He shuffled forth and gave him a not-quite-manly hug, one brief squeeze around his shoulders, and drew back even before Arthur had time to flinch.

"You still should have contacted me." Cobb said. "You didn't have to- disappear like that. Don't go thinking I've been happy with that. After the job, you're going to come over and spend some time with us."

Arthur sagged against the minifridge after Cobb exited, as silently as he'd entered, and felt a weak, watery warmth squeeze his chest.

None of them were composed when they awoke, not even Arthur, not even Cobb. They all ran their hands over their arms, and for a few seconds the air was filled with that odd consonance, palm over arm. Yusuf raised his eyebrow at them.

Eames pressed down on the vicious urge to scream that he was never going back in there, not again- partly because he couldn't bear to be seen the coward in front of Arthur, and partly because Ariadne, the youngest and a girl, had recovered swiftly and was now reaching for one of the cups of tea Yusuf was handing around. That angel.

"Hard time?" he said solicitously, but there was an undercurrent of schadenfreude there, definitely. One of those fallen ones, then. With bloody good tea. Eames sipped it as an Englishman should, and then just threw the whole thing back, because god if he weren't getting too old to have dreams of being drowned in acid.

"Just out of morbid curiosity," he said, the only one to answer, "Do acids really work that fast on the human body? It took about three minutes, I think, for me to die."

Yusuf winced. "Bases work better than acids for dissolving organic material, actually-" he said, but everyone glared at him.

"Stop talking." Ariadne said. "It's not like she ever had to drown in acid to recreate that experience, anyway."

This first incident where she noticed them, deliberately tracked them down and then killed them turned out not to be the exception. Yamashita Hisori noticed them every single time after that. They'd simply intruded so many times that she had realized, on her own, how to lucid dream.

"Fuck, I didn't know a person could do that." Eames said once, ripping out the IV and trying to rid himself of the feeling of having had half his body roasted by a dragon. He glared at the prone Japanese girl, who had been out cold practically four days straight, and had not had any significantly lucid period in reality she could have possibly used to gain understanding of her surroundings and her own mind enough to start lucid dreaming. Her gaunt features pressed into the expensive linen as she slumbered on. "How the fuck did she figure it out? She's supposed to be sleeping."

"To be fair, we've been in her head quite long, now." Cobb said, stretching back and wincing.

"She was a very intelligent girl." Arthur said. The last few days had... somehow shrunken him, he looked that moment as tired and defeated as he had the day Eames had accompanied him to the subject's house. He tugged nervously at his tie with shaking fingers, not meeting anyone's eyes. The thought returned to him, with stronger intensity, that he ought to say something about it... call him out on it, or at least tell Cobb about his worries.

But it wasn't as if Arthur was compromising the mission with his... whatever. To the contrary, he'd been invaluable so far, acting as a reliable translator with Hisori's words and her books. They'd tried coming up with a dreamscape, based on those, designed to draw her out, but it never seemed to quite work, Hisori's rabied projections swarming over the place and destroying whatever intent they'd put behind it. Arthur was killing himself over that. They could appreciate the effort he was putting in.

But neither Ariadne nor Yusuf had known Arthur for more than one job, and they didn't know that his work now- exemplary and painstaking as it might be- was sub-par compared to the brilliance he had displayed, just over a year ago. He'd been at his peak, then, a multi-talented extractor with an exceptionate eye for detail and precision. Cobb had noticed. It had taken Eames a bit longer, but he had as well.

But Cobb wasn't saying anything, and Eames supposed that if Cobb, who'd known Arthur since he was a scrawny teen with too much talent to rot peacefully, wasn't saying anything- in public, at least- it probably wasn't anything too bad.

He resolved to keep an eye on the situation, though. Obviously.

The first sign that the situation was devolving came when they were plunged into a dungeon.

Not one of those empty dungeons.

"She has- quite the imagination." Ariadne said, her lips white where she was biting them. Unconsciously, she reached out and grabbed someone's arm- it turned out to be Eames. He slung a companionable arm around her. Arthur dragged his eyes away.

Corpses had tumbled on each other in small, languid piles all around the room. Some appeared to be sharing limbs. Several decomposing bodies were locked in unmistakable positions of fornication.

"Maybe you should go back." Arthur said quietly, watching Eames' sleeve drag against the back of Ariadne's neck as the girl turned a little, averting her gaze from a particularly mutilated pair.

"Oh no," she said immediately, although she still looked ill. "You need me. My constructs stay longer than any of yours."

It was true, and she proved it by, with an effort of will, dissipating the corpses and turning the room into a bright, sunny salon, recreating it down to the lingering smell of hairspray and shampoo.

"Ooh-er." Eames said, and removed his arm. (Arthur noted.) "Where is she, anyway?"

Cobb was staring at the mirror to the side, the one that took up half the wall. "There."

"Ariadnedon'tlook." Eames said in one rush of words, but she did-

-and gave this very small hiccupping sound like she was too shocked to speak, and Arthur didn't blame her, because in the mirror, in the exact same room they were standing in, they were there.

But different.

It came to them in a blur of images they didn't quite stare at too long, but couldn't wrench away from. Arthur registered it as Ariadne's own clothing threading through her body, through, silk scarf disappearing into her neck, limbs splayed obscenely but at least not sexually, bunches of her shirt shoved into her stomach. Cobb's limbs- had been braided, and where the bones had broken they jutted out too long, dream-long, out of the flesh, he himself had become a porcupine, with what looked like one needle per pore, and Eames-

Eames-

"Let's get out." Arthur heard someone say in a quiet but slightly too-high voice, and was stunned to realize it was himself. It wasn't like this was the worst thing he had ever seen, Eames had made- that was, his projection had done things just as gruesome while pinning him somewhere in front of a mirror. (Memory was too quick, too hard, dreams shouldn't be like this, they shouldn't remain in his mind like this, this wasn't normal, but he pushed the thought away)

It was just Eames, face a mask of gore, being strangled with his own intestines-

Cobb did the act expertly, and they all left within dream-seconds of each other. They blinked to an awakening at the same time in reality.

Ariadne brushed away tears that had smeared on her cheeks and pretended she wasn't too shaken.

"This is- getting overboard." Cobb said, and sprang to his feet. Arthur watched him move, a fraction shakier in his pacing. "I have to let- Saito know that we can't do it."

"Come on," Eames said, but even he did not look too convinced. "We have three days until the deadline. We can't stop trying."

"Saito's paying us by the hour." Arthur said, his voice neutral, but it startled him. It was as if the words had just leapt out by themselves. Eames was staring at him, looking faintly surprised by his support, and Arthur struggled to remember where he was as the gaze pinned him like he was a concussed moth.

"We try again." Ariadne said. Her voice did not waver.

The fifth day, Saito came back.

"My meeting concluded most satisfactorily." he announced, as if anyone had asked. "I trust you will complete the mission in time, so I can fit in my associate's downfall as a grand finale to this business quarter."

Ariadne squinted up at him, eyes bloodshot. Cobb openly glared, and Saito gazed baldly back. Somehow it didn't seem all that worth it, going diving down to suffer all that shite just so they could indulge this man. A practically omnipotent, ridiculously rich, charismatic magnate, but- still.

They forgot to seeth when Saito took them out for lunch.

"I can't believe I'm here." Eames said. "Excuse me. I need some time with my totem."

Cobb grabbed onto his sleeve and pointed at his top. It had rolled to a stop on the top of the table, which was not glass but some crystal structure threaded through with veins of light blue and green.

"We're in the Kagai." Ariadne said, swaying.

"What would you like to order?" Saito said, sitting down and cracking the menu. There was a smirk on his lips as he watched Cobb gather his top and stuff it into his pockets, and something vaguely predatory. "I assure you that most of the food here is up to par."

"Oh man." Yusuf said, looking giddy.

They had a fairly excellent time.

In a ridiculously expensive Japanese restaurant where they were charged per unce of perfumed air they breathed in, where the dazzling noon sunlight flooded in filtered through a layer of rice paper and cast (tastefully fragmented) prisms all over the table, it was easy to forget everything that had been happening to them for the last few days. Dreams were, after all, dreams, and no matter how upset one felt after waking up, their inevitable nature was the ephemeral recollections they left. Even trained to retain such memories, it was hard to take them seriously when they were here, money ramming reality home.

Arthur chose something from the menu that looked like someone had threaded grass through sliced lamb, and worked his way through it quietly as everyone else chatted amiably, giving his quotidian input in semi-regular intervals so it would not seem as if he were withdrawn. During the job, he never spoke too much, but when they were out for an occasion it would seem strange to keep his silence. He found it oddly trying on his nerves, especially when- he- gave a laugh that was a little too loud, or happy.

It ended soon enough, though- after spending stretched-out time in dreams, reality seemed to blur past like a highway.

"We have a complimentary selection of wines, sir, would you like to-" the waitress who came over after their dessert (something exquisite done with delicately sliced mangosteen and tapioca) had been cleared away said in accented but flawless English. She smiled at them, and Arthur thought, I wonder how much we're paying for that smile, too.

"Hell yes." Eames said, stretching, his expression devious.

"No drinking on the job." said Cobb, his face not as severe as it could have been. The luncheon had mellowed him.

"Do not worry," Saito said pleasantly, "I will be subtracting his pay for the period of his intoxication."

Eames, instead of looking disappointed, just let out a little laugh. Arthur thought of the hell they'd been through for the last few days, and thought he understood. He dragged his gaze away from Eames, all the same.

They ended up purchasing- that was, Saito ended up purchasing- a couple of bottles of something, lines of tiny, inked kana streaking across the rice paper.

"It says Sauvignon Blanc." Eames said, looking vaguely confused, running a bottle around in his hands, and Arthur found himself staring at those hands, the bump of the knuckles, the strong fingers and broad palms, and the slight green sheen the elongated, squarish bottle cast on them. "But everything else is in Japanese. I know my wine; what is this? Imported?"

"It is French wine." Saito said, looking at him as if he were a dim child.

"If it's imported, why's it in Japanese?"

"It is not imported." Saito said.

"It's a money thing, Eames." Ariadne said.

Eames screwed up his face but did not protest. Arthur turned his gaze swiftly to his own hands when Eames turned his head to his direction (too spindly, too pale, his own hands looked so incapable, somehow, that moment) but it was only to ask all of them if they were leaving, now.

They were.

They split up at the parking lot- with the exception of Saito, they'd all arrived in Cobb's rental, but agreed that on the way back they'd go three each.

Arthur opted for the rental, along with Ariadne, and they made for the spot Cobb had parked his- and all three stopped in puzzlement.

"I know we've only used it about twice, but I could have sworn yours was a white Avante." Ariadne said. "Where'd it go?"

Arthur ran his eye over the lot halfheartedly, not particularly feeling like throwing himself into the problem. In the spot Cobb had parked his car, there instead stood a gleaming new Wasabi, which he vaguely remembered from his cram-trawling on the internet while he caught up with a year's worth of news. It was the most expensive car this year, something like that. It didn't look that different from the numerous expensive cars he'd seen. It looked like it would be a limousine when it grew up, all dark, dangerous gleam and low hood, and a faux-grill, wiped silver.

"Don't tell me some rich bastard towed mine away so he could have my space." Cobb said, clearly disgruntled, casting a look around at the near-empty lot. The other three were already driving out, coming their way. Saito's driver stopped a few feet away from them, and in the passenger seat, Saito rolled down his window, and gave them a slow smirk. "Problem, Mr. Cobb?" he said, enunciating in that way people did when they knew something others didn't, and wanted to show it in the most melodramatic way possible.

"My car is gone." Cobb said. "I knowit was this floor. There's only one floor for the lot."

Saito gave one whopping swoop of a gaze, his eyes travelling from Cobb's face to the Wasabi in his spot. "I believe that is yours, Mr. Cobb." he said, in that same smug slow way. Arthur gritted his teeth, and saw Cobb's temple shift as he did the same.

"What?" Cobb said.

"Your keys are in your pocket." Saito said, and rolled out the window.

Arthur stared at the Ferrari exit out into a blue sky and roll down the road. It had been over a year since he'd wanted to laugh like this. Cobb's expression was to die for.

Cobb reached for his totem.

"Come on, Dom, let's take her for a ride!" Ariadne exclaimed, hitting him lightly on the arm, and bounced impatiently in front of the door until the man reached inside his trouser pockets and blinked as his fingers found something he evidently had not expected.

The car door clicked.

"But I didn't even click-" Cobb said, and then something spread on his face, a rare kind of delight. "Let's get in."

The reprieve lasted only those few hours.

They went in again in a better mood, even though they had made no real progress in Yamashita Hisori's mind except for being shown gruesome images. Cobb insisted there was something in there, though, and was plowing through with it, anyway. They'd compiled a list of leads they could follow up on, and had tried talking to Hisori, mentioning the subjects they'd come up with one by one, trying to find a way to get to her.

This time, they didn't even get the chance.

The sun baked the pavement, and a dark haired girl leaned against the wall across the street, wearing a white sundress. She made a point of meeting their eyes, one by one, before tilting her head and walking inside a building.

"She must have a fever," Cobb said, the sweltering heat getting to them as they jogged. "We should-"

"Talk after." Eames said. There was excitement in his voice. "She's sent the projections away, we're getting somewhere, Cobb!"

They were. Not to a place they wanted.

It was a theater they walked into. It was likewise empty, but they saw a flash of dark hair against white marble wall, blank-perfect from the imagination of an inexperienced lucid dreamer. The posters were all of the same movie that Arthur recognized, some crime movie from a few years back, Red Eye. He tucked it away into his head to look up later.

They followed her into one of the smaller auditoriums. It turned out to be one of those disjointed dreams where time tied into knots, and a few seconds later they found themselves seated, all four in a row. Arthur was at the right end, seated next to Ariadne. He turned his eyes up to the screen, which was flickering to life-

This was wrong, he thought, but could not move. Did not move. Semantics looped on themselves and twisted in dreams. It seemed so unimportant, because it was himself that was up there.

Screen-Arthur was in a bathroom, naked, sitting on the toilet lid with his head in his hands. He looked younger than Arthur did now, not much, perhaps by a several years. There was something around his neck, a cheap-looking ornament. He was aware of Ariadne looking down, cheeks tinted pink, but the other two were still staring up, Cobb with a clinical look of concentration (and quite some apprehension) and Eames was too far away to decipher.

The camera swung towards the door. It had one of those shoddy bar-locks, and the tip of a knife traveled up the crack of the door and knocked the piece of metal out of the way. Someone outside rammed the door open, and a fat, naked man stormed in. The camera zoomed out a little to give a full shot of his body, from the thick neck, the sagging bulge of his stomach, the angry erection that jutted out from his pelvis to the patella, a tense divot in thick, flabby stretch of his legs. Screen-Arthur's head jerked up, and he rose, his eyes going wide- at the camera- Arthur in the theater squeezed his own shut, but opened them a second later, determined to look at this, he wasn't weak, it wasn't like he was-

Seeing this kind of thing for the first time, really-

The fat man spun the knife in the air once, caught it, and slapped screen-Arthur with the same hand. The boy- yes, call him that, Arthur thought to himself, it would work to distance himself from this- tumbled back, into the tub, hit the wall, fell down, his legs draped awkardly against the edge of the tub. The fat man lifted them up, spreading them forcibly-

Ariadne was making a little sound next to him, a series of distressed gasps, and Cobb was growling, an entire-body rumble-

No, was it Eames?

Himself on screen reached up, his arm twisting awkwardly, and his fingers scrabbled against the knobs on the wall. The water came on as the fat man positioned himself, water sprayed out on them-

(Ariadne's gasp)

"SLUT!" the man roared, his face twisting with anger, and thrust- the camera tilted away, and gave them a panoramic shot, the fat man's buttocks quivering as he rammed in. Screen-Arthur, his face pressed against the floor, made a sound that made Ariadne press her fist against her mouth, a high not-scream of unutterable agony-

Arthur did not even think of moving from his seat- later, they would see this as evidence that Hisori was getting skilled with her manipulation of her own dreams, but at the moment Arthur thought nothing so clinical. He was frozen, watching himself on that ridiculously vast screen (really, whose idea had it been, to install such a huge thing in theaters? Small view would do quite well, this was... overpowering) as the man fucked him, curses streaming out of his mouth.

It was Ariadne, bless her, who warped the dream around- she'd always been the best at manipulating dreamspace- she stood up, faced them, a small black shadow in front of the glaring screen where the fat man was currently hitting him with a shampoo bottle of some sort as he thrust in. Arthur's gaze was still fixed on the screen when she shot him first, and two things followed him to awakening, when he opened his eyes without much fuss to see Yusuf and Saito waiting on the sofa. One was himself, eyes squeezed shut, blood draining out with the shower spray as his entire body rocked with the force of the other man's blows, and the other was the trail of tears on Ariadne's face as she pulled the trigger.

Ariadne was crying for real when she woke, her face screwed up against the force of it as she visibly struggled to get herself under control. Cobb curled into himself, his face stony, but his eyes were on Arthur, and he desperately wished they weren't looking at him like that. He suddenly hated Hisori, hated her intently, not because she'd shown him that scene to hurt and shock him- he didn't feel that hurt and shocked, to be honest, just kind of blank- but because she'd made them, those three, look at him like that, and he hadn't even done anything.

"You okay?" Cobb asked him.

Arthur raised his eyebrow at him. "It was just a dream, Dom."

Yusuf looked like he was going to ask, but shut his mouth.

It's going to go down okay, Arthur thought with relief, no one's going to make a fuss- but the explosion came from an unexpected source.

"She's having fun with this," Eames yelled, lurching to his feet and slamming a fist against the wall. He looked enraged, suddenly, his eyes settling on the ever-slumbering Hisori. "That- bitch, that fucking bitch, she's just playing with us like this, we can't do this anymore-"

Arthur was aware of the fuss, but it seemed that something rang in his ears, a clamour that he could not ignore. It was not the words he listened to, but the sight of Eames stalking around the room in a barely-contained fury, sending looks at Hisori often now and then like handing an unpleasant task in small doses. If looks could kill, Arthur thought vaguely, but most of him was remembering- that rage, how absolutely- it had been so-

He was aware of heat traveling slowly through his spine, something far from arousal, something like a large, slow animal raising its head and scenting the air. His own breathing sounded loud. The image of that fat man returned to him- and he remembered the way he'd seen his own legs splay up with an external force, those meaty hands holding his heels in place-

Exchange those hands with-

(A wine bottle, Sauvignon Blanc, the bottle contours squared out, the green hue, the rice paper)

He swallowed.

"No, I will not calm down!" Eames shouted, but his voice was coming from the bathroom (when did he go there, Arthur thought, his thoughts like pudding, sinking slowly down under a layer of languid blankness, and something else was rising, a bubble of gas up to the surface, and he knew what it was, not a desire but compulsion, and when it popped he knew what he would do, he'd go to the PASIV and...)

The toilet flushed. "Fuck, that was the most expensive thing I've eaten in my entire life." Eames said disgustedly, and emerged again, face not green, but pale. Arthur quickly looked away, because Eames was looking at him-

Stop looking at me, your eyes are all wrong, you're all wrong, you're the wrong person, you can't look at me like that like you- like you care-

"I'm all right." Arthur said, and stood up. It would be in character to go out, quietly, and leave everyone in the dark as to what he was thinking. He wanted to do that. "I think- I'll go- get a drink. Or something."

"Do you want-"

"Alone." Arthur said, looking at Cobb, aware of what his face must look like but completely unable to control it. He felt like a clogged drain, things piling up on an overloaded system, unable to process. His own throaty yells as his legs were wrenched up. Ariadne crying as she shot him. Eames vomiting into a toilet. Eames grinning at him as he ran a knife down his sternum. Eames punching the wall, enraged on his behalf. Eames twisting his arms behind him and shoving his torso over the edge of a building. Eames playing with a bottle of wine. Eames- Eames-

He had to clear it. All of it. Clean slate.

"I'll be back." he heard himself add as he left.

Arthur headed to his own suite. He had his own PASIV at the bottom of his suitcase. He remembered battling with himself over packing it, he remembered thinking I'm through with this unhealthy obsession and also knowing- not thinking, but knowing- no I'm not. It the end, it had been like compulsion, his hands folding it away- without the cooperation of his brain, but under the control of the part of his being that took the form of a British forger in his dreams.

He locked the door securely, and with hands that did not shake, he slid the IV in under his skin.

He closed his eyes, took two breaths, and his dreams hit him like a collapsing building.

Arches loomed out of the ground, sprouting out from the marble bases like flowers. Cathedrals lurched up into the sky, spires jutting proudly under the sun. Obelisks sprang up, a chorus of grinding metal on metal.

It was soon too much, no space at all for roads, only buildings. Arthur soon found himself wedged in an alley. To his right was a beautiful building in red brick that felt rough against his arm, even through his shirt, and the left was a cold metal-plated monolith.

Eames stood in front of him.

It was a dream, so there was nothing strange about the fact that he stood unfettered by the architecture around him while Arthur stood trapped. He, in fact, started off from a distance and took half a minute in reaching him. His walk was casual, itself a paradox, because the paths where he walked were wide. Arthur watched him approach, and closed his eyes.

"You've been a while, pet." Eames breathed in his words like a gasp, his expression murderous, his eyes glittering with malicious, furious hatred.

Arthur bent his head back. This felt... familiar. It was terrible, but it was also good. He could already feel the pain in his back, a sort of reverse déjà vu, in anticipation of what was to come. "I'm sorry." he said. It felt good to say I'm sorry and be sure that no one would lie to him that he had done no wrong. It was good to have Eames finally tell him the damn truth about himself-

Eames reached out, took his throat. He was wearing what the other Eames, the one who wasn't real right now, had worn the first day Arthur had seen him in sixteen months, that odd mix of casual and formal- crisp white shirt, a beautiful maroon tie that had been loosened a little too much, a fawn-colored jacket over it that had no place in a business meeting. The black trousers, the sneakers cleverly disguised as proper brogues. His hair, rather longer, in casual disarray.

But the smile never changed. The fingers tightened. Arthur tipped his head back to give him better access, and felt the pain first, than the dizziness, and then a new flash as a knife ripped down his torso, starting at his tie and going down to his lower abdomen. His clothes sliced neatly away like butter, and blood welled from the shallow cut on his front.

"I always say I'll split you open," Eames spat, "But I think we should try a new way. We haven't done this in a while."

Dreamily, Arthur moved his arms- Eames was allowing him some freedom, now, the buildings had shifted a few feet away- and tugged aside his ruined clothing and shrugged them off.

"You're beautiful when you're not being stupid." Eames told him, running a finger down the long cut, smearing blood in one thick, shallow line. "It's been a fucking long time since I saw you... I missed you."

Arthur smiled, almost happy enough to cry. When Eames ran his bloody thumb across his lips, he licked it.

It was a dream. It did not taste like anything.

That was wrong. He wanted to- feel, taste, whatever. There was an easy way to do that.

He opened his eyes wide, and glared at Eames, feeling absolutely deranged. "Fuck me."he spat, and watched Eames' face twist darkly with a bitter satisfaction.

"Red Eye is a movie from five years back. Story's simple, there's a terrorist and a girl. We can see obvious parallels." Cobb said. "The main character was even raped at knifepoint in her past. Yamashita Hisori obviously-"

"It doesn't matter anymore." Eames said, his eyes a little bloodshot. "We're not going back in there."

Saito raised his eyebrow at him. Eames ignored the look. "We can't. This is impossible. Saito, enduring this isn't worth your grand stand-down-"

"From all accounts, it was not you who were injured by the, ah, viewing." Saito said delicately, picking at some imaginary lint.

"No, goddamit, it was Arthur! Fuck, he can't do this-"

"Funny thing, he seemed quite capable half an hour ago." Saito said.

Ariadne asked in a quiet, nervous voice she hadn't used since her first job, "Where- where is he, anyway?"

"In his suite." Cobb said instantly. He'd checked, of course. The door had been locked. Cobb trusted he was doing something to calm himself. Perhaps even drinking. He wouldn't blame him. "Let him rest."

Eames obviously was not finished. "He can't go back in there." he said, not shouting anymore, but in a voice that had somehow narrowed, each syllable becoming a diamond point. "He can't."

"It's not- your decision." Cobb said, but he seemed shaky on the issue. "We found- a way. Hisori is revealing herself to us. The images, disturbing as they were, they're getting closer- closer to what we want her to-"

"Hisori," Eames enunciated slowly, the diamond points turning into knives, "is not male. Nor was she raped upside down in a sodding- motel tub."

"We're still getting closer." Cobb said doggedly. The conversation was between those two, now, everyone else shut up and watched them like a tennis match. Back. Forth. Back. "The images- aren't real. Dreams fade fast if we want them to."

"Yeah, and that's supposed to be a consolation? An excuse?"

"It's her dream. She could have done anything to us there, but she's not. Her own trauma's preventing her, somehow, from doing the same to us- as the victim- there's a key here, there's definitely a key here-"

"Screw you- screw you-"

Eames ran out of breath. The room was very quiet.

The door clicked.

Arthur glided in, the epitome of composure. He sat down next to Cobb. Everyone stared at him like he was a ghost. "What did I miss?" he asked. The only sign of discomfort he gave was when he shifted in his seat, wincing for some reason.

"We were thinking of-" Eames started, but Cobb and Saito both shot him a glare. The combination seemed to quell him, or perhaps it was Arthur's narrow gaze, passing over him like he was insignificant.

He looked better. In fact, better than he'd looked for the last few days, when he'd been overworked and laconic. He almost looked like his old self- still too gaunt, a bit pale, but that stillness.

Cobb continued. "Arthur- we were thinking of taking you off the team. What just happened down there... it wasn't..."

But their arguments crumbled in front of Arthur's startled, but steely stare. "Take me off the team?" he repeated, not in italics, but the words just hung there in the air, in plain block letters, indigestable. It seemed ludicrous to everyone, just then, that they could have thought of removing this obviously undisturbed man- a most capable member- from the highly difficult picture. He himself looked astonished, a poised sort of astonishment, by the suggestion. "Whatever for?"

"The..." Eames said, and trailed off helplessly when Arthur fixed his gaze on him again. There was just something off about his eyes. They looked kind of glassy. Perfectly focused, but also glassy. And the look in them wasn't quite human. "We..."

"You can't be serious." Arthur said calmly, without even a hint of laughter in his voice. The way he said it made it clear, I've just made a figure of speech. What I don't mean is, I'm trying to convince you to let me stay on. What I mean is, you're going to let me stay on.

Cobb tried again. "You must be upset about it, understandably?" It turned into a question.

Arthur laughed. The sound set Eames' teeth on edge for some reason, although everyone else seemed to be calm enough about it. It was... something. It sounded like carefully distilled hysteria, condensed and cut off into even bytes. Mechanical madness. The impression rushed by him in one instant, and all Eames had to grasp at when the understanding passed was the impression that no, that laugh, it was wrong. Nothing coherent.

"Cobb," Arthur said, almost gently, "It was just a dream. They don't leave marks."

They took the rest of the day off, anyway.

Arthur was clearly displeased, but Ariadne pleaded that she needed a break. She most definitely did, but Eames knew she wasn't as freaked out as she claimed to be. Ariadne was young but resilient, although everyone went a little soft on her (as Eames thought it rightly should be, some misguided chivalrous instinct still residing in his self).

Eames was spending some quality time with his hideously expensive Sauvignon Blanc. He shouldn't be using a sake cup to drink it- he had a dim idea that this was sacrilegious to wine tasters, but no one seemed particularly bothered. It was excellent, but Eames rather thought of putting it away again. He couldn't quite bring himself to savor it in this mood.

Dreams. They faded. One often woke with intense recollections, but they faded swiftly, and trying to write them down was like trying to keep the ebbing tide in with a collection of tin cups. And it wasn't even that- dreams weren't about events, precisely, they were about the entire thing, the chaos. An elephant was as significant as a pebble or a mote of dust in a dream, but in reality one tended to take note of the elephant.

But extractors were trained to recollect even the details, not the bare causal stream of things. Cobb had an eidetic memory, but Eames knew he'd spent four years honing himself to retain that talent in dreams. He himself had always dreamed vividly, had a natural talent for recollection, and an uncanny mind for details. Arthur hadn't been that type- he'd built his skill over the years, slowly but surely, with incredible effort. The hardest tower to build was the hardest to demolish. Arthur probably couldn't let his dreams go even if he tried.

The wine smelled like melon and grass, and Eames spent a few minutes just breathing in the scent. Slow intoxication. Yes, he'd do that- he never got hangovers from wine, only beer, and tomorrow he'd wake up languid and relaxed and he'd go in again. He didn't have any delusions about succeeding in this, but the pay was excellent, and besides- it was a guilty pleasure, working with people he liked.

Liked rather a lot.

He took a small sip of the drink, merely wetting his lips on it. He was torturing himself with this. Arthur sat a few feet away, working on his computer, looking impossibly poised. It was six in the evening and his suit was immaculate, his tie straight, his hair unruffled. He blinked rarely, the computer monitor turning his face white. He looked old like that, old and stern but still fucking beautiful, and Eames put his cup down because if he didn't retire for the night now it was going to kill him.

"Kind of tired." he drawled. "Tomorrow morning, yeah?"

Yusuf looked up from the chessboard. He had four pieces left. Saito had... more than Eames could count from this distance. "It's just six fifteen." he said.

"Long day." Eames said, and could not help looking at Arthur. Not obviously- even drunk, Eames had a conman's discretion. He instead gazed at the door, a few feet away from Arthur, and noticed him outside the focus of his vision. He was still on his computer, concentrating. "For all of us." (Still no movement.) "We should all get some rest." (Arthur's arm moved as he pressed something on the keyboard.)

He gave up, and returned their good nights with a good natured, slightly drunken salute, and headed to his own suite. He felt too sober.

He'd see if he couldn't fix that.

Eames looked unfocused the next day, Arthur noted. His hair was combed and slightly wet from his shower, but there was the way he smiled, a little zoned-out. Just two days ago he would have thought- ridiculous things, about that awful tie, about the corners of his mouth, the warmth of his shirt- but today was today. Arthur had gotten everything in place.

He loved the way everything had suddenly turned into glass edges and straight, focused lines. It was the way a person with bad vision would feel he first wore glasses, everything snapping into a clarity so unexpected and relieving it was almost shocking. He felt like the future had straightened itself out, and he knew where to walk, and there was something moving around in him. It was something good. It buzzed on his nerves and obliterated the distractions, and he wondered why the hell he hadn't thought of living like this- obviously it was possible to juxtapose his two lifestyles together. Why, they complemented each other- the fine edges of pain drove him forth, snapped everything into place, made him calm, because nothing mattered.

One did not notice the imperfections in a vase after it was shattered.

Just a single shard that briefly ruined his serene veneer:

"Arthur," Ariadne said. They were just about to go in. Yusuf stood next to the PASIV, ready to press the button. Everyone was waiting for him. "Is something wrong?"

Their solicitous faces told him it was perfectly understandable if there was.

"No." Arthur said. His voice slid out without a hitch, his face was still locked in the vaguest of amiabilities. "It's just- my hands-"

They were shaking. Not fine tremors, Arthur could have managed that. They were shaking, heavy, noticeable shakes, and the silver of the IV needle blurred against the gray of his trousers. He did not swallow, or make a face, or clench his hands. He stared at them, wondering what could possibly be wrong with him, when everything was going so well.

"Here, let me." Ariadne said, leaning over, plucking the IV from his hands and sliding it smoothly into his skin. Her hands were expert, a surgeon's grace, an extractor's. She smiled at him. Arthur did so back, smile working in flawless auto, at it should be. "Ready to go?"

Arthur clasped his hands together firmly, and leaned back. "Let's go."

Yamashita Hisori had obviously never been to an actual marsh. She'd seen movies of it, maybe, cheap adventure films, read books on it. But she didn't know how it felt to have your boot dig at the soft silt below the water, how it clung against sodden, rotting weed.

Arthur moved forward fluidly. Things erupted into hell around him. He saw Ariadne in the distance somewhere, thought about calling out, but didn't. They were here for Hisori, and they'd postulated that a realignment of olfactory details- smell was, of course, most connected to memory- could be the key to bringing her memory back. Unlikely, but worth a shot.

Marshes had no part in it, and Arthur wondered what the hell they were doing here before he came face to face with Cobb.

Who was upside down, blood streaming from his gut wound to his face.

Arthur blinked at it, weary of Hisori's childish games. It wasn't as if this sort of thing even phased him anymore, even the slightest bit. He'd gotten it all sorted out now, in his head, he had it all figured out. This was just a dream. Life was going quite well. The real Cobb was dreaming in Saito's hotel. Blood didn't frighten him anymore.

Something exploded out of the thick coppice in a flurry of foul-smelling feathers, screeching to the high heavens. Arthur tore his gaze away from the fake Cobb's ruptured abdomen to stare at a gigantic bird, a blur of yellow and a colorful blue tail, its wings beating agitatedly at the water.

This was wrong. That bird shouldn't be here-

"That's not mine."

He was facing Hisori. He hadn't moved, but that was the way dreams were. He answered- "If it's not yours, who-"

He swallowed. There was something wrong with that question.

Hisori didn't look like the part of the villain anymore, the mocking laugh, the cruel, deranged smile, the long, tangled dark hair. She looked like a young girl instead, and she seemed small all of a sudden, water lapping at the knees of her jeans. "Who are you?" she asked. "You're in my head, why have you brought-"

What was she talking about-

Why have you brought-

That bird.

He turned around, Cobb was gone, but his agitation was still there, a parrot his father had bought for him when he was seven or eight, a sick yellow huddle that had died within days of its arrival.

This wasn't Hisori's projection.

It was his.

"No," he whispered, denying it, but it was all falling apart, the edges blurring, and everything was back to the way it had been, a year ago, his worst times, when nothing was clear and everything lay in dust. His calm was gone, just like that, and he stared wildly at the parrot he'd once christened Cookie. You didn't bring in your projections into other people's dreams. You didn't. The only case he'd heard of was Cobb's, and Cobb-

He ran.

Ungracefully, a jumble of limbs and muddied fabric and time and space whirling by him as he tore his way inelegantly through Hisori's subconscious. He didn't even know what he was doing here anymore, everything was tearing down in front of him.

Then he stopped running, because there was no point in it anymore. No point in anything.

Yes, a thought gripped him, his eerie-light gaze boring into him, his fingers bruising down on his shoulders. He had a solution, he'd always known it, and it was so very simple. He smiled at his projection of Eames, feeling that familiar daze steal over him again, and reached out to run a thumb on his stubble.

All he needed was a few minutes- Eames was here, everything was all right-

"Arthur? Arthur! There he is!"

The world shook itself back to chaos again. Eames disappeared as Cobb marched up to him- not a wound on him, and somewhere in the distance Arthur thought he heard a parrot cease its screeching- and took him by the arm. "Where were you? Ariadne set up the landmark."

So she had, but he'd been running, or he'd been distracted by- by him. There he came, too. Arthur stared at him, confused, with too intent a gaze that made Eames pause in his walk, something flickering on his face. Hadn't he just been wearing- something in paisley? Green? But this one had a jacket on-

Focus! He told himself, but it was useless, everything had been battered into pieces, and Eames, he was coming closer, although he mustn't. Arthur tore his eyes away with an effort that was very nearly violent, and stared instead at Cobb. "What- are we doing?" he said, and his voice sounded unfamiliar and lost even to him, and he heard himself also say give me an answer, although to his relief it did not emerge from his mouth.

Cobb was staring at him, perplexity melting into worry. "We were- working on smells, Arthur." he said, a bit too slowly. "We were going to-"

Eames was next to Cobb, now, and somewhere Ariadne was approaching as well. It was Eames he reacted to, though, the scent of leather and cigarettes, and now very faintly of the wine he'd had yesterday. This wasn't Ariadne's construction, or Hisori's memory. It was his, again, and he twitched violently with it, revived slightly. "I know that." he said, his voice businesslike, crisp, and all he had to do was stuff his hands into his pockets to hide the tremors. "What I mean to say is, what are we doing wrong? This isn't going the way it planned."

"We were going for cherry chapstick and her assailant's Pancaldi cologne." Ariadne said, breathless. "But it went wrong! I know I got it right, I smelled them for an hour each before coming down here. But-"

"It smells like Sauvignon Blanc." Eames said, sounding faintly amused instead of disturbed, and Arthur wondered how he could he, couldn't everyone see that this was his doing? That he was the one messing up, introducing foreign elements? How could they be so calm about this when the world was falling apart, he was falling apart, oh god, they could all see it, any moment someone would go and say it, expose him for the mess he was.

"And... cigarettes." Ariadne said. "Like, old cigarettes. And there's cologne, but it's the wrong type, I think it's Anthracite."

Eames laughed. "I used to use that one." he said, and Arthur's chest felt like it was going to beat its way out of his chest.

How couldn't they see it, Arthur wonderered, as they headed back to the haven Ariadne had built, the rusty framework swaying high up, completely at odds with the landscape. The projections were already circling, hostile, and that had been the intention, to draw Hisori to them. As they walked, Ariadne struggled to change the scape, blot out the visual and bring in the olfactory. They walked through a series of flickering scents- cherry gave way to cigarettes again, turned back into some foreign cologne that seemed vaguely offensive- Hisori's own interpretation, not theirs- and it turned back into Anthracite, although Arthur struggled mightily not to think of it.

"You shouldn't drink so much." Cobb was saying to Eames.

"I didn't!"

"What's with the wavering, then?"

"Intoxication doesn't bring in interference!"

"I wouldn't know, I've never been drunk on the job before-"

"It's your damn cologne-"

"I used it, what, ages ago! In Mombasa, and maybe on the inception job, I didn't even remember it until Ariadne brought it up-"

How could they not notice, Arthur thought again, feeling like he was in trance. Ariadne sealed the door behind them and he watched the projections angrily storm around, feeling vaguely sick. It's me, it's me, I'm sorry, I never meant to do this, this is all my fau-

He was there. Outside. Standing stock still, dressed in a green paisley shirt that clashed horribly with his jeans. Hands in pockets, a slight smirk on his face, his eyes boring into Arthur's.

Standing next to Hisori.

Ice ran in his veins.

They weren't looking out yet. Ariadne was still struggling with the scent, Eames and Cobb squabbling over the semantics of intoxication and subconscious. Arthur watched paisley-Eames put a hand on Hisori's shoulder, whisper something in her ear that made her laugh, laugh like a child who'd heard an adult joke. He was speaking Japanese, of course. Arthur spoke Japanese.

He didn't know how much time passed- time passed like hiccups in dreams, anyway, it couldn't have mattered. Eames turned Hisori around, a pliant and happy-looking Hisori, combing out her long hair with strong, gentle fingers, and then braiding it. He had to do it twice, because he missed out on a few strands he didn't see, and he was touching Hisori like he'd never touched Arthur, gentle but impersonal, and Arthur had no idea how to feel about that-

He'd just torn his gaze away, because even if he couldn't solve his problems he didn't have to be such a- voyeur- when he heard Ariadne gasp, "What the hell-"

So it started- Arthur closed his eyes, this was when it would all start to blow up in his face, when Cobb would grab his shoulder and demand how could you let this happen, I taught you better than this, you disappointed me, and Eames would stare at him with that stunned expression I never knew I was working with such a sick fuck, and Ariadne would never treat him like a respected colleague instead. He put his hands in his pockets again.

"Fucking-" Eames said, and then his voice choked out and died like someone had broken his neck, twisted his throat around and strangled the sound in the messiest way possible.

"I hate her," whispered Ariadne.

It was-

Yesterday, after they'd awoken from the theater, Arthur had gone down and had dreamed, he'd met Eames in a stranglehold of oppressive architecture. Eames had pushed him upside down, not getting rid of gravity but keeping it there, all the blood rushing to his face, making the experience much more visceral when Eames had crouched down, wrapped those capable hands around his throat, and squeezed.

His neck started to hurt with the memory of it as his Eames, outside, recreated it.

Later, he would think back and put the obvious together- that the other Arthur had been Hisori's projection. That his subconscious had run through a section of the routine he had ached for but had been denied. That his own projection of Eames had been the piece that had all sealed it together, the key to their project- Hisori didn't like any of them, but this was part of him that she understood, and they should have thought of it to begin with.

Just that moment, though, there was nothing but his sluggish, tired heartbeat and the scene taking place.

Eames had taken off his jeans midway, the waistline at his knees. He was fucking Arthur languidly, an Arthur that seemed a universe away. They were just a short distance away, perhaps seven, eight meters, and in the dream every detail jumped out at them, as the dreamer wanted them to remember this. Arthur's back was pressed against the marsh weed, his hair half-submerged in the water, because Eames was pressing down on his neck with his hands, a calm smile on his lips. His eyes met Arthur's- the Arthur who was watching.

Look closer, he seemed to say, look at us, aren't we, together, like this? And they were, Arthur's suit bisected neatly as it been in his own dream, a line of blood on his sternum. Eames' hand on his throat, pressing down like a dolmen, a bland expression on his face, a jeering one. Arthur's legs splayed and wrapped around Eames' waist, calves pressing into paisley, his body reduced to one shuddering white curve of pain.

"We don't have to watch this." Cobb said from behind him, his voice tight- with disgust, Arthur knew, he was nauseated by all this, what Arthur had created. Yet, he himself was still unable to wrench himself away, even though waking up would be a simple matter. Eames in paisley rocked in, one fast hard thrust, and the other Arthur's head jerked into the water almost entirely, the hands around his neck submerging as well. "Arthur. Come on."

Hisori was standing there next to him, her hand wrapped around his wrist. Cobb snarled. "You bitch."

Now she'd say something. That man isn't mine, it's your friend's, I didn't dream up this depravity, it's all his. But she didn't- instead, she twisted her body, maneuvering them both so that she was standing in between Cobb and Arthur.

"What the hell." Cobb said, and the gun wavered a little.

Arthur stared down at Hisori's plaited dark hair. She had some very nice hair, rich and long, and Eames had touched that hair, Eames had touched her like he'd never touch Arthur. Eames touched Arthur like pushing down into muddy water bruising his neck killing him and bringing him back to life. "Cobb," he started.

"I want your friends to go." Hisori said. "Even the man who fucks you in your dreams. I want them gone, now."

"What did she say?" Cobb said.

If he were lucid, he would have come up with a cleverer lie, but he wasn't, he was drowning. "She wants us out of here," stumbled out of his mouth.

"Why is she standing in front of you?"

"He asks too many questions." Hisori said, her voice bright, manic. "I'm going to-"

"Hisori-"

But something had lunged forward, one of Hisori's projections, and Cobb was dying again, splayed in reverse, blood from a gut wound streaming into his eyes. Somewhere in the distance, a parrot shrieked. Ariadne gasped in horror, but she was next, collapsing in a hail of gunfire.

"Arthur!" Eames shouted, his voice urgent, "Arthur, take yourself out, she's going to-"

She can't hurt me any more than you did, Arthur thought, but Eames was dying, and he was unable to stop himself from flinching, and he could feel his hands vibrating in his pockets like they had a life of their own. The parrot gave a sound like it was dying as Eames' corpse sprawled on the ground, blood leaking out of his ear.

"I liked the other him, so he died quickly." Hisori said, whirling around, her face alive. Arthur stared at her. And suddenly Eames was there, a presence behind him that radiated heat. His hand skittering on Arthur's throat, coming to close around it entirely, and a thumb stroked up and down his chin. "I like him, too, his name- Eames?"

She pronounced it Imzu, and he felt cornered by them, Hisori's sudden talkativeness, Eames behind him, hand ready to tighten any moment. He arched into the touch, eyes closing, and it was suddenly better, he was grounding himself in Anthracite cologne and leather and an arm looping around his waist.

"His name is Eames." Arthur whispered. "Yes, that's... his name..."

The kick came.

He was a puppet, jerking in darkness, and the pressure on his back became his own weight, sagging into the hotel couch.

Arthur was becoming weary of awakening to see the others staring at him like they expected him to have a breakdown. He would have gathered himself, collecting himself into one searing point of efficiency and intelligence, but when he looked for himself to do that he could not find anything.

His hands buzzed on his knees.

"I-" he said. His mouth felt dry. "Need a glass of water."

Yusuf obliged. There was a terrible silence in the room as they watched him drain the cup, throat working in a series of swift, small swallows.

"We are going to stop." Cobb said. "Saito, we can't go on anymore."

Ariadne did not look like she disagreed. Eames, instead of raging like last time, had fallen into a deep, terrifying silence, like an eye of a storm.

"We will talk about our contract after you have all rested." Saito said.

"No, no, we talk about this now." Cobb fretted, but there was no heart in it. They were all sick of it, having their jobs and the creation they loved turn on themselves by the brutal psyche of a hurt child.

"I want to stop, too." Ariadne said in a small voice.

No one needed to ask Eames' opinion.

Arthur set down his glass and met their eyes, without feeling like he was seeing anything at all. "I will retire to my suite." he said bluntly, uncaring of deceit or courtesy anymore, because there was only one thing to be done now. His back felt warm, like someone was pressing up against him.

He rose. No one stopped him, but their eyes tracked him to the door.

The last thing he remembered was having to try several times with the IV line. His hands had started shaking violently when he'd attempted it, for some reason, almost as if some part of him didn't-

Then he didn't have to think anymore.

He had no evidence. None at all. So Arthur retreated to his suite when disturbed, for a short period of time- less than an hour. So he didn't answer when he was in that state. And he'd done it once. And he'd looked perfectly well when he emerged- icily so.

Eames had seen his hands. He also knew what sort of drugs caused that sort of thing. He'd seen the expression on Arthur's face in that dream, when he'd turned around, like he was out of his mind with something, or on something.

He'd planned on following from the moment Arthur had left. He'd expected to have to something drastic- steal a card, break a window, something like that. But on his way out, 'downstairs to get a coffee', Saito tucked something into his coat pocket. The movement was quick, but small and hidden, the reflexes of a pickpocket. A card key.

Eames paused, and could have sworn there was something on Saito's face, a little like guilt.

He did not nod, but went on, walking down the hallway. Ah, Arthur's suite next to his. The door in between had been firmly locked from day one, but it was still the narrowest divider. He pressed his ear against the wood, and concentrated. Everything seemed to hush around him, a ring of silence. There was no noise from the next room-

Except the quiet wheeze of the PASIV.

The knowledge of what Arthur was doing frightened him more than the drug theory. Eames hurried, running out of his own room and unlocking Arthur's door, not bothering to be quiet now, because the several minutes he'd wasted already added up to an hour in dream time- and god knew what Arthur had done in that hour already. Or- good gods, a horrible idea came to him, if he'd gone deeper, he could have stretched it out-

Arthur was fast asleep on the bed, hooked up. Eames did not hesitate to follow, pulling out a cord of his own.

"Screw you, darling." he muttered, finding his vein easily. "Screw you very much indeed."

He closed his eyes.

He was in a city, standing on the roof of a building. The weather was terrible but windless, as if someone had pasted a picture of bad weather over the area but hadn't bothered with the additional details. Typical sloppy dream, not characteristic of Arthur at all. He obviously hadn't planned anything, and was caught up in something to which the design of the dream had no relevance.

And it was so empty.

Peering down, Eames couldn't see any projections at all. Granted, the place was clogged with buildings- it rather looked like one of those industrial ghost cities- and he couldn't see many roads from where he was, but even so, the place stank of abandonment.

It was not one of those convenient dreams where you found yourself in the same room as the dreamer, either. This place was vast- and wandering around just hoping was not an option. He'd find him in the end- the nature of dreams being the way they were- but he wasn't satisfied with being found.

Eames dreamt a little bigger, and flew.

It meant that he would draw an obscene amount of attention of projections nearby- flying was only safe enough to be enjoyable in one's own dreams- but there were none at first. He glided between buildings, the details hazy and leaving only a faint impression of old and peeling and little else. He tried to be unobtrusive, staying close to the walls.

After a while, he saw people, but none of them were looking up. None of them, in fact, were even moving about much- most were sitting down, their heads bowed, listlessly scattered around the city, doing nothing in particular. He saw a disproportionate amount of homeless people, almost a normal city's number, just sprawled on benches and sidewalks.

Projections told you a lot about a person's state of mind.

He flew faster.

Eames had reverted to the classics.

Arthur was curled up, pulling his knees back as far as they would go with his hands. Eames' chin was tucked on his pate, Arthur's own shoulders braced against his chest, Eames' arms encircling him to work at his hole. It hurt. Like the furies.

"Huh-harder," he said, his entire being reduced to a fleeting, fading whisper on the wind, saying, harder, liven me up harder, let me taste it for just one more fucking second-

"Pushy bitch." Eames said, and twisted the bottle of wine around in his hands. Arthur gasped helplessly, feeling it push inside him, cold and fragile. The blunted square corners grated against muscle. Impossibly, it slid in what felt like a full inch deeper, and he let out a raw scream, his frame vibrating with the force.

"Darling," he was told, the word grazing his ear like some hot exotic butterfly, "If you clench your arse... just once... that thing will break."

In reality- he didn't know what would have happened in reality. But in the dream, the bottle was as fragile as Eames wanted it to be, and now Eames wanted him to hurt. It could crumple like paper, be as thin as a thumbnail-

"It could," Eames picked up where he left off, "be cracking right now, hairline fractures from neck to bottom, a slow process like building a spiderweb- but you just can't hear it begin its slope to shatter because of your heart, your heart, it's beating- tell me who it's beating for, Arthur-"

"I- Eames, I don't-"

The projection left the bottle where it was and grasped his knees, pulling them viciously back, almost behind his shoulders. Arthur let out another hoarse scream of pain, startlement, and terror- the rough movement was bound to have knocked the bottle about, it was going to break, it was going to break-

"You'd like your arse full of glass, wouldn't you-"

"Eames-"

"Stop." Eames said, and he did stop. Eames ran a hand up and down his chest, in a proprietary, and almost soothing motion. Arthur shuddered and sobbed a little, arching into the touch. The other hand left off from supporting Arthur's knees to stroking his hair, very gently- and Arthur relaxed, even unmindful of the feeling of the lip of the wine bottle grazing, then pressing against the asphalt- the bottle in him shifting, his ass straining with the agony.

"You like this." Eames said, the hand on his chest moving down his body to cup his straining erection. Arthur couldn't stop shuddering into that touch, as he always did. "You like this, you like being a fucking whore, you like not being able to control your own dreams, because you never had control over anything in the first place. Why lie to yourself, that you did? I was always here, love, and just because you stopped dreaming for a month doesn't mean you didn't see me down here every fucking night."

Eames' grip turned almost brutal, and everything blurred together, it was no longer even just pain and pleasure but a different sort of hurt, a dull one in his chest that seemed to fester quietly even when other pains threatened to drown everything out.

That was how the other Eames found them.

There were screams, and then they stopped.

He threw all caution to the wind and rose up into the sky. A few projections glanced up at him then, but they didn't even glare- they just stared upwards with a terrible expression on their faces, something a lot like- it couldn't be- longing-

Filing it away for later, Eames soared off into a new direction.

"No, no, no," he said, aware that he was slurring but not caring, staring up at the second Eames' horrified face with blooming terror and guilt. "You can't be here, you can't be here, get out, get OUT GET OUT-"

He hated that Eames at the moment, so hard that his heart thundered with the hatred, and he was aware that he was crying, and he was about to surge to his feet, summon up a gun and shoot him, shoot him so he could awaken and get the hell out of his dream, this was his dream- his secret- his weakness-

A knife slid smoothly to his throat, mid-movement. Arthur hissed with pain, but stilled his movements reflexively. Being killed here would have been the best move, naturally, but somehow-

"What is this?" the other Eames said, sounding as if there were many emotions he was repressing in an attempt not to frighten him, and calm himself.

"And," the Eames at his ear said, sounding delighted, "Who is this?"

He thought he'd lost all his inhibitions, all his shame, across the history of his liaisons with his subconscious projection of Eames. Apparently not. He had his legs splayed out in an obscene, and obscenely revealing fashion, and Eames had to have an excellent view of the wine bottle- his wine bottle, the one he'd chosen out and bought himself- lodged bottoms-up (oh god- what a horrible pun) in his arse.

That was it, then, there was nothing for it than to thrust his neck forth, slice it on the knife being held there, wake up- into reality, where it would fade away with time, where lights could be turned on, where memory could be conveniently erased with the right amount of money.

He did not. Arthur did not have to think very much to know that it was because here and now, he still had a protector with him, whereas in reality there would be nothing in between that clear shocked gaze and himself. Not even a knife. Not even a wine bottle.

"Nice view you must have from there." Eames said, shifting a little, bringing his arms around Arthur's legs again to pull them back in one hard, vicious movement. He couldn't help screaming as pain blazed through him again, and it seemed that his heart had moved to his head, pulsing at the temples, fast, furious beats. "Like it? He's pretty, isn't he? You know he is, you've always liked him, you're always staring at him-"

"Fuck you," Arthur rasped out, mortified.

"He likes it." Eames said. "Watch, I'll-"

"Get the fuck away from him."

Arthur had been unaware that Eames could sound like that, like there was hell opening up in his throat, and the words were ground out like they had torn up something in there in the process of escaping. His face was contorted like he was going to scream or cry for one blurred second, and then he was holding a gun in his hands, one of those angry guns, all black and twisted steel, the safety very small and hidden.

"If you shoot me..." Eames said pleasantly, and Arthur was getting confused which was which, and insanely, he thought, which one's the good guy? As if this were some movie, or a novel, where there was a simple answer wrapped in black and white and artful sheens of gray, a key that wasn't mired in layers of confusion and heat and pain and madness. "He'll... topple. And I swear to you that the glass will break, because he secretly wants it to, he does."

A heartbeat, Eames staring at them, something close to betrayal on his face, and also something that was very clearly pleading, and Arthur could feel the Eames behind him grinning into his shoulder.

"And you can't deny," he said sunnily, "That you want it to break, too, because- you like seeing him, you like him screaming, you like him broken, just like I do, and you'd love to see him all twisted and bruised because it's the only way he'll ever show you anything of himself that-"

"FUCK YOU!"

The first bullet went wild, ricocheting off the wall and pinging off to the distance behind him. The third narrowly missed.

The second found Eames' arm.

Eames did not scream. He did not move. Instead, he looked up, and Arthur was glad that he could not see his face, and terrified because the other Eames, he could. What he was seeing wasn't really a reflection at all, it was Arthur he'd be reading in the ugly contempt of the projection's expression.

"You should realize," he said, reaching out and around again to grasp the neck of the bottle firm, and the movement made Arthur cry out, "that his dreams- they aren't Arthur's anymore. They're mine."

The next few moments stretched out over an eternity.

Eames pushed it up, but the pain was lost in the white flare of pleasure that followed, and Arthur could not help but make a sound- a cross between a hoarse moan and a mewl. Eames kissed his ear.

And then he punched Arthur brutally in the stomach.

His screams drowned out everything.

He was aware, perhaps, of Eames- one of them, he could not tell the fucking difference anymore, yelling as well, and he heard more shots. He heard laughter, and felt blood on his face, but all these things were fleeting notices, prank phone calls sent to a busy 911 line, because nothing,nothing could make its way past the shattering pain inside his gut. Muscle tore with the ease of wet paper as glass dug in. He felt it grinding against his intestines, he felt shards shoot up his arteries and grate against his lungs.

"Fuck, fuck," Eames said, crouching over him, and Arthur was dimly, very dimly aware that there was only one of him now. He couldn't tell which one it was. He didn't care.

"I'm sorry," Arthur said, and he was sobbing, too, he didn't know he'd had time to cry, it just simply hurt so much, and he could only mouth that one word, because he was, desperately, sorry for everything, and he wanted to convince Eames that he was, in earnest, very truly sorry. "Eames, I'm sorry, I'm, I-"

"Shut up," Eames said, but there was no rancor in it, and it sounded rather as if Eames were using the words to steady himself. "Darling, shut up."

And Eames was moving him, very carefully, but new pain ripped up out of his spine and layered over the original one, and Arthur would have screamed more if he had any breath left, but he couldn't. There was only pain. No words for it, only blinding, mindless pain.

He opened his streaming eyes to find that Eames had changed the entire landscape, the ghost city falling away into a sheer blue sky and rock. Now they were looking over an unfenced section of a sheer, chalky cliff, overlooking the sea- the image imprinted itself behind his eyeballs- but it didn't matter because they were falling- falling- Eames' arms around him- the pain fading as they plummeted- Eames' lips mashed against his cheek- falling-

They gained consciousness at what seemed to be the precise same moment. Arthur opened his eyes to see Eames blinking, sleep fading away to leave only hard clarity. His cheeks were wet. Arthur could see the evening light, filtered through the curtains, reflected off them, tears smeared almost full across both cheeks. He tried to ignore it.

Eames sat up slowly, never taking his eyes away from him. "Arthur," he said.

"Don't-" Arthur said, unable to think of what he should feel now, anger at the intrusion, guilt about the projection, or grief about it all being over, over- but the only thing he could summon up was a numb and horrible hurt and a weariness that he wanted to submit to, that he wanted to go down for, and never come back again.

Eames seemed to understand for a moment as they stared at each other, feeling like two bruises on the same expanse of skin.

His arse hurt like hell.

"Don't say anything." Arthur completed the sentence a few minutes later, slumping against the sheets. Neither of them, it appeared, had the strength to pull out the IV lines from their wrists, but Arthur did so, feeling like he was tossing away something dirty and horrible. Eames sluggishly tracked the motion with his eyes, but did not follow suit.

Arthur closed his eyes, aware that he was crying again, and did not realize Eames was moving until his hand was on Arthur's arm, a tentative touch. It was too real, and Arthur made to pull away, but his body clearly had a selfish, stupid mind of its own, because two seconds later Arthur found himself wound all around Eames like a fucking ivy plant, face nestling in his shoulder, legs hooked around Eames' knees, binding them close.

Eames froze, just for one second, enough for Arthur to start distangling himself, but then he pulled him close as well, squeezing almost too hard, his hand on Arthur's hair, not quite gripping, not quite roving.

"Is... it true, what he said." Arthur said, too tired for words but saying it anyway, because he had to.

"What?"

"You want me."

Eames hissed a little, and Arthur couldn't decipher the emotion behind it. "Arthur, it was your damn subconscious, you-"

"Is it true?" Arthur pressed.

Silence.

"This is so fucked up." Eames muttered into his ear, and added, even quieter, "Yes-" into his hair, and clammed up entirely. His hands curled into the fabric of Arthur's jacket, creating twin pressures against his shoulderblade. It was oddly soothing.

His body felt like someone had rolled a fucking piano over it, but he had enough strength to pull back, enough to look Eames in the eye without being cross-eyed. Eames had a strange expression on his face as he stared back, and Arthur didn't want to know what he himself looked like, at that moment. Insane, probably. "Fuck me." he said.

They had so many points of contact at that moment that Arthur would have felt the whole-body flinch Eames gave at his words even if he'd been under anesthesia. "What." Eames said, his shock steamrolling over the question mark that should have been there and simply turning the word into one dead-weighted, flat syllable.

"Please," Arthur said, unable to articulate any reasons for his request except that he wanted it, so much, his body was arching into Eames again, his hands scrabbling against Eames' torso for purchase. Pressing himself forth like that, he could feel an almost-erection straining against his stomach. The pressure made him mewl, and he felt Eames' breathing stutter in his throat as he pressed his mouth against his neck. "I know, I know it's, it's, not good, but I want it, make me feel better-"

"Arthur-"

His hand found the bulge in Eames' trousers, and he stroked, unable to do much except writhe helplessly against the slackening body, and Eames' breathing was harsh, now, he was definitely aroused, and Arthur pushed his victory over his- (disappointment?) sorrow, and told himself yes, this is good, this is what I want.

"You utter bastard," Eames snarled suddenly into his ear, and Arthur felt a strong hand drag his own up from Eames' groin, and the other pushed him back by his shoulder, not roughly, but not gently either. "You are not using me like that, and you are not making me use you like that, either-"

Arthur closed his eyes, shuddering weakly, and started when he felt a thumb sweeping across his cheek, wiping the moisture there away. "You are not," Eames repeated, but in an infinitely softer tone, "going to make me into- some sort of stand-in, because I will never- ever fulfill that role for you."

He extricated himself from Arthur, gently, untangling their limbs, to lock the door and draw the blinds before climbing back onto the bed. Arthur closed his eyes as Eames palmed the back of his head, gently drawing his face down to his collarbone.

They lay there in silence for about two minutes before Arthur murmured, not sleepy but absolutely exhausted, "They're going to wonder..."

"Let them." Eames said, and that was that.

Another few minutes went by before Arthur whispered, feeling very young, into a neck where a heartbeat fluttered in an even, steady rhythm: "S'ry."

In response, Eames tightened his grip a fraction around Arthur's chest.

And it was nearly three hours after they'd been there, in an almost trance-like state of peace, not asleep but not quite conscious, either, aware only of each other and the warm spaces closed in between them, that Arthur finally raised his face, the tear tracks nearly invisible, and said in an utterly businesslike tone, "I know how to make Hisori remember."

"Is this the time." Eames groaned, pulling him back down and kissing him lightly on the temple to show- well, he didn't know. Some silly sentiment he didn't feel like putting in words. He just wanted to do it. "It can wait."

It did.

Cobb was skeptical. He wouldn't be Cobb if he weren't.

Arthur was patient but evasive, telling him almost nothing about his plan, and not bothering to lie, either. Eames watched, his eyes hooded, not stopping him.

"She's not going to hurt me," Arthur said for the thirtieth time. "I won't let her, either."

"After what's happened for the last- six days." Cobb said. "Sharks. Acid. Defenestration. Pornography."

"You're the one who kept saying we shouldn't give up."

"That was before- before-"

"You can't let your emotions get in the way of your job." Arthur said. Cobb blinked, and crossed his arms defensively. Eames, in the corner, hid a snort. "Come on, Cobb. One chance. One."

"Are you sure you don't want someone to go down with you?" Cobb tried, one last time, but everyone knew he'd given in.

The answer was no. Arthur slid in the needle- into his right arm. The nature of this particular job had been such that his left was riddled with small red marks.

They all watched him as he went under, linked to the young Japanese woman by the device that defined their lives now.

"Two levels down means that the five hours he requested will be, well, nearly a month." Yusuf said idly. "Wonder how he thinks he can go on for that long. Judging from what you told me..."

"And why won't he tell us what he found that will make her remember?" Ariadne added, clearly annoyed at being kept out of the loop.

When Arthur did not awaken within the next ten minutes, which meant he'd already survived a day in there, they dispersed, admitting to themselves that Arthur probably knew what he was doing.

Cobb, however, did not wander off to tour the city as the others decided they would do, but quietly followed Eames into his room, his eyes cold. "Yesterday," he started, "You and Arthur were-"

"I know."

Cobb frowned, his face reflecting his displeasure of his eldest child having it off with such untested individual. Well, Cobb's version of 'untested individual' extended to everyone outside a very small circle, i.e. himself and Arthur, but still. Eames had to smile. "If you hurt him-"

"I know." Eames said, now annoyed, thinking- You didn't notice when Arthur was having the bloodiest time in his life- but then he saw the expression on Cobb's face, fleeting but undeniable, and figured that Cobb probably had known, and that was probably why he was so touchy now. "Look, you know how he's been- these days-"

Cobb folded his arms.

"It's- literally- none of anyone's business except Arthur's and mine." Eames said, going for brutal honesty. Cobb's face didn't change, but Eames imagined all the things he was probably thinking, and hurried to intercept them before Cobb grew claws. "I mean- I'm not saying it was because of me, that's not it at all, but- hell, it's complicated."

"I don't see how everything can be so complicated." Cobb said, his voice sarcastic, bordering on testy. "That fact that you- you two- aren't saying anything about anything, that seemed pretty damn simple to me."

Eames thought of last night- Arthur murmuring broken strings of gibberish against his neck- and thought, simple, no, never simple. "He-" he started, and stopped. "He has your trust."

"Yes." Cobb said. His countenance was that of a man knowing he was probably walking into a trap, but telling the truth anyway because there was nothing else to be said. "Absolutely."

"Then you're going to have to trust him. And, well, me, but probably a lot less."

The blond man didn't look pleased with the idea. "Just- tell me if it was- whatever this whole thing is, that you're not telling me- I won't push- dangerous. Is dangerous."

"It's a 'was'." Eames said immediately. "It's absoutely a 'was'. But no, it wasn't dangerous."

He wouldn't be a forger if he didn't lie at least once in a conversation with a superior, after all.

Cobb exhaled, finally relaxing a little, leaning against the door jamb. "He looked- better, today." he said. "A whole lot worse, but- much better, too."

Eames swallowed.

"Don't fuck up." Cobb said, in the precise same tone he'd use before he collapsed a dream on someone's spine, leaving them to wiggle and yell for hours before they woke up and found that they'd their greatest secrets torn from their minds- and walked away.

He was on a couch. And then he was on a plane.

Next to him, Yamashita Hisori was gazing out of the window, looking nervous. Her hair was still plaited, like the last dream, and she was fiddling with the long end of her braid. She looked at him and smiled.

"It's a red-eye flight." she said. "Things got... very delayed. A lot of things."

Arthur had to agree.

"So." she said. "What do you do- what's your job?"

Time passed.

"What's- that, the way you look now- different." Hisori said. They'd spent a week- or at least, a length of dream-time in which the sun had risen and set roughly seven times- in Cairo, and she had a tan. They were now standing in a museum, dry and not well-lit. A series of obscure Impressionist paintings were lined up in front of him. "You really look different. From the other times. When you were with your friends."

"Things changed." Arthur said vaguely. He didn't know what to feel about those 'things', but it was all right. He'd find out in time.

"I don't understand." Hisori said, half a lie.

Arthur smiled. "I have- something good up there. It's waiting for me."

Hisori grew withdrawn and thoughtful. "Something- up there." she said haltingly.

"Up there." Arthur said. "Is horrible sometimes. Senselessly so."

"We know." Hisori said, because it was old news. "Where do we go next?"

They'd been to places- Arthur's memories mostly, Jersey and Egypt, Brazil and Guam, Thailand and the Mediterranean. Hisori liked traveling, never liked to stay in one place. She avoided her projections these days, and they walked in places where they were sparse.

"We've been running away too much." Arthur said quietly. The scenery in front of them fell away silently, the wall and paintings raining away to leave stark, beautiful white cliffs- Dover, Arthur could finally recognize, where Eames had brought him to wake up. Eames had pushed him off here, they'd both fallen off. He'd been in far too much pain to appreciate the view then. It had been Eames' creation, and it was now Arthur's, and it would become one of Hisori's. "This- is next."

Starting off this job, they'd imagined a wall of some sort they'd need to tear down to get Hisori's memories back, but it hadn't been like that at all. Symbolism could only get you so far. This was a dream. They played by Hisori's rules.

And Hisori had been falling for a long time.

The girl knelt down, tentatively putting her hands on the edge. He could not see her face, but her voice, when she spoke, was wondering. "It's- not somewhere I want to go."

"It's defined you for while." Arthur said. He did not feel like Cobb would have when playing Mr. Charles. He was not playing any part here, except perhaps as a friend, or a guide.

Hisori turned her head. Her face had changed- she was the girl they'd seen when Ariadne had brought her first in, a gaunt woman, shrunken by her experiences and mental illness, but the haze of misery had lifted from her face.

She rasped, "It was good. Cairo. And the other stuff."

Arthur knelt as well, and they both looked down into the windless abyss. The rock wall stretched on, the white fading into grayness with distance. He took her hand. "Let's go."

They leapt.

EPILOGUE

He had a gorgeous awakening, no force or suddenness about it. One minute he was sleeping, a deep, natural slumber, and the next he was rolling around, stretching his muscles out against creased, warm sheets, burying his face against his pillow and slowly opening his eyes.

Dawn light streamed in through the window, painting everything in pale pink and weak gold. The clock blinked red- 6:48.

He was unable to stop one of the soppiest grins he'd ever worn in his life from his face.

He rolled out of bed in slow motion, taking several minutes to finally get to his feet. He was utterly naked, he realized with the silly, contented languor that morning people had upon awakening that non-morning persons found abominable, and bent down to pick up a shirt that was crumpled on the floor. He shook it out. It was one of Eames', of course. It had a faded cartoon duck printed on the front. He put it on before padding outside to the kitchen, expecting to see his partner pottering around or reading the newspaper.

Instead, he found an empty kitchen. There was a simmering pot of asparagus, and several pieces of toast piled up on a plate, still cold from the fridge. Three unbroken eggs lay on a frypan. Eames had obviously gone out for the mail.

Arthur was a culinary nightmare, so he merely padded to the living room and sprawled out on a couch, putting his feet up on the table. Most of the wall was a window here, and he had an unbroken view of the city sprawling out in front of him. He could see Lake Michigan out there, a distant, gleaming line of blue. They could have gotten a place with a full view and still have tons of money left over, but they'd agreed that this was fine, too. Besides, Arthur liked the cityscape.

Their door beeped and Eames strode in, mail in one hand, newspaper tucked under the other arm, card key held in his teeth. He was wearing nothing but his boxers.

It was too early in the morning to be outraged- and besides, Eames had done that plenty of times, and not so paradoxically, no one had complained- so he just smiled sunnily at Eames, who fell into the couch opposite Arthur and tossed the letters on the table. "Ad, ad, tax, letter, magazine subscription, ad, postcard." he announced, "And a fresh celebrity scandal on the first page."

"Thank god, we've had too much real news for the last two days." Arthur said, and picked it up. Eames preferred the radio for his news, which he listened to on his way to work (after two months of utter decadence, they'd both decided they had too much time on their hands and had gotten employed, more for fun than anything else. It also gave them time apart, which they both agreed they needed, although, of course, not too much).

"Give me the crossword when you're done." Eames said affably and stood up. They regarded each other, Arthur's eyes dragging along Eames' torso and the line of his bicep, Eames' on Arthur's bare thighs- both up again, and they laughed at each other before Eames walked into the kitchen, Arthur contemplating the hem of his boxers, and remembering their precise elasticity. Eames, the angel, never bought clothes that couldn't be pulled off in times of need.

The smell of coffee drifted in soon enough, carried on the breeze from the half-open window. The sunlight went from pale pink to a richer syrup color on mahogany floorboards, and Arthur curled his toes in the soft rich carpet as he waited, his attention only half on the news. Some rave review on a mystery novel. An column on how adventurous teenage sex was ruining religion. A shoe advertisement, some gorgeous, half-naked female posing archly. Too skinny. Something on gay marriage (again), a picture of furious activists posing under the boiling LA sun.

"What do you think of that?" Arthur said again, tossing down the paper. Eames entered with a tray- it was oddly amusing, retired gangster look versus sunny housewife look- and set it down in front of him. Look the paper from his hands.

"You wanna?" he said casually after a few seconds of skimming.

Arthur reached for his toast and asparagus. "We could get around to it someday." It wasn't like it mattered.

Eames' eyes creased with laughter, and Arthur knew they were in perfect accord.

The postcard was from Cobb. It was his writing, anyway. He was doing well. One of these days he was going to have a talk with Saito and tell him that they could stop the honeymoon, but he was having too much fun. Philippa and James sent their love. They were in Bali, this time as tourists, it was kind of funny to sit at the airport and not worry about running away. Tell Eames that he'd fry his stupid British ass if he sent presents like that to James again. He was still far too young for sex dice. They'd- not the children- had a good time, but that was irrelevant. Pass it on. Miss you. Will visit in a while, after we visit India, because Saito has this ridiculous idea that every child should get an elephant ride for their ninth birthday. Best wishes, etc, Cobb.

There was a picture enclosed, Cobb with an uncomfortable looking smile on his face, Saito with a smug one, the children, and a pretty woman wearing what looked like a bra made out of coconuts. Eames would love this. Arthur smiled.

Biting into his toast, Arthur slit the letter open with his pinkie. The return address was from an office in Chicago, but he knew that wasn't true. The handwriting was Hisori's.

He read it, the handwriting all bunched together, the English careful but awkward in places. Hisori was doing well. She was getting homeschooled, with excellent tutors, courtesy of Saito. She was catching up quickly, and was thinking of applying to a college abroad. How as Arthur doing? Gained some weight, she hoped. How was Mr. Eames? She saw their company's ad on the internet last week. It was horrible. Don't tell him. She was reading 1Q84 these days. She'd heard the English translation would be released there September, he should read it. It was an interesting series.

"Business?" Eames said, setting down the crossword. It had been filled out, all of it. It hadn't taken him four minutes.

"Reeve," Arthur said, the lie easy and guiltless on his lips. "Wants a review of his files." Every relationship had its secrets. Arthur rather liked the thought his would be deliberate and minor. Hisori was a very sweet girl.

"Mm?" Eames said, clearing away the last piece of egg on his plate. It made a clink on the table as he set it down. "Darling, you need to do something about that shirt. You have better fashion sense than that."

He smiled. "Oh?"

"I think you should start by taking it off." Eames said, leaning forward. Arthur's eyes tracked his arms as Eames brought his elbows to rest on his knees. "You are not a duck person."

"You do it." Arthur said, without changing his slightly amused, calm expression. "With your teeth."

Eames' eyes widened in delight.

They didn't manage to get it off, anyway.

Arthur had not picked out the carpet. He'd have bought a flimsy, tasteful one, and in that moment he was glad he had not. (In Italy, Eames had run his eye through the stock, and said, "We need something rich with smooth fibers, with no friction burns.") Eames had him pinned down on it, and he felt his shoulderblades tense against the surface as he arched up, hooking a leg around Eames' waist.

His partner tasted of strawberry jam and eggs. Arthur dug his fingers into his back, glad he'd clipped his nails, since it meant he could hang on as hard as he wanted. He arched entirely off the carpet, Eames' knees and one hand, and his own elbows supporting them in the air.

They broke the kiss and Eames said in his ear, "You'd better be bloody glad I work out."

"You're a sodding wuss," Arthur said, imitating his accent, and bit his ear, wrapping both arms around him and shifting his body in one hard downwards grind. Eames jerked, nearly lost his balance, and then lowered his entire body on top of him.

It was hardly a sudden movement, and Eames kept most of his weight off Arthur's with his arms, but Arthur tensed all the same. Not much- he didn't freeze, but his thighs and neck went tense- it was those areas, for some reason, and Eames, whose lip was on his collarbone, obviously noticed. It was mortifying, how quickly and considerately Eames extracted himself from Arthur, and sat down next to him.

"It wasn't-" Arthur said, unable to hide his frustration. With his shirt rucked up around his ribs, Eames could hardly miss the fact that Arthur had lost his erection. "Dammit, I- can't even tell what sets me off, you were fantastic, I'm sorry- let me-"

He reached for Eames, who didn't stop him as Arthur lightly ran his hand from his sternum to his groin, and his body tensed like a whip drawn tight as Arthur formed a loose fist around the fabric outlining his cock. Arthur languidly jerked him off, enjoying how Eames looked and sounded even though he himself didn't getting hard again, the eyes fluttering shut, the little sounds he trapped in his throat but made their way out anyway, the way his shoulders tensed and relaxed, the way his body rocked- oh yes-

Eames arched up, his spine straightening itself out as he threw his head back, and his hips bucked into Arthur's palm as he came, and he could feel the fabric dampening under his fingers as Eames relaxed, shudders rocking his frame.

"I'm sorry." Arthur repeated. "I think- I don't know, it was so-"

"Random, I know." Eames said, but he didn't sound unhappy as he reached his arm around and put an arm around him. "Arthur, this upsets you far more than it does me. You're the one who didn't get off."

Arthur made a subdued noise in his throat, but didn't quite say anything. "I don't know if-" he said, knowing he still sounded too frustrated. "I still don't understand why I do this. You can- you know, if you want-"

"Ye gods," Eames said, but he sounded peaceful and sated. "I told you we're not fucking until you're ready."

It was the way he said his 'f's, those teeth brushing against that exquisite lower lip, and the way he made it sound like any other word, so casually tossed out. Arthur buried his face in the junction between Eames' shoulder and neck. He felt disgustingly vulnerable, but Eames' warm hand was on his shoulder, the thumb stroking over the exact spot on his neck that Arthur was pressing his mouth against, deliberately mimicking. "Don't know if I'll." Arthur said, and that's all he needed to. Eames' laugh hung in the air and seemed to distangle itself slowly, unfurl its meaning to Arthur, promising to take years with the process.

"Darling, we've a long time to learn how." Eames said, his palm warm on his neck, his voice bright and content. "We're going to live forever."

Arthur, kissing him gently, believed it.

*Fugu: Blowfish. Poisoned blood and intestines. Its main attraction is the novelty of the danger rather than the flavor. Only licensed chefs may prepare it in Japan.